- In this movie, I'll introduce you
to the exciting world of variable-width strokes
in Illustrator, and I'll also show you
how to customize those strokes using the width tool.
So for starters, I'm going to click on
this big, thick, green path outline right here.
And notice up here in the control panel,
we can see that the line weight is 50 points,
and right next door we see the word Uniform.
And that indicates that the stroke is consistently 50 points
along the entire path outline.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
You can switch to a variable-width stroke
by clicking this down-pointing arrowhead right here
and choosing one of these so-called Width Profiles,
such as Width Profile 2.
And now we can see that the path gets thicker
over here on the left-hand side,
and then it gets thin top right,
and then it thickens up again down right.
Now the line weight value indicates
the maximum thickness of the line.
And so if I take that value up to 80 points, let's say,
then a line is allowed to get as thick as 80 points
but no thicker, or more reasonably, I would go ahead
and take that value down to, let's say, 30 points.
But my guess is that instead of just accepting
one of these default profiles,
you'll want to customize the thickness of your path.
And you can do that by selecting the Width Tool
midway down the Toolbox.
And if you don't see it, then go ahead and click and hold
on one of these Liquefy Tools,
and choose the Width Tool from the top of the flyout menu.
Notice also that it has a keyboard shortcut
of shift + w for width.
And now if you hover over the path outline,
you'll not only see the usual anchor points,
but you'll also see these white width points.
And as soon as you find one with your cursor,
then you'll see two handles on either side of it as well.
And so one way to use a width point
is to click on it to select it,
and that makes it persistent so you can keep track of it,
at which point, you can drag out on one of these handles
to make the stroke thicker,
or you can drag inward to make it thinner.
Now if you're lucky, you don't have to actually
click on a width point, you can just hover over it
to find the handles and drag the handles directly like so.
Now one of the more amazing things about the Width Tool
is that it allows you to work on deselected
and selected paths alike.
So notice this orange sunshine path right here.
It ends in two round arrowheads.
In front of those arrowheads we're seeing stars.
And so notice clicking on a star
isn't going to make any difference,
and that's because the star doesn't have a stroke.
So you need a stroke to start with.
But assuming that you have a stroke,
as we do in the case of this orange path,
then I can just go ahead and click and drag
in order to create a new width point,
and what I'm going to do is go ahead
and make the path a little thinner at this location.
Now notice whereas normally if I was to change
the line weight value, I would change the size
of the arrowheads as well,
but that doesn't happen when you're adding width points.
The arrowhead goes ahead and stays its original size.
Also notice that once you're working
with a variable-width stroke,
you will see width points at either end,
in which case I can go ahead and make that stroke flare
by dragging outward on this handle.
All right so now let's say I decide
to put another width point right there,
and then, of course, I decide that's not really
a good location for it.
Why, then, you can drag a width point to any location
you like, and it will expand and contract the stroke
like some sort of crazy tapeworm.
All right, now I'm going to go to the end point here,
and I'm going to make it thinner like so,
and I might add another width point
right about there and make it pretty thin as well.
All right now I want you to see down here at the bottom
of the stroke panel, that in addition to the profile
which represents the profile as it exists now,
so in other words, we're seeing our customized changes,
we've got this icon right here
that allows us to flip the direction
of our variable-width stroke.
But notice if I click on it, I flip the mountain
and not the orange stroke,
and that's because it's the mountain that's selected.
Even though we were working on the orange stroke,
it is not a selected path outline,
as indicated by the stroke color
up here in the control panel.
And so if you want to switch focus to that stroke,
you need to press and hold the control key,
or the command key on the Mac,
to temporarily gain access
to the last used arrow tool,
which in my case is the black arrow,
and then go ahead and click on that orange path outline,
and then release the control or command key
to return to the width tool.
And now notice in addition to the stroke turning orange
up here in the control panel,
we're seeing a very different profile
listed at the bottom of the stroke panel.
And so now if I click on the Flip Along icon,
I end up flipping the desired path outline.
All right, also notice next door to Flip Along
is Flip Across, but it's dimmed,
and that's because so far our variable-width strokes
are centered on their path outlines.
You can change that, however, and I'll demonstrate that
on this green path outline.
So I'll go ahead and control click or command click on it
in order to select that path,
and then instead of just dragging
one of these handles right here,
I'm going to press the alt key
or the option key on the Mac and drag a handle,
and notice what that does is it allows me
to move one handle independently of the other
in order to make the thickness of the path asymmetrical.
And now that I've done that, you can see that
the Flip Across icon is now available,
at which point I'll go ahead and click on it
in order to flip the thick portion of the path
to the inside of this mountain.
And now I want you to see that if I just go ahead
and drag one of these handles
instead of pressing the alt or option key,
that I move them together with each other,
but I'm doing so relative to their new length.
And that, folks, is how you assign variable-width strokes
as well as customize those strokes using the Width Tool
here inside Illustrator.