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- In this movie I'll show
you how to mow through

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a bunch of quick, smooth shapes.

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And if nothing else, the Curvature Tool

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is great at allowing you
to draw nebulous forms,

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like these blobs of paint

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with a minimum of mindless energy.

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So the first thing we're going to do

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is create a new document

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with a photographic tracing template.

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And so I'm going to go up to the File menu

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and choose New from Template,

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or you can press that keyboard shortcut

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of Control Shift N, or
Command Shift N on the Mac.

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Then I'll go ahead and grab
my Center Guides template

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and click on the New button.

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Now I'm going to click on the Guides layer

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to make it active,

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and I'll go up to the File menu and choose

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the Place command,

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or you can press Control Shift P,

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or Command Shift P on the Mac.

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And in my case I'm going to go ahead

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and navigate to my Exercise Files folder,

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which is on my desktop.

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And I'll take a look at
my 12_curvature subfolder,

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in which I'm giving you an image file

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in the form of Palette photo.jpg.

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After which point I'll go ahead

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and click on the Place
button to load my cursor.

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And then I'll click inside the document

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to paste the image.

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And by the way,

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this image comes to us from the

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Fotolia Image Library, about
which you can learn more,

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and get deals, at fotolia.com/deke.

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The original is in color,

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but I just didn't want the colors to

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get in our creative way here.

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All right, now you want to go up to the

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Control Panel, make sure
Align to Artboard is active.

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And then click on Horizontal Align Center.

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And then click on Vertical Align Center

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in order to center that
guy on the artboard.

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That looks a little high for me,

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so I'm going to press Shift down arrow

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to nudge the image down 10 points.

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And then I'll double click on

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an empty portion of this Guides layer

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to bring up the Layer Options dialog box.

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I'm going to call this layer Template,

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and I'm going to turn on
the Template check box

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and click Okay, in
order to turn that image

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into a tracing template.

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All right, now what we want to do

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is trace these blobs of paint,

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and so I'm going to start things off

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by selecting the Curvature Tool.

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Again, you can get it
by pressing Shift Tilda.

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I like that keyboard shortcut a lot

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because if I'm not paying attention,

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I often just accidentally
select the Pen Tool,

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because they look so similar.

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But their keyboard shortcuts
are very different.

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Anyway, I'll go ahead
and select that tool,

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then I'm going to press the D key

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in order to instate the
default Fill and Stroke.

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And I'm going to click on the Fill icon

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that first swatch right there,

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and change it to None.

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And then I'll take the Lineweight
value up to four points,

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like so.

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All right, now it's just a
matter of drawing the blobs,

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and you can see here

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that I've got a little pencil

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with a universal No icon next to it,

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and that's because a
locked layer is active.

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I need to switch to the Drawing layer

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in order to get the Starter cursor here.

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And then I'm just going to click,

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and I'm not really recommending

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you do a wonderful job
of tracing these blobs

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because they don't look that
great in the first place

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and I want a lot of variety here.

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I want to be able to see
a lot of edge action,

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so I'm just drawing any old shapes here.

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And I also recommend
that you draw each one

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independently, as opposed
to just drawing one

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and then copying it a bunch of times

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because that sort of
duplication is oftentimes

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pretty obvious, especially
when you're drawing something

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like this that's only going to take you,

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you know what, maybe five
minutes in the first place.

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So I'll just go ahead and
continue to click around here

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and if at any time you change your mind

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about a placement of a point,

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or you want to add another one,

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why, by all means, definitely do that.

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All right, I've only got a couple more

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and then I'll tell you after I get done

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drawing these blobs of paint,

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I am going to move onto the hole

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right there inside this painter's palette,

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but first let's go
ahead and draw this guy.

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And I've giving it a lot of edge action,

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once again, I want to make that clear.

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But you don't have to,

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you can do anything you want.

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This guy seems like he's got a little bit

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too much edge action.

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But in any event,

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if you press Control Shift A,

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or Command Shift A in order
to deselect everything,

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you can see that even though I've been

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as random as possible,

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that I have some very
smooth shapes, indeed.

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All right, now this hole
is a little more difficult,

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at least if you want to exactly trace it,

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that's going to be very hard.

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Because the Curvature Tool is not the

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most predictable tool in terms of

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getting specific results.

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And as we'll see, the tool
that's much better than that

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is the Pen Tool, as we'll
see in the next chapter.

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But for now I'm just going to go ahead

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and click to centerpoint there, there,

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right inside the paintbrush,

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the bottom portion of the paintbrush,

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some place down here,

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and then we want a
fourth point right there.

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And notice that I, as predicted,

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did not exactly trace this hole.

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And so what I need to do is
just move these points around.

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You really don't want to give something as

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elliptical as this more than four points,

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because you're going to start

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flattening out your curve, if you do.

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So my recommendation is to not get

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too hung up on things,

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just move the points to more or less

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the locations in this video.

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And as you can see,

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they're not equally
distance from each other,

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by any means.

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So we have essentially
two axes going right now,

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we've got this one going up into the left,

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and then we have this other one going

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very slightly up and to the right.

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And so you can see they're not

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crossing each other perpendicularly,

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and that really is the
key to getting halfway

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decent rotated ellipses

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out of the Curvature Tool.

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At which point I'll
just go ahead and press

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Control zero, or Command zero on the Mac

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to zoom out.

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And I'll press Control Shift A,

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or Command Shift A to deselect that oval.

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And I'm going to double click on the name

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of this layer here inside the Layers panel

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and I'm going to change it to Palette.

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And then I'll press the Enter key,

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or the Return key on the Mac.

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And that might seem like a strange name,

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given that the one thing
I haven't drawn yet

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is the palette, but it's
coming in the next movie.

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And now I'm just going to go ahead

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and quickly color these shapes

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by pressing the V key to switch back

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to the black arrow tool.

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And I'll click on this guy up here

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and I'm going to change its Fill

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to this shade of Pink that begins R237,

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these are all default colors

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included with the basic RGB document.

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And so I'll just give you the R value.

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Next I'll select this
second guy right there

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and I'll change it to the Yellow

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that begins R252.

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I'll select this next guy in line

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and I'll change him to this Green

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that begins R57.

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And then I'll select the next one,

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he's going to be Blue,

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and it's going to be this shade of blue

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right here, it starts with R41.

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And then finally, this guy,

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I figure he wants to be Orange,

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and so I'll change him
to the medium orange

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which begins R247.

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And then I'll go ahead
and click off those shapes

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to deselect them.

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And that's how you draw a bunch of

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quick, smooth custom shapes

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using the Curvature Tool

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here inside Illustrator.