Variable width, Outline Stroke, and Unite

Over the course of this next project, we're going to draw a silhouette…of a tree, very much like what you see here, and if you're not…an artist, you may find this to be a little intimidating, but I can…assure you with the right approach, it's completely doable, as you're about to see.…And the right approach is going to be a combination of pathfinder operations, of…course, along with the blob brush and the eraser tool, and we'll also go ahead.…And create…this moon up here as a compound shape.…Now, we're going to start off in this movie by taking…a bunch of lines that I've drawn in advance, and we're…going to turn them into a kind of leafless tree using…a combination of the outline stroke command along with the unite operation.…

So let me explain how I created the tree limbs in advance here.…I started with this, just cruddy photograph that…I shot from the balcony of the holiday…express, because I was really interested in drawing this tree.…There is a great shape to it even though of course, the background is terrible.…