- Alright, now, one of the great things
about Variable Width, especially the fact that you can
adjust strokes asymmetrically, is that it gives you
a new control over the way that you align the stroke
to the path outline, that goes well beyond this
Align Stroke function that we saw a few movies back.
And it's just as applicable to open path outlines
as closed ones.
So, let's say for example, that I press the a key
to switch to the white arrow tool,
and I click on this upper right segment
associated with this ellipse here.
And notice, over here in the Stroke panel,
how the Stroke is currently aligned to the outside
of this path outline.
And so, I'll go ahead and click on this segment
and then shift-click on this this one,
and shift-click on this one, so that
the upper right segments are selected in each one
of the ellipses, and then I'll press the backspace key,
and I lose that alignment.
Illustrator goes ahead and automatically
switches my Align Stroke option back to
Align Stroke to Center.
But that's OK, because I can modify this setting
using Variable Width stroke.
And so, I'll just click off the paths to deselect them.
And then, I'll switch to the Width Tool,
which, once again, you can get by pressing shift + w.
And now, I'll just go ahead and double-click
on this top endpoint in this left-hand path.
And now, I'll change this Side 1 setting to 20 points,
and I'll change Side 2 to 0.
So, in other words, I've distributed all of the stroke,
all 20 points of it, to the outside of the path outline,
at which point I'll click OK to accept that setting.
And then, I'll double click on the other endpoint
for that same path, and I'll change its Side 1 setting
to 20 points, and I'll change Side 2 to 0 point, once again,
and then I'll click OK for that.
Alright, now, I'll press the v key to switch
to the black arrow tool, and I'll go ahead and marquee
the other two path outlines.
And now, I'll grab my eyedropper, which, once again,
I can get by pressing the i key.
And I'll go ahead and click on that first path outline,
the one on the left-hand side,
in order to lift its attributes and everybody
is aligned once again.
And it gets headier still.
I'll go ahead and collapse my Stroke panel
just a little bit, so that I have a little more room
for my Layers panel, down here
in the bottom right corner of the screen.
And I'll turn on the Spirals layer right here.
And I'll press the v key to switch
to the black arrow tool, and I'll go ahead and click on
any one of the spirals.
Notice that their light blue strokes are centered
on the path outline, as by default.
And then, I'll go up to the select similar objects icon,
up here in the Control panel, I'll click on
the down-pointing arrow head, and I'll just go ahead
and choose All or Stroke Color.
Either one's gonna work fine.
And that'll select all the spirals.
And now, I'll switch back to the eyedropper tool,
and I'll go ahead and click on one of the purple paths,
and that aligns everybody beautifully.
And now, I'll just press control + a, or command + a
on the Mac, in order to select all the path outlines,
and I'll go over to the Stroke panel right here,
and I'll switch the Caps option to round cap,
which goes ahead and fills in the gaps up there
at the top of the path outlines.
After which point, I can go ahead and press the v key
to switch back to my black arrow tool.
And I'll click off the paths to deselect them.
And so, thanks to your ability to asymmetrically
adjust strokes along their path outlines,
using the Width Tool, you can align strokes to path outlines
with this kind of precision control,
here inside Illustrator.