Variable width profiles and vector pack brushes for strokes

There are times when you want to have a varied line width to the stroke of an object, or even apply a stroke attribute that can mimic a traditional texture, such as a dry brush or a spattering ink pen. Illustrator allows you to customize the stroke to obtain a large variety of appearances. In this section, we will look at how to accomplish both techniques.

Variable width profiles

The Width tool (Shift + W) allows you to vary the thickness of the stroke along any path. Click and pull on any area of a path and you will be able to enlarge or reduce the width for that portion of the path. Each anchor along the path that is adjusted can be further adjusted at any time through the use of the anchors that were created to make this width adjustment. In Figure 6.8, you can see that the selected anchor is now assigned two additional anchors for adjusting the width:

Figure 6.8 – The Width tool used...