Drawing rectangles, ovals, and stars is nice, but that’s not why you use Adobe Illustrator. The true power of Illustrator is that you can use it to create custom shapes as you need them—this allows you to tweak a design to perfection. Illustrator comes with a variety of tools and functions, each with its own strengths and uses. Whether it’s the mystifying Pen tool, the Live Paint feature that allows you to edit and color vector objects more freely, or the dependable Pathfinder and path functions that have helped make Illustrator so powerful over the years, this chapter reveals the true art of the vector path.

Strip away the cool effects. Forget all the fancy tools. Ignore the endless range of gradients and colors. Look past the veneer of both print and Web graphics. What you’re left with is the basis of all things vector—the anchor point. You can learn to master every shape tool in Illustrator, but if you don’t have the ability to create and edit individual anchor points, you’ll find it difficult to design freely.

Illustrator contains a range of tools that you can use to fine-tune paths and edit anchor points. At first, it might seem like these all perform the same functions, but upon closer inspection, you’ll find each has its use.

Mastering the Pen Tool

Just the mention of the Pen tool sends shivers down the spines of designers throughout the world. Traditionally, Illustrator’s Pen tool has frustrated many users who have tried their hand at creating vector paths. In fact, when the Pen tool was introduced in the first version of Illustrator in 1987, word had it that John Warnock, the brain and developer behind Illustrator, was the only one who really knew how to use it. In truth, the Pen tool feels more like an engineer’s tool rather than an artist’s tool.

But don’t let this prevent you from learning to use it.

Learning how to use the Pen tool reaps numerous rewards. Although the Pen tool first appeared in Illustrator, you’ll now find it in Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, and Adobe Flash; if you know how to use it in Illustrator, you can use it in the other applications as well. You can use the Pen tool to tweak any vector path to create the exact shape you need, at any time. Additionally, if you give yourself a chance, you’ll see that there’s a method to the madness. After learning a few simple concepts, you’ll quickly realize that anyone can use the Pen tool.

Usually, when new users select the Pen tool and try to draw with it, they click and drag it the same way they might use a normal pen on paper. They are surprised when a path does not appear onscreen; instead, several handles appear. At this point, they click again and drag; now a path appears, but it is totally not where they expect it to appear. This experience is sort of like grabbing a hammer by its head and trying to drive a nail by whacking it with the handle—it’s the right tool, but it’s being used in the wrong way.

While we’re discussing hammers, let’s consider their function in producing string art. When you go to create a piece of string art, you first start with a piece of wood, and then you hammer nails part of the way into it, leaving each nail sticking out a bit. Then you take colored thread and wrap it around the exposed nail heads, thus creating your art. The design you create consists of the strands of colored thread, but the thread is held and shaped by the nails. In fact, you can say that the nails are like anchors for the threads.

When you’re using the Pen tool in Illustrator, imagine you’re hammering those little nails into the wood. In this situation, you aren’t drawing the shape itself; instead, you’re creating the anchors for the shape—the Bézier anchor points. Illustrator draws the thread—the path—for you. If you think about drawing in this way, using the Pen tool isn’t complicated at all. The hard part is just figuring out where you need to position the anchors to get the shape you need. Learning to position the anchors correctly comes with experience, but you can get started by learning how to draw simple shapes.

Drawing Objects with Straight Paths

Follow these steps to use the Pen tool to draw a straight path:

1. Select the Pen tool, and click the artboard once—do not click and drag.Clicking once with the Pen tool creates a corner anchor point. This anchor point is the start point of your path.
2. Now, move your pointer to where you want the end point of your path; click again to define a second corner anchor point.

Once you create this second point, Illustrator automatically connects the two anchor points with a straight path, completing the line.

For now, the first concept becomes clear: when you’re using the Pen tool, clicking—not dragging—is what defines a corner anchor point.

At this point, with your Pen tool still selected, Illustrator assumes you want to add points to your path. By clicking again, you can create a third corner anchor point, and if you do, Illustrator draws a path to connect the second anchor point to the newly created one.

Admittedly, this behavior may prove confusing because you may have been expecting to start a new path rather than add to the existing one. To start a new path, you first have to deselect the current path. The easiest way to do this is to click a blank area on the artboard while pressing the Command (Control) key, which temporarily changes your tool to the Selection tool. Once you’ve deselected the path, you can click with the Pen tool to start drawing a new path.

So now you understand a second concept: when drawing an open path with the Pen tool, each click adds another anchor point to the path until you deselect the path, which is how you indicate to Illustrator that you’ve finished that path.

You can indicate that you’ve finished drawing a path in another way—by drawing a closed path. Until now, you’ve been creating open paths, but now you can try to create a closed shape—in this case, a triangle:

1. With nothing selected, select the Pen tool, and click once to define the first anchor point of the triangle.
2. Move the pointer to another part of the artboard, and click again to define the second point.
3. Now move the pointer once more, and click to define a third anchor point.
4. A triangle has three sides, so you have all the anchor points you need, but at the moment, the object you’ve drawn is an open path.To complete the shape, move the pointer so it rests directly on the first anchor point that you defined, and click once to close the path.

At this point, if you click again elsewhere on the artboard, the Pen tool starts drawing a new path.

This brings us to a third concept: when you create a closed path, the next click with the Pen tool starts a new path.

If this sounds confusing, try it once or twice, which should help—especially if you pay attention to your Pen tool pointer. When you’re using the Pen tool, the pointer changes as you draw, helping you understand the three concepts you’ve just learned. When the Pen tool is going to start creating a new path, a small X appears at the lower right of the icon; when the Pen tool is going to add anchor points to an existing selected open path, no icon appears next to it; and when the Pen tool is going to close a path, a small O appears at the lower right of the icon.