Illustrator - Pen Tool - Monster
Tutorial Reference:
Download practice file:
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- Complete the following exercises (on the provided artboards) covered in the video
- Teeth
- Antennae
- Mouth
- On a new artboard (or project). Remember to use layers
- Create a monster body of your own design
- Put the teeth, antennae, and mouth created with the pen tool onto the monster body
- Create a simple background
- Complete the exercise as covered in the video (with the extension above) and post in teams and on your weebly portfolio site.
What you learned:
- The Pen tool is used to create and edit anchor points and paths
- Important to set stroke color, fill color, and stroke weight before drawing (for our project: 1 pt, color to black, and the fill to none)
- Be sure to turn smart guides off
- Create straight lines
- Click and release to create an anchor point
- Move the pointer, and you’ll see a preview of the path you are creating.
- Click and release to create another anchor point. Continue clicking and releasing in different areas to create more anchor points for the path.
- To close a path
- Move the pointer over the original anchor point
- When a circle shows next to the pointer, press the Shift key and click the end point.
- To stop drawing a path without closing it, press the Escape key
- Create curves
- When creating an anchor point, drag to create direction handles, and then release.
- The more you drag when creating or editing anchor point handles, the more curve the path has.
- Create corner points (change path direction)
- To change the direction of a path while drawing, drag to create a smooth point (a curve).
- Release the mouse button.
- Move the pointer over the end of a direction handle, press the Option key (macOS) or Alt key (Windows), and drag the end of the handle to split them.
- Remove direction handles
- To remove a direction handle as you draw with the Pen tool, so that you can go from a curve to a straight line, click back on the last anchor point created to remove the handle. Then continue drawing.