Second Best Feature In Illustrator CS5 : Beautiful Strokes

The second Best feature in the Newly released Adobe Illustrator Creative Suite 5 is the Beautiful Strokes ( Shift -W). Now any body can create and illustrate swirly lines, strokes, leaves, wiggly lines etc in a matter of seconds. In this tutorial We will show you just how simple it is to create those fancy lines you’ve always been dreaming of. Although you may draw the strokes using the pen tool , but it is highly impossible to get the strokes to this precision which this tool give you. Also the amount of time is too much while creating these types of shapes manually. Argh ! and not to mention the effort and stress you under go to make the stokes smooth and right.

Have a look below and see how easy it is to create the line in Illustrator.

Draw a stroke with the pen tool or brush or pencil what every you feel like.

Just to make the stoke a little visible you can give  it a little thickness of about 3 – 4 points

Select the Width tool from the control Panel on left hand side

Move your cursor over the stoke and you will see the  handle as shown below. Just drag the line to your desired level of width and you will see the temporary line in blue color just like you see below. Alternatively if you press the option key or the alt key you can control the handle individually  , giving it a kind of calligraphic look.

Just leave the mouse button to commit the changes .

If you want to make the thickness lower just move your cursor to the point and click the handles and drag inwards . Keep repeating this process until you get the desired shape.

Try different types of shapes

Now you know , How easy it is to make these strokes. If you preview the document in outline mode ( cmd +y ) you will see that the stroke is just the same, you haven’t made any changes to the stroke itself.