Further Developing Your Pen Tool Skills

Pen Tool Practice Exercises:

Pen Tool Tutorial:

Read through this tutorial carefully and follow along with illustrator using the pen tool. You will be required to turn in a pdf file that demonstrates your steps of pen tool practice in each step of the tutorial, additionally at the end of the tutorial there are 10 black shapes. You must trace these shapes using the pen tool. You may download the images, and use the FILE/PLACE function in Illustrator to place the jpg on your artboard for tracing.

View the tutorial here: http://www.vectordiary.com/illustrator/drawing-with-pen-tool

When your Pen Tool Exercise is complete you can move on to this next assignment, Place and Trace. The goal is to further practice your Pen Tool by tracing line art over a photograph.

Place and Trace Assignment:

1. Search for a photograph online that you would like to trace... make sure the image is at least 1000 pixels wide so that it contains some good details
2. Download your image and "Place" it in Adobe Illustrator
3. Lock down the layer that contains your photograph, create a new layer to create artwork on
4. Using your Pen Tool, trace line art over your photograph, make sure there is no Fill, Outline only!
5. Turn off the photograph layer now and then to see your line art. Keep drawing until your image contains a good level of detail