Illustrator Beginner’s

Using Offset Paths for Dynamic Lines

This is the eighth tutorial in the Illustrator Beginner’s series. Up to this point, you have mostly been learning to trace over sketches with the Pen Tool. With this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create dynamic lines with the Offset Paths feature. Here is my stroked line drawing from the last tutorial.

I start by selecting the pupils in the eyes and the mouth using the Selection Tool. To select multiple objects, press the Shift key each time you click.

Next, change the color of the stroke to none and the color of the fill to black using the Swatch palette.

You can also use menu bar at the top to change colors. They added this menu in either CS or CS2, so you may be out of luck if you’re on an older version of Illustrator.

Your drawing should look like this after the color change.

Next, select the leaf part.

I’m going to change the color of this to white. The final won’t be white, but I usually like to fill everything with either black or white to start. Don’t ask me why. That is just the way I do things. Anyway… instead of using the Swatch palette to change the color, I’m going to use the Eyedropper tool. With your leaf selected, click on any of the white space of your artboard. The leaf will turn to white.

Now, you’re ready to use the Offset Path on the leaf. Go to Object > Path > Offset Path.

A dialogue box pops up and I set the Offset to 2 point.

This creates a shape that is uniformly 2 points larger than the original. I set the color to black for the new shape. Notice how it looks like a line, even though it is just a slightly larger shape.

If your leaf is overlapping your eyes or your stem is overlapping your leaf shape, you may need to move things around. If you are working on layers, then drag the layers into the right order. Be careful not to drag the layers into one another. You can always undo layer changes with the Undo (Command/Control Z).

If you aren’t using layers, then use the Send to Back (Object > Arrange > Send to Back). I have a little trick to move things around using the Send to Back and the Group. Basically, if you group an object in the back to one in the front, the group moves your object in the back to directly underneath the front object. This also works for layers. If you group two objects from different layers, it will move the object from the lower layer onto the upper layer. This trick mixed with the keyboard shortcuts (Command/Control G and Shift Command/Control [ ) can save you a lot of time.

Next, I repeat the steps I did with the leaf shape on the stem.

After that, I do the same thing with the eyes. For the eyes, I used a 1 point offset.

Finally, I wanted to make my lines a little less uniform looking. I start by selecting the eyes with the Selection Tool. When the eyes are selected, you can see a bounding box around them. Pull down on the middle anchor point on the bounding box. This will make the black shape a little larger which make the line weight look heavier on the bottom.

I also adjusted the leaf shape as well. Here is what the whole thing looked like when I finished. Hey, you’ve got a line drawing! Put some color on that sucker and your Grandma just might hang it on her fridge. With that said, next up is the magical world of color.