Reshaping a Drawing with the Contour Editor Tool

10 mins

Beginner

T-HFND-004-008A

You can use the Contour Editor tool to tweak the contours of vector shapes and brush strokes in your drawings, as well as reshape pencil lines and strokes.

Authors

Marie-Eve Chartrand
Christopher Diaz
chrisdiazart.com

NOTE: If you use the Contour Editor, Perspective or Envelope tool on a textured brush stroke, it will deform its texture to fit the new shape of the brush stroke. Note that this will resample the texture, which is liable to make it lose quality.

How to reshape drawings

In the Tools toolbar, select the Contour Editor tool or press Alt + Q.

In the Drawing or Camera view, click the shape, contour or pencil line you want to edit near the area you wish to change.

The shape or line's control points appear.

Click on one of the points to select it.

The point's Bezier handles appears, as well as Bezier handles for the surrounding points.

TIP: You can select several points by drawing a lasso around the points, or by holding Shift while clicking on points to add them to your selection. You can use the Contour Editor to scale and rotate a selection of multiple points by enabling the Show Contour Editor Control

option in the Tool Properties view.

Do one of the following:

To move a point or a selection of multiple points, click and drag it.

To change the curve on both sides of a point, drag one of its Bezier handles.

To change the curve on only one side of a point, press and hold the Alt key, then drag one of its Bezier handles.

To deform the contour, drag a part of the contour between two points.

To deform the curve between two points, hold the Shift key and drag the contour between two points.

To remove a point's Bezier handles and make the lines it is connected to straight, press and hold the Alt key and click on the point.

Straight lines have no Bezier handles at their points by default. To create Bezier handles for these points and make their lines curved, pres and hold the Alt key, then click and hold the point and drag the mouse cursor away from it. A new Bezier handle will follow your mouse cursor until you release the mouse button.

To add a control point, press Ctrl (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ (macOS) and click on the contour where you want the new point to be created.

To remove a control point, select the control point and press Del (Windows/Linux) or Backspace (macOS).

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