Microsoft Expression Design - How to Use Paint Brush and the Pen Tools

Learn how to use Paint Brush Tool and Pen Tool and some other related tools in Expression Design

Video Transcription

Jesse Brown: So the Paint Brush tool or B as your Quick command, is just a free hand drawing tool. So if I click and I start dragging across up and down, wherever my mouse goes, it will follow me. So I am going to just drag around to the very top of this shape, just to demonstrate how this tool works. So this one has a Fill because of the last object I selected had a Fill, and this is a Gradient Fill, and we can tell by looking in the appearance category under the Fill tab. We'll come back to this later. Now we are going to move on to the next tool. The next tools we are going to use are Pen tools. The first one I want to use is the Bezier Pen tool, and that's the one on the top here. I am going to select that. I am going to draw a quick highlight on my lens. So I am going to click and drop one point. I am going to click, hold and drag the next one. Now dragging allows me to create a curve between the two points. So I have got my curve established. I am going to click and add other one. I am going to drag a nice curve, and now with the Pen tool, you can also delete these handles. So with each point there is a handle. That handle helps to determine the radius of the segment you have just drawn. So I am going to click on this point again to delete the forward handle, and this will allow me to draw a straight line just by clicking another anchor point. So it is drawing lines between each point, and as I come around, I am going to complete this shape, and I can tell that I am going to complete it by the way the mouse cursor changes. So now we have just demonstrated the Pent tool. There are other related tools. Those other tools are the Polyline tool. The Polyline tool is another free-form polygon maker. So over here in an empty space, I will start to click and it just starts dropping lines between each point that I drop. One other special quality about this tool is if I click and then I drag, it will start to form an arc. So that's the Polyline tool. Next, we will use the B-Spline tool. Actually, before we use the B-Spline tool, I want to clean my artboard up a little bit. So I am going to select my Selection tool. I am going to select this various art that I have created on here, and I am going to delete it. So I have clicked on it to select it, and I am going to hit the Backspace to delete. I am going to select the next object, press Backspace, and get it off the artboard. I am going to do that to the final object. Now with the B-Spline tool, I am going to create a better highlight on my glasses. Now the B-Spline tool will create smooth paths based on the point you drop. So to better demonstrate this, I will make a nice big arc on here for you to see. So between this point and the next point, you can see that it is arching my path. So this allows you to draw really smooth shapes. You can see I can make a nice curved highlight in my sunglasses here. Now I am going to complete the path, and you can tell that I am going to complete the path, because the cursor icon indicates a fully connected path.