The "clock method" makes Illustrator's Pen Tool easy

The pen tool is one of those tools that is incredibly useful, but it can also drive you completely bonkers, especially if you are new to Illustrator or other apps that do use this tool. So, in this video, we're going to use something called the clock method, and this is going to make using this tool so much easier. So, we're going to jump into Illustrator now and get started. So, you can see I have an italicized letter O on screen. This will make sense at a moment. And first of all, we're going to grab the pencil here. The keyboard shortcut is P. We can click, click, click and effectively do a straight line dot to dot. Right, let's swap that fill to a stroke. And you can see we've created whatever that seems to be. Now, we can also use this tool to click and we can click and drag. And we can drag out a curve. And then it nicely continues that curve, which is very lovely. And then we can start another curve. Click and drag and we can do wibbly wobbly lines. But you can see here it wants to continue this path with a curve. If you don't want that, you just have to click on the last anchor point and it cuts it short. and we'll follow it up with a straight line. So, we can click and drag for a curve and then click here, cuts it short, and then follow up with a straight line. Straight line, straight line, straight line. Click and drag. Click and drag and then click to cut it short. So, we can very easily switch between creating straight lines, curves, or a combination of curves and straight lines. So, that's the that's the introduction, the crash course. Now, we're going to move on to the clock method, and this is flipping brilliant. It's sometimes also known as the 90° method, or you can call it whatever you like, really. I'm going to grab the pencil tool for now. We'll pick a lovely color. Let's go for Let's go for pink. Why not? There we go. And for this technique, what we need to do is we need to scan everything that we're going to pen tool. So, in this case, we're going to go around the outside of the O and on the inside, and we need to put a cross in certain places. These crosses will determine where our anchor points go. So, actually, if I just scale this down and move this to the left. So, we'll do one here, and then we'll have another one over here. And I've now lost my lovely pink color. Let's go and get it back. There we go. We need to add these crosses at points where the path changes direction or it flattens out. So I'll show you what I mean. Let's just go up here. We'll start at the top cuz we can see we've got this point where it's flat for like a tiny bit. So we're just going to put a little cross there. So that is our first anchor point done. So we're going to follow around this curve. You can see we're curving. We're curving. We're bending. We're bending. Oh, hang on a second. We've reached a point now where it's actually going to change direction. So here you can see it's kind of rising rising rising. You turn your head to the side and then all of a sudden it's going down down down down. So around about the point where it flattens out here we're going to put another cross. Try and do a normal one. There we go. So again here we're curving we're curving we're curving all the way down to the bottom. And then around about here this is where it would then start curving the other direction. So hopefully that makes sense. So we'll put a little cross there. And then same up here. curve, curve, curve, and then around about here, this is the point where the curve stops rising up and then it starts going back down. So, you have to identify those changes in direction. And where that change happens is where your anchor point goes. So, we could do the same for the inside. We're actually going to do this with two points instead. So, I'm just going to add one at the top where it flattens out and then one at the bottom. You can do this with four just like we've done on the outside, but I'll show you why we can do it with two in a minute as well. If you can do it with fewer anchor points, it's always better because it's easier to edit the curves and you're going to get smoother curves as well as a result. So, we'll just put one at the top and one at the bottom. We'll ignore we'll ignore that for the minute on the inside. And sometimes what you will do is you'll add too many points. You'll see me do this later in the video. And then you'll go back and refine them and take a few out and things will clean up pretty nicely. So, this is where we need to put our anchor points. First of all, what I'm going to do is select this O here. We'll just drop the opacity and then lock it with command or control 2. And now I'm going to grab the pencil. Make sure I've got a black stroke. We'll chunk it up a bit just so we can see what we're doing. How's that? Yeah, that's okay. And we're going to start with our first anchor point. So, we're going to click here. Now, the reason this is called the clock method or 90° method is because we're not doing this. So, we're not clicking and dragging and going, "Hey, D." What we have to do is when we click and drag, we have to hold shift and we go horizontally, which is towards either 3 or 9 on a clock, or we're going vertically, so it's going to be towards 12 and six. So, vertically, 12 and 6, horizontally 3 and 9, hence the clock method. So, what we're going to do is we have to hold shift. If we let go, it's going to go all over the place and muck it up. So, we're holding shift as we drag this out. We're going to let go, and it's now going to shoot off a curve around here. here. So, we're going to find our second point. Remember, it's over here. Here we go. Oh, look at that. Illustrator nicely marks it for us. And remember, click and drag, holding shift. Now, sometimes you'll be able to drag it out. And look, there you go. It's It's lined up pretty well. Other times you'll get it like this and it won't quite line up. No matter what you do, don't worry about that because you can fix that after. And we'll come back to that in a bit as well. The important thing is that you get the anchor point in the right place. So, we're just going to go and put these anchor points now in the same places as on the left one. So, click and drag with shift. In fact, I'm not even going to bother dragging it out really. I'll show you why we don't need to worry about that in a minute. Whoops. Click and drag, holding shift. We'll just deliberately throw it off and I'll show you how to correct it. Click and drag, holding shift. Fantastic. And we can do this one as well. So, click and drag, holding shift. Click and drag, holding shift. You can see here by doing this, there's no way that I can get that that interior part of the O in one go. You can see this does look horrendous, but as I said, it's about the placement. So, with the direct selection tool now, which is A on the keyboard, we can go into this. We can click on these different points and we have these bezier handles on either side of the anchor point. And again, when we drag this, we're holding shift. We're not doing this. We want to hold shift and we'll pull this one down. And do the same with this one. Pull it out. So, we just adjust these two handles holding shift until we get this to line up. You could do the same for actually, no, let's do the outside first. So, you see I mucked this one up deliberately here. We're just going to pull it up. There we go. And pull this in. So, just adjust both of these till they fit the curve. Nice. So, for the inside one, same again. We're just going to pull it out. Pull this one out here. In. Go. There we go. Pretty good. So, if we just get rid of the original, paste this in. Let's just get rid of the middle. So, you can see you can see that we've pretty much perfectly pencled that O using this technique. So, that is the technique and how you do it. Now, we're going to try on something a little bit harder. So, we have an image of a lovely kitty cat. Now, I have not warmed up with this. This is the first time I'm doing this. So, you're going to see in real time how I might make mistakes. I might put anchor points in the wrong place. And you'll also see possibly some mild panic, but also how I go around dealing with it. So, we're going to select this, go to my layers panel. Uh, I'm going to double click the layer, and we'll dim this to like, I don't know, 30%. Let's lock it. And then switch back. And I'm going to do the vector version on a new layer. So, again, P for the pencil, and let's a slightly thicker stroke weight. We'll go for three point. Now, where do we start? That's a good question. We'll start at the ear because it's like a sharp point and sharp points are a little different. So, we're going to zoom in. Click and drag holding shift. And you're going to hear me say that a lot. There's no laughing at me in the comments. Right. So, here it completely stops. So, this isn't like meant to be a curve. So, we're going to click like we did at the very beginning. And then we're just going to start a fresh curve here. Again, we can click. We're going to hold shift and do a straight line here. And then, ah, this is a tricky one. So, this does throw me sometimes. So, I'm starting to get my head around how this works. With this one here, I have a tendency to think, oh yeah, let's just create it on an angle like that. Now, this isn't following the the 90° method or the clock method. It's on an angle, which isn't always ideal. So, what we can do is we can leave that in and fix it after. Or with this one here, we can click and drag on this existing point. We're just going to click and drag. And you can see here, we could go and again, add that midpoint. But actually, if we go all the way around to this point where again, it flattens out. Remember, those are the points we want to look for. We can click and drag here and then use the direct selection tool to go and edit it. So, we've basically got this same curve. We've taken out an anchor point. So, what I normally do is I would put the anchor point on an angle like this. And it's fine having that anchor point there. But if you grab the pen tool, click on it, it removes it, then you can go in and fine-tune the rest of the curve. Sorry, that was a terrible example there. Yeah. So, what you will do is you will add more anchor points. But any that don't conform to the clock method, try getting rid of them and see if you can use the ones that you do have, so this one and this one to achieve the same curve. because if you do it in fewer anchor points, it mitigates the chance that you're going to get any sort of wonky bits or curves that aren't smooth. Right. So, we're going to go down here and then we're going to click drag, holding shift here. This is going to shoot up to the tail here. So, again, we're flattening out here. Remember, we're following those curves. Again, just like a second ago, we could add one on a diagonal, but this would be a mistake. Instead, we want to go up here to the next point where the curve changes direction and flattens out, and we'll add it there instead. So, there we go. This one at the top is quite easy. This one here is a bit tricky because it is on an angle. So, I've got to figure out the best way to do this. Maybe we'll try this. Go there. We don't want to do an angled one again. So, we're going to go and jump to this one. So, try to keep all your anchor points horizontal and vertical. Come back. And we'll fix all of these after, but we're just zooming ahead now. Getting the anchor points in the right place. Click and drag holding shift. Hold shift so it's nice and flat. Click and drag, holding shift. Click to cut it. We don't want it to start continuing a curve like that. Should be pretty straightforward. Click and drag holding shift again. Cut it because we're going back on ourselves. This one here. So, I think yeah, again, this is very tempting to do something like this, which you can do. It's not the end of the world. Okay. So, if I click and drag on this, you can see it's going to it's going to muck up the other path. So, we can hold down alt or option. This will enable us to start a straight point. And we can hold down shift. So, it's going to create a bezier handle in that direction. And then it kind of starts by shooting off with a curve. And again, we're going to ignore the diagonal bit. We're going to go down to the bottom here, the flat, and we're going to click and drag, holding shift, and then we're going to use these handles to adjust curve. There you go. And it just sometimes does take a little bit of jumping backwards and forwards. Sometimes you'll realize that you've put the anchor plate in anchor plate, the anchor point in the wrong position. So then you kind of might need to adjust the actual position of the anchor point. But as long as you know that you uh shouldn't kind of ideally adjust the angle, try and keep it horizontal or vertical, you can create most shapes. So this one, maybe I bring this one up a little bit. Okay, this is looking pretty good. So we're just going to go around this. We got this one. Something like that. Bring it in here. Come back and adjust that one later. So again, this one we're not going to go on the diagonal. We're going to click and drag, holding shift. So it starts off with a nice curve. And then we'll do that there. And then we're coming back in here. I think this it's a bit pixelated, but that might be maybe a curve. As long as it doesn't look like a dog, I think we're good. And we'll bring that up. And you can see here it's kind of shooting off a little bit too high. Got this bit here. So, we'll try this. Clicking and dragging, holding shift. I think this one might have a slight curve to it, which is a tricky one. Probably one of those instances where I would do a custom curve like that because I'm not going to follow it up with another curve. So, for me, I'm I'm I'm okay with having that one there on a slight angle because I'm going to cut it anyway. and then follow it up. In fact, same for this one. We could Yeah, we could do something like this if there was going to be like a dip or a curve in the middle. But if there actually another way of doing this is we can just do something like this and then we could select this point. Press A for the direct selection tool and just round this off. So sometimes that's an easier way to do it is actually create a sharp point and then just round off the curve with the direct selection tool. So you could even do it here or in another few any other key places where you want things slightly rounded but not totally sharp. So, let's hide this layer so we can see our artwork. It's a bit easier to see like this. That's a pretty good first attempt, actually. So, actually, no. I probably need the artwork back, don't I? Just to see where I've gone wrong. Well, it looks like a cat, which is great. I think I am just going to round off these two points. So, those ears aren't super spiky. It's another great use of that technique. What have we got here? This is looking pretty good. Let's go and have a look at the foot. A little easier to see when you work with a stroke. So, maybe I'll just bring this down a bit. Pretty good there. Just zoom in here. Ah, okay. A little bit of a kink there, but that's fine. We just have to bring it out. Holding shift just to make sure that this is smooth and it kind of flows smoothly from that straight line to the curved line. Now, we're bring looking up here. We're just kind of making sure the width is consistent. Now, normally if it if it were a tail that needed to be the same width, I would just do the whole thing as a stroke, but this is a bit of a bit more of a pen tool exercise. So, we'll keep that there. Maybe just move the position over here. Something like that looks pretty good. And then what you can do as well is you can go through and you can always delete points if you want to. So I think maybe I'm just going to bring the back. Might move this one up a little bit. So you can see sometimes moving the anchor point is the right play. That does look pretty good actually. And then we'll just round off this bottom part just so we're consistent with a lot of the other parts well like the tops of the ears and things. Just makes it a bit softer and a bit more playful. And if we then swap the stroke to a fill you can see we've done a pretty good job pretty quickly at penciling the cat. Okay. So, the main things to remember with this technique is you want to add the points first. Just mark them out so you know where they need to go. Get the anchor points in the right place. Then, we're going to click and drag, holding shift, going horizontally or vertically, trying to use as few anchor points as possible. If you do use more anchor points, you can always remove them and just streamline the whole thing. And once you've got the anchor points in the right place, you should then be able to stick within all of those parameters to use the direct selection tool to adjust the different curves until you are able to get to your final result. And if you'd like to dive deeper into this, I've got my full Illustrator course linked below. But otherwise, take care and I'll see you next time.