Give your illustrations an old etched or engraved appearance with my new collection of 30 free brushes for Adobe Illustrator. These brushes feature a variety of hand-drawn line patterns in horizontal, vertical, diagonal and cross-hatched orientations that can be used to apply shading to your digital drawings. After being scanned from hand-made pen strokes, they were then processed into Illustrator brushes that seamlessly repeat along paths of any length without stretching or deforming.

How to use the vintage shading brushes

Open the brushes file into Illustrator by choosing ‘Load Brushes’ from the Brushes panel menu. Each brush can then be applied to a path that has been drawn with the Brush, Pencil, Line or Pen tool. To change the scale of the brush, alter the stroke weight to increase or decrease its size.

The brush stroke will likely extend beyond the desired shading area. One technique to trim it to size is by drawing a temporary shape and set it as a clipping mask to make the excess portions invisible.

An alternative masking technique is to add an Opacity Mask to the path, then paint over the unwanted areas with the Blob brush (or a black-filled shape) to hide the excess.

Download My Free Vintage Shading Brushes