From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

957 Illustrator on the iPad: The Pen

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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957 Illustrator on the iPad: The Pen

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- [Instructor] Now we'll take a look at the Pen tool inside Illustrator on the iPad. And if you're something of a Pen tool, a fishy and natto then you'll find that it's not quite as nuanced on the iPad as it is on the Mac or the PC, but it does have a thing or two up its sleeve. And so what I'm going to do is switch to the third tool down over here in this left-hand toolbox which is the pen tool, and then I'll just tap as opposed to dragging in order to create corner points like so. And by the way, you may have more luck doing this with your finger, as opposed to an Apple pencil because when you're working with the pencil, it's easy to drag just a little bit and create a smooth point. And so notice that these are all corners as indicated by the fact that they are square. And now I'm going to change the fill by tapping on this white circle right here and I'll drag inside the hue ring in order to get green and then I'll drag inside this square in order to increase the saturation and the brightness. And now switch back to the black arrow tool which will give me these various icons below the shape. And I'm going to drag up on this item stroke with and so I'll just go ahead and drag up in order to increase the line weight value. Let's say to 20 points, should work out pretty well. Now, one of the interesting things about the Pen tool is that along with the direct selection tool, it allows you to modify anchor points. And notice, I'll just go ahead and switch to the Pen tool and now I'll drag an anchor point, I'll tap on a different anchor point to select it and I'll drag it around. Now, you have to be careful if you're going to work this way because it's easy to tap inside of a segment at which point you're going to add an anchor point like so. Which works out fine in our case but if you want to play it safe and you just want to modify anchor points, then you're best off working with the direct selection tool at which point you can select a point and drag it around like so and then you'll see some additional icons down below the points as well. All right, now I'm going to grab my Pen tool once again and I'll just go ahead and tap to create a triangle, like so and now I'm going to switch back to the black arrow tool up there at the top of the toolbox, all marquee both these shapes. And you just have to partially marquee them which is true insight illustrator and the Mac and PC as well. And now notice this right-hand column of icons, we've got this one here below the alignment icon and it brings up some object commands, including group. You could group the items if you want to but I want to tap on this guy, Make compound path which will turn the inside path into a hole. And now I can go ahead and scale the shape if I want to by dragging one of these corner handles if you want to scale proportionally, then tap and hold inside the touch ring on the inner side and then drag like so and that will maintain the shapes proportions. You can also drag this widget up here at the top in order to rotate the shape. When rotating if you tap and hold in a touch ring, you will rotate in increments of 45 degrees. If you drag to the outside of the touch ring, then you will rotate in increments of 10 degrees like so. All right, so that's one way to work. That is to say tamping with the Pen tool to create corner points. I'm going to go ahead and delete that path by tapping on the trashcan icon and then I'll select the Pen tool once again. All right, so another way to work is to drag with the Pen tool in which case you'll create a smooth point and notice this time when working with smooth points, the anchor point is represented by a circle like so. And now go ahead and drag to this location. If you like, you can move a point after creating it just by tapping on that point and dragging it with the Pen tool. So that's a pretty useful feature that works differently on the Mac or the PC. And now I'll go ahead and drag like so, and during your drag, if you tap and hold inside the touch ring that will break the alignment of the control handles. And what that means is that you have yourself a cusp point. And now I'll go ahead and press and hold inside the touch ring once again, and move that control handle to a different location and then I'll just go ahead and tap on the first anchor point in order to close the path outline. And now if you want to break the alignment of these two control handles, then tap and hold inside the touchscreen once again. Now I need to clean this up a little bit. So just to be safe, I'm going to switch to the direct selection tool, and then I'll tap on this anchor point and move it around a little bit and I can modify the control handles if I like as well in order to adjust the curvature of these segments. Now let's say I changed my mind on this selected anchor point top left, I want it to be a smooth point once again, then tap and hold in the touch ring and drag to the outside ring like so in order to get the secondary behavior and now if you drag the control handle, you will re-establish the alignment of the two control handles and as a result, you'll end up with a smooth point as indicated by that circle, right there. Notice that this one's a circle, this guy over here is a square. And now at this point, I can continue to drag these anchor points around in order to smooth things out. And so I'll drag that control handle upward, I'll move this anchor point down. And now let's say you want to move an anchor point around the shape around the contour of the path outline, then what you want to do is tap and hold and the touch ring and drag out like so before you start dragging so that the outer ring is selected. And now notice if you drag the anchor point, it moves around the outline of the path. I cannot stress to you how useful this feature is. If you use it maybe once, instead of a bunch of times in a row like I did. In any event, I'll go ahead and drag these out. So again, I just want to reiterate that because it fairly blew me away you tap and hold in the touch ring, drag to the outer ring, and then drag that anchor point along the path outline. Now I'll select the black arrow tool up there at the top of the toolbox. I will tap outside the path outline to de-select it, and I'll go ahead and tap on the shape tool icon to bring up this fly out menu and I'll select the ellipse tool right here, and then I'll just go ahead and drag inside the face. It's important that the face is not selected otherwise you'll manipulate the face instead of creating a new path outline. Now, what we want to do is switch back to the black arrow tool up there at the top of the toolbox, partially marquee those two paths like that, bring up the object options over here on the right-hand side of the screen, and tap "Make compound path." And you'll end up turning that ellipse into a hole. Now, if you like, you can go ahead and scale the shape as well as rotate it using these various bounding box handles. And those are a few ways to work with the ever powerful Pen tool here inside illustrator, running on an iPad.

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