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

The tool that can draw anything - Illustrator Tutorial

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

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The tool that can draw anything

- The topic of this chapter is Illustrator's flagship drawing tool, the pen tool. In case you've never heard of it, the pen is that one tool that lets you draw anything you want with absolute precision in Illustrator's native language, so that when you describe a path outline with the pen tool, Illustrator knows exactly what you're talking about. The pen tool creates a path as a series of anchor points and, new term, control handles. These points and handles act like dots in a connect the dots puzzle, only each dot gives instructions to Illustrator on how to precisely create the straight and curving segments in between. After all, this is not a child's connect the dots puzzle. This is one for fully grown adults, or very talented children. Thing is, these dots, the anchor points and the control handles, they serve very different purposes. As we saw in the previous chapter, an anchor point locks down its neighboring segments. One segment travels into the anchor point, another segment travels out. As a result, the path outline invariably passes through each and every anchor point. The new element, the control handle, is not so much a dot as a magnet. If you drag a control handle down, the segment bends down toward the handle. If you drag it up, the segment bends up. The segment never touches the handle, it merely arcs toward it. It's as if the segment is attracted to the handle, but doesn't dare get too close. Every path has to include anchor points and for a straight-sided path such as a free form polygon, anchor points are all you need. But if you want curvature, you need control handles. Control handles are those things that make segments bend. Now you might say, wait a sec, Deke in the last chapter we saw the curvature tool making curvature without control handles. Actually, the control handles were there, it's just that the curvature tool hides them. The pen tool, on the other hand, shows them to you in unflinching detail. Oh, and in case you're familiar with the pen tool, Adobe has added a few features over the last few years. What are they? Well, permit me to show you in the following movies.

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