How to Create a Bumble Bee Path

Today’s tutorial is a design question that’s never come up before. Karen wants to create a swirling path of small rectangles resembling the path a bumblebee might take. 🙂 I had to think about this one for a while and finally came up with ONE method. I’m not sure it’s the easiest one in KNK Studio, but it will get the job done.

Select the second icon under Graphic Edit Tools and just randomly draw a path as shown in the figure on the left.

Select your path and go to Arange>Convert to Polyarc, then go to Arrange>Reduce Nodes and enter 0.05. Click on OK. Double click your image to bring up the nodes, as shown on the right.

Click on the second trash can icon up on the Smart Bar:

The purpose of this icon is to erase path segments. So move in a little ways from the start of the path and click once, then go a little further and click again. The path between the two clicks will be erased as show by the two arrows in the diagram to the right.

Skip ahead, repeat with two clicks to erase another path segment. While you can’t be exact in the spacing, in the end the result will be fine. Continue until you reach the end of the path.

Click on Apply and the resulting image will be as shown on the right.

With the image selected go to Transform>Outline. Uncheck Inline, make sure Keep Original is not indented. Then enter a value of, say, 0.04″. Click on Close and the end result will be as shown below!