- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to trace
a custom path outline, specifically,
the perimeter of this artist palette here.
And even though this palette looks like it was born
to be traced with a curvature tool, it actually requires
a fair amount of experimentation and effort.
Obviously, the first step is to go ahead
and select the curvature tool,
which you can get by pressing shift + tilde.
And then I'm going to start up here
at the top of the palette, like so.
Right there at the apex, I'll lay down a point.
And then over here on the far left side
looks like a good second point.
Then I'll come down to the very bottom
of the palette, which is right about here, and click.
And I don't want to fill, so I'm just going to go ahead
and get rid of it while I'm still working on the shape
by clicking on this first color swatch
up here in the control panel, and changing it to none.
And again, just so that you can see another way to work,
if the fill is active, as I can see it is
in the upper left corner of the swatches panel,
you can just press the slash key.
Alright, now I'll go ahead and click
right about there, so I'm just trying to click.
I'm really not paying that much attention
to the rubber band here.
I'm just trying to click on the most extreme points
along the perimeter of this palette.
And now I'll click right about there,
and I know, if we are paying any attention
to the rubber band, that would seem like a terrible idea.
The thing is, the second I click
and then move my cursor to a new location,
you can see that that rubber band preview
is going to change dramatically.
Alright, now I'll click on this extreme point
and then finally, I'll come back
to the beginning, and click again.
And we end up with not the right shape,
that's for sure, but it's not a half bad start.
Now what we need to do is add points,
and move them around, and see what kind of results we get.
I'm going to start by adding a point right about there,
and notice that that has a pretty bad effect.
It's flattening out the shape.
It's turning this point into quite the corner,
but you can see, if I move the point a little bit,
things are getting better.
And now I'm going to click to set
a point right there, and I'm going to move it down.
One of the keys, by the way, when you're working
with this tool is to make sure that your points
are not in a straight line because once they are,
you're going to get a lot of flatness.
Now I'm going to click here in order
to create a point that is more or less
along a straight line, which is why we're seeing
such flatness, and then I'll go ahead and move this guy
down, and I'll also move this guy up a little bit.
And I'm doing this based on a lot of experimentation.
It may be hardly a surprise, but I've tried
this out a couple of times here.
And now I'll go ahead and move this guy down,
and I'm going to drag this point over to about here, let's say.
And that makes it clear we need another point
on the left-hand side, so I'll click right
about there to add one, and then I'll move it down and over.
And now actually I am moving it up,
and that means that I've got to move
this guy up a little bit as well.
It might be tempting to throw a point
over here and move it down, but our better bet
is to move this guy over to the left,
this top point, and see what we come up with.
And then I'll move this guy down,
and notice, as a result, we get this nice, smooth arc.
Another lesson is the fewer points you can use
with the curvature tool, the better
because, as we've been seeing with our ellipses,
we get the smoothest results
with just four points and no more.
Now I might sort of noodle around here
a little bit, and just try things out.
But what I found was that this area right here,
the interior edge, kept looking lumpy
regardless of just about anything I did,
which is why it's totally okay,
if you see something like this,
to switch to a different tool.
And the great thing about the tools
that we've been seeing is that they're perfectly capable
of editing each other's results.
For example, if I wanted to, at this point,
I could go ahead and switch to the pencil tool,
which, of course, I can get by pressing the n key,
and then, with this path selected,
I could go ahead and drag along it,
taking special care, by the way,
to make sure that I'm beginning and ending my drag
on the path outline, and then I'll go ahead and release.
And I got that result, which I really don't like,
by the way, so I'm going to undo
by pressing control + z or command + z on the Mac.
And I'm going to try again, see if I can get a smoother result.
This does not look smooth at all.
You know what?
What I could do, I could keep doing that if I want to,
or why don't we try a different tool.
Just want to make the point that that is totally possible,
and, incidentally, I am working with the mouse,
in case that's any defense.
Let's go ahead and switch over
to the smooth tool right here.
And I'm going to press the enter key
or the return key on the Mac to bring
up the smooth tool options, and I'll make sure
this guy here is cranked all the way to smooth,
and then I'll click okay.
And now, let's see what happens if I just drag
up like that, if we start smoothing this out.
The thing is, that's not really seeming very right to me,
so I'm going to switch back to the pencil tool.
Hopefully this is giving you a sense
of how much back and forthing you can do if you want.
And now I'll press the enter key
or the return key on the Mac to bring
up the pencil tool options, and I'm going to crank
this guy to smooth and click okay.
And now, I'll try it again, cross my fingers,
and release at this point, and that's getting
to be pretty good, I guess.
We're not really following the path outline very well.
So let me see if I can do that a little better.
And I end up with this result here.
After which point, I could switch back
to the curvature tool, if I want to.
And notice now, I have way more points,
but this is what I want you to see.
If I start adjusting these points,
it's very possible, well, in that case nothing happened.
But it's very possible that I'm going to get different results.
And this guy, it looks to me like we don't really need him,
so I'll just click on him and press the backspace key,
or the delete key on the Mac, to get rid of him.
Then I'll select this guy and press backspace or delete.
That looks like that was a mistake,
so I'll put him back by pressing control + z.
Let's see if I get rid of this guy what happens.
Well, that looks pretty similar to what I had
before I started with the pencil tool, but you get the idea.
Eventually, you can move these guys around
until you start getting smoother results.
And having demonstrated that about as well
as I think I'm going to, I'll go ahead
and switch back to the black arrow tool,
and click off of the shape, and you can see,
even though it didn't occur on video,
that in the final version that I drew here,
that I do have a pretty darn smooth path outline.
So it is ultimately possible to achieve
the effects you're looking for.
And that's how you draw a highly specific,
custom path outline, with varying degrees
of success, using, at least in part,
the curvature tool, here inside Illustrator.