All right, so as I promised, we are going to learn the pen tool today, okay? Pen tool. And when I draw it, I draw it like this, okay?
It's also known as the Bezier curve. And you guys can certainly, you know, look it up on the Google. On the Google, as my daughter says.
And you can find out all about it. So I have a little write-up about the pen tool on the module so you can read that. And it draws using what we like to call anchor points and handles.
Okay, these are called handles. So an anchor point is actually one single point. And if you think about... Back in the olden days of geometry when we were in high school and you had to plot points, remember those point plotting days when you had zero, one, two, three, four, and you were told to plot, you know, at one and three, right?
These are the anchor points and then two points make a line. It's exactly that same concept. So these are the anchor points and when you put two together you make a line.
So no different than that. The only difference is in Illustrator when you add a handle it causes it to curve. Okay, that's the only difference.
So the thing that we're going to do, the exercise that we're going to do, is we are going to build... I'm going to turn the paper this way. We are going to practice building a circle. And we're going to do this in Illustrator.
And we're going to create a grid. And we're going to make... Vertical guides, five vertical guides about an inch apart, and five horizontal guides about an inch apart.
Okay, that's what we're going to start by doing. These are guides. And I'm going to walk you through this.
I just want to show you like a drawing so you understand the start and the finish. And then what we're going to do is we're going to plot these points. And then when we plot them, remember two points make a straight line.
It's going to cause a straight line and as we plot these points it's going to make a baseball diamond. Okay so that'll be the first thing we do. We're going to make a baseball diamond.
Then we're going to go in and we're going to use that. We're going to just use the pen tool for. I'm going to make a separate piece of paper right here. We're going to use just the pen tool. and that's going to do anchor points okay so we're going to do that then we're going to add the convert tool and that's going to give us the handles and i'll talk about the handles in a minute so i'll define the handles in a minute so when we add the handles we're going to pull we're going to click and drag and when we click and drag it's going to put handles on both sides now if you could see me I'd be doing like this little airplane thing where like I'd have my arms out doing like this little airplane pose because when you add handles on one side it automatically pulls them to the other side.
It's like airplane wings or like a perfect marriage right when you add one it perfectly adds a symmetrical one on the other side. So when you do that it starts to form a curve and what you need to have though is to click and drag on the other side and give those handles over here as well and what that does is it forms a perfect curve like that. So every time you use the convert tool to click and drag on one of these anchor points, it automatically creates a curve. So our second thing we're going to do, and you're going to see I've made tutorials for all of this, we're going to do these handles by clicking and dragging and we're going to create a circle. And then from the circle, we're going to create a heart.
you'll see in the tutorials and then we're gonna do it all over again and we're gonna learn this and learn this and learn this to you like you're blue in the face so i'm just giving you an overview of what we're gonna do now i just want to give you a rough about the things that the handles can do the convert tool so the convert tool can do a couple things okay the the first thing it does is it creates symmetrical handles. Okay, so if there's an anchor puts a handle here and a handle here, same size, they move together, they go together like a seesaw, like a teeter-totter. They never divorce. Okay, the second thing it can do is it can actually divorce the handles. So when you take the convert tool, and you click on a handle, you can actually divorce it and then you can move this handle independently wherever you want to without adjusting that one.
The other thing you can do is you can delete the handles. So if you have handles here and you don't want them, you can click on the anchor point And then you will delete those handles away. Do you guys know this symbol? That's a delete symbol from editing way back in the 80s.
So it can actually delete the handles. So it can do three things. So you have to be really careful when working with it.
And the other thing is it looks very much like the direct selection tool. So you just got to be really cautious and notice the difference. This one has no back and this one has a back. So let's end the video.