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Illustrator user for 20 years here, and yet here we are... Stumped by AI 2020 and pulling my hair. Today I need to change the size of my brush to edit a stock vector image.

enter image description here

There is a "Stroke" setting in my toolbar, which doesn't do anything to the brush (even though I cannot draw strokes with a brush...).

There is another Brush menu, which only has two options inside of it: "Touch Calligraphic Brush" and ".5pt Flat"

I can double-click on the latter to change its size, but I want to use a simple dot brush, not a flat one. Double-clicking the "Touch Calligraphic" brush doesn't open an options panel.

For some insane reason, it seems that the other documents I have open in AI have different brushes available in the "Brushes Definition" menu. Is this a new AI "feature"?

How do I make this document's brush smaller?

enter image description here

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  • You realize that those 2 drop downs are 2 different things, right? One is the brush, the other is the Stoke Profile. it appears to me as though in one of the files, the Stroke Profile menu is incorrectly being activated when it should not be. The file ending in 90001 appears to have the correct menu highlighting and menu displays. The other file may simply be corrupt. (or it may be that in one file you have a fill applied and in the other a stroke) If you copy/paste to a new file does it work then? Sorry, I can't test CC2020.
    – Scott
    May 5, 2020 at 0:53
  • But the stroke option is present in the menu of both documents, while irrelevant because I cannot create strokes when the brush is selected... I'd just like to be able to use a simple, round Illustrator brush in any illustration. I will try to copy/paste and let you know, but I ended up finding a workaround (I just wanted to hide the waist of the character so I selected the lower anchor points of the shirt and used down arrow). May 5, 2020 at 1:32
  • Well you could simply load the default calligraphic brushes. It's not uncommon to remove everything superfluous from files for places like shutterstock (makes file sizes smaller)
    – Scott
    May 5, 2020 at 2:59
  • Try this. Create a new blank document, copy and paste the content from the EPS into it.
    – Billy Kerr
    May 5, 2020 at 7:53

1 Answer 1

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Unfortunately, you can not change that Touch Caligraph Brush (I don't know why).

That brushes are the default brushes of Illustrator in a particular case:

When we create a new file, the Illustrator shows me the brushes, swatches, symbols, and graphic styles according to the new file I created.

When the Illustrator doesn't show us that resources are because the original file is from EPS, SVG, or whatever vector application. It is because those generic files do not have those Illustrator resources.

But you can always create a new brush and play with the settings.

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