The Curvature tool is a little bit different than the Pen tool and it's a little bit
easier to create shapes with smoother curves for a lot of people. So go ahead
and go to File, New, create a new document where we have some room to work
with and then select the Curvature tool on the Tools panel. You'll notice the
shortcut right there.
It's the SHIFT plus the tilde sign. And how this works is if you just click and then
click and then go somewhere else, you'll notice it has this rubber band preview so it
can give you a preview of what this curve is going to be like and it's acting a little bit
differently than the Pen tool. So if I click and if I keep going along, it's
pretty easy to create almost a perfect circle here, just depending on what kind of
shape you want. If you wanted it a little bit more lopsided we could do that and
with the Curvature tool, there's a couple of shortcuts to know. So what we want to do
is when you first click, if you hold down ALT, you can create a corner point
instead of a regular curved anchor points. So what that means is if I just click
and then hold down ALT and click, now I'm just creating straight paths with points
in between. So if I like go ALT on the PC or OPTION on the MAC, then it does that
curve again. You can also do the same thing by double-clicking. So if I double
click, double click. You can also go back to other points and just hover over them.
You'll notice that we can move them even after we've drawn the shape and if you press CTRL
on the PC or Command on the MAC, it will toggle it to the selection tool. You can
move the shapes around like that. So let's say you want to add more path to this shape here.
What you can do is select it and then go to the Curvature tool again. You'll notice we
can keep going from where we left off like so. And another shortcut to be
familiar with is the SHIFT. It's going to change the angle little bit. See how it constrains
it a little bit compared to not holding on to SHIFT. You can also toggle these
points between corner points and just regular curved points so if I just go up
here and double-click it changed it a little bit and I'll double click here.
It changes it and toggles it back and forth so if I don't want this to be a regular
corner point like it is here, just double click it and then it turns it into
this curved point. So the Curvature tool is pretty useful for just creating these
naturally curved shapes and paths. And it's a little bit easier to use to create these curves
for some people compared to the Pen tool but remember those shortcuts when we want
to create different curves paths or straight paths and as we're using this, it can be a
useful tool to create logos and other illustrations.