Drawing freeform path outlines

- [Voiceover] In this movie, I'll introduce you to the new and improved pencil tool. Now, assuming you've 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, it my case it's called RGB with center guide.ait and click on a 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 fly-out menu.

Now if you've upgraded to the most recent version of Illustrator, you'll see that the pencil shares a fly-out menu with a shaper tool as well as the join tool. Both of which we saw in a previous chapter. Also notice that it has a keyboard shortcut of N and the reason that 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. Alright 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 a 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 dialogue box. And notice this Fidelity option up here at the top if you're working with a tablet, you might wanna make your path outlines more accurate.

In my case, because I'm working with a mouse though I wanna make them as smooth as possible, so I'm gonna crank that slider triangle all the way over to the right and click okay, and now if I draw the path, even if the preview's looking 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 wide 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 marquee-ing those two points in order to make sure thy'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 a 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 dialogue box.

Now this dialogue 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 fifteen, so in other words you need to make sure that you end your path outline within fifteen screen pixels of where you begin it, and so I'm gonna go ahead and turn that checkbox on and click okay, 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 gonna see a circle next to the cursor, which tells us that we're gonna close the path outline.

Now the one problem with it, at this point is that it's rounded off, so the closed points tend to be what are known as smooth points, as opposed to corners. If what you want is a corner, then try beginning the 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, clean, smooth, fluid shape complete with corners at the top, and the bottom.

Alright, now I'm gonna 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 gonna 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, Rx237 Gx28 Bx36 in order to create this final effect here.

And that folks is the basics of how you use the best free-form drawing tool in the business, the new and improved pencil tool here inside Illustrator.