Transcript:
[MUSIC] He’ll obey your Jin Ganske. And this is the place to be to develop your creative skills in this tutorial. We’re going to learn how to master the pencil, and we’re going to do that by playing the Bezier game now. This is a website that lets you train your pencil skills and it’s really cool. So after this video, please do click the link in the description if you’d like to go to the site and have a go if you’ve never used the pen tool before in like Photoshop Illustrator Indesign XD, Then don’t worry, you can start here. This is the perfect place to start you off and has tutorials as well to help you. If you use the pen tool for years like me, then try it anyway. You know, you might learn something new like. I learned how to draw a heart a more effective way, so it’s a really really fun game and a good way of learning the pen tool. So let’s jump into it. You’ve got this big swooshy thing from the start screen. You can play around with that, and when you’re ready to get started, just click on the button at the bottom, and it starts you off with a basic tutorial, and you can skip these from the bottom right corner, and you’ve got some familiar shortcuts from some of the Adobe Apps like command or control Z, depending on whether you’re on Mac or PC. You’ve got shift command, ed, so you can redo your last action clear stage. I’m not entirely sure what that does, and you could hold shift to snap your angle to either horizontal vertical or 45-degree line. And you can hold down the Alt key to unlink your points when you’re halfway through creating a line so yeah, with that said, let’s jump into it so you can see, it’s prompting us here to start this off. Well, just left-click and we’ll just click here, So the goal is to go from point. A to point B and draw the shape and the shapes do get progressively harder. So whether you practice this loads and loads and loads and go all the way through it or whether you just kind of do five minutes a day. This is a great way to hone your pencil skills. So we’ll start up here and you can see that. I can move this around, so there’s a bit of leeway. If you like that precision that 45 degree angle, hold shift and with shift held just continue to click around here. And if I do go out or I make a mistake, you can see it doesn’t complete that line, so it encourages you to get better with the tool, so if you do get stuck at a particular point kind of in this game, then that’s great. Just keep doing that level over over again until you learn the technique and then move one, you’ll be a pro. You’ll be a pro by the time you finish this. Okay, so a circle, a bit more complicated. We’ll, just left-click here and then left click, and nope. It’s gone wrong already. We’ll try again left. Click left, click and drag trying to follow the lines as best. I can, you can see. It continues that curve and we’ll continue that on one round and we’ll complete it perfect now. This is an interesting one. This is a heart, and this is a way that I’ve never used to draw heart before, and but it’s really interesting. I should probably do a tutorial on this, so what you do. Is you left-click up here and drag this out now before letting go of the left mouse button, hold down the Alt key, and it will allow you to bend this part round, so you can then let go and you can see. It continues this curve and well left-click on the bottom point and drag that out and again before we let go of that left. Click well. Hold down the Alt key, and it will allow us to bring that up to here. So these guides are really useful is showing you kind of where to position the points then. I can let go and it way. You completely wrong. Then so we’ll try again drag that out. Hold alt, drag it over there. Let go and you can see now because. I’ve kind of set those anchor points up correctly when it completes this curve and it brings it back. It draws the heart perfectly basically and another way of doing a heart is draw half and get that perfect and then just copy and paste it and flip it over horizontally. Just so it’s like perfectly perfect, okay. We’ve got a car so left. Click, and this is pretty straightforward, so we’ve done straight lines and we’ve done circles from our previous one. So actually, this here is a pretty straightforward. One, we’ve got a big, long heart here, so we’ll go up to back here with that curve. Kind of flattens out a little bit and we’ll drag that and there we go look at that first time. Come on, so when you get further into it past the tutorial stage, it tells you how many nodes or how many anchor points you should be able to do it in. And how many you actually use so at the moment? I use 15 and out of 15 that we’re available, but it also says this stage has been completed with seven, so it’s kind of challenging you to try and do it with fewer anchor points better and better, so let’s go to the next one through an aeroplane. Okay, so we can do this lots of straight lines again. We’re just going to curve this around. Bring this up so actually, once you kind of practice this and get used to it, It’s just really a case of drawing lots of straight lines and lots of curved lines now. I’ve been using this pencil for years now. So if you’re new to this and you’re finding it difficult, please don’t get disheartened. Just keep practicing and this tool is a great way to get better at that because when you’re trying to create something in a program like illustrator, for example, the more you know the tools and the better kind of the more experience you’ve got using those tools. Whatever you come up with in your mind like that awesome design, you think of you’ve then got the tools and the skills to be able to actually bring that into illustrator and create it digitally so among many other tools? The pen tool is one worth learning because it is specifically there to draw custom shapes. So anything you decide you want to draw in your mind. You can then do that and bring it to life in Illustrator. It’s probably one of the most important tools to learn. I think if you’re into kind of drawing custom shapes or things like logo design. That was a pretty straightforward one, okay. I used eleven. It could be done in ten. If you manage to do this in ten, please. Do let me know down in the comments. Okay, we’ll try one more, so we’ve got a little kind of spanner. Here, mess that one up. Oh, you can see that. This has gone really wrong. Okay, so let’s undo so try dragging this out, maybe? I’ll hold Alt and it will allow me to straighten that up there. We go so holding down the Alt key When you’re halfway through kind of drawing a Bezier curve it you can hold down ultimate or kind of cut that in half and allow you to continue with a straight line can. I do this like this. I’ve messed that one up. I know it’s gone wrong again. Okay, so we’ll drag that out. We’ll hold Alt. And then it will let us bring that back around two nodes remaining down it again. I’ve done it again. Okay, we’ll drag out, hold alt there. We go no well clearly. I need to go and work on my pen tool skills a bit more, but I hope you enjoyed this video. It’s a great tool for getting started with the pencil, or if you’ve used it for years, you might learn something new or like me. Just get better so there. We go hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Please feel free to leave any questions or comments down below like this video. If you enjoyed it, take care and. I’ll see you next time [Music]!