Teach Yourself
CorelDRAW 8 in 24 Hours
You can use freehand curves to draw designs on your screen in CorelDRAW 8. Even skilled artists find it difficult to draw complex designs with a mouse, but the ability to add to or enhance a design with freehand curves is a powerful tool in creating illustrations.
In Figure 8.1, you can see a few uses for freehand lines. The mountains in the logo were drawn freehand and then edited and filled. The shape surrounding the lizard was drawn freehand. And even the letters "TE" were touched up using freehand drawing editing tools.
Freehand curves are drawn with the Freehand Drawing tool. This tool is part of a flyout that also includes the Bézier tool, the Natural Pen tool, the Dimension tool, and the Connector Line tool. These tools are shown in Figure 8.2.
You can use freehand lines many ways in illustrations.
The Freehand tool flyout.
The Natural Pen tool is similar to the Freehand tool, except that it draws a "filled-in" line. You can adjust the width at different parts of the line. In Figure 8.3, I drew the first letter of my name with the Natural Pen tool and tweaked the thickness of the resulting "line," which is really a shape.
The Natural Pen tool draws lines that are shapes.
In this Lesson, you focus on the Freehand Line tool. To be honest, nobody draws great-looking shapes with a mouse or even a more sophisticated computer drawing device. The trick is to sketch out a crude drawing that is close to what you want, and then touch it up by editing the resulting nodes.
Because nodes are very powerful, you will explore different aspects of them in this lesson, and in the next two lessons as well.
Just A Minute: Don't become frustrated trying to draw smooth, gracious curves with the Freehand tool. That's not going to happen. Your shapes will turn out nicely as you learn to edit nodes.
Just A Minute: There are other tools in the Freehand flyout in addition to the Natural Pen tool. The dimension tools, which are for adding measurements to objects for technical drawings or for callouts, are beyond the scope of this book. You'll spend a whole lesson on the Bézier tool in the flyout in Hour 9, "Creating Bézier Curves."
In Hour 1 of this book, you learned to draw straight lines by clicking once, holding down the Ctrl key, and clicking and clicking again. With that technique, you can draw horizontal or vertical lines, or lines at 15-degree increment angles (such as 45 degrees or 30 degrees). You also learned to create objects composed of several line segments by double-clicking to add new nodes to your object.
The process of drawing freehand curves is more freestyle. You simply click on the Freehand tool and then click and draw on the Drawing area. As previously mentioned, your first, and even 100th, attempts are not likely to produce smooth and elegant curves. That's okay. Try drawing a curved line such as the one in Figure 8.4 for practice.
Freehand lines never look good before you touch up the curves.
After you draw a curved line, you can apply any outline attribute to that curve. Refer to Hour 6, "Defining Outlines," to refresh your outline skills.
In Figure 8.5, I've defined a custom dashed line and line thickness, and applied it to my freehand curve.
You can apply any outline attributes to a curved line.
You can transform curves into closed curves. These closed curve objects can have fills assigned to them. Sometimes it is difficult to tell if an object is a closed curve. One way to tell is to look at the Property bar and see if the Auto-Close button is grayed out. If the button is grayed out, your curve is already closed.
You can also tell if a curve is closed by selecting it and checking the Curve Property bar. If the Auto-Close button is available, the curve is not closed.
You can create a closed curved object by having the curve end where it started. For example, if you try your best to draw a circle, it might not look too round, but if you end at the point where you started to draw, your circle will be a closed object.
CorelDRAW assists you a bit in creating closed objects. If you come pretty close to ending your curve at the starting point, CorelDRAW will assume you wanted to end exactly where you started and close your object.
Later in this lesson, when you start to use the Shape tool, you'll learn to convert closed curves to curves that are not closed.
If you have a curve that you want to convert to a closed object, you can use the Auto-Close button in the Property bar. To do this, select a curved object and click on Auto-Close in the Property bar. That's it! The first and last point (or node) in the curve automatically connects with a straight line.
Figure 8.6 shows two different curved lines that I transformed into closed curves. Each of the closed curves has a fill applied.
Any curve can be closed using Auto-Close.
You have already seen how every selected object displays eight handles. These black squares on the corners and sides of a selected object enable you to resize the object by pulling on them.
Selected objects also display much smaller control points called nodes. These nodes enable you to edit the shape of a selected object with tremendous detail. In this lesson, you learn to use nodes to edit the shape of curves and to edit text in micro-detail.
Some node editing is possible using the Pick tool, whereas more complex node editing requires the Shape tool. In this next section, you start by editing nodes using the Pick tool.
When you select a single object and examine it closely, you see tiny nodes. These nodes are smaller than the handles around the selected object and are only visible when you select one object.
Another difference between nodes and handles is that nodes actually appear on the outline of the actual shape or curve, whereas handles appear on the corners and sides of a rectangle around the object.
Nodes do different things under different conditions. They behave differently in Artistic Text, shapes, and curves. Here you learn to edit nodes on curves and artistic text. For now, you need to know that every shape has nodes. When you draw a shape, CorelDRAW automatically generates nodes and curves that, together, compose your object.
In Figure 8.7, you can see that my somewhat crudely drawn lizard is composed of many nodes that separate curves. Together, these curves and nodes make up the curved object.
Every curve is broken up by nodes.
If you click on the Curve tab in the Object Properties dialog box, you can see whether your curve is closed, as shown in Figure 8.8.
Counting nodes in the Object Properties dialog box.
The first step in editing a node is to select it by clicking on the node with the Pick tool.
You can move a selected node by dragging on it. In Figure 8.9, I am dragging one of the lizard's nodes and, in the process, reshaping the lizard.
Reshaping a curve by dragging a node.
You can add and delete nodes by right-clicking on a node with the Pick tool and choosing Add or Delete from the shortcut menu that appears. In Figure 8.10, I am adding a node to my curve.
Adding a node to a curve.
By adding or deleting nodes and moving them around, you can tweak the shape of your freehand drawing.
Text nodes behave differently than curve nodes; for example, you cannot edit them using the Pick tool. However, if you select an artistic text object with the Shape tool, you can edit individual text nodes, and you can control spacing between characters.
Selecting Artistic Text with the Shape tool also displays the vertical and horizontal shape-sizing handles. The vertical shape-sizing handle appears on the left edge of the selected text, and the horizontal shape-sizing handle appears on the right of the selected text (see Figure 8.11).
The vertical shape-sizing handle is only useful if you have more than one line of text. If you do, the vertical sizing handle increases line spacing when it is pulled down and compresses spacing when it is pushed up.
Shape-sizing handles.
You can expand the spacing between letters by dragging the horizontal shape-sizing handle to the right or compress letter spacing by dragging it to the left. In Figure 8.12, I've stretched out the letter spacing.
Increasing spacing between characters.
You can also edit the horizontal and vertical location of individual characters with the Shape tool. When you drag on the node attached to any characters (the node to the left of the character), you can move it. In Figure 8.13, I am rearranging my text.
Move individual artistic text characters using the Shape tool.
You can edit the shape of individual text characters by transforming text to curves. After you do that, you can no longer edit the content of the text in the Text Edit dialog box. But you can reshape individual characters.
By combining freehand lines and editing nodes, you can create curves from scratch. Your first try to draw a freehand line will be crude, but CorelDRAW offers many options for editing your drawing.
Reshaping text.
Selected objects have handles that you explored in earlier hours. They also have nodes. You can move curve nodes using the Pick tool, to edit the shape of a selected object.
Artistic text nodes move the location of individual characters. Use the shape-sizing handles to edit text spacing.
Create the beginning of a logo such as the one in Figure 8.15.
Figure 8.15.
Try creating this logo with the Freehand and Shape tools.
© Copyright, Macmillan Computer Publishing. All rights reserved.
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