Illustrator Tutorials - Pen Tool Beginner's Guide

[Music] hey guys in today's tutorial I'll be showing you how to use the illustrator pen tool this is a video I wanted to make for quite a while since it covers the very basics of illustrator and it gives you the tools you need to be able to create vector based design this is typically what you'll be using when creating professional-grade logos for typography and for screen printing on t-shirts for example so this is one of the most important skills to have as a graphic designer before we start I just want to thank our friends at Skillshare for sponsoring this video Skillshare is an online learning community that offers over 16,000 classes and projects on a wide variety of topics ranging from graphic design to finance game design illustration photography and many other subjects all the classes are taught by seasoned professionals in their respective industries like Jessica hitch and air entrapment for example who I'm sure some of you are familiar with if you're into lettering or graphic design in general now here's just a quick glimpse of all the Adobe Illustrator classes you'll be able to follow once you get familiar with the pen tool make sure you guys stick around to get a free two-month membership to you can check it out for yourself and get unlimited access to all the premium content Skillshare has to offer alright let's get into this now at first the pen tool might seem a little bit hard to get a full grasp on but it's really pretty simple once you understand the basic principles behind it so I created this guide to help you guys gradually get familiar with the pen tool until you're comfortable and not to use it on your own and start creating your own personal designs with it you'll find a link in the video description to download the Illustrator file this is completely free and it'll help you guys follow along the tutorial feel free to pause the video at any given time to follow along and resume whenever you feel ready all right now that you've downloaded the illustrator file we can get into the very basics the pen tool works by creating paths which are connected by control points I'll show you what I mean in just a second so for this part will focus only on geometric shapes made out of straight pads I'll start by creating an open path which means that not all the points are connected to make a closed shape like this Pentagon for example up here I made some guides indicating where to place your control points in order to create these specific shapes so you guys have a reference to fall back on if you're unsure about where your points should be at this stage it's pretty straightforward but when we'll start creating curves these will come in handy now let's select our pen tool I'll set the fill color to none and I'll go with this bright pink for the stroke you can use any color I just want something that stands out so I'm going to start at the bottom here and place a point as you can see my path is now anchored to this point and I can move freely around it then I'm going to connect it to this corner up here and from there I'll move to the next point down here and press escape when I'm done now we can move on to this next shape and repeat the process this time we'll connect all the points and make it a proper closed path you can start wherever you want and simply connect each corners with one another [Music] now you see this little circle right here next to my cursor this indicates that I'm about to connect the last point and close my pad and by the way these shapes don't need to be perfect just try and be as precise as you can okay now let's go to this slice shape here so again I'll create my first point here but this time I'll hold down shift it'll make it so that my pad can only move in perfect 45-degree angles around my starting point you can see as I move around my control point that the path will snap to the closest vertical horizontal or 45-degree angle this can come in really handy when creating shapes and illustrator so let's just go ahead and connect all the points holding down shift alright so now we know how to create straight path feel free to start over until you feel comfortable to move on to the next part okay so we covered straight lines but Pat can also be curved the vector curves created with the pen tool are called Daisy curves now I'll show you how to create them we'll start with this single curve right here I'm going to go ahead and create my starting point on this end here but this time I'm going to click and hold now as I drag my cursor you can see I have these two handles I can rotate their own like the way i position these handles will determine the angle and the shape of my curve again if I hold shift I'll be able to drag these handles in a perfect vertical or horizontal line so I'm going to drag this handle up to this guide I created again you can rely on the figures I made up here to figure out where to place your handle now essentially you want to create your curves with as little points as possible this will generally translate in smoother looking curves now as you can tell I have this curved path to work with so I'm just going to go ahead and connect it to the end of the curve over here now my curve doesn't have the right shape but that because I still haven't placed a handle on this point so I'm going to go ahead and drag my handle to the guide and now I'm left with a nice and even curve again it doesn't matter if it's not perfect but if you do want to correct your curve you can just hold command or control on PC and select the control point or a handle and move it around until you're satisfied all right now we're ready to move on to a continuous curve so we'll repeat the same process but this time we'll just keep going I'll start at the same point here and go up with my handle then I want to place my second point right here in the middle and drag my handles down and then keep going [Music] we could go on like this forever now let's try another kind of curve this time instead of going straight up and down with the handles we'll do a 45 degree angle I'll drag this one up to the guy holding shift but this time we're going at an angle and then I'll go to the second point and do the same and pull up to this guy so now we have a curve with two control points instead of three so this is just another way to create curves depending on the shape you want you can also make the freehand curves without holding down shift if you're going for a more inconsistent type of shape like this but for now Ridge is going to focus on creating curves with straight handles now in some instances you'll want to be able to convert a curve into an angled corner or a pointy tip for example on is dropped in we have all these smooth curves and then we have this sharp tip so I'll show you how to go about it I'll just start creating my shape now you can start wherever I'm just going to go ahead and start up here and make my way down to the tip following the guide now as you can see this bottom handle here isn't reaching the guide but I'll adjust it once I created my point down here so I'm just going to create the point and drag down and then I'll adjust the handle by holding command to bring up the direct selection tool and dragging this handle down remember to hold shift to keep a straight line alright now I'm going to go ahead and adjust this point down here to get the curve I want so I'll bring this handle right up to the guide [Music] now I want to keep going but I'm kind of stuck because handles will only let me create curves so what we're going to do is we'll break this curve by keeping elves pressed and grabbing this handle now we can bring it up to the guide then I'll move up to create the same curve on the left side I can then proceed to close my shape up here now I added an extra challenge to this part so once you feel comfortable recreating the drop pin with the guide you can move on to this figure here and try tracing it without guides [Music] again feel free to go over this part as many times as you need until you feel comfortable moving on alright guys now's the time to put everything we learned to the test so I've created this squirrel shape which is made out of straight fat a bunch of curves and some broken fat I also included curves that weren't made with straight vertical or horizontal handles because sometimes you just won't be able to get the curve you want just by using straight handles and that's fine now let's try tracing this guy I would say try and trace without looking at the reference too much and just refer to it when you feel stuck this should help you get a better grasp on where to put your point and how to drag your handle I'm going to trace along but I'll just speed it up a little bit so the video doesn't last forever [Music] [Music] and guys remember that you can always edit your curves after making them so they don't have to be perfect on the spot alright guys sorry shape is done now if you had a hard time at first it's all good I know it can be a bit frustrating when starting out but trust me just keep practicing and at some point it'll just kick in for you and you'll get the hang of it so just keep going at it until you feel comfortable [Music] now I know a lot of you guys following me are into lettering as well and you'll be using the pen tool to create digital lettering so I've added this last section to show you guys how I create letters using everything we just learned there's a lot of different ways to create letters in Illustrator but this is just how I prefer to do it I essentially create each part of the letter as a separate shape that way I can easily move things around afterwards if I want to tweak the letter for instance with this beep I'll create three separate shapes the top curve the bottom curve and the bar again I'm just going to trace along but I'll speed it up a little bit and by the way I barely ever go right into illustrator and freestyle so if you've watched some of my speed art videos you'll see that I always start by sketching my piece with pen and paper so I have a pretty good idea of the shape and composition of the word I'm going for I find this to be a much easier workflow than to just jump into illustrator and start tracing so I really encourage you guys to sketch your work beforehand it'll make it a lot easier for you [Music] alright guys so we've covered all the fundamental steps now the pen tool takes a bit of practice so I know I keep repeating myself but feel free to go over these exercises as many times as you need until you feel like you've mastered all the steps think of this as a primer to digital lettering or logo creation once you feel comfortable using the pen tool you'll have the foundation you need to create pretty much anything in Adobe Illustrator creating logos and type is what I personally enjoy the most when it comes to graphic design which is why I wanted to share this skill with you guys in the hopes that you'll enjoy it as much as I do I'm always pushing to get better at it by learning new skills and techniques to try and perfect my craft for example right now I'm learning the process of customizing typography with this class by Aaron droplet this guy's pretty much the ultimate reference when it comes to vector work and customizing type and he has a very natural and captivating way of teaching which I really enjoy I've also just started this class by George Beauvoir on how to design a modern style logo George is pretty much a veteran when it comes to brand identity and digital illustration so I'm having a ton of fun learning about his techniques and what his workflow is like when creating a logo you will find thousands of classes just like these on Skillshare so I strongly suggest you guys check it out if you want to step up your graphic design game make sure to click the link in the video description to get your free two-month Skillshare membership this means you'll have access to over 16,000 premium online classes completely free which i think is a pretty sweet deal all right guys so as usual if you have any questions or suggestions make sure to let me know in the comments section I'll do my best to get back to you as soon as possible thank you so much for watching I'll catch you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Made by Mighty

Views: 1,002,710

Keywords: pen too beginner's guide, mighty illustrator tutorial, mighty illustrator, pen tool beginner guide, illustrator guide, pen tool beginner, illustrator beginner, pen tool beginner tutorial, illustrator pen tool beginner, made by mighty illustrator, illustrator tutorial, illustrator beginner tutorial, illustrator pen tool, pen tool tutorial, pen tool, illustrator pen tool tutorial, adobe illustrator pen tool, made by mighty, mighty, pen tool guide, illustrator adobe, illustrator

Id: j69a3-shkGE

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2017