Drawing with
the Bézier Tool
Creating curves with the Freehand drawing tool is easy, if inelegant.
Its not unlike using an Etch-a-Sketch, with which you move haphazardly
from one point to another. Creating curves with the Bézier drawing
tool is a truly different experience, both in the way the tool operates
and in the results.
FIGURE
4.8 When is a line not a line? When it is: (B)
a preset, (C) a brush stroke, (D) a spray, (E) calligraphy, or (F) a pressure-sensitive
line.
After reading all of the books, scouring the CorelDRAW Users Manual,
sifting through all of the magazine articles, and taking copious notes
at CorelDRAW seminars, one conclusion seems inescapable:
- It is impossible to teach anyone to use the Bézier drawing
tool.
Drawing in Bézier mode is like sculpting with warm Jell-O. Every
action has a reaction and youll always feel like youre one
jiggle too slow to keep up. You surely will gain little understanding
of how the tool works by reading someone elses prose. The only way
to learn is to experiment with the tool yourself. Nonetheless, our advice
follows.
The Bézier tool doesnt trace every shake, rattle, and roll
of your mouse through a path. It looks for a beginning point and an end
point, and then connects them with one curve segment. When creating Bézier
curves, you do not click and drag across the entire segment; rather, you
click on the start and end points and drag once to shape the curve
between the two points.
Howeverand this is one of several confusing aspectsyou can
choose when to perform the drag. You can do either of the following:
- Drag after laying down the start point, and
then click once on the end point.
- Click once to create the start point, and
then click and drag to the end point.
You were warned: this stuff is impossible unless you put hand to mouse
or tablet. So open a new window and try the following two maneuvers:
- 1. From the Curve flyout, choose the Bézier
tool (the second from the left).
- 2. Click once anywhere on the page.
- 3. Move the mouse elsewhere.
- 4. Click and drag. As you drag, you will be creating
a smooth curve.
Press the spacebar twice to disconnect from the curve. Then try it this
way:
- 1. This time, define the curve when you pick the
start point. Click anywhere on the page, and then drag the mouse away
from that point.
- 2. Release the mouse and move it elsewhere.
- 3. Click once. The path between the two points is
automatically a curve.
You can also use Bézier mode to create a series of straight lines
by clicking from one point to the next, and this we feel is the most efficient
way to create shapes. Its easier than using the Freehand tool because
you dont have to click twice in a row.
The important thing to understand here is that all curve segments in
DRAW are in fact Bézier curves. (The Bézier curve is a science,
not just a CorelDRAW feature. It was developed by French mathematician
Pierre Bézier as a way of describing the dynamics of a parametric
curve, for use in streamlining automobile design.) The essential difference
between the Freehand tool and the Bézier tool is how you create the
curves. With the Bézier tool, you do it explicitly; with the Freehand
tool, you draw as if you had a pencil in your hand and you let DRAW figure
out the details. And again, you can create straight lines with both tools,
which, ultimately, is how we recommend you create many of your shapes.
Undrawing with Eraser and
Knife
We like to refer to these two tools this way because they start their
work only after you have already drawn something. As part of the toolset
in the Shape Edit flyout, the Eraser and the Knife tools are as close
as the DRAW user will get to sculpting: they allow you to create by removing
elements.
Figure 4.9 began as a rectangle. Then we went to the Eraser tool and
started undrawing. When used on a selected object, the Eraser tool eats
into that object, chewing up and removing nodes and paths in its way.
The Eraser tool is relatively crude, with no auto-smoothing. Creating
the sun was easyits a simple shapeand so was the cloud.
But the hills were difficult and the lightning bolt and rays of sunshine
were agonizing, all requiring considerable cleanup and refinement with
the Shape tool.
FIGURE
4.9 We used the Eraser tool to cut and chisel
a rectangle to produce this simple picture.
So it is not the process that is noteworthy with this drawing, which
we acknowledge to be inefficient. And we dont consider it to be
a piece of fine art; it rises to about the level of cute. But what makes
our meteorologically confused drawing worthy of noticeand the reason
youll find it as Weird Weather.cdr on the companion
Web page is that the entire thing has been sculpted out of a rectangle.
This drawing is not a dark backdrop with white-colored objects on top.
There is only one object here, with one color, the dark background. Everything
else has been cut from the background, with the Eraser tool making the
big cuts and the Shape tool cleaning up after it.
Figure 4.10 adds a small stream, created with the Knife tool. The Knife
can slice an object into two, and once done, the two pieces can be separated.
So again, the river is not a white object; it is another gap between subpaths
of this one object.
What is so important about this technique? After all, you could create
the same look with white objects in front of the dark background, and
if you needed it to be all one object, you could use Combine to do it.
But the idea of erasing parts of an object is novel to vector drawing,
and performing this feat manuallyi.e., using the Shape tool and
meticulously slicing up an objectwould be so tedious and confounding
as to be unthinkable. The Eraser and Knife tools provide a way to work
with an object that would otherwise not be considered. You probably wont
use the Eraser or Knife very often, but because no other tool works quite
like these, when you do need them, youll really need them.
FIGURE
4.10 A river runs through it, courtesy of the
Knife tool.
|