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

975 Snapping to a glyph with the Pen tool

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

975 Snapping to a glyph with the Pen tool

- [Instructor] Now I'll show you how to precisely trace the letter form associated with a specific glyph using the pen tool which will allow us to fill in these stars. And so notice if I switch to the type tool which I can get by pressing the T key and I drag it across one of these stars it is a character of type and so I'll bring up the character panel at which point you can see that the font is set to HWT star ornaments which assuming that you have a subscription to the Creative Cloud you can activate from Adobe Fonts. I also want you to notice these snap to glyph options down here. And so you can turn these guys on and off as you like. We want to make sure that angular guides and anchor points are turned on. All right, so I'll just go ahead and escape out of that panel and I'll switch to my start-up document right here and I'll zoom in on this right-hand star, let's say and then I'll switch over to the layers panel. Now, if you're working along with me you want to lock down the bar's layer by clicking in that second column that'll just make it easier to work inside this document and then select the draw layer. You want the type layer, which contains this type including the stars you want that layer to remain unlocked for the time being then go up to the view menu and make sure your smart guides are turned on and that snap to glyph is active and that snap to grid is turned off. All right, now I'll switch to the pen tool which I can get by pressing the P key. And now I'll right click on this star and choose the first command from the shortcut menu which reads snap to Glyph capital L. And that's because the star happens to be mapped to a capital L on the keyboard. All right, notice that goes ahead and highlights the star and we're seeing these smart guides. Now the easiest way to work is to just click on every one of these corners like so and you should see the word anchor. That's going to tell you that you have precise alignment. And so you're going to have to click an awful lot of times in order to trace this entire star shape. The good news is that clicking is all you have to do. You don't have to drag or press the Alt or Option key or any of that other fancy stuff. And so just go ahead and click on every single one of these corner points and then mosey on back to the very first point you created. Now with any luck, you'll see a little circle next to your pen tool cursor which is telling you that you're about to close the shape. If you don't see that just as I'm not seeing it then do not click on that first point. Instead what you want to do is tap the A key to switch to the white arrow tool and then select that anchor point right there. It's the very first point that I created and I'll go ahead and drag this to some other location just so I can keep an eye on it and then I'll Shift click on that other anchor point right click anywhere inside the document window and choose join or you can press Control J here on a PC or Command J on the Mac and that should go ahead and join those two anchor points with a straight segment at which point you can click on that aberrant anchor point and then drag it back so it snaps into alignment like so. All right now I'm going to press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool and I'll click anywhere on the path outline to select it. I'm not interested in a stroke, so I'll go ahead and click on that second swatch right there and switch it to none. And then I'll click on the fill swatch and I'll change it to the shade of dark blue that begins R equals 46. All right, now what you want to do is duplicate that star. And so I'll go ahead and press control zero or command zero on the Mac in order to center my zoom. For the best results you do not want the bounding box to be turned on. So if this command reads hide bounding box go ahead and choose it in order to turn the bounding box off. And then I'll go ahead and right click on that left-hand star and choose the first command in the shortcut menu snap to glyph capital L and that'll move the highlight over to this left hand shape at which point I'll drag my blue star by any one of its anchor points until it snaps into alignment like so and then before you release you want to press and hold the alt key or the option key on the Mac so that you create a duplicate of that star. All right now what we want to do is select both of the star shapes and that's going to be very hard to do, however while the type layer is unlocked. So go ahead and lock it down by clicking in the second column here inside the layers panel and then shift click on that first star like so. All right now at this point notice over here in the far left side of the control panel you can click release glyph in order to release those characters of type. And now what you want to do is scoot all the anchor points inward. The easiest way to do that is to use the offset path function which is available inside the properties panel. You can just click on this button right here or if you prefer, you can go to the object menu, choose path and then choose offset path. And I came up with an offset value of negative two points which moves all the anchor points inward by a uniform amount. And then I'll just go ahead and click okay. All right now offset path creates a duplicate of the path outline. Never really understood why, but in any event go ahead and press control X or command X on a Mac in order to cut those new star shapes then click and shift click on the original star shapes press the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac in order to get rid of them. Switch over to the layers panel make sure the draw layer is selected and then press control F or command F on a Mac in order to paste in front. And that's it. Now you can click off the shapes to de-select them and that is at least one way that you can precisely trace a letter form associated with a specific glyph using the pen tool here inside the most recent version of Illustrator.

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