- In this movie I'll show you how to smooth out
and redraw certain portions of a path outline
with the help of a couple of additional tools
that live here inside the Pencil tool flyout menu,
including the Smooth tool and the Path Eraser.
The first thing I'm going to do is press the V key
to return to the black arrow tool, and then I'll
go ahead and select my heart and I'll get rid
of it just by pressing the Backspace key
or the Delete key on the Mac.
And now I'll go ahead and switch back to the Pencil tool,
and let's say I draw one half
of my heart really nice
like this and the other half
is pretty wobbly, and I'm making a lot of herky-jerky
movements here, and I finally end the path outline
at the top.
Well, then, I end up with this pretty unsmooth half
of a heart over here on the left-hand side.
One option for smoothing it is to click and hold on
the Pencil tool and then releasing this vertical bar
in order to create a floating toolbar, and now I'll
go ahead and select the Smooth tool and I'll press
the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac,
in order to bring up its fidelity option, and I'll crank
this widget all the way over to Smooth and I'll click okay.
And now what you can do is just drag from one endpoint
to another to show the Smooth tool the area that you want
to make smoother, and the reason we're just dragging
from one point to another point is because of Smooth tool
we'll go ahead and smooth out that range
of segments in between.
You can also, by the way, just go ahead and drag
along the path if you like, or you can drag along
the smoother outline that you're looking for.
Another option is to get rid of this area altogether
by grabbing the Path Eraser tool and then dragging
its hotspot, which is the eraser portion of the cursor
by the way, from one endpoint to another,
and then that's just going to delete that range
of points in between.
Then you can redraw them by switching back
to the Pencil tool, which, of course, you can get
by pressing the N key, and then you could just try
to draw a better path outline in between.
Another way to work is to go ahead and start
at a certain point and then draw the better path
outline like so, and then end at a specific point
in the shape, and you've got to be very careful
if you're going to do that, especially when you're
working with close path outlines because it's easy
to do this number where you don't quite end things
right and you end up opening the path outline.
So if what I want to do is change the course
of the path, then I'll go ahead and undo
that modification and I will once again drag
like so from one point,
one interior point in the shape, to another.
And then, I might just go ahead and say, "All right,
"I want this to be a little sharper down here
"at the bottom," and so I'll redraw that section
and then I'll redraw this section,
as well, and so on.
And that's how you smooth out as well as redraw
certain portions of a path outline, using a combination
of the Smooth tool, the Path Eraser
and the Pencil tool, which are all, as we've seen,
available from the same flyout menu.