Illustrator CS4 – The Pen Tool

A new academic year starts and the website springs back into life. Welcome back, or welcome for the first time.

So we start with Adobe Illustrator, the application that has been known to drive sane artists to the edge due to it’s seemingly unintuitive drawing tools with the main culprit being the Pen Tool. I’ve gathered together a few videos which should help those of you getting to grips with this for the first time.

First is a series of three videos from Jamie Yeates which give a nice, easy introduction.

Next, a tutorial video from an interesting source – Church Media Design TV – who do the show to help people ‘use media to increase God’s kingdom’. However, you don’t have to be religious to get something from this. It covers one of the exercises I covered in class on Sat 23 October and also introduces some more. If you want to go straight to the segment about the Pen Tool, go to 4 minutes in.

The page for the original video with links to the resources mentioned is here.

Check out the Illustrator section of the reading list for the recommended books.

The most important thing? Keep practicing!