From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Mastery

Introduction to the Puppet Warp tool - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Mastery

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Introduction to the Puppet Warp tool

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- Alright, we'll be working with a bunch of projects throughout this chapter, starting with this guy right here, which comes to us from the Dreamstime image library about which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke.php. And one of the great things about Dreamstime is that they have tons of vector-based artwork that you can integrate into your own designs. Alright now, before you can apply the Puppet Warp tool, you need to select the object you want to modify. And so I'll go ahead and click on this octopus right here and notice that it's a single compound path as indicated by the words compound path over here on the far left side of the horizontal control panel. Now I should say that I went ahead and added the smile for the sake of demonstration as you'll see in just a moment. Alright, just so we have more room to work. I'm going to turn off this Dreamstime layer here inside the Layers panel. And then I'll go ahead and select the Puppet Warp tool, which looks like a pushpin. And notice if you loaded my custom D keys, it now has a shortcut of Shift + P. Now notice when you first select the tool, illustrator goes ahead and lays down this wireframe mesh, and it also assigned some automatic pins. Now, in my case, I have a total of six pins, three along the top, and three along the bottom. Your results may vary. Now, if this is your first time using the tool, you may see this message right here, which is telling you that switching the tools or editing the artwork, commits your Puppet Warp changes. This is a very important message, it's telling you that the Puppet Warp tool applies static modifications, just like the old school transformation tools, or what have you. whether we're talking about the Rotate tool, the Scale tool, or what have you. Alright, I'm going to go ahead and turn that message off. And now I'll go ahead and drag this selected pin right here and notice as I drag this one pin, the other pins remain stationary. Now that's not to say nothing is moving where those other pins are concerned, there is some movement going on, but as you can see, I'm mostly stretching at the selected pin while the other ones remain fixed in place. Now, if you end up dragging a pin too far, you can end up curling the path outline as I've done here. I want you to see that as I'm dragging, for example, this pin down here that I am moving the mouth along with the body of the octopus, but I am not moving the eyes, even though they're part of the same compound path, the Puppet Warp tool regards them as independent subpaths because they started outside of the larger mesh. And we'll see a little bit more of how that can work in your favor in the very next movie. But for now, I'll just go ahead and drag this guy to a different location. So you can feel free to experiment with those pins as much as you want. If you want to lay down another pin, then just go ahead and click. And so notice if I hover over this arm right here, I see a pushpin cursor with a little plus sign that shows me that as soon as I click, I'm going to add a pin at this location, and then I can drag it around as much as I like. If I decide I don't want a pin, for example, this guy right here is twisting the arm in a way I really don't approve of, then all you have to do is select the pin by clicking on it, and then just go ahead and press the backspace key, or the delete key on the Mac, to get rid of it, and the arm will retract to its original location. At which point, instead of creating a pin right here, which is going to ensure that I get a curl, again, I don't want that, so I'll press the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac, I'll go ahead and click at this location along the top of that curl, and then I will once again drag, and that way I don't get the crimping that I'm seeing over here in the top right corner of the artwork. And so if I want to eliminate that problem, I just go ahead and select that pin, press the backspace key to get rid of it, and then click on the top of the curl, once again, and drag it upward like so. I might go ahead and drag up the head so that the eyes appear inside the body as well. And that is a first glimpse of how you use the very powerful Puppet Warp tool, here inside the most recent version of Illustrator CC.

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