From the course: Illustrator: Drawing without the Pen Tool

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Using Simplify to create smooth paths

Using Simplify to create smooth paths - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator: Drawing without the Pen Tool

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Using Simplify to create smooth paths

So we know that we can use the Smooth tool inside of Illustrator to kind of paint or draw over a path to kind of smooth it out. However, like we said before also it's not really the most efficient way if you have a mouse and it can sometimes introduce additional anchor points to your path. Well, let's talk about a different method on actually how we might be able to smooth paths. More importantly, a way to smooth paths and also reduce the number of anchor points in your artwork, so that it's more simple and easier to edit in the future. There is a command inside of Illustrator called Simply. Its main goal is to take a path that has a lot of anchor points and usually extraneous anchor points, and reduce the number of anchor points so the path will be more simplified and will print faster. However, when you sometimes reduce the anchor points, you also need to kind of smooth out the path, and simplify actually works great for this kind of technique. Let me zoom in over here on this file…

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