Advanced Pen Tool tricks in #adobeillustrator

Do you hate the pen tool or you one of those people who spent way too long learning it? You're like, I'm pen tool master. Uh, regardless, you're going to like this tip. So, I'm going to grab my pencil tool, which is the N key. Clearly, not really. Okay. And I'm going to draw. This is meant to be a leaf. I'm going to draw really slowly. That worked. Then this side. Oh, it's good. Yes, that's a leafish. Then I'm going to grab my join tool. There's a join tool. Okay. And if you can't see the join tool, go down to your three little dots down the bottom and make sure up here you're on advanced. Then you'll be able to find, click and hold down on the pencil tool, grab the join tool, and watch this. You ready? Scrubby dub dubdub. It's cool, eh? You just kind of drag over it and very roughly and it just joins it up. I do love it. Uh, that's turned out kind of smooth. My drawing ended up smooth is because I doubleclicked on my pencil tool. Watch this. If I double click it, I make sure it's smooth. It makes you look better when you're drawing in Illustrator. You can see here it's a complete join shape. We can fill it. If it's a little bit wonky, you can go to edit paths and go to simplify. Even that, can you see from here? No, where was it? There. One anchor point, two anchor points. Just too many anchor points. Watch this. I can just crank it up. Look at all the anchor points go away. And it holds its shape. It's making it super easy to update later on. I grab my direct selection tool and say, "You, buddy, uh, need to be more like a leaf. " If you're still here, I'll give you a bonus tip. Watch this. I'm going to grab my pencil tool again. Okay. And I'm going to draw a little thing down the bottom here. It's got no stroke or fill. I'm going [snorts] to hit D on my keyboard for the default colors. That's not the tip. Just forgot to draw it with a fill and a stroke. Okay. D will throw in the white and the black. If I select both of these and then go to my shape builder tool, so shift M. Okay. And I hold down my option key on a Mac, alt key on a PC, and if I just click and drag across these, it chopped a bit out. And no pen tools were harmed in the making of this leaf by flame. It's a flame now. I've decided it's a plan. Now, if you like these tips, uh, follow me here for more. And if you're like, "How long have those tools been in there? " You might be ready for my Illustrator advanced course. Check it out on Bring Your Own Laptop.