How to use the Width Tool in Adobe Illustrator

Hey guys Jeremy here and today I have another tutorial for you. We're going to be learning about the width tool in illustrator cc. This tool works with all the cc and the previous versions of illustrator. So first off we're going to get right into it. As you can see I've got this little cute octopus guy here that I've done. And I'm going to show you how to try and recreate the tentacles. As you can see the tentacles are usually thicker at the base. And as they go to the end of the tentacle it's thinner. So we're going to try and do that today. So I'm just going to shift over to the next artboard. And to access the width tool I'll show you on the left here. It's a little bowl thing with three points and width tool. Or you can press shift w and when you press shift w you can see on your mouse it's got a little squiggly line. So that means it's activated. So to make the width tool work you got to select a stroke. It doesn't work on shapes so you got to have a stroke selected. I'm just going to ungroup those and get right into it. So select the stroke and press shift w. So what the width tool actually allows you to do is actually create, make the stroke more thicker or thinner. So what I'm going to do now is as you can see there's a white dot on it. That means the width tool is activated and it's like a little anchor point sort of thing. So what I'm going to do now is just click and drag and as you can see as I zoom out here it's actually made that point thicker. And now it looks like ice cream. So I can also do it on the bottom and I can make this thicker as you can see. Or I can make it thinner and make it pointy at the bottom. So it's really easy to do. All you got to do is click and drag and you can make really cool shapes with that. So what else you can do? You don't have to do it on the anchor point. You can do it anywhere along the middle or along the stroke. And what it's actually doing is it creates anchor points. And you can always go back to those anchor points. As you can see I got one here and one here. And you can always resize it. So if you just go to the ends of the anchor point on the side, see the white ball, you can just drag. And I can just always, you can always go back and edit it if you don't like the thickness of the stroke. I can always go back and edit that like that really easily. And you can make really abstract shapes. You can also move the anchor point as well. So if I select and go back to shift W, I can just grab it and move it up against the line. It's going to move the anchor point on the actual stroke. So as you can see and it's changing the width because it's moving it down and it tries to keep it proportional from the stroke. So another thing you can do is if you select it, and if you hold alt, which is a cool trick, it's actually going to only do the width on one side. So as you can see, you have control and just holding alt and just clicking and dragging again. And you can create these really weird shapes and it's really awesome. Another thing to notice as well is when you're dragging it, I'm not sure if you can see, but if you hold shift and you drag, it will try and keep the stroke proportional. So I'm going to not hold shift and I'm going to move this and that's what it's going to look like without holding shift. But if I control Z and do it again, I'm going to hold shift now. And as you can see, it's sort of held as proportioned to the width. So yeah, that's just another quick trick that you can do as well. So we're going to jump right into it and try and recreate these tentacles. I'll try and do it really quick. I've just made these strokes using the pen tool and I'm just going to go through and make the thickness. It's really cool because the width tool allows it. It makes the whole line thick depending on where the anchor points are on the line. So if you only got two anchor points, more of the line is going to be thickened. And if there's only like two anchor points at the ends, then the whole line will get thick. So it's always good to play around with adding more anchor points to the line. And I'll probably show you how to do the pen tool and add anchor points maybe in another video. But not right now. So you can also, what I've done is rounded off the ends of the tentacles. See in the stroke palette on the right here, I've just selected a round cap, but you can also do a butt cap. As you can see, it's squared it off. But I like to be round because octopuses usually have a round tentacle. So I'm just going to get that, select it all, hold alt and drag it across to the little octopus, the half body. I'm going to make that a bit bigger and then I'm just going to move it to the middle. And there we have it, guys. We have our cool little octopus with the tentacles that we made. It doesn't look the same, but you get what I'm saying. Appreciate it. Thanks for watching, guys. Let me know in the comments what you guys have done or if you have any questions. And appreciate it if you can like and subscribe. And I'll catch you in the next video. See you guys.