- 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 Illustrator's perspective,
they amount to an attempt to understand a foreign language.
Think of it this way,
when you drag, particularly with a mouse,
you draw a rough, irregular line.
In previous versions of Illustrator,
the program tried to smooth that line
using an averaging algorithm.
The result was a glumpy version of what you originally drew,
only it looked like wiggly, garbagey junk.
Nowadays both the pencil and the blob brush
are so smart, 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
to 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/anchor points,
is the new curvature tool.
In the next chapter we'll meet the other coach,
the revamped pen tool.
In both cases, it's a whole new ballgame,
as you're about to see.