Finding the Pen on the rail
The rail is not a flat wall of buttons. Related tools are collapsed into group slots, and each slot shows one member at a time with a small triangle in the corner. The pen slot holds five tools and opens with the Pen itself. Click the triangle to open the flyout, choose a member, and your choice sticks: the slot keeps whatever you picked, remembered on your device, until you change it.
That is why this lesson says "the pen slot" rather than "the fourth icon down". Two people can have the same editor and a different-looking rail.
Pressing P activates the Pen no matter which member the slot is currently showing.
Click for corners, drag for curves
A bezier path is a chain of anchors with handles pulling the segments between them. The Pen places those anchors one at a time, and the gesture you use decides what kind of anchor you get.
- Press P The Pen arms and its option bar appears above the canvas.
- Click once on empty canvas That drops the first anchor. Nothing is drawn yet; a path needs at least two.
- Click again somewhere else A straight segment appears between the two anchors. Keep clicking to build a run of corners.
- Instead of clicking, press and drag The anchor lands where you pressed and a pair of bezier handles pulls out under your cursor. The segment behind bends to follow. The further you drag, the deeper the curve.
- Keep going Mix clicks and drags freely. A path can be all corners, all curves, or any mixture.
Drawing a good curve is mostly about restraint. Fewer anchors placed at the extremes of a curve beat many anchors placed along it, and they are far easier to edit later.
Closing and finishing a path
When your cursor comes back near the first anchor, a close ring lights up. Finishing while that ring is showing closes the loop rather than leaving a gap. This matters, because a path that looks shut but is not shut will not fill the way you expect.
Three gestures finish the run: press Enter, press Escape, or double-tap on the canvas. All three commit what you have drawn. If the close ring is lit, or your last anchor landed on the start, the path is closed for you. Otherwise it ends open, with the anchors you drew kept as artwork.
Escape here does not throw your work away. It ends the path and keeps it. That is the Illustrator behaviour, and it catches people who expect a cancel.
The Pen option bar
With the Pen armed, the option bar carries a small set of controls that change how the next path is built.
- Path mode, five buttons: Regular Bezier (the default, click for corner and drag for curve), Spiro (auto-smooth), B-Spline, a sequence of straight line segments, and paraxial, which restricts every segment to horizontal or vertical.
- Continue, a toggle titled "Continue drawing from an existing path". Off by default.
- Shape, a cross-section profile for the stroke: None, Triangle in, Triangle out or Ellipse.
- Scale, the width multiplier for that Shape. Default 1.
- Auto-join and Guides, two text pills. Auto-join connects your endpoint to a nearby free end on release. Guides shows snap rings and node circles while you draw. Both are off by default.
Auto-join and Guides are one shared pair of flags across the Pen, Pencil and Brush bars. Turn Guides on for the Pen and it is on for the Pencil too. Holding Alt peeks the guides regardless of the pill.
The rest of the pen slot
Open the pen flyout and you get four more tools that operate on paths you have already drawn.
- Add Anchor Point: click anywhere on a segment to insert an anchor exactly there. The curve does not change shape, it just gains a control point.
- Delete Anchor Point: click an anchor to remove it. The two neighbouring segments re-join into one, so no gap appears.
- Anchor Point (Convert): click a smooth anchor to make it a corner. Drag from an anchor to pull out a symmetric handle pair. Drag one handle on its own to break the pair so the two sides move independently.
- Join: joins path ends, with a Smooth or Corner option on its bar.
| Keys | Does |
|---|---|
| P | Pen tool |
| V | Select tool |
| F2 | Node tool |
| Enter | Finish the path you are drawing |
| Escape | End the path, keeping what you drew |
Common questions
Why did my path not fill in?
It is probably still open. Watch for the close ring near the first anchor when you finish, or finish with your last anchor on the start. If the ring is lit when you press Enter, the loop closes.
What does the Continue toggle do?
It is the Pen bar toggle titled "Continue drawing from an existing path". Turn it on when you want to resume an open path rather than begin a new one.
Should I use Delete Anchor Point or just press Delete?
Use Delete Anchor Point. It removes the anchor and re-joins the two neighbouring segments into one, so the path stays whole.
My rail does not show a Pen icon. Where did it go?
Someone, possibly you, picked a different member from the pen slot's flyout and the pick stuck. Open the flyout via the slot's triangle and choose Pen again, or press P.