- In this movie, I'll show you how I was able to trace
my turtle using the Pencil tool
combined with a drawing tablet.
Even if you don't have such a device,
I think you'll find a lot to learn inside this movie.
So I'll go ahead and switch over to that tracing template
that I created in the previous movie.
Now I'll select the Pencil tool.
Again, you can get it by pressing the N key.
And I'll press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac,
to bring up the Pencil Tool Options dialog box,
and I'm going to scoot this Fidelity setting
one tick mark to the left of smooth,
which tends to be my favorite setting.
And then I'll go ahead and click OK.
All right, now I'm going to zoom in on the turtle's head
down here, and armed with my stylus,
I'm going to trace around the head.
And notice how I'm no longer seeing that preview
right there.
That's a bug.
And by the way, as soon as I release,
we are going to see the line.
But naturally, you'll want to be able to see the preview
as you work.
And if that ends up happening to you,
you want to go to the View menu and choose Preview on CPU,
and that'll take care of that problem in the future.
All right, now let's say I want to draw another line
down here but I don't want to do it yet
because my path outline is selected.
And so if I were to just start in dragging like so
I would redirect the path outline,
which is not what I want.
So I'll press ctrl + Z or cmd + Z on the Mac to undo that,
and then I'll deselect the path outline
and you can do that by going to the Select menu
and choosing Deselect.
But you're going to be doing that a lot,
so I recommend you memorize this keyboard shortcut,
which is ctrl + shift + a here in the PC,
or cmd + shift + a on the Mac.
And that'll allow me to start a new path outline
as we're seeing right here.
And I'll go ahead and extend it all the way to the shell.
And now, just so I don't have to deselect the other path,
I'll draw this one up here, and there's nothing that says
you have to get the entire path finished.
You can always continue a path like so,
and you can redirect it.
If you find out you're drawing badly,
just start redirecting that path, as you see me doing here.
All right, now I'll go ahead and draw this line,
and I'm also going to draw his eyes.
So I could draw this using the Ellipse stool.
But as long as I have the Pencil tool selected,
I might as well use it.
And then if I don't like that shape right there,
I can just drag over it again, but make sure you release
back on the path outline each time you try a redirect,
because otherwise, you're going to open that closed path
and make a big mess of it.
All right, now I'll press ctrl + shift + a,
or cmd + shift + a on the Mac,
in order to deselect that circular path,
and I'll go ahead and draw in the eye like so.
All right, now I want my path outlines to be thicker,
so I'll press ctrl + a or cmd + a on the Mac
to select everything.
And then I'll change the line weight up here to 3 pt,
and then I'll click on the word Stroke
and I'll select both the round cap and the round join
in order to keep my strokes as smooth as possible.
All right, now I'll go ahead and press the escape key
and I'll press ctrl + shift + a or cmd + shift + a
on the Mac in order to deselect my artwork,
and I'm going to go ahead and paint the shell.
And actually, there's not a turtle on earth
who has a shell like this, but I think it's pretty cool
so I'll just go ahead and trace around the outside
in multiple takes, and that's because I'm trying to anchor
my hand as I work here.
And notice there, I goofed up a little bit,
if you can see that, oop, I made it even worse
by dragging at it a little bit more.
But I think I can do a redirect like so and clean that up.
And I was totally wrong, I still got a problem,
so I'm going to go ahead and ctrl + space bar
or cmd + space bar + click to zoom in,
and then I'll drag from right there,
up to that portion of the path outline,
and that smooths it out nicely.
Now here's the point at which you're going to want to know
this information no matter what,
whether you have a drawing tablet or not.
Notice that our path outlines are not really meeting up
with each other, and we have little curlicues
at the end of some of them.
That's when the White Arrow tool comes in handy.
So I'll go ahead and select that tool
or press the A key, of course,
and then I'll grab this anchor point right there,
and I'll drag it 'til it snaps into alignment.
You'll see the snap if you've got your smart guides
turned on.
And this guy here looks like he's in the right position,
but he's got a little bit too much curvature going on,
so I'll press the N key to switch back to the Pencil,
and I'm just going to go ahead and see
if I can make this smoother.
And that time, I just drag with the mouse by the way.
All right, now I'm going to press the A key
in order to switch back to the White Arrow tool,
and I'm going to go ahead and grab this guy
and drag him down, got a little bit of an auto scroll
going there.
And I'll drag this point down as well.
Now this is something that happens frequently
with the Pencil tool.
It goes ahead and creates an extra point at the end.
Obviously, if you don't want that,
you can just select it and press the backspace key
or the delete key on the Mac to get rid of it,
and then I can go ahead and drag this point down
just a little bit and so forth.
So I would be remiss if I was to suggest to you
that you're going to draw everything right
with the Pencil tool.
That's just not going to happen.
You're going to have to go back and do some additional work,
very likely using that White Arrow tool.
In this case though, I want to just go ahead
and redirect this path a little bit,
so I will click on it with the White Arrow,
then I'll press the N key to switch back to the Pencil tool
and I'll go ahead and drag on that path again.
And you can see that its head is a little lumpy here,
so I might, this time, switch to the Smooth tool
and just drag over this region like so,
to smooth it off nicely.
Now I'm going to go ahead and zoom out a little bit here,
and I'm going to continue painting that one path outline.
So I'll press the ctrl key or cmd key on the Mac
in order to get my White Arrow tool,
the last used arrow tool on the fly,
and I'll just click to select even just a little bit of it.
And then I'll press the N key
to switch back to my Pencil tool,
and I'll continue drawing this path outline like so.
And at some point, I'll end up finishing it up here,
so I'll just go ahead and space bar + drag up a little bit
and then finish the top of the shell.
And in my case, it ended up meeting in a corner point,
which is nice.
However, that's a terrible edge,
so I'll just go ahead and redraw it
and see if it looks any better.
This time, notice this point up here is a smooth point.
So what that means is now we're getting
a bunch a curvature there.
We don't really want that,
so I'm just going to zoom in and see if I can redraw this
section better so that we get a nice corner
at that point.
And that's looking better, it's not best by any means yet.
All right, now I want you to see what happens
with this sort of spiral, which of course no turtle has,
but it looks great on this guy.
And so I'm just going to drag along the spiral.
This is yet another method for creating spirals
inside of Illustrator.
And again, I think it's preferable to drawing a spiral
with the dedicated Spiral tool,
because you can get some really great results
as we're seeing right here.
And it's pretty darn smooth as well
for my first attempt at this.
And now I think I just made it worse
by dragging over it again, but that sometimes happens.
Now I'll try to drag even still more
in order to get that curve to come out a little bit like so.
All right, so I'm not going to draw the entire turtle
in front of you, I just wanted to give you some tips
for how to get the best results
and how to take care of the edges
so that everything lines up exactly the way you want.
And that's at least one way to trace a turtle
using the Pencil tool combined with a professional quality
drawing tablet here inside Illustrator.