- In this movie, I'll show you how to erase
and smooth lumps in your artwork.
And specifically I'm talking about this extra bit of line
up here in the hair.
We've got a lump down here at the bottom of the chin.
We have some imperfections around this eye,
so if you're working along with me,
obviously your imperfections are going to be different.
But I do want to show you how you can make things better
using a combination of the eraser, the blob brush,
and the smooth tool.
So I'm going to start up here at the top of the artwork.
And then I'll click on this black outline
with a black arrow tool to select it.
And then I'll get the eraser tool,
which I can now get by pressing the E key,
and with this small brush, I'll just go ahead and paint
over the top right here, like so,
and then I'll paint away all that extra lump.
And notice, that doesn't necessarily
give me the smoothest results.
And the thing is, the eraser tool isn't quite as skilled
at creating smooth transitions as the blob brush is,
and part of the reason is if you press the enter key,
or the return key on the Mac,
in order to bring up the eraser tool options,
you can see that we don't have a fidelity slider.
Which is a shame, quite frankly,
but it's just the way it is.
So I'm going to cancel out of here.
So you may find yourself needing to smooth things
over using the smooth tool, which you can get
by clicking and holding the pencil tool,
and then selecting the smooth tool from the fly out menu,
and then just drag over that same area once again
in order to smooth it out, then you may want to zoom
out a little bit just to make sure
that you haven't messed up any other parts of the path,
because what can happen, when you're smoothing
one section, another section gets unsmooth.
So you may have to just sort of check out
what's going on in other sections of that path outline.
Now this area may respond to the smooth tool by itself,
but in my case it didn't, so I'll just go ahead and press
control Z, or command Z on the Mac,
and I'll switch again to my eraser tool,
and I'll paint over this little region right there.
Hope for the best, ends up looking okay,
but we do have a couple of neighboring
anchor points right there, in fact we have two sets
of anchor points on either side of this segment,
which is generally not something you want.
So I'll go ahead and select the smooth tool once again,
which has no keyboard shortcut,
not my default, anyway, you can give it one if you'd like,
but I'm just going to drag over this section
in order to smooth things out.
Alright, now let's check out any other problems.
We've got a problem right there, as you can see.
So I'll go ahead and, once again,
select the path outline, and I'm doing that
by pressing the control key, or the command key on the Mac,
to get my black arrow tool, and then clicking
on that path, like so.
So every time you use the smooth tool,
you deselect the path outline.
Alright, now grab my eraser tool,
and I'll drag over this little section,
and that gives me another divet,
so I'll grab my smooth tool,
and I'll just drag over this region once again,
to smooth it out.
Now this eye has a different problem, as you can see.
I'm missing some path outline,
so I'll control click, or command click
on that path to select it,
and I'm going to make these anchor points
a little more visible by double clicking
on an empty section of my drawing layer
to bring up the layer options dialogue box,
and then I'll change the color to violet,
which shows up pretty well, and I'll click okay.
Now, I need to add some stuff to these path outlines,
so I'll go ahead and switch back to my blob brush,
and I've got a little brush, as you can see right here,
so I'll just paint over this area with it,
and then I'll paint over this region as well.
And, if I get unsmooth results,
or too many anchor points,
then I'll just go ahead and switch back to the smooth tool,
and drag over each one of these sections, like so.
And that looks like I need to drag a couple of times,
in order to make that work.
Alright, we have a little bump up here
at the top of the hair, so I'll go ahead and control click,
or command click on that path to select it.
I'll get my eraser tool, and then I'll paint
over this region, like so.
Of course i'm only erasing the selected
path outline, nothing more.
And then I'll switch back to my smooth tool,
and I'll drag over that portion of the path
to smooth it out.
And now I'll go ahead and zoom out a little bit,
and I'm just searching for other problems right there.
It looks like we have a little bit of a problem edge,
and so this time I need to add to it,
so I'll grab my blob brush tool again,
and I'll just paint upward, like so.
And I'm trying to be careful here,
so I do as good as a job as I can,
and, let's see, where else do we have problems,
I think there's, oh, right there, on the bottom of the chin.
I'll go ahead and get rid of it
by painting with the eraser tool.
And I'm just going to paint straight with the tool,
and see if I get a nice sharp corner, which I do.
And that seems pretty good to me.
And then we've got some other problems
down here on this part of the path,
so I'll just go and paint over this
with the blob brush tool this time.
That gives me a very unsmooth result.
So, I'll drag over it with a smooth tool,
but you don't want to drag all the way to the corner,
because that will smooth out the corner,
which is not what you want.
In here I can smooth that out
using the blob brush tool, once again.
So I'll just go ahead and paint down, like so.
And that's a little unsmooth,
but I'm not going to worry too much about it.
And then we've got a lump on the shoulder,
as I recall, there it is, and so I'll now
grab my eraser tool, and I'll paint over it,
and then I will revisit it with the smooth tool
just by dragging.
And just so you know, by the way,
I've got my smooth tool set to smooth things
up as much as possible, which you do
by pressing the enter key, or the return key on the Mac,
to bring up the smooth tool options dialogue box,
as you can see here.
I've cranked the slider setting all the way over to smooth,
which is just fine, so I'll just cancel out.
Alright, and then I will zoom out
by pressing control zero, or command zero on the Mac,
and I'll deselect my artwork by pressing control shift A,
or command shift A on the Mac.
And the result is the artwork you see right here.
I think things could be a little better though on the slip,
so I'm going to control click, or command click right there,
and this time I'm going to grab my blob brush tool,
and I'm going to increase the size of my brush, like so.
And instead of dragging with the tool,
I'm just going to click in order to create
a little bit of roundness right there.
Alright, now I think I'm done, so I'll zoom out once again,
press control shift A, or command shift A on the Mac.
Ad that's how you both erase and smooth away
lumps in your artwork using a combination
of the eraser tool, the blob brush, and the smooth tool
here inside Illustrator.