hi there in this tutorial, we're going to start with some basic lines like this and then do this to the, with the width tool. Okay, it's going to take our simple lines, add a bit of dimension to them and a little bit of sexiness. Alright, that is the width tool. Let's learn how to do that now in adobe illustrator. Alright, so get started. Let's go to file and go to open and in your exercise files. Okay. There is a file called width tool click open. Alright, we're gonna start with the kind of like leaves at the top here. I want you to kind of complete, I want another leaf down the bottom here to show you how I drew it. Okay, so pencil tool, I'm going to have a fill of none, Little stripey line and I'm gonna have a stroke of white and I'm going to have the stroke width down to hairline which is .25 and I'm double clicking on my pencil tool to make sure the smoothing is way up and I've turned off, keep selected. Okay, click. Okay, so what I want to do now is just kind of click and drag an...

d you can see the because of the curving is quite up high, it's making me look a whole lot better than I am come. Alright, so we've got a bottom leaf now what I want to do is do what we did at the intro there and have those lovely lines. Okay and the trick with it is to get started with the black arrow and it's best to select all the lines and make sure it's really thin. Okay, so the stroke weight needs to be at either .25 or less. Okay. Yeah that what's it needs to be quite thin to get started. The next thing I'm gonna do is de select in the background and we're going to grab the width tool. It's this guy there looks like a kind of a bow and arrow, click on it. Okay? And this magic tool, okay if I zoom in a little bit, okay, it means I can grab any point on this line, okay? And click hold and drag if it doesn't and it kind of just goes nowhere dragging the wrong way, give it a wiggle. Okay. And you can see here beautiful if you've ever tried to do that before with the pen tool again you try and draw one line and then the other side. I love the with tools so cool. Huh? I clicked on this line, I didn't really select on it. Just grab a with tool and just start pulling them out wherever you feel like you should. Okay, I'm just gonna work my way around this one. It's amazing. You can transform something quite simple. Okay, I got this moving on to make it look a little nicer but yeah, just kind of giving it some fullness. Here we go. Now you can do more than one point on a line and I'll show you how to do that in this next part. Okay, I'm happy with yeah, I'm happy enough with it. Okay, I imagined it better. But anyway, down here, okay, I've got a path that I've drawn and what we're gonna do is with the width tool, we're going to end up with multiple kind of widths on it. So I'm going to start with one about here. Okay, And you can see it's kind of working its way all the way around okay, from thickest here, all the way to thin at the two ends. Now that's fine. Okay, if that's the look you're looking for but what I'd like to do is I wanted to get kind of skinnier along the top here so it's just I can click out another line. Okay, click the wrong way, click and drag up. Okay, I can make it thicker up here, which is cool, but actually just want to make it thinner so just dragging this little point to make it quite thin and then I got this kind of like bulge there thins there and then maybe across the middle here, I'm going to drag out a nice thick one, you can start to get these kind of like cool into place of thick and thin. Okay, maybe down here, I want it to be nice and thin, but over here I wanted to give a nice little kind of like whippy tail thing there, you get what I mean? Right, so I'm going to drag this nice and big but potentially I wanted to get a lot smaller through here and then get nice and big again at the end here. Cool. Another thing you can do is you can slide these to say that they're in the wrong point. This guy here, you can click on them and just drag him around. You can see you can kind of wiggle his way all the way around, you can't go past that guy um that I've already got them, but you can drag these along with another one, you can kind of, you can see it's kind of moving and adjusting. You can also hold down the shift key okay? And drag one side, not the shift key. Hold down the option key Okay. And you can drag one side at a time. So it's option on a mac or on a Pc. Okay, And just grab any of these either side, it doesn't really matter. Okay, you can just do one side rather than both. Come on. Now we've used the pencil tool quite a bit now to get our curves. We're going to go back to the curvature tool because I guess this is a font and I guess I want a little bit more preciseness to it rather than really hand drawn stuff. So we're going to grab the curvature tool and before I start drawing and it's going to make sure I got no Phil and I got a stroke and in terms of the stroke width I'm gonna pick just one point for the moment. Okay and it can be hard to know where the curvature tool, how many points you need? It's a little bit of trial and error. Right? So if I click once and twice I get a straight line is obviously not going to be enough. Okay so if I click once and maybe a third, okay so just three of them you can see it's just gonna bend in the middle, it's not what I want. So what I do want is there's two curves, there's one going this way and one going that way. So one there, okay the tippy top kind of one halfway through the apex of this curve, it's very slight one, it's gonna click once and then one kind of at the apex of this one and then it's going to come out here and click once I get a kind of a nicer line now it wants to continue on, I can grab the black arrow just click off in the background now if I grab my width till now I slept on this with tool it's going to work to a degree. Okay well it's gonna work nicely but what you'll see here is if I zoom in on the end here you can see I got this kind of like stubby into it. Okay it's because I didn't change my stroke with before I started drawing so I'm going to zoom out. Okay, so with this I'm going to undo actually. Um so before I use my width tool I'm going to make sure the stroke is quite thin, you can't have zero but you can have like .05 something super thin and okay, I'm using black as well as my fill now if I grab my width tool. Okay. And I don't know how many points I need. I might need to I want one there to kind of get the top bit, maybe one more for a fuller middle. That's not what I want. I'm just gonna do one in the middle. Come on dan, it was not quite right. I'm going to drag it down. Yeah, I remember this is drawing is not meant to be perfect. It was just kind of a hand drawn and get it going one. So the other thing I might do is that um there's this like little white whip in the middle there. Okay, so it's a little bit hard when there's something already there. Okay, so if I grab my, say curvature till now it wants to join up and wants to do things. So black arrow, I'm just gonna click and grab the center. Just kind of move it off and we'll get back, we'll move him back in a second now curvature tool or pencil tool. I probably want the pencil tool for this one pencil to, I just want to kind of like a curve out of here. Mm hmm. Yeah, we'll see how that works. Okay. And I'm going to make it a stroke color of white. Okay. And now I'll move this back in because I drew it after this black line, it should be on top. So I'm gonna kind of move it into position Using my archies just to kind of tap it down something like that rotated around a little bit. Now I'm missing about okay, you got the idea of what we're doing here. I'm gonna turn the stroke down 2.05. Okay. And I'm gonna grab my width tool and I'm going to drag this out a little bit hard because there's there's lots of things fighting for the width tool attention so I might go something like that, drag it down a little bit. How do I like it? Yeah, I like it enough. Okay, so what I want you to do is your task is to go through and finish this. Okay, so I'd like you to go through and do this part. Okay. One thing when you are drawing this part on the bottom here, let me have a quick little look with digital is that if I draw one, draw one and come back here, everybody wants to join up to that existing one. So you've got to make sure when you're coming to this end point is just to stay away. Okay. And you can fix that up afterwards. Move with the white arrow. Okay. And you can drag it in afterwards. It won't kind of join up after it's been drawn. Okay. And start with that. Okay, all of these lines here, the one little hint, I've practiced this already. Okay, I've taught this a few times so let's go and change it back to black. The one thing that catches people out is this Oh and I only learned it through practice as well. Okay, How many points does it need? It looks like it needs about four. Okay, turns out it works out nicely, click once, click twice, click again, click again. You get this kind of like boxy circle and it's kind of close to what we want. That was a bit quick. But yeah, with the width tool you can yeah move these and adjust them and you see if you can give it a go, give the Vigo the ego, then do all these like little extra bits and you go through color it. I'd love to see how you get it. Like I've never actually gone through and completed it fully myself. I'd love to see what other people do with it. I know it's not the best one but I'd love to see yeah, your interpretation. You can totally adjust it and make it as you want but I'd like to see it as a project. Yes, A screenshot it and send it to me. That'd be awesome. Alright That is it for the width tool? It's pretty cool. Huh? Makes during those kind of sexy lines. Super easy. I love it. Thank you illustrator. Alright, onto the next video.

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Daniel Walter Scott

Multi-award winning, influential media designer & Adobe Certified Instructor with 15+ yrs of experience.

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topics covered in this class

Graphic Design Illustration Adobe Illustrator Drawing

Ratings and Reviews

Roz Fruchtman

BIG COMPLAINT... I'm just starting this course. I have Illustrator CS6. My BIG/HUGE Complaint and I only watched 2 1/2 brief lessons... Is that the FiVRR LOGO (top right) is RIGHT ON TOP of the Illustrator Panels and YOU CANNOT SEE what is under it. IF one is just learning, they need to see what everything looks like in Illustrator (or any class). I STRONGLY suggest that FIVRR and CreativeLive find a better place to put the FIVRR Logo instead of putting it where it BLOCKS ESSENTIAL course visuals! Not sure I can get through this, but I'm not giving up quite yet. I like the course previews and IF I can learn how to get around Illustrator I will be thrilled... I am a Photoshop person, and Illustrator makes me feel like an incompetent! ;) Perhaps IF I can learn Illustrator I can use it for some of the visuals I create! Thanks in advance. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE find a better place and size for the Fivrr Logo. ~Roz Fruchtman aka @RozSpirations

Annie Kerr

This was a great class that covered the fundamentals really well - some of the instructions were out of date if you are using Creative Cloud but wasn't anything I couldn't get around. I loved the format and Daniel is a great teacher, who made each video interesting and fun to watch!

Christi Peace

This class is AMAZING!! Daniel is a very thorough, entertaining and easy to follow instructor. You DO NOT need to take any college course on Illustrator because this is the whole thing right here!! You will be a pro once you complete it. I only wish that Creative Live could send me a diploma for it once I complete it! BUY THIS CLASS! IT’S WORTH EVERY PENNY!!

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How to Draw Lines with the Width Tool in Adobe Illustrator

How to Draw Lines with the Width Tool in Adobe Illustrator

Lesson Info

13. How to Draw Lines with the Width Tool in Adobe Illustrator

Lessons

Class Introduction to Adobe Illustrator CC for Beginners

Class Exercise Files for Adobe Illustrator CC Essentials

Getting Started with Adobe Illustrator CC

How to Draw in Adobe Illustrator CC with Shapes & Lines

How to Draw Using the Shape Builder Tool in Adobe Illustrator CC

How to Draw a Fox Using the Shape Builder Tool in Adobe Illustrator

Drawing - Quiz

How to Draw Custom Logo Shapes Easily in Adobe Illustrator CC

How to Draw Anything Using the Curvature Tool in Adobe Illustrator

How to Draw Using the Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator CC

Drawing with the Pencil Tool in Adobe Illustrator CC

How to Use Brushes in Adobe Illustrator CC