Master the Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction: Hi. I'm Hunter from Interactive, and I am a graphic and motion designer based in Australia, and we'll be teaching this course. Illustrator is a powerful tool that allows you to create scalable vector graphics. Using its tools, you can turn basic shapes and colors into illustrations, logos, icons, fonts, and many more the. Illustrators Pen tool is one of the most powerful tools inside the illustrator. It's the tool that allows you to create these vector graphics. But this tool can be challenging to master as a beginner. This course is made up of five video lessons, which teaches you the pent tool step by step. We start with how illustrator is laid out, and I'll show you how to navigate the artboard the quickest possible way. Moving on, we start to use the pen tool to create anchor points, paths, and direction handles. Throughout this course, you will follow a pre made template, which will guide you through using the pen tool and make the process easier. Finish off the course, I will show some pro techniques to make perfect curves and also how to use other shapes to make paths. When you enrolled to this course, you will be automatically placed into a community of illustrators and designers running through the same course that you are. So you may be able to ask questions in that group to get some answers from people who are a little bit more advanced. This community also allows you to share and gain feedback on your work. This course will take you from a beginner to an expert, and by the end, you should be able to make complex shapes. Inside Adobe Illustrator. Even if you know the basics of the Pentool, this course will have some advanced techniques for you to learn and to help you step up that Pentool game. I can't wait to see you in the course and good luck. 2. Welcome + Download the Exercise Files: Okay. First of all, I'd love to thank you for joining this course. There's a few things I'd like to run over before we get started. There are exercise files, which you can follow along inside this course, and they're really handy and useful to help you practice the pen tool. Second of all, I'm running a Windows computer, which means that whenever I say control, it means command on a Mac and lt is option on a Mac. Also, preferences are in a different location. On a MAC, they're up under illustrated preferences and on Windows, they're up under edit down the bottom preferences. You can also access the preferences using control or command K, and that might be a quicker way to get there. All right, I'm going to jump in and show you where you can get the exercise files. I'm on the page where this course is, and there'll be an extra lesson in here called Welcome and downloading Exercise files, don't worry about the draft. This is because I'm still uploading the course. So to grab the exercise files, you can come down to the section here, you can go about this class and down the bottom here, we have downloading the working files. Here, you can click that link and I'll take you through to download the exercise files. And also, you can do it under projects and resources. I have the exercise files under here. Another thing that would be great is if you start your project and you just do point number one of the project. You just introduce yourself, why you want to learn the penal what the hardest part of using the penal is and what is the hardest thing that you've found about the pento if you've used the penal before. You can create that project here, and then to complete the project, you will upload a screenshot a bit later. I'll show you how to do that. In the end of the course, you upload a screenshot of what you've done, and you can edit the project and upload it in. All right. We're going to jump into the next lesson, grabbing Illustrator. If you already have Adobe Illustrator, you can skip the next lesson. I'll see you there. 3. Downloading Adobe Illustrator: In this lesson, we'll go over how to actually get Illustrator and how to install Illustrator to computer. So you'll have to come to adobe.com and you'll need a subscription, so we need to come to creative and design and go down to view all plans and pricing. Now, as you can see here, Adobe Illustrator is 2099 a month. For just Illustrator. And you can see all apps, which is all these apps on this page is 52 a month. So you can see that if we just buy three separately, we quickly come up to this price. So it's a better value to buy all the software if you plan on using Photoshop in design and illustrator. You can also come to the Adobe logo here, back to the home and go creative in design and view all creative products. And you can see here, we can do Illustrator, and we can actually start a free trial, but you may want to do the Creative Cloud all apps. So we'll start a free trial, and as you can see here, you get seven days free, and then you get charged that. So it might be worth trying it for seven days if you haven't used Adobe. Now, it'll take you through that whole process of setting up an Adobie account. Once you've done that, you can come to download Adobe Cloud. And you'll want to download the Adobe Cloud desktop application. So if you take this URL, and you can hit download here, it'll get you to log in. So with your Adobie account, and I'll get you to download this little app and you'll need to install it. And this little app sits on your computer and it holds all your adobe programs. These are all the adobe programs available in my plan, and it'll have all the software and I can just hit install when I want to use one to install it to my computer. So you need to do that for illustrator. It'll be down in here. And you can just install. You can also update the software here. So if you click on that update available, it'll come to update, and you can click update the software. So that's how to install adobe and update it. 4. Getting Started with Adobe Illustrator: So now that we have Illustrator open, we can actually open our exercise files. So instead of creating new, we want to open. You can also open a file up at file open, or control. Now, we want to navigate to wherever you've saved the course working files, which you downloaded at the start of the course, and we want to open 2.2 Pen tool practice guides. Click on that and just press open. All right. Now that we've opened it, you should see across from the properties panel a layers panel. If you don't see that, your workspace may be different to mine, and to reset the workspace, you can come up to switch workspace. Currently, I have the essentials workspace selected. We can come down to reset essentials and it'll reset the whole layout. You can also do it over at windows, essentials and come down here to reset essentials. And click that. Now, we'll be using the layers panel, and we'll be using this top layer. If you've clicked this other layer and try to draw on it, you'll have an error or you won't be able to draw. So we need to be able to use that layer. So we select the layer practice layer of the top and you'll be able to use that top layer. Also, I'll show you later, we'll switch these two layers from step one to step two. Let's head back to the properties panel. And in the next lesson, we'll go over navigating illustrators interface. I'll see you there. 5. Navigating Adobe Illustrators Interface: In this lesson, we'll go over the illustrators interface and where everything is. Up the top is called the application bar, and we can find lots of settings in here. We can also find a control bar under window and down at control. And the control bar sits under here and it changes depending on the tool that we are using. Let's go to the type tool down here, and you can see it adds all the type features here. Let's hide that control bar. Let's go back to our selection tool. In here, we have the document window. And of course, the document name here. That a little star there means we haven't saved our document, and we can do that by pressing Control S or going file and save. Inside the document window, we have an artboard, which is the big white area. Now, Illustrator can take multiple artboards. This is the area that we do our art in. Outside the artboard is called the scratch area. Let's move over to the right here. We have panels. These panels are depending on which tool we use and allow us to change settings. Let's go back to our properties. You can also open up more panels under window. If there's a panel, I say that it's not showing, maybe like the pathfinder. You can come down here and find it under window pathfinder. You can see it opens a new panel up and we can click this top bar and drag it around. We can also snap it into areas. If I drag it to the side here, snap it in there, and I can just pop it back in there like so. So it's nice and hidden and tucked away. Let's open that, pull it out and cross it out. We don't need it for now. And of course, over to the left, we have the tool bar, the tools that we'll be using are the selection tool, the direct selection tool just under that, and the pen tool, we may also use this tool. There's some shortcuts to avoid using this tool there. And also down here, we have here a scale tool, and we'll be using that one there. If any of these tools are missing for any reason, you can come down to the bottom. Add a toolbar. If I scroll to the top, you can see that any of the tools that are graded out mean it's in the tool bar, and it may be also hidden under the tool and you can open that up by clicking and holding. If we find the tool, maybe the scale tool is missing, we can drag the scale tool back out, like so. If the scale tool is missing for any reason, you can click this tool here and drag it straight back into where it come from there. Let's click off to hide the tool panel, and that's it for navigating illustrators interface. 6. Panning and Zooming in Adobe Illustrator: In this lesson, I'll show you how to pan and zoom in Illustrator. First of all, I'll show you how to use the tool to pan and zoom, and then I'll show you how to do it the quick way using keyboard shortcuts. The Zoom tool is down the bottom here, and we can select it here. And to zoom in and out, you can click and drag to the right to zoom in and click and drag to the left to zoom out. As you'll notice, it'll zoom into wherever we start the Zoom. If I click the center of this corner here, and then drag to the right, it'll zoom into that area and vice versa, I'll zoom out of that area. We can also use keyboard shortcuts to center the document, so we can use control or command zero. Control or command plus and minus to zoom in and out. Now, you may be finding that your Zoom is a little bit different. We can get that to our Zoom preferences, bo pressing control of command K, and it will open it up, and I believe it's under performance and under GPU performance, which is the graphics card. It's got animated zoom. If we check this off, I can show you how it usually zooms in the old illustrator, which is by selecting an area and you can zoom into that area by selecting it and by holding the oltkey You can just click and Zoom out. Let's press Control or Command zero. Let's go Control or Command K back down to our performance and turn on animated Zoom and press K. Now, the quicker way I find to zoom is going back to our selection tool is to just hold Alt and use my scroll wheel to zoom in and out. Once again, it'll zoom into wherever your mouse or cursor is placed. So, we can zoom in and out by holding the key. The easiest way to pan is by holding down the spacebar key and left clicking and dragging. That'll pan. If we hold down the spacebar key, it'll sharp this little hand, and then we can use that to pan. Centering the document again, Control Command Zero. That's it for panning and zooming adobe Illustrator. And in the next lesson, we'll start creating Anchor Points adobe Illustrator and start creating this letter here. The letter A. I'll see you there. 7. Creating Anchor Points and Paths in Adobe Illustrator: In this lesson, we'll start adding anchor points and pars. To add anchor points and pars, we have to use the pen tool. The pen tool is three down from the top, and it looks like this here. We can also access the pen tool by pressing P on the keyboard. Next, we want to make sure our layers over here, we have the practice layer selected so that we're drawing a guide on this layer. We also want to make sure these two other layers are locked, and only step one is visible. Let's go back to our properties. Now we can change the stroke, and we want to change the stroke color so we can actually see the stroke when we draw over this ladder here. To change the stroke, you can do it over here, and you can double click this stroke background here, we can change it to a color that we like. Let's hit. Let's use our key and our scroll wheel to zoom into the bottom here. And so what I'm going to do is pan across. I'm going to start at the bottom here. I'm going to start at the anchor. We're going to plot a point by left clicking. Now we can pan over here by pressing a space part and dragging, then we can come over here and plot another point. As you can see if we zoom out, we've still got the pental is still connected to this line to the anchor, and we've created two anchors, one here and one here. Now there's a line connecting them, which is called the path. So what we can do is use that line or the penal to add anchors to create paths between those anchors. What I'm going to do is now go up here, what I can do is hold shift, which you snap it on a 45 degree angle. Let's go up to here. Click and we'll continue on just by left clicking in all the places, holding down the space bar to pen. Then what we can do is bring it to the top and just click and click here. Now, what I want to do is just press the escape key, and that'll finish this line. So now you can see that we've got this line from here all the way up to there and it's finished. The reason why I finished there is because we start having some curves in the next line, and we'll go over handles in the next lesson. 8. Creating Curves using Handles in Adobe Illustrator: In this lesson, I'll show you how to create handles to create a curve. So direction handles help us create curves in Adobe Illustrator. So what I can do is I'm going to zoom in. Last lesson, we press escape, which finished this line or this path. So to connect the path back up, we have to have a pen, P on the keyboard to go back to our pen tool, and we can hover over that anchor point. And you'll see that the tool changes. Right now, it's got a little star, and then it'll change to a forward bracket, which means we can select or left click on the anchor, and it will select that path again and we can continue creating. Let's use that key and scroll will to zoom out. Let's go down to the bottom and let's hold key to zoom in. What we want to do here we need to start creating a curve. And so what we need to do is we're going to come back up a bit just before the curve starts around about here. And what we can do is click, without letting go, we can drag out a handle. And these are called direction handles, and we want to drag it in the direction that we want the next anchor point to go. So we don't want to drag it backwards because it's going to create a loop. So if we drag it this way and we want to line it up roughly with the line before it, and we can let go. So, let's go to create a curve. This here is creating a direction of our curve. Now, we have a little handle out the back here, which you can see here, and we want to get rid of that because this line behind us is straight and it doesn't need a curve. So we can hold down the control key on our keyboard. Why we've got the pen tool selected, and just select that little handle and drag it all the way back in until it intersects with the anchor, and we can let go. Let's come around the bend. Once again, we want to click and drag this time, we're going to hold shift to snap it horizontally. We're going to drag it out that far and let's drag that handle back in. Like so. Now we can adjust these curves by using a control key. I can use my control key to pull this curve down a bit. I can also pull this handle back in a bit. Like so. And let's complete the shape. Let's keep going around, holding our shift key to make sure it snaps. Let's bring it up here, and we want to add an anchor point just before the curve again. And so this one will have a curve, which means we need to create direction handles. I'm going to drag it out to about there. I'm going to create a curve, and let's make this one a bit bigger. Because this curve is a lot sharper up the top, we want the handles to be longer than the bottom. Let's pull these handles back in a bit. And we also notice that the point here starts too early. So we can hold down a control key. Click on the anchor point, and we can hold shift also to just drag it back. Now what we can do is drag that anchor out a bit. I also want to get rid of the back of that. And then I'm going to drag this handle out a bit more. We don't want to hold shift there because it will snap vertically. So we just want to drag it out to about there. And we can also hold control, select that anchor again. Now I want to grab that top handle and bring it back into the anchor. Let's hold a space bar and complete the shape. Let's go up to there. Hold shift for this horizontal line. Put another point. Once again, we want to just before the curve here, drag. We don't want to hold shift for this one. We want to drag it in the direction that we want the curve to go. Let's pull this handle back in. Let's go around the bend and come to the bottom where it straightens out again and go horizontal. We want it there. Let go. Maybe we bring this handle in back in a bit and we can bring this handle out. Like that. Let's take this handle back in, control key and drag it all the way back to intersect with it, and then we'll come in here. To close the shape, you'll see that the pental has a little circle next to it, which means when we click on the anchor, we can close this shape. And so now this path has turned into a shape. Let's finish off the center by just adding three anchor points. Let's shift along the bottom. I'm not worrying about if it's perfectly on the guide because it's never going to be perfectly on the guide. Now we've created the A. In the next lesson, we'll look at corner widgets and how we can create curves with a corner wget. I'll see there. 9. Use the Corner Widget to Create Curves: In this essen, I'll show you how to use corner wgets to create curves. So what we want to do down here is create a corner wget. So let's use a key and a scroll wheel to zoom in there. We'll Zoom in nice and close, probably not that close. Let's press A on our keyboard. That's going to bring up our direct selection tool. That allows us to select an anchor point. And so we can do this one of two ways. Making sure the bottom layers are locked. We can Just click and drag across that anchor point, and you know it's selected because it's filled in, and the rest of the anchor points are white. You can also just click on the anchor point like so. Now, this little circle here is a corner wget. And as you can see, my direct selection tool now has a little curve towards it. If you cannot see this, then you need to go up to view and down and click Hide Corner Wget. And that will show and hide the corner wget. So what corner we can do is if we click on that little circle, we can click and drag out here, like so, and it creates a corner and it'll create a corner all the way up until the anchor point here hits here, like so. So now, there are two points in the bottom here, and one point up here, it's created two extra points for us to create that corner. Let's zoom out and that'll create the corner wiget. Let's hide step one layer, you can see that it's probably not as big, we probably don't want it that big, so we can adjust it and bring it back. Now, there are some other options in the corner wget that we can use. We can double click on the little circle, and it brings up this little panel. That's a corner panel, and we can change how the corner wget works. So we can go inverted, which means it'll bounce out and the curve will be opposite to what it usually would be. And we can also create a champ, which is just a straight line between the two. Let's go back to our round, it has a dimension, which is how much the radius is of the curve. Down here, we also have two options relative and absolute. These don't make too much difference. They probably make more difference in other options and make slight changes. We just want to here as round. We're not going to touch this because we can addit the radius using the little icon. And we can press, and we can create a corner widget. This will work anywhere up in here. If we want to create corner wgets that are the exact same as each other. We can select more than one point. So I've got that point selected because it's filled in. Now can shift and select this anchor point, and you can see two corner widgets that popped up. Now I can click and drag this and it'll create the exact same radius dimensions on both sides. Let's go control. A few problems that you may find with the corner widget. I'm just going control, going to go all the way back before we made the corner wget. Let's go P and add a point in here. Then if we press our A keygin for the direct selection tool. You can see that we have an issue with the corner wget because we've added an extra point, which means we can't create a corner larger than this point here. So we want to make sure we haven't got points in our line. In the next lesson, I'll go more over creating anchor points and subtracting them and how we can use them. 10. Adding and Subtracting Anchor points in Adobe Illustrator: In this lesson, I'll show you how to add and subtract anchor points, and I'll also show you how to add handles to anchor points that don't already have handles. So to add and subtract handles, we used to use other tools in the penal here. But since Adobe has had so many updates, we can just use keyboard shortcuts to access those other tools. So let's go and get our selection tool. Let's select this shape and press P. Now we have the whole shape selected and all the points, and you can see that if we hover over with the pen tool without clicking anything, the little pen tool has a little minus. That means we are going to subtract the anchor point here. But we don't want to do that because that'll connect all this from top to bottom straight down there. What we want to do is we're going to hide step one layer under layers and show step two, which has the curve, and we'll come back up to the top. And we'll add a point at the start of the curve here, and you can just hover over the path. You don't want to click outside the path where the star is on the pencil. You want to hover over the path with the plus. That'll add an anchor point. Then we can add another anchor point here like so. T minus an anchor point, you come in here and it'll turn into the minus tool and you click it. So a way to add handles onto our shape is with the penal also. Sometimes you may want to use the anchor point tool, but we can always just use the penal to do it. I can do here is hold Alt and you can see the change to that other tool I just showed you, which is the anchor point tool. And just by holding Alt, you can access that tool and you can click and drag up. And right now, I'm dragging in the direction that we created the line. I'm going to drag it like that far. We can also use this tool to pull in handles. So if I hold Alt, I can grab that handle and drag it back in. And that means we are splitting this tangent and the direction handles. So they're no longer linked. So we can bring that all the way back into the anchor and let it go. Let's add another point down here. Let's hold alt, click and drag this way. We're going to hold shift for this one, don't worry about that handle coming out the back. We'll fix that in a second. Let's hold control, grab that handle and pull it in, like so. So what we've done is added and taken away anchor points in adobe illustrator. We've also added handles using all the pen tool. Let's press control S to save the document. And in the next lesson, we'll use Pathfinder to punch out the triangle out of this shape. I'll see you there. 11. Using Path Finder to Subtract Shapes in Adobe Illustrator: In this lesson, we will create a compound path using pathfinder, and I'll show you in a second why we need to do this. What I'm going to do is select this inner shape here. As you can see, this shape is deselected from the outside shape here, which means they're not connected in any way. If I drag this, it's not connected to that center triangle that we had. So if I go control Z to undo that. Selecting the shape, we want to make sure we have the selection tool, not the direct selection tool. If I give this a fill, I'm just going to come here and default the fill and the stroke, and I'm going to swap the fill and the stroke here. Then we're going to come down here, select the stroke, and hit none. As you can see here, one, this shape here is in front of the black shape in the background. And also the black shape is filling in this area which we don't want. Let's change this stroke here to a f, switch it like. And if for some reason, yours looks like T. Let's go range. Send this one to the front. Your fields looks like this, all you need to do is select it, right click it and go range and then send it to the back. Now what we can do is select both of these, and we want to use pathfinder to punch this shape out, the shape in the front out of the shape in the back. We can do that by going to properties and Under properties, there is a pathfinder tab. This is the path finder panel that I showed you earlier in the course. If we go window down to pathfinder, you can see that it's a separate tab from the properties, and it has more options. Now the option that we are looking for is the minus front. With both shapes selected, and the shape that we want to minus out is in front of the other shape. We need to click minus front, and as you can see here, it punches the shape out. And if we go to layers and twirl this down, you can see that it's creating a compound part, and that's how illustrator creates two shapes in one and punches out other shapes. So now we have the finished letter A, and we can move on to the letter G, which is the next chapter of the course. We'll show you some more advanced techniques of using the pen tool and some quicker ways of creating some shapes. I'll see you there. 12. Perfect Curves with the Pen Tool: All right, it's time to jump into the next chapter of the course, and we'll start with the letter G. Now, I'm not going to show you all the techniques of doing letter G. I'm just going to walk through one technique which really helps your skills with the pen tool. That is to always keep all your handles horizontal and vertical. It's easy to manage your handles that way. I'm going to show you an example. And what you can do to look at the example yourself is 12 down step two, and you can unlock it, and G is the top one here you can just hit select there. You can see that this shape is selected. Let's go back to our direct selection tool. What I'm going to do is come into my preferences. I can go edit preferences, and let's go into general. What we can do here is come down to selection and anchor display. Now, if you're on a Mac, the preferences are under Illustrator rather than edit. Now what I can do is here show multiple anchors when selected. Let's check that and hit Okay. Now, with our selection tool, we can drag across all the shapes, and you can see that we can see all the handles. You can see that making a really nice curve You can use vertical and horizontal handles. These are all perfectly vertical and horizontal lay creating these handles. So let's go and do that. Let's twirl this step two back up, lock it. Let's come down back into our preferences. You can go control or command K. Let's go back into selection and anchor display and hide those handles. I don't want to see them. I'm going to hit. And we come back up to our practice layer, and we can start drawing that practice. So start at the top. Click Shift, and I'm going to go in this direction. And we can come down there. And we can just make our way around. I'm always holding shift, and we also want to place the points on the extremities. So the fest outside of the shape. So we don't want to place it halfway here. We want to place it down the bottom here like that. Can use a control key to edit the previous handles and continuing to hold shift to make sure that it all stays horizontal. And we can make our way around. Let's come in here. Add a point. Let's pull this back in. Remember that the layer below is just a guide layer, so you don't have to follow it strictly. So there we have it, I've run around really quickly and edited this shape and drawn it out. Now what you can do is if it's not that perfect, you can come in here and with the direct selection tool and you can edit some of these points by selecting the point and you can just drag those handles. Remember to hold shift and just visually edit it. So there's some areas in here. Another technique is to smooth it out using that corner tool. But I don't like a lot of points in my document. I refer to adjust it here because if you smooth it out using that, it's going to add two extra points. Let's come down here. Let's alter that path there. I think that looks pretty good. It could probably do a little bit more adjustments here and there. But I think we'll move on to the next lesson where I show you how to scale handles and scale shapes so that you can do the insides very easy. Okay. 13. Use the Scale Tool to Edit Paths: In this lesson, I'll show you how to use the scale tool to edit handles and parts. Let's go and turn that step two layer back on. It's a guide layer underneath. What I'm going to do is change my stroke on the front to a different color. Pick a random color. Now, what I'm going to do is come into here and click and hold on the rectangle tool. Come down to the ellipse tool. What I can do is in the shape here is I'm going to come in the center, click and drag. Without letting go, I can hold alt, and that means we can scale from the center, and we can get this shape how we want it. We're scaling from the center. We can get pretty close, and we can let go. Now what we can do is use the scale tool to edit this shape. So what I can do is come in here, direct selection tool. A on the keyboard. Let's select this top point. We can press S to access the scale tool. And when we've got that point selected, we can click and drag out here, you can see that by dragging to the right, we're scaling this shape up and dragging to the left, we're scaling it down. We just want to drag it to the right. Okay. And let's come A, and let's select that bottom point and press S for scale tool, and let's scale that bottom. We can also scale both points. In height. Let's straight down the sender, let's select the bottom point and the top point. Let's press S on the keyboard, click and drag down and that'll scale in height. What I want to do is just scale over so slightly like that in height. There we have that shape. Can also do it down below. Let's go L for lips tool. Let's draw a circle this time. Perfect circle. Let's hold shift to create that circle. What I can do Here's come in here. Let's select the two outsides press S. Let's click and drag to scale this to where we want it. Now, let's grab these points, and I'm going to drag this one up a bit while holding shift, and I'm going to drag this one down a bit. Just a little bit. Now I can also press S here to scale that up a bit. Let's press A on a keyboard, select that other side, press S. And we're going to scale up. Ver so slightly, and we can just adjust this using our keys now. There we go. Let's hide that bottom layer. Let's give the outside shape a fill, shift x to switch the fill and the stroke. And we want to make sure that this color is a bit different so we can see it. Let's change it to a lighter color. Let's select them all, go properties and minus front. Now you can see that we have the G. Let's change it back to the normal colors, switch the front turn stroke and switch it to none. Now we can see all the problems that we have in our shape. One, I think this corner here could be fixed a little bit. Let's bring this down a bit more. Like that. Also, we've got a little bit of a funny thing happening up there, which is probably that being too high. We can just edit it slightly to make it look right. All right, there we have it. Let's have a scale shapes and handles inside of Illustrator. 14. Class Project: All right, we're going to jump in and do our class project. So for the class project, what I want you to do is recreate a font. So what we're going to do is come into layers and turn off the practice layer, and we can lock that just so that we don't edit it. And we'll come down to new layer. We'll create a new layer and we'll just call this one guide. We'll come over to our toolbar and grab the type tool, and we're just going to click once, and I'm going to paste in a word that I've already got copied to my clickboard we're just going to paste in this word beautiful. We're going to use a selection tool and select the word and use this little corner here to scale it. Let's hold shift to keep the proportions, and we'll just make it nice and big and move it back into the center. I'm going to double click on that word and it'll bring up the type tool again. Now with that cursor like this, rather than that, we can select, click and drag across the word. I'm going to come back to properties, and I'm going to find a font, I believe we've got a nice one here. This is an Dobe font, so you can grab this if you want. And so I'm going to pick a font that would challenge my skills, and you can work up to something like this. Now, I'm going to right click it, come down and create the outlines. That will vectorize this font. And what I'm going to do is use this as a guide. If we look at this font, you can see that it's made fairly well if we look into it. So we can use this as a guide for us. Or we can choose to make it from scratch. So we'll make it a new practice layer up top. What you can do is lock that guide layer and draw over the top of this, using the penal, so you could come in and using what you've learned in the course, you can come in and start creating this. Now, what I want you to do when you've finished building out this new shape is we'll use this as an example. Or show the practice law. With your new font, what I want you to do is come here and we're going to select it or with our direct selection tool. What we'll do is go to view. You can either hide or keep the corner wigets. I'm going to hide the corner wgets so that it hides all those corner wgets so we can't see them. We're going to go to preferences down here, preferences selection and anchor point display. And I'm going to put the size up a bit, and I'm going to show handles when multiple anchors are selected. Click that and hit. That's going to show our handles. Now, for the project, we're going to screenshot this and upload it into Skillshare. To do a screen grab on Windows, you can press Windows Shift S, like so, and you can click and drag over what you've done to create a screen grab. And on a MAC, I believe it's Shift command four to do the same thing. And what you'll do is upload that into your project. So you'll need to edit your project or create a new project if you haven't already and upload the image into your project. That way, I can see what you've done with the pencil and see if you picked up the techniques that I've taught in the class. And of course, you can do all the reverse of that if you don't like this when you've finished with a screenshot, come back to preferences, selection and anchor display. Hide the handles. You might want the size of the anchor points and handles smaller and press and once again, view and show those corner widgets so that you can see them again, and Illustrates back to default. All right, I can't wait to see your projects, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 15. What's Next: Well, you've made it to the end. I hope this course has taught you how to use the penal, and you feel a bit more confident about creating pards in Adobe Illustrator. So what's next from here. First of all, I'd love your feedback from this course. And down below, you can write in the discussion or send us an e mail at info at Interactive do Studio. And you can send us an e mail, giving some feedback on what you thought the course was like. You can also leave a review down below. We'd love to hear feedback and we'll be updating the course to make it better for the next wave of students as they come in. Also, we would love to see your work. So if you create anything using the pen tool and you post it to social media, especially on Instagram, you can tag at Interactive Studio, and we'll give it a lie, and we may repost it or add it to our story. We'd love to showcase our students work. Skillshare has some amazing classes, so it's worth diving into some of those and enhancing your skills even more. Also look out and be on the watch for more of our courses. We're releasing courses, and we've definitely got a heap of courses planned for the future. So give us a follow and you'll get notified whenever we release a course on Skillshare. Anyway, that's it from me, and until next time, I'll see you guys later. Bye bye.