How To MASTER The Pen Tool - Vectornator Tutorial 🖋

hey guys what's going on let's move all Patterson and welcome back to a new video today I'm gonna be showing you how you can master the pen tool inside a vector nater either on your Mac or on your iPad both apps are the same and both of them are completely free before we get into it make sure you press that red subscribe button turning on post notifications it means the world to me when you do that but not only that it actually lets you know when I've uploaded a new video like this one now don't be afraid of this tutorial the pen tool isn't as hard as you think as long as you follow these basic rules and watch the end of this video you'll be absolutely fine so let's get straight in to the start of this tutorial this tutorial is brought to you by vector later ok so go ahead and open up vector data obviously as the starter we're gonna then go ahead and make it a new document I always like to work an A for for a poster which is generally a good poster size though when you're open this you'll realize that there's not much difference aside from this to the Mac one because it is all basically just the same app this is just inside of the iPad what we want to do though is want to use the pen tool the pen tool can be found over here now I will give you a little rundown first before I give you a little task or something that you can do so what you want to do is just play around with the pencil see how it works why it does what it does this is a really good explorative way of working out well basically if you don't know the pen tool is just a path this is how vector artwork is made it's done through equations and mathematics and this is how you get it so that your work is never pixelated because you could zoom in on that and it'll never pick slate now this is actually a shape that I've just created so we're gonna go into the style and we're gonna bring the opacity of the fill up and we're actually going to choose a different color let's choose a crazy blue I'm gonna get rid of my style options and go to my select tool over there so as you can see here I've got my shape and you can tell it's a shape I can transform it I can keep up and down now we've transformed me inside of vaccinator if you use gestures with this other hand over here and hold one finger you will keep the aspect ratio this is based like holding shift if you use two fingers you won't do anything and three fingers don't do anything on here either so if you're trying to transform something but you want to keep it in its actual aspect ray so you don't change it you don't want it to do this put a finger down and you'll find it works a lot better if you're worried what all these white spots are on my hand I've been painting and it won't come off shame on me so once you played around with it a bit more and you know kind of what you're doing in here go ahead and play around with the tool bar over here over here what we'll need to know for this tutorial is at this one which is the selected option you also need to know the direct or node selection and then you've obviously got your pencil here now that I've told you the very basics of the actual transform II and the pencil and you had a little play around with it we're going to go ahead and import an image to trace over now a vector mater is very good at this so all you need to do is go to your photographs that you've got find something that you've drawn before I'm going to go ahead and draw classic on here because that's a pretty good and hard one to do so I'm going to go ahead and basically import that in to vector later and we do this by going up here to the top right and then going into the photos camera roll we're going to bring it in and when you press it you'll get it there it really uses orange to go ahead and rotate it and again if you put a finger down it will constrain it to 45 degrees then I'm going to spin my cameras around and again I'm going to transform this up by holding with my finger to keep the constraints correct there we go so now we've got our thing in there go into your layers and you'll see your image there we're going to go ahead and basically change the opacity of this layer and then you might not see it take place but if you just do this like scroll in and out it will work just fine we're gonna go ahead and lock that layer we don't want that layer to be played around with when you lock it you can no longer touch it or transform it it's just locked go ahead and create a new layer on the top by pressing this button and we're going to be working inside of this one to select this layer once your images in and it's locked and you can't play with it go ahead to the top here and then go to your pen tool and we're gonna get rid of the fill you do this by clicking that eye until you see this little part here and it should have a red line streak through it the stroke through its I want it to be about a point and a bit so it will keep it there so the first thing about pen tooling especially with typography I've talked about it before is that you've got to keep the Hamill's horizontal and vertical so you need to keep them kind of like this so each handle is basically up and right or left so up and across are you boxing it in you want it to be like a box and we do that by going through the extremes off the curves now in this tutorial I'm going to give you basically a rundown on how to do this just so you can practice but it does take a lot of practice to know which point goes somewhere else so good to your pen tool and then we're going to start off with the top up here I know there's going to be a point up here and I know I need to go to the left so when I go over to the left you can see that my handles are going everywhere so go ahead and put two fingers down and when you do this it will constrain it and we want it to be horizontal like this constraint horizontally let go and you've got your first Anchor Point and your handles now I know that I want another point here as well because that's the extreme of the curve that we've got here and I want it to curve this way so I'm going to give this a point here and as you can see a black line has appeared now what we need to do is again use two fingers and basically pull down like so so we keep a horizontal and vertical now when I'm here I know that this handle where my pen is at the bottom is way too long so what I'm gonna do is put a third finger down I'm gonna do that that Anita knows by the gesture that it only wants me to use or to bring up or transform this other handle so hold with three fingers and bring it up to where you need it to be which is gonna be around about here let go and when you've done that you've created a perfect curve now will you go to my direct selection tool or my notes all over here I'm going to select it's both of these and you can see the handles we can go ahead and make some adjustments here so I can select this but I kind of a select it's going to go everywhere so I'm going to keep it at two but they're not only that I only want to affect this side the actual handle that I'm using so I'm gonna use three fingers to get the exact point that I want same with this I can edited anytime now you don't have to do that for every line you can normally just go ahead and plot your points which means just basically click and drag at certain areas and then go ahead and refine it later which is what we're going to do now that you've got this nice curve we're gonna go ahead and select this node down here I'm gonna go ahead and pull down you can see there it's got a bit haywire again but we'll bring it back up and we're gonna go down here to this part here to the C then now I'm going to roughly go ahead and plot everything so this plotting here is basically me going to left to the right and you'll see it'll look very strange but this is where the handles that need to be is a very odd way of doing it but it's actually the least stressful way in fact of doing it because you're just getting the points down that you need and once you've got the points down that you need you can worry about the other things later on now that looks awful right it's it's all bumpy and the lines are everywhere but it'll give you a good illustration of what the pen tool does you can see that I've got horizontal and vertical anchor points on each area now what we can do with this is we can actually go ahead and edit each handle to be correct so starting from the top all we want to do is select this anchor I'm going to use three fingers when we use three fingers is gonna just use that and go and bring it in on that handle then go to do the same for this handle over here so you select it use three fingers and it will lock it in place select this one bring it back out a bit maybe bring it in a bit you can see this handle is going way too far down so we do the same we bring it back up and we basically use this as like a really therapeutic way of creating letterforms this handle here you can hold with one finger when you're creating it and it will create an offcut and off joint basically where your handle doesn't follow the other handle that it's connected to so I've done this for purely ease of use when you're using the direct selection tool or the note tool you can actually select the anchor point that you want to work with and change the positioning now if you want to add another anchor point like I'm going to do here just double click with the node tool here and then it makes you what the handles by pressing it not every handle has to be vertical and horizontal but it does help now this will need a lot more work done to it to make it look good because we got this one down here obviously as well so we move this move this move this you can see here that I'm using all the gestures that come with this vector native app to create something good and it does just take practice and time to get each letter correct ok that's about as good as I'm going to get it over here for this time well what about the next one so all we need to do is invent an agent instead of switching over here from one tool to the other just double tap with your pencil and then if you've got the second generation Apple pencil it will switch between two tools which is very clever for something like this with a very long neck you just need to go ahead and try it from the top find the extreme point at the bottom use two fingers to bring that down as you can see it's not horizontal at the top but it follows the curve now when I've got the curve just right I'll put my third finger down and drag it back up I don't want this handle to go further than the bottom of this out so I'm going to bring it over to our halfway and then I'm going to zoom in and then do a horizontal angle point and when I've got the curve I like three fingers bring back up like so and then now if I just press like this it's going to create just a normal point down here I'm gonna go ahead because there's a curve there do this three fingers pull back oh I want a bit wrong then that's okay we can fix that and if you're finding that it's way too thick if the shirt do you think you'll find out how to see what you're doing so you can just lower it if you like but for this illustration I'm showing it so you can see so you can see that what the curve that I like I'm going to bring that up with the three finger point just there then up here because it's got a called slope we're just going to use an angled version now you can see that this line here is coming up to the top but I need it to sort of give it down so take this anchor point here with the node tool and you'll see it'll move both of them but if we add one finger it will break the anchor point from itself same with this one we want it to sort of break from itself to come down then when we go back to the pen tool it will create that little slide that we need there now for anything else like the a which I'm going to show you in this all you need to do is basically use a shape because you've got a circle that so we're going to go ahead and use a circle here I'm going to create one just like so I'm going to go ahead and manipulate it maybe use the selection tool to do this manipulator like this so it fits we're just trying to get it so it looks correct still working in the stroke mode like so now what we want to do now what we want to do is want to copy this circle so press copy over there and paste and then we're going to go ahead and transform this again so we just go ahead manipulate it like so like so and there we go we've got V basically the two shapes now what happens if these shapes go ahead and turn it into a fill well you can see there it doesn't look that great does it so what we need to do is when they're in a fill state select them both go to paths and then we need to go ahead and press this one which is minus front which will - that shape then we can go back now and go ahead and add the stroke back in and you can see that it works there and the rest is basically just the same as we keep going as we keep going along with this it takes a while but you basically keep refining it until it looks perfect but it starts with a good sketch I'm going to do it in like normal speed for me just so you can see just what I normally do a vaccinator so this is basically my job and how it works most of the time but this is how I like to fit my anchor points making sure they look and decent bring that back down don't be afraid to zoom right in it's all editable that's the great thing about this and there you go that was how quick it was now if I go ahead and select all of these with the selection tool we only go to this style over here tick away the stroke we can see there what we've got we can go ahead and get rid of that sketch layer if we just move the L in a bit and the seat in a bit you can see that I've made very good progress on the vectorizing of the classic well there you go guys that is the tutorial done and over with and I hope you learned something new about the pencil but not only that about vaccinator motivator has actually sponsored this tutorial video to show you a bit more about the app and to basically get a designer like myself using it in front of you so you guys can learn from creatives around the world now if you have an iPad or a Mac then vector later is completely free you do not have to pay for it and you can get it from the link down below in the description I just want to thank vaccinator for sponsoring this video and if you haven't done so already please press that red subscribe button and turn on post notifications so you never miss out on a vector native tutorial which I'll be uploading them about twice a month for the next few months thanks for watching and I'll catch you guys in the next video see you soon goodbye [Music]

Channel: Will Paterson

Views: 147,441

Keywords: design, vlog, graphic, art, photoshop, illustrator, adobe, pen tool illustrator, free illustrator, vectornator, vectornator x, vectornator pro, vectornator pen tool, vectornator tutorial, how to use the pen tool in illustrator, graphic design on ipad pro, apple, ipad pro 2020, ipad pro apps, free ipad drawing apps, will paterson ipad pro, will paterson, will paterson bird, will paterson logo, design tutorial, will paterson logo design, disrupt design education, gfx

Id: U6AKMnqEVdk

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 05 2020