Different Strokes

Quick reference

• 00:00 Now, to use some of what we've already learned now,
• 00:04 we can grab things like our Arc tool or our Spiral tool and
• 00:09 we can see what kinds of things we can do with our line.
• 00:13 Now, I've already shown you guys that you have the ability to use the Width tool to
• 00:18 select the point to make lines wider.
• 00:20 But you can also do this for the overall line itself.
• 00:24 So if I go back for a second,
• 00:26 if I just wanted to select one of these anchor points to modify the width, I could
• 00:30 do that using my Direct Selection tool and then either grabbing the Width tool or
• 00:34 pressing Shift and W, and just extending this line to make it thicker.
• 00:39 Which produces a pretty cool looking result.
• 00:41 But if I wanted to make the entire line thicker,
• 00:45 I could just select the whole shape and, again, grab my width tool.
• 00:49 And now, when I move it in and out,
• 00:51 you can see that it's affecting the entire path, here, that I have.
• 00:54 So that produces a very different look.
• 00:57 This is more kind of a uniform look that we're going for here, and
• 01:02 if had only one or two increase or decrease the width of one of these points,
• 01:07 I would only select one at a time.
• 01:09 So now, I can come back in and
• 01:11 modify that shape even more to produce a greater variety of looks.
• 01:16 All right, so let me just come back over here,
• 01:19 change the weight of the line back to one, so you can see where we started.
• 01:24 And the other thing I wanna do, is change the round joint and the round cap to make
• 01:28 it rounded on the ends, just to change the look a little bit for something smoother.
• 01:33 But I just wanted to show you guys what else you can do here with the Width tool,
• 01:36 because you don't have to just change one side or
• 01:39 the other, you can change the whole line as well.
• 01:43 So the Width tool can be used in a variety of ways in order to change
• 01:47 the weight of a line.
• 01:52 And you can also use this option over here,
• 01:54 in the stroke panel, to flip along the path so that you can actually reverse it.
• 01:59 And by doing that, you can produce some different results as well.
• 02:09 So you guys can see that there's a lot of different things that you can do with this
• 02:12 tool, here.
• 02:14 Experiment with this, try the Width tool out, it works not only for
• 02:19 arc segments but pretty much any kind of line or path.
• 02:23 So I just wanted to show this to you guys because I didn't want you to feel limited,
• 02:26 like you could only change one specific anchor point.
• 02:29 But you actually do have the ability to control a lot more than just that.
• 02:35 You can see, here,
• 02:36 just within these five lines, how much variety we were able to produce.
• 02:40 So I'd like you guys to try and experiment with this as well,
• 02:42 to see how many variations of the same line you can come up with,
• 02:46 just using the Width tool and the options, over here, in the stroke panel.

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