From the course: Illustrator 2020 One-on-One: Fundamentals

Drawing freeform path outlines - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2020 One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Drawing freeform path outlines

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- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll introduce you to the new and improved pencil tool. Now, assuming you created that center guides template a few chapters back, go up to the file menu and choose new from template, or you can press that keyboard shortcut of CTRL + shift + N, or CMD + shift + N on the Mac. Then locate your template, in my case it's called RGB with center guides.ait, and click on the new button, and you'll end up with a blank document. Now go ahead and select the pencil tool, which is located midway down the toolbox. If you don't see it at this location, go ahead and click and hold and choose the pencil tool from the flyout menu. Now if you've upgraded to the most recent version of Illustrator, you'll see that the pencil shares a flyout menu with the shaper tool as well as the join tool, both of which we saw in the previous chapter. Also notice that it has a keyboard shortcut of N, and the reason it doesn't have the more obvious shortcut of P is because that key is assigned to the pen tool, which we'll see in a later chapter. All right, now just go ahead and start drawing, and I should say by the way, first of all, I'm creating a heart, in case that's not obvious. And I'm drawing with a mouse as opposed to a tablet, which I think is obvious by the roughness of this outline. But notice as soon as I release that we get a smoother shape as we're seeing here. Well, let's say it's not quite smooth enough. Then you can press the backspace key, or the delete key on the Mac to get rid of that shape, and then, with the pencil tool active, go ahead and press the enter key, or the return key on a Mac, to bring up the pencil tool options dialog box. And notice this fidelity option up here at the top. If you're working with a tablet, you might want to make your path outlines more accurate. In my case, because I'm working with a mouse, though, I want to make them as smooth as possible, so I'm going to crank that slider triangle all the way over to the right and click OK. And now, if I draw the path, even if the preview's lookin' pretty chunky, I should expect to see smoother results. And sure enough, as soon as I release the mouse button, I see a very smooth shape indeed. Now, the one unfortunate problem with it is that it's an open path outline instead of a closed one. Notice if I press the A key, to switch to my white arrow tool, and I click on one of these points up here at the top of the heart, the two points are not joined together by default. Now, you can join them just by moving one directly on the other, like so, and then marqueeing those two points in order to make sure they're both selected, and then just going up to this option right here, connect selected endpoints, and that'll go ahead and fuse those endpoints together in order to create a closed path outline like so. So that's one way to work, the other is to redraw the shape subject to a different setting. And to demonstrate that, I'll press the backspace key a couple of times here on the PC, that would be the delete key on the Mac, in order to get rid of that shape, and I'll switch back to my pencil tool once again, and I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to bring up the dialog box. Now this dialog box has been in a high state of transition, so you may see different stuff. But currently we have this checkbox, close paths when ends are within however many pixels. By default, it's set to 15, so in other words, you need to make sure that you end your path outline within 15 screen pixels of where you begin it. And so I'm going to go ahead and turn that checkbox on and click OK, and now I'll go ahead and draw the shape once again, but I want you to note the cursor. See how the pencil has a little asterisk next to it? That tells you that you're creating a new path outline like so, but notice as soon as we arrive at the very first point inside of the shape up here at the top, that we're going to see a circle next to the cursor, which tells us that we're going to close the path outline. Now the one problem with it at this point is that it's rounded off, so the close points tend to be what are known as smooth points, as opposed to corners. If what you want is a corner, then try beginning a draw at a different location, so for example, I'll just go ahead and press the backspace key there, and again, that's the delete key on a Mac, and then I'll draw the hump of the heart, and then I'll come back around and draw the center of it like so, and then I'll go ahead and connect those endpoints in order to create a nice smooth fluid shape complete with corners at the top and the bottom. All right, now I'm going to make my shape a little bigger by clicking on the word transform up here in the control panel. Or again, if you don't see it, click the X, Y, W, or H. And I'm going to make sure that both the values are linked together, that is, both the width and height values, and then I'll change the width value to let's say 500 points. And next I'll go ahead and give the shape a thicker line weight by taking that stroke value up to eight points, and I'll click on the fill icon, which is the first stroke up here in the control panel, and I'll change the color to the shade of red R237 G28 B36, in order to create this final effect here. And that, folks, is the basics of how you use the best freeform drawing tool in the business, the new and improved pencil tool here inside Illustrator.

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