Adobe® Illustrator® 10 Classroom in a Book®

Drawing curves

In this part of the lesson, you'll learn how to draw smooth curved lines with the pen tool. In vector drawing programs such as Adobe Illustrator, you draw a curve, called a Bézier curve, by setting anchor points and dragging to define the shape of the curve. Although drawing curves this way takes some getting used to, it gives you the most control and flexibility in computer graphics.

You'll draw the pear, its stem, and a leaf. You'll examine a single curve and then draw a series of curves together, using the template guidelines to help you.

Selecting a curve

1.	Choose View > Curved Line to display a view of a curved line on the template.
2.	Using the direct-selection tool (), click one of the segments of the curved line to view ...