- In this movie I'll show you how to mow through
a bunch of quick, smooth shapes.
And if nothing else, the Curvature Tool
is great at allowing you to draw nebulous forms,
like these blobs of paint
with a minimum of mindless energy.
So the first thing we're going to do
is create a new document
with a photographic tracing template.
And so I'm going to go up to the File menu
and choose New from Template,
or you can press that keyboard shortcut
of Control Shift N, or Command Shift N on the Mac.
Then I'll go ahead and grab my Center Guides template
and click on the New button.
Now I'm going to click on the Guides layer
to make it active,
and I'll go up to the File menu and choose
the Place command,
or you can press Control Shift P,
or Command Shift P on the Mac.
And in my case I'm going to go ahead
and navigate to my Exercise Files folder,
which is on my desktop.
And I'll take a look at my 12_curvature subfolder,
in which I'm giving you an image file
in the form of Palette photo.jpg.
After which point I'll go ahead
and click on the Place button to load my cursor.
And then I'll click inside the document
to paste the image.
And by the way,
this image comes to us from the
Fotolia Image Library, about which you can learn more,
and get deals, at fotolia.com/deke.
The original is in color,
but I just didn't want the colors to
get in our creative way here.
All right, now you want to go up to the
Control Panel, make sure Align to Artboard is active.
And then click on Horizontal Align Center.
And then click on Vertical Align Center
in order to center that guy on the artboard.
That looks a little high for me,
so I'm going to press Shift down arrow
to nudge the image down 10 points.
And then I'll double click on
an empty portion of this Guides layer
to bring up the Layer Options dialog box.
I'm going to call this layer Template,
and I'm going to turn on the Template check box
and click Okay, in order to turn that image
into a tracing template.
All right, now what we want to do
is trace these blobs of paint,
and so I'm going to start things off
by selecting the Curvature Tool.
Again, you can get it by pressing Shift Tilda.
I like that keyboard shortcut a lot
because if I'm not paying attention,
I often just accidentally select the Pen Tool,
because they look so similar.
But their keyboard shortcuts are very different.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and select that tool,
then I'm going to press the D key
in order to instate the default Fill and Stroke.
And I'm going to click on the Fill icon
that first swatch right there,
and change it to None.
And then I'll take the Lineweight value up to four points,
like so.
All right, now it's just a matter of drawing the blobs,
and you can see here
that I've got a little pencil
with a universal No icon next to it,
and that's because a locked layer is active.
I need to switch to the Drawing layer
in order to get the Starter cursor here.
And then I'm just going to click,
and I'm not really recommending
you do a wonderful job of tracing these blobs
because they don't look that great in the first place
and I want a lot of variety here.
I want to be able to see a lot of edge action,
so I'm just drawing any old shapes here.
And I also recommend that you draw each one
independently, as opposed to just drawing one
and then copying it a bunch of times
because that sort of duplication is oftentimes
pretty obvious, especially when you're drawing something
like this that's only going to take you,
you know what, maybe five minutes in the first place.
So I'll just go ahead and continue to click around here
and if at any time you change your mind
about a placement of a point,
or you want to add another one,
why, by all means, definitely do that.
All right, I've only got a couple more
and then I'll tell you after I get done
drawing these blobs of paint,
I am going to move onto the hole
right there inside this painter's palette,
but first let's go ahead and draw this guy.
And I've giving it a lot of edge action,
once again, I want to make that clear.
But you don't have to,
you can do anything you want.
This guy seems like he's got a little bit
too much edge action.
But in any event,
if you press Control Shift A,
or Command Shift A in order to deselect everything,
you can see that even though I've been
as random as possible,
that I have some very smooth shapes, indeed.
All right, now this hole is a little more difficult,
at least if you want to exactly trace it,
that's going to be very hard.
Because the Curvature Tool is not the
most predictable tool in terms of
getting specific results.
And as we'll see, the tool that's much better than that
is the Pen Tool, as we'll see in the next chapter.
But for now I'm just going to go ahead
and click to centerpoint there, there,
right inside the paintbrush,
the bottom portion of the paintbrush,
some place down here,
and then we want a fourth point right there.
And notice that I, as predicted,
did not exactly trace this hole.
And so what I need to do is just move these points around.
You really don't want to give something as
elliptical as this more than four points,
because you're going to start
flattening out your curve, if you do.
So my recommendation is to not get
too hung up on things,
just move the points to more or less
the locations in this video.
And as you can see,
they're not equally distance from each other,
by any means.
So we have essentially two axes going right now,
we've got this one going up into the left,
and then we have this other one going
very slightly up and to the right.
And so you can see they're not
crossing each other perpendicularly,
and that really is the key to getting halfway
decent rotated ellipses
out of the Curvature Tool.
At which point I'll just go ahead and press
Control zero, or Command zero on the Mac
to zoom out.
And I'll press Control Shift A,
or Command Shift A to deselect that oval.
And I'm going to double click on the name
of this layer here inside the Layers panel
and I'm going to change it to Palette.
And then I'll press the Enter key,
or the Return key on the Mac.
And that might seem like a strange name,
given that the one thing I haven't drawn yet
is the palette, but it's coming in the next movie.
And now I'm just going to go ahead
and quickly color these shapes
by pressing the V key to switch back
to the black arrow tool.
And I'll click on this guy up here
and I'm going to change its Fill
to this shade of Pink that begins R237,
these are all default colors
included with the basic RGB document.
And so I'll just give you the R value.
Next I'll select this second guy right there
and I'll change it to the Yellow
that begins R252.
I'll select this next guy in line
and I'll change him to this Green
that begins R57.
And then I'll select the next one,
he's going to be Blue,
and it's going to be this shade of blue
right here, it starts with R41.
And then finally, this guy,
I figure he wants to be Orange,
and so I'll change him to the medium orange
which begins R247.
And then I'll go ahead and click off those shapes
to deselect them.
And that's how you draw a bunch of
quick, smooth custom shapes
using the Curvature Tool
here inside Illustrator.