today I have three essential tool combinations and you can use when using
the pen tool as designers it's important to have a website to show off our
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so today we're taking a look at three different tools in Illustrator
they are great when they're combined with the pen tool the first tool today
is the width tool and to demonstrate the various uses it has let's press P for
the pen tool and draw a softer line right across a document remember guys
you can hold down shift to do a perfectly straight line no matter where
your cursor hovers so with this first pen tool combination you can find the
width tool here in the tool bar or you can use the shortcut shift and W which
is the keyboard shocker the width tool is awesome because you can change the
thickness of a pen tool path anywhere along the line and this is useful for
digital illustrations but also things like Lego designing no other tool offers
you this level of customization along a pen tool path also you can hold down the
alt option key and click and drag just one part of the line like so as you edit
and work with the pen tool path and the width tool you're going to be creating a
stroke style here and then you can actually use this stroke style on a
completely new path using the pen tool
the next tool that is awesome to use in combination with the pen tool is the
smooth tool you can find that here in the tool bar and this tool is great if
you're not too amazing with the pen tool just yet but also it's really good just
to smoothen out your paths on your designs
so it's quickly to demonstrate I'm gonna draw a pen tool path that is not smooth
and quite jagged all you need to do is to click and draw over the path like so
and this will make your line that much more smoother with every single stroke
also you can click a single Anchor Point just once with the smooth tool and the
whole line will be smooth in that as well this tool is really useful and I
use it quite often when I'm using the pen tool too before the last tool in
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right here at cetera graphics the third and the final tool today which is very
useful when using the pen tool here's the joint all on screen are two prime
examples where the joint tool could be useful on your graphic design works but
firstly I still have people asking me how am i angry points actually larger
than usual so if you have illustrator CC you can come into the preferences here
and adjust the size to be larger or smaller I'm actually going to lower mine
for this part of the tutorial so the joint tool in this situation here on the
Left can actually join two lines where the intersects this helps you when
you're designing something in a very freehand manner using the pen tool and
you then want to tidy things up on your design and here on the right is another
situation where the joint or can be used and it would actually extend two lines
so they can join together the lines will continue in the direction
that path is already heading until they meet and as you can see here well is
exactly what just happened so when you're using the pen tool for your
graphic designs remember to use these three tools in combination and where
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