HOW TO USE THE PEN TOOL - Adobe Illustrator

in this adobe illustrator tutorial we're gonna take a look at the pen tool so whether you're a total beginner or just don't understand the pen tool you're gonna learn a lot in this video I think you'll really enjoy it if you're new around here my name is Nathaniel Dodson if you enjoy this video make sure you hit the little subscribe button subscribe to the channel so you don't miss any illustrator tutorials in the future and also I would be remiss if I didn't mention that this video was brought to us by our good friends at Skillshare today we'll talk about them a little bit later but just know there's a link down there and the bio first 500 people to sign up you get to I said it 2 months of Skillshare for free and as you learn a little bit skill share pretty cool stuff they've got over there but let's jump into Illustrator and get started learning about the pen tool alright so here in Adobe Illustrator we're gonna go file new to open a new document and we'll just go with something like that's a letter size you can choose print here just grab the letter size document I'm gonna change mine to RGB color mode though cuz I'm not printing it and 150 PPI for raster effects hit create it's gonna give me the document I want and then I'm gonna pop out to my finder and I'm going to drag my sketch into illustrator now this sketch you can download it there's a link in the description of this video totally free no obligation you don't need to buy anything sign up for anything anything like that just a JPEG image you can download hold down shift and alt let's shift an option on the Mac and scale the sketch down quite a bit and I'm gonna position him kind of here in the middle of the document me will hold down shift make them a little bit bigger or something like that and that should be good we're gonna end up getting rid of the sketch later no worries I'm gonna double click on the open area here of the layer around the layer name and it's gonna open my layer options I'm gonna check on dim images too I'm gonna say look not the image opacity down to 30% it's gonna make the image very very light and faint so we can see our lines really easily and then we're gonna hit the little open space between the eyeball on the blue bar to lock that layer up and of course create a new layer and on this layer will call it lines or something and let's zoom in to begin playing with the pen tool now the pen tool is right here and it doesn't work like you would think you click and start scribbling and you do all this crazy stuff and then you get frustrated and put the pen tool away and you don't touch it again but the pen tools far too powerful to give up on it that quickly let's let's play with it here a little bit I'm going to get the stroke selected I'm gonna select the fill first up here in my color panel by the way if you don't have that it's just window color I'm gonna hit the little cross icon just to get rid of the field we don't want to feel just a sketch just a stroke excuse me for our sketch and let's make the lines maybe blue right blue should be easy to see and what you do with the pen tool is you click and you're placing these anchor points imp drag now these are tangent handles maybe we shouldn't touch on them yet you just click to drop anchor points right and when you join the anchor points you end up with a shape or in this case a path the path that has a blue stroke on it I can hit the little flippy flopper arrows and now it's a blue triangle right you can do anything you would do with the shape and illustrator you can spin it around or crunch it in on one side or select it and delete it if you decide you don't like it I'm gonna do reset so my stroke is activated and not fill grab the pencil again now part of the the greatness of the pen tool is the custom of the customization the the flexibility and the control you have when you're drawing with this tool all right let's take a quick break here I want to give a shout-out to my good friends at Skillshare com thank you for sponsoring this video skill shares got more than 25,000 classes that you can view online one of my favorite design classes that they have is logo design with trampoline secrets of shape type in color listen to that title it's by a guy named Aaron's rattlin he's a legend he's great to watch work and talk and everything else it's a ton of fun and the class is barely an hour long you're absolutely gonna love it you're gonna learn a ton especially if you're into logo design graphic design just enjoy using Adobe Illustrator now premium Skillshare memberships begin around $10 a month but again like I mentioned at the beginning of the video first 500 people to sign up using the link down in the description of this video you get two months of Skillshare for free and the spots they generally go pretty quickly so I might want to check it out if it's something you think you're interested in let's get back into Illustrator and continue our journey so let's trace out spider-man here we're gonna trace his head we're gonna trace his neck and then we'll maybe trace the eyes and then I'll show you a cool little trick for covering all of the Spidey web stuff on his face as well so what I'll do is I'll begin like let's say right here and why am i picking right here I don't really know it just feels right the more you work with the pen tool the more you'll kind of get a feel as well maybe I'll go up here to the crown of his head now you can click once you can click a second time and before you let go I'm still holding down the mouse click and drag and you get these things that pop out that allow your to Bend so we want to just kind of work this so it moves along with the flow of his head right now that's just a simple click and drag you have two tangent handles that spike out of our Anchor Point I'm going to zoom in a little bit here because we want to come down along the side of his face here but we got a problem because my next point I would place here but you can see it's giving me this loop deal ooh and that's a mess so what you want to do and this is just really really key when you're using the pins who will keep your finger on the alt or option key because you can hold down alt or option and grab this tangent handle right this one down here and you can suck it back in so I'm gonna hold down alt or option and just suck it back in see how that tangent handle up there it just remains the way it is where it's not moving at all we're just moving this one so I'm gonna move it maybe just like that and then I'll loop right in here against the eyeball and then we'll end up coming down here near the chin and I'm just gonna pull that out until it kind of goes along with spider-man's face now of course the chin is not this shape this is gonna look terrible we could come all the way over here maybe that would work I want to be a little bit more defined around the chin I'm gonna hold down alt or option again suck that tangent handle in and I'm just gonna pull right around the chin kind of sort of something like that and now here I don't know that I'll need to adjust this tangent handle it's nice and long and I've got a nice long flowing stretch of path here that I want to work with I'm holding down the spacebar by the way and that's allowing me to adjust the placement of my anchor point I'm holding down spacebar as well once I drop an anchor point and that allows me to move around the document so I can see there that is and maybe I'm looking at it and saying you know what the it's it's a little bit too like too much of an angle and I can hold down alt or option and just say look just soften that up a little bit flatten it out a little round come around the face a little bit nicer and then we can come up here to where we would join and just as a matter of habit you usually want to hold down the alt or option key when you're joining it closing your path now in this case we don't need to i'll you'll see why we need to later so I'm just gonna bring this right around here and follow his head as closely as I can but I also want to zoom in and I want to make sure see how there's like a slight peak there right it doesn't quite come together perfectly smooth well in order to edit our paths now that we've created this first base shape we would go back to the pen tool and weekend while you want to click and hold on the pencil you have this Anchor Point tool now you can click on any anchor point and when we do that you can see it it sort of does this messy thing and what it's doing is it's getting rid of see this big tangent handle that's pulling the curve into the majority of this path that we have when we click an anchor point it converts it back to just a standard anchor point with no tangent handles why is this site not being affected well because when we initially created the path we didn't drag an anchor point out there see I could have also used the pen tool and said hey place an anchor point there and click and drag my initial starting tangent handles and then come down over here clicked an out of my second tangent handle right and then hold down alt or option or you can even hold down alt and click that anchor point and it just sucks the tangent handle right in so then we begin with a straight edge or a straight corner in our path we didn't do that though so the only anchor or the only tangent handle I should say that's being sucked in is the tangent handle that has to do with this piece of the path here for sort of the back of the head now this is not the best way to edit the path this tool here the white arrow the direct selection tool you can select any anchor point and you can click and drag those tangent handles and edit and adjust to make your curve your path just perfect so it flows together really really nicely and we can go over the rest of our document as well and we can adjust these anchor points so if I click an anchor point here I can click the tangent handle and I can just move it around right now let's say I select this and I don't quite like the placement of it here I'll zoom in and you can literally click an anchor point and just drag it and place it exactly where you want and all of those curves and everything they just kind of move with what you're working with so maybe I want to bump that out a little bit and just like that we've created the base shape for spider-man's head now this is a more complicated obviously than like a little simple triangle or box but it really gives you a taste of what the pen tool can do let's have some fun here with the neck shoulder region let's grab the pen tool now I'm not going to be worried about following the his jaw line exactly you're gonna see we're gonna use a little trick to make sure we get that lined up perfectly we're gonna begin just click up in this area of his chin and I'm gonna start dragging out my tangent handle we're gonna try to follow this little curve right here now you may be saying how did I know to drag to right there again it's just a touch and feel thing where you just know I need to pull to about there now we've just placed this anchor point but we didn't want to click and drag anything because this curve as we're placing it it's kind of perfect right so I want to place that anchor point but I want to begin bending the shape into this part of his shoulder so now I can hold down the alt or option key click on that anchor point and drag my tangent handle out so I'll drag a tangent handle to about there and then I'll click and drag this down to about there voila we follow the shoulder really nicely all right I'm just gonna loop around out here and then I'm gonna hold down alt or option let's pull the tangent handle out like this and I'm going to pull right into here just like that and now I'm gonna pull I'll pull right around here and we're just gonna follow the contour of the back of the neck and then the same thing here as we come up here into the back of his head so none of this has to be incredibly perfect and what we what we can do is just close this thing off by bringing the path down around to right here and close it off now it doesn't look perfect because it's lines all over his face don't worry about that let's grab the white arrow real quick I'm gonna grab this anchor point right here and I think I might actually drag it up a little bit more maybe even up to like there now you see how it clicked me right to the path that's because under the View menu I have smart guides turned on so we can do that and then we can click our tangent handle here and just pull it so it moves along with the back of the neck just perfectly and that's great I can even move this anchor point down again don't worry about all this mess here underneath his face so you may be saying how is this gonna work well let's drag a selection over both of the paths we just created and we're gonna flip that blue color from the stroke to the fill I want to show you something so it just looks like we have this human head outline we have this lines layer we'll open that up and here I've got the base of the neck but it's above the head shape I'm going to grab the base of the neck here and let's let's select the fill color see we're not getting any options for a stroke because we have no stroke applied we need to click on the fill color to pull it to the foreground of our color selection options here and then we can change it let's make the blue on the neck just a little darker it looks pretty bad still right that's because these layers stack like layers of a sandwich so let's drop this down beneath his head and look at that we've got a perfect jawline just like that so it just kind of disappears behind the face all right I'm gonna select both these shapes I am going to say hey look no Phil see it's given me a question mark because both Phil's are different dark blue and normal blue I'm gonna say look no Phil at all go back to stroke and just say give me a give me a dark blue stroke that's great and I can even go to my properties panel here and say get me like a five point stroke something that's really really noticeable right see how big and thick that is all right I'm gonna collapse properties we're gonna open up our layers panel once more and we're gonna draw his eyes so again we're gonna use the pen tool for this and what I want to do is begin up here where we have a point so right here is our point and I know that I need to draw a line down to follow that curve so let me click try got a tangent handle kind of like that and then I'll come out here to the flat spot and I'll pull the rest of that curve into place something like that and while pulling that curve we pulled a tangent handle out of the front which actually will work well for us we can just loop right down here around the front of the eye voila and now we've pulled the tangent handle out of the front again so we'll loop around the eye again and then we'll come right up the backside of the the eye really part of the mask I guess and I'm just gonna pull this into it like that now here's where things get a little tricky we probably wanna hold down our ultra option key and click to join that path it's going to make sure that we preserve that straight line just running right into the corner to give us a perfect little corner with no curviness to it I'm gonna deselect this and you can see we've got spider-man's I just like that now I'll grab the pen tool again we're gonna do the same thing for the inner sort of lens of the the mask we're gonna just pull a little put a little something-something into it right there I'm gonna be careful that you don't get your tangent handles too close to tends to do funky weird things but again it's just gonna be one of the things you'll learn as you play with the pen tool and experiment for yourself I want to come through here I probably went a little bit too far I'm gonna come through here like this something like that and then I'm gonna hold down alt or option come all the way back up and just complete the lens shape just like that so I've got these two pieces of his eye is it perfect not really because this this little Anchor Point really could be more like out here right and then we could just click these handles and adjust to them a little bit just tweak and adjust them just a little too look a little bit better still not perfect but I think it'll be good enough for for our purposes here today just flatten this out a little bit more something like that and again the beauty of the pen tool is you can go back and forth with this stuff all day until it's just perfect you have exactly the shapes that you want and things you're looking good for you all right I'm gonna grab both these eye shapes that we just created let's go object we're gonna say transform and say reflect I'm gonna say hey look reflect this on the vertical axis and I'm gonna preview it you can see that looks bad but I'm gonna say copy so make a copy of that original artwork and now we have the second eye so I can drag this right over there maybe I'll drag it downward a little bit just resize it just to touch you know have a little bit of fun with it and push it back and forth make it exactly how we want it to be and then deselect and now we have our outline of spider-man all right let's take a look at combining some shapes and kind of finishing up just a very quick rudimentary spider-man type icon shape I'm going to obviously we got to get rid of this thing out here and this overlap of the neck because it was cute and fun looking at the layers and everything but we need to get rid of that as well so here's we're gonna do we're gonna use this tool right here called the shaper tool so I'm gonna select that and all I need to do is draw a squiggly line out here over this part of the shape so I'll just draw a squiggly line through the whole thing just like that BAM trims it off I'll draw a squiggly line right through here boom trims that right off look at that that quick we just trim that stuff up now you can see there's still give me the dotted line like we know something was there we know you're just hiding it from us but that's totally fine we're gonna we're gonna deal with this in just a second but before we do that I'm gonna quickly grab my ellipse tool we're still drawing just with this thick blue stroke I'm gonna zoom in and just create this little grommet grommet thing he's got here in the middle of his costume there we go just like that or his mask outfit whatever you call it there we go something like that just a little pinch points and I'm gonna zoom back out and we can see here we have this shaper thing it's a shaper group now the reason you can see it only looks like it has one eye we didn't really touch the other eyes with that shape or tool so they they're not getting looped in with that shaper group but let's unshaped a shaper group so click the little circle to select the whole shape or group and then we'll go object expand and we're gonna choose to just expand the object not the fill in the stroke just the object just that shape group expand it back out see now it's a regular group now that it's a regular group we can go object and say hey look ungroup and we might have to do it again object ungroup because sometimes a double groups and now we have all these paths right so that's everything we've got we've got the little grommet point we've got the two little shapes that are making up the I on the left side of the face and so on and so forth so here comes the fun part and more pen tool let's zoom in and we're gonna use the pen tool to create the vertical lines on spider-man's mask so grab the pen tool and let's change the color of our lines maybe we'll go with a green something like that might be fun maybe a darker green so it's easy to see and what I'm doing is I'm not gonna begin right here I want to overshoot the edge of spider-man's mask so I want to imagine like this line right here I want to kind of imagine where it's gonna be it's gonna be way out here and actually before I get to that let me just do this little guy right here so again imagine where it's gonna be it's gonna be out here so I'm gonna begin right here pull my tangent handle and again I'm gonna overshoot the line voila just like that and then you can hit your Escape key or your enter a return key to just complete that little path let's do the same thing up here for this path drag that out and this one is gonna kind of go right to the center of spider-man's face I can't quite see where I'm drawing it and I'm D docking and undocking everything actually got it pretty close that's pretty good you can hold down your alt or option key of course and adjust your tangent handle and I'm gonna just just going to adjust it to make sure I get it as close as possible something like that is nice hit the enter or return key just close that path off and then we'll come out here and do it for this path and I'm gonna speed this tutorial up here and just go through this really really quickly and there we have it all of the vertical lines for spider-man's mask taken care of will knock out these horizontal ones here in a second but what I want to do is first select all these lines and group them up and make a set of custom guides we're gonna do that using the magic wand tool we can double click on the magic wand tool and say hey look we don't need to select stuff that is of the same stroke color remember all these strokes are green so I can click one of those strokes if I can find it there we go it's gonna select all the green strokes and now see all these paths in my path in my layers panel it's kind of a mess so let's go object and choose group it's gonna tuck them all nicely here into this one group we can shut it off turn it on anything we like let's select that group and go edit copy and then say hey look edit paste in we got two copies of it now shut off the one on the bottom the top one we're gonna rename guides and with this selected so I've got two selected my layers panel go view guides make guides and it gets rid of all that stroke and just gives us these nice blue guides the great thing about this is that these become very easy to work with as long as we've got view smart guides turned on now you may be saying what's the deal with the guides why do we need them well basically because when we create the little spidey web connectors we want them to line up exactly and peek right on up I don't want to do that let's redo it redo make guides I want them to line up exactly and peak right where my other paths are coming through that being the green lines but we don't want to mess up the green lines so we're hiding the green lines we're creating these custom guides and now we're gonna talk about sort of a second version of the pen tool and that is the curvature tool so that's right here this is kind of cool you just click once with it and then click where you want the second point to be that being the peak of this sort of bow so I'm going to click right there and then smart guides are gonna click me right on to see how it's saying guide that's saying look you're gonna place this point exactly on that guy yep that's where I want to be now with the curvature pen when I continue drawing with this pen tool see how it's give me that that warp d wu on the end there it's it's smooth when it shouldn't be we should have a sharp point see if I continue drawing it's in a slender man's gonna have a very wavy looking very neo spider-man web 2.0 spider-man we don't want that we want traditional spider-man so hold down the alt or option key and click right there on that anchor point and see that it just allows you to have a nice sharp row rebirth or beginning so we'll go right back to the peak and we'll go right over here to the guide outside of spider-man's head right there and then just hit the Escape key to complete that set now I did miss that little line right there so with that in mind I'm going to undo I'm gonna connect with the guide right there hold down alt or option click there click in the middle of that second a second little bit of spider spider nests and then hit the Escape key and just complete that path just like that now it's important we want to overshoot the path so we're going to make sure we're hanging out past spider-man's head on both sides hit the Escape key to just complete the path anytime all right now once more I am going to speed this video up and we're to go through and create all of these bits of Spidey web for spider-man's head all the horizontal lines and at any point obviously slow the video down or pause it and follow along with yourself and let's get this thing done and there we have it I sort of selected some of the blue stroke and it's switched so the top half is green the bottom half is blue so I'll just quickly select the bottom half I'll grab my eyedropper tool and say yeah give me the same color as those top strokes and now we've got all of our sort of horizontal spiderweb lines for his mask and with these selected I'm gonna group them by going object group just to contain them all so we've got all the horizontal bits of spider-man's mask and here I'll turn on the group that is all of the vertical bits as well I'll go up here to view say guides hide all the guides I don't want those guides there and with all of this it now begins a process of trimming all of this stuff we already kind of played with some trimming tools namely the shaper tool so let's just go in real quick and just a zip away a lot of these strokes that are sticking out I'll just come through here zip that off and the key is just do that squiggly line just like that and you'll get a nice clean trim you may need to zoom in a little bit to really make sure you're getting the piece of the path that you want right so I'm just cutting everything off don't worry about these little bits that overlap that's a matter of layer stacking we can adjust that later no problem and I'll probably just speed the video up here as I zip through and just squiggle over all the stuff that I want to get rid of and just create a much much cleaner version of our spider-man here all right nice and clean the only problem is like I said some of that layer stacking stuff but we have it all within this giant shaper group we want to select the group like we did before and of course go object choose expand and I'm gonna say yeah not the filler the stroke just the object and we've got this layer group and we're gonna need to ungroup this a bunch of times as well object ungroup object on group object ungroup and there we go a bunch of paths now before we go any further I'm going to grab my move tool I'll make sure everything's D selected grab the magic wand tool and I'm gonna select all the green stuff again and go object to group so this is all that Spidey mask stuff for his face right just like that that'll allow us to change the color very easily but also we can drag it down in our layer stack and just put it beneath all this other stuff just click and drag and move it down all the way down here to the bottom just like that and if I deselect you'll see now the edges are cleaned up a bit now I could probably zoom in and see yeah right there right there I could have cleaned that up a little bit better I'm not gonna do it because it's gonna create a new shape or group and make a little bit of a mess for us and for the sake of this tutorial it's not going to make a huge difference in the grand scheme of things but let's just really really quickly give a spider-man some color I want to I'm gonna drag the color panel out here so we can work with it I want to see my paths a little bit more I want to select the path and I want to duplicate this because I want a spider-mans color to be beneath the Spidey web but I still want the path to be there to cover up the edges so we don't see any of the edges of the webbing so I want to duplicate this edit copy edit paste in front and then we're gonna drag this down down down in the layer stack until it's beneath the spider-man and stuff or I should say spider web stuff select that bottom path and just flip the fill and the stroke and then here for the fill let's just max out our red Channel and give it solid red alright great looks pretty bad don't worry hang with me here let's do the same thing for the neck so we've got the neck right here we're gonna do that edit copy edit paste in front and drag it all the way down all the way down actually we're gonna put this beneath the face and once more we can just hit the little flippy-floppy arrow yep set the stroke as the fill boost Reds set the green in the blue channel to nothing and actually let's darken the neck a little bit just to give it a little differentiation and there we have it now we can grab the the webbing and instead of it being green let's select our stroke there and just click on the white color swatch let's make it solid white there we go and now we can begin doing some fun stuff well the little blue grommet here in the middle that should also be solid white right for the stroke there we have it and actually we maybe should give that a white fill as well so select that let's select the fill and say yeah right here just uh let's give it a solid white there in the middle just like that and then for his eyes we're gonna go ahead and select this the innermost shape and again we'll flip fill with stroke and let's set this to white there for the middle and then the outer stroke here we're gonna flip fill and Stroke see it covers up the white don't panic don't worry we're gonna fix it we're gonna set this to like kind of black let's just go with black we could do a very dark gray but let's do black for now and then we want to drag this this is the eye patch piece or the lens of the mask so we'll drag that up above in fact I can name that layer lens something like that and if we want here with this path if you're seeing any of your spiderweb edges you may want to give this that same 5 pixel black stroke so we would open up a properties panel here and just say hey stroke go 1 2 3 4 5 points like before see that we get the blue and we can select in our color panel here the blue stroke and just say get rid of all that blue just give us solid black and that's gonna make sure everything's covered up nicely for us and then we'll do the same thing here for the the pieces of the eye over here so these are kind of open-ended shapes not ideal but we can make it work we're gonna flip the fill on the stroke here and we're gonna fill the lens with white it's gonna be kind of hanging out over the edge a little bit but we're gonna we're gonna pretend like we don't see it for right now for the sake of this tutorial again it doesn't make a huge difference and then for the outer piece flip the stroke to the fill and just fill this with solid black and again if you wanted you could set the stroke and just say yeah black stroke and you got to go into properties like we did before and go to 5-point and all that good stuff and really all that's left to do here and you could of course add gradients to make it look even more interesting things like that but that falls outside of the scope of this tutorial you could argue a lot of this stuff does as well but I'm just showing you what you can do with the pen tool and how to create a little a little something extra with it as well so these overlook these overlay paths here for the neck and the head we can just change the stroke color from blue to solid black and maybe even push them up in terms of the size I mean make it like eight points so it's a really thick defined edge for the artwork and the same thing here for the neck and just say yep get make sure that's solid black there BAM and just push this up to about seven or eight for the size and just like that you know and I may actually push it push it a little thicker than that so I'll select that maybe I'll go to like 15 let's see what 15 looks like we'll make it ridiculous let's go 15 voila and you can see we've created this really cool like spider-man piece of artwork and it's all predicated there on creating that base shape with the pen tool we did it from our sketch which is traced it out added some colors added some lines and had a lot of fun doing it all right so there you have it that is the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator if you enjoyed this tutorial I would appreciate it if you subscribe Chandler drop a comment down below let me know what you liked about the video and if you created something cool that you thought was neat to attack man it in insta on Instagram in Instagram whatever act up vid is my name I like to try to check out everything that I can over there and I'd love to give you a little bit of love for what you create an illustrator I'll be I hope the video really helped you out and for learn about the pen tool and tangent handles and anchor points and everything else that we talked about today in this tutorial ladies and gentlemen that's it get it got it good Nathaniel Dodson tough vidcom I'll catch you in the next and before you go make sure you subscribe to my channel for more great tutorials every day also by my course it helps us do what we do and this channel is supported by viewers just like you you can also just click the thumbnail and watch another video from this channel see you next time guys [Music]

Channel: tutvid

Views: 727,470

Keywords: pen tool illustrator, adobe illustrator, pen tool tutorial, illustrator tutorial, illustrator pen tool tutorial, graphic design, illustrator pen tool, adobe illustrator tutorial, how to use the pen tool, design tutorial, how to design, tutorial pen tool, illustrator beginner tutorial, design, vector, how to use illustrator pen tool, illustration, vector graphics, how to design a logo in illustrator, logo design illustrator, AI, sketch artwork, drawing artwork, convert vector

Id: tXpnKlUMZQA

Length: 27min 32sec (1652 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 06 2019