Setting the appearance of paths

In the Part Editor , there is a panel on the right labeled Properties.

Under the Properties label is a line of text showing what the panel is showing properties for. In this case, it is showing properties for the two selected paths. If no objects were selected, it would show Defaults, or graphical properties that will be applied to newly created paths. The properties in this panel only apply to paths. Groups can not have graphical properties applied. If only groups are selected, property editing is disabled.

Below the labels, the panel is broken into three sections: Line, Fill, and Effects. The Line section contains all of the properties that affect the appearance of the path itself, while the Fill section contains properties that control how the area enclosed by the path is filled. The Effects section allows you to apply Blur, and it applies to both the Line and the Fill of the object.

Line Properties

Color

The Line section starts with a color popup. Use this to set the color of the line of the selected paths. The colors in this popup menu come from the parts document’s color set.

The colors in a color set are usually named for the thing they are intended to be used on, not for the color itself. That is, you would name the color for a character’s hair Hair, not Brown. This allows the Hair color, or other color, to be changed by the user of the part document. The first three colors on the menu, None, Black, and White, are exceptions to this and are not editable.

For the paths shown selected above, outlines of a hand and forearm, you might choose to use Black. It’s not unusual in comic art to use black outlines for everything, and only color the fills of things. A convention in Comic Strip Factory’s included characters, however, has been to use the same color for the Line and the Fill. See Color Adjustment below to see how we make the line stand out when it is the same as the fill.

If the color menu doesn’t contain a color for the thing you want to apply a color to, you can choose Add Color… at the bottom of the menu. Choosing this shows a popup panel attached to the color popup button, which allows you to name the new color, and a standard Color Panel, which allows you to define the color. Once you have created and named the new color, it will be applied to your selected paths and available in the popup to use int he future. For more on color creation and editing, see Choosing and using colors .

If you don’t want a line to be visible on the path at all, choose None from the color popup menu.

Color Adjustment

In order to allow colors to be used consistently, but still allow variations for lighting and other reasons, named colors can be adjusted wherever they are used. The adjustment is done using the slider under the color popup, and it allows a color to be darkened (all the way to black) or lightened (all the way to white) in steps. As shown by the labels under the slider, moving it to the left makes the color darker, and moving it to the right makes it lighter. The central position sets the normal value for the color.

The typical setting of this control for the line color of something when the fill color and the line color are the same (and this is more an artistic style choice than a rule) is about four ticks in from the left, as shown here:

Weight

It is typical to leave the line weight of paths set to 1 point in comics. However, you may occasionally want to use a different line weight on the outline for some specific purpose, or you may want to use a path where only the line is visible for a purpose that would require a different line weight. For example a character’s wire-rimmed glasses might be drawn with a two-point line but no fill (or some kind of fill for just the lenses). To adjust line weight, you can either type in a number in the field or click the attached button and choose a weight from the popup menu.

Style

A path’s line style is typically left solid, but this popup menu also allows you to apply a number of different dashed line styles. These might be used for stitching on clothing, a pearl necklace, or other special purposes. The Root Wizard’s pants, Reggiemator’s shirts, and Jeannie and Lexi’s special costumes make interesting use of dashed lines and different line weights.

Opacity

The opacity setting can be used to make the line partially transparent for some special purpose. Note that if you use a fill color and the line weight is large enough, and you use a translucent line, you will see that half of the line is outside the filled area and half is inside it.

Fill Properties

Color or Gradient

At the top of the fill section is a selector bar for choosing whether you want to fill with a color or a gradient.

Fill Color and Adjustment

If you choose to fill with a color, the options for setting that color, adding colors, and adjusting it lighter and darker for a path’s fill are the same as they are for its line. If you do not want to have the area contained by the path to be filled at all, choose Color as your fill type and None from the color popup menu.

Gradient Fill

If you want to fill the path with a gradient, choose Gradient as your fill type and click the gradient popup to edit the gradient. When you click the gradient popup button, this popup window appears:

You can edit the gradient in this popup, and the changes will be shown on the selected path as you work. To accept your changes, you can click OK or just click outside the popup window. If you want to return the object’s fill to its previous state, from before you started editing, click Cancel. For more information about editing gradients, see Editing gradients .

Gradients don’t use named colors, so they don’t allow users of the parts to easily edit colors globally where you have used them, but they are useful for providing a nice dimensional look to things like skies, walls, and floors. In body parts, you usually want a more organic shading look than is possible with gradients. There it is better to make a path, fill it with the Shadow color, set a line color of None, and blur it. See Using paths to clip other paths .

Opacity

The opacity setting is used to make the fill partially transparent. Note that color definitions and gradients can include transparency themselves, and this setting can only be used to make the fill of an object more transparent than its color or gradient defines, not more opaque. A good use for a transparent fill might be the lenses of eyeglasses, drinks in glass, and windows. But if every use of a color should be transparent, you should build the transparency into the color.

Effects

Blur

To blur an object, select it and adjust this slider to the right. This setting affects the entire part: line and fill. For parts that are typical size of parts in characters, we suggest only a small blur setting. For larger objects, a larger blur might be needed. Blurs are useful for shadows and highlights (in conjunction with the colors of those names), wrinkles in fabrics, and smoke and haze. For many of these purposes, clipping the blurred path to another path is useful for the full effect.

Hide and Show All

At the bottom of the Properties panel are two buttons, Hide and Show All . These are used to turn on and off a “hidden” property of paths and groups. Unlike other properties, this one is temporary, and is not saved. Hide completely hides the selected objects, making them impossible to see or select. This can be useful if an object is in front of an object you need to edit. To make all objects visible again, use Show All .

The “hidden” property is a view-only property, so changing it is not an undoable action. If you hide something and then Undo, the previous editing action is what will be undone.

If you forget and leave an object hidden, it will be made visible again when you exit the current editor or edit one of its siblings.