- [Instructor] In this movie I'll how to use
the pen tool to create and modify corner points.
Which are anchor points that occur
between straight segments.
I'll start things off the way I normally do,
by going up to the File menu
and choosing New From Template,
or you can use that shortcut of Control Shift N
or Command Shift N on the Mac,
and then I'll go ahead and double click on my RGB
with center guides.ait file
in order to bring up a blank art board.
All right, now I'll go ahead and select the pen tool.
Which you can get by pressing the P key,
and if for some reason you're not seeing
the pe tool at this location,
then go ahead and click and hold on whatever tool
you are seeing and select the pen tool
from the top of the fly out menu.
Okay now I'm going to change my fill and stroke
by clicking in this first color swatch
up here in the control panel,
and then I'll select none,
and next I'll go ahead and increase the line weight value
to six points like so.
All right, now very likely your pen tool cursor
will appear black,
but the difference is purely cosmetic.
The way the tool works hasn't changed one iota.
All right now if this is your first time using the pen tool,
it may look a lot like the curvature tool.
After all, the only thing we're missing
is the little curly Q coming off the cursor,
but the pen works very differently.
Now when you first select it,
you're going to see a pen too cursor with an asterisk.
Which tells you that you're about to start
a new path outline.
Which I'm going to do just by clicking to create
not a smooth point as you get with a curvature tool,
but rather a corner point,
and now if I move my cursor away,
you can see two things happen.
First we lose the asterisk.
Which tells us that we now have an active path outline,
and second we see the rubber band preview.
Which shows us what the next segment will look like
if we were to click at the present location.
All right, so I'll go ahead and click
in order to create another corner point,
and you can see that Illustrator automatically
joins the two points with the straight segment,
and now you can continue clicking
to create a free form polygon.
If you move your cursor back to the first point
in the path outline,
you'll see a little circle next to it.
Which tells you you're about to close the path,
and once you have, the asterisk comes back
to tell you that if you're going to click again,
you're going to create yet another path outline.
All right, in addition to close paths,
you can create open paths as well,
and there are two ways to do that.
You can either press the Escape key
in order to turn off that path outline,
and that will allow you to create a new one,
or I'll go ahead and wake this path outline backup
by moving my cursor over it,
and you can see now I get a little line next to the cursor.
Which I call the resume cursor
because it allows you to resume modifying the path,
and so notice as soon as I click
on one of these endpoints,
I again see my rubber band preview
and the asterisk next to the cursor once again disappears,
and now I'll just go ahead and click a couple more times,
and now let's say once again I'm done editing.
The other thing you can do is press the Enter key
here on the PC, or the Return key on a Mac,
and that'll go ahead and deactivate the path outline,
and as you can see,
I get the asterisk back next to my pen tool cursor.
Which means that if I start clicking
over on the other side of the document here,
I will begin a new path outline.
Another option that's available to you
when you're modifying open path outlines
is the ability to connect two open paths,
and you can do that just by moving your cursor
over the endpoint of an inactive path,
such as this one right here.
At which point you'll see a little anchor point
next to the cursor.
Which tells you that you're about to connect
the two path outlines, as well as deactivate them.
Which is why I once again have an asterisk
next to my cursor.
Now in addition to creating paths with the pen tool,
you can also modify them,
and you do so by first selecting the path outline.
Which you can do by pressing and holding the Control key,
or the Command key on a Mac.
Which gives you temporary access to the last used arrow tool
at which point you can go ahead and click on a path outline.
Such as this one, in order to select it.
Then go ahead and release the Control key,
or the Command key on the Mac,
and now move your cursor over an existing segment.
At which point you'll see a plus sign next to the cursor.
Which tells you that if you click,
you're going to add an anchor point like so.
Now let's say I want to move the anchor point
to a different location.
Well if I press the Control key or the Command key
on the Mac and try to drag that point,
I'm going to move the entire path outline,
because after all, my last used arrow
was the black arrow tool.
So I'll go ahead and press Control Z
or Command Z to undo that move.
I could manually switch back to the white arrow
by pressing the A key,
or I can switch between the arrow tools on the fly
by pressing Control ~ here on the PC,
and as you may recall, the tilde key
is the one in the upper left corner of an American keyboard.
Now on the Mac, that's not going to work.
That's going to switch you between open documents.
So what you have to do instead
is press Command Option Tab,
and that will go ahead, in my case,
switch me back to the black arrow tool.
So in other words, either Control ~ on the PC,
or Command Option Tab on the Mac
is going to toggle between the black and white arrows.
At which point I can keep that Control key down,
or the Command key down on the Mac,
and then I can click on that new corner point
that I just created,
and I can drag it to a new location.
That's a pretty great way to work, by the way.
You just go ahead and release the key,
hover your cursor over a segment,
click in order to add an anchor point,
and then Control or Command drag it to a different location,
and I'll go ahead and do it again here,
and Control or Command drag it over to this location,
and so I can continue working that way as much as I like.
Now you also have the option of deleting anchor points,
and you do that by hovering your cursor
over an existing point like so,
at which time you'll see a minus sign next to the cursor,
and then all you have to do is click
in order to make that anchor point go away,
and now I might just Control drag or Command drag
that point upward a little,
and this works, by the way, with any path outline.
It doesn't have to have been drawn with the pen tool.
So for example, let's say you want to create
a free form triangle,
then one way to do that is to grab the rectangle tool.
Which again you can get by pressing the M key,
and then you can just go ahead and draw
any kind of rectangle you like.
Then switch to the pen tool.
Which again you can get by pressing the P key,
and then go ahead and click on one of the anchor points
to delete it, and you'll end up with a triangle.
You'll also see a brief message saying
that the shape has been expanded,
because it's no longer a so called smart rectangle
here inside Illustrator.
And now I can go ahead and Control drag
or Command drag any of the anchor points
in any manor that I like.
And that's how you create and modify corner points
just by clicking with the pen tool here inside Illustrator.