3.6 Rulers

Hi, welcome back. In this lesson I'm gonna show you how to use the figure tool. The figure tool is what we use whenever you want to create a shape, guide or ruler. To select it, press U on your keyboard or select whatever icon is showing under your gradient icon in your toolbar. Once you've selected that, move along to your Sub Tool box here and you'll see a few different headings. The first heading is the shape heading, and the first tool is the straight line tool. And this works in much the way you'd expect it to, so you just drag your line and it will draw a straight line there. If we go to the tool properties, we can change the brush size, so that will change the thickness of the line when we draw it. We can change the opacity and we can change the anti-aliasing. The less anti-aliasing we have, the more jagged and crisp this edge will be. We can also change our brush shape, so it doesn't have to be a filled in line. We can choose one of these presets here, like bumpy, and it'll draw that shape across our straight line. If you need to draw anything other than a straight line, we have a few different tools here to choose from. So you could choose curve, and that works in the same way as the straight line, but after you've dragged the straight line out you can modify it by moving your cursor around like this. And once it's in a shape that you like, you can click and it will draw that curve out. You can use the poly-line tool. Now this draws connected straight lines. They're connected by anchor points that you're defining here. And once you're happy with that, you can press Enter and it will draw your straight lines. And lastly, you can choose the continuous curve. And this one works in a really similar way to the pen tool in Photoshop. You'll also find a few different shape drawing tools here as well. So if you're using the marquee tool or the lasso tool a lot to make a selection and then getting a fill bucket, filling that selection in, creating another selection, filling that in, so on and so forth. You probably need to be using the lasso fill tool. It's a hybrid between the lasso and fill, and every time you create a selection on your canvas, it fills it in with the foreground color. We can choose some preset shapes here as well, so we've got a rectangle, an ellipse and a polygon to choose from. They all work in pretty much the same way, so I'll just show you the rectangle for now. I'll draw a rectangle by dragging that out on my canvas. And if I wanted these edges to be rounded rather than sharp, I could go to the tool properties, tick on roundness of corner. I could then move the slider around, and next time I draw a rectangle you'll see we have rounded edges there. At the moment, it's drawing just the outlines of this and that's because we have outlines ticked. If we wanted a filled in rectangle, we could chose this filled in option here and create a filled in rectangle. And if we wanted this line and a fill, we could choose this section here. And the next rectangle I draw, you can see our foreground color dictates this outer line here, and then it's filled in with our background color. You can also specify an aspect ratio here or a specific measurement. You can change your brush size which changes the thickness of the outside line. And you can also change your opacity and your anti-aliasing again. If I just clear that and create a new layer, I can show you this other tool here. So if we go along to the Frame tab there, choose the rectangular frame, and the rectangular frame is what you'll be using to create comic books. So I'll drag a rectangle on the canvas and you'll notice two things. Firstly is that we have this white area inside our rectangle and this light purple area outside. And if I draw there, you'll see that this white area is our active area, and the purple is masked away and you can't draw outside of that. And the second thing to notice is that it makes a frame folder in our layers. So if you look in our layer section here, we're not just on a normal layer anymore. We have a layer inside of a layer folder and we have our masking there. I'll just undo that, go back to the figure tool, and I'll show you don't have to just draw rectangular frames either. You can choose a poly-line frame, so you're using anchor points to draw something a bit more free-form like that. And if you want to go completely freehand, you can choose the frame border pen. Draw a shape and you've got completely freehand line there. For the time being, I'll go to the rectangle frame. Draw another rectangle on the canvas and I'll show you how you modify this into a comic book. So as I said, it creates a frame folder at the top here. These last two sub tools are divide frame folder. So if we select that and create this line which snaps to the edges of our rectangle, you'll see that our active area has become this half of the line that we've dictated there. And if we look in our layers here, you'll see that it's actually created two frame folders. So essentially it splits our rectangle into two folders that we can then edit separately. I'll undo that and show you the divide frame border. So if you wanted all of your panels to be on one page, you'd use the divide frame border section here. So I can just draw a line, as I did with the other tool, but this time we keep it in the exact same frame folder and can keep creating as many panels of your comic book as you want. And once you're done with that, you can go into the layer inside our frame folder, choose the pencil tool, and you'll see we can only draw in our comic book frames, there. Go back to our sub tools here. I'll hide this, create a new layer, and I'll show you the rulers. So we have a few rulers to choose from. We can create a linear ruler, and at the moment that has measurements along it because I've ticked scale. And you can change your scale to whatever measurement you like there. If you untick that you'll see you'll just draw a straight line. We can choose a curve ruler. So we can draw a curve like this. We can even choose a figure. So again, we have our rectangle, our ellipse and our polygon. I'll draw an ellipse here. And we have a ruler pen, so you can draw that one completely freehand. And I'll show you what happens with rulers now. So you've drawn all these rulers on your page. You can choose one of these drawing tools and every time you draw near it, it will stick to that ruler. So you can get really neat and accurate lines that stick exactly to the ruler that you've drawn. And if you want to delete these rulers and see your lines underneath, you go to the operation tool, select them all and press Delete, and you'll see your lines. We have a few other rulers to choose from as well. So if we scroll down a bit, and we can choose special ruler. And if you look in your tool properties you get to specify what kind of ruler you want here. So you can choose parallel lines, parallel curves, multiple curves, focus lines, focus curves, concentric circles or a guide. So I'll choose concentric circle. But do go through all of those and see what each of them do. And once you've set that, go to your drawing tool, and you'll see that it doesn't fit rigidly to the rulers as previous, but it's more a guide that centers around this point here. So I can draw as many circles as I want, but they'll all conform to this circle here. If we go back to the figure tool. And the last one I want to show you is the symmetry ruler. So if you choose symmetry ruler at the bottom and on a new layer you can draw a line down. And now when you go to your drawing tool, you'll see it creates symmetry. And now that's two points of symmetry. So if I undo this, go back to our figure tool, and I change number of lines, say, to eight, now when I draw my symmetry ruler, it will create eight points. And if you want to move that, again, choose the operation tool, and you can move that down. And now we have symmetry along eight points. One last thing I want to mention about rulers. You have a ruler in one layer here, and this is bound by default to this layer that you're working in. So you'll see, if I create another layer now, that the ruler just goes away and you can draw as you like. If you want that ruler to conform to all layers, you can click on this small ruler icon that appears actually in your layer, and then you see you have the ruler drop-down here. And you can choose show in same folder or show in all layers. So this will show in all of the layers that are in the same folder, and this one will show in all of the layers completely. So if I choose that and go to the top of the layer, you'll see that our ruler is still visible. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to work with text and create speech bubbles.