Hi James

Are you trying to use the default charcoal brushes? If so, they should colorize to whatever stroke color you choose without a problem. Perhaps you mean that the color panel is only showing the grayscale/black ramp? If that's the case, open the stroke panel flyout menu and change the color space to RGB or CMYK and you'll get color options. Alternatively you could double click the stroke icon in the color panel or the tool panel and choose a color from the picker that pops up. If that's not what you mean, please clarify.

As for adjusting the texturing and tapering of a brush, you'll really need to edit the shape that made the brush and then resave it as a new brush. Simply drag the brush shape from the brushes panel onto the artboard. it will appear as paths that you can modify. Use whatever means you want to change the texture, filters or manually. Then I'd suggest either the transform tool or the scale tool (set to non-uniform) to adjust the taper. When it looks the way you want it to, drag it back on the brush panel. Charcoal brushes are art brushes so choose that when the popup asks. Colorization method should be set to "tints". That should do it.

if you want to re-use that brush, be sure to save it. Go back to the flyout menu in the brush panel and choose "save brush library"

Michael

http://www.learnadobesoftware.com

edited: added the line 'Colorization method should be set to "tints".'

Message was edited by: Michael Riordan

I can't seem to duplicate the problem, everything is doing exactly what you want it to do on my end. Here are a couple of screen shots:

I felt compelled to try this out in the CS6 beta. It's still there.

You don't need two sets of brushes libraries. You need one set of brushes created in RGB color mode of the document not RGB color mode of the color panel which in CMYK color mode of the document is still CMYK colors converted to RGB numbers. The color mode of the document is displayed in the title of the document's window and can be changed from File > Document Color mode. Brushes created in RGB color mode will always give equal color in any of the CMYK color spaces because CMYK gamut has lighter blacks.

Adobe made a stupid mistake by creating brushes in a CMYK color space. When the blacks of the CMYK color spaces are converted to RGB color spaces they are not fully black because the color management matches the colors - the full black in a CMYK color space matches some dark gray in a RGB color space because RGB color spaces have wider gamut allowing darker blacks not possible with CMYK spaces.

This is not a bug, simply bad workflow used by the people who created the brush libraries and users have to fix that by recreating the brushes in  RGB color mode of the document.

@Scott-Sorry Scott but I beg to differ. I tested the problem again, starting with a new document set to RGB. The color did appear  as R=0, G=0, B=0 in the color panel when the brush was initially applied, but the problem with the color still occurred when a new color swatch was chosen. It doesn't seem to matter if you start with RGB or CMYK.