Width Tool in Adobe Animate

Hey, this video we're gonna talk about the width tool. Now, the width tool here, I love the width tool. Um, it's a way of changing your boring strokes. Kind of like what we did with the brush libraries earlier. Remember the fire? Okay?

But this one here is to play with the kind  of width of it obviously. So we're gonna create a new layer just  so we don't mess up any of our earlier, um,  stuff that we've been working on. I'm gonna call this the, uh, width  Tool. Um, there's no naming conventions for the layers. Okay? So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna be on  the first key frame here.

I'm gonna grab my pencil tool. I'm gonna have the smoothing. I'm gonna crank the smoothing up to like 70  because what I wanna do is, um, there's alien here. I'm gonna give 'em a kind of a hairdo. Now I'm gonna turn my stroke down to one  and I'm gonna make it black because my alien has black hair  and I'm gonna keep, that's not bad, okay? So I just kind of drew that one.

Do I get even luckier? What you might do is my smoothing up to a hundred  and then you're almost guaranteed to get something  I'm clicking undo or edit. Um, using the shortcut here for command C  or control C on a pc, um, just to get something I like. And then we're gonna switch to this width tool. Now the width tool, it's brilliant. Watch this, click hold and drag and it just kind of come on.

Which way am I dragging it? There you go. Okay. So it, it just kind of adds that, I'm gonna zoom in a bit. We haven't zoomed in much in this program. We haven't done it at all actually is,  I don't zoom in quite a bit  because this is, you need to view it actual size.

Why? Because that's the size  that it's gonna be on a website in terms of an ad. So there's no point zooming in too much,  but there's some zooming in here or some shortcuts. Hold down command plus on your keyboard  and minus to zoom out or control plus on a PC  and then minus to zoom back out. So I'm gonna zoom in. Can you see it just kind  of adds this nice little curve to it.

Um, so you can add more than one. Okay? And it just means if you've ever tried to draw anything  with the B pen tool  and you've, you can draw one side easy enough, but try  and get a matching side can be quite tough. Now I still don't like that shape. It's not smooth enough for me. Go away.

You go away. So one more time with a pencil tool. Come on. Pencil tool. I should use the pen tool, but I'm trying to keep it all  to like really simple tools in here  'cause I don't wanna have to go and explain the pen tool  'cause that's a whole day's work  because, come on, I'm getting there. Actually what I'm gonna do is we're using the smooth one we  are feels like the best I've got it.

That looks okay anyway. So back to the width tool. I grab you, drag it out  and you can see it just, it's a nice smooth line. So there's nothing more than that. Um, it gets kind of cool when you start going into, say,  say I wanna, I'm gonna unlock the wizard layer  and I'm going to zoom in on his arm  here and I'm gonna double click it. Okay.

And I'm double clicking a couple times. I've gone inside of a group, inside of a group  'cause it's been grouped all sorts of ways. And I eventually got my way into the arm here  so I keep double clicking it until I found all my way in. Okay? I'm inside all these different groups  and I'm gonna use the ink. Okay, the ink bottle tool.

So the fill tool adds a different fill  so I can pick a new fill from here. Um, and that's what he does. Okay? The ink bottle, I'm gonna undo that. Uh, the, the ink bottle here does a similar  thing but except with the stroke. So I'm gonna pick, uh,  I'm gonna add a stroke to the outside.

Can you see it? Just adds it to it there. Okay. And it add in nice stroker on the outside. And then if I go in with my whipped tool, I can kind  of get a kind of a cool illustration style, which this,  if I drag say this corner out a little  bit, can you see what it's doing? It's kind of moving it around  and I can start kind of skinning in bits  and trying to get it looking a little bit more like a pen.

Okay. And you can kind of get a nice cool, stylized um, kind  of stroke around the outside. There we go. That's fine. Now I wanna go all the back to scene one. I can either double click the background  by using my selection tool  or you can just click scene one, double click my background.

Couple of times all the way back to scene one. You can see I could start working around with this. Uh, adding with the ink bottle, adding strokes around the  outside and then playing with the width tool. I'm gonna zoom back out. The quick key to kind  of full screen is command one on your keyboard  or control one on your keyboard should zoom all the way out  again to like a hundred percent. Alright, that's it for the width tool.

Actually, one last thing before I go,  I'll show you the width tool. Width tool was stolen from Adobe Illustrator  and it's amazing what you can do with it here. There's some of the drawings I've done. So, um, let's look at this one's a bit more better example. So it's, it's a, it's just a siloized bit of type. Um, and what I do is I draw it first  with the pencil okay in my notebook.

And then I go over it with the width tool. And the width tool works exactly the same in  Illustrator as it does in flash. So you can use this the exact same thing in Flash,  and you can see the kinds of lines you can draw  that are just really impossible to do  with the pen tool normally. Um, so yeah, if you are using the, um, uh, illustrator  or Flash, um, the width tool could be a new best friend  for you for especially kind of these curved,  varying sizes along here. All right, that's it for the width tool. Finally.