Fill brush stokes ?

Question

When I'm working with illustrator I like to use the brush tool to create my line work beacuase of the nice ticks and thins I get. I'd love to be able to use my fill bucket to color my art...but no can do. The only way I've found to color it is by painstakingly dawing each shape with the pen tool on a separate layer and then filling those shapes. Surly therre must be a better way. Can someone please help me find a way to convert these brush strokes into something I can flood fill.
Thanks
Bob O

Answer 1

> It's a kind of Live Paint light for AI 9, 10 or 11 users...
More than that, Kurt, it's a kind of Live Paint for AICS2 users that doesn't require conversion of the line work to a special Live Paint object; and that doesn't remove the Brush strokes from your line work as soon as you use it.
Kurt's suggestion is a valuable technique. For those who haven't downloaded and dissected the file, the principle is this:
1. Create a new document. Layers Palette: New Layer.
2. Layers Palette: Target the lower layer by clicking its target circle.
3. Appearance Palette: From the Flyout menu, select Add New Fill. Give this fill some color other than black. It doesn't matter what color; its purpose is just for the filled areas to show.
4. Still in the Appearance Palette, click the Fill listing and drag it to below the Contents listing. Leave it selected.
5. Effect menu: Pathfinders>Merge. your Appearance Palette should now look like this:
Layer
Stroke [none]
Contents
Fill
Merge
Color [your color]
Default Transparency
4. Layers Palette: Choose the top layer. (Don't target it; just chose it to make it the current layer.)
5. Brushes Palette: Chose a Brush. (Any of the default Calligraphy Brushes will do, but I usually use an Art Brush made from a simple geometric shape, such as a "football" or a right-pointing triangle.) Make the current Fill color None, and the Stroke color Black.
6. Brush Tool: Draw four more-or-less straight strokes in the top layer, in the form of a tic-tac-toe board.
7. Select all. Layers Palette: drag the selection marker (the little square at the right end of the top layer's listing) down to the lower layer. You should see the center square of the tic-tac-toe board become filled.
8. Move the ends of the strokes around a bit. You should see the colored fill redraw itself accordingly. (This is the aspect of it's being like Live Paint, as Kurt mentioned.)
9. Now get the Brush tool again and draw some loose paths on the lower layer, as if you were drawing the linework of a freehand cartoon. Wherever crossing or touching paths create a visually enclosed area, the colored fill occurs.
10. Select the paths of your cartoon figure. Drag the selection marker up to the top layer. Note that the fills disappear, because these paths now reside on a layer which does not have the Fill and Merge Effect applied at the Layer level.
So, if you want to draw without fills automatically appearing while you create your line work, draw into the top layer. If you want to draw with fills automatically appearing, draw into the lower layer. At any time, you can move the paths between the two layers.
When you're finished with the line work:
11. Select some of the paths on the lower layer. Object>Expand Appearance. Because parts of the Appearance are Layer-level attributes, all of the paths on that layer will be expanded into "literal" paths, and you'll have a Group. However, if you were to ungroup the selection, you'd see that there are duplicate objects underneath each of those created from the brush strokes. These duplicate objects will also have the color of the enclosed area fills. So...
12. After Expand Appearance, click the Merge Pathfinder in the Pathfinder Palette. THEN ungroup the selection. Move a few of the objects apart and you'll see that the extra fills underneath the former brush strokes are gone. You have nice tidy merged paths which "kiss" without overlaps or "crosscuts." (Besides just being tidy, the art is already mostly optimized for such things as vinyl cutting. If you want small overlaps as I often do for vinyl, use Select Same Fill Color to select all the fill color objects and use Offset Path to create the desired overlap underneath the surrounding line work.)
13. Of course, now you can just select the individual fill area objects and re-color them as desired.
Kurt, thank you for this. I've never played around much with Pathfinder Effects applied to Layers, and evidently your previous post of this technique came at a time when it was not convenient for me to download the sample file.
I hope the above elaboaration will be of help to others who may have difficulty realizing what is going on in the sample file; and that it may help them get as much use out of this as I probably will.
I also hope others will play with this and understand why it is such a disappointment to me that Live Paint removes Brushes.
I also notice that when using this technique, the Merge Pathfinder (the literal one in the Pathfinder Palette, not the Effect) adds way too many points to the linework paths. To see what I mean, try this:
1. Draw the tic-tac-toe grid in the top layer using the Brush Tool, using the default 15 pt. oval Calligraphic Brush.
2. Select the four paths. Object>Expand Appearance. Note the number of points used to outline the strokes. Note that the original spine paths of the former Brush Srokes are still there.
3. Click the Merge Pathfinder icon in the Pathfinder Palette. This removes the spine paths and unions the filled paths, eliminating the cross cuts. Note that the number of points has not significantly increased.
4. Now Undo the merge. Undo the Expand Appearance. Drag the four paths to the lower level (the Level with the Pathfinder Effect applied to it).
5. Expand Appearance. Click the Merge Pathfinder button. Note that many, many points have been added to the paths which define the line work.
I find that completely ungrouping before doing the Merge does not avoid the unwanted additional points. But if you ungroup, then select just the line work before clicking the Merge button, it will do the merge without adding the extra points. So I would suggest doing this:
After you are finished with the line work, Expand Appearance. But before changing the colors of the fill objects, do this: Fully Ungroup. Then select one of the colored fill objects, and choose Select Menu>Same>Fill Color. Then Select>Inverse, leaving just the line work objects selected. Then click the Merge icon. (Of course, if other unrelated objects exist in the file, temporarily lock layers or hide objects to avoid selecting objects other than the line work.)
(It would be nice if the Merge Pathfinder could be improved so as to not cause these additional points in such situations.)
JET