From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Fundamentals

Drawing one point at a time - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Drawing one point at a time

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- Illustrator's pencil and painting tools are all very well and good. In fact, if you ask me, they're very well and great, but from illustrators perspective, they amount to an attempt to understand a foreign language. Think of it this way. When you draw, especially with the mouse, you may draw a rough irregular line. Illustrator will do its best to turn your irregular line into exactly what you want. Now behind the scenes, the magic of the pencil and the blob brush are that they try to predict your intentions. Illustrator may interpret one gesture as a straight segment, the next as a smooth arc. In fact, if you take a close look at the stuff we created in the last two chapters, just about everything can be construed as a combination of lines and variously scaled arcs. In other words, Illustrator is translating your gestures into the points and segments that it thinks you are meaning to create, which is great. But if you're serious about mastering Illustrator, you have to at least occasionally express yourself in the program's native language. That is by drawing a path outline, one anchor point at a time. See, each anchor point anchors the path outline to a specific location. And then that anchor point pitches a straight or curving segment to the next anchor point that you draw. It's like a game of baseball, except the basemen are the anchor points. In this chapter, the coach, the guy who's directing the basemen slash anchor points, is the curvature tool. In the next chapter, we'll meet the other coach, the pen tool. In both cases, it's a whole new ball game, as you're about to see.

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