From the course: Illustrator 2023 Essential Training

Pen tools - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2023 Essential Training

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Pen tools

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- [Instructor] Okay, let's go ahead and press P on our keyboard to get the pen tool because we are actually going to start drawing or to be more accurate, plotting. Now the grid you are seeing here is not one of illustrator's grids which you'll find out more about later on in the course, but something that I've built from line segments, so it's nice and large, hopefully so you'll be able to follow along easier. And I've also used a bit of illustrator magic to make sure that everything you draw has a really nice chunky magenta stroke. Again, that will be easier to see. Okay, so let's get started and move to an intersection as I am now and simply click, then move somewhere else and click, move somewhere else and click and then go back to the first point. Notice that the cursor has a small circle next to it which indicates you're going to create a closed path. So the beginning and end are indistinguishable. So things with straight lines, pretty straightforward. Let's do delete on there once and then twice. Let's try something a bit more challenging. So we're going to visualize a box of four squares, so move to an intersection. This time you're going to press and drag out just over halfway then move diagonally down to another intersection, press and drag again just over halfway diagonally down again. Press and drag like so, diagonally upwards. Press and drag like so. And then go back to the first point you drew again, you get that curse it press and drag and trace out the handle that you drew and there you go. You've drawn something that is very, very circle like. Let's delete that a couple of times and we're going to try another exercise here. Starting over on the left hand side, I'm going to get you to press and drag upwards towards halfway, something like that. Move over to the next intersection and then press and drag downwards. And then what you need to do is hold down the Alt or option key and drag this bottom handle round up like so. Then you can move across to the next intersection, press and drag downwards like so. Okay. And you can see you've created a repeating curve. I want to go from here to a straight line. So go back to the point and click on it. So that's not the handle, that's the point. Now move across to the next intersection and click, there you go. So you've gone to a straight line. Now hold down the alter option key, click and drag upwards just around about halfway and then move across. And you are in familiar territory by now, I'm sure. So as you can see, great tool to draw with. Very, very precise, but it's kind of fiddly. Let's delete what we've got there a couple of times and go to the toolbox and notice that the neighbor is the curvature tool. This one you are going to find much easier. Go to a major intersection or any intersection for that matter and double click. Go across it and double click. You can go down and double click and across and double click and back up to the top same closing icon there and double click. And notice you've drawn something with a curve. Double click again. Hey, there you go. Because this tool can convert its points really easily, double click like so. Double click down and there you go. You've got a really interesting and very, very circle like shape just there. Let's delete that a couple of times and draw something else. Okay, so we've already seen how we can draw a square and turn it to a circle. Let's draw a circle really quickly. So click and click and click and click and click in the way that I've just done. And you'll find, again, you've drawn something very circle like and you probably know how you can change the nature of those points to corners. You can also click and drag to move points around. It's very, very flexible for doing that, it's much, much easier. With the normal or traditional or classic pen tool, you'd have to use the direct selection tool to go ahead and move things around to do that. Let's try one more thing just here. So we'll delete a couple of times to get rid of that. Let's go over to the left hand side here and what we're going to do is click. Okay. We're going to aim for sort of the middle-ish of one of those squares and click again and then double click at the next intersection and then aim upwards again and click and double click at the next intersection, move across and double click. And then go upwards and click, and downwards and click. And you can see how much easier it is to draw with this tool. I didn't like it when it first actually appeared in Illustrator, but now it is my go-to tool for maybe 90% of the paths I draw. So there you are, that's the classic pen tool or pen tool and the curvature pen tool or curvature tool if you like.

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