In Illustrator shapes are made out of paths and points. So go ahead and open up
the example points and paths.ai to follow along and I have a file here with some
basic shapes. If you click on the white arrow at the top of the Tools Panel,
it's called the Direct Selection tool. You notice this line right here.
It's basically just a path and then points on the other end or anchor point or just
simply anchor. And you can click and drag the anchor point and move it around and
you can also, of course, click and drag the path and move it around. So if you took the
Selection tool and click and drag and then you can see right here it adds that bounding box
there so you can click and drag the edge and resize it. It will not pixelate like a raster
image would as you enlargen it or zoom in. And the one over here, this one is a little
bit different. It's a curved path so we have an anchor point here, an anchor
point there and also an anchor point in the middle. You notice it has a third term here
we need to know. It's called a handle. So if you click and drag that handle with the
white arrow, the Direct Selection tool, you can change the curve of that point
so you can see here the angle of this curve can change
by clicking and dragging the handle.
And we have a square down here I drew out with the Rectangle tool.
Just hold SHIFT for a perfect square and we can move these paths and you can also move
the anchor points. And the same thing here with the circle which is drawn with the
Ellipse tool, except that we can click and drag either side and it will change the curve,
change the angle of that path. And this actually has four anchor points.
One at the top, one at the bottom, one at the left and one at the right. And we can move those
anchor points, the location. We can change the angle with the handles and we can also
click and drag the paths in between the points to change that as well.
So this is an open path. It has'nt been closed out and this is a closed path as you can see here.
And this is also a closed path, circles back around and then there's an open
path. We'll be going over how to adjust these, combine them, separate these paths
so it's an open path throughout this course. So that's the basics of points or also
called anchors or anchor points and paths in between.
It's very important to understand this when we're creating illustrations and
logos in Illustrator.
I'll see you in the next lesson.