From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

974 Tracing a specific letterform with a shape tool

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

974 Tracing a specific letterform with a shape tool

- Hey gang. This is Deek McClellan. Welcome to Deek's Techniques. Now over the last couple of weeks, I've been showing you how you can snap a graphic object to the contours of a character of live editable type in the most recent version of Adobe illustrator. Well, this week it gets even better. As I show you how to trace a letter form with precision accuracy using a shape tool such as well, the ellipse tool. Plus, you can trace that character without first converting it to a path outline, as was your only option in the past. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so all we want to do is fill in these negative spaces here inside the letter O's as well as these two stars, would have been hard to do in the past, much easier to pull off inside the most recent version of illustrator. Now, in case you're working along with me, I want you to know that these stars are characters of type. From a font called HWT, that is Hamilton Wood Type star ornaments. And this is a font that's currently available from Adobe fonts. So, if you don't have it, you can go ahead and activate it. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch back to illustrator. We're going to start with this letter O right here. And so I'll go ahead and zoom in on it. And I'm going to switch to the layers panel. Notice that I've created an empty layer called "draw", that's just going to make this project a little bit easier to pull off. Now, what you want to do is go to the view menu and confirm that your smart guys are turned on as well as the snap to Glyph Command. And then you want to right click on this O and choose snap to Glyph O. All right, next, go ahead and select the ellipse tool from the shape tool fly out menu. And we're just going to go ahead and trace the entire O, that is the big outside portion of the letter O. All right, now, assuming that you're working on that draw layer, you can go up to the control panel here and click release glyph. We do not want to stroke, so I'll go ahead and change that guy to none. And then I'll change the fill to this dark shade of blue that begins R=46. All right, now this guy is a little bit too big, could end up showing through over here in the top right region. And so the easiest way to scale it, is to switch to the scale tool right here, which you can get by pressing the S key. And then press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to bring up the scale dialog box. And I came up with a uniform value of 96%, which go ahead and touch that blue circle behind the white O. And then, click okay. And if you get this shape expanded message, don't worry about it. It's a lie. The shape has not been expanded at all. All right, I'm just going to go ahead and space bar drag the document so I can see the other O right here. And then, I'll right click on it, so you don't have to switch tools, and choose snap to Glypho from the shortcut menu. All right, now I'll switch back to the ellipse tool and I'll just go ahead and drag inside that highlighted rectangle right there. All right, now I'll click release glyph on the far left side of the horizontal control panel, and I'll change the fill to this dark shade of red. All right, this time around, we need to switch from the scale tool to the shear tool, which allows you to slant objects. And I'll just go ahead and press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac to bring up the sheer dialog box. And I set the access to horizontal, and I came up with an angle value of 14 degrees, at which point I'll click okay. All right, now switch back to the scale tool and then I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac. And I'll click inside this horizontal value right here and I'll take it down to 93%, or even 92% might work better. I'll leave the vertical value set to 96%, which tucks that red shape behind the white O, at which point I'll click okay to accept that change. And I'll de-select my artwork by pressing control shift A, or command shift A on the Mac and I'll press control zero or command zero in order to center my zoom. And that's how you precisely trace a letter form using a basic geometric shape tool by stamping to its glyph here inside the most recent version of Adobe illustrator. If you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a follow-up movie in which I show you how to trace the exact boundary of a character of live, editable type using the pen tool. Deeks Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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