How Can I Square off the End of a Point in Illustrator? I'm Making Leaves from a Brush that I Made.

Hi there!

I am attempting to do something different with brushes, by making some leaves that I made into a brush and using the brush to make multiple leaves, in different directions.

I created a leaf from one of the brushes (the one on the far right of the screenshot) and then I did Object à Expand Appearance. So the brush stroke is now an object with a fill. I clicked around on it, and I found out that I can in fact get two separate halves for this expanded leaf … which is great because I can make each half a different color if I want to, which is what I had done here (see the first one on the left of this screenshot).

Before expanding, I had created two copies of the brush stroke for that leaf (via copy/paste), and then I reduced the stroke size of one of them in order to create a stem for the expanded leaf (see the one on the far right). This I did because the expanded leaf was made from the same brush stroke and I had wanted the stem to follow the same path as the middle of the expanded leaf without having to manually draw out the stem, which I was doing before using this technique.

Since I had scaled down the stroke size a bit for my “stem”, I had to play around with it a bit by dragging it around with the selection tool in order to make it fit perfectly in the middle of the expanded leaf, which I had accomplished. But how do I get a square tip for the stem … is there an easy way to change from a point to a squared tip without having to manually manipulate the tip's anchor points with the direct selection tool? I guess I need to “expand the appearance” of the stroke for the stem first as well? I'd like to be able to just click the bottom of the tip then click something else to do this for me automatically and be able to widen it afterwards. I find it difficult to change the shape of a point manually with the direct selection tool. If this is not possible, please give me advice on how to easily do this.

Thanks in advance!