From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

823 Drawing cartoon teeth aligned to the hair

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

823 Drawing cartoon teeth aligned to the hair

- [Instructor] All right, now we're going to add some representational details to our pattern, namely these teeth that are aligned to the hair. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch to our document so far, and because we want exacting results, I'm going to switch back over to the line segment tool. So most people think of this tool here inside Illustrator as being a very basic tool but it also gives you exacting control. All right, so I'm going to click at this point right here and notice that my smart guides are turned on. That'll bring up this dialog box and I'm looking for a width of 50 points and I'm going to change the angle value to 180 degrees, which will give us a horizontal line going out to the left, at which point, I'll click okay. And we'll end up with this line segment right here, and you might just want to check by clicking on the word stroke up here in the control panel that the line weight is set to two points and that round cap and round join are both turned on. All right, now press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool and go ahead and drag this guy by its right hand point all the way down to here until it snaps into alignment so you should see a white snapping cursor. At which point, press the alt key or the option key on the Mac so you see a double arrowhead cursor and then release to create a copy of that segment. Now what I want you to do with the black arrow tool selected is press the enter key or the return key on the Mac in order to bring up the move dialog box and what we want to pay attention to here are the distance and angle values. So notice that I just moved this guy down negative 60 degrees and by a distance of 50 points. And so let's say I want the border between the top teeth and the bottom teeth to align to this horizontal step in the blend right here, and so if you count the spaces between the blends, we have one, two, three, four, five areas, and so our distance of 50 divided by five gives us 10 points, and so what we want to do now is move this guy back up one two segments and so I'm going to change this distance value to negative 20 points and that's going to bump this line up, like so. At which point, I'm going to click the copy button so that I have a total of three horizontal lines right here. All right, now select this line right here and Shift + Click on this one. So leave the middle line deselected and then go up to the object menu, choose path, and then choose join, or you have that keyboard shortcut of Control + J or Command + J on the Mac, and that should join these two endpoints right here. If it joints them across at a diagonal, then undo, just go ahead and press Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac to undo that change and then grab your pen tool, which you can get by pressing the P key and go ahead and click on this point right here in order to extend that path, and then click on this one to connect the two. And now, if you press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool and you click anywhere on that open path, then press Control + J or Command + J on the Mac and you will close the path. And you can't help but get it right this time around. Now over here in the swatches panel, notice that my fill is active, and I have this group called grays that ends with a swatch called light gray. I'm going to go ahead and click on it. It is a very light gray, almost white, but not quite, and that will fill that path. Because this border path right here is in front, we're still able to see it. Now press the A key to switch to the white arrow tool right there and then go ahead and click on this segment and Shift + Click on this one, and that will gas and select both the segments. Then press Control + C or Command + C on the Mac to copy them, followed by Control + F or Command + F on the Mac to paste them in front. Now we want to blend between those paths by going up to the object menu, choosing blend, followed by make, or you've got that keyboard shortcut of Control + Alt + B or Command + Option + B on the Mac and my goodness, that is horrible. So we've got a couple of problems. For one, we have too many steps and for the other, because these paths are going in opposite directions, we're blending from this anchor point to this one, and visa versa. So what we want to do to start things off is click off the paths to deselect them and then click on either this side or that side, doesn't matter which one, in order to partially select it, and then go up to the object menu, choose path, and choose reverse path direction, and that's going to give us a much better result. Now you want to go up to the object menu, choose blend, and then choose blend options. Turn on the preview check box, make sure spacing is set to specified steps, and then click in that value right there and then press the down arrow key until you like how many teeth you see. In my case, I like three steps, which gives us four teeth up here at the top and four teeth along the bottom. At which point, I'll click okay in order to accept that change. All right, now I have made one teensy tiny mistake, and that is I've put all the teeth on the complement layer, which I'm ultimately going to get rid of and so notice if I turn that layer off, my teeth go away. That's not a good thing, and so I'll go ahead and bring that layer back and I will select the entire content of the layer. This is the easiest way to go, by clicking the top right corner of the layer here inside the layers panel, then press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool, Shift + Click inside the big orange region to deselect it, and Shift + Click right about there to deselect that blend. And now go ahead and grab that tiny green square and drag it down to the grinners layer. And now if you turn off the complement layer, the teeth should survive. And by the way, you can leave that layer off because we don't need it anymore. We just needed it in order to make sure everything was properly aligned. All right, so that's how you draw the cartoon teeth and align them to the cartoon hair. In the next episode, we'll create the triangular cartoon eyes.

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