Hey all, I know this is a Photoshop forum, but I was hoping you could help. A friend of mine has Illustrator (8 I think) and he can not figure out how to "save as brush" so he could, say, draw an arm and save that arm as a brush he could then use to stamp arms onto his virtual paper as much as he wanted. Is this possible with Illustrator? If so, could someone tell me how? Also, can Illustrator "paint" or "draw" in vector graphics and if so, can THOSE items be saved as brushes as well? Thanks much for the help, sorry about posting in this forum for this, --Eryk

Those features were new in Illustrator 9, so I'm afraid your friend is out of luck. If the free version of Expression 3 is still available form Microsoft that might work, depending on the kind of output desired.

Thank you kindly. So, if he gets version 9, he can do this? Is it easy to figure out or could you maybe list the steps (Unless they are too long)? Thanks again. :)

I doubt he'll be able to get 9 - there might be some remaindered CS stock, I suppose, but CS2 (effectively AI 12) is the current version. To make an Art Brush, which stretches the artwork along a path, the simplest method is to draw the artwork (there are limitations - no gradients, blends, type, imported images or (I think) symbols - so if any of those features are required they will have to be expanded to line-and-fill work) and drag it onto the New brush icon at the bottom of the Brush palette, then pick Art brush from the dialogue. The other options are Scatter brushes, which spray copies of the artwork along a path, and Patern brushes, where you define several elements for the ends, corners and plain parts of a line and Illustrator uses them to tile along tha path.

Thank you so much. I will let him know right away. He does have Illustrator 9 after al, so this will help tremendously. :)

Hello all, I am "the friend" in question :) I have Illustrator 9, not 8. The problem I had when trying to create the brushes from a vector created body part is that I would get a message stating something like "there are parts of this image that cannot be converted to a brush" I will try it again tonite and see what the exact message was. I do remember there were 3 different type of brushes that can be made but none of them would allow me make them as I need so I could save out body parts to easilly create various poses on a character I've created in Illustrator. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated! - John

Did you have any of the things I mentioned above - gradients, blends, type, imported images - in the artwork you were using? There isn't a fix for using bitmap images, other than tracing them to make a vector version, but most of the others can be handled by Expanding or Outlining.