From the course: Illustrator 2025 Essential Training

The Pen tools - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2025 Essential Training

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The Pen tools

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- [Instructor] Let's begin by tapping P on our keyboard. That gets us the Pen Tool, these days known as the Classic Pen Tool because there's more than one, in fact. There are three, as you'll discover in this movie. But for now, we're just going to work with this one. So just move around the artboard just for a moment before you start, and make sure that you're seeing some of these magenta lines and also words like anchor. In fact, that's the only one you're likely to see in the center of these circles here. You might see it on the end of the lines, as well. And these are called smart guides, and they're very, very useful, in fact, super useful in this exercise. So if you're not seeing those, Command + U or Control + U is the way to toggle them. If you need to go to the menu system, they're in the View menu and Smart Guides as you can see enabled here, just there. Okay, so let's begin then by going up to this point at the top and clicking. It doesn't matter if it says anchor or not at this particular moment, that we don't have to be super precise. But just make your way around clockwise clicking like so, and you'll see that you're drawing straight-line segments. Simple clicking does exactly that. If we go back to the point at which we began, you'll also see the cursor changes, and you get a small circle down to the bottom right of the cursor. Now you may have to look at this on your own screen, especially if you're watching on a phone, because it's quite tiny, but hopefully you can just about see that. And what that means is it's going to close the path. So it'd be one continuous path all the way around, or it would if we were to click, but I'm not going to. I'm just going to undo one step here. So Command + Z or Control + Z, and then I'm going to go back to the last point I drew, and the cursor will change again. And this time it gets a small caret symbol next to it. And what I'm going to do is click and drag out like so. and then I'm going to hold down Shift as I drag, okay, just to draw what is known as a control handle, okay. And this is the beginning of a curve. If I then make my way up to the point here, you can see already the preview is showing us a curve line, and then I press and drag, it's one motion, okay, like so, and I'm holding down Shift again like so. And you can see I've then drawn a curved segment like so. Okay, if I make my way back up to the top to close the path, I then need to press and drag again. I'm holding down Shift here. I'm only drawing the left handle even though I'm dragging to the right. Okay, and you can see now that I've drawn curves. So I'm just going to back that up just a little bit, Command + Z or Control + Z a couple of times, back to this point here. In fact, I'm going to go one step further, so it's just showing a straight-line segment. The reason you have to go back to the point here and click and drag is that you need to tell it that it is a hybrid between a corner and a curved point. And then, it allows you to carry on drawing curves nice and smooth. If you wanted to do the opposite and go from a curve, okay, back to straight, you then go back to the point, wait for the symbol and click, and then you're back to drawing straight-line segments like so. Lots and lots of fun as I'm sure you're appreciating just now. But stick with it, okay? It's easier than you think. Just requires a little bit of practice. So what I'm going to do here is hit Delete, and I'll need to do that twice because it just deletes the most recent segments or the connecting segments and then deletes anything you've left over afterwards. And that actually is useful. Let's take a look at the next tool. Now there is a shortcut for this. It's Shift + Tilde on your keyboard, or you can just go to the tool here in the Toolbox and click on it, the Curvature Pen Tool. Now this one is actually my favorite drawing tool, and perhaps you'll see why in just a moment. So I'll go up to the point at the top here and click. I'll then go to the next point and click. And at the moment, everything looks exactly the same as the Pen Tool. However, you'll notice, as soon as I start to move and click, I'm drawing curved segments straight out of the box with no extra tools, no going back to points, and all of that stuff. If I want to draw a line segment that's straight, I just double click at the beginning of the line segment, okay, and double click at every segment thereon. So let's just pretend I wanted to make straight segments just here and here and then go back to curves, and I just click like so. And you can see that it's working out the curve for me. Now one of the advantages that this tool has over the Pen Tool, one of the many advantages it has, is that you don't need to use an extra tool in order to move points around. Let me just tap A on my keyboard to go to the Direct Selection Tool, which you saw earlier in the course if you're watching this sequentially. Okay, if I tap A, then I can move points around just here, if I click on an individual point, and then I can change things about the handles like so, and all of that stuff. Now if I go ahead and draw with the Pen Tool, just very briefly, so I'll just delete these two here and go back to the regular Pen Tool, if I wanted to actually affect a handle, so I'm going to go ahead and create a handle just here, okay, and draw one out just here as well, I would need to temporarily hold down the Command or Control key to access that tool. So I'm still in the Pen Tool, but it's given me temporary access, as long as I hold down that key, to the Direct Selection Tool. As soon as I've done my edit and carry on, I'm back to the Pen Tool. So you can see that's a lot of fuss, but with the Curvature Pen Tool, which I'm going to switch to right now by using the shortcut, okay, and you can combine these tools, it's very easy. If I want to go ahead and change a point or move a point around, I can simply bend it to where I want it to go like so. I can add points really simply, and if I want to change them to straight points, all I need to do is double click on them like that. Very, very easy to use. Okay, I'll delete everything I've got there. Let's look at the new kid on the block, as it were. If we tap P on the keyboard and then long press to access the other tools in here, we've got the Quick Pen Tool. Now this was developed for Illustrator on Web, which is an easy way to get people into Illustrator. It comes with a HUD, that's Heads Up Display, and this is how it works. So at the moment, it's looking for continuous arcs. So I'm just going to click in just random places along here, and you'll see that as I do so, I get continuous arcs like so. Okay, or I can draw some interesting stuff. I also get this limiter just here. And when you launch the tool to start off with, you'll be presented with this really unobtrusive (chuckles) panel here, which gives you all of the shortcuts here, okay. So you can see the different things that you can do here and to mess with that as you need to. Okay, so this thing here will allow you to change the end point of the path there, and then you can carry on. You can also change the depth of the arc, okay, by holding down the Alt or Option key and scrolling. You can see that that's working for me there just now, okay. And then I can draw like that. I can also switch between the other modes by tapping the 1 key on my keyboard. So look at the HUD at the top left, and if I tap 1, you'll see now it's ready to draw straight-line segments for as long as I want to draw straight-line segments. If I tap 2, I can flip the curve. I can also get ahead of myself first and tap 1 first to switch to curves. If I tap 2, I can change the direction like so, okay. And it's actually switched already for me to sharp-corner arc. So if I wanted to draw curves that continued on from one another, I could be bumpy-style thing, then I could do that here and carry on drawing curves. And if I needed to flip, just tap 2 to do that like so. There you go. So those are the three pen tools in a nutshell. They are something you're going to need to learn to handle, and you're going to get some practice at that in the next movie.

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