Puppet Warp in Illustrator

In this post, we cover an Illustrator tool that also stars in Photoshop: the Puppet Warp! This tool is an incredible resource for distorting and manipulating our vector designs. Use this when you’re making subtle changes to shapes, curves, and details, or recreating a sense of depth or movement, keeping all details unique and organic. It’s a world of fun!

Follow me along this step-by-step illustrated guide to learn how to select artworks, add pins and transform our designs. We’ll also have a look at mesh grids and some other cool tricks.

This post is based on my Illustrator Advanced Course. When you become a BYOL member, you gain access to this course as well as my 30+ additional courses on After Effects, Photoshop, Figma, Lightroom, and more. As a BYOL member you will also enjoy personalized support, earn certificates, and tackle exciting community challenges. Head here to sign-up!

Time to get creative!

A Whale, a Steampunk Town, and the Warp Tool!

Let’s begin by having a quick look at the subject we’ll be working on. Here’s a large steampunk-ish whale, magically swimming across a vibrant steampunk-ish street background. It’s feeling a bit sad and lonely, so let's give this whale a more confident posture and some graceful movement. 

This image is one of the downloadable resources from my Illustrator Advanced Course, follow along using that file or use your own vector designs, it’s all good!

Puppet Warp is usually nested inside the Free Transform Tool group in the Toolbar to the left of our workspace. If you can’t find it, look for the Edit Toolbar button (the one with three dots “…”) at the bottom, scroll down to the Modify group, click, and drag to move each one onto the Toolbar.

It should look a bit like this:

Select and Group your Vector Shapes!

Our whale is made of a large number of smaller shapes that, combined together, create the color, shadows, and textural details needed to make it look good! In order to use the Puppet Warp tool, we have to make sure all the shapes are part of the same group. I’ll remove the background for now so you can have a clean look at all the steps we’re taking.

With the Selection tool, click and drag the cursor over all the shapes, to ensure that none are forgotten. When all parts are selected, we can use the Shortcut Command + G on a Mac or Control + G on a PC to create the new group. We can also right-click the selection and pick the option Group. It’s also possible to do this by clicking on Object at the top menu bar and choosing Group. And one more option: click on the Group button in the Quick Actions panel placed to the right of our workspace.

Too many options? Pick the one you are most comfortable with, and let’s move on!

Pins and Mesh Grids

When we first use the Puppet Warp tool, Illustrator will place some default pins on our whale and cover it with a grid mesh. This may seem complex, but it’s quite simple.

First, let’s understand pins.

In the Puppet Warp tool, pins are anchor points that we manipulate to lock or distort specific parts of an object.

Black pins are fixed anchor points, the ones that are not currently selected. All of these fixed pins are locking their surrounding areas, as we use the white pin at the center of our whale.

White pins are active pins. We manipulate them to create warps and distortions. We click and drag them to distort the vector object. We can also use the Rotate feature to warp the pin’s surrounding area.

This means that when we are transforming a white pin’s area, all the black pins are keeping their surroundings properly locked and safe. We need this balance, for example, to preserve original shapes, curves, or lines that we don’t want to be affected.

Pro tip: Depending on the effect we are aiming for, it is possible to select more than one active pin and apply changes to a large section of our design.

Mesh grids are a net of interconnected points (called nodes) where we can place pins for transformation. Mesh grids also work as a visible reference to how each transformation affects the whole object.

When we have a large number of pins over a more complex object, mesh grids can be a bit overwhelming, so we can show or hide them as we are editing our artwork. While the Show Mesh option in the Puppet Warp panel is left unchecked, the grid mesh will remain hidden. If we click on it and check it, the grid mesh will be visible.

There is one more option to assist us with the Grid Mesh. We can expand its area to adjust transformations' scope and precision. Larger mesh sizes are great to manipulate large sections of our design, keeping details safe from unwanted distortions. Smaller mesh sizes offer higher precision, allowing us to create realistic and subtle changes to the tiniest details without affecting the object’s overall structure.

We can adjust mesh size by typing a value inside the Expand Mesh field or adjusting it dynamically by clicking on the right arrow next to the value field and using the mesh size slider.

One more thing before we push on. We can remove the default pins from our whale and replace them with our own pinpoints. To do this, we move our mouse to the Quick Actions panel, below the Puppet Warp panel, and click on Select All Pins. Next, we hit the Delete key and they are gone!

Using the Puppet Warp Tool

Now that we’ve covered the basics, there aren’t many secrets left to reveal. Working with the Puppet Warp tool requires patience and some trial-and-error. Keeping things subtle and working our way from zero to finished transformations will save us energy and create stronger professional results.

Let’s go back to our whale.

I’ll place some new pins in strategic points and move on from there! This example will help us understand the Puppet Warp tool’s mechanics. Let’s say we want to change the whale’s posture and position, creating the illusion that it is swimming upward and fast, full of grace and personality! Can you define the parts of the whale that you would need to transform to create such an impression?

Here is my first take on this challenge.

From left to right, I want to raise the whale’s nose and chin. Then I need to keep its center leveled, while adjusting both pectoral fins and the dorsal fin above. Finally, I’ve pinned the tail’s tip so I can pull it up to an upward maneuvering position.

How do we do all of this? Quick and easy! We select a pin, click, and drag it with our mouse to its new size and position, and move on to the next one. Carefully observe the mesh and overall whale shape to see how each pin distortion impacts the whole object. Remember that as you drag or rotate each pin, the others remain fixed.

As you can see, I’ve added a few more pins to the whale, mostly to keep the center features as smooth as possible. It’s perfectly natural that you may need to adjust the same pin more than once, so move back and forth across all pins until you are happy with the end result.

I’ve created a new composition, to help us understand how subtle changes can change an image and how Puppet Warp allows us to do it in just a few minutes!

The small whale is the one we had at the beginning and the large one displays all the changes we’ve made so far. Can you tell the differences? We’ve added depth and movement to the original image. It looks like the second whale is following a current, building up strength and speed, and the first one is already climbing upward to the water surface. Cool, huh?

Let’s bring up the background and recolor the second whale.

It’s not perfect, but I bet you can clearly understand what we’ve done to this artwork, so far. And we did it together! Awesome! High-fives all around!

Let me show you two more things we can do with pins and Puppet Warp. We’re going to create a more dramatic distortion for tutorial purposes and build the illusion that the whale is describing a powerful curve and its tail is arched behind her.

Repeat what we’ve learned so far. You can add new pins or remove old pins to help achieve the desired look.

Next, we will warp or rotate some details to add realism to this new movement. Quick and easy! We start by selecting the pin placed at the tip of the tail and move our cursor inside the pin’s area until the rotating icon pops up!

We click and drag to create the warp effect, fine tune other pins if necessary, and we’re on our way home!

Or maybe not.

Just one more tip for you all! How do we deal with overlapping shapes and how do we define what’s in front or what’s behind the object? Let’s say we went a bit too far with the last effect and we’ve ended up with something like this:

We want the tail’s tip to show up in front of the whale. Can we change this?

There is no feature in Puppet Warp for something like this or any magic shortcut, but hey, you are following an Advanced Tutorial, so I bet you already have the answer for this! Let’s tackle it anyway, so nothing gets left behind!

Using the Direct Selection tool (shortcut key A for both Mac and PC), we select the whale’s tail shape. You still remember that we are working inside a grouped object, right? Yes!

With the object selected, we open the Layers panel to the right of our workspace. Next, we collapse the new whale’s layer group (I should have given it a proper name), find the highlighted tail layer inside and click and drag it all the way to the top of the group.

It’s not magic, it’s Pro level Illustrator skills! You should feel proud! Well done!

One last thing, before we go!

I’m sure that many of you have seen fitting examples of how the Puppet Warp tool can change designs, adding layers of movement and fun to lifeless characters and shapes.

But, have you ever considered using this tool on Typography and basic shapes like strokes? If not,  I can’t help but share these sketches with you. They’re not beautiful and precise,  but I want to show you how your imagination can always find a way to use a new tool. 

There’s only one catch for this tool’s use with text objects: characters are automatically converted to outlines to apply Puppet Warp effects, so make sure you save a copy before moving on.

And there we have it!

Awesome! We’ve made it to the end of our tutorial! I hope you’ve learned something and are excited to use this in your future designs! 

What 's Next?

To go deeper with Illustrator, join BYOL and you will gain access to my Illustrator Essentials and Advanced courses as well as my 30+ additional courses on Figma, Photoshop,  Lightroom, Premiere Pro, Webflow, and more. As a BYOL member you will also enjoy personalized support, earn certificates, and tackle exciting community challenges. Get started here. 

See you in class! – Dan