Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Draw Using the Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator CC

Hi there it is time to learn the Pentacle. Penta was the hardest thing to learn in illustrator. We're going to do it together, we're going to make this ninja, we're gonna make an owl, we're gonna make an alien and we're gonna make a crown. Let's draw those now together in adobe illustrator. Okay to get started. No, I'm not going to make you imported again to make it as a template. I am going to save you some time. Go to exercise files. Open up one called parental and I've kind of done that for you. Okay. And just make sure on the layout one. Okay, go to your properties panel and we're gonna zoom in on this alien. Okay. And we're going to build the same things to show the kind of differences between the pen tool and the curvature tool. Now, basically the curvature tool does a lot of thinking for you and it's pretty good and pretty intuitive, but there's times we just need to like get the pen tool to do exactly what you want. Okay, so grab the pen tool is just above the curvature tool he...

re. Okay. And what we'll do is you can see mine is set as a crosshairs is because I've got caps lock on some people prefer to use the pen tool like this. Okay. And it comes out of the tip of that little pen or you can hit caps lock on your keyboard. Okay. And you can see it becomes crosshairs. Okay, I'm going to do it just like this so I can zoom in see my whole guy And okay, so what happens with Pentacle is that by default it wants to do corners of the opposite of the curvature tool. If I click once, click, once click once, it's only going to give me it's going to be a very interesting octopus. Okay, so clicking once gives you corners under all that go back. Okay, so what you do with the pen tool is you click and drag to get a curve at the top here I click and drag and this is probably the hardest thing to do is to get it started because I click and drag out but there's no curve but I'm on apex but once you get out here you can see it's kind of, you can see it's a curve because it's connected. Plus you see those handles instantly whereas the curvature tool they were hidden. Okay, so same thing on the apex here I click and people just click once remember clicking once gives you a corner for the mental okay, so it's not gonna work. So I'm gonna undo So click and drag down. I know dragging down because you want to kind of like continue the lines to follow the line drag that way but that can be a little confusing some of those people drag this way and move it around, you get a bit of a sense for it after we've done our full kind of alien. I'm dragging it out to get this to kind of line up, don't worry if you don't quite get it okay, you can fix it up afterwards with the white arrow, it's quite easy. The next thing I wanna do is before I carry on, I want to give it no Phil so I'm going to go to the fill here, redline. Cool kick off. So remember I'm going to look for the same same kind of like technique as the curvature tool. I'm looking for this apex here, I'm going to click hold and drag down for a corner and this is going to be clicking and dragging for the whole thing because there's no curves right, sorry, no corners. So here I'm going to click and drag and you're like, oh no, I can't get it, so don't worry too much about getting it perfect on the on the first, go around, we can fix it with the white arrow and add and remove anchor points afterwards. Same thing here, click and drag and you're just like, oh it's too big, it's not quite working, it's okay we can adjust these afterwards. Get a kind of close okay, and I'm just going to click hold and drag on all the apex of these curves, click and drag. Remember the apex is just kind of where the curve changes the most. So the curve changes quite a bit across here, clicking and dragging, cooking and dragging, cooking and dragging and dragging and dragging if yours is going horribly wrong and it's still attached and it won't work can you like okay what you can do is go either under so edit undo or command Z on a Mac or control Z on a Pc. Or you can hit the escape key. The escape key says detach, okay, stop trying to draw lines everywhere, so I'm going to undo go back to him so and again if you kind of click off and it's like half finished, what you can do is watch my cursor, I've got my pen tool and I'm kind of just hovering above, hovering above, see that little change in the icon there, get a little straight line that means like do you mean this? I'm like yep, that's what I meant. Okay, so I'm going to click and drag that to get a curve, click and drag you click and drag you another one there. Okay, so I'm just going to work my way around this alien, come here. Alien yep back to here and this is another kind of Gotcha for people that are new, is to come back here and you look great just click once and unlike the curvature tool it doesn't kind of like automatically adjusted, it kind of went you click once, see me in the corner so I put a corner and it's going to undo, it's going to click and drag because I meant a curve. Alright now yours might not look anywhere near like mine, mine's not that good either, but yours might be looking a little worse for wear. What we can do remember is the white arrow tool, the direct selection tool, we can click on these guys okay? And we can adjust them so I can click on the anchor point, move the anchor point along to make sure it's on the flow of the text or sorry, the flow of the line and grab these handles. Okay. The influence the way the line passes through and I can kind of just work a little around, don't be afraid to move it around to get a feel for what it does and kind of start doing these adjustments. So here as well I'm going to tuck him in and I'm just going to work my way around just to kind of fix this up a little bit, I'm not going to spend too much time on it, I say that every time and then I spend loads of time trying to make this thing look beautiful as much as my quick little Neff alien is Oh yeah, beautiful dan. And with this one as well, I've got my smart guides off just because they can be a little hassle when using the pen tool trying to free form stuff. The smart guides remember under view smart guides there is there, I got them off. Cool, let's do the inside, one click and drag maybe that's the hard one because you're like okay then you follow whichever way you've dragged if I drag up, I've got to kind of follow the line this way because it's coming out that way. If I dragged down comes out of there there can drag and with a circle it needs at least four points to kind of look half decent. Okay, and you can see with the curvature tool, it does a lot of kind of like fixing up for you, which is quite cool, but sometimes you just don't want that as well. So you, the pen tool is a little bit easier because it gives you a lot more kind of controlled, a lot more manual. All right, that'll do yes, I just used the ellipse tool probably to get it looking really nice and I am totally going to cheat now because I'm bored of this alien, I'm just going to grab my black arrow, click off, click on copy paste and my terrible circle is now just going to be a bit smaller done. Alright, let's look at the crown. This word becomes easy, Mental, loves this stuff. Don't have to hold anything down and just click once click once click once. Okay, so with the pen tool clicking and dragging gives you a curve clicking once gives you a quarter point awesome. Okay, so then we get to our ninja Hello ninja, can you zoom in a little bit, you'll notice that when you zoom out and you've got something else selected, it goes, hey, did you mean this? And so it kind of zooms out and moves back up there and you're like no, no, no down here please. Okay, you can turn it off in the preferences, so we're gonna start down the bottom right hand corner with the pen tool and that is a corner. Okay, nice sharp corner, click ones. Now, where is the curve? The curve here is the apex of it is halfway through here, so I'm going to click and drag this is a little hard because you're like, I just need a little subtle one. Okay, so you end up kind of give it a wiggle around, get a feel for it, okay, you're dragging on the handles and when you get it to him, that's it. Now, this is going to be a corner because it's a change of direction. Okay, and this is gonna be a corner, so just click ones, corner, click ones, corner, click ones and then there's a little curve in here. Okay, and click and drag, Cool it once for a corner and okay, we've got curves again, how many, like do I just want one? I could try and do one. Just never going to get the right shape with just one of them. It's a final helmet thing. I'm looking for a perfect circle though. This happens lots. Yeah, okay, if you get close to the edge, it really wants to jump out and you can let go go to undo and then zoom in or out and it will kind of jump back to the center again. Cool so what do I want I want I know through experience that a circle needs four. We kind of did it for the alien up here. Okay so I need one there one there one there and there's no bit down the bottom so I don't need him. So clicking up and down, that's another one like drag down and people kind of, which way does it go? Remember you want to kind of drag and follow the line. There's another one there cooking and dragging cooking and dragging click once for a corner if you get it wrong okay and you go down here and you click once and you're like oh no what do I do? Okay you can just leave it and we'll show you how to fix those up in a second. Just kind of leave it there, we'll leave it there. Okay got a curve and dragging it out. Don't I'm going to try and fix it but there's a bit of a problem here so I'll come back and do that once for a corner. This one's for a corner curve. Taking drag once for a corner to get this kind of straight line started another straight line, you can drag for a curve and so that one's a corner where it should be yeah so that one's a curve when it should be a corner and this one I'm gonna draw it as a curve, it should be a corner, go back to here, quick ones. Now I've got a full shape now to do some adjustments. Okay, there are two major things I need to fix is I need to change these two. Okay and there's a full tool to do it. It's called the anchor point tool. Okay, so I click on this if you're using an early version and I think it's called the anchor conversion tool, something like that. Okay, so it looks like that in both versions, click on this guy and what we're gonna do is we're gonna zoom in. Okay and we'll look at this guy and if I click on him once he was a corner, oh sorry it was a curve and now he's a corner and this guy here is a curve. Well both of these are curves when they should be corners, jeez dan. Okay let's let's change something else let's say let's click on him. Okay now he's a corner. Great, let's see I want to make this guy a curve and all I do is click hold and drag him. Okay we have to move it around a little bit you can see now he is a curve. So there are yeah this tool does both at once to get rid of the curve and if it's a corner and it should be a curve, click and drag it out, give that a practice. Now there's a few things that need tidying up, grab my white arrow, there's this guy here and you can see well you might not be able to see why, but I've got this anchor point here right there he is. Okay, he's down here and the handle's come out quite far and they actually go past the point here and that's trying to like force line to go. Like I'll show you kind of an exaggerated version trying to go back towards itself. So often with these handles, they can't go past kind of like the next anchor point. Otherwise they start doing some weird stuff so both of you guys can be dragged in closer to the home here, closer to the anchor point. Okay, you're gonna keep it like this and I should go through and fix the head okay, because he's a little bit off now. If you are looking at things, you're like, man, why isn't it symmetrical? Because it looks just a little bit wonky often, If I click on this point here, um to make a perfect circle, I'll show you what a perfect circle looks like the lips still drag it out. It's made of the same points go to the white arrow. If I click on one of them you can start to see right, I'm gonna slipped on them all. Actually click on one of them, you can see on the top one that one's flat and these handles are exactly the same length. So, and these ones parallel. Okay, so that's kind of what we're looking for. You can see here on this top point, this guy's flat, which is awesome. But these guys are kind of both heading off on an angle. So what I'm gonna do is first get them to line up roughly the same kind of points. It's roughly kind of about there from each other. And I want them to be kind of like straight up and down and watch this when I'm dragging this guy around. If I hold shift, it does lock them into it like a nice um nice little thing there. Same with you straighten up buddy. And okay, both of these top. It's, I want to drag in a little bit and a little bit and don't be afraid to move the anchor point as well. It's maybe just a bit high on that line. Better. Better. Not perfect for better. Okay, so I would like you your next mission is to draw the owl. Okay, so I want you to go through draw the owl. Okay. As complete shapes and then see if you can use your amazing new illustrator skills and show me a version of your pal. And I'd like to, if you've done the previous tutorial just to kind of a side by side. Just copy and paste them from one document to another. And I want you to see what you did with your curve tool and what you did with your pen tool. They're both perfect awesome. If one's better than the other, I'd like to kind of hear your feedback about which tool you like the most. Are you a precision pen tool person from pen tools? Like the one that's been around forever? The courage tools new And is it cheating? It's not cheating. You're still drawing but it's helping you out a little bit. I want to know which you found better so get them side by side. Give me a screenshot. I'd love to see what you're doing. Alright that's it for this tutorial. I will see you in the next one.