Learn Advanced Pen Tool Tricks

Hi everyone. Welcome to Advanced Pen Tool Tips and Tricks. The pen tool can be a tricky one  to learn if you've got some basic skills. Okay? I'm gonna show you how to take them to the next level  to kind of get uh, smoother lines, loads of shortcuts. Kind of stop you having to  go through a whole bunch of tools.

Basically we just use the pen tool for everything. Hold a few shortcuts down  and we can get very far in our design. Alright, let's get in there. Let's do some advanced pen tool tips and tricks. Alright, first up, I've created a document. Uh, I've just made mine a thousand by a thousand pixels.

It doesn't matter what size. Uh, I want you to bring in an image. Let's go to file. Let's go to place  and in your exercise files, okay,  there should be one called pen tool there. Is there pen tool oh one. What we're gonna do is we are going to set it as a template.

Okay? All that does is bring in the image  but puts it on a background layer that is locked. Okay, see, check out my layers panel. See it's on this template layer. It's locked. You can unlock it to mess around with it,  but it's kind of faded it out as well.

So this is something I drew in my notebook. Let have a little look and let's  get advanced to pen tooling. The first tip is often when you are starting  with the pen tool, you can go to view  and turn smart guides off. I often turn that off when I'm working with the pen tool. The shortcut on a Mac is Command U on a pc, it's CTRL U. So I'm gonna turn that off.

The next tip is  to change the anchor points, make 'em a bit bigger. They can be quite small on some displays. So on my Mac I go up to the word illustrator at the top, go  to settings and down to this one selection  and anchor display. If you're on a pc, go to edit general or edit settings. Um, and go to the same thing section and anchor display. And let's crank this one up.

Okay, anchor points are massive. Let's see what we've got. So when I grab my pen tool,  which is the P key on my keyboard, watch this. Boom. Look how big these guys are. Giant handles.

You might find something in between. I'm gonna see if we can work with the giant handles just  to make it easier for the video. You find the size that works for you. All right, so I've got the pen tool  and just note if you are, haven't got much experience  with the pen tool, none at all. You might wanna check out the essentials course  version of the pen tool. Um, but if you've got some  basic skills, you should be all right.

We're gonna kind of supercharge pen tool here. Just so you know, it does take a lot of practice. Okay, so if you did watch the essentials version,  the way I teach it to kind of get used to it  and a lot of self-taught people, they'll click once  for a corner, they'll get to this curve here  and they'll go, okay, drag out, click and drag for a curve. Click once for a corner click and drag and that is fine. It kind of works. What you'll find is you've got extra  anchor points that you don't need.

I've got one, two,  and three defining this curve down the bottom  here and that works fine. But you'll find the more anchor points you have,  the less smooth things are. Especially for something like this where it's really small. We've got one, two, and three defining this curve. So the trick is I'm gonna undo, undo, undo, undo. Uh, I'm gonna start down the bottom here.

And the weird thing is, is instead  of putting the curve in the middle,  I'm gonna put it at this corn point here. I'm gonna show you what I mean. This first one's a bit  of a hail Mary and you don't really know  what it does without a bit of practice. Watch this, I'm gonna click hold and drag  and you're like, I've got a my anchor  point with some handles coming out. I've dragged it this way  'cause it's the way the line's going. Can you see?

You can see what it's doing  to the line here. So over here  As well, I'm gonna click hold and drag it out. Okay? And you can see I can do the exact same thing,  the same curve but only two anchor points  and the handles on both ends are doing all the work. The trigger is this bit down the bottom here,  okay, what is happening to this? So what I can do is I can hold down my option key down here  and I can break this watch, crawl down my option  and it jumps to you see my cursor changes from the pen tool  to the convert anchor point tool.

And I can click hold and drag this  and kind of just break it over here. Okay? Get at the top head. I wanna drag it out again even though it's not perfect. I do need both the top and the bottom handles. Just doing the bottom one will kind of work.

I like to have them out at both the top and the bottom  or at least the first and second anchor point. Okay, roughly we can fix this up afterwards. So again, I need to break this one. So hold down my option, key on my Mac alt key on a PC  and I can kind of break it to get it to go where I want. Same over here. I'm gonna click hold  and drag to get the curve.

Gonna hold down my option key to break it,  to get it to go where I want. And it takes a little bit of time but forget about the apex. Go to the top here, drag it out,  hold down my option or al key. Okay and break it off. And you gotta kind of know  that the anger point will drag the line this way  and that's the bit  of experience that it takes a little while. Now that might be advanced enough  but if you wanna go super advanced,  what happens is watch this, I'm going  to drag this line outta here instead of letting go.

Then holding the option key and breaking it. What you can do is you can say drag and  before you even let go of the mouse,  hold the option key in a Mac alt can a pc  and it breaks it in one go. Okay? So just removes one little step. It's how I've got fast uh, drawing things with a pen tool. But yes, it is quite complicated.

This one here, this line, there's too many curves going on. I've got two handles so I can bend the line two different  ways, like up and down  or in this case both the same sort of way. This one is one curve, another curve,  another curve, another curve. There's too many going on. So I've got this first one going  but I'm gonna need one here. Okay?

Sometimes you just can't control it all  with just two anchor points. You need one two  and I'm gonna need this third one down here. Again, hold the option key or the alt key before I let go. I'm just getting it roughly in. I can get it pretty close. But even if you're a pro, it does take a bit  of time afterwards to tidy everything up  and you see where you've dragged the handle in too far.

I find it's actually easier being quite zoomed in. Okay, when you are doing these  and you see that one's too far out,  this is gonna lead me into my next little  super duper shortcut. Okay? Is I can do this and keep going and come back  and fix it, but I can fix it while I'm working. Yes you can. Okay, so it is the command key on a Mac,  the control key on a pc.

So we've done two, we've done the option alt, okay,  which allows us to break the line  and now we're doing the command  or control key depending if your Mac or pc. And what it is is we can drag this anchor point, look at  that whilst we're working. So I just held down that key command on a Mac control on pc,  just drag it back home a bit  so it's not wrecking my drawing so much. So I can actually do pretty close  to finished using those tricks again. Drag this one out. You holding the option,  an old can drag it to bed there.

Drag this last  One out. The last one's  always a pain in the butt. It's like, hey, do you want this to be a curve? Like no, no we don't. So before I let go, I'm gonna hold down the option key. Break that one, grab this one, hold down my option.

Counter mac alt. Can a PC get you back to where you started? The first and last join is always a bit tricky, kind  of doesn't know what you means. So it jumps around a bit. So now I can stay on my pen  tool here, okay? And hold down those keys.

Remember,  command basically just switches it  to the direct selection tool and the option key drags it to  or changes it to to the convert to anchor point tool. So I never go back to the direct selection tool. I can, but that's gonna go around  and go you, I want this to do a lot of the work there. This is a hand drawing so  it's never gonna line up perfectly. See this one here, I want to be mostly straight  and let this curve do the work. I could put another anchor point in here,  but you end up with this like little kind  of like kink in your pen line,  which is also called the stroke pen line.

Okay? And the same here. Okay, I can work my way around. I've still got the pen tool selected. Okay, I'm just clicking on anchor points. Finishing these up.

Click on this anchor point, move the handles a little moons. Okay? And this one here, what I wanna do, yeah, we go,  this one here is trickier. If I use those same techniques, you know where you got  to the end here and it went, oh, you're gonna be a curve. And it kind of, I had to fix it  afterwards when we went all the way around. This one here, if I click  and drag for the first one, okay, click  and drag for this one.

Haven't quite got it, that's right. Whole option to break it. Go down this way. Okay, come this one you can see what it's done. It is done. What we did when we got to this edge of the flipper here  and it's kind of turned into a curve, but that's okay.

We can hold down our option key on a Mac  or key in a PC just to kind of force it to go  around sometimes here, can you see it's got this uh,  handle selected but not this bottom one. It didn't disappear, but it doesn't know  you've meant to select these ones. So sometimes you gotta hold your command or control key. Click on that once to highlight the anchor point  to get all these things to spill back out. Sometimes happens, sometimes doesn't. All right?

Hmm. All right, what do you think? Do you like the tricks? I got a couple of other ones. Let's have a look at this one here. Okay, another little tip is we've looked at  the optional rock key.

Okay? The commander control key, depending if you make a pc  and the last one is spacebar,  which is the same for all of them. So let's say I start down the bottom here,  start getting my curve, go up the top  here and I just kind of miss it. It's just way off. Okay? And I start dragging.

You're like, ugh, okay. If you hold spacebar  before you let go easy, you can move the anchor point,  let go of spacebar and then keep dragging. It has to be all in one motion. So your mouse has to be down the whole time. So click hold and drag click hole and you get it wrong. Click hold and drag.

But before I let go of my mouse hold spacebar  and you're like, yeah, you go, you go look at us. Pin tool masters. Another trick is we go back  to the command key on a Mac control key,  a PC we use a second ago  for selecting back to the direct selection tool. Remember we could use it to kind of like adjust this  and we can use it while we're drawing. So earlier in the video I showed you how  to like start doing it and then let go and then hold  The command or control key and adjust it. You can do it while you're drawing.

Watch this. I can say, say I wanna point,  actually I'm gonna break this one holding my alter option. Okay? Then I'm gonna start dragging here. Okay? And sometimes you need the moon on the other side,  the little handle to be shorter on one side than the other.

And you're like, why are they the same length? Okay, before you stop dragging. Okay? So we get here, you hold the command key down,  they're still connected, but you can see one can get  shorter, one can get longer. Ooh, I don't do that very often, but you can. This is the advanced shortcut stuff.

Okay, there we go. Now we've got smart guides off. Sometimes smart guys need to be on okay, command you. Okay? And sometimes it just snaps way too big. And again, the tip for this, we kinda looked at it earlier,  is if you're like, don't just get close, just zoom in, okay?

And you'll get lots more screen real estate  and you can get a lot closer  to a line without actually joining it up. Okay? You want it to start close  without it actually connecting. Just zoom in a bit. Last but not least say  that you do want these things to line up. Okay?

So um, it might be  that you've already got some existing,  actually I'm gonna draw something real quick. Alright? I'm gonna turn off all my layers panel. This one here, I want these to line up down the bottom here. And I don't wanna just kind of like snap them. I want these paths to line up.

'cause I could turn all my smart guides  and I could just line these things up and try  and snap them, okay? And that kind of works what I wanna do. Okay? But what I wanna do is actually leave the top part  of this alone and I just want these  anchor points to line up. So I'm gonna go into out outline modes, command Y on a Mac,  control Y, and a pc. I'm gonna give my direct selection tool,  which is the achy, okay?

And I'm gonna go to both of you guys. I don't wanna move 'em around. I just want you two  to go to object. Let's go to path. Let's go to this one called average. And let's average them both and watch what happens.

Bam, it kinda lines them up. Cool, huh? So sometimes you kinda lines things up  and you're like, oh, it's close enough, nobody can see. But you can actually technically get them bang in the same  place by selecting just the anchor points you want  and then going up to object path and average. But you gotta have something selected first. Otherwise if it's grayed out, there you go.

It's a good uh, tip. Make sure if it's grayed out,  you gotta have them selected first  with the direct selection tool. Alright, my friends, that is all the tips  and tricks that I have got for the pen tool  to make you just better with the pen tool faster with it. Loads of shortcuts. I know it does require lots of practice,  but while there are lots of cool tools  and illustrator, often the pen tool is the kind of core one  that a lot of designers and illustrators use. So here you go.

Bit of practice, give it a try. Try some of the shortcuts. Maybe only a couple will sink in the beginning. You can come back to this video. Once you've got the hang of it, just  pick one, pick them all. It's totally up to you.

Alright, that is it. I will see you in the next video.