From the course: Illustrator CS5 Essential Training
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Drawing curved paths with the Pen tool - Illustrator Tutorial
From the course: Illustrator CS5 Essential Training
Drawing curved paths with the Pen tool
So we know that when using the Pen tool in Illustrator, when I click once to define an anchor point, I'm creating a corner anchor point. That means that those anchor points are connected by straight lines. However, what happens when the design calls for the use of a curved line? In order to do that, we'll need to learn how to create smooth anchor points. To make things more visible inside of Illustrator as we draw, I'm going to change my fill to None. I'm going to leave my stroke set to Black. But I'm going to change my stroke weight to 4 points. Now I'm also going to select my Pen tool. Now you already know that to create a straight line you need corner anchor points, where you click, release the mouse, reposition your cursor, click again to create that straight line. The process of creating smooth anchor points is just a little bit different. So I'm going to press Command+A and delete the path that we've just created. And I'm not going to click, but now I'm going to drag the mouse…
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Contents
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The importance of modifier keys1m 52s
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Drawing closed path primitives11m 38s
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Drawing open path primitives5m 47s
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Understanding anchor points3m 43s
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Drawing straight paths with the Pen tool7m 37s
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Drawing curved paths with the Pen tool9m 47s
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Drawing freeform paths with the Pencil tool5m 33s
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Smoothing and erasing paths3m 8s
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Editing anchor points7m 21s
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Joining and averaging paths10m 9s
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Simplifying paths4m 55s
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Using Offset Path2m 16s
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Cleaning up errant paths2m 32s
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