Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating and Editing Paths

we're gonna keep working a little bit with strokes, so we talked a little bit about them, but I want to just call it a little bit more detail on them. So a stroke. We talked about how we could create a stroke with the pen tool or the pencil tool, and it ends up being the same thing, right? We've got the points and the paths and I can create him. Like I said just on the fly, I'm gonna actually just create a stroke with the pencil tool. And we talked about assigning a color, clicking the strokes tool here and then assigning a color. And again, we're gonna talk about color in just a little while. I think we'll talk about that. The fourth segment, Um and I give it a color, and I'm gonna go to the strokes panel. I'm actually gonna pull that off. We talked about moving panels around. Sometimes I like to just pull them off so that I can actually see them. Put them exactly where I need to move him up. So they're closer to my artwork, and I'm going to go ahead and just beef that up a little bit...

. so it's a little thicker so you can see it and we're talking about these endpoints in the corner points. The first thing is the cap. If I look at this capital's actually Zuman a lot more on that. So look at that and I can see that that stroke just ends. The point is right here and the stroke. Like we said, half goes on each side of that stroke or the skeleton part of that stroke, and it just ends flat. Just like that, we can change what the end cap looks like. I could make it round, so that's kind of nice. It gives it just sort of a little bit more organic. Look a a drawn look or brush look, because it's got that round cap to it. I can also do this cap here, which is projecting. It's basically the same as the round, only it's square. But it's different because the point doesn't come all the way to the end that comes all the way to the end. That doesn't and there's reasons why you may or may not want. That just depends how it's interacting with other objects, so just keep in mind that you have some options for what the end caps look like on your point, those things if we have corners, So I'm gonna actually just draw another portion of the line here, just do that. Just something jumping right. Then we take that and select that item, and I'm gonna work with the corner points here. So right now what I have is just a minor join, like until it that I wanted to be around a joint or I can go ahead and give it a bevel joint. So again, it's just what happens to the corner point. So it's just some little changes that we can make to the Strokes. But it's pretty significant when you start working with really intricate strokes. Like I had the one that had that really sharp miter or whatever, I could have just changed that point. Instead, I could have changed them all to the beveled from there, and stop playing with that limit that we played with earlier building I can do is I could take a line and I can make it a dashed line. It's coming here, and I can choose to make this item a dashed line and I'm actually gonna zoom out a little bit, well, too close. And right now what it's doing is it's telling me that I want a 12 point dash and I have nothing here in the Gap. And that, basically is saying that the gap is the same amount as the dash length itself certain instead of 12 points and then a 12 point gap. Well, I can make it so that my dash and my gap are different lengths. So what I like to do, I often do a 16 point dash with an eight point gap because otherwise, if I don't put anything that assumes the gap is the same as the dash itself, some is gonna hit Tab to that. So now I get kind of his longer align with a smaller gap. Now I have spaces for two more dashes into more gaps, and that's basically so I can set a pattern. I could I can have up to three different lengths repeating in this pattern so I could do a 16 and eight, and then maybe I want something like an eight point dash and a four point gap. So just get that specific pattern going like that. Does that make sense? I can add on that Nothing I could do with the dash is Is this little bit over here either preserves exactly how the dashes will fall, or you could do it so that the corners automatically are always even, which looks a lot better, especially if you're doing a rectangle. Let's do this rectangle tool here and let's go ahead and change this back. So we just have just our to our 16 are a point. So right now I've told it to preserve it. However it hits. So you notice this one down here Looks strange. These two kind of butted up against each other. Please don't even come close. And then this one looks really nice right now when actually is formed together nicely. Well, I want all the corners toe look like that point. So I select this item and go over here to this option. So I lines the dashes for me, select it, tell it to align it for me. So now it aligns it nicely. And if I make this a little bit larger there, we can actually see. Actually, it's the size of my dash Let's actually make that 14 point. Let's make a 20 point. Just want try to make it so I can actually see a little difference. There we go. So each one looks like that. So everything's completely even and it just gives us a nicer sort of finished look to it, make sense. So those are a couple things that weaken Dio. And then I'm gonna go ahead and make this instead of a dashed line, zoom in a little bit again, and I want to play with the ends of this. What happens on the ends of the lines? Well, that's what the arrowheads air for. So I can air of an arrowhead that isn't Arrowhead or it could be the end of it, the other end of the arrow, basically or other options. So in this case, I'm just gonna scroll down, got a lot of choices. Their heads, We've got some silly ones to something like that. That's really big. We're gonna play with that. Just second will change that. Let's come back up here and just choose. Let's go. This arrowhead. Now, in conjunction with that arrow, that looks terrible. I think one thing you might notice is that the head that is right to the end member, the line came up here and that's because on the cap we told that the line comes right to the end of the stroke itself, the actual again, that underlying skeleton. If I change it, though, so that has a projecting cap. I didn't really change that. It all depends on the angle, you know, it's really close to the end of this angle thing. It just doesn't look great. One thing that we can do is I can change the scale of the Arrowhead because they actually instead of being 100% of the line, let's make that a little bit smaller. Let's make it 70%. It's actually just go down a little bit more. That looks pretty decent. I think I think that looks at least a lot better than what we had there, and I'm gonna select that line again and come over to the second line and this is just the end point and again it depends which direction you drew the line. Sometimes I can't remember which direction I drew the line, but that's OK. We've got an option for that I can click this little button, which just reverses the order that it went in. So if you did it the wrong way and put the wrong arrowhead, don't change their had just change the direction of the line. All right, So come in here and maybe I'll just make this 80% and that looks a little bit better. So I've got some arrowheads on there from beginning and end. Now, this line is just a line like we've had it before. I can grab with my direct selection tool and often what happens times. If you selected the direct selection tool and you try to move something, it still wants to move the whole line. It's grabbing the whole thing. You have to select off of it and then select on it. And now I can actually see my individual points center there. So just know that that's kind of a pain that happens. But I could play with this. Obviously, this is not gonna be very beautiful, But again, remember, I have my direct selection tool. If I get close to a handle, it wants to pull it from close to the anchor. A poll by the anchor close to the handle. I'm changing the shape of that line. But if I get close to the segment, I get that little rounded tool again so I can grab that and just grab the segment itself like we did before. So I could just again make a lot more changes a lot quickly, a lot quicker. I'm sorry. Then I was able to before before I have to sit And actually, no, what angle to turn everything with. But with that new tool where you could just grab it and pull out the lines, I feel like I have a lot more control over my lines if I didn't do so well when I first started out with that make sense on it. So that's a little bit of strokes. So strokes or something that again are there all the time and we're gonna add some multiple strokes. Toe items in just a little while is well, so we're not stuff with just one particular stroke. Get rid of a few of these here and I want to play with make a kind of a quick stroke here like this and again, we have our cheat sheet now to tell us or a cheater tool to tell us what things were gonna look like when we create or close certain objects. And I'm going to de select that shift, control a or shift command A to de select that. And I wanna introduced this little tool here called The With Tool. And the tool is really cool because it lets you take I've got this stroke and it's a uniform with its 10 points. But maybe I wanted to be a little bit more flared on one end or pinched on another end. I can actually do that. Even though I've created this stroke. That's 10 points with Soma. Zoom in a little bit on that and just select the item, and I'm gonna go ahead and choose this variable with tool. When I do that, I can roll over any point. You know, I have this sort of traveling little anchor point, and it's not connected to any anchor points that are actually here. I can do whatever I want with it. Close this really quickly. If I take this and just slide it outward, I can see that it's making my endpoint wider, and I can't rotate the end. It's taking that same skeleton that's there and where it ends and half the stroke on one side and half on the other. But it's now making it wider at that point and I let go. So if I look in the preview mode for the Allen mode, I can see that I still have just that one simple path that's there. But I'm adding that appearance of making it wider. There may to come over here, and maybe I'll just pinch it smaller on this end. Sometimes you just have to moving back and forth to get the right direction going. I just want to pinch it down to zero there, so I've created a little bit of fluid movement with that. But again, if I look at it now line mode, it's still just that one line I could make changes to. If I don't want to try changing it in that mode, maybe I just want to work with the handles here. I can do that just fine from here without having to be distracted by the appearance so I can come in here and maybe we could change here, maybe change this handle here, right? Or maybe I grabbed the center here and move this down a little bit. Something like that. And as soon as I bring that back to the preview mode, that's still there, and I can see that Didn't look, doesn't look nearly as good. So do that. Bring that back the way I had it. But the nice thing is, I can work in either mode like that. So I love this very with tool. Because sometimes you just want to make something that's maybe little triangles, maybe doing like a plane or something like that. And you just want to have sort of ah, cartoony, look to the jet stream back behind them. You want these triangles? I don't want to sit. Make three separate triangles. I can easily just take one line and I can copy and paste that. So I'm just doing commander Control. See, Commander Control V to Paste to back in. I can take those items and then work with that variable with tool. We're here and just pinch these out. There's a little bit bigger here, A little bit bigger here. I make one each one a little different even there now I've got my little my little zoo me lines right coming here. Just throw those here. Maybe something like that. Then I can play with the angle we played with the Rotate tool earlier. We can rotate those in, grab this other item here and rotate those as well, something like that. And they're now we've got a little bit of movement, and I didn't really have to draw out a triangle for that. And I could play with the miter edges. Well, come here and play with the amounts. I can pinch those in with that. The with Tulloch's well makes sense. I love the very boy. Still, because I can just visually see what's happening to it. I didn't need to think about if I had a draw. This is a shape, and I'm trying to draw the outside. I'm trying to draw this and the curve and then come backwards and then match this curve. I can't even imagine trying toe do that and trying to make that look good. And also, if I have that, you know, and then if I had to have at another another curve to it here, I'm not sure I'd be able to do that at all. So I love that this tool is just there pretty easily for me to use. Well, Carisa in the chat rooms also says that she loves in all caps the variable with I love it. It's just like, yeah, it's just a quick way to sit there and just make little little changes along the way. And I can make changes later to you. Don't like the way it looks fine. I make some changes to that as well, and you can even get kind of crazy with it. If you want to start pinching it in between as well. You could pin shit here, make it wider here, you know, and then you can add new points. It doesn't have to be a point that already exists. Just grab a spot and start moving it in and out. So you just come up with some really crazy shapes that way as well. All right, so we did some life corners and all that. So I think I think we'll skip over that, um, but reflect, reflect tool is something that I use a lot and that is underneath the rotate tool reflect tool and I talked a little bit about this in the essentials one, but I kind of wanted touch on it just because I'm not sure if I went over quickly or I had a lot of people ask me about it afterwards and the reflect tool I use all the time because I'm not gonna be able to draw something symmetrically. So I love that I could create something and reflect it, and then take that reflected. I get this nice shape in one of the shapes that we worked on was just kind of a logo shape. And I am going to just kind of show how I draw on top of other items so we can actually talk about that. So if I want to bring in an item that I want to design, I want to design a logo and I want a nice crest, but I'm not really sure how to draw that. I might use that as kind of a starting point or is a cheat sheet. And I'm going to do ah, file. I'm gonna place this file and actually, before they do that, I am going to show you keyboard shortcuts because this is one that they added in recently that I've actually changed on my machine to be a little different. So under the edit menu, you have keyboard shortcuts, and I don't know if you guys use shortcuts or I love shortcuts, but some of them are missing from illustrator. I go under the menu under here that comes up on. Actually, let's go to this illustrator Defaults under this menu menu commands is where I find everything that lives under these menus that are here. So I'm gonna go ahead and choose under the illustrator menu. The one thing that's missing by default is hide illustrator. You notice that's totally missing. I like to be able to do commander control age to hide my applications, and I could do that. I can come down here under the illustrator menu under ah, Hide Illustrator, and just click in this little box. You have to actually click in it and then key on the keyboard shortcut that you want. Someone do command H. And when I do that, I get a little error down there, saying that's already in use by the hide edges Command. Well, if I say OK, it strips it away from the hide edges command but assigns it here. Well, I could say Go to conflict. Great. Now go to that one. Let's fix the height edges, command. All right, let's think of something else. Shift command age for hide ages and it says it's been used by the Height Art Boards Command. Well, I don't use that. If you don't use it, don't worry that it's going to strip it away. So we're gonna go ahead and say, OK, and if I just say OK, I need to give that a name So I can now have a name for my set of keyboard shortcuts and I would just type in the name there, which is what I did here to create my keyboard shortcuts called Erica. So I've already got that, and that's where I have that change. So the hide illustrator is already there. So if there's another tool or something like that, or maybe you don't like the keyboard shortcut that's there for a particular tool for me, I find that the tools just having plane letters with no modifier keys is hard, because if my cursor is sitting in a text frame and it's, you know, is the P for the pencil to or something? I'm really typing P and not realizing. I just typed P instead of actually switching to that tool. So again, if you there isn't a shortcut, assigned one. If you don't like the one that they're reassigned one so good. Is there any way to save those and put them on a different machine? Yes, you can, actually, Well, on a different mission, like somebody else's machines like, Let's say, at your house, you have creative cloud on multiple computers. They wanted to put it on another computer. If it's a different account, you need to pull the file off. I forget where they I think it's in the preferences, the library references. If it's the same they now when you get the new version, it asked, if you want to sink to your creative cloud account, so all those settings actually say so. But if not, there is a file, and I believe it's in preferences. I just forget where it is in the library preferences. So yes, so you can actually save that. And then everybody has the same keyboard shortcuts or you have the same one on other machines. Exactly. All right, so that's my long winded way of getting back to place, which is a keyboard shortcut they put in recently. But I actually changed it, so it's the same as in design, because if you're jumping back and forth between the two sometimes forget you forget which keyboard shortcut you're using. So I'm gonna go ahead and place an item, and again we're gonna work with images later. But I just want to show you what I do when I'm tracing on something else. So if I come in here and I look at say, I just have a j peg of an image that I liked and I'm gonna say place, but I won't do before I place that item, I want to place it as a template. And what that does is it's going to great back somewhat. It's gonna lock. It's gonna put it on a whole separate layer. And I know we're not going to really get into layers, but I'm going to just show you a little little clip of layers and why they're handy. And then I'll let you guys explore the layers on your own. So I say place and here's that item and it just placed it, plunked it right in the middle. Well, I had a whole bunch of these when I really want is up here in the upper left. So what I need to do is go to my layers panel, come over here and click layers, and I can see what it did is it created a layer called template and it locked it. That's what this little icon means. If I click in here, I can also locked my other layer that it created. And it also has this visibility icon. Now it has an eyeball and all the regular layers. But this is a template layer. For whatever reason, it has a different icon. I can click that, and I can't see it anymore. It's not very helpful, but I wanna click lock to unlock it. But for the most part, I'm gonna want to lock. That's the whole point of making a template later, so it's locked in place. But the reason I had to unlock it is that I want to move it. So I have that item sitting here cause that's the item I want to create. So I'm gonna re lock that. And I'm also going to double click on the name template actually off to the side here, and I get my options for that. And one of the options is how dim do I want to make the images? Well, I'm gonna make that 30% just cause I wanted to be a little bit more great back. So now I have that. I'm gonna click on this layer layer one, and this is where I'm gonna put my items. Everything else is locked. I'm not gonna worry about layers really anymore. I just wanted to show you when I make a template when I draw on top of it. And the first thing I see is that to create this crest, I can see that there's this particular shape here and it's mirrored left to right, and I can take the whole top item. And if I took that shape and mirrored it down below, I would now have this nicely laid out shape. So that's what exactly what I'm going to do with that. I'm gonna go ahead and create this shape that's here, so I'm going to use the pencil I'm gonna create something not read. Let's make it kind of a bright color that we can see. It's making this kind of lime green. And I might make the strokes a little bit thicker just so I can see him. I've lost my strokes panel because I closed it. What I can do is come back here to my workspace and say Reset, Erica. And suddenly my strokes panel is here because remember, I had it open, and then I closed it up. I pulled it off so we could see it. I closed it. So I'm gonna go ahead and make this. Let's make this two points. Think right. So I'm gonna go ahead and put some rulers on Commander Control are, And I'm just going to drag down some rulers to the center points of this particular image. I was gonna eyeball that. I don't put those there. I'm gonna lock those rulers like we've been doing right, click or control click toe lock those guides. And the reason I want to do that is because again, if I can select the guides and I start flipping things, I'm gonna actually be duplicating my rulers. And that is something I could never figure out until the last minute. I realize I've duplicated all my rulers. So I'm gonna go ahead with the pen tool, and I'm going to zoom in a little bit more just so I can see this one quadrant here. And I'm just gonna go ahead and use my pencil and again I can create these. As I go along, I'm gonna click. So I get that hard corner point. All right, so everybody see what I'm doing. Hopefully let's make this green color. I can't see it a little bit thicker. Just weaken CIA's. Everybody can see that and then click on there to reverse that direction. Click and hold so I can get that nice arc one click again. And let's actually just draw that shape. I'm gonna click here and we click one more time at the center. Now the center one. I want to make sure that I don't have any weird angle If it dips and even just a little bit and I reverse it would get kind of ah, kind of a weird hump in the middle. So what I'm actually gonna do is I'm gonna undo that we're gonna come to here and get that nice arc. But then what I'm probably going to do is maybe hold down the shift key. Although it sometimes I get a lot closer because I don't want to, actually. Why is it doing that? I want to click here and hold on my shift key. So get that straight line. So you know, when I flip it, I'm going to get a nice straight line. The thing is, I am gonna have a really flat point in the middle. So, Senator, they get really close. Then hold my shift key just because I don't want that little dip or the little bump either way. So I'm going to de select that. And so now I can turn off that one layer. Let's turn off the template layer so I can look and think. Okay, that looks pretty decent. I'm on my way to flipping that over, so I'm gonna go ahead and use my selection tool because I'm not working with the individual points. I want to work at the whole thing. As you know, as a unit. Remove this over ever so slightly. And then what? I want to do is I want to flip it on that angle, right? So I want to flip it over. So if I just used my reflection tool, which is here, this little item here when I select that, if I just double click on it and I choose preview and I flip it horizontally, you notice what it did? It flipped at the right direction, but on its center axis, it just flipped it over. And I can choose Copy, but that's great. Now I have two pieces like that. I don't really want that. I'm gonna hit, undo, double click on the reflect tool again. And instead, I'm sorry. Before I do that, I'm going to tell it where I want to that angle toe happen or that reflection to happen. So I selected the reflect tool. I'm gonna hold the option key down and then click once, so I'm and I'm doing it right on this center guide. So it's flipping at that point that I'm clicking. Right? So by having that guy there, I know that I'm clicked in pretty close. Hold on the option key and it flips over. You can even see that it shows it what it's gonna look like when it flips over, and I want to make sure I hit copy. So now I have that they're now. I can zoom in on that, but I can kind of see that's pretty good. I would do have that flat piece, but I could have boys at the last minute gone in some adjustment with the pen tool as well. But I just was trying to avoid getting a dip or a bump on there. I can select these two items. They're two separate items. I go up onto the object menu and come down to path and choose join. And now when I do that, it's one item, right? So I select this item. It's actually one entire item, so it's all joined together. I would do the same thing Onley This time, when I click with Affleck Tool, I'm going to option click down on this horizontal guide because now we wanted to flip on that axis, sold on the option key. Click once comes up and I want to tell it. I wanted to flip vertically and I'd like it to copy. So now when I do that now I have that nice object that's their select. Both of those go back to that object menu, choose the path tool or the PATH menu and then tell it to join. So now I have one item that's there, all right, it's pretty cool on so that Yeah, So I have, like, I cheated right, because I used this and I drew on top of it. But I could not have imagined that shape of my head, nor could I have drawn it. But by having something to least start from and you can see that that's not exactly how they did. It was probably hand drawn because this is pretty good. But here, obviously, it's not an exact reflection of it. And if you don't want exact reflection, you can always make changes to it as well. But I like that. I could just use the reflect tool to do that. I'm actually gonna hide that we don't even need that other one that's back there. The other thing I want to do is take that path, and I'd like it to also be inside, like we had this other inside path. That's a thinner line, and I want to do that as well, so I'm going to make this a little bit thicker. Let's bump this up to five or six, and I want O make one. That's about half that thickness. Zoom in a little bit on it, and I'm just going to duplicate it in place and then make it a little bit smaller, so we'll show you had to do that. So I'm going to do up under edit. We're gonna copy it. That's pretty easy, pretty self explanatory. And then I'm going to go under the edit menu and choose Paste in place, and that's gonna put a copy exactly on top of it. So now I actually have two copies of I hit Delete. One item went away and one is still there. So let's do that. Make sure I didn't do didn't under the paste in place. I have that, and now I can't want to make it smaller like this. Just altogether. Well, to do that, I hold on the option of the Alte, which is like when we're drawing the shape it drew from the centre outwards. That's exactly what it's doing is going to draw from the centre outwards, but it's going to size it from the center outwards. So I'm gonna grab one of these side handles and I won't hold down the option of the all key. But I also wanna hold down the shift key because I want to constrain my proportions. Somebody hold down both of those and just drag in and so I can see that it's dragging in. But what did it do wrong? I'm gonna make this a little bit thinner so you can see it. So what happens when I just make it smaller like that? Well, it is smaller, but it doesn't fit. The path doesn't fit is well that way. There's a couple different options would take the hard way, and we can start doing this until something looks decent. But it's never really going to be the same. Exactly. Follow the same because of the way shapes your drawn. And when we size it down, the proportion just doesn't work. So we have a handy tool for that. We delete that one we just created and go back to this path here. I'm gonna go under the object menu and come down to path and shoes offset path and we'll turn on the preview so we can see what's gonna happen to that. So I'm gonna just tell it Preview, you know, is it drew this other line exactly in the same path. Right? So now I have that nice even look that I was looking for, but I didn't want it to go out. Words. I wanted to come in. Somebody has a negative number, and I'm actually gonna do Let's do 10 points and see what that looks like. I'm just gonna hit tab. Now I can see that that came in pretty nicely. So actually, it's bringing a little bit more. Maybe points member to put PT If you're using a different unit of measurement, make sure you write it there. I hate it when it's been in inches, and I think I'm working in millimeters and I do it and it's way to smaller way too big. So I'm gonna go ahead and tell it to do it that way. We'll say OK, and I would change that inside stroke, just down to that thinner stroke that's there. So now I've got something that's really nicely inside, and it's filling the same path as are going along the same way. I don't like the way that looks it, although it's kind of jagged. E. That's weird. Let's try that might have been my miter point that's here. Let's try offset path again and to come in here miters find. No, no, let's try Previously. That looks like it is kind of jumpy, isn't it? I'll try. My, uh, my miter limitless. Set this back to 10. No, I don't like that at all. It's a little jumpy. We'll figure out why, though it's not quite a smooth is the one that was in here. I'm not really sure why I might come in here and just grab some rounded corners and try and make it work a little bit better. Sighs that down to three points and then I'm well on my way to making this nice little shape that I've created. Yeah, I don't like I don't know what it did. Hear It all just did that. I'm not really sure. I don't know, but anyway, usually looks pretty good. I don't know why I did that corner thing, but I like to use the opposite path for that because always you're never going to get that angle just right. So if you had even say, a rounded rectangle or rounded corner of any kind If we create this rounded red corner are rounded rectangle, I come in here and if I did the same thing where I copied it and then pasted it in place and then made it smaller again using the corner and doing option or alter and shipped to bring it in those those were never gonna fit inside each other. The radius are never gonna fit inside each other. You have to do the office it path to get the exact scaled look to it. So again, object path offset path. We preview that. That is really weird, how it's making it completely sharp like that. I have no idea why it's doing that. Let's to five points. There we go. So it actually nests inside there nicely and actually changes. You can see that we have a different radius. We have 50. here and here we have 0.1, so it changes it so that it actually nest inside. Denizens cool the opposite path thing. I think it's pretty cool, as is the reflect all Let's close the transform panel up. All right, so that's how I use like a sketch if I was doing a sketch or anything else. Sometimes I have an element that I know what it needs to look like. But getting it from something I look at a piece of paper to something that I draw with the mouse or with a stylist is so disconnected that I usually use that for a cici. So any quick questions over there Quick question from Abrar, who is wondering if illustrator can trace an image by some command. It can, actually, it says, I'm not good with the pencil and tracing, yes, if you if you want to trace it completely. Yes, there's an image trace feature. I did cover that in the essentials as well. It's a kind of involved, but if you had, say, a sketched drawing, I don't have have a hand sketch them. I don't think it's on this machine. Does somebody who did a sketch for me? I can actually put it in there and use Image Trace, and it will create brushstrokes in there. But I covered that in detail in the essentials one. But the answer is yes, it's a magic button, and it actually does really cool stuff. I really like it