Illustrator's Quick Pen Tool is amazing!

In this video, we're going to take a look at Illustrator's quick pen tool. And this is kind of a new tool, but not really. Like it's in the beta at the minute, so you will need that to do this. And hopefully, it does come to the main version soon, because it's flipping awesome. And for certain scenarios that you'll see in a minute, it is very useful. So, first of all, you need to download the beta. So, just go to Creative Cloud, go to apps here, and you've got all apps, beta. Boom, there it is, Illustrator beta. So, we've got the beta open, and you'll find it hiding under here. Quick pen tool, shift plus Q. And at first, it's quite interesting, cuz it does very specific things. So, we've got the straight line one here. And you can see if I hover over these, they've got number one next to them. And that's because I can press one one one one one one one, and I can quickly switch between these different modes. And then what's this one here? Flip the arc, that is number two. So, we can flip it around, which we'll demo in a sec. And then we can just hide the panel, which uh we don't need to do. So, what we're going to do first of all is I've got a bunch of shapes here that I'm going to looking at. So, we could use the straight line one. We can click and drag, holding shift. And this pen tool, it snaps to 15°, 30°, 60° increments. So, a bit more than your standard 45 with the usual pen tool. So, if we click, what we could do is you can see we've got a few more snapping points. Yeah, what is that? So, 0 30 60 90. Yeah. So, we could then do something like this. I'm just holding shift, clicking and dragging. Wait, and we've got uh like a heartbeat monitor, which is cool. And we can adjust the length of the line as well whilst still using this tool, which is really handy. We'll do that in a minute as well. Uh let's give this a thicker stroke. We'll set the fill to none. And we can very easily create something like that with all of those diagonal lines at the same angle, which is lovely. Right, let's throw that up in the corner. What else can we create? We can create a cloud. Let's switch to this one here. So, we could click and drag. You can see it draws out a lovely curve. Again, we can hold shift if you do want to snap to those angles. And then we'll do like a really nice big one up here. And then a slightly smaller one here, and then maybe a a tiny one at the bottom. And you can see it marks that bottom line as well. And then rather than a curve, I can press one to switch back to the straight line, and connect it back up. Now, if you don't like these really sharp spiky bits, say you're doing something like an icon, and you want something a bit more playful, what we can do is we can always round the cap and round the corners. And you can see it just rounds off those sharp spiky bits a little bit. That's quite a good cloud, actually. I'm happy with that. Well done, Dan. Bit of bit of self-praise there. Okay, next up, we have this shape. I don't really know what this is, but I mocked it up for fun. So, something like this, we switch to a straight line. We're snapping to that same sort of What is that? 60° angle. So, we'll do something like this. And then what we could do is grab the direct selection tool, and just round off those curves a little bit. So, it could be like a like a flame or something, or part of a logo. So, that can be pretty cool as well. Let's throw that up there. something that looks like a wild apostrophe. So, we could drag this out, press two to flip it around. Now, I don't want the whole curve. I actually just want part of it. So, I'm going to just do something like this, and then intentionally bring it back to the point that I want it to stop at. So, when you're doing something like this, okay, we're going to press two to flip it. What you can do is you can look at the whole curve, but imagine that you're only going to use part of it. So, we'll try Let's press one. Ah, there we go. We can flip it all the way around, and create something like that. We can then still go and fine-tune all of this. So, if we do want to bring that in, as you can see, I've completely [laughter] completely ruined it. [gasps] Ah, let's go back and have another crack at that, I think. Just the way it goes sometimes. We'll We'll go round to here. Yeah, there we go. Line it up. That's a bit better, and then it continues that round. So, sometimes it is just a case of using this tool, and flipping between the different ones here to get the right one, and then just flipping the arc direction. So, whether it's like this, to get exactly what you're looking for. There we go. That turned out pretty well. So, it's a pretty crazy stylized apostrophe thing. Ooh, we've got another one as well. Okay, so these two are kind of similar. By the way, it enables us to very quickly draw perfect circles as well, which is nice. But with this one, what we're going to do, we'll click and drag, and we're just literally using that same middle version, and we've just created whatever that is. That could be something that's part of a logo. So, if you do have a shape that is very similar to that, this tool, rather than the normal pen tool, will make very short work of it. So, again, let's do something similar. We'll do that perfect semicircle. We'll come around to the midpoint here, and then we'll just connect it straight back to the start. So, we could do this. We'll duplicate it and flip it 180°. So, you could say we've sort of created a marble, almost, if we just stretch it out a little bit. I think you're reaching a little bit there, Dan, but we'll throw that one to one side. Let's do another one. We're going to go and do a circle. And I think with this one, actually, we'll do something a bit more fun. So, we will In fact, I'm going to shrink some of these and move them out of the way. Let's shrink that marble down. There we go. So, we'll make this one a little bit bigger. And of course, there's loads of different shapes that you can create with this tool. So, we're going to create another circle in the middle. So, we'll just copy, paste, and then scale it down with the scale tool and shift. So, it all stays perfectly central. And then we're going to hover over this point, and then click and drag. I flipping love this, cuz again, it marks it, and it snaps it. So, we've just added a perfect semicircle. We can select it, press R for the rotate tool, find the center point of everything, hold down alt or option, and click. Now, for this next bit, it depends how many different segments you want to divide this into. I'm just going to I'm going to pick 10, cuz I think it'll look kind of cool. So, we'll do 360° divided by {forward slash} 10. And then go ahead and click copy, command or control D, and you can just keep repeating this all the way around. I mean, how cool is that? It's quite thick, so let's just go and drop the stroke weight. And you can very easily create things like this, which I flipping love. It's always fun playing around with these new tools, and just seeing what is actually possible. Now, something else we can also do, if we zoom in and go and grab the shape builder tool, we could try and click in the different segments. Ah, right, no. We can't do that. Some of this isn't connected. Let's try turning on gap detection. This can sometimes be quite useful. There we go. Nice. So, if there's like a fraction of a pixel where these lines here aren't overlapping and connecting, you can see that it just highlights entire segments, and that's not what you want. So, sometimes turning on gap detection, you can see small here, it's three pixels. If they're close, like really really close, they're within three pixels of each other, these different end points and lines that are overlapping, it just counts them as they are touching, they are together. So, that's why now with gap detection turned on, I can highlight the individual segments. Let's just check. Yes, we're all good. Fantastic. Now, we can just click in each segment, and what that does is define it as its own shape. We can go and then grab a live paint bucket tool, click to make a live paint group. And if we go and set our fill to Well, we can just go and pick any color. It doesn't really matter right now, but we're just going to whack in a color. And you could keep the stroke if you wanted to. So, we could go for the same sort of pinky color, but like a darker shade. That can look kind of cool. In fact, let's just Let's fling that to one side. We'll save that for later. And then if we expand the live paint group instead, let's get rid of the stroke. Now, we can't set it to none. You can see the question marks here. Just go and pick any color, and then it will let you set that back to none. Now, we're going to ungroup everything. There we go, ungroup all. So, you should be able to pull this apart. Now, we don't want to do that. So, we'll put it back. But then select all these individual pieces, make sure your fill is selected, and then we're going to add a gradient. Ah, we've got some weirdness going on there. Oh my goodness, what has happened? Right, we're going to use the shape builder tool together with alt or option to remove all of this middle bit. Let's try and clean that up. Got some random anchor points stuck in the middle. God, what has happened here? My goodness. Goodness me. This is one of the downsides of the shape builder tool. You can see it generates a crazy amount of geometry. So, we've got to figure out a way around it. So, I'm going to go and just connect all of these up. Make sure we don't ruin the design. When I did this a minute ago before recording this, it didn't do this. I wouldn't try to avoid this, because with the shape builder tool, this is just one of those things that happens. Whether you like it or not, maybe you do everything perfectly, exactly the same process, sometimes things just happen. Illustrator's like, "You know what? Do you know what, Ginger? We're going to give you a challenge. Deal with this." Huh, and we successfully have. Dan one, Illustrator zero. There we go. That's pretty solid, I think. So, we've got our gradient. It's black to white. We can go to the gradient panel, and then what we can do is we can click on here, and we can go and pick some more interesting colors. So, let's go for like a nice Oh, I don't know. Let's Let's go RGB. We get a few more punchy colors. Nice yellowy color, and we'll pick like maybe like a reddish pinky color. Yeah, that looks pretty cool. And we can change the mode as well. We can turn on dither. We can change classic to perceptual, which is a more recent feature. You get natural blending. And we can change the type to radial as well. And this is pretty cool. You can see here already, you've got the like the gradient in there, but it's very subtle. And if we go and grab the midpoint here, we can pull this to one side. Oh, look at that. Look at that. We could maybe even pull this over, and it just enhances the color. And you can fine-tune how much of either color you want to be uh which one you want to be more dominant or not. And then we can select it, go to edit, edit colors, recolor artwork. And then we can unlink this, and just freely change these around. So, rather than mucking around in the gradient panel or with loads of swatches, if you want to switch this out to something a bit different, you can do that from recolor artwork very quickly and easily. And then you can still go in and change all of the gradients settings. So, if you do want to go for linear, I don't know why it's changed my colors back, but there you go. You can do that. But I think uh I'm going to keep it radial, actually. Um yeah, I really like that. So, honestly, this is just a few ideas and things that you can do with the quick pen tool. And it's one of those things that I do hope comes into the main version of Illustrator, because whilst we've You've quite a few pen tools here. This one definitely helps in certain scenarios and it just makes drawing smooth perfect curves just so much easier. And there we go. There is a look at Illustrator's quick pencil in the Illustrator beta. If you want to learn Illustrator with me, I've got my full course linked below. But otherwise, take care and I'll see you in the next one. [music]