Explore drawing with the Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction: Do you find it difficult to manipulate your artwork in Adobe Illustrator to get the right curves and shapes. Hi, I'm Tammy de Zilva and I'm a surface designer based in Brisbane, Australia. I'm a digital artist and the Pen tool is essential to understand when creating vector artwork. It can seem tricky to master at first, but I can vouch that we've practiced in time. You will learn to draw with the pen tool and manipulate your vector artwork with ease. As someone who doesn't draw in a traditional sense, the pen tool is one method I use to draw digitally. In this class, I'm going to show you step-by-step how to use this tool in Adobe Illustrator. We will create some fun summer themed motifs. In a bonus lesson, I'll show you how these can then be used to create an art print. If you're new to Adobe Illustrator, you might like to firstly take my other class, repeat patterns for beginners using Adobe Illustrator, where I walk you through the setup of your workspace and show you the basics. This class is suitable for beginners to intermediate who know the basics of Adobe Illustrator. and want to really master their understanding of anchor points, paths, and the Pen tool. All you need is Adobe Illustrator and your computer. At the end of this class, you'll gain the confidence to draw with the pen tool. So let's dive in. 2. Class Project: For the class project, I'm going to guide you through seven lessons that will take you through different ways to use the pen tool as we create a variety of summer themed motifs. I will also show you some additional tools to assist you in the process. Download the file in the projects and resources tab so you can follow along with tracing over a sketch and a photo. We're going to create outlines for unnoticed first, and then we'll color them at the end. Once colored, join me for a bonus project where we assemble them to create an art print. Before starting, I want you to give yourself permission to take the time you need to master the Pen Tool, practice, practice and more practice, and you will gain confidence. Feel free to follow along with me in the lessons and create the same artwork in order to learn. Please keep in mind that any artwork made with my motifs is purely for learning purposes and isn't to be used for anything further, such as printing onto products. Posting on social media is fine as long as appropriate credit is given to me. Post your projects on the class page so you can get feedback from the class and me. Be sure to give someone else's projects some love to. If you post on social media is the hashtag #pentoolwithloopla 3. Straight Lines: Okay, let's get started with the pen tool. So the first thing I like to do is make sure I only have a stroke color and no fill so that we're only creating an outline. So head over here, we've currently got a white fill. Will turn the fill off, and we've already got a stroke set to black. Now remember if you have no fill and no stroke, you won't be able to see really what you're drawing. But don't worry, if you forget to set your colors at the start. Once you start using the pen tool, you can still go over to the side and fix that up. Let's find the pen tool in the toolbar on the left-hand side here we can see it here. Third down on the left. If we click and hold you will see the flyout menu for the pen tool. And we can see the shortcut key is P. Let's create a straight line. So we'll first click to drop an anchor point and then release, Drop another and release. And we can keep going. When we're finished. Click the Escape key. That ends up path. Now if you want to be sure to create a dead straight line, hold down the Shift key. While you're doing that. If you drag your mouse up and down, you can see while I'm holding the Shift key that it doesn't move. And once I take the Shift key off, it goes back. If you drag it up while holding the Shift key, it will allow you to also create straight lines in 45-degree segments. Let's create some random zigzags to get a little bit more practicing. So every time you have an anchor point, it represents that you want the path to do something different than the path it's currently on. So as you can see when we're creating straight lines, it's pretty straightforward. I want you to practice creating some straight lines and some zigzags using the Shift key and see how you go. 4. Curved Lines: Alright, let's clean up our art board as we don't need these zigzag and straight lines from the previous lessons. So using the selection tool, let's select those and delete. You might like to also turn on the grid for this lesson to help with creating even curves. So if we head up to view and show grid, if you wanted to turn the grid off. Can do that in the same place. View, hide grid. Let's create some curved lines. So we'll start with selecting our pen tool. First, we're going to click for an anchor point. But we're not going to release our mouse this time like we did when we were creating straight lines, instead going to drag. Now you can see some lines here and these are called direction handles, and they determine the length and direction of the curve. So the longer the direction handle when you drag, the longer the curve will be. Don't worry if you don't get the direction exactly how you want it when you first draw as you can go back and manipulate it. So let's release and drop. Second anchor point. Now you can see the curve. We're going to drag. Using the grid, we can make our direction handles be the same length and direction as the previous one, which creates a nice even curve. We'll click on next anchor point, drag release. Click on Next, drag and release. And again, we can hit the Escape key to finish off that line. The last example, we dragged on our first anchor point. But if you don't drag on your first anchor point, it doesn't actually give you any direction handles as it instead treats it as a corner. So let's try doing that in comparison. So I'm dropping my first anchor point without dragging. This time you can see we've got a straight line. Click our second anchor point and drag. You can see we don't have any direction handles showing on our first anchor point this time and the curve is leaning more towards the anchor point we're at now. Don't worry if you don't get this correct. I'll show you in a second how we can go and put those direction handles back on there. So just create this curve out a little bit more. Hit the Escape key. So this time if we use the direct selection tool, which is this filled in here. We then hop over to the Properties panel. You can see we've got these two tools here for converting our anchor points. So this one converts to a corner and this one converts to smooth. So let's click on our first anchor point here. You can see we've got no direction handles. The one above that we created first. And where we did do a drag when we first drop that first anchor point, it does have the direction handles. Let's go back on this first anchor point on the second curve and we'll click convert to smooth. Now you can see we've now got direction handles here. And now that we're using our direct selection tool, we can manipulate those direction handles in the same way that we do when we're drawing initially with the pen tool. You can change the shape of the curve by changing the direction. You can drag it to determine the length of the curve. And likewise, if you wanted to change back, we can click on a corner. And we no longer have those direction handles there. Getting used to manipulating the direction handles takes quite a bit of practice to get used to it. So don't give up if you're struggling with it at the moment, keep practicing and you will get the hang of it. So we now need to create some curved lines for use with our final motifs. I'll go back and show you the, the final motifs that we're creating. So we've got this kite and we've got the pineapple. You can see we've got a curved line for the kite tail, and we've got these curvy lines on the pineapple. So let's go ahead and create those. So we'll select our Pen tool again. This time we do want to have for the kite tail a corner anchor point. So we'll click, click a second anchor point. This time we will drag to create a little bit of a curve there. And again then a third anchor point. You could curve that a little bit also. And we'll hit the Escape key. To finish that kite tail. Now we'll create pineapple squiggles. So on our pineapple, we had four lines which we can just create one and then duplicate them. Let's create our squiggles for our pineapple line. We'll click and drag. Click and drag. Again. We're lining up our handles to keep them nice and even click and drag. We can even use the Shift key here on our handles. And that will keep them perfectly straight as well. Wel'll click, drag Click, drag. We had three sections on that line. So we've got to create one more. We'll finish that off. Click the Escape key to finish that curved line. So I want you to take some time practicing creating curved lines and getting used to manipulating the direction handles both while using the pen tool and later via the direct selection tool. Go ahead and also create or kite tail and our pineapple line so we're ready to use them when we combine them together. 5. Closed Shapes: We need to keep our pineapple squiggle and kite tail for later. So let's change back to the selection tool. We'll zoom out Command Minus. Select both of those and move them to the side. And we'll select those other two play curves and delete them. If you Press Command Zero. We can go back to the full screen of our art board. We're going to learn how to create a closed shape this time. And I wanted to show you what happens when you use the pen tool, where you have a fill set on it rather than just a stroke. So let's go to our fill here. And I will set a color for that. I'll go and select my pen tool. And I'm just going to randomly start creating here. As you can see, it's a bit easier to see. I mean, I'm going wild with what I'm creating. But as you can see, it's a little bit harder to work with. Versus if we had taken our fill off and were to randomly create shape. Let's go back to our selection tool and delete those two. Alright, let's create a rectangle. So go back, select Pen tool. If you can see here under the Pen tool before we've clicked anything, there's an asterisks beside it. So that always shows up when we're clicking our first anchor point. I'm going to click, I'm going to hold down the Shift key to create a perfect side from my rectangle. Click, hold Shift again, click, hold Shift again, click, hold Shift again. And as I get up to my starting anchor point, we can now see that there is a circle under our pen tool, which indicates that we're closing the path. And now our pen tool has gone back to the asterisks to create a new shape. So let's try creating a basic circular shape. And we're actually going to use this for the body of our Sun. So let's just pop back over here. We've got the body of our sun. This time, I'm going to click and drag. I'm going to keep the Shift key down to create it nice and straight. Drag, keep it nice and straight. Again closing our path. Click down nice and straight. Because we had our grid showing it was easier to create a nice even circle. Now let's create a star. Will go over here and we've got our star, which you can see. I've created it with curved edges. I'm going to show you a cool little trick on how to get those rounded corners. Let's just start grading our star. Just roughly create it. And we can then manipulate our star afterwards. Make it even. And we'll click at the top to close our path again. If we use our direct selection tool, Let's zoom in a little bit. So Command Plus click on an anchor points. Let's try and make this a little bit more even. Okay, now let's look at how to create a rounded corners on the star. First, I'm going to show you how to do that to just one of the corners. So we'll click on our Direct Selection Tool. Pick one of our anchor points. And you can see this little circle here. And when I put my mouse over it, you can see the little arc underneath my mouse pointer. I click and drag on that, creating a nice round curve. And depending on how far up I drag, will depend on how big that curve is. You can see that we've got two anchor points. Now, after we've rounded that point off and created the curve, Let's undo that. Now let's do it to the whole star. So using our selection tool we will select the whole star who then go to direct selection tool. And now you can see those blue circles on all of the corners of this object. So now when I move this, I can do it to all of the corners, which gives you a nice even shaped thing. Love you for you to go ahead now and practice creating some simple closed shapes. Create the body of the sun and the star. I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Tracing a Sketch and Photo: In this lesson, we're going to see how we can draw with the pen tool while tracing over a sketch and a photo. Be sure to download this file in the projects and resources tab so you can follow along with me. Let's start with the palm tree. Now you can see in the layers panel here, I've locked all of these images, sketches, and outlines so that when we're drawing with the pen tool, it doesn't interfere with any of those. So let's zoom in on our Palm tree. We will grab a pen tool, and let's do the palm tree trunk first. This one's nice and simple as it's a nice, easy shape. Will go back select with our selection tool and click the direct selection tool. Let's zoom in a little bit more on that first, Let's try that again. The selection tool, the direct selection tool. And now we can say all of those circles for our points. Let me just make that slightly rounded. Now I'm going to lock that path that we've just created, just so that it doesn't get in the way when we're creating the palm fronds. Let's zoom out a little bit. Right back to the pen tool. And let's start on our first palm frond. Click. Drag, release. And now you can see here that the direction of the curve isn't the direction that we're wanting to go in. So instead what we're going to do is we'll click back on there again and you can see that's going to make it into a corner anchor point. Click drag release. Again, we're going to click so it resets it. We will carry on doing the rest. So, Let's go back, click on it our selection tool. Let's hide the original sketch. We'll zoom out. We can see our newly created palm tree. Now, follow along with me. I'm going to do the same thing now for our monstera leaf. So I'm going to zoom in, get my pen tool and I will start. Let's hide our monstera leaf. You can see our new outline. To keep everything grouped together. We've got four different elements for our monstera leaf. So let's click on all of those and group them together. Go ahead and trace around the palm tree sketch and monstera leaf photo. 7. Practise Drawing: In the template, I've also included the outlines for the remaining motifs. So you can keep practicing with the pen tool. Follow along with me. Next, we're going to do ice block. So let's zoom in on our ice block. Here you can see that this has got rounded edges here. So for all of these, we can create rectangles and then round our edges on them to make it a bit easier. So select our Pen tool. I need to do the drag. Hold the Shift key down. Click and release. Hold the Shift key down, click and release. Hold the Shift key down click and release. And we'll close that path. We'll just use the direct selection tool just to line that up a bit better. Now, I want to create this curved top here for the top part of the ice block. With the Direct Selection Tool. Hold down the Shift key and select both of those anchor points. And now we can round that shape out. Same for the bottom. Hold down the Shift key as we select both of those two anchor points that are rounded edge as well. Let's lock that over in the Layers panel. While we do the same thing for stick. We don't need to create that same shape again, we can duplicate it, we will select it with the Selection Tool. Hold down the option key to duplicate and hold the Shift key to keep it in alignment. And we've got our second ice block. Unlock that, and group all of this together. We can hide. our original ice block. Let's go over to our flip-flop. Okay, I'm actually going to show you the smooth tool now because that's looking quite a bit wonky. So let's head over. Not under the Pen tool, under the Shaper tool, we've got the Smooth tool. So first we need to select what we want to smooth. Click that smooth tool again. We're just drag and click around there. And this will help smooth out our anchor points that we've got. You can see that's already starting to look a whole lot better. There we go. Okay, let's select that with the Selection tool again. Then we're going to duplicate it and reflect it. We can do that all in one go with the reflect tool. Let's double-click that vertical reflect copy. Using the Select tool. We can then drag that over and rotate that to fit nicely in there. Let's go ahead and group all of those component of the flip-flop. Hide that one again. Oh, look how wonky that is. Let's go back in there. We've got the script path. Let's get this path for the main part of the flip-flop it as smooth tool. Again, we'll smooth that out. That's looking much better. Okay, let's close that grouping and let's tackle the pineapple. Let's head over here. Zoom out a little bit more so that all fits. It's going up pen tool and create the body of the pineapple. Okay, and we'll create the umbrella panels. The last one. So unlock those and group all of our umbrella together. That one into the group as well. Okay, I just wanted to show you one other little trick. If you get a curve when you go to add your next anchor point and it's not in the right direction of where you want it to go. As I showed you before, you can click back on there to make it a handle and carry on. Or you can actually split the direction that the handles are going. So, to do that. We hold down the Option on the Mac or Alt on Windows. And either one of those handles, you can make it a split direction handle so that it's going the opposite way. Now, we got there in a very similar kind of way, just two ways of doing it. I'd love for you to go ahead and trace around all of those objects, have a play of that last little technique as well. In the next lesson, we're going to go over adding and removing anchor points and we'll tidy up these motifs all together as well. 8. Adding and Removing Anchor Points: Just come back to our original art board and I'm just going to show you how to add and remove anchor points. So let's use our selection tool and hold the Option key down while we drag to duplicate this squiggly line. If we go back to the pen tool, Let's zoom in. You can see if we hover over an anchor point, it brings up the minus sign, which will remove an anchor point. If we put our pen tool over a path, it will add an anchor point. And we can then use our Direct selection tool to manipulate that as needed. Handles and we can manipulate it in the same way as before. You can also use the shortcut key to add an anchor point with the plus sign or to remove of the minus sign, as well as via the flyout menu. Well, you've got add and delete anchor point tool. Now while you're drawing with the pen tool, you can also go back and delete a previously dropped anchor point by clicking on it. Let's go here and I will demonstrate that to you. So let's create a random path here. Obviously we're adding anchor points by moving forward. I can't go back and delete the last anchor point, but I could do that by doing undo. For any other anchor points. If I hover over them, you can see the minus sign appears and I can remove them. Then I can carry on with where I was at. Now let's go back to our art board with all of the motifs we drew during tracing. I've also added the other elements into this art board as well. So we might like to add some more anchor points or remove any anchor points if we wanted to tidy up the shape. These are all looking pretty good. Maybe just do a little bit of a touch up on a couple of things. This palm frond for example could do with a little bit of smoothing. It's got a slight little bump there. So let's grab our Smooth tool again and smooth it down a little bit. Also fix up the shape. Smooth tool again on the flip-flop. Might also fix up the squiggly line to make it even. So the top of the curve is at the same point. So grab my Direct Selection tool, drag out both handles to get them all similar height. Let's look a much better. Let's zoom out Command zero. And now we're ready to start assembling and coloring our elements in the next lesson. 9. Assembling Colouring: Let's assemble our pineapple and our kite. I think I might squished down as squiggly line here a little bit. Reduce the size. Let's move it in, holding down the Shift key so I can re-size it, keeping it to scale. Now, holding down the option key, drag it down once and press Command D, to duplicate. I think I might actually make that stroke a little bit thicker. Next, let's move out kite tail out of the way. And we'll create our cart. So go to the pen tool, zoom in and create a diamond Go to selection tool. And let's make that a little bit bigger. And we'll rotate that. Let's bring our kite tail up. Might just get the direct selection tool. And we'll change the curve of the kite tail to suite our kite Let's lock that path. when we add the lines, to the structure of the kite. We will unlock and group that together. Let's add some bows to our kite tail. Go back to our selection tool. Hold down the Option key and we'll duplicate. Now let's create some rays for our sun. So to make it easier to center our rays around the sun. Let's move out the sun centered on our grid. Will get the pen tool to create ray escape to close that that line off. And select it with the Select tool. Next we'll get the rotate tool will select a point in the middle as our reference to rotate around the circle. Click the option key. Click again. And let's try rotating that 18 times around. So we'll click copy and duplicate that command D all the way around. So that's nice and evenly spaced. Let's go to the Layers panel, select the rays, and we'll group them. Let's increase the weight on those and give it a rounded finish. Go back to our layers and let's group those and we will group the whole sun and rays together. Okay, Let's start to color all of our motifs. So I'm just going to expand up the Layers panel. Because I've got everything grouped into their different elements. Okay, I will just select all of the squiggles for the pineapple and group them together. Move them down into the pineapple group. And two bows for our kite as well. Okay, let's start with the sun, which we just created. Then, We'll select the body of the sun. We don't want a stroke around that anymore. And we want the yellow fill. We can then select the rays and change that stroke to yellow as well. We might actually bring that stroke up a little bit more. So they're a little bit thicker. Close our sun group down. Let's have a look at our kite. So we can see here on the layers panel, we actually want to move the body of the kite below the lines on the kite so that they'll be seen. Let's make our kite pink. Actually, we don't want the stroke to be pink, we want the fill to be pink. So we can actually just use that arrow here, swap them around. Follow along with me while I color the rest of the motifs. Now let's look at doing the panels of the umbrella cover. Let's zoom in. And we're going to use the Shape Builder tool. So Shift M shortcut or clicking the shape builder tool here. And we're going to color each of the panels individually. The first color I want to do is yellow. So I drag into that first panel. Second panel is orange. And we can see that has not quite worked there. And we actually don't want the stand in that as well. You can see when we're highlighting over here with the shape builder tool, It's not separated it into the correct segments. This can be because the anchor point isn't high enough and an intersecting with the outline of the umbrella. So let's undo. the coloring we did previously, and we'll examine the anchor points up the top. We'll click here. Let's zoom right in. We only want to look at the top part. I'm actually going to change into outline mode via command Y. They actually look pretty good. Let's zoom in. Maybe it's the bottom ones that aren't quite right. And yes, we can see that this one here, it's not intersecting with our direct selection tool. We'll click on that anchor point. Let's zoom in a little bit more. Click on that anchor point and bring that. Let's scroll over to the next one. We'll click on that anchor point again. Bring that over . Next one. Let's click the anchor point and move that over. Let's zoom back out again. Get out of outline mode, we hit Command Y. We'll select our group for the umbrella cover and let's try the shape builder tool again. Let's just check before we actually do any coloring. That's one segment. That one's still doing two. That's one, one and one. Let's go back into outline mode again and have a look what's happening here. Perhaps it's this one. Let's bring this one over there. And yup, this one is still isn't quite right. Okay, let's zoom out that again. Command Y to come out of outline mode. We want to make each of these paths also have a rounded stroke. And same for the main section of the umbrella. So let's go in there and change. all of those. Will select that whole group again. And we're going to use the shape builder tool to color each element in. So we don't want to stroke anymore. Pick our first color, which is yellow. Next color, orange, green, yellow, orange, and green. So we can see that each of the panels still has a stroke on it. So if we go into our Layers panel, we've got some leftover elements there. Let's get rid of those. If we click on each element here, we can see there's still the stroke. We can turn each of those off. And there we have our umbrella. Let's zoom back out. Command 0. We have all of our colored elements ready to assemble next into a fun summer art prints. 10. BONUS: Create an Art Print: The art work size that I've got here is for A4. If you wanted to change that to suit the size that you're after. Let's start by clicking on our art board tool. And you can change that here for our width and height. I've got it also sit in millimeters as the default. If we come out of our app or tool with the selection tool, go to properties, you can change your units here. Let's apply a background color. I'm going to create a rectangle. I've got my art board is A4 size, so I know that it's 297 mm by 210 mm. To make it white color. I'm going to align it to my art board so it's vertical and horizontally aligned. I'm going to arrange this background right to the back. And we can see that now is at the very bottom of our layers panel. Go back to our selection tool. I'm going to lock that rectangle layer in so it doesn't move around. While I move the elements. I'm going to add some text in here to say, hello summer. I'm going to go to the Text tool. Type Hello. I've got at the top here and pick a font to use. I'll increase the font size up here in the control bar. Let's make that a little bigger. We'll go back to the Selection tool so we can move that down. That in pink. And I'll create some, select that. And I might pick a different font for that. It is confidential, regular I might make that orange. To think a little bit bigger as well. I'm going to select our text, group that, and align them vertically and horizontally. So we've got that in the center. Then I'm going to move elements around. Next, we'll select and group all of our objects. And we'll align them all again to the center. And there's your fun summer art print. 11. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for watching my lessons and congratulations for creating a fun summer art print. Remember, it takes time to master the pen tool, so keep practicing and that will be the key for it all to sink in. We've learned to create straight lines, curved lines, closed shapes, traced over sketches and photos, manipulated our anchor points, colored our artwork and laid it out for an art print. Drawing tool is one way to create art without drawing in a traditional sense. If you'd like to learn about creating artwork with shapes and how to create a repeat pattern, check out my class repeat pattern for beginners using Adobe Illustrator. I hope you've enjoyed following along and I'm feeling more confident with the pen tool. Be sure to post your motives or art print in the project gallery so we can all enjoy your fabulous work. Feel free to ask me questions in the discussion section if you'd like to find out when any future skillshare classes are released by me, you can follow me here on Skill Share by clicking the follow button beside my name. Feel free to leave a review and let me know if you enjoy this class, you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook Luplasiges to keep up with what I'm up to or to sign up for my monthly newsletter. Thanks again and I'll see you next time. Bye. 12. Need more?: Hey, friends, are you feeling stuck or need some fresh insights to tackle a challenge in your creative business? I'm offering one on one sessions through Skillshare. Why not join me for a focused call where we'll dive deep into your specific challenge. I have experience in art licensing, director customer sales, and wholesale, markets or craft fairs depending on where you're based, in person and online workshops and more. Or maybe you need technical assistance with creating repeat patterns in Adobe Illustrator or Procreate. We'll work together to break down your challenge and brainstorm practical solutions tailored to your needs. No fluff, just actionable advise. To book in, you'll find the link below or head over to my profile page. I look forward to working with you soon.