Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: Hi, I'm John Rahmat
of Crusoe design C and welcome to the
Pentool Master Class. In this class, we'll be going
over the fundamentals and best practices of using the Pen tool in
Adobe Illustrator, arguably the most important
tool in the program. Once you master it, you'll have the power to create
just about anything. We'll also dive into
using the curvature tool, which will allow you
to make smooth curves no matter what your skill level, and we'll get into a
brand new tool that is very exciting called
the Quick Pen Tool. It's probably going
to change the way you use Adobe
Illustrator from now on. This class is actually
a complete rebuild from the ground up on
my Pen tool course, which launched almost
ten years ago. In that time, it had
over 6,000 students, and they uploaded more than 140 amazing and inspiring
class projects. The reviews were incredible, but it was time for an update, and I packed this class with even more tips and examples
for you to learn from. For this class project,
you're going to be creating your very own custom enamel pin. An enamel pin is a great way to put your newfound
knowledge of Pentool to use because
it's going to force you to create something that's
really precise and cool, get very small, with a
limited amount of detail, a limited amount of color, still have tons of creative potential. I'm also going to show a bonus behind the scenes footage of how a pin is actually produced straight from the
factory. About me. I'm a graphic designer
and illustrator with over 17 years of
professional experience. I specialize in logo
design and branding, but I work on a wide
variety of design projects. I've worked with
bands like Blink two, brands like Hi, my name is
Mark, Thoughtspas Athletics, and I've even
released my own merch with companies like New era, all working full time in the
sign and print industry. That means I always design with real world
applications in mind, ensuring everything is done efficiently and professionally. I'm also a Skillshare
top teacher since the program
started in 2015. Nearly 100,000 students
have taken my classes, and they've watched over 2.6
million minutes of content. But enough about
me, keep watching, and let's learn to master
the pet tool together.
2. The Class Project: Alright, thanks
for staying here. Let's get into the class. It's time to learn more about the class project. Let's
get to the computer. Okay, so depending on whether
you're using the app or a different web browser or
different device than me, your website may look a little bit different than what
I'm showing you here, but you'll find your way
to projects and resources, and this is where we're going
to outline the ideal way to post your project and what the class
project actually is. And that is to design your
very own custom enamel pin. So you should be able to
click Read More here, and this is my example
of ideally what I'd love for you to do for
your class project to share with the
rest of the class. I've put here some of my favorite reference pins that I put on a Pintrest board, so you can click that
and use those as reference or find your own reference and
share those with us. Then I'd love to
see your sketches. Again, this is a complete
rebuild of my class, so these are sketches
from over nine years ago. I'd like to take a
little more time now, but especially when it comes to logo design and
simple things that I know I can recreate
really quickly and easily in Adobe Illustrator, I won't spend a ton of time on the sketch phase
because I know that I can work on it more accurately
in Adobe Illustrator. Of course when I'm doing
something like an illustration, then I want my linework to be really good
before I even bring it into whether it's Illustrator or Procreate
or a different app. And then, of course,
I'd love to see your final digital pin. In my case, you can
actually click and see my project gallery and see my actually produced pins because I've made a lot of them, but we'll show you
those in just a moment. I know it can be
overwhelming to give you a project like this without
any kind of guidance, so you might be stuck trying to think of ideas of what
you could create. So I've given you
some theme ideas. You could illustrate
your favorite animal, letter your favorite quote. You could draw a
monogram which is just your initials
intertwined with each other. Illustrated a
celebrity portrait. That would be a lot harder. Illustrated vehicle, and so on. There's also guidelines if you were to actually get
your pin produced. Generally, you want your pin
to be between 0.5 " and 2 ". A lot of my pins are in the
inch and a quarter area. You want to keep
your pin to have a maximum of five colors. This part is really important if you're actually
producing your pin. You need to keep a border
between each area of color, and I'll show you what that
means in just a moment. Then I've got some
resources here, but we're going to
talk a bit more about the Bezier game later. Before we go to my project, I just wanted to
scroll down and you'll see class projects.
Right now, mine's here. This order may look
very different to you, but it's set to most recent. You can go to trending or
you can go to most liked. This class has 140 projects at the moment, and
they're all amazing. It's crazy how much talent
was into this class. How many students
absolutely killed it. I love looking through these. This is inspiration
in and of itself. There's so many fun, clever. Some are dark and moody. There's just so much creativity in all these different
class projects. So please do look through them, give them likes,
give them comments, if you like them, and hopefully other people will
do the same for yours. So I'm going to go up
here to my project. You'll be able to find mine in the gallery somewhere here if you want to be able to look
at it. This here is my pin. And you can see that a lot
of this is the same as I put there under resources just to give you the guidance
for your pins. But I've also included some
photos of my real world pins. So this is the original ones. This is here are
owl from the class, which you'll see
me redraw shortly. And I've even shown a whole lot of new pins
that I've created since. I find making pins really fun. It allows you to be
really creative, but at the same time, the
parameters are very small, and you have to think
about all the detail and what you can and cannot pull
off in such a small scale. When I was talking about
having a border in between, it's less important
when you have fewer colors like
I've been doing here. But each of these little areas is somewhere where they actually pour ink into in order to
hold this stamp color. I did a version on this that
was black on black on black. If we scroll up here,
you get an idea. You can see the really
strong indentations. To fill this in with color, all they do is take
an ink bottle and I'm going to show you
behind the scenes later in the class and they
squeeze the ink into each one of these
little channels and that's how they color it. That's why it's
important. You can't have a color simply touching
another color. Need a border in between
when it comes to a pin. So in this example here, this is actually a gray versus a white, and if this did not have
a border between it, then of course,
those colors would bleed together, and
it wouldn't work. You have to have a
border in between everything when you're
making an enamel pin. But I think that covers
the class project. I really look forward to
seeing what you guys create, and let's move on and learn
how to use the Pen tool, the curvature tool, and the
brand new Quick Pen tool.
3. The Basics: The first thing we want to do is to either create a new document or open an existing document that you want to practice in. I've already got my
document open here. The next thing I want
to do is make sure that our workspaces are
essentially the same. If you go to Window
here and go to Workspace and then
click Essentials, your screen should look more
or less the same as mine. I'm going to make a
couple alterations to it just to tweak it to what
I like a little better. So we're going to
open up here and drag over this comment box
because I don't need it. I'm going to hit the X button in the top left there
to get rid of that. I want to bring a few panels
that I'm used to having in. If we go to Window,
down to color, then clicking at the
top here of this panel, I'm going to click
and drag it to the top up here and it should
just pop in like that. Then I want to go to Window
and down to swatches and we're going to do
the same except we're going to put that between
those two panels. Then I'll just drag that
down a little more. That should more or less
help on that side of things. On this side of things,
we're going to make a few changes over
here to our Pen tool. What we want to do is
down here at the bottom, you'll see three dots. That's editing our toolbar. And you can see over here
you got the Pen tool, and then we've got an
add AnchorPoint tool, delete AnchorPoint Tool,
and then the AnchorPoint tool.T of those are already in here in this Essentials work
panel that we're using in. All we need to do is click on this one and drag it in
over top of the Pen tool, and now click on this and
drag it over where rejsted. And now all of those options should be within our Pen tool. You can close this here.
And now if we go here, we can click Pen Tool. Okay, so this is
the Pen tool panel. These are the main tools that
we're going to be using. You can see these better, and if they're in a slightly
different order, that's okay. That's just how I drag them in. Then, of course, this is our
selection tool at the top. So we're going to be using
these tools the most. So if we hover over one of these tools like
the Selection tool, you can see the letter V, and Illustrator showing
us how it works. But I just mostly want you to focus on that letter
because that is a quick key and that's how we'll get to this every time
without having to actually drag our mouse over here and click this
button every time. Memorizing quick keys is essential to using most
software, in my opinion. Now if we go down
to our Pen tool, you can see again by hovering over it that we
have the letter P. You want to memorize
that as well. Now the last thing we
can do just to make sure that your screen
and my screen are pretty similar is we'll go to
Illustrator up here and we're going to go to settings and
selection and anchor display. This may be a little
different on a PC, but you should be
able to find it. Now, down here is
the main thing. You just want to make
sure that your settings are essentially
the same as mine. I've got my anchor point size to default this handle
style on the left. Highlight anchors on Mouse
over and I currently have show handles when
multiple anchors are selected turned off. That can be useful to turn on. Maybe we'll give it a
try later, but for now, I'll just mirror my settings
and we'll be good to go. Okay, so as I move
my mouse around, you might see things jumping
out and colors hiding. See these things. These
are called Smart Guides. I think smart guides
are essential to illustrating properly
in Adobe Illustrator, but sometimes they can
be a bit of a nuisance. I'll show you how they're
useful, but for right now, I'll show you how to turn
them on and then off again. So if we just go up
here to view and down right here to Smart Guides, you can see the
quick key here is command you or Control you on a PC and that'll allow us
to turn those on and off. So if it gets a bit distracting, I will turn them off, but for the most part, I
like to have them on. It's good to get
used to them and they'll be very useful
as you're illustrating. There's a little
asterisk down to the right of my pen tool here right in the
middle of the screen, and that means that
we're going to start our very first anchor point. I'm going to click over here
onto the left and you can see that it's drawn a box.
That is an anchor point. Now if I move my
mouse anywhere over, it's going to show an
imaginary elastic line here. This is telling you if
I were to click here, that this is where the
line would be placed. Now, if I hold the shift
button while I'm doing this, it will actually snap to
exact 45 degree increments, which is actually
very useful as well. So for the moment, we're
just going to draw a very plain old line here. So I'm going to click
again and release, and now we have our
very first line. Now, you can see the pen tool
is automatically trying to decide where I'm going to
go next and pre the line. But I actually don't
want to continue that. I don't want to make
any more lines. So if we just go ahead and
hit the escape button, that'll allow us to stop
from making a new line, but we'll keep the
Pen tool selected. So I'm going to hit a now the cool thing about the
Pen tool is that a lot of these little tools
that are shown up here are actually basically
built into the tool. You can see here that we have
the add AnchorPoint tool and it is a plus symbol. If I select that there and I go along
anywhere on my path, I can just add these
anchor points just like so. You can
see just like that. Now with the next tool, the delete AnchorPoint tool, I can go ahead and I can
click on any of those anchor points to actually just delete them even though I
just created them. But there's only
very few instances where I actually need to use these two tools as they are up here and actually go out
of my way to select them. For the most part,
the Pen tool has them built in and
it's just as easy. When I have the
Pen tool selected, just the main tool and
I hover over a line, you'll see the plus
automatically shows up and that means it knows that I want to add an anchor point. Now if I hover over
an AnchorPoint again using just the
normal Pen tool, it will show a minus
and it knows that I want to delete the anchor
point, so I will click there. That means that you do not have to select these very often. Now the next one up here
is the AnchorPoint tool. If we select that
AnchorPoint tool and we click on an anchor and Trag, you will see we're
starting to make s curves. But again, if we
just let go and I'm going to undo this by
hitting Commands Ed, that's Edit and then undo
and it's Control Z on a PC. But again, using the
normal Pen tool, all we have to do
this one takes a key. If we select over top of our anchor point and
I hold down option, which is Alt on a PC
and click and drag, that is that same anchor
point tool that we just used. For the most part, you
don't actually need to go ahead and select each
of these tools individually. You can just use
the Pen tool and it will automatically
do what you need or you have to click an extra key like the Option Atwell and I just
clicked and we'll be able to access all of these
little versions of the Pen tool really seamlessly. With my main Pen tool selected, I'm going to add a couple
anchor points along this curve. Let's add one here, here
and here, for example. Now if I were to hover
over this anchor point, you can see that that minus
symbol is showing up. So it's allowing me to
automatically delete that anchor. So if I click that,
you can see that line actually turns into
almost a straight line. Not quite with these
little handles pulled out, but it's almost a straight line. So it's lost the curve in
the angle that I had before. So I'm going to undo
that with Command Z. Again, that's Control
zone on a PC. This is where using the
delete anchor point tool specifically is actually useful. So if we go ahead and
we click that up here, a little hidden trick that it has is when I'm hovering
over the anchor, if I also hold down
Shift while I click it, it's going to do its best
to hold that exact line. So I'm going to undo this again, and I'm not going to hold shift. So I'm going to click it again, you can see how that
line is almost straight. If I undo and I hold Shift,
well, I click it this time, you can see the line maintains the curve a lot more accurately. And this is a great way to clean up your artwork
when you have unnecessary anchor points
because you can go ahead, click them, hold
Shift and see whether Adobe is able to build
almost the same curve, even without that
anchor point there. It's a good way to make sure your artwork is as
clean as possible. So now we're going to talk about a couple other ways that we can exit our Pen tool
while we're working. So I'm going to go ahead
first and delete this. So I've gone to
my selection tool and I'm just going
to hit Delete. Okay, so using this, we're just going to go
ahead and once again, we're going to start a new anchor point,
I'm holding Shift, and I'm going to click over here to draw another anchor point. Now, as I mentioned,
it's actually going to try and create the
next line for me, but in this case, that's
all I wanted to draw. So as I mentioned before,
if we hit Escape, that will allow us to exit
that point where Illustrator knows we're not trying to draw any more continuation
on that line, but we're still
using our Pen tool. So that's one way to do
it, and that works okay. But that's a button, and then let's say we wanted to go
to our selection tool, which is V on my keyboard. Now I'm on my selection tool. I actually hit Escape and then V. But if we go back here,
let's just do it again. What I can actually do
is skip the escape step if I want to change tools and just hit the
letter V, for example, and it'll pop me right
into the selection tool, which is one of the ways that I generally get out of
using the Pen tool, just Auto habit because
the selection tool is something you
use consistently. But this actually
works with any tool. So essentially, if you
hit a quick key or you come over to your toolbar and you select another tool, it will automatically exit
the Pen tool for you. That's one of the options
to get out of it. The other option, again, we'll just start a new line.
I'm holding Shift here. And as we drag over here, what we can do is go to select
and then go to deselect, which is Command Shift A. Now, it looks like
that line disappeared because I did not
have a stroke on it. That's an important thing
that we can talk about. So right now, it's
automatically set to this fill, which you can see up here
is 80% K as in black. So let's go ahead
and make that red, and these little arrows
will allow us to flip it. Right now our fill is red, but we can't see it
because we haven't made a box yet.
More on this later. We actually want this fill to be the stroke and the
stroke will add a line. If we flip those and increase
our stroke thickness, you can see now our actual line right
there just like that. Another thing
that's interesting, as I'm clicking and dragging, you could see before I actually clicked again that this
line here is blue. Everything's blue, and we can actually change
that if we want to. That color is dictated
by the layer color. If you go over here
to our layers panel, you can see over
here to the right, there's a tiny little blue box, and that is telling
us that this layer is blue. It's right
here as well. If we just double
click on this layer, you can see the
color is light blue. So if we change this to
any other color we want, let's just say
green, for example, and click Okay, you
can see how all of this changed to
green. Delete that. Again, if I create
a new line now, you can see how it is green. Perhaps that will be
easier for you to see, but it allows you to change the color to whatever
suits your eyes the best, whatever stands up the most, and whatever you're
most comfortable with. If we were to click here to add our anchor point and
then holding option, we were to shift and click, you can see that we can get these nice curves like I
was showing you before. This can also be done
by if we click this. Now if we click
over here and drag, you can see I'm dragging
out these handles. We call them handlebars, and this allows us to make a curve another way
to do this would be to draw our line here and using our Pen tool, we're
going to hit escape. Now I'm not clicking, I'm holding option
first before we add an anchor point and I'm going to click and
drag on this line. This will actually allow
us to edit the handles of both anchor points
at the same time and make a really nice
smooth curve just like that. So this is a nice trick to making sure that you've
got really smooth lines. And lastly, with the Pen tool, a lot of the times when
you're building shapes, you want to actually
close the shape. So if I go over here,
you'll see that this white box jumps up and it says anchor because I've
got my smart guides on. And this little slash beside the Pen tool means that it's going to pick up
where we left off. So I'm going to
click that, which is going to allow me to
select this line. And now, once again, we are
drawing within that line. Going to hold Shift and
just click down here, and then holding Shift, see
how it snaps right there. That's thanks to
my Smart Guides, and now I know I'm exactly in line with the point above
it, so I'm going to click. Then if we come up here, we are going to have our option to close our path finally. You'll see there's a little
circle by our Pentool cursor. If I click there, that means that this is now a closed path. This is all one
continuous shape now, and this is where we
can change our fill, and we'll have a
nice shape design. Over here, we can either just
change our fill by adding a color here or if I undo that, we could have flipped the
stroke to the fill right there. Okay, so that covers
all of the basics, and now we're going to
move into practice drills. Practice drills are very
important because there's no better way to
learn the Pen tool than by actually using it. It is definitely one of
those tools that you will only get better at by
the more you use it. So if you rarely use it,
you're going to struggle. You're not going
to have the little nuances of where to put your anchor points and how
to control your handles, and those are the keys to what makes good, smooth artwork. So let's move on to
some practice drills.
4. Practice Drills: Okay, so let's start off with some easier practice
drills first, and then we'll move into
the more difficult stuff. The cool thing about
Illustrator is it has some built
in shapes already. As you can see here,
if we hop her over, we've got a rectangle tool. We've got our Lips
tool which allows us to make ovals and circles. We've got the polygon
tool and the star tool. What I've done is I've gone
ahead and grabbed all of those and made some basic
shapes for us right here. Now, I want to show you
how these are built and how to rebuild them
using a Pen tool only. What I'm going to do is I'm
going to click and drag. I'm holding Shift and
also the option button at the same time while I'm dragging and that will
copy and move them over online perfectly for me. The reason why I
don't want to draw directly over these is because I've got my Smart Guides on. So if I move to my Pen
tool here and I try and draw from this corner or
this corner or any corner, it already knows that
there's an anchor point there because the smart
guides can see it. So what I want to do is kind
of trick Adobe illustrator. So because I want
some extra space, I'm just going to draw a
couple little circles here. And I'm going to center this just like that,
and I'm grouping that. So Command G, and now
this is all one group. So what I want to do is turn
this into a raster image. So Adobe Illustrator no longer
sees these vector shapes. So when I'm drawing
with my pen tool, it's as if I'm creating
these from scratch, and I can still use
my Smart Guides because I find them to be
very useful. Show you why. So we're going to do is go
to object down to rasterize, and then you can either
have a white background or a transparent background because I'm using a dark
background in this class, and I'm using white shapes. I want a transparent
background or it's just going to make these
invisible on a white background. So go ahead and click Okay. I added these little
circles out here so that the Pen tool doesn't know
where the anchor points are. If I didn't have these circles, it would know where
this corner was. So now that we're here and you can see
that this is Raster, see that? The pixels. Now we can actually start to rebuild shapes
with our Pen tool. So a rectangle or
square is fairly easy, but there is a little tip when you're using the smart guides. We're going to draw
our first points, so I'm just going to click. And then dragging
and holding Shift, I'm going to click again and dragging and holding Shift down here, I click
one more time. That part was pretty easy. Now I'm going to turn my smart
guides off for a second. Command U, they are turned off. Now, if I hold Shift and I
try and click over here, I can try and get it close, but I'm purposely
going to miss it. Now if I come up here, even
holding Shift, you can see, I'm missing this anchor point, so it is not a perfect square. If I click here with the
circle beneath the pen icon, it will close the shape, but it is not a perfect
square because we missed it. Now, you can fix this by using
our direct selection tool, which is A on our
keyboard and we can select both of these
points and we can go over to properties and
then we can down here to a line and we can align
to the horizontal left. I want to make sure this
is set to our selection. Now it is a perfect shape. It might not be a
perfect square because it pulled it over here,
but it's pretty close. Let me show you how
to do it properly. We're going to go undo Command, Ed, command Zed, command Zed. Alright, so we're
back to our one, two, three points here,
so we're going to select this we're
picking back up. And now, if I have
my smart guides on, so command, I've
turned them back on. When I'm holding Shift,
as I drag down here, it is automatically
going to snap. There's a little pink line. It says, Hey, you are exactly in the center of the anchor
point at the top, which is great for me
because that means I'm going to make
a perfect shape. So I click here, and now I don't even need to hold Shift
technically, but I can. I come up here and I
click my anchor point, and now I know that this
circle has changed the color. That is a perfect square. We're going to move a little
quicker here just because I don't want to be too
repetitive, but it is helpful. We're going to make
this polygon tool. Now you can see using
my Smart Guides, it's selecting the dead center of the square, but that's okay. I click. I I try to
hold shift here, it wants to snap to
a 45 degree angle. Unfortunately, this is
not a 45 degree angle. So we're going to
let go shift and I'm going to click here where
I think it looks right. Going to hold Shift
again and I'm going to click here, let go of shift, and I'm going to come
down here and once again, we're lining our anchor points up perfectly because
of Smart Guides. And now if it come down here, you can see that it doesn't
always want to catch. It would be nice if
it caught that anchor point up there, but it's not. So let me show you
the next trick. This shape is a mirror, so from the top is the
same as the bottom. So we come over here and
we finish this shape. Now this is all one shape. So if I go option and shift and I click
and drag this down, I'm going to
duplicate that shape. Now I want to use my
mirror tool, the reflect. What I'm going to do
is click it and then I'm going to hit Enter
on my keyboard and that pops up this little
panel and I want to horizontally reflect this and I preview on so I can see what
it's doing. Click Okay. Now I'm just going to hold
shift and click and drag that if it was playing nice,
it would snap together. This is one of those things
with Adobe Illustrator that's frustrated me
for a very long time that still hasn't been fixed is sometimes even
using your smart Guide, things don't snap properly. These two shapes, especially
while I'm holding a shift should be snapping
together perfectly, but they aren't for
one reason or another. Sometimes with
Adobe Illustrator, what you need to do is
move things around. I'm going to hold Shift to grab both of these pieces and
I'm just going to move them around somewhere
up here and we're going to see if
it wants to behave. It doesn't click this. Wait for it to
snap to something. It's snapping to something and now see how it's
snapping together. Now I know that these anchor
points that I zoom in infinitely are deadlocked
on top of each other. That's the beauty of
using Smart Guides, but for some reason, sometimes illustrator likes to
be in pain with them. Now I want to connect
these two shapes. And there's two different
ways to do this. We can use the Pathfinder or we can use the Shape Builder tool. Because I don't have the
Pathfinder panel open, I'm just going to
go ahead and use the Shape Builder
tool right over here, Shift M on your keyboard. If we click the top shape and drag down to
the bottom shape, that will automatically
make it all one shape. I've moved back over
to my selection tool, and there you go. We've got a nice,
perfect polygon. So now let's talk
about creating a star. One of the things that
you should do to create perfect artwork is to try and think a little bit
outside of the box. So if you're going
to make the star, you would probably click here, and then maybe not holding shift because of the angle,
you're going to click here. Now I hold Shift to
get a straight line. This is probably how most
people would do it, right? Now, let's pretend we didn't have the star
directly behind us. Let's move over here
and try this again. Here's where things get tricky. I want this line to look like it's extending
perfectly down, right? I don't really know where
that is. I can visualize it. I can kind of guess
maybe it's that angle. And now, you know, these lines, if I drag this here, those
aren't in the same spot. They're not in the
same angle. No good. So this is where you have
to think outside the box sometimes when you're
building your shapes. So if I click here at this very top point and I come all the way down because this line is all the same, all
the way down here. And now we could come
all the way up here. We're building this
kind of how you would draw it theoretically, that's one option, and then you could hold Shift and come
all the way over here. This is not a bad execution
of it. We could mirror that. Another option would be to undo that if I click here and I
bring it all the way up here. I know with my ser guides and I'm snapping to the
center point at the top. So what I would probably
do is bring it up here, and now using the same system I just showed you
on that polygon, we mirror this vertically.
Hope it snaps. Thank you. I did snap.
Use our Shape Builder. Now we know that this is
perfect mirror image, and now we can drag here, hold shift over here. I would probably
bring this right down at that point, see
it snaps to that. We know that that is
nice and perfect. Selecting both of
those pieces together, we draw and there you go.
You have a perfect star. We could have done that even
without the star behind us, it would have been
really nice smooth, easy to do design because we thought a little bit outside the box on how we
built that shape. Okay, now we get into
the more tricky part, especially for
people that haven't used the Pen tool very much. I want to show you a tip that
I'll use once in a while, and that is to look
at a pre built shape that Adobe Illustrator
has already made. So here is a circle. So if I'm using my
direct selection tool, which is AMI keyboard, I'm selecting this and you can see where the anchor points are. There's one at the
bottom middle, one at the side middle, the other side middle,
the top middle. There's nothing.
There's not 50 points. That's another big mistake
that beginners use. They make way too many points. The goal in building
the shape is to try and use as few anchor
points as possible. Now we can't really tell
where the handles are here. This is where that
setting change is helpful that I talked about at the beginning
of the class. If we go to Illustrator settings and then down to Selection
and Anchor displays, right here, show handles when multiple anchors are selected. I turn that on this time. Click Okay. And now you can see the handlebars
have popped up for me, and I can look at
another shape that was built by Adobe Illustrator
using the Ellipse tool, and I can see essentially
how a circle was built. So then knowing
this information, this is how we would build
our circle with the Pen tool. Now, of course, this is one of those drills that is
really just for practice. If I were going
to make a circle, I wouldn't use the pen tool. I would use the Ellipse tool. But that doesn't matter. The point is you're
trying to learn how to make perfect
smooth curves, and if you can learn
how to make a circle really smoothly yourself, then it'll be very useful
later down the line, even when you're
making semicircles or different types of curves. So starting at the top
here, I'm going to click and drag my handlebars
out just like so. We don't have to worry about
being perfect just yet. You will see what I
mean in a moment. I'm going to guess the middle somewhere around here,
click and drag out. Guess this middle is
somewhere around here. Look, Snap, click and
drag that guy way out. Once again, as I've shown, I would actually
then turn this into a half circle so that
we can finance it, make it perfect,
and then mirror it. Now, you can see here
what I'm getting is because my
handlebrs dragged out, I'm getting this funny shape, so it's not going to
make a nice smooth line. I'm going to do is hold
option and I'm going to grab this handle over here and I'm going to drag it
right back onto there. Again, because my
Smart Guides are on, it snaps perfectly there. Now I can click
this anchor point, come up here and I know I
have a dead straight line. Now let's turn this fill over here to red so you can actually
see what we're doing. Let's make the stroke smaller because we want to
be really accurate. What I done there wasn't bad. It was actually pretty
reasonably good. But what we want to do
is try and fins this. Using my direct selection tool, that's A on my keyboard, I'm going to select
this top anchor point and I'm going to drag this handle and now we can come over here
and sort of look. Going back to my pen tool, I'm going to hold
the option button click and drag on this
anchor and hold Shift. And this will make
sure that the top and bottom anchor points are being pulled
exactly the same. You see, it's a
little off there. So I'm going to pull this in just a little bit.
Another trick you can do. And again, I hope this
is something that Adobe Illustrator fixes one day, or at least I don't know how
to do it if anyone does. But you can drag
this over here and kind of guess where that is. The end of that anchor point. Now, if we click
here, I can actually drag this handle right back and then come in
here till it snaps. And then I can come down here, click this one and drag it, and then I know that these two are dead in line
with each other, and that makes this
part a little easier. Another option that
we could have done is actually make the circle in four different
quadrants and then mirrored each quadrant to
make the full picture. That's an easy way
to make sure that your handles are
in the same spot. We could have done
that with some of the other shapes as well. Again, this is getting
pretty overkill, but I like to make them
as accurate as I can. Coming over here to
this anchor point, if I click and drag down
and click and drag back up. Do you see if we're
really settled now, I know that that is exactly
in the center of this shape. Now, there are times where this isn't going to
work as smoothly, but sometimes you want to hold option and you want
to move one anchor. I'm going to hold shift, so it's just moving straight
up and down. And this is okay, but what's going to happen sometimes if you
don't want it to is it's not going to have
a perfectly smooth angle. I don't know if you're going
to be able to see this. It's kind of a weird
little point here. It's not as smooth as
I'd like it to be. And that's why it's best when you can when it works for the shape
that you're building. If we click and
drag holding shift, and we move both handlebars
out the same exact amount, you're going to have
a nicer curve here. It's going to be
symmetrical and smooth. So I'm pretty happy with this. Again, you could finesse it
night and day to make sure every little part
of it is perfect, but I think this is okay. With this selected, I'm
going to hit Shift X, which is going to move
my stroke to my fill. Now I'm going to click
and drag holding option. We're going to do
that reflect tool. I'm going to use a little
action that I set up, which is F two on my
keyboard and it allows this to just do it
automatically for me. If you want to learn
more about setting up cool actions like that, I actually have a class on it and I have shown
exactly how I set up my favorite actions so that those little things that take a couple clicks I
can do really fast. All right, so let's
go ahead and try the four quadrant idea. Since that we'll make sure that our shapes and our handlebars
are all really equal. I'm going to pick
basically where I think the center is of this shape. This part's a bit tricky because I might not
be nailing this. Then here I'm going to click and I'm going to drag out with my option key and shift held down to pull
out this handle. I'm going to come
over here and again, using my option key held down, I'm going to click and drag this out to sort of move
out that handle. Now I'm going to hit Shift X to swap my fill in my stroke. And here we can finss this
until we're 100% happy. If we're happy with
this, for example, we'll ShiftEx again
and now I can simply mirror it just like this can use my Shape Builder
tool and I can do it again. And look, it snapped. Again, we didn't nail
the center point, so that's why this
is a little bit off. In this case, we'll
just stretch that out, but it's pretty darn close. What's good about that
is we know now that the handles are about
the same in all spots. We see that this is exactly lined up with this because
we just mirrored it. I can pull up my ruler
here for my guides, which I could have
done earlier too. I used to box instead. But I'm just pulling
this over so now see how you can see that these are exactly line with each other. That's a nice way to do
it just by mirroring and uniting those quadrants using either the pathfinder or
the shape build a tool. It's again, a little bit counterintuitive
and it feels weird, but that's a good
way to make sure your shapes are really
clean and accurate. Now I can reflect this left and right and up and
down and you can't even see that the shape is
moving at all because it's that accurate in all directions. Now that I check that, let's go ahead and clear these guides. We'll go to view down to guides, clear guides and that gets
rid of all of them at once. Now we have a pretty
good understanding of how Adobe Illustrator builds these shapes
if we were to try and recreate them
with the Pen tool. Again, of course, when you're making these types
of specific shapes, it's actually best to
just use the shape tools. They'll be more
efficient and more accurate than using
the Pen tool, but it's great practice and it's a great first practice drill before we move into
something more complicated, which is recreating
a famous logo using only the Pen tool.
5. The Bézier Game: Okay, now it is time
for the Bezier game. This website is a
little known website that has been around for as long as this class
has been around. I originally released it, I
believe over nine years ago, and this website was out then, and I think it's
still the same now. It's actually a
pretty cool tool. It has flaws, and I'll explain
those to you as we go. It has some points where you could develop
some bad habits, but I'll try and
explain those to you and we'll move along. I'm not going to
do every game here because it would just
be too time consuming. Maybe I'll do a
live stream one day on YouTube or
something if you want. Okay, so we're going to click here going to hold
Shift, of course, as we've done in our class, and we're going
to come down here holding Shift and click. Now, doing the same thing here, which is cool is this house uses a 45 degree angle and then it
is using 90 degree angles. It's not worried about if one side is perfectly
mirred to the other side. I actually missed
the node at the top again because I don't have
Smart Guides on this website. But it's showing you the
good habits of where to click and drag
out holding Shift, your anchors so that your anchors are
basically in line and is helping you just kind of understand
how the tools work. Okay, so this shape is
actually quite complicated. It's not that easy to
do with only two nodes. Now, you could do it with more, and I think it could
be acceptable, but it is good to use as few anchor points as possible when you're
creating something, and this is a good way
to show you how to split your handlebars
because you don't always want them to be dead
in line with each other. So before we click this point,
this is the tricky part. You actually have to hold Option or before you even
click this point. Holding option and
I click and drag. And what I'm dragging here
is not my actual line. It is simply the handleb that
will guide my actual line. That's where it's tricky. I haven't shown you
that really yet. So if we let go there, now
we're drawing our real line, and I'm not holding
a shift anymore. And now I want to
click and drag and it's showing you roughly
where that anchor point goes. And here I'm still holding. This is now where you
bring in my option or Alt. I'm going to drag this up again. This is just the
anchor. It's the guide. And now we're going to
click this last point. We don't need the option, and we're going to
drag out there. Okay, so now that we've
finished the tutorial stages, we're getting into one
of the harder ones. And this is the only
one I'm going to do because I want you
to try them yourselves, and it might be boring
watching me do them. Now, this is where you could
learn some bad habits. You'll see when we
complete this car, it's going to tell us, Hey, we should try and complete
it with nine nodes. And the term node is
interchangeable with anchor point. And I know at some
points here I will call some of them differently. So a node is a point the
same as an anchor point, and then we have the
handles that get dragged out from the
AnchorPoint slash node. There's different terms for it. It depends on the software and there's old
school, new school, and so sometimes I
accidentally use them interchangeably.
To make it clear. So I will show you
how I think is the better way to do this using
the Pen tool as practice, and then I'm going to
show In Adobe Illustrator how to actually
build this shape. And sometimes to
use the Pen tool, the best is to know when
not to use the Pen tool. We'll get into that
in just a moment. So once you start here, the more obvious way
to do this is we're holding our shift and
we're making our points. Now, of course, I would
just continue this along, but the game is not
going to allow that. The game actually wants
you to do click here and hold out to drag
out our handlebar. Then come up here and click
and drag out a handlebar, and then that way you're
using less nodes. Now the problem with
this is that this is clearly a very poor shape. I actually wouldn't
execute it this way because it's more
margin for error. Now, if I could
bring on my rulers, I could get these handlebars in line with each other and there'd be lots of ways to improve this. But this game won't allow that. I'll show you how
I would actually do it even just in this game. I would start by clicking here, just doing as I did before. What I would actually do
is add that extra anchor point and go in the middle
and then click and drag. And then I know that that
wheels in nice round shape. So these are the instances
where sometimes using a little more anchor
points or nodes as they're showing here is inconvenient
but works well. I'm using option, I'm clicking and dragging this handle
by our way up here. I'm really just
trying to guess it. You can see I overshot it. And that's another
flaw with this game is I don't think it's going to let me come back and fix that. If we command Z that, I'm going to drag this and I'm going to have to try and
just cheat it for now. I'd rather do that
either straight up. But again, I'll show
you how I would do this in Adobe Illustrator
in just a moment. There we go. Not bad. See, it's saying I use 15 notes. I could get it down
even less to do a nine, you'd actually have to
round these bumpers, which looks inaccurate
to the original drawing. That's where the bad
habits could start. Now with the screen captured
image in Adobe Illustrator, I'll show you how I would
actually build this. Again, this is when to not use the pen tool
compared to when to use it. I would simply make a rectangle here and I would
drag it all the way out just like that for bumpers then I would
use the Ellipse tool, which is L on my keyboard. And I would click and drag. I like to hold Option and
Shift at the same time. That allows me to drag
out from the middle. Then of course, we
can move these over. Want it to be about in the
center of these lines. And then using option and shift, I to click and drag over to
bring that wheel over there. And so, of course, that's
a better way to make sure that those shapes are going to work
really well for us. Okay, so now we want to
do the roof of the car, and I can see how this is probably getting
pretty distracting. In different workspaces,
the embed buttons up here, but because we're using
this essential workspace, it's kind of hidden. So we're going to go
to a window down to links. There's our image. We're going to hit these three
lines and go embed images. Then I'm going to take it
a step further and I'm going to go Command
and the number two, which actually locks that image, so it's not selectib anymore and that gets a little less
distracting to look at. This shape for the
roof is crazy. It's not really a smooth curve. If anything, I would probably
want to smooth it out. Right here, it doesn't
look that smooth to me. Anyway, I would
start here probably. Click and drag. Again,
if we can do it the shift way that is nice
and nice and straight. Now I'm holding
options so that I can move my handlebar
up to here, letting go and then I'm going to click to put down my point. Now, if I can, I'd like
to do this all in one and we're probably going to forego the horizontal vertical rule. You can see, is it not
exactly how they have it. But to me, this is
actually a cleaner, smoother line, so I think
it's an improvement. I'm going to hold
option to move this over and then I'll just click a point in here
and then over here. Now we can select the
entire car and we can use our Shape Builder tool
like we've been using, or we can use Pathfinder. I only haven't been
showing Pathfinder because it's just
another panel to open, but we can go to Window
and a Pathfinder. It's actually something
I use more than the Shape Builder
just because it's the old school way
and I'm used to it. And right up here, we have the Unite button and that will actually combine
all of these shapes all at once without
having to click and drag and scratch all over it with
our Shape Builder tool. Pathfinder is very useful and I taught an
entire class on it. You can check that
out in my profile. But there you go. That's
how I build this car. It's a lot smoother,
cleaner, faster and easier. But the whole point of
the website, of course, is to just give you practice with using the Pen
tool specifically. I want to give you a
little bit of context that sometimes it is
better to use shapes. In fact, almost all the time, if you can get away
with using a shape instead of using the
pen tool, do it. But the combination of
shapes with the pen tool is the ultimate way probably to build any shape
that you need.
6. Drawing A Logo: Okay, so it's time to get into a much more challenging
shape to try and draw. What's great about this logo in particular is that
it's not an easy shape to draw just using
the Ellipse tool or the rectangle tool. You could if you
really wanted to, but it's really a great logo to make with the Pen
tool, no matter what. So it's a great example of what you would want to
build using the Pen tool, and we'll see if we can do it. There's lots of challenges. And I'm going to show
you some tips to make sure that your
handlebars are in the right positions
to try and make your curves as
smooth as possible. So the first thing that
we want to do is get our vector Apple logo
that we can trace. So what's cool about
this is that it's actually already existing
inside of a font. So if I use my type
tool here and we can just leave that to
the default um Ipsum, change that to white here and
go over to my properties, and I'm going to make
sure that I have Helvetica selected,
just regular Helvetica. We're going to go to type
and then down to Glyphs, and we're going to
select all this type, and we're going to
double click this Apple logo here in our glyphs. That will give us the
vector apple logo, which is what I've
done here already. What's great about this
is it's a good way to reverse engineer how
something was built. Now, a lot of fonts are not
built in Adobe Illustrator, they're built using
font specific software. But still, most
of the time, it's a good way that you
can dissect a font. Here's a good example here. If we just type in hello, and we have this in
a nice script font. You can actually just go
Command Shift O to turn this into outlines just like I was going to do with the
Apple logo there. Now we can see how
the font was built. Now, you will see that with some fonts that are cheaper
and purchased online, they tend to be a
little less precise. But if you go with an
old school classic font, you're going to
see the difference between a really high
level font creator. Let's undo this. Let's go to an old school font here
like Edwardian Script. Now, you can see if I
turn that to outlines, there's a lot less points
used still quite a few. There's a little more than
what I would but again, this could be the difference
of importing this into Adobe Illustrator from whatever font software
they're used. There's maybe a slightly
excessive amount of points here, but it still gives
you a good idea of how this shape was built. It's still a great way to
dissect how fonts are created, especially if you
want to do your own, especially if you want
to do a script font. So getting back to
the Apple logo, we've got our vector
Apple logo right here. All we need to do is
go Command Shift O, like I just did with
the other example, and that will turn that
into a vector shape. Now, once again, you
can see that there's definitely way too many
points in this shape, but we're going to try and
make it as smoothly as we can with as few
points as possible. So we're going to
just rasterize that like we've done
elsewhere in this class, and we'll go over here
to this larger version. Now I want this
image to be locked. I'm going to hit
Command in the number two and now that will locked
it so it's not selectable. Then of course, I'm going
to select my pen tool. Where you start on shape is
just personal preference, and I'm just going to pick
this top left corner. When doing these shapes,
most of the time, I'm going to try
and put my points at the apex of the curve. So at the highest points
and the lowest points. And the trick is to try and make sure that my handle bars, if possible, are on 90 degree
angles or 45 degree angles. And generally, that will
make smoother lines. I'll show you how potentially less experienced person
might use the pen tool. Now, it's going to
still look pretty clean because I've got this perfect
vector shape to trace. But what they may do is kind
of go like this, right? Just make a whole bunch of
points all the way around, and you can see
that my handlebars are whatever angle they feel like and this will work okay. This is an okay example
of a beginner work. And again, of course, because I have this perfect
shape to trace, I'm going to be a little
bit better, but even still, it looks a little unsmooth here. So the better way
to do this is to use as few points as possible. So I'm going to come up
here and I'm going to find basically the topmost
point of this curve, and I want to be right
in the middle of it. And another little tip
that I haven't shown you yet is I'm holding Shift
right now to drag this out. But if I decide, Hey, I put
that point in the wrong spot, if I actually hold
down the space bar, I can actually move my
original point around. I have to let go of the
shift button for a moment. But holding the space
bar, I can move that point around to
exactly where I want it. And then I can hold Shift again after I've let
go of the space bar. So right now, we're
just going to kind of imagine where I think
the handlebrs should be, and then we will
finest them later on. So again, I'm going to try and roughly find the center here. Going to drag that
all the way out. Now I'm going to go
all the way down to the bottom and drag this out. Again, I'm going to try and find the highest point of that curve. We'll say it's there,
drag that out. See, I feel like we
missed that a little bit. Now, this point, we'll just go like this. So
this is what I'm saying. My handlebars are now 90
degrees this way or this way, straight up and down
or straight left to right is the ideal scenario. I'm actually going to use my option key and I'm going to drag that handlebar down there, and I'm going to try
and make it like this. I definitely missed a bit. Sometimes when you
hit too many buttons, your computer thinks
you're doing other things. Okay. Click and we'll come
up here, click and drag. Then we will see how much
more work we need to do. Let's just make that
a little thinner. Some of this is
looking pretty good. This is where you can definitely spend a lion's share of the time finessing and it is going to depend on how
perfect you want it. But in most cases,
we want to try and get everything as
perfect as we can. This spot definitely
got a little sloppy, so I'm going to drag
this handlebar down. This one over like this. That's starting to
get pretty clean. Spend some time
finssing afterwards. But the main goal was to try and get them pretty
close to start with, and then you can do
your little touch ups afterwards like I'm
doing right here. This is where you go, I missed overshot
this a little bit. Most of this will just be
trial and error until you get more and more experience
with it and then you'll get closer to where you need
to be right off the start. You can see here I did not
use very many points and I have a really
smooth, nice shape. It's quite possible
that's actually smoother than the original
version that was there. Okay, let's do the top now.
Let's start at this point. Come down here and
we're going to try and keep this 90 degree rule still. That's pretty good. Now here, we're going to
run into some issues, I think, drag this up. Don't think we can do
this all with one point. You can see that the shape here is just a little
bit different. Instead, we're going to
have to put a point in the middle and we're
going to have to break our golden rule without
getting too crazy. You could add a lot of
points to try and really stick with your
rule of 90 and 45, but in this case, we're going to get pretty close this way. It's one of those scenarios
where if you know the rules, then you know when
you can break them. And so if you go to
Object Unlock All, that will allow me to
delete an example below it. Now, if we turn this all white, we have a beautiful
looking Apple logo with really clean lines. And yes, if I were building
this for a client, I would really spend some
serious time making sure that all of these lines were
as perfect as possible. Feel like somewhere in here, the gap doesn't it'd be nice if these lines kind of
flowed the same angle. But we're just showing
the example of what we had and what
we were working from. And regardless, we've got
really clean, smooth lines. So that is the goal when
you're using the Pen tool. It doesn't mean you have to do it that way, but if you can, you're going to have
better results more often than not. Okay. Let's move on.
7. Drawing My Pin: Without further ado, I'm
going to show you how I would go about building this pin
and how I did build this pin. I've got my original
here on the left, which is actually already
vectorized, of course, and I've got my right version here, which I've rasterized. So I'm going to show you
one tip that I haven't yet, and that is if we
delete this image here, I'm going to hit Command X. We go over to my layers, and I'm going to paste
it in a layer and go Command F. I'm pasting that
image onto that new layer. Now if we double
click this layer, I'm going to go ahead
and click Template and I'm going to
dim the image too. Let's even go down
to 25%. Click Okay. Off the hop, you'll notice that the image there has gone to 25%, as I told it, but you may not know what the difference
is with a template layer. The best way that
I can explain it is if I were to rasterize
this really quickly, right here, just like so you can see the
artwork right now because we are in normal viewing
mode, normal preview mode. But if I were to go Command Y to go to Wiframe
or outline mode, that image becomes
nothing but a rectangle. It's not easy to check when you're drawing
over top of it. Sometimes you need to go in a wireframe mode to
see how it looks. When you have a template layer and an image on a
template layer, like you can see here, the image still shows when you're
in outline mode. It's a really great tool and it's really useful
when you're doing complex artwork where
you need to check your resource because you've buried it with all
the new pieces. Command Y to get back
out of that again. Now I'm going to show you
how I built this with the Pen tool and with some of the shapes and the pathfinder. I will show the first part of it and we'll explain
how I did it. Then the next half of it,
you've probably got the idea, so we'll just do it in
a fast forward mode with some soothing
music or something. One of the easiest
things to start with, I would think would be the nose. We're going to pretend that
this is our original sketch, and as I actually showed, sometimes when I know
that I'm going to be doing it really
clean afterwards, sometimes my sketches
are very loose. So this is literally
my sketch for my owl. So you can see I hadn't put
a lot of thought in it. It was just the general outline and the shape of how
I wanted things. So to try and trace my owl over this doesn't
make a lot of sense. So I instead just
started building it right in Adobe Illustrator.
Sometimes I do that. Sometimes I'll have
a really thought out better sketch that I can
actually trace from. So in this case, we're going to pretend that this is our sketch. And let's pick something
that's going to stand out nicely and make
this our stroke. So let's make a box here. I'm going to drag this out, and now I'm going to rotate it, so I've got those points there. I grabbing these two
at the same time, I'm going to hit
S on my keyboard, and that means I'm
using my scale tool. Because I have just those
two points selected, if I click and drag, I can pull them in or out
at the same time. Then I'm going to
manually pull up this point and pull
down this point. Also, I have my stroke set
with a nice rounded corner. So we're going to
click stroke here. To make that cap nice and round and the corners
nice and round. I'll smooth that
out a little bit. I was using a bit
of a thicker line. That's another thing when
you're making a pin, you want it to be at least 0.75. If you can go one point
or higher, I was better. You don't want to
go too thin and too detailed or the ink
would fill it in. For the purpose of making a pin, you don't want to go too thin. Of course, here, I'm going
to use my ellipse tool. Now there are some really
new cool tools that I will show shortly that we
could have used instead, but let's stick with building
it how I would have. Got my pathfinder open there. I'm going to mirror this
and drag it over to here. Now we can basically do the
same thing here where we start with our
square or rectangle, drag it down and using
my selection tool, I'm just going to
delete that top point. Grabbing these two
points, I'm going to use the scale tool again to
drag them in just like so. Sometimes when you're
building up your layers, inverting that with
Shift x for the white, so it doesn't get too confusing, try making the white
a different color. We'll go yellow in this case. Now we've got our black, which I'm using as
blue for the moment. If you're not used
to doing this, things will start to get pretty messy because sometimes you want to add a fill and
sometimes you don't. In the case of this nose, since nothing's going above it, we can add a white fill here. And then I'm going to
bring it to the front, you can either go to object, arrange, bring to front, or you can use the quick
keys which are shown here, and it is shift command, and the right bracket. Of course, because I originally built this nine years ago, almost ten years
ago now, there's things I see that I would
definitely do differently now. But it's a fun little piece. It's fun to look
back and see how I built it and the decisions
that I made back then. So as I've already explained, I'm doing things
like holding option to change the angle
of my corners, and I've got my smart guides on, so everything snaps nicely. Let's give this a white.
This one I'm talking about. See how things are now I can't see what my original
artwork looks like. So now if I go Command Y, I get to see what my
wire frame looks like directly on top of
my original design. I could come in here and
refine anything I want to. And we're just going
to reflect that, unite those together into one big piece coming back
into our wire frame. Now I'm going to make the top
like an eyelid coming down. Then I'm just going to
finish that shape outside of that circle. Hit divide. With everything
selected, I actually deselect the thing I want
to keep and then I just hit delete and now I need to shift that
down to the bottom. There's a lot of ways
to do these lines and here's one of the options. I'm going to start
with this line because it's already straight. I'm going to start here, end it around the end
of this circle. Looks like it was shifted
over a little bit. This part may not be perfect,
but we'll give it a shot. Now what I'm going to do is
bring out my rotate tool. So I'm going to hit R on my
keyboard and then hit Enter. Now I'm going to
play with this angle using my arrow keys, I'm going to move it up
until it's about right. It's like 28 degrees.
I'm going to hit Copy. So it's going to keep
my original line and it's going to copy
a new line for me. And then I'm just
going to repeat that. Maybe I didn't do it this way perfectly last time, clearly. And then I go -28 to
get that last one. Maybe I didn't know how to
do this trick last time. All right, so just resizing and shifting these a little
bit. That's pretty close. I'm not sure why I cropped
it quite this way, but this crop seems
to be about right. I basically want to cut
all of these lines using my divide in my pathfinder and then tediously
bring those lines back. Okay, so now we've got that Deron will come in here,
I'll grab the eye. We're going to mirror it
using my reflect tool there. Again, we're going to
group all of this. And now we just want to
make sure everything is nice and centered
to each other. It needs to be grouped.
So let's do to the nose. We don't need that
piece anymore, and that should prove like that's all
beautifully centered. Now, again, if I were to do this again and
start from scratch, I would make this angle
match this angle for sure. That angle should be
the same, I think. Some of this is a
bit tight, too. I want to make sure all
of this is rounded. Just like that. I
think at this point, you've got a pretty
clear idea of how I went ahead and made my pin and
what my thinking was. So now I think we've entered
the point where we should go ahead and go into fast
forward with some nice music, and then we'll see you
guys on the other side. Or if this is boring, please skip ahead
to the next video because there's tons of
good information coming up. Okay, I think we got it here. Now what I would do
is bring this up. And because I made a copy
of it, we can destroy this. It can be all destructed. I even redrew my old logo there for you to see
it before I switched over to calling it Crouso design C. So I'm grouping
this together. I'm going to use Y, which is my magic wand tool to
grab everything blue. Command X will delete that, but copy it at the same time. Now I'm going to go Command A to select everything
else, delete it. Command F to paste it in place, and we'll make that black. Showed how to make
a brush in there. There you go. That
would be how I would make my final pin. I hope you guys found
that interesting. I know that some of you already know some
of this information, but sometimes
watching other people make things can be
a bit cathartic, but we did it in fast
forward with music, so it couldn't have
been that bad. If it was, you could
have skipped ahead. All right. Anyway, I hope
you guys enjoy this. Let's get on and get
into some new tools.
8. The Curvature Tool: Okay, so it's time to
talk about a new tool, and I think a good
way to show off the new tool is to do an
exercise that we've already done because this will
be able to allow you to see the differences between using the regular
Pen tool and this tool. This is called the
Curvature Tool. So you should see it just
underneath the Pen tool. It's a very similar looking icon just with a little
squealy line to the left. And we're just going to
come on over here and I'm going to lock this as we've done earlier in the class. So this is our raster image, and this is the
vector image that we made earlier
with the Pen tool. So now I'm going
to show you using the curvature tool how
to do the same thing. This tool is actually
really cool. It works pretty well for
this type of purpose. I think it uses a little more points than what
I'd like to use, but it does allow you to
get really smooth lines or smoother than you
would if you're a little less experienced
with the Pen tool. I still think the Pen tool is the way to go more
often than not, but this can still be
something to keep in your arsenal for
unique occasions. So we can pick anywhere. I think last time I started
up here, so we'll do that. And now what's unique about this is you're not going
to see any line. There's no elastic band showing you what's going to
happen just yet. All I did was click there,
and now I'm just going to come along to this part of
the shape and click again. Now, it looks like I've
drawn a straight line. But as soon as I start
moving my mouse around, it's going to start
acting like a curve, and it's going to show the
next curve and the last curve. So it actually is
going to change. So I could drag this
out before I click and sort of see what it's going to look like if I'm all
the way down here. And obviously, it looks like the curve is not going
to be very accurate, so we're going to
make a shorter curve. It doesn't have to be
absolutely perfect because it will keep
editing itself as we go. So I'm going to click
there, and then I'm going to come down
a little further. We'll just keep on
inching away at it. Again, if it isn't perfect, don't sweat it because
just like anything, we can go back and
clean it up afterwards. It's still interesting to see
how close it actually gets. Here's where we get
to a tricky spot. This is a sharp angle. The only way to get a sharp
angle and not have it continue trying
to make curves is to actually double click. I'm clicking two times and now it wants me to
make a straight line. This is great if I want
to make a straight line. So if I wanted to
make a straight line when I click again,
I double click. But since in this case, I don't just continue clicking once, and it will continue
going back to the curve. And again, we can do
it, double click here, and then don't worry that it looks like a straight line
because it'll sort itself out. So you can see, just like that, it's actually fairly
smooth already, but we can still go in
here and tidy it up. So using the same tool, and that is there's a little icon beside your
number one on your keypad. So if you hit Shift and that little swiggi that's
going to bring it up. Of course, you can just
go up here, click it. So now we can come back
and we can grab our points and start dragging them around
to try and improve them. On top of just dragging the points that we've
already created, we can, of course,
make new points and drag them in like so. You're basically just going
to continue going like that all the way through and that will clean up your messes. Unlike the Pentool, what's nice about this is
if I undo here, it will actually fix the
line before as well. That way, it is trying to
make this as smooth as possible and you're
not going to get as many crazy hiccups. Of course, down here, we definitely would
need to do some work. But this is basically
all you do. I'm not going to rebuild
this whole thing again, but this is the same idea,
just click and drag. You can see in the end, you're going to have a lot more points, a lot of unnecessary ones, but it does work and
it's going to give you a pretty smooth,
accurate results. Another thing you
should, of course, consider with anything
in Adobe Illustrator is using different tools
for different parts. For example, in the
earlier lesson, it was hard to get this
with one point anyway. What we could do is click here and we could do this
part with our Pen tool. We're using our
normal Pen tool here. You can see that
worked out great. Now I can simply switch
to my curvature tool. Again, we got to
double click here so it doesn't try
and make a new line. Now we could just work on it
like so we finish our line, we got a double click up
here to finish our line. That works pretty well, you can use the two tools together. The best way, I think to use the curvature tool is to use it in tandem with other tools, of course, depending
on the scenario. But it is a pretty useful tool, especially if you're
not completely comfortable with making
curves with the Pen tool. It's a great way to try
and make those a little easier and you can still use it in tandem with the Pen tool. That is the curvature tool.
9. This Message Will Self Destruct!: Welcome to a video that
will self destruct. The reason for this
is the QuickPenTol is a brand new feature
in Adobe Illustrator. In fact, it is so
brand new that it is not in the version of Adobe
Illustrator I'm using, even though I'm using
the newest version. What I mean by that is the
only way to actually access this tool is to download
the Adobe Illustrator Beta. Now when I make this
class, of course, I want it to last a very long
time, for the most part, all of the information in
the Pen tool hasn't actually changed in nine years since
I last made this class. However, this quick
Pen tool is a new tool and it could be a very
big game changer. For the moment, the only way to actually access it is
to download the Beta, which I will show you
how to do right now. Then in the future, when
they have actually updated and put it into the regular
version of Illustrator, I'm going to sneakily come back into this class
and just delete this video and pretend like we didn't have to
switch to the Beta version, even though somewhere on
there, it'll say Beta. But we'll hope
people don't notice. Maybe I'll block
out the word Beta. Okay, so here's how
you do it on a Mac. On a PC is a little
bit different, and hopefully you can figure
out those differences, but I'm on a Mac, so I'm
going to show you this way. So I use a little thing
called bartender, which actually hides a lot
of the clutter up here. This is not a paidad, but I do find it to be a
useful little tool. It just hides
everything under here. But I need to click that and up here is where my Adobe
Creative Cloud is. I'm going to select that that's going to pop open Adobe
Creative Cloud for me. Now, I've already got it here, but you may not see this. This I believe is only showing me the apps that are
actually downloaded on my computer or already using
through Creative Cloud. Yours may look a little different and that's
not too important. We're going to go over here and we're going to click Apps. Now, if you scroll and
scroll and look in here, you will actually not
find the Adobe Beta. It is hidden over here under this tab where you click Beta. Under here, you'll
see that there's different options and Adobe is experimenting with allowing us to use more Beta versions of their software so that basically we can pre test everything so that when they
actually release it, it's cleaner and
they can implement changes based on our feedback. It's really cool system
that they're using now. If we have her over here
to Illustrator Beta, you should see a button here
that will be installed, just like I can see
on Premiere Pro Beta. However, I've already
installed this Beta, of course, I don't
need to click it. But as soon as you
click it, let's just do this premiere one. You can see it says waiting
up here in this corner and then it should show us
the little progress bar of installing and
once that's done, I'm going to go ahead
and cancel that. Once that's done, you
will see an open button, and then you can go ahead and
click that open button and you will see the Adobe
Illustrator Beta open. Just close the Creative
Cloud box there. Just like that, we have the
Adobe Illustrator Beta open. Now I'm going to make
a little quick video separately of this to show
other people how to use it. But this is really cool. I'm going to show you
here in class as well. One of the problems
with downloading a Beta or for that matter, just upgrading
Illustrator in general is that you generally are going to lose all of your settings, and you may not realize it, but you work hard at
getting those settings and getting everything to work
exactly like you want. And then you switch versions of software and everything's
in the wrong place, and it can be very frustrating. So for example, I've
already done this, but if I went into
essentials and I said, Hey, I want my workspace, the
one that I customize, I don't want to
have to redrag in all these tools and
reopen all these panels. I can just be really
tedious and frustrating. And there's other settings
that I really want. But what I can do is
open my Illustrator, the main one that
I'm using right now. If we go down to Edit
and we hit my settings, export settings,
we can save this as whatever we want
on our desktop, so I'll save it right there. Settings were exported
successfully. Now if we open up
the beta version, now if we go to Edit down to my settings and import
those settings, we can click Okay here, find that file that we just saved, open it up and just like
that, it will save. Now, it's going to reboot the software for you to
have all those settings, but what will be cool is
as soon as that's done, once you open up a new document, you should be able to see things like your custom workspaces, which previously you
couldn't switch. Now my custom workspace, which I'm actually not using
for this class because I don't want to look
too overwhelming. Since there's a lot
of things in here we're not using for this class, but it's something that I use. It's an important part
of my daily workflow, and now it is
nicely transferred. Again, this works very well
when you're just updating yearly Adobe Illustrator as
well, not just for Betas. It's just a really cool, quick way to bring all of
your settings from one version of the software to the next version without
starting all over. So there we go. We've
got the Beta open. You can see up
here, it says Beta, and over here, it says Beta. I'm undecided whether I'll
hide those. We'll see. We'll see what I'm
editing. Okay. This is the self destructing video. If you got to see
it, congratulations. You're watching this
in the recent future. Alright, on to the next video.
10. The AMAZING Quick Pen Tool: Okay, now it is
time to talk about a brand new tool in
Adobe Illustrator, and it is called
the Quick Pen tool. This tool is insane. It works extremely well
in certain circumstances, and it's just different enough that for
someone like me that's been using Adobe Illustrator for a long time, it feels foreign. It doesn't click quite
the same for me. It works really well, and I think I would be able
to get used to it. But there's some things about it that are just
unusual and different, and I'm going to show you how
to do everything with it. So we're going to go over
here and you should be able to see it underneath Anchor 0.2. We've got our quick Pen tool. It depends on the version of Adobe Illustrator you're using. If you come down
here and we click those three buttons
on our toolbar, should be over here. If you see it over
here and it's not in your toolbar, go
ahead and drag it in. Once we've done that,
we can select it, and that is Shift
Q on our keyboard. Going to be really important to memorize some of the quick keys with this pen because it's got different ways
of being used, and you basically
have to know the quick is in order to
do it comfortably. So if we look up here, there's the ability to draw
straight lines, continuous arcs,
sharp corner arcs, which I'll explain in a moment, and then flip the arc
that you're working with. And all of these can be
done by using the keys. So as you can see,
each one of them has in brackets right
now a number one. This is something
they may change as they continue releasing
this brand new tool. But for right now, you just
toggle through that by pressing number one on your keyboard while
you're drawing. We go over here to flip Arc,
you'll see a number two, and that is because you
have to hit number two on your keyboard to actually
be able to flip an arc. The next little tricky
thing is using Alt and scroll on either your
mouse or your track pad. If it's your trackpad, it's probably two
fingers on a swipe and that will allow
you to increase or decrease in arc size. So we're going to
show you how to use this tool by building
ourselves a little ghost. Can be a happy ghost or an
angry ghost, it's up to you. Once we're done building
that, I'm going to show you a more complicated
example of how I might use it when
I'm building logos, and I will admit it could save me a ton of
time in the future. All right so before I
draw my first point, you should be able to see
a little squiggly line beside the icon. That is the Quick Pen tool, and that means we
are going to start with our continuous arc, which is the default right now. If you click here, and then I go over here and I hold Shift, this makes sure that my point is directly in line
with the last one. But I'm actually going to
release shift from a moment, and I'm going to
hold down option, which is Alton a PC, and I'm just going to scroll. This is what I was talking about about affecting that arc. Scroll all the way up until
see that little plus sign, a little pink plus
sign in the middle. I want that to come all the way up and intersect with my line so that means I've got a
really good semicircle here. I'm going to go ahead
and click and you will see that it has
built my semicircle. There's a bunch of
little arrows popping up and I'll explain what
those mean shortly, but for now, we'll
just continue on. It's now I'm going
to come down here and you can see it automatically now wants to build
another semicircle. It's for some reason
automatically defaulted to the
sharp corner arc. I don't know if I
press something. But regardless, we're
going to press the number one and get over to
the straight line. You could also click it up here, but number one is
obviously easier. So holding Shift,
I'm going to click. And now I'm going to
press the number one again because I
want to get back to the continuous arc and then over right here to the
sharp corner arc. Now I'm going to hold
this roughly there so that I can see that it's in
line with my last point. This is where I want
to invert that curve. I'm going to press
the number two and you can see it is
inverted it just like so. Now at this moment,
I'm not exactly sure because this tool
is so new and so I don't know exactly how
to make these line up perfectly so the exact same height and shape
and things like that. We're just going to go ahead and guess something like that. It's not as perfect as how
I like to make my art work, but it's going to
be an okay example. I held shift, brought it to that intersect, and we'll
make our point. Now if we again, hold the number one,
hit the number one, that'll bring us to
our line and we can finish this just like we would
with the normal Pen tool. We've got our outer
shape of our ghost. Of course, our ghost
should be white. The beauty is if you're unhappy
with any of these curves, you can come in right now, make sure the shape is selected. I' hitting Shift Q
and I'm going to grab that anchor point and
I'm going to drag it down. That's going to allow me to decrease that angle
to my liking. You can see it doesn't
seem to want to snap. What I could do is Command R, which is control RN PC, drag down a guide. Now I'm selecting this and
now I can pull it down. We should be able to get
it pretty darn close. So those are pretty
much in line. I think this ones maybe a
little wider than these two, but this is something
that we could finss and something to get used
to with a very new tool that's a little unusual. Here's one of the things that's definitely a bit odd about it. You can also make
our eyes with it, which you would think
would just be a circle, let me show you. If we make a semicircle
holding shift here, and I release, I'm going to make this same color
as my background. Let's make the fill that color. Now we have to go back to our
quick Pen tool, so Shift Q, before we continue here, I'm
hitting Escape and now you can see these funny
little arrows. Let's show you what those do. The first arrow here where I
started my first point will allow me to actually change
where that first point was. So it's actually erasing
that line where it was, just like you can see
here in wireframe mode. Now, you might have guessed it, that means we can
actually do the same thing with our
finishing line. We completely change where
that finishing line ends. Now, here's the one that's
a little bit surprising. This one, if we
click and drag it, we're actually building
another semicircle inside of that with two
lines connecting it. You would have thought, if
I undo that that you had have to click here
with our QuickPenTol. You'd have to switch over with one to our straight
line, hold shift. Then we'd have to
switch over to our arc, then we'd have to invert
it. Come over here. Click try and we're going
to have to use our option, try and get that angle right, so on, click here, get
back over to the line. Boom, that would finish it. You can see that I'm way off, but I could have made it nicer. Instead of doing all of that, that's what that quick
key allows you to do. Simply drag it out and that's going to allow us to
fill in that shape. I'm going to use my
regular Pen tool for some reason, I
unfinished that. I'm going to invert it.
But that's a cool way to make a little
happier looking ghost. I'm using Option and
Shift to cover that over. I'm not sure if I
explained this earlier, but if we have these
grouped, I use Command G to do so.
Control G on a PC. And now if I select
this background piece, and then while it's selected, I also hold Option, which would be Altona PC,
and then I click again. Now I have this back ghost
shape as a key object, and that will allow
me to come over here to align and make sure that my eyes are aligned perfectly to the center of that shape. So let's finish off
our little ghost here. My as well use our
Quick Pen tool, and I want to invert
this because I want it to be a happy
little quick pen. And could continue to just go over to one
so we can finish our line or we could
have just snapped to the regular Pen tool,
doing the same thing. I want to make sure
that's nice and centered, and there you go. We have a happy ghost. Now, of course, because the
quick Pen tool is so easy, this happy ghost doesn't
have to be happy. He can be angry and scary. So let's just simply delete these eyes and this mouth
and using the same system, we will go like this
to hit number two. Going to click. Now I'm
going to drag this down. Boom, that is one
angry looking dude. I'm going to use
our reflect tool. Group those two together, key frame it, center it. Boom. Now, let's do the same thing we did with
the eyes on the other one. Oh, he's such a sad,
angry, little ghost. Boom. I don't know what you did, but you made him mad. Move your eyes down, your
face, whatever you want to do. And again, using the
normal Pen tool, you can come in here. We can move things around, so we could round these points, do anything that
you can normally do with your vector shapes. You can just use them together with this awesome
quick Pen tool.
11. More Quick Pen Action: So now I'm going to
show the Quick Pen tool in tandem with some other
tools that I think makes life a little easier
and would have saved me a heck of a lot of time when I designed this logo. Through a client of mine called the Beer Farm, and
I'm really happy. I think this rooster
is very cool looking, so I'm gonna lock
that right there. Now, let me show you how
I actually built it. So over here, I built
my beer bottle. I'm not sure why I did this exactly and
then mirrored them, but then I combine
that and united it. This is how I built
my rooster body. I basically made a
bunch of rectangles, shape them together, and then using my circle
as my cutout. This is the old school traditional way to make sure
your curves are really, really nice, use the circle or ellipse tool
whenever you can. That makes sure that
these are all nice. So these are little
semicircles that I made. Again, just cutting
a circle out of another circle and then
that's how I got my feathers. I did the same
thing up here with these circles, semicircles. I made the hair out of that. Then, of course,
I had the bottle. This is stuff pretty
straightforward with some circles and strokes. This is actually my
initial rooster. He did not have
enough character. The initial idea. But
regardless of how I built it, let's try and build it
using what we know now. Now that we have something
called the QuickPenTol and now that we're more
aware of the curvature tool, there's a few ways that we can make our lives a little easier. I don't mind how
I did this belly. What I did, like I
showed over here is that I merge these
shapes together. I'm going to open up
my pathfinder here. I would have taken
these, united them, I could cut that out, got rid
of it, that kind of thing. Then grabbing here,
this is how I can get my belly nice and round and I can control how round it is. It's not bad. That
worked pretty well. I don't mind that. That angle is a little hard to do with our
new nice quick Pen tool. But some of these
other things like the tail feathers are really, really cool
with the quick pen. Okay, so I'm not going to
rebuild this entire thing. What I want to do is
show off how cool the quick Pen tool could be and how useful I might
actually find it in the future when I'm building
something new like this. Before, what I did,
as I mentioned, is I would have made circles. And of course, there's a
lot of trial and error. And one of the worst
parts about doing it this way is when
you make a mistake. So let me show you a little
bit of an example here. So basically, this
is what I would do. I'd grab these two pieces, use my pathliner or my
Shape Builder tool. Then I think I
brought this in here, rotated it, this kind of thing. This may not be perfect, but something pretty
close like that. I got this semicircle. So, you know, I was building
something out like this. There we go. Let's just
make those all one color. You know, especially if
you get to this point. Now, I always try and
save versions, right? I would copy and paste
it as I go along, so I can make edits. But now if we're at this
point and we decide, Hey, we want to try and change
these angles, Okay, it can be done
with the pen tool, but it's a little bit of a pain. So let me show you this is where the QuickPenTol is unreal. Alright, so having my
QuickPenTol selected, I'm going to click here
and come over here. Now we have to hit
two to invert this, and this is where option and
scroll comes in very handy. So option scroll get
that angle, pin it. Come over here. I got to hit
two again. Option scroll. Pin that and we
just continue on. I think you get the idea, so let me skip ahead for
a second for you. Okay, now, check that
out. We have got this rooster's tail
feathers all locked in. It was a little bit quicker, but what is way
better about this is now using this
Quick Pen tool, I can actually come
in and really start fine tuning any of
these curves. See that? I can really have really
nice smooth curves, and I don't have
to worry about all the weird handlebars
and things like that. I'm actually affecting the
angle that I'm drawing at another thing that's really
cool is this circle here, if I decided I wanted to change this placement
of this line. Let's invert this for a second. Not only can I do it and
drag it up like this, if I drag it and I
hold down Shift, this little clock appears and it shows 15 degree increments. It's telling me, hey,
I'm snapping this to exactly 15 degrees, which is really cool
to be able to have that precision and be able to actually use
math while you're doing. So that is a really amazing use of the Quicken tool in
my opinion, of course, we can continue using the
QuikPenTol or if at any point, we're more comfortable
with our Pen tool because we've used
it for so long. We can just bring on the
Pen tool and continue on, and then we can still
make edits with the QuikPenTol or go into our curvature tool,
anything you want. You can mix and
match all the tools I've taught you in
this class and more. And that's what makes Adobe
Illustrator so useful. It's gotten better and better, especially in recent
years, in my opinion, and now there are so many efficient and great
ways to build your artwork that you can do it whatever's
comfortable to you.
12. How A Pin Is Made: Factory Tour: Here is a behind
the scenes factory view of how enamel
pins are made. When this class was
originally released, I partnered with
a company called Apple Metal to produce My pins. They sent me this footage, so don't mind if
it's a bit shaky. This is a machine
they use to engrave the design into a
zinc alloy mold. They then take that
mold and punch it in a metal to create the
interior details of the pin. As you can see, the pin design is repeated on a sheet of metal, and then they use this machine
to cut the pin to shape, cutting it out of
each metal strip. They then put a group
of pins into a tray, and they polish them with
a large buffing wheel. Now the pins are
ready to receive ink. Surprisingly, this is all done by hand by
squeezing ink out of a bottle with a very fine needle into each channel
of the pins design. This is why it's vital to have a border between
colors in your pin. Once the pins have
received color, they go into these
drying machines at 220 degrees for 5 minutes. They then hand file or polish any last parts that may have been missed in the earlier PSA. Once that is done,
it's time to glue on the pinbcker to allow you to
push the pin through fabric. Then the class that would
go on the back is added. As you can see, the process is a lot more hands on than
you might have guessed. I hope you enjoy this behind the scenes look at
how a pin is made.
13. Thank You!: Okay, thank you so
much for taking the class before I
say my final goodbye. I did want to
emphasize that I've taught a lot of classes, in fact, over 36 at this point. And this page may look a
little bit different from you, but this is my
Skillshare profile page. You can head to
skillshare.com slash R slash Crusoe Design Code. Spelled just like
this CR USOE Design code without the period. That should bring you
here. This will probably look a little different
as each class comes out. I've taught a ton of
different classes, mostly on Adobe Illustrator. There are some on Procreate,
some on Photoshop, and I've tried to
organize them from newest classes to
most popular classes. And then specifics
like Illustration and improving your workflow. So please do take a moment
to go through all this. You can also find my
procreate brushes on Super Peer and even
more classes here. I also have an Etsy shop and
some examples of my work. So take a look around
and see if there's any other classes that will
be of interest to you. I know that if you
did enjoy this class, I would highly recommend you tech out my Pathfinder class, which is right here
at the moment. The appearance panel class is really great because, again, these are tips that are
actually going to impact your daily workflow as much
as you use Adobe Illustrator. If you use Illustrator a ton, then my actions class
or my speed course or even my super speed
course will all be vital to making you even more efficient in
Adobe Illustrator. Of course, you can
follow me on all things at Crusoe Design Co. Most active on
Instagram right now, but you can follow me on there. And there's
crusodsigncode.com that will kind of link you to all
of these various things. I also have a YouTube channel, and I do my best to upload shorter content to there,
as well as Skillshare. So maybe I'll talk to
you with my face now. Okay, thank you so much
for taking the class. It really means a lot to me. If you think I missed anything,
please do let me know. You can contact me on
all social media at Crusoe Design Co. Definitely
make sure you click Follow. It's somewhere on
my Skillshare page. So you'll be notified whenever
I put out a new class. And thank you, thank
you, thank you. It's been a little
bit, and I'm so happy to finally redo
this entire class. Hope you guys enjoyed it, and we'll see you soon
with a new one.
Jon Brommet, Crusoe Design Co.
