Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and in this video, I'm going to show you how to use
the Pen tool, and I'm also going to throw in a bunch of really handy tips and tricks at the end,
so stick around for those. And by the way, this is not going to be about the Curvature tool,
which is kind of like the Pen tool, but not quite. I already have another video about that,
and I'll leave that in the description below. All right, let's get started. Okay, so I'm
here in Illustrator, I'm just going to come over here to Create New, then I'll come up to Print,
I'll choose Letter, and then we'll Create. Now the first thing you need to know about the Pen tool
is that you can just click different areas to draw points that are connected by paths.
So let's get on our Pen tool by hitting P on the keyboard. That'll bring us to the tool, which
is right up here. Now the first thing to know about the Pen tool is that you can just click,
and click in a different point, and you'll get a straight line between those two points.
You might have a different fill and stroke color, so hit D on your keyboard,
and that'll give you a white fill and a black outline. We actually don't want a white fill.
I'm going to click on this one - the fill - and then I'll click on this 'none' right
down here. So now we just have a black stroke. Okay, now we can continue to make our shape.
And now you might end up with something like this. When we zoom in on this, you can see that
there's a point, but there are also two little handles out here, and we also have a curve here.
Let me zoom back out. And the reason this happens is because you click and then you accidentally
drag your mouse or your Wacom tablet. So let's undo with CMD Z or CTRL Z. And that'll put us
back on the last point. We'll continue to draw something and right now I can stop drawing if
I want to. But generally speaking, you'll want to close all your shapes. If we hit Escape right now,
that'll kind of end the shape. Now if we fill this with a color - I'm coming over here to my
swatches and by the way, if you're not seeing some of these palettes, you can come up here to Window.
For example, Swatches is right here. So if we zoom in on this part right here, you can see that
we've got a green fill and black outline, but our black doesn't go across. If you have a fill and a
stroke, you'll almost certainly want to complete your paths. So let's get back on the Pen tool
by hitting P. I'll click back on that last anchor point. And then when I get close to this one,
you'll see a little circle beside your cursor, and that means it's going to close the path when you
click there. So now we have a full shape. Now a common problem that people have is they'll
be drawing along, and then they'll close the shape, they'll deselect... and it'll disappear.
That's because your shape doesn't have a fill or a stroke. Just select it, hit D, and you'll have
both a fill and a stroke, and then you can get rid of the white or get rid of the black or whatever
you want to do. I'm going to just delete these. So that's your straight line. Straight lines are
fairly simple, but let's do some curved lines. And there are a couple of different ways to draw with
curved lines. So I'm going to hit P to get back on my Pen tool. And now I'm going to click and drag
right off the bat, that'll give me these two handles. I want to hold Shift to make those
handles snap to 45 degrees on just put it right up here. So that's one way of doing it. And then
when you click and drag in the next spot, you'll be able to pull the anchor point so that it moves
the path. Now I don't really like doing the 'click and drag right off the bat' way. So I'm going to
delete this. What I usually do is click once, and then I'll come up here to the top, hold Shift and
pull a kind of quarter curve out. And then I can click up here and pull another quarter curve.
Now the Pen tool kind of shows us what's going to happen.
If I click down here you can see where the path is going to go. But let's say I want to
come back this way. To do that, all I need to do is click on that last anchor point.
And then I can choose to click once, or - I'll undo - click and drag to make a curved area.
Now if you're trying to draw something, it's always good to try
to get your anchor points on the outermost part of the curve. So right here, right here, here,
of course you'll want it in here. But then here, this is the outermost part of the curve. This
one is close, it's not perfect, but this one probably could be right down here instead.
It's kind of a good rule of thumb to try to make your drawings that way. So let's draw an eye. I'm
going to click once and I'll get up here and I'll hold Shift. And I do this so that when I click
down on the right side, I'll have a similar curve. I've got Smart Guides on. So I'll click here,
and then I'll just click and drag. I'll come up here and finish the point. Now let's zoom
in here. I'm going to hit Z and just zoom in to show you what's happening here. I thought
I was close to this point, and I released, but I didn't get them lined up. So I'm going to hit A
to get on my Direct Selection tool, and I'm just going to draw a box around this point.
So this one is not selected, but this one is. I've got Snap to Point on so these will snap.
Now if we zoom in really close, you can see that even though they're right on the same point,
they're not connected. So we would have to connect these by hitting A, selecting both,
and then CMD J or CTRL J. That's Join. You can also come up here to Object > Path and
Join right here. I'm going to undo and show you a different way to do that. I'll get my A tool
and I'll just move this one close. And then I can use my Pen tool, start it, and complete it
by doing this. Either way that I showed you is going to give us an extra point. You'll have two
points on top of each other, or you'll have one a little offset. So you can hit P and then the minus
symbol, and just delete one of those. Okay, not the best eye in the world, but that's okay.
I want to select all with CMD A or CTRL A and just delete. And this time, I'm going to try to trace
something. I've got a little cat I saved, and I'm just going to drag that right onto my Illustrator
document. And it comes in pretty big, so I'll hit S, which will bring me to the Scale tool,
and I'll hit Enter or Return. And then we'll bump this down to maybe 40%. When I draw something like
this, I like to open my Layers panel with F7, and just lock the layer that the cat is on. And then
I'll create a new layer that I'm going to draw on. So I'll zoom in by hitting Z on my keyboard,
and now with something like this, I usually would make the black all one shape, and then I would put
the eyes on top of it, and maybe even these black circles on top of that. So let's do it that way.
I'll hit P on my keyboard. I do want to say if you find yourself drawing something pretty uniform,
like this shape right here, there is most likely going to be another way of doing this inside
Illustrator that is going to give you a better look, and it's going to be easier. For example,
I could take two circles, overlap them and then use the overlapping shape for that. But
since this is a Pen tool tutorial, I'm going to only use the Pen tool. I'm going to hit D on my
keyboard to get the white fill and black outline, and then I'm just going to toss out the white.
I'll change the black to green, and now get right on the very edge here, click once, and I'm going
to go all the way over to here. Now it takes some practice to get used to how the Pen tool works,
but with a shape like this, you should be able to do it with just two anchor points. Now we want to
change directions here, so to do that, I'm going to click right on that anchor point, and then I'll
come right back over to this one and drag down. Now obviously, this doesn't line up very well.
So when this happens, I just undo, get back on my Pen tool, and then just try going halfway.
Now if you don't like where you place the anchor point, you can use the spacebar
to move it around like this. All right, that looks pretty good. And I'll click to close.
I'll get on my A tool, the Direct Selection, and move this over just a little bit.
Okay, next I'm going to draw the ears. Usually when I'm drawing things that need to be combined
with other pieces, I overlap them, because when we use the Pathfinder or Shape Builder later,
we need those to be overlapped for that to work. So I'm going to click up here at the top of the
point and drag, then I'll click that anchor point. And we'll do a straight one just by clicking once.
We'll complete the shape. Now I'm not going to actually draw both ears, I'll just reflect this
one. So to do that, I'll hit O on my keyboard, and I'll just get in the middle and hold OPTION
and click once. Maybe we'll change the angle a little bit. That looks pretty good. And we'll copy
and I'll move this one up. So I have these pieces all done. So we'll go ahead and trace
this part down here. So I want this to overlap. I'm going to click up into here,
then I'll click and drag right here. I'm going to get as far as I can until it starts looking weird,
so right about here. Then I can make that a straight point. Let me get my green back here.
Okay. Then I can hold Shift, so I go straight over for this part down here. These parts here
are a straight line, so I can just click at the very corners of those. Then I'll hold Shift,
come over here and click again. So all these are straight lines, which is really nice. After this,
I'm going to click and drag, see if I can get that to match. That's pretty close.
And now you can kind of see that it's not going to work very well, because if I click here,
I'm going to get that curve. If I click down here, it's not going to work. So...so I'm just going
to click on this anchor point and start a new curve right about here, that looks pretty good.
Click and drag, I'm going to click this one to start a new curve, and then pull one out
from here. Now, if you do that, if you click to start a new curve like that, you might run into
having it not look great right there. I'll show you how to fix that here in a moment.
And the thing about the Pen tool is it just takes a lot of practice. So
try to use it every day, until you really get the hang of it, because it does take practice
to kind of just get a feeling for where that next ... next point is going to go.
So in this case, I would just pull this up a little bit here. You can always change it
afterwards with your Direct Selection tool, but you need to click right on certain anchor points
to do that. Okay, so let me hit Shift X to switch my stroke to a fill. And you can see right here
that this doesn't look very good, so I'm going to click on that.
Then I'm going to get underneath my Pencil tool to the Smooth tool.
Now I can just kind of go over that area, and it'll smooth it out. It has to be selected though.
Okay, this is looking pretty good. Okay, I'm going to hit Shift X to change the fill back
to a stroke. I'll hit P to get back on my Pen tool, and then I'll just click and drag,
click that point, and then finish the shape, like this.
Now, this is just a circle. So I'm going to hit L on my keyboard to get to my Circle tool. And
I'll just make a really thin circle. And I will rotate it with the R tool,
which will bring us to the Rotate tool, right over here. Now I'm going to reflect this. So I'm going
to hold Shift and select both of these pieces, I'll hit O, I'm going to hold OPTION or ALT
and click right in between, and then we'll change the angle so it lines up. That looks pretty good.
We'll say Copy. Now I'm going to hit P to get back on my Pen tool to just do the nose really quick.
Okay, so now we have everything all drawn out. Now I want certain pieces of this to be combined,
so I'm going to hit V to select them. That piece, that piece and then the ears. All those I want to
be one shape. I'm going to come down here to Pathfinder and Shape Mode > Unite. Now
I'm going to hit Shift X to get a fill only. Now I think I'll change my color. We'll make
this kitty kind of dark gray. I'm going to get back on my Selection tool and select both eyes
by holding Shift. I'll hit Shift X to switch to a fill, then I'll click the eyes themselves.
I'll hit Shift X to get a fill only on those two. I'm going to make those black. The nose,
I'll hit Shift X to get a fill, and make that white. Now you might have noticed that these
eyes have extra pieces hanging off, so I'm going to select both of them and then hit Shift M,
which is my Shape Builder, and hold ALT or OPTION to just click the pieces I don't want.
Same thing over here: Shift M, then hold OPTION or ALT to get rid of the pieces we don't want.
So this is looking pretty good. I think he had a mouth, but I'm going to leave that off.
Now I want to give you a few tips and tricks that you can use with the Pen tool.
If you're making something like a zigzag line, as I mentioned before, you really shouldn't be doing
that. But what if you just want part of it to be a zigzag line? To show you when I mean, I'll hit P
on my keyboard and just draw a line. I'll hit D to get a white fill & black outline and get rid of
the white. I'll come up here to Effect > Distort and Transform and Zigzag. Just gonna increase...oh
yeah, that looks good. We'll say OK. I just played around with the numbers. I got 7 and 15,
if you want to try this. We'll say OK. Now if you hit CMD Y or CTRL Y, you'll see that
this is not really a zigzag, it's actually a straight line still.
So we need to expand it. And we need to expand the appearance. So go to Object > Expand Appearance,
and that'll bring us to just the stroke. If you do that more than once, it's actually going to
give us a result that we don't want, which is little filled areas in here. Anyway. So let's
say we're wanting to draw something else that's connected to this. So what we can do is just hit P
now, and continue this line on down here. So maybe we want to do something like this.
And in this case, I also would want to have it just reflect. So I'm going to use my Direct
Selection to copy all of this part, and paste in front. I'll hit O, and Enter or Return,
and we'll do a Vertical reflect. And now I can just line these up over here, like this.
And now this is lining up perfectly. So I'm going to join these by selecting them both and
then going to Object > Path and Join. And then down here, I'm going to join them with CMD J.
I'll need to get my Shape Builder and then hold OPTION or ALT to remove that piece.
So you could do something like this - a combination of using something that's more uniform
with something more hand drawn that you would need the Pen tool for. Let's say you're doing
something like this - drawing a mask, and you want the bottom part to be a different color like this.
So in that case, I would select the points along this part of the path only, copy and then
paste in front, that's CMD F or CTRL F, and then just start drawing the top part.
And now it lines up perfectly right along this line. Let's say you have a high res
image that you need to create in vector. You can actually use Image Trace for part of this.
This happens a lot of times with small companies - they don't know the value of the
vector Illustrator file, they end up misplacing their own logo file or even throwing it away.
But they do still have their nice high res JPEGs. For something like this,
I'd first make a copy of the layer and then hide one. And then I'd select this and just
go to Image Trace to see how it does. Okay, so a lot of this looks really nice.
We lost some detail here on the star. You can click that other layer on and off to see how it
did. I think this part up here looks nice, but this part needs to be redone. So I'm going to
go ahead and select this and expand it. And then I'm going to get rid of the white by hitting Y
on my keyboard to get to the Magic Wand tool, and then just select all the white and delete it.
Now let's say I just want this piece, and I'm going to rebuild everything else.
So I'll hit CMD Y or CTRL Y, I'll hit Q to get my Lasso tool, which is over here, I'll just draw
around the pieces that I want, maybe just this, I'll copy that. And I'm going to select everything
else and just delete it. And then I'll paste in front. Now I'm going to hit CMD Y or CTRL Y to get
back out, I'm going to turn on that other layer. I'll move this layer up so the drawing is on top.
Maybe I'll change the color a little bit. If you find usable pieces with Image Trace,
you can just continue the logo from there. So I'll hit P, and then I can just start from here.
I just hit Shift X to turn that back into an outline. I could just use straight lines all the
way down through here. So that's an option - using parts of an Image Trace to help you with your logo
design to speed things up. For this one, I would just kind of draw all this out here. Like...
like that, and then draw this piece on top of it, and this piece to on top of it. And then create a
circle with the Circle tool instead of trying to draw that myself with the Pen tool...and
use the Star tool to draw this. So those are a few things you can use in addition to the Pen tool to
make your life a little easier. All right, if you liked this video and you want to see more videos
like this, just hit the Subscribe button and the little bell next to it, and you'll be notified
every time a new video comes out. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!