How to Make a Confetti Brush in Illustrator

Illustrator Brushes

In Illustrator, brushes are a very handy tool to use on almost any of your projects and give them almost any style you can imagine, but with Christmas and New Year Holidays just around the corner it is a good time to learn how to make a confetti brush in Illustrator to use it on any of your festive designs. Using nothing but the default Illustrator tools, we can make a vector confetti brush which will become very useful if you need to make backgrounds for larger size pages due you can scale it to any size without loosing quality.

Step 1

Open Illustrator and make a new file at any size you want. In this case i will make mine at 1800 x 1200 px.

Step 2

Select the Star Tool and draw a start anywhere on the canvas.

Step 3

Copy (Ctrl+C) and Paste (Ctrl+V) the Star 4 more times and randomly place them close to each other but without overlapping them.

Note: You can use different shapes as well (rectangles, circles, squares, etc) the brush that you can create with this technique do not need to have all stars, it can also have a combination of different shapes.

Step 4

Set any color you want for your stars. In this case, i will use the following ones:

• #e8d771
• #c37e32
• #fdf7ea
• #a38036
• #2f142d

Step 5

Select all the stars and go to Window > Brushes.

Step 6

Click on the "New Brush" icon, select "Scatter Brush" in the pop-up window and click OK.

Step 7

Give your brush a name. In this case I will set mine to "Stars".

Step 8

From the "Size" option dropdown menu select "Random". Set the Minimum value to 20% and the Maximum to 60%.

Step 9

From the "Spacing" option dropdown menu select "Random". Set the Minimum value to 1% and the Maximum to 20%.

Step 10

From the "Scatter" option dropdown menu select "Random". Set the Minimum value to -50% and the Maximum to 30%.

Step 11

From the "Rotation" option dropdown menu select "Random". Set the Minimum value to -180º, the Maximum to 180º and be sure to have the "Rotation Relative to" option set to "Page".

Step 12

This step is optional, but very usefull if you want to later change your confetti shapes colors to a monochromatic scheme. If you wish to keep the current colors, simply click OK and go to the next step, otherwise under "Colorization" set the Method to "Tints" and click OK.

Step 13

You can now see your new brush in the Brushes Panel.

Step 14

To test the new brush, delete all the stars and draw a path with the Pen, Pencil or Brush tool.

Step 15

With your path selected, click on the recently created brush to apply it.

Step 16

Lastly, if you want to change the color, simply select the Stroke color you want in the Swatches Panel.