ILLUSTRATOR CS5 - 'DRAW INSIDE' TUTORIAL ... - WordPress.com

ILLUSTRATOR CS5 - ‘DRAW INSIDE’ TUTORIAL Some of you might want to make use of this great feature that Illustrator has. It’s called the Draw Inside tool. This tool is a life saver for designers and will save you loads of time when doing any kind of design work in Illustrator. You can switch this feature on by changing Drawing Mode, but don’t be put off by this technical sounding language - basically all that this means is that you have to press one button.. So you change drawing modes by clicking on the button that is second from the bottom of the Tool bar, below where the Colour Picker for fills and strokes is, and just above Change Screen Modes (see below) then simply choose ‘Draw Inside’ from the drop down menu.

Just select the item on the art board that you want to draw or paint inside, and click the DRAW INSIDE button and illustrator does the rest. This feature can be used in Text, shapes, objects, and just about anything you have selected on your canvas. You can use the pencil tool, all types of brushes, gradients and symbols to draw inside your selection - A really useful tool that will save you loads of time and enable you to be creative without worrying about creating complicated masks and so on. Below is a simple example of how it works. As stated above, The Draw Inside tool is found in the bottom of the tools panel, it’s an option in the Drawing Modes selector. For this example we will demonstrate using some text. Type out anything you like, set the font size to something pretty big (130 -150 works well) and choose a chunky bold font.

Change the colour of the text if you wish to. Now click the Draw Inside button. Immediately you will see that illustrator has guessed that you want to draw inside the text, so it places a kind of bounding box around the text. (This is the dotted line which you see around the 4 corners in the screenshot below.)

Select the Brush tool or gradient tool, or pencil.

Simply make the strokes over the text or the object. Don’t worry if your strokes go outside the borders of the text. Illustrator will clip it for you instantly. When you are done, the text will look something like this.(see below). Also you can manually release the clipping mask if you wish to by right clicking over the object and choosing Release Clipping mask.

The possibilities of this feature are only limited by your imagination, so have fun experimenting with it!