First create a circle with no stroke and a black fill.

Using the white arrow, pull out one side of the circle.

With the convert tool, click the pulled out end and remove its rubber bands (or “bindings”).

Select your shape with the black arrow, and after you open the Brushes palette, click on the little arrow in the upper right. Select “New Brush.”

When it asks for Brush Type, select Art Brush. In the options panel, you don’t need to change anything, but make sure that the direction of the arrow goes from big to small. When you open your Brush pallete again, you should see your newly created brush. Select the Spiral tool, and create a spiral.

Now, apply your brush to the spiral. Here’s some examples of what you might see:

If the stroke size is too large, make it smaller.

Now this spiral is a bit too much to use for regular graphics. I want swooshes, not spirals. To edit the size and composure of a spiral, click on the document area without dragging out a spiral. When you click, the spiral toolbar will come up:

Decrease the amount of segments. I will use 4. Press okay and Illustrator will generate a new spiral for you. Apply your brush and ideal stroke weight to it.

That looks much more like a swoosh. Make another swoosh with 3 segments, and another with 2.

Now you have 3 shapes to work with. Keep these somewhere on your art pad and duplicate them to create a design.

When you have your design ready, select all it’s parts and go to Object>Expand Appearance. Now choose the white arrow and select all the outlines one by one, avoiding the spirals.

Now move them over to a different part of the art pad. You can see that they left their spirals behind (They might be invisible, so select the blank area). You don’t need these anymore so delete them.

Now select your vector outlines and go to the pathfinder panel. Click the first button called “Add to shape area”. Now immediately click the expand button on that panel, to mix all your vectors.

Now you can change colors, and edit them as you wish. Create multiple swoosh groups above each other for great effects. The best thing about this tutorial? Every single thing you create is unique, so it won’t look like every other person’s photoshop-brush swirl.

Keywords: Adobe Illustrator, swirls, curls, swooshes, background design, spirals, curly, vector, brushes.