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

Introducing the Eraser tool - Illustrator Tutorial

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

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Introducing the Eraser tool

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- [Instructor] All right, now I'll introduce you to the Eraser Tool, which works a lot like the Blob Brush, except, of course, it erases without the smoothing technology. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and switch over to my document so far. And I'll create a new layer below the drawing layer, so I'll go ahead and click on the template layer and Alt or Option + click on the little page icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. And I'll go ahead and call this layer colors and I'll change the color of this layer to Violet and then I'll click OK. All right, now I'm going to change the color of the stroke, because, again, it takes precedent, to this shade of green that begins with R = 140. And now I'll go ahead and switch to the Blob Brush. Now, as you can see here, I could just start scrubbing back and forth with my tiny little brush, but that might take me a while to get anything done. And so I'll just go ahead and increase the size of my brush by pressing and holding the right bracket key until it gets very large indeed. And then I'm just going to paint quite sloppily, actually this is a little too sloppy I think, so I'll reduce the size of my cursor a little bit here. But I want to make sure I paint at least everything. So I'm going to paint around the eye and then I'm going to paint into the ears, like so, and I'll go ahead and paint into this ear as well. And we need to paint down into the body. And I want to make sure that I'm painting all the way to the bleed, which I am. And now I'll go ahead and paint up this wing and I'll paint around this wing as well. So, of course, I could've chosen to be a little less sloppy about this process, but I want to be able to show you how to work with the Eraser Tool. All right, so after making sure that I've painted at least everything I want to I'll go ahead and grab the Eraser Tool, which is located two tools down in the single column toolbox and by default has a keyboard shortcut of Shift + E. We're actually going to be changing that in a future movie, so stay tuned for that, because it's a very useful tool after all. Now the Eraser Tool either works on the selected path or if no path is selected it works on all the paths. So we just want to affect this green path here and so I want to make sure that it is selected. And then I'll paint, like so. Now you may be under the impression that it's going to erase the way it's showing you that it's going to erase, by the way. That is to say, into the black stroke as well as the green stuff, but that is not actually the case. Notice, as soon as I release that I only erased the selected path. So even if I do this number, I'll increase the size of my brush by pressing and holding the right bracket key, once again, and I just totally erase his mouth and nose, they come back because they're not selected. So just bear that in mind, don't panic. All right, now I'll go ahead and paint over this stuff to get rid of it. And I will reduce the size of my brush by pressing the left bracket key and I'll erase up into this area right here. And see what I mean by the lack of smoothing technology. Notice if I press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to bring up the Eraser Tool Options that there is no fidelity slider. For whatever reason it just never been introduced to this tool. And so it works just like the Blob Brush of the old days. All right, so I'm going to paint down into this region here and I'll increase the size of my brush and go ahead and paint around this detail. And you want to keep an eye, by the way, on the left side of the control panel as you're working. Make sure it continues to read Compound Path as opposed to Group. If things turn into a group it's a little bit of a problem. All right, so I'm going to paint up inside of the black brush stroke, by the way. And you just want to make sure, notice there we've got Mixed Objects, that's an issue, and that's because this guy has gotten separated from the rest. As soon as I erase it we're back to seeing a Compound Path, so that's good. All right, now I'm going to reduce the size of my eraser and paint into this, not too far, I almost went too far. In fact, I'm going to do that again. I'll go ahead and paint up, like so, and then I'll reduce the size of my cursor and paint right here, let's say, and then up into this region. And I'll go ahead and zoom out and I'll increase the size of my cursor quite a bit I think I can get away with. Notice how it looks. It's kind of like, it's kind of like a big polygon if you check out the way that it looks as it's painting. See that. And then it goes ahead and erases the pasteboard as well, that's not real, it's not going to do that. It's going to go ahead and bring all that stuff back. But this is a problem. Notice that I painted in too far. In which case, just press the A key to switch to the white arrow tool and grab these anchor points, click on one, Shift + click on the other, and just nudge them up, like so. We probably want to nudge these anchor points down. So it's really a combination. Look at this guy, he's totally aberrant, but I don't really care, because if I were to delete him at this point I'd leave a hole in the path outline. So I'll just kind of move these guys around. And then continue on like that. Maybe I'll take this anchor point up a little bit, so that we have a little more wiggle room. All right, now this is an issue down here, I'm not going to show you how I erase everything, because it's a little tedious after a certain point, but I'll go ahead and switch back to that Eraser Tool right there and if you're not seeing the Eraser Tool by the way, if you're seeing the Scissors Tool instead just click and hold on that tool and choose the Eraser Tool. There's no reason on the face of the planet to use the Knife Tool. It's one of my least favorite tools in the software. But I'll go ahead and switch to the Eraser Tool and I'll paint inside this region right here. So you have to keep the brush small when you're painting into the corners. And then I'll just go ahead and paint around the outside of this area, like so. And then maybe I'll come back and paint into this region here in order to sort of separate this region. And now what you can do is press the A key to switch to the white arrow tool, click off the path outlines to deselect them, then carefully Alt + click or Option + click on the outline of this subpath right here, that'll select the whole thing, and then press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac in order to get rid of it. All right, now I'll switch back to the Eraser Tool and I'll go ahead and paint inside these scallops right here and so that means I just need to increase the size of my brush, because after all, it is more or less of a circle, whether it's actually a polygonal circle or not. And that makes it easy just to paint away these scallops, as you see me doing here. Unfortunately along the body I'm not going to be able to get away with that, because I would paint into the body after all. But I can just go ahead and paint down this side in order to get rid of these details here. And are you seeing the massive mistake I made? I wish I did before I did all this work. Because I had no path outline selected I really did erase everything. And so now I'll have to press Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac. I was feeling so celebratory about how I could paint away those scallops, but that's not the way to work. Press and hold the Control key or the Command key on a Mac to get that last used arrow tool, which happens to be the white arrow, and then click inside the path to select the whole darn thing. And then I'll go ahead and switch back to the Eraser tool. I keep doing so tediously by clicking on the tool's icon, but that's because I refuse to acknowledge that tool's current shortcut. And that's because there's a better shortcut in our future. And now notice as I paint away that stuff the black path outlines come back, which is exactly what I want. And now I'll go ahead and paint down inside this region and then I'll paint up, like so. And then a few minutes later I end up with this perfectly filled creature right here. And that is how you combine the Blob Brush with the Eraser Tool here inside Illustrator.

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