- Alright, so if using the Pencil Tool with a mouse
is a good experience,
then using it with a drawing tablet
is absolutely sublime.
And if you can draw you really want to invest
in a drawing tablet.
They can be had for as little as 100 bucks,
depends on the model.
And the best place to find them incidentally
is from a company called Wacom,
that's W-A-C-O-M.
And you can find all about them at wacom.com.
Meanwhile, if you have a couple
of thousand dollars to throw at it
you can get the tablet that I'll be demostrating,
which is a Cintiq.
Which is essentially a screen that you can draw on directly,
which provides you the best graphics experience there is.
In this movie we're going to start things off
by creating what's known as a tracing template.
So the idea here is that I did a pencil sketch
using a real pencil and a piece of paper,
and then I scanned it
and placed it inside of an illustration.
This could just as easily however be a photograph.
And let me show you how to create a tracing template
in this very movie.
So the first step is to go up to the File menu
and choose New from Template,
or once again, you have that keyboard shortcut
of ctrl + shift + N, or cmd + shift + N on a Mac,
then locate your center guides template
and click on the New button in order to create it.
Now in this case we don't really need the guides,
so I'm going to get rid of them
by going up to the View menu,
choosing Guides, and then choosing Clear Guides.
Alright, now I'll go ahead and click on the guides layer
to make it active, and I'll place my image
by going to the File menu and choosing the Place command,
or you have that fairly predictable keyboard shortcut
of ctrl + shift + P, or cmd + shift + P on a Mac.
Alright, now if you're working along with me
I've got the pencil sketch ready and waiting,
Pencil sketch.jpg.
Go ahead and select it, and then click the Place button.
Now notice at this point you could make it a template
just by turning on the Template checkbox,
but that tends to be a fairly messy experience
and it doesn't allow you to control the placement
or the scale of the template.
So just go ahead and click the Place button.
That will load the cursor with the image,
as we're seeing here.
At which point just go ahead and click
in order to place the image inside the document.
Now what you want to do
is go up here to the control panel,
make sure that the alignment option
is set to Align to Artboard,
and then click on each of the Center icons.
First Horizontal Align Center,
and then Vertical Align Center.
Alright, now click on the word Transform
in order to bring up the Transform panel.
And make sure the center point is selected
over here in the Reference Point matrix.
Then turn on the link, so that we're constraining
the width and height values to each other.
And that will allow us to proportionally resize the image.
At which point I'm going to change
the width value to 940 points.
And that will change the height value in kind.
Alright, now you can press the escape key
in order to hide that panel.
Next what you want to do is double-click
in an empty portion of this guides layer
in order to bring up the Layer Options dialog box.
Let's go ahead and call this layer template,
since that's what it is.
And you also want to turn on
the Template checkbox right here.
And that'll go ahead and automatically dim the image to 50%,
which is going to work out great.
You can change that value if you want to,
but 50% works well for this specific template.
So I'll go ahead and click OK
in order to create that new tracing template.
At which point I can go ahead
and begin drawing with the Pencil Tool
here on the drawing layer.
Which is exactly what we'll be doing
by the way, starting in the next movie.