using adobe illustrator for the first time ! The pen tool

This week at college...

Learning to uses adobe illustrator for some one that isn’t really a computer person is rather challenging, don’t get me wrong i love a challenge but i felt a bit defeated after using it. What we were told to do was use the pen tool to create the shapes that are shown on the mac. The shapes were simple, so i was like i can do this there easy but looks can be deceiving as i found out. The way to do it was to create the anchor points to join the lines.... for some reason i found this really challenging! But it got worse on the circles, to  do these you had to click hold until the two lines came out from the side and then click and drag to make the curve, for the circle you make a quarter at a time and continue from each anchor. For some reason i got a very peculiar set of lines that were closer to a figure of eight than a semi circle. After trying six times i got a half and then persevered to get the other half that took a few try’s but i got there. 

After i had got this far I wasn’t very hopeful for the next steps to come but I was willing to try. In the end i think i had tryed at least 4 times on each and had got the rough out line, it was funny when i got to the shape of the car as i done that first try! and found it the most easy what is ironic as i could hardly do a circle to start with. 

After using the pen tool i was definitely a lot better that i thought i was going to be by the end of it, but I guess practice makes perfect. I don’t think I’m ever going to see my self choosing to used this in any work of mine in the future but I’m always willing to try. I felt the overall way to master using this is being slow and patient (what I don’t have a lot of when it comes to computers) but its a working progress and i want to get better as we do live in a modern time wear the world evolves around them and are critical to the way we live. 

I think the next time i use this tool I’m going to star working nice and slow and continue to learn the basics to get an overall understanding of this software, and more ill let you know how i get on if the out come is any good but stay in tune for more.

Rhys