How to create watercolor brushes in Adobe Illustrator. First you’re gonna paint some of your own. Then you’re gonna scan them into your computer, open them up in Photoshop. First, adjust the levels. Dark in the black, light in the white. Then once you have the look that you would like, use the Lasso tool to select just one at a time and copy and paste it into Adobe Illustrator. Here inside illustrator, you’re going to use the image trace tool. You’re going to do six colours and make sure to ignore white and then hit expand. Now you’re going to create a new art brush by opening up your brushes and hitting the plus sign in the bottom right hand corner. Make an art brush you can name it here. Stretch to fit stroke length. Make sure the direction is the same direction as you painted it. Use Hue shift and make sure this overlap is selected and hit okay. Now it’s going to show up in your brushes panel. These are really fun to use to add textures to your lettering, to put as watercolor backgrounds for your designs. There’s tons of different ways you can use them, and since they’re an illustrator, they are all vector based, so you can use them as much as you would like.