Man, I love Illustrator.
This gif is cycling between the full preview render and the outline view of a tiny handful of paths, with some magic applied. It’s based on this method of creating grass, but substitutes a little triangular symbol for the generic line, and drops the ‘roughen’ effect.
It looks astoundingly close to the grass I’ve been drawing for the past few years via individual strokes with a triangular art brush, but takes a tiny fraction of the time to make happen – at this point, I have definitely spent more time documenting this than it took me to draw this grassy hill, once I had the appearance stack tweaked to my liking. And if I wanted it to be Just Right, I could easily go back and add a few more pieces of grass by hand to fix a few awkward edges.
If you want to play with my version yourself, here’s the appearance stack and effect settings. Make two green colors and switch freely between them while drawing some overlapping shapes, stick a shape behind them with just a basic solid fill, and bingo. Grassy terrain.
I thought “Magical Grass Bush” would be something else. But this is good, too. ❤
I could totally make a magical grass brush of that kind, too. I figure a few simple pointy ovals with some zig-zag effects applied, then stick that in a scatter brush.