Self made ink scatter brushes expand problem

[jevgenichernov]

Hello, I made ink scatter brushes a while ago and on a few previous projects they worked well. But today weird thing started happening. I think my brushes do not expand properly.

When not expanded, I can color the stroke normally, but after I turn them into shapes, the fill does not work the way it is supposed to. It colors the whole selection area (the square) not just the object. Fill and stroke menu also does not show properly. The first picture shows my brush after being expanded. On the second picture I tried to recolor the same expanded object.

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

That seems to be a bug with scatter brushes. Illustrator doesn't delete the invisible rectangle automatically. After expanding you need to select all unpainted objects (no fill/no stroke) and delete them. Then apply the fill you want.

[jevgenichernov]

Thank you! It works after I select all points of the invisible rectangle and delete them.

[Kurt Gold]

You can outsmart this behaviour by applying a placebo-like Transformation effect to the (live) Scatter Brush strokes.

That is, select all your Scatter Brush strokes, go to Effect > Distort and Transform > Transform, take the default settings and click OK.

Now the invisible rectangles will not be created when you expand the brush strokes.

You could also save the brush stroke plus the placebo as a graphic style to prevent the undesired behaviour in case you are going to use the brush often.

[jevgenichernov]

That works too. Thank you!

[DougKatz]

That is just remarkable, Kurt Gold. How one thinks to even explore this as an outsmarting strategy is inconceivable to me. Brilliance strikes again.

[Kurt Gold]

Well, the non-transforming placebo substance once was pretty useful in older versions of Illustrator: Almost all kind of expanded brush strokes left the original paths as unstroked and unfilled objects. Most of the time – at least to me – those leavings were useless. Therefore I lion-hearted invented the placebo strategy to squelch the good-for-nothing paths.

Joking apart, I'm pretty sure that it was just a fortunate discovery by accident about two decades ago. Nice that it may still be useful in the latest Illustrator versions.

Hope you're fine, Doug.