Lessons

Lesson Info

Drawing with the Pencil Tool in Adobe Illustrator CC

hi there in this tutorial, we're going to learn how to use the pencil tool to do some kind of creative hand drawn effects were also going to take the lines and make them dashed and dotted. We'll also do things like this with a kind of sushi add arrowheads. Okay. Hopefully yours will look nicer than my ones. We're going to go and do that now in this tutorial. All right, it's jumping. Alright, so let's get started. Let's go to file, let's go to new. We're going to have a print documents. It's going to be litter and it's going to be a landscape. Okay? Let's click create. Let's bring in an image. So file place. Okay. And the difference in this case is we did before, we're going to use drawing one and in previous tutorials, if you've watched them, we've clicked on template and that kind of puts it on its own layer. It fades it out a little bit and locks it so that it's easy to draw over the top of. We don't want the kind of fading part of it so we can't use template. We're just gonna leave ...

Drawing one, We're going to take place Okay? And um you can click and drag out and that will give you like a specific size or if you click once, like I'm going to do here, it's gonna kind of just put it in its full size, so depending on your image, you might drag it out or just like I've done here, click once and it comes in a full size also just to make sure I've got view and make sure smart guides is turned back on, we turned it off in a previous tutorial and click hold and drag it so it kind of lines up, it's a little bit big for this page and that's okay. So in your layers panel, we're gonna manually kind of do that template part that we did in the previous video. So this one here, I'm going to double click the word, layer one and this is going to be background. This is not essential. Just it's just handy when we're doing this tutorial together. So I've named it and this kind of mysterious icon here, this kind of empty space, click it, it locks the layer. Okay, so I just want to know that that's the place to click and I'm going to make a new layer. This is a little turned up page down the bottom here. I'm going to click on that once. Okay, I've got layer two and I'm just going to double click layer two and call this one drawing. Okay. And I know I'm on this lab because it's blue. So the pencil tool is this guy here. Okay, underneath our paintbrush tool, you might find you've got the shaper tool. Okay, out by default. So click, hold it down and grabbed the pencil tool. Now the pencil tool by default is a little bit weird, a little bit hard to use. So we're going to change that. So let's say I'm going to draw a smiley face, I'm going to draw around here. Now the weird thing about it is watch this. If I keep drawing, can you see it doesn't draw new lines. It redraws over the existing ones and kind of disappears. It's, it's kind of a strange thing to happen. So we're going to change that by default. I'm going to delete that, putting the delete key on my keyboard. What I'm also going to do is I'm going to go to my properties panel and I'm going to make sure that I've got no Phil I'm gonna have a stroke of white. Okay, Just to fit with what we've got in the background here to change the pencil tool options, you just double click on it. So double click the pencil tool and then here's the things we want to change. Like keep selected. Okay, we want turned off. Okay. And the other thing we want to do is here, it says fidelity. Okay. Um, it's going to try and help you out and make your drawing look a little smoother and a little better. I love it. Right up. Okay. Especially if I'm drawing, say with my mouse, like I am here or my touch pad, wakame is a little different. Okay, even with wakame tablet. Okay. Where you're drawing with the pen? I, I like to crank it up. You maybe not as high as this, but we'll go full max smooth. And now when we draw, look what happens, just kind of makes everything fluid and nice. That's probably not the nicest. Okay, but let's grab our black arrow. I'm going to delete them. What I'd like to do here is just some kind of free form. I'm going to do flames out the bike for no good reason, but you can see when I draw on a let go. It's done quite a nice job. And what I'm gonna do is actually do a one piece and which one to let go kind of smooths that out nice. So my flames are going to be terrible. What I'd like to do is instead of doing them in one go, I'd like to have two parts. It's just going to help us when we do the next bit of example when we have a little look um at brushes. So I'm just kind of kind of draw these flames. Now I really want to go get my wacom tablet here because this is looking pretty bad. These are meant to be flames by the way, looks like a pineapple is growing out the back door. It looks like a pineapple. That's okay. Um what we're going to do is look at some of the techniques for stroke. So some of the first things you need to know about drawing lines like this is with the black area. Let's select them all and because we've got the background layer locked. Okay, it doesn't select any of that stuff so I've got them selected and over here under our properties panel. Okay. The basics are stroke. We've got the stroke weight, which we looked in at an earlier example. Okay. I'm gonna crank it up to say six points just so I can show you some of these other options for stroke now to open up all the advanced settings for the stroke. Just click on the word stroke and it kind of opens them all up if you want to go a different way. There's a way of opening up that panel forever by going to window and open up strokes. If you're getting sick of having to open it and you've got a big enough computer. Okay? You can just go to window and stroke and it's only giving you the tiny options. Weird. I know, but if you double click the word stroke, double click it again. It's got like three modes, four Moz small version. Stupid version, massive version. I don't know why they've got at least different versions. Okay. But if you keep clicking on it, you'll find that's the like big, big version. I'm going to use this option in here. Okay. So it collapses back in and better use of my space. I'm going to click on it and the first thing we're going to look at is the capping. Okay, so this changes quite a bit of the look. I'm going to zoom in a little bit of my pineapple flames. Okay, I'm going to click on stroke by default. You're going to have what's called a butt cap. Okay, right there. But cap unfortunately named and it's just kind of just flat at the end. If I click this next one rounded cap, can you see I'm going to go on off on off, just kind of rounds off the ends and that's really nice, especially when you get a low stroke. Okay, a small stroke like this and you just don't want to have like really pointy end or butt caps. Okay, just kind of curves it off a little bit nicely. Gonna go back up to six points. Let's have a little look at some of the other options. So, but cap is flat at the end. This one here, I very rarely use projecting cap kind of goes out past the line ends here and it goes back past. So let's go. But cap projecting cap, I think I just like saying, but cap okay, projecting cap actually I'm going to leave it on but cap. Okay, and we've got these corners here. So lots of these lines aren't corners that are straight lines. This one, here's a corner and do any other ones. I think just this one here. Look what happens when I change it from a corner of a miter join to around join. Okay, can you see where it goes around this curve? It's rounded on the edge. Okay, so the joints are different and this last one here kind of devil's it off like an edge. I never used that one either. So either with those first two are quite good and I'm going to leave those as is and what might look good for our flaming pineapple now is down here, right at the bottom. Something called profile. Profile is a nice way of just changing the line instead of being perfect all the way along. Look on this one here just kind of makes it tapered at both ends. You can kind of see that gets projected onto our lines. That's kind of why I wanted having separate lines because you get this kind of like pointy ends on both sides or is this one here? It's pointy at the tippy tips. Okay, but not quite thick through the middle here. Up to you. Okay, but have a little play around with the rest of them. So I've got them selected click on stroke and down the bottom here and profile. I can go through and say I want this one which is kind of strange. Yeah, more pineapple. E Okay, you can flip them. Ok, Depending on how you want them on the line and let's have a little look at some of the other ones. I'll let you have a look. Okay points Other ones are the ones I am going to probably go back. I like this one. I think this width profile five I'm going to use him now. There's a couple more things I want to show you about strokes drawing with strokes and one of them is say arrows. Okay, so I'm just gonna grab my pencil tool again. Okay. And I'm going to draw something like that. Meant to be like the wheels turning. That's what it's meant to look like. Okay, that's okay. Okay with it selected. I'm going to grab my black arrow. I'm gonna click both of these by dragging a box around them and what I'll do is go to stroke and this one here, arrowheads are quite important. Well quite useful. Okay, so with it selected the two lines, you've got a beginning and an ending and it really depends on which way you started drawing. Play with both. Okay, I'm gonna go error here. It's kind of not the way I wanted it. So that's actually the end of the beginning. I want turning this way. Okay, so if you scroll down the arrowheads eventually they turn into the kind of tail end of the arrow and this is gonna look better for the beginning. Okay, and by better it's a pretty wonky era going for this hand drawn look. Okay, so profile as well. I might go through and try and make it look nicer. Now you can see I added that kind of profile, the same as this one over here, but it just doesn't look the same if I click off. Okay, it's quite thin. It just means the stroke width isn't that high. So with them selected, I'm going to raise the stroke with. Now. What happens with arrowheads? Is that by default there? They've got a weird proportion to the line. Okay, so a four point area is really big. So when I click on stroke, there's a percentage underneath both of these ends and you can see if I scale this one down, It's going pretty slow. So I'm going to toilet down to maybe say 20% of the line and 20% of the line. Why? Because I that looks a bit weird but I want to increase this kind of stroke with okay, and maybe flip it across. I don't know if they're really ugly lines but you're getting the sense of it right with you can add arrowheads. Easy Peasy. Okay. Next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna look at dashed and dotted lines and we're gonna try and make it look better. Like I promised you when I practiced this, I had flames out the back and cool arrows stand. Not so good in actual practice. All right. And so what we're going to do is do a little dotted line around here. So it looks like it's cut it not dotted lines and dashed line so it looks like she could be cut out. So the pencil tool again, I'm going to just draw a really rough kind of line around the outside line, around the outside now stopped at the edge of the desk and we're going around okay, back to the beginning. The good thing about going back to the beginning, watch this, remember that a little icon with a circle, See that changes there. It kind of shows you it's going to kind of complete it. Cool. So not hard if I slipped on the line and I click on the stroke there is a dashed line, click on it magically dashed. If I click off. Okay, dash line there's a couple of things you might want to do with the dash line. So I've got it selected. I'm going to increase it so I can show you and back under stroke things like the rounded cap. Can you see the difference between those two depending on what you want to do? The other thing is is that the dash line here, if you leave, it's just gonna do 12 and 12. So 12 points and then a gap of 12 points, you can increase this. Okay, so maybe 22. Okay, and it's just going to do 22 points and 22 points. You can have a smaller gap say I want 10. So it's going to have smaller gaps and larger um kind of dots or dashes. Okay, you can do the opposite. So the dash can be quite small so maybe two point and the gap is going to be quite big. Okay, depending on what you want to do. I feel like that's kind of like a zipper detail or Frankenstein stitches, One or the other. Um let's go back up. I'm going to do 12 and 12. Now you don't have to, if you want them to be x identical, you can just leave and it will kind of guess that then what you mean by the gap is 12. It's like a dotted lines. Weirdly there should just be an option that says dotted as well, but it doesn't and they're really hard and even when I'm making them, I'm like, how the how the hell do you make a dotted line again? Okay, it's a, it's a funny old thing. So let's go the pencil tool and I'm going to draw like tassels from this. Okay, I'm gonna grab my black arrow, select both of these and get rid of the dashes. So click on stroke, you might not have yours. Okay, so let's turn it off in a straight line and I'm gonna have my weight at about four point. Now weird thing is, is dotted. It's actually part of Dasht. Okay, Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but if you make the dash zero And you make the gap anything. So 12, it makes kind of dots, actually they're just lines. Okay, so with them selected in here, all I need to do is change it from that default, which is a butt cap to a round cap and that makes our little dotted lines. Okay, so you just need to make sure one of them or the dash is zero. So it's actually got no length. Okay, But there's around a cap around it so it kind of wants to wrap itself around that nothingness Dotted lines. They're kind of weird. Okay, so turn on the dash line, make sure the dash is zero and you can have the gap any size you like. Okay, 20 will just space them out. You can have them really kind of close together. They can even kind of like overlap like that. Mm I'm Gonna Go for 10. Nice. Alright. So amounts, let's have a look at our magical drawing. We've learned of things about strokes. We haven't made anything very pretty though. But what we'll do in the next tutorial is we'll add brush strokes and things will get marginally prettier. So let's go and do that now in the next tutorial