Alternative Drawing Techniques in Adobe Illustrator CC

everyone heard of the pencil and while some people love it there are a lot of users struggling to get to grips with it in this video I will reveal a few alternatives to the pen tool that can change everything you do in Adobe Illustrator this tutorial is part of a comprehensive online course called Adobe Illustrator master files you can check it out and try the free trial if you want to learn everything there is to know about this amazing industry standard application in this video I will show you a few features which are designed to help you creating curved paths there are four alternative methods that can simplify the task of drawing curves and these techniques are especially useful for those just starting out with Illustrator and who can't get their head of hand using the pen tool some of these tools were introduced in the Creative Cloud version of Illustrator so if you are using cs6 or older versions you might not find them in the toolbar first of all let me show you the curvature tool so let me zoom closer on this example here and by the way you have this file as well so you can practice exactly the same things I'm doing here so think of the curvature tool which is here in the toolbar as the pen tool 2.0 as it works very similarly to it but it simplifies the way you draw and interact with curves so what I would do is start at a point like that then I click on another point and then when I move further you see straight away that the curve is being created when I click on the next point where the curve turns so I go to this point here you see at the moment it's far from what we need but once I continue going along immediately the path is getting better especially this second section so it knows that from that curve that it created automatically we need a different one because we change direction so it's really smart at recognizing what it needs to do automatically and you only need to decide where you place the anchor points so if I put it here let's say and then I put another one there then at the moment it doesn't look great but as soon as I go further up it will get closer to what we need now I am going to just go through it quickly and add two points for each of these turns you will see why I do that even though it doesn't look perfect at the moment maybe this one is quite sharp so I will just use one point there but then for these bigger turns I use two points and then I will use one more point here another point there and then I connect all of them together and once again look at that first segment immediately that it connects into that other section there because it has a completely different direction it will update the previous curve so at the moment if we look at this outline it's not great but we can improve it one thing it's good to remember if you double-click on a point you can quickly turn it to a corner point double-click again turns it back into a smooth point if you want you can also of course reposition points by just simply dragging them around and immediately you can see how much better that looks I can also drag this one further up and I can find a good spot for it probably up here and I might feel like I need to also move this one around or I can also add a new point on this path so if I click anywhere and start dragging I can fit it more closer to the shape that we need so once again here I might need to add an additional point click and drag and then click and drag here as well just to make sure this follows it the way we need it so one disadvantage of using these two would be that you need more points to create the curve like with the pen tool I will be able to do this whole section where I have currently seven points with two anchor points but doing it this way is more like an estimation of the path and then you are refining it or molding it into the shape that you need now you don't always have to add the additional points see how perfectly I managed to drag this down and immediately it fits I can do the same thing here drag it down a bit just adjust it along the path and immediately it's starting to fit much better so you can always learn where next time you should place anchor points from this so you place down the anchor points and then it this tool really teaches you what's best to do whenever you need to create these type of pods I can put an additional point here just to make sure that part fits as well a little bit better now for the eyes again you would be able to use the ellipse tool but let's just test the curvature tool on that so I click on each of these corner points and because it is a very simple geometric shape it actually manages to do it really well but it's important that I place down a point in each of those terms so you have to use this method to go around and it's almost the same that applies to the rest of the path so you try to resemble the same thing whenever it turns you have to put down a new point now when you select this of course you can see all the anchor points and the handles as well so really it is like using the pen tool but a slightly different way to get to the same result and don't forget if you feel like you need to reduce the amount of anchor points you can always use the simplify feature so you go into object path simplify and at the moment with 91% curve precision the current one is actually more points than the original so 31 is the original but if you reduce the percentage we can go below it and it will still look good so now we managed to reduce it almost 10 points less but it still looks fine and you see here on the top it managed to use only one two three points the third point is all the way down there so that long segment has been created and even the ellipse is now using only two anchor points each so that's another thing that you can use simplify to teach you how you could do a better job by placing anchor points and using those now the second example and the second method that I wanted to show you is the reshape tool you can find this tool here in the tool bar but I prefer to use it in combination with the pen tool so this approach is slightly different because here you have to first draw straight segments and then convert them into curves so for this method you still need to use the pen tool to draw the path like this let's just say I add points another point up here then another one and I could go along this path just like that and then what you need to do is to hold down the alt or option key to convert each segment into curves let's start with this one at the end and just simply drag it out and it turns into a curve I will click and drag until it fits and then I keep doing the same thing here as well there there and then this last one here okay so you can see it's very effective and much easier than using the pen tool especially for those who are not accustomed to working with it and because it's a shortcut I can still continue drawing so I don't have to stop I can go further and then again whenever I decide I can switch to using the reshape mode holding down the alt or option keys and do these segments even this big area here can be covered with probably two segments again just drag it out and that might not be perfect but we can always improve it and just drag that out now I can just hold down command or control to use the direct selection tool and just slightly further adjust these parts like that select this point here and using the handle I just refine it a bit and also that handle now it's perfectly fits even that big segment I managed to do with three points all together and then of course don't forget you can always use the smooth tool to get rid of these little bumps in your path you just have to make sure it's selected and then using the smooth tool you can check if you see any bumps on the path but it immediately looks much better now there's another additional shortcut you can use with this reshape feature and I'm going to show that here so if we want to draw perfect semi circles you can also use the shift key for that so if I start up here and go down there to simply drew a straight line then I will click again all the way down here now we have two segments they are both straight and I'm going to hold down the author option again I'm using the pen tool by the way but once I hold this shortcut down it switches to the reshaped tool but while I'm doing this I will also hold down the shift key and look what happens instead of having the handles on an angle I will keep them completely straight and that helps me to do a perfect semicircle so I can just drag it out there and then do the same thing here old and shift so remember shift is needed for that I'm going to keep it also perfect semicircle and at this point I could even go all the way up here again to close this up and I hold on old and shift together and look at that we have one of these shapes perfectly created so this reshape technique I think is a very effective tool because it can really improve the way you work with the pen tool but it is also worth mentioning that if you actually use the reshape tool itself instead of using the shortcut with the pen tool you will be creating additional anchor points along your parts and that's something that you should avoid so I would recommend to use the shortcut instead of using the actual tool on the next example I'll show you another interesting alternative which is called the arc tool you can find it just under the curvature tool join together with the line segment tool so there's the arc tool here and these two can quickly create in the ten curved segments so what you do is you start doing click and drag and if it goes in the wrong direction just press X on the keyboard that changes the direction and then if you feel like the curvature itself is not good you can use the up and down arrows to change that and once it fits I just let go then we can draw the next curve segment here I just click and drag again press X go down and then press up and down every one till we are happy with the result I'm just going to fit it there we can go up in the other direction press X first of all then use the up and down arrows until it fits again higher up I can go here and then once again click and drag press X and close this up there there is one last interesting shortcut with this tool if you are drawing a curve and then press and hold the tilde key down you can do multiple curve segments just like that and all of these will be independent lines so I can always select them and reduce the strength on the stroke size on them so you can see them a little bit better this can also be useful for so many different techniques so it's worth experimenting with it and last but not least we also have another brilliant feature unfortunately it is also only available in illustrator CC and it's called corner widgets to make sure that it is visible you have to enable it from the View menu so you can find it there if it says hide that means it's already visible and now let me just select this star here and if I switch to the direct selection tool that's when these corner widgets will become visible so once it's enabled and you have the selection you will see small circles near every corner point on your pads you just need to drag them to convert them to round or smooth points and the great thing about this is that you can always adjust them easily so you can come back and adjust them also if you use the direct selection tool you can adjust individual points so I'm just going to click outside click on this point here and now I will only adjust that instead of affecting all the others also another technique you can do is to double click on the corner widget and change the style of the corner even the rounding option as well which will change how the handles will be aligned on the path and also what you can do is when you have all the points selected you can even type in the corner radius up here so if I want exactly 20 point or 20 millimeter corner radius I can type it in and if I need more information I can also access that menu that we saw before and change the corners on all of these corner points so that's all I wanted to show you in this video these were the five different methods that I call alternatives to the pen tool and although learning the pen tool is important make sure you also spend some time and experiment with these and you will probably come up with your personal preference and combination of all these together to develop your own drawing style in Illustrator [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Yes I'm a Designer

Views: 71,634

Keywords: illustrator tutorial, adobe illustrator, illustrator cc, graphic design, pen tool, vector drawing, drawing paths, reshape tool, curvature tool, corner widgets

Id: OL3hH-ulF3A

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2017