Adobe Illustrator CS3 – Drawing Objects with Curved Paths
Drawing Objects with Curved Paths
The paths you’ve drawn up until this point were all made up of corner anchor points, which are connected with straight lines. Of course, you’ll also need to create paths with curved lines; this section explains what you need to know.
By now, you should be able to understand the statement we made earlier about how drawing the path is the easy part of using the Pen tool. The hard part is trying to figure out where to place the anchor points to get the path you want.
In Chapter 2, Vectors 101, you learned that curves are defined with direction handles, which control how the paths between anchor points are drawn. When you want to draw a curved path, you follow the same basic concepts you learned for creating straight paths, with one additional step that defines direction handles:
- To draw a curved path, select the Pen tool, and make sure an existing path isn’t selected. Position your pointer where you want to begin your path, and then click and drag outward before releasing the mouse.
Clicking and dragging with the Pen tool defines the smooth anchor point and, at the same time, allows you to position the direction handles.
This action creates a smooth anchor point where you first clicked and defines direction handles at the point where you released the mouse.
- Now position your pointer where you want the next anchor point to be, and click and drag once again.
Using the direction handles as guidance, Illustrator draws a curved path connecting the two smooth anchor points.
- Move your pointer to another location on your artboard, and click and drag to create a third smooth anchor point.
- Click and drag the first anchor point to close the path.
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Even the most experienced Illustrator artists need to switch to the Direct Selection tool to tweak the curves they create, which can be time-consuming. To get around this time suck, you can press the Command (Control) key while the Pen tool is active to temporarily access the last-used Selection tool. While the Selection tool is active, click and drag the anchor points or direction handles to adjust the path, and then release the mouse to continue creating more points with the Pen tool.
We can now define a fourth concept: clicking and dragging with the Pen tool creates a smooth anchor point and defines its direction handles.
Learning to anticipate how the placement of direction handles creates the path you want takes time, but you don’t have to get it right the first time. Once you create a smooth anchor point, you can switch to the Direct Selection tool and click and drag the anchor point to reposition it. Additionally, when you select a smooth anchor point at any time, the direction handles become visible for that anchor point, and you can use the Direct Selection tool to reposition those as well.
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