Mastering the Pen Tool in Illustrator

1. Pen Tool Introduction: Hello, my name is Fania. I'm a French illustrator based in Montreal in Canada. I have a graphic design background. I've made quite a few logos, illustration in Illustrator. Actually, it's the app I've been using forever, I guess, to create vector based illustration. The pen tool is probably the most important tool that you want to get to know if you want to get skilled illustrator. Mastering this tool is crucial if you want to draw a nice and smooth vector. Today we are going to dive into that tool. Specifically, I'll give you all my tips and tricks to use it with confidence. We are going to start with the very basics of the pen tool and the other tools that you need to know to work and combine with the pentol, such as the anchor point tool, and how to switch quickly from this tool to the direct selection tool. Then we'll do some simple exercises to understand the gesture. And we'll finish with a doodle. In my case, it's going to be a flower, but any of your doodle will be fine. As a bonus, I'll show you a magical tool to colorize your doodle. You don't need to be experienced illustrator. Just basic knowledge is okay, and you're good to go without further ado. Let's get started. 2. Pen Tool basics: Okay, once you start your Illustrator app, you land on that page. Let's start by opening a new file. You might have pre selected files here, but let's create a 10 " by 10 " file. It doesn't really matter in terms of resolution, but we want to have enough space in our board. Let's click on Create. Before we start tracing our doodle, let's focus on the two different types of selection tools. The black arrow is the main selection tool which select the entire object. The white arrow is the direct selection tool which will select part of the object. It allows to move anchor point individually, like so. Okay, let me just explain quickly how the pento works. Let's select our pental, which is the nee right here. Or you can just press P for pen. Set your field color to none. The white square with a red line in the middle. At this point, we just need a stroke. Let's do it. Let's get rid of this one. Click to start a line and then click, click again to drop another point, which is called anchor point. Then push escape on your keyboard to let go of the line. Here you are with your first object that you can move with your main selection tool with a shortcut there. Okay, let's do that again, go back to our pen tool or again, press click where you want to begin your line. Click again and then click once more. You have now a line with three anchor points. Let's push escape on the keyboard. There you are. You can move your points any point right now. Let's do it again. Let's get back to our pen hole. Click to start a line, click again, and then escape. Now let's say that you want to start where you were. You are going to position your pen hole on the last point. And you can see there's a line beside the nib. It means you can click and it's going to restart your shape where you left it. Now go to the first point, and this time there's a circle popping up by your nib. This means you are closing the shape. Now you have an object made of three vector points. You can move your object with your main selection tool. All right, that's cool. Now let's draw curves. Let's remove these three shapes. All you have to do is the exact same thing, but this time instead of just click, you're going to click and drag. Before you let go, you will see handles appearing. These handles are going to define the curvature of your shape. These curved lines are called bezier curves. You can go on with another point and another one. Just click and drag every time, and then go back to the first point. When you see the circle beside your knee, you can click and drag to close, but you have to click and drag in the direction of your drawing. Otherwise, you see this is what's going to happen and you don't want that. You're going to click and drag in the same direction. Now you have a shape that you can alter, fill with color, and so on. Always remember to always drag in the direction of your drawing. This is important when you have a more complex shape to trace, and we'll see that in a short moment. Okay, now that I've shown you how to make hard angles curves, in the next video I'll show you how to combine them with the Anchor Point tool and a few shortcuts that will help you create end shake. 3. The Anchor Point Tool: All right, before we go any further, we need to save our file. Of course you go to file save, or you can just click command S or Control on a PC. Then you're going to choose where you want to save it. I'd like to save it on my computer. I'm going to give it a name of choose my location, which is going to be my desktop. Click Save. I had one before, so I'm going to replace it and click Okay. And you're good to go. All right, so one of the very important tool that goes with the Penthol is the Anchor point tool. Which is right under the Penthol and you can access it with a shortcut shift C. But let me give you my little secret. When you are using the penthol, just press and hold the option key. Have the anchor point tool when you need it. And do the same with a command key or control on a PC to get the direct selection tool. This way you can go back and forth from the Anchor Point tool to the Direct Selection tool to the Pen tool. Anchor point tool, direct selection tool, pen tool. You'll see after a while it's going to be like a second nature, you won't even think about it. So what do we do with that Anchor point tool? Well, its primary purpose is to convert corner anchor points to smooth anchor points. I'm going to draw a few corner anchor points. Then if I use my anchor point tool, which is remember the option key, I just drag it and then I have a smooth anchor point, vice versa. If you get the anchor point tool, again, just press and hold the option key. And when you click on a point, it will remove the handles and transform my curve line into a corner. If I go back to that point with my anchor point tool, like so, I click and drag and I will add handles again that I can spin around to whatever shape I want to. If I hold the shift key, I will increment the direction of my handles by 45 degrees like so. But that's not all. If I have a shape with straight lines like this one, for example, if I go between the point and drag the line with my anchor point tool, I will create handles to make round shapes that goes in both directions. Last tip that you will need to know to get your shape drawn faster. If you want to add a point to your line, just hover your pen on the line and click when you see a plus sign. This will add an anchor point with two handles. On the contrary, if you want to remove a point, hover your pen tool on a point and click when you see the minus sign beside your knee and you just removed a point. I can add one. I can remove one. Just as simple as that, now that you know everything about the Penthol. In the next video, we are going to apply this principle with a few simple exercises. 4. Pen Tool Simple shapes: All right, now that you know every little secret about the Pen tool, let's do some exercises to help you improve your skills. I've added a file in the chat under the message section, and it's called Basic Exercises. Once you have downloaded the file, just go to the file menu. Go to place. Now grab the file, Double click or just before you click on your board, you're going to go to the upper left corner and drag your file to the bottom, your art board, so it is placed at the exact same size of your artboard. That's really important. Then we are going to go to the layers, which is that icon here. If you don't have it, you can go to windows and layers and it's going to appear, we are going to lock that layer. We could also click shift two to lock the object, and we are going to make our drawings on a layer on top of it. In that way, that drawing is not going to move and we're going to be able to draw very easily on top of it. Grab your pentel, make sure your color fill is to none. Then we are going to start our drawing. We start at the very beginning. We click and drag in the direction where we want to go. We are going to keep a short handles. The shorter they are, the less curved it's going to be. If you want to have a big curve, you make a big handles, a small curve, it's going to be smaller handles. Then I'm going to click on top of my wave with my shift key. I click first, I push the shift key, sorry, and it's going to be 90 degrees handles. Same here, they are going to be strictly parallel. If I click the shift key, it's going to help you making a very similar curve, I would say. Hopefully I'm clear when I say that, okay, click and drag with the shift key. If it's not perfect, it's not a problem. We're going to adjust it after click and drag, Click first, then D, and then click the shift key, that order, click shift key, click, drag shift here. We want to change direction. We want our draw to go down here. But if we click just here, we're going to have a curve. Of course, what we're going to do is we're going to grab our handle with our Anchor point tool and we're going to pull it in the direction where we want to go. And then we'll be able to click and we'll have a corner. And then we're going back and we're going to do the same in the other direction. At the end of the drawing, you see my circle here. And then I'm going to click. And I'm not going to drag because if I do that, you see I'm going to create another handle here which is going to create a curve. And I don't want that. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to click. So I'm not creating a handle, but I still have the handle I've created at the very beginning of my drawing. So it's going to give me that corner here and the curve on that side. Now I'm going to adjust all my curves with my command key, which gives me the white arrow to the direct selection tool. I'm just pulling my handles everywhere. I want to adjust my drawing, I can pull the handles or I can move my point depending on what exactly I need to adjust. If I need to adjust the position of my point, I'm going to grab the point. If I need to adjust the curvature, I'm going to use the handles. This is how you're going to use your penol to create your bezier curves. Next we're going to work with corners and straight lines. I'm going to let you play with those shapes. Very simple straight lines. You can just exercise yourself to just drop the points from one angle to another. Then use your option key and command key. Just with your points. You can add points, create handles if you want to just play with the shapes however you want just to get used to the pen tool. Now what we're going to do together before we go to the next step is just playing with those waves here. I've created them again, so you will have plenty of time to do it by yourself. Then all we are going to do is create shark fin or waves, whatever you want to call it. We're going to grab a point and then we're going to grab our handle here with our anchor point tool and just pull it down so we have this curve now. We can also grab the curve itself to make it even bigger. Then we're going to get back to the direct selection tool and then grab the anchor point tool and create the wave. Let's do that. Again, it's just to get used to go from one tool to another, Grab your anchor point tool and pull your handle down. And again, do that with this one. Then you can play with the curves if you want to make them even bigger or you can grab your point, you can play with your handles. Just make yourself more comfortable with the tool. And the more you're going to do that and the more you're going to be skilled. And that's it. In the next video, we're going to draw a flower. 5. Pen Tool Flower doodle: Okay. Now that you are more familiar with the Pentel, we're going to try something a bit more complicated. Not too much, it's just a flower doodle. You can of course, use the file I've provided in the same place as the other one, or you can use your own doodle that you will previously scan and place on your file. I've created here a file which is ten by ten, like the other one. I'm going to save it right now. I'm going to press Command and it on my computer and call it flower doodle. Okay, I'm going to place it here as we did previously. Let's place our doodle, which is shift command or shift control. I'm going to get my flower doodle here. As I did before. I'm going to start from the very top of my file and d drop my flower. Once you have placed your image, we're going to transform it as a template. It's going to be locked and transparent, so that will help you drawing on top of it. For that, you're going to double click here. Under the layer options here you can see you can click as template and you can dim it even more to 30% and now it's locked and transparent. Okay, now we are ready to trace our flower. The first thing I'm going to do, of course, is to select my pentel. Then I'm going to make sure my fill color is to numb. And I'm going to zoom in it's command space bar. Just drag your mouse control space bar for a PC. I'm going to click on top of my pedal then I'm just going right here to the side, to the very bottom. Of course I'm dragging and dropping. Then I'm going to change the direction with the anchor point tool like So I'm going back to the side of the pedal then I'm going to click here. As you can see, I have a point like I want, but I don't have any option to move here and make that nice curve. What I'm going to do is I'm going to drag and drop. If I drag and drop here, that handle is not in the right position. I'm going to click on the option key to grab my Anchor Point tool and just bring it down until I'm happy where the line is going. I'm going to do the same thing here. Just grabbing the handle here. I'm going to grab the handle to make sure the line is going to follow my drawing here with my direct selection tool, I'm going to select the point. Then with the handles, just move them until they follow the exact drawing. Here I have a nice curve with only two points. Let's do the second one. I'm going to start from the bottom. This time I'm going to click and drag. Click and drag. Here I have the same curve. I'm going to check if I'm able to do it with just one point, which is the case. I'm going to take my direct selection tool and I'm going to move both handles, the curve stay smooth. I'm going back here, I'm going to click on the point. I'm going to go back here and finish my drawing. You see I have plenty of handles that are not well positioned. I'm going to just grab the anchor point tool, bring it back here. I'm going to use my direct selection tool to make it smoother. But right here you see I cannot follow that path because I don't have a handle. I have to go back with my anchor point tool and redo two handles. Then again, I'm going to grab my handles. Going from the direct selection tool to the anchor point tool to manipulate my points. So I'm going to finish the petals, but I'm going to spit it up a little bit and I'm coming back for the rest of it. Okay, now that the petals are finished, I'm going to draw the pistols. Of course, I could draw it with the pentol, but I have a much simpler tool which is the shape tool. And it's under that square here. I'm going to go and take the ellipse tool and click shift to make sure it's constrained to a perfect circle. And I'm going to trace it just like that. I can make it a bit bigger if I want. That's it. 6. Pen Tool Colorise Flower: All right, I'm back with my flower. As you can see, I've almost finished the drawing. I've cleaned the center and I've left two leaves to show you how I did it. Also, I've added thin line here to create shadows, and I'll explain why those lines are a bit thinner. Also, you can see my swatches here that I've created For that, I've created a swatch file that you will find with the other file that I make available for you. Let me show you how I cleaned the center of my flower. I want to remove these two lines, but I still want to have closed shapes. What I'm going to do is I'm going to my pen tool, then I'm going to select with the direct selection tool, I'm going to select that, drawing that line, if you see the plus sign here. I'm going to add a point here and add a point here. I'm going to select this one and I'm going to just press Return to remove those lines. Now what's really important is to select the point and it touch the line here to make sure that the shape is closed here. I'm going to do the same exactly. I'm going to add a point here. Remember if I just over my pen tool on the line, I'm going to see a plus sign here. Another one. Oops, Just make sure you're on the line. I'm going to select this point with the direct selection tool. If I add Shift, I can select a second one and then press Return to remove them again. I'm going to grab this one and just bring it here to the center. And that's it, that's how I clean my shape. All right, so now we are ready to colorize our flower and we're going to use the live paint bucket. So first we're going to move our swatches over there. We're going to select the flower. We're going to define the live paint areas. We're going to make live paint, which is, as you can see, option command X for the shortcuts. Then to select the paint bucket, you are going to use the letter K. All right, and we're going to use our colors that are here. First you diselect and then you're going to use the Eye Dropper tool, which is letter. I'm going to select my first color. And then I'm going back to the live paint bucket, which is K. You see it's selecting the areas that I need. I just have to click inside. This is the reason why I was saying that you need to have closed shape. Now I'm going back to my eye dropper tool with the letter. I going to get my other color. Going back to the live pain bucket and click here to have my color. As I said, it's just like paint by numbers. Now I'm going to get the lighter green color, my leaves, back to the eye dropper, back to the live paint bucket, and you just go from I to K to get your colors. Okay, let's remove the outlines that we don't need. But first, the very important thing that we need to do is select our flower, because right now it's grouped inside the live paint bucket. We're going back to object to life paint and we're going to expand this way. We're going to be able to group our objects and treat them individually. For that we're going to object ungroup or shift command G. Now you might have to do that several times because you have several groups. We're going to select those lines here. We want to, let's get a very pale pink as you can see. If I do select them, they're all colorized, but you have to, of course, make sure that you have selected the outline and not the field color. Let's do the same thing for the leaves. So we're going to select them, to select several objects at the same time you just shift and click on the object. We're going to choose a lighter color, very light green, Let's say it's more like a yellow green here. And click there. We have our stems. All right, now we want to get rid of these outlines rather than just select them one at a time. We're going to select same stroke weight. This is the reason why I changed the weight of the stroke. To make sure if I select them, I don't select the whole outlines and I'm just going to press Return. As you can see, we don't have any more outline here now. You can do the same with the others or you can keep them. You just do whatever you want. So I'm going to show you, I'm going to pick up the flower, go to same stroke weight. So all those stroke weights are selected. But as you can see, they selected also the centers. And I don't want that, I'm going to keep them. I don't want to get rid of them, so I'm going to keep them just like that. And this is how you colorize your flour with the life paint bucket. 7. Pen Tool Conclusion and project: Congratulations, you made it. So now that you've learned to master the pentel, you'll be able to trace any of your drawing. Now, I'd like you to trace either my flower or any of your drawing and share in the chat so we can all see what you've been doing. Seeing my student work is the best reward possible. I wish you enjoyed the course and if so, please let me know your impressions in the chat. So feel free to ask any question and I'll be happy to help any further. Of course, if there's anything specific that you would like to see as a course here by any means, let me know. Don't forget to follow me on the platform. So you'll be notified on my next course. Finally, be proud to share your work on social media and don't forget to tag me so I can see what you share. Thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you next time.