Draw with the Pencil Tool


The Pencil tool has a split personality. If you start from that understanding, then you won t get as disoriented when odd things happen when you use this tool.

The Pencil tool can be used as a quick-and-dirty way to draw lines. It s also a way to redraw existing lines to smooth out edges or tweak an illustration.

As a drawing tool, the Pencil tool has its limitations. Even experienced Illustrator artists , who use drawing tablets to facilitate more accurate drawing, usually start from a sketch created with an old-fashioned pencil, piece of charcoal, or paintbrush. When you want to create a complex illustration, you ll often want to create artwork on paper first, and scan your artwork into Illustrator. But the Pencil tool provides a flexible way to either draw with your mouse or drawing tablet or trace a scanned image.

The Pencil tool also has its limitations as a redraw tool. Artists who become comfortable with using the shape, line, and arc tools and the Pen tool generally stay away from the Pencil tool since it duplicates the features of those tools, but not as well. That said, many designers who are new to Illustrator find the Pencil tool more intuitive than its big brother, the Pen tool. You ll use the line and arc tools later in this chapter and the Pen tool in Chapter 6.

Set Stroke and Fill Color

Before you start drawing with any tool, you ll want to set a stroke and a fill color. To define a visible stroke color, click on the Stroke icon at the bottom of the Toolbox, and then choose a color in the Color palette that appears.

You can choose a fill color by clicking on the Fill icon in the Toolbox and then clicking on a color in the Color palette. Figure 4-2 shows a red stroke color and no fill color being assigned.

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Figure 4-2: Stroke is set to red, and fill is set to None
Note  

To assign no fill to your drawings, click the Fill icon in the Toolbox and then click the None button below the Fill/Stroke icons in the Toolbox. It might be helpful to avoid color fill as you experiment with drawing tools.

Define Pencil Tool Preferences

Before you start sketching away with the Pencil tool, double-click the tool to open the Pencil Tool Preferences dialog box. Use the Fidelity slider to define how many anchor points to generate as you draw. The fidelity value tells the program how faithful it should be (in pixels) to the user s actual mouse movements.

A low fidelity value, for example, tells Illustrator to stay very close to your mouse (or drawing tablet) movements. Low fidelity values create more angular curves. A high fidelity value allows Illustrator more freedom to stray from the path you draw to create a smoother curve. A low value generates more anchor points, while a high fidelity value creates a smoother line. Figure 4-3 shows fidelity and smoothness settings in the Pencil tool dialog box.

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Figure 4-3: The low fidelity value and high smoothness settings mean that the Pencil tool will draw smooth curves that do not adhere closely to the path you draw with your mouse or drawing tablet.

Figure 4-4 shows the same drawing, done twice. The drawing on the left was done with a low fidelity value, while the smoother drawing on the right was done with a high fidelity value.

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Figure 4-4: The drawing on the left, produced with a low fidelity value, is more jagged than the one on the right, produced with a higher value.

The Smoothness slider in the Pencil dialog box works in a similar fashion: a high setting evens out your drawing.

If the Keep Selected check box is checked, after you draw a curve with the Pencil tool the anchor points will all be selected. This feature is useful if you expect to edit your anchor points after you draw with the Pencil tool. Selecting the Edit Selected Paths check box enables the Pencil tool to function like an editing tool, changing the size and direction of selected paths.

Draw with the Pencil tool as if you were holding a pencil. Hold down your mouse button or use your drawing tablet tool and, with the Pencil tool selected, simply start drawing, as shown in Figure 4-5.

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Figure 4-5: Drawing with the Pencil tool

If you enabled the Keep Selected check box in the Pencil Tool Preferences dialog box, the object that you draw will automatically be selected as if you had clicked on it with the Selection or Direct Selection tool. This makes it easier to edit the drawing by redrawing the generated path.

As you draw with the Pencil tool, Illustrator generates paths. You can ask Illustrator to smooth those curves out (to varying degrees) as you draw. Or you can use a special tool on the Pencil tear-off, the Smooth tool, to soften your curves after you draw with the Pencil tool.

However you generate paths with the Pencil tool, if you examine them you ll see they are made up of anchor points and line segments. Try it. Select a curve you ve drawn with the Pencil tool, and take a close look at the anchor points you generated. You ll want to be aware of these anchor points as you begin to edit your line.




How to Do Everything with Illustrator CS
How to Do Everything with Adobe Illustrator CS
ISBN: 0072230924
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 175
Authors: David Karlins

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