Flash Tools: Pen Tool

Video Transcript

"Now, we've been looking at the Pen tool. We just created this shape using the Pen tool. What I'd like to show you now is the additional Pen tools. Remember how we spoke about, if there's a little black arrow in the bottom right hand corner, which there is on the Pen tool. There are additional tools in the drawer. So we've got the Pen tool, underneath the Pen tool we've got the add Anchor Point tool which is pretty self explanatory. If we decide we want it ahead at the point simply click right there and if we get our Sub-Selection tool and drag that out. The next tool down is the Delete Anchor Point tool, again, we just want to delete it, and away it goes. And our final tool in the Pen drawer is the Convert Anchor Point tool. Now this tool is probably one of the most misunderstood tools at least when I started using flash and illustrator and they both work the same. If you take your tool, and I'm actually going to zoom in, so that we can, oops, so we can see a little better. If you take your tool and click and drag you get these nice handles. We'll some people, you know, they think that the whole thing is messed up because they'll drag and get these weird looking shapes, hit undo. Basically if you click and drag, you have to drag out to the side depending on how far from the original point these handles are will depend on how wide your arch is going to be. So if you just remember that simple point. Now if you cross over you're going to get this going on, which may or may not be what you're looking for but it's basically a way to round out some of those corners. If I decide I want to do it on all of these corners, making sure to go the right way rather than to, you know, going this way. So make sure you go the right way here and another quick shortcut is if you hold down the space bar you get this hand, that allows you to navigate without having to scroll. But now, real quickly I was able to take that shape that was very angular and if we zoom out you should be able to see that it's now completely organic with round corners. So thats the suite of Pen tools finishing with the Convert Anchor Point tool."