From the course: Illustrator CS5 Essential Training

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

Drawing curved paths with the Pen tool

Drawing curved paths with the Pen tool - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator CS5 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

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…

Contents