Painting with the Shapebuilder tool - Video tutorial

[angelize]

Finally here it is! The video tutorial I promised about the watermelon painting. It's a little on the long side but it takes you through the whole process in real time.

I am also attaching a .xar file you can use as a template with named colours hand picked from a photo of watermeon slices, and a pre made background image .

I apologise for the dog barking at the end, he has bad timing!



watermelon_painting.xar

[PhilM]

Hi Frances,

Thanks for championing the shape builder tool.

I'm surprised that the cartoonists don't seem to have picked up on it yet because it should be great for "inking in" cartoon outlines.

Phil

[handrawn]

oh it is Phil, it is

one of the especially nice things about it is the way that you can just build up lines by keeping on adding to an existing stroke, as you would with a brush or a pen on paper, without ending up with a mass of lines/shapes/objects [the 'h toggle' to supress visual nodes is a real blessing in this regard]- and erasing with the eraser tool is just as easy - a simple break shape then gives a set of colouring shapes

need a tablet for this to take advantage of the pressure sensitivity, and its then very quick and simple to do

Thanks for the tutorial Frances,

[wizard509]

Very nice tutorial Frances. It's always nice to look over someone else's shoulder to see how they do it. Thank you.

[BobMoyer]

Excellent tutorial!

Thank you very much,
Bob

[angelize]

Thank you Phil, handrawn, Larry and Bob. I am glad that the video is helpful. I have found the shapebuilder/eraser tool combo and using the shift key to switch from one to the other to be useful for a lot of things. As I demonstrated in the video you can paint in shading and highlights exactly where you need them. And I have also found the Shapebuilder and the eraser tool to be very useful for photo editing, You can use the shapebuilder like any other drawing tool to draw on the mask layer(and yes the eraser works too)

[Soquili]

Frances thanks for the tutorial. I see the Shape Builder and Eraser Tool are much more than simple novalties or calligraphy tools.

[angelize]

I think they are very useful and we have only just scratched the surface. I can see where the SB/E combo could be useful for photo compositing and you may remember I found them useful for those fancy photo edges. I tried to get a thread going a few weeks ago where we could all take part and experiment and post our experiments http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...pebuilder-tool

[handrawn]

I've taken Phil's point on board, I'll try and put something together but video tutorials are not my speciality ...

[PhilM]

Just to clarify, I was thinking of the shape builder being used to "colour in" between or behind sketched outlines. This came up on TG a few times in the past and the most common solution was to use the freehand or shape editor tools to create the colour shape. Hopefully, the shape builder now offers a more natural way to do this.

But any demo of any technique using the shape builder would be valuable and worthwhile.

Phil