Making brush strokes with Stroke Shape

If you’re not one of the lucky people with the budget or bother to have a drawing tablet, there are still a few options that make life with a mouse much easier. Namely, we can have strokes that taper off using Stroke Shape.

First, let’s activate the Freehand tool and look at the Shape drop-down. Figure 5.29 shows what kind of stroke we can get with the various options contained therein:

Figure 5.29 – Different shapes for drawing with the Freehand tool to simulate brush strokes

Just as we saw with Powerstroke earlier, these options allow you to rescale the stroke, and keep the overall shape of the simulated brush stroke.

The last two options, From clipboard and Bend from clipboard, apply two different Path effects to achieve the look of the last copied object. That is to say, you copy a shape you want to act as your brush, and then choose one of the two clipboard options. The next brush strokes...