Step 1: What is a Brush in Illustrator?

Before we dive into creating our custom rose brush, let's talk about what brushes are in Illustrator. A brush in Illustrator is a vector based shape that is applied to a path to add some extra flair or texture to your design. There are several different types of brushes, including art brushes, pattern brushes, and scatter brushes. Today, we're focusing on creating your own custom art brushes.

Step 2: Start & Stop Points

To get started, you will need a Vector Heart & Rose or another vector design. It does not matter if you draw them out, image trace them, shape builder them, or get them from etsy we just need a Vector format to work with and loaded in Illustrator.

If we want to help guide the Rose and have a certain start and stop point, we need to make some adjustments to our heart.

Now, select the heart shape using the Selection Tool (V)

Next, we want the Add Anchor Point Tool (located in the Pen Tool dropdown menu)

To get to that we can press + or left click and hold down the Ink pen tip and select Add Anchor point tool.

If successful, your cursor will have the aim and a little +sign in the lower right-hand corner.

Use the tool to create two anchor points on the right side but close to the center bottom of the heart just like this.

We select the center point we created with Direct Selection Tool (A) and then press delete.

These points will help guide the brush with the start and stop points we want for our design.

You can then use the Direct Selection Tool (A) to adjust the position of these anchor points as needed to determine the best intersecting paths, but we will focus on that later.

Step 3: Creating a Custom Brush

Lets create the brush now. With your Vector Rose selected (V), go to the Brushes in the panel, If you do not see brushes in the panels, go to Window and click on Brushes.

In that window we will click on the "New Brush" button in the bottom right corner. Or we can drag and drop the rose into the Brushes window.

Select Art Brush and click OK.

In the Art Brush Options dialog box, adjust the Brush Scale Option to Stretch Between Guides. For direction I have Stroke from bottom to top. If your design is not looking correct you can also change the orientation in the options section with Flip Along, or Flip across. We can adjust these later once the art brush is applied to our path.

Don’t forget to give your brush a meaningful name such as Lovely Rose Brush and click OK.

Now to apply this brush to our design, with our selection tool(v) click on the heart, then in the brushes window click on your custom-made Lovely Rose Brush. You have now applied the Brush to your shape.

Step 4: Stretch Between Guides

Now lets adjust or stretch/shrink our design to our guides. Lets go back into the Art Brush Options for our custom brush, and we do that by Double clicking on the Art Brush from the Brushes Window.

Here we can adjust how the rose is scaled across the heart, we do this by moving the Dotted lines either up or down in this case or left or right if we were working with a horizontal text on the heart.

Move these guides around until you get the desired result you are looking for.

Now, the Lovely Rose Brush will be stretched proportionally between the two guides you created.

Step 5: Adjusting the Size and Line Stroke

If our image is too small or we want it a little bigger, we can change that with the stroke size.

Lets get the Selection Tool (V) and select our heart. 

Go to the Stroke panel and adjust the stroke weight to your liking. Keep in mind, a thicker stroke will result in a larger brush size.

Now is the time to play around with the Stroke and scale of your design to get it to the size you want. You may need to make some adjustments in the brush if you scale it up or down by a drastic amount.

Step 6: Expanding Path and Joining Together

We are almost finished everyone, so if you made it this far and this video is helping you out remember to click that subscribe and like button.

Now to make this design more stable after we have cut it, we will want the end of the stem and the rose itself to intersect.

To accomplish this, we can simply Press A OR select the Direct Select Tool. For this design I am going to select the Rose Flower node and drag it a little further down so that it intersects the stem.

If your rose was distorted in this process, you can adjust with the anchor point handles OR by repeating the Step 4 Stretch Between Guides.

Once you are good with how your design looks, and do not want to make any more changes. Ctrl-C Ctrl-V or Copy and Paste your design, then drag you can drag it off to the side of your art board. This is so you have something to go back to if you want to make changes later on.

Remember if you are doing this for CNC your heart is still just a single line vector, we still need to expand it out to an object like the original rose we used to make the brush. If you are just printing it, you do not need to convert it unless you are going to import it into another program.

With our Rose Heart selected we need to go to Object, Expand Appearance. Now our object is exportable, but we still need to clean it up.

Depending on your design you maybe able to use the pathfinder to join everything together, but for this we are going to need to use the Shape Builder Tool.

To give our design more strength once it is cut, let’s get rid of the void in the steam area.

With the Rose Heart still selected (V), click on the Shape Builder Tool. Then starting inside the shape part, we want to keep. We left click inside the shape and then draw across the void or areas we want added to the shape.

As you can see by doing that some of our rose and stem created some paths we do not want. That’s ok we can clean those up. We will start with the sections that belong in our main shape.

To get rid of them stem in the rose we are going to Press and Hold ALT while we left click, and draw threw each part of the stem in the Rose for all the areas that are not part of the main shape.

Then finally we can export as we desire, either as a Vector Base Object such as SVG, or a Raster Based Image.