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.