Editing parts in a comic

Sometimes one of the parts in a character is nearly perfect for what you need, but just needs a little tweaking. For these situations, you can use the Edit command on the toolbar or Edit Part in the Objects menu. (These are the same command.) This opens the selected part in the part editor. (If the part is in a group, you may need to edit the group first, then select and edit the part.)

If your desired change to the part involves reshaping paths, or adding new paths or deleting paths, or changing the color or other graphic attributes of some path in the part, you may need to learn the full graphic editing capabilities of the part editor, and should look at the section on Creating parts under Creating Characters and Backgrounds .

If you have dragged in a whole pose, you may want to just make some small changes to the parts in the pose, or replace some of them, in which case you should look at the chapter on Working with groups .

However, there are many situations where you can make some easy changes in the part editor without learning its full feature set, because most of them just involve moving things a little bit. This is mostly useful for changing facial expressions. Most of our characters’ faces are designed to make a few simple tweaks not only possible, but easy.

Consider editing this Fred Nerd head, for example. The easiest edit to make to most of our faces is the aim the eyes somewhere else. The two eyes can usually be selected together in most of these faces, because they are in front of everything else and not grouped, except with each other. So if you click on one of the eyes, they are both selected together, like so:

This grouping allows you to move them around to aim them somewhere else. Because of the grouping, most small moves, as long as they stay within the glasses, or in the case of most other characters, the eyelids, will still look like both eyes are looking in the same direction. (If you want them to look in different directions, you can use the Ungroup command on them, then select and move each eye individually.) Here are some examples of different versions of this face you can get just by moving the eyes:

In most of the Fred heads, and in some other characters, the eyebrows are available as separate objects within the part (that is, not grouped with anything else or even each other). In this face, the eyebrows are only visible as small curves just over the glasses, but if you click one of those curves you can select them, and the whole eyebrow is actually present. So you can move one or both eyebrows up or down to get some good variations of the facial expression. As a Nerd, Fred would appreciate the one eyebrow raised expression so frequently used by Spock and McCoy on Star Trek. And edits to the eyebrows made in conjunction with edits to the eyeballs expand the possibilities.

Some of these changes involved scaling or rotating the objects, not just moving them, but they were all made with just eyeball and eyebrow edits.

Another customization you can make with Fred is to remove or tweak his glasses. His glasses are a separate object at the part editor level (they are actually a group). so it is easy to select them. Here are some variations on the same face you can make using his glasses:

Finally, most of the characters have hair that can be removed if you want to make a bald version. If you click on the hair to select it, you may notice it selecting more than just the hair. In the case of the head we’ve been working with, it also selects his whole head outline down to the shirt collar. This is because the paths that make up this part of his face are all grouped together. To select just the hair (or anything else) when it won’t select independently, double-click it. This will open the group that the hair is part of in the editor.

It may look to you as if you have deleted parts of his face! Don’t panic! As you can see from the part preview shown here in the top-right corner of the editing view, those pieces are still in the part. You have just focused the editor on a group within the part that does not include them. If you now click on the hair, it (and only it) will be selected. If you then delete it (hit the delete key), it will be removed, which you will also see in the part preview.

When you are done with this, you can exit this editor using the editing level navigation control near the top of the window.

To return to the part editor to do more work on Fred’s head, click in the part of the control that is labeled “Part (Head).” To return to the view of the whole comic, click the part of the control labelled “Comic.”