Getting Familiar with the Pen Tool

Quick reference

• 00:05 Now I'd like to jump into showing you guys how to use the pen tool, which is
• 00:09 probably one of the most, if not the most important tools in Adobe Illustrator.
• 00:13 Now the reason I say that is because it's used for so many different things but
• 00:17 it something that you guys should become familiar with and
• 00:20 you can become familiar with after a little bit of practice.
• 00:24 So start things off, just go ahead and press P on the keyboard or
• 00:27 come over here to your toolbar and grab the pen tool.
• 00:30 Now the first thing we're going to do is click, and
• 00:32 as soon as you click, that's just going to create a point.
• 00:35 And you can see as soon as I move my cursor around,
• 00:38 that I have this blue line here and that's just indicating a path.
• 00:42 So if I were to click again over here, I would now have a line.
• 00:48 So again, click to make a point then come over here and click again.
• 00:54 And if I were to just continue to move my mouse around,
• 00:57 you would see that I would still have this blue line kind of
• 01:00 following me wherever I bring the pen tool.
• 01:03 And that is going to be the case until I click to
• 01:07 come back to the original point where I started,
• 01:10 at which point you'll be able to see that there's a small black circle, or
• 01:13 a black outline, indicating that once I click here I will have closed my path.
• 01:19 Okay, but if I wanted to let's say, create a line here, and then that's it.
• 01:27 Well how would I get rid of this line to make sure that I don't have to close
• 01:30 the path because, you know, I could come back here and just click to do that.
• 01:35 But at any point if you want to deselect this path so
• 01:40 that you no longer see this blue line, you can do that by pressing either Cmd or
• 01:44 Ctrl plus Shift and A on the keyboard.
• 01:47 Or you could come up here to the Select menu and choose Deselect.
• 01:54 Like this.
• 01:57 Okay, so that's the basic idea, but If I click again to make a point,
• 02:02 instead of coming out in a straight line, you can come in an angle like this,
• 02:06 but you can also click, and before you let go of the mouse,
• 02:10 just actually hold, click and hold, and you can drag.
• 02:14 And notice that I'm now creating a bezier curve.
• 02:18 Okay so all this is doing is allowing me to Create a curved path.
• 02:23 And you'll see these two long lines coming out from the sides.
• 02:27 Those are where my handles are going to be.
• 02:29 So if I release right now, I'll still have this blue line here.
• 02:33 So let me go ahead and deselect by pressing Cmd+Shift+A.
• 02:37 And now you'll kind of see the shape that we've started to create here.
• 02:42 So, I'm going to press A on the keyboard to get my direct selection tool,
• 02:45 which remember, is the tool that we want in order to select and
• 02:48 manipulate certain points.
• 02:50 And if I click on this last point here,
• 02:52 you'll see this line coming out and the end of the line going this way.
• 02:57 And if I click on one of these end points, which are called handles
• 03:02 I can bring the shape in, and I can still modify the curve, okay?
• 03:08 I can shorten the handle, I can lengthen it, and I can change it.
• 03:14 Alright? So if I'm not happy with the curve I made
• 03:16 originally, well I have a lot of options for what I can do, just using the handles.
• 03:22 But let's say I wanted to continue this shape.
• 03:25 I can just click outside of it, press P again to my pen tool, click
• 03:30 on the last point that I made and then I can come over here to close the shape.
• 03:35 So now I've created a shape with a nice looking curve, okay?
• 03:40 But at any point if I'm unhappy with any of these points,
• 03:43 all I have to do is press A to get my direct selection tool,
• 03:46 click on one of these points, and move it or modify it however I want.
• 03:52 But let's say I wanted to curve this similarly to how we curved our rounded
• 03:57 rectangle tool.
• 03:59 You can click on one of the circles inside when there is one,
• 04:03 to change the curve or to make it sharp.
• 04:07 Okay, so now I have kind of a curved edge instead.
• 04:11 And here are my two handles that will allow me to select a point,
• 04:17 select any of these points, and play with the curve even more.
• 04:23 You have a lot of control over this, just using curves and points.
• 04:27 But the important thing is that you just understand the basic idea of the pen tool,
• 04:31 that when I click, and I click around, I am just making a straight lines until
• 04:36 I click and I hold, and then I'm making curved lines, okay?
• 04:40 And you can deselect, you can add points, take away points and so forth.
• 04:45 So let me show you how we could go about adding a point
• 04:49 to this shape that we just created over here.
• 04:52 If I come back to my pen tool over in the Toolbar, I can actually click and
• 04:55 hold, and when I do that, I'm just gonna go ahead and pop this out so
• 04:59 that we can float it around freely like we had done earlier with our shape tool.
• 05:04 Now what I can do is I can select this pen tool here that says add anchor point or
• 05:09 the add anchor point tool.
• 05:11 Switch the pen tool with the little plus sign next to it and now I can click
• 05:15 anywhere along my path and that's going to allow me to add another point.
• 05:19 So now I can select this point and I can move it in,
• 05:24 I can round it, and I can manipulate that part of the path.
• 05:30 Okay and again I'll have handles here usually attached to my anchor points and
• 05:34 that will allow me to add more detail or
• 05:37 add more of a curve to anywhere along this path.
• 05:42 Now if I wanted to delete one of these points,
• 05:44 I would grab the pen tool with the small minus sign next to it, and
• 05:48 then I can just click on one of these points to remove it.
• 05:51 All right lets see what happens if I remove this point.
• 05:54 Please use the delete anchor point tool on an anchor point of a pass.
• 05:59 Okay, so I have to remove it from one of those main anchor points.
• 06:06 And then of course we have our anchor point tool.
• 06:11 Now what this tool allows you to do is to, again,
• 06:13 kind of manipulate these anchor points.
• 06:16 So with this tool, I can grab any of these points that we've made on our path,
• 06:22 and I can change them drastically, just using the handles.
• 06:25 So you can see how much we've changed our shape, just by adding a point,
• 06:30 using the anchor point tool to manipulate it.
• 06:34 So, the pen tool is really great, because you can add as few or
• 06:37 as many points as you like.
• 06:39 You can create virtually any shape and the pen tool is also used very commonly to
• 06:44 trace, an illustration, to trace a photo, to basically draw and
• 06:49 illustrate and create anything that you want.
• 06:52 So as I do this here, I've just created this kind of random shape,
• 06:56 a combination of hard angles and curved angles.
• 07:00 And lets just go ahead and fill it with black, so I'm going to press Shift + X,
• 07:04 X to get my stroke, and then I'm going to choose none for the stroke, okay?
• 07:09 And from here, just like with our other shapes I can rotate it,
• 07:14 and I can also do some other things by coming up to Object, Transform.
• 07:18 Let's say we wanted to reflect this vertically.
• 07:21 I can do that too.
• 07:24 Okay, but now I can add points.
• 07:27 I can add a point somewhere along the path here, grab my direct selection tool and
• 07:31 just manipulate that one point.
• 07:34 Or, if I wanted to remove some points, I could either select a point and
• 07:37 just delete it, or I could use my delete anchor point tool.
• 07:44 So these are the basics of how to use the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator.
• 07:48 And there's a lot that you can do with it and a lot more that I will be
• 07:51 showing you guys, but I just wanted to cover some of the basics for that tool.
• 07:55 But I would definitely recommend, just practicing a drawing,
• 07:59 creating curves, closing shapes, and experiment with
• 08:03 the handles to see what kind of cool things you guys can draw on your own.

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