#7 How To Use the Pencil Tool in Adobe Illustrator

1. #7 How To Use the Penciil Tool in Adobe Illustrator: Hi there. My name is David. Too risky, and I wanted to thank you for choosing this course. I know that there is a lot, Of course, is out there. That is why I am so grateful that you chose this one. Everybody's talking about the mantle. They want to learn it. Use it because they see it as an answer toe all off their design problems, but they rarely look at the pencil toe. Anything really hidden gem. It allows you to create great looking curved and FREEHAND paths so easily it will even correct your mistakes to make your artwork look more professional. Welcome to the seventh part of the every illustrator To explain Siris in this class, you'll discover all the ins and outs of the pencil to, and it's sidekicks to learn how to use the pencil to and why to use it. How to make illustrator Correct your mistakes. Your artwork looks more professional and how to use other tools like this move toe bath, razor tool and the joint tour. It's a concise, straight to the point illustrator mine of information or one of the most under estimated tools in the program. So enrolled in the class and take your illustrator knowledge to the next level 2. 1How To Use the Pencil Tool - the Basics: you've seen my flat design classes, you already might have an idea on how the pencil tool works. You already know how it can sometimes be a fantastic replacement for the mental. But if you haven't in the next few videos, you'll discover how the pencil tool works when and why to use it. And you'll also discover the pencil tool sidekicks, the smooth tool, the path, the razor tool and the joint note, though, that she won't find all of these tools if you don't have illustrator at least CC 2014 So let's start with the pencil toe. The pencil tool works pretty much the same way in illustrator and in design. It lets you draw open and close passed as if you were drawing with a pencil on a piece of paper. It is most useful for fast sketching or creating a hand drawn look. The pencil tool sits right here in the Tools panel and has a default shortcut, which is the letter and on the keyboard. The way you create passed with the tool is really simple. All we gotta do is to click and start Dragon to create a line like this one as you draw the pencil tool. A dotted line follows the pointer and notice that the path takes on the current stroke and fill attributes and remains selected by default. The pencil tool allows you to create paths that have this freehand look, but you can also create straight lines with it. All you have to do is to press and hold on the shift key and notice that this straight line appears next to the tool. If we're now, just click drag and let go. We will create a straight line, just like with the pen Tal and will create them in 45 degree increments. Could also attach another path to the one we just created, and it could be both straight and freehand. All we have to do is to start drawing from the last anchor point and again, if we hold down, the shift key will create a straight path. And if you let go of the shift key, weaken, just create a free hand path, just like so. And if you do want to create a straight path with the pencil tool, but you don't want to be constrained to 45 degree increments just press the bulky or the option. If you're on a Mac just like that, this is the basic way to create paths. Using the pencil to In the next video, we'll take a look at some more ways of using the tool. How weaken Draw closed paths with it, how we can add it. Paths we created, how we can connect and reshape them as well. So I'll see you in the next video. 3. 2Creating More Paths with the Pencil Tool: with the pencil tool in Illustrator Weaken, Draw closed paths not just FREEHAND open paths in order to create the close path with the pencil tool. First we have to select it, of course, now its greatest shape. That would look like a very freehand circle as soon as I'm closing on the first anchor point. It's very is displaying this little hollow circle to indicate that we are about to close the path. By the way, notice that we don't have to be spot on on the first anchor point for Phyllis Fear to close the path. This is a functionality off the told that we will talk about while exploring the options of the pencil told. But for now, let's just remember that we can let illustrator to close the path for us, even if we are not extremely precise. So this is how you can create closed paths with the pencil toe. You can also add another path to an existing path with the pencil tool. When we hover over an endpoint, we'll see this slash indicator appearing next to our cursor. If we know, just click and create path with the intention of closing it. Using another endpoint illustrator will show the same hollow circle, just as if you were creating closed path. We can also reshaped paths with the pencil toe. Let's just select the path we want to change. Let's position the pencil tool on or near the path to redraw, and now we can drag the tool until the path looks the way we wanted to notice. Though that depended on where you begin to redraw the path and in which direction you drag , you may get unexpected results. For example, you may unintentionally change a close path, an open path, change an open pathway, close path or lose a portion of a shape. What's important to understand is that as soon as we draw a line, illustrator will drop anchor points automatically, and we don't get to choose where they are positioned. The number of anchor points is determined by the length and complexity off the path, and we can change the overall looks off the pass by. It's just in the pencil tools, global settings. So let's move on to the next video, where we will do just that 4. 3The Pencil Tool Settings: to get to the pencil. Tool options with simply have to double click on it in the Tools panel. And in here we can control the fidelity, which works pretty much the same as the fidelity is heading for the brushes inside Illustrator. It basically determines how faithful to your mouse or stylised movements. The path is going to be so if you want that with this lighter, more towards the accurate value. And if you want smoother paths, just move the slider more towards the smooth value. Let's see that in practice. Let's say that I want the path to be smoother, so I will make sure that the slider is positioned closer to the smooth value and start drawing. As you can see, Illustrator is not following the movement of my cars or to faithfully. Instead, it's given me smoother paths. If we, however, move the slider more towards the accurate value and then start joined, the paths are going to be last smooth but definitely more accurate. Their film your pencil strokes option applies. He fill to pencil strokes. You drop after selecting this option, but not to exist in pencil strokes. Remember to select a filled before he drove the pencil strokes. So, for example, if we keep this option checked and select a filled not when we drone weaken. See Phil applied to our pencil stroke. They keep selected to option determines whether to keep the path selected after he drove, and this option is selected by default. The next option. The old key toggles to smooth tool option. It will allow us to initialize the smooth tool or which we'll talk about later simply by pressing the old key on a keyboard. And if we don't check this option pressing, the lt will simply allow us to draw a straight line, as we saw in the previous video, the next option of close paths when ends are with them. This option will allow us to determine how close we have to be to the first anchor point in order for illustrate to close the path for us. Added selected paths determines whether or not you can change or emerge a selected path when you are within a certain distance of it, which is set right below this option. Here, we can specify how close the mouse or stylist must be to an existing path in orderto added the path with the pencil tool. So these are the pencil. It'll options. I think that the most important ones are the fidelity and close path options, and I encourage you to take a look at these options and find out for yourself how different your results can be when you change the pencil tool settings. 5. 4The Pencil Tools Sidekicks The Smooth Path Eraser and Join Tools: the pencil tool comes with some sidekicks that give us even greater control over the results we can get using the tool, these sidekicks right here alongside the pencil. And they are the smooth toe, the path eraser tool and the joint tool. So let's take a look at them in this video. As you can see, I got a very freehand cloud here that I created with a pencil toe. Let's say that I would like to smooth parts of it even further. I can do that with this move toe, so the pass elected. I'll make this move too active and drag along the path I want to smooth out, and I can repeat the process until the path is as smooth as I would like it to be. By the way, we can control how much smoothing is applied to the path with the small tool by double clicking on the tool in the tools panel and weaken just the just the slider right here. Now the second penance. Little sidekick is the path eraser to that sits right here, and it lets you raise parts of a path by joint along the path. Vista is useful when you want to limit what you raise to a path segment so we can just raise a path segment by bath segment, just like so now the last pencil told Sidekick, is the joint with this tool, we can easily fix paths that do not exactly intersect the way we want them to. Maybe the past we draw for short of intersecting or they did meet but extended beyond the point of intersection. So, for instance, let's say that we want to draw a straight line that we want to connect with a free hand line. But, ah, we weren't too careful and didn't connect them properly. Now we can just grant the joint tool make, Of course, showed that these two paths are selected. You cannot just scrub across the points off the past. We would like to intersect, and there we go. The paths join, but without mortifying the trajectories off the original paths. This tool can come in really handy when you want to join close paths and you're fed up with using the join average command, which sometimes can produce unexpected, to say the least, results. So these are the pencil told sidekicks, the smooth the path, the razor and the joint tool will be up to you to decide whether you will utilize them in your day to day design work. But I think that the pencil tool is definitely worth learning. And let me show you the practical benefits of fusing it in the next video, which, by the way, will reveal the class project, so stay tuned. 6. The Pencil tool class project: for the class project. I'd like it to create this birthday cake. If you've seen in my flat design classes, creating it won't be a problem for you. And if you haven't, let me just quickly break down this design for you real quick. Now, as you can see, we only have simple shapes here. We got to this rectangle for the base. We got erect and gold for them. And this bottom part of the cake, we got a rectangle for the stop part of the cake. And as far as the candles go on, they consist of simple rectangles and ellipses that will so slightly transformed. But if you don't want to create the whole cake, you can just focus on the pencil tool creation aspects off this and off this cake. Now I created this chocolate mousse or distant icing with the pencil tool and this one as well, and I created the strawberries using only their pencil tool. So if you just want to create on the icing or or this like chocolate mousse and decreed the strawberries, you can use the other well file or layer that I have prepared for you. So as you can see, we only have from the the basin off the cake. We only have the candles And of course, we got the background. So let's take a look at how to create him. The icing for them for the birthday cake using the pencil tool. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab the pencil told right here, and I'm gonna give it some dark, some dark as stroke. It can be even black. Why not now? The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to simply press and hold on the shift key to create a straight line that would stretch across the base of the cake just like so. I would simply find this left ankle point and start creating an I will icing just like that . Of course, he doesn't have to be perfect. It's a free hand icing. It will look something like that. And I am going to close the path just like so. I'm going to simply add this brown color that I have right here. So I'm going to initialize now than the eyedropper tool. I'm simply going to grab this color just like so. And just like that, I got to this. This chocolate mousse, created just like so now we could do is we could add maybe another, another part or another layer off this chocolate mousse. Um, beneath this will this outer layer and that's as simple. It's simply grabbing this one. Bring it, bring it a bit down while holding down the old corruption. If you're on a Mac Prince straight down, just like so and I'm going to make a darker brown just like so, And I'm gonna move it all the way behind this of 1st 1st part or this 1st 1st moves chocolate mousse. What we can do is we can go to the pencil tool right here, and we can maybe make our our Well, I seen even Mawr even more smooth. So I'm simply going to move the slider towards the smooth option. Right, Here's more value and I'm going to click. OK, so now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to make sure that my pencil, it'll has, say, stroke applied to it, just like so. But I'm going to start to with the straight line. So I'm going to present holding the shift key, create a line just like so and now I can again create create a chop chocolate mousse that is going to look something like that. I can now allow illustrate to smooth this whole path form. And I think it looks a bit better than the bottom part. And if you don't want to, if you don't want it to be like a chocolate mousse. If you really wanted to be an I B, I seen sound somebody going to add another filled to it, and we can go with the color that is, that's hacks. Value is E F F f. That's a really off wide flat design color off white, just like so. And there we go. We could maybe add another another layer of this off this Ah, well, icing in this case, Sasa be I'm going to drag this guy down, maybe make it just a bit darker. This should be fine. And again, I'm going to move it behind the this This 1st 1st icing just like so And maybe we could move it just a bit up. I'm going to select both these guys and move them up, just like so. And there we go. We got the icing and the chocolate most created with the mental so well with the pencil toe . So in their decreed the strawberries, we just gotta grab the pencil tool again and just try to come up with a free hand shape of a Strober that is going to look something like that. I'm going to give it a nice strawberry color. It's going to be this. Maybe this red color. Why not? Just like so and now I'm going to create, like the middle and middle like this spots that you can see on a strawberry again with the pencil told just like So let's leave it like that and I'm simply going to duplicate it, just like so you don't have to create lots of them. Just if you will suffice, just like so, and I will simply just to select all these spots, just like so and then select Strawberry again. I'm going to group all these guys, duplicate them to the right and press control de several times on my keyboard to create all the strawberries, just like so now if you want to, you can maybe make sure that all these guys aligned properly, but I'm going to leave it up to you. The purpose of this class project is you're creating them and the strawberries and the ice in order. Chocolate knows if you prefer, and with that pencil toe. So I hope that you'll like this class. And if you have, please give it a thumb's up right of few words of review if you want to. And, of course, submit your class product. It always helps me in making these glasses more discoverable for other students just like you. So until next time, have a nice design. My name is David Tyminski.