Illustrator and Live Paint

I attended the Illustrator begginers workshop which went well. I can honestly say using the pen tool is not difficult at all, however the variable width tool has proven more difficult.


Issues with variable width and Pen Tool:

I'm not sure how to make the ends of lines fat so they meet up at a chunkier section of line, if a group of three meet they seem to want to meet at a single point. I need to address this.

Where a group of 3 or more lines meet, I'm not sure how to keep this neat so the variable width can do its job properly.

I scanned in a coloured drawing I did of this character and traced him on Illustrator using the pen. I also began to mess around with his facial expression, since his face is a mask it must remain static but I developed a design that can be rotated to give a 'freindly' expression and a 'spooky' expression. I use these words becuase they are the ones that came up when I asked people what emotion or feeling the expression conveyed.


So thats how it goes!


I then used the live paint tool to colour the character, again no particular issues really, although I'm sure if i understood the pen tool more I could learn how to add variable tone into the colours, like how the belt buckle looks but without the lines inbeteen.



I begun to add tone to the hands using the same outlining-in-black technique as before. However I would like to add shading in the clothes and things without using black outlines all the time. I gave that a go, and ran into problems.


I'm not sure it's clear on that image, but I began to draw lines in with a darker shade of the same colour with the intent of filling them in with that same colour.

All went well until it started refusing to make those new shapes for Live Paint. I tried altering them using Live Paint > Gap and changing the size of the gaps it allows but this didn't work.

Another issue is, where the shade line joins the black outline, there is a over lap that looks rough.



Ive tried Select > Same > Fill Colour with Black as the fill colour with the intention of moving everything black (the outline) to the front using the Bring To Front tool.

But that didnt seem to select anything. These are issues to take up with Simon.