Path creation tools are applications that allow you to create commonly used geometric paths in a way that is much more efficient than using the Pen tool.
Common geometrical figures (ellipses, rectangles, polygons, etc.) like paths created with the pen tool, are ultimately just anchor points and control handles. However, unlike arbitrary paths, with geometrical figures, the points and control handles follow simple mathematical rules that can be defined by a few parameters, but they must be arranged very precisely. For example, a rectangle must be a closed path of a specific width and height and precisely parallel sides.
The Path Creation tools are simply programs that generate the Anchor Points and Control Handles of geometrical figures based on a few defining parameters, which you specify either graphically or via dialog boxes. These tools are used frequently because:
There are two broad categories of path creation tools. Those for creating:
When you are using path tools, you are typically creating several (possibly many) objects, and therefore, alignment becomes a critical issue. A typical workflow is to:
Because, in practice, grids and guides are critical to the typical workflow, we start this page with articles on how to use these alignment aids.
A Grid is a background that looks like graph paper but does not print. You can use a Grid to quickly align objects optically.
To use a Grid in Adobe Illustrator:
Since the commonest use of Rulers is to place Guides, Ai considers guides a feature of rulers, and to create guides you must first enable Rulers (Ctrl + r).
Using Rulers in Adobe Illustrator:
To toggle Rulers on or off, execute the View > Rulers > Show/Hide Rulers (Ctrl + r) command.
Ai allows you to use Rulers in one of two ways:
To toggle between Global and Artboard rulers, either:
To set the Ruler's origin (0, 0) point for both the horizontal and vertical rulers:
Guides are thin, horizontal, or vertical, lines that do not print, and that you can create and place in arbitrary locations to help you position and align objects relative to one another, and to the artboard. You can toggle guides on and off, and you can choose their color and whether the line is solid or dotted
Guides are software objects that are represented in the Layers panel. Consequently, instead of deleting (or clearing) them when they are no longer needed, you can simply make them invisible by clicking the eye icon in the Layers panel. In that way, you can save guides for later use. You can also move a set of related guides to their own layer, name the layer and control the locking and visibility of the entire set as you would any other Layers panel object.
Typically, you create guides using Rulers. However, you can also convert arbitrary lines or objects into guides.
The three basic operations for using standard Guides in Adobe Illustrator are as follows.
Create a Guide:
You can make custom guides from any path. This is particularly useful for (A) creating guides from shapes created with the polar or rectangular grid tools, and (B) creating non-linear guides.
To convert any path to a guide in Adobe Illustrator:
View > Release Guides is the inverse operation. It converts a guide into a line.
Smart Guides are pop-up guides that appear as you hover over, draw, or transform objects. They provide information that can substantially improve your productivity as you create and layout the elements of your composition. There are seven Smart Guide features, which you can choose to enable or disable. The purpose of this article is to help you get the most out of Smart Guides by describing each of the features in sufficient detail to enable you to (A) know what features are available and (B) to make an informed decision about which features to use.
In the Edit > Preferences > Smart Guides dialog, you can:
Note that turning on View > Snap to Grid or View > Pixel Preview will disable Smart Guides.
Alignment Guides
When you are moving an object, alignment guides show you when a feature (e.g., an edge or the center) of the object that you are moving is aligned with a feature of nearby objects. For Alignment Guides to detect the center of a shape, you must have selected the Show Center icon in the Attributes panel.
Anchor/Path Labels
As you move the cursor, Anchor/Path Labels show you when you are hovering over an anchor point or a path segment.
Object Highlighting
As soon as you hover over an appearance attribute of a path, Object Highlighting shows you the underlying path. This is most useful when the path has an Effect applied to it, as in the figure, where a line's stroke has a scribble effect (Effect > Stylize > Scribble).
Measurement Labels
When you are creating a Live Shape, Measurement Labels will show you the dimensions of the shape. When you hover over an Anchor point of a selected path, Measurement Labels will show you its x-y coordinates. Finally, when you hover over the center of a selected shape, Measurement Labels will show you its x-y coordinates, provided that you have selected the Show Center icon in the Attributes panel.
Transform Tools
When you use Transform Tools (Scale, Rotate, or Shear) and you have the Measurement Tools setting enabled in the Smart Guides Preferences panel, the tools will display guides that preview the effect of the transformation.
Spacing Guides
When you are moving a shape into position with a series of two or more other shapes, Spacing Guides popup to show you when the shape that you are moving has the same relative spacing as the other shapes in the series.
Construction Guides
When you have made the Pen tool or a Live Shape tool active, and you hover its cursor at position that is a specified angle relative to the nearest anchor point of the nearest path, Ai will display a Construction line. You set the angles that trigger the display of Construction Guides in the Edit > Preferences > Smart Guides dialog.
Tools for drawing open paths include:
Even though it is not grouped with the other Live Shape tools, the Line Segment tool creates a Live Shape. You can see this in the Layers panel. When you create a straight line with the Pen tool, the Layers panel gives it the default name "Path." But when you create a straight line with the Line Segment tool, the Layers panel will give it the name "Line."
As with most tools you can use the Line tool to create an object either quantitatively or visually.
To create a line segment using the Line Segment Tool Options dialog box in Adobe Illustrator:
When creating a line segment quantitatively , by default Ai uses the stroke color. To tell Ai to use the fill color, click the Fill Line box. However, for that to work, you still must have the stroke color set to none. If you have both a fill and stroke color specified, Ai will use the stroke color, even if you have specified Fill Line.
To create a line by drawing with the Line Segment Tool in Adobe Illustrator:
Provided that you have turned on View > Smart Guides, as you begin dragging out a line segment, Ai will display a Measurement Label, which shows the segment's length (distance D) and the angle.
When working with the Pen tool, the Smart Guides show only the length of the current line segment. With the Pencil tool Smart Guides do not work at all.
The Line Segment tool does not create a simple path as does the Pen tool or the Pencil tool. Rather it creates a line that is a Live Shape. The accompanying figure illustrates the differences. In the Layers panel the Pen tool or the Pencil tool will create a Path; whereas, the Line Segment tool creates a Line. On the art board with Bounding Boxes turned on, Line Segments do not show the bounding boxes, but display only two end points and a center point.
When working with a line that was drawn with the Line segment tool and Bounding Boxes turned on, you can use the Selection (black arrow) tool to move either endpoint of a Line Segment independently, or you can Alt + drag on an endpoint with the Selection tool to rotate the Line Segment about its center. This is not possible with a line that was drawn with the Path tool or the Pencil tool.
Expanding a line (Object > Shape > Expand Shape) turns if from a Live Shape into a regular Path.
Shout out to Helen Bradley for her cool video "Illustrator - Live Shape vs Regular Shapes - what they are and how they differ" that makes all this clear.
The Arc Tool fills a rectangle with a Bézier curve that arcs from one corner to the other. You set the Length of the rectangle's X and Y axes, in the Arc Segment Tool Options dialog.
The curvature of the arc is determined by perpendicular control handles that extend from the corner where the curve launches to the corner where it lands.
You set the length of the control handles by the Slope setting in the Arc Segment Tool Options box. The Slope is the percentage of the X and Y dimension along which the control handle will stretch.
As with most tools, you can use the Arc tool to create an arc either quantitatively or visually
To generate an arc using the Arc tool dialog box in Adobe Illustrator:
To draw an arc with the Arc tool in Adobe Illustrator:
When working with the tool, you can:
The Curvature tool (shortcut Ctrl + ~) is an alternative to the Pen tool for quickly creating curves that are made up entirely of Anchor Points that have Control handles (i.e., Smooth Points and Change Direction Points). The tool's distinctive features are that:
The Curvature tool has several drawing modes that may change as you draw. Each drawing mode has a distinctive purpose and in each mode the Curvature tool has distinctive capabilities. Ai displays a modifier icon in addition to the Curvature icon to signal what mode the cursor is in and what you can do when the Curvature tool is in that mode. The cursors, with their mode modifiers are frequently referred to as if they were completely distinct types of Curvature tool cursors. The following table defines all the Curvature tool modes and what the modifiers mean.
| Cursor State | Modifier | Means that the tool will: |
|---|---|---|
| Start |  |
Start a new path. |
| Extend |  |
Extend the current active path. |
| Move Anchor Point |  |
Slide the Anchor Point along the Path or reposition it away from its current location and thereby move the path to a new location. |
| Add Anchor Point |  |
Insert an Anchor Point into a Path Segment |
| Close |  |
Click on the Starting Anchor Point of an Open Path and thereby make it a Closed Path. Ai will adjust the control handles not only on the previous Anchor Point but also on the Starting Point. |
Activate Path (Resume) |
 |
Reactivate an inactive path so that you can resume editing it. |
| Alt + click |  |
Place a Change Direction Point. Whenever you click on two successive points with this cursor showing, Ai will connect the two Change Direction points with a straight line, i.e., a segment with both its launching and landing Control Handles in-line with one another so that the segment appears straight. |
To use the Curvature tool in Adobe Illustrator:
Assume for the moment that you want to create a path made up entirely of smooth points. The figure illustrates drawing a circle with the Curvature tool with Smart Guides turned on.
The Shift-key constrains the placement of an Anchor Point so that it will be on a line that makes an angle of 0, 45, 90, 135, 180, 225, or 270 degrees.
To create a Change Direction point with the Curvature tool in Adobe Illustrator:
To create a straight segment with the Curvature Tool in Adobe Illustrator:
You can perform common path editing operations with the Curvature tool on any Path, even if you did not create the Path with the Curvature tool.
To edit an existing Path with the Curvature tool in Adobe Illustrator:
For a concise yet comprehensive video, see How to Use the Curvature Tool in Adobe Illustrator CC by hikeart. For a dramatic illustration of how powerful and time saving the Curvature tool's path editing capabilities are, see the Curvature Tool in Illustrator CC 2018 by Martin Perhiniak at Yes I'm a Designer.
The Pencil tool is useful for creating organic (irregular, asymmetric) shapes. It allows you to create a smooth free-form path by making a simple, click + drag gesture. The tool automatically sets down anchor points and can also smooth minor deviations that are introduced by small jerks in the dragging gesture.
The tool's smoothing capability much improves its usefulness but creates a fundamental trade-off: you can have either (A) high accuracy (fidelity to your drawing gesture) and too many anchor points, or (B) nice smooth lines with few anchor points and low fidelity, but you cannot have both. Some segments of the path will always remain either too jagged or else smooth but not accurately placed. For that reason, working with the Pencil tool is an iterative process of drawing and redrawing a path to get it to be both smooth and accurate.
Fortunately, the tool makes redrawing paths easy by allowing you to keep a path selected and correcting it by drawing over it. The Pencil tool has several drawing states, which it signals by adding small icons that modify the cursor. Of these, the states related to redrawing (the Start Path state and the Continue Drawing-Redrawing) are the most important.
| Cursor State | Modifier | Means that the tool will: |
|---|---|---|
| Start | * | Start a new path |
| Continue | / | Continue drawing or redrawing the current path. with the pencil tool |
| Straight Line | _ | Shift + drag draw a straight line constrained to 0, 45, or 90 degrees. Alt + drag draws a straight line that is not constrained to a particular angle. |
| Close | o | Close a path a path drawn with the Pencil tool. |
Before you start using the Pencil tool, you will probably want to do some experimentation to find and set the optimal trade-off between fidelity and smoothing. To do that use the Fidelity slider in the Pencil Tool Options dialog.
To set the Pencil Tool Options, double click the Pencil tool, and update the setting.
Note that to use the tool in the normal, iterative (drawing and redrawing workflow), you will want to accept the default Keep Selected option and have the Edit Selected Paths option set to a non-zero value (the default is 6 px). The Edit selected paths option enables or disables the smoothing function of the Pencil. Choosing the Keep selected option makes the smoothing work flow more fluid by keeping whatever path you are working on selected after a drawing gesture so that you can immediately correct problems by retracing the path.
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Fidelity | Controls how many anchor-points the Pencil tool will insert for a given gesture. The Accurate setting makes the path faithful to your gesture, but produces the most anchor-points. The Smooth setting produces the fewest anchor-points, but omits small deviations in your drawing gesture. |
| Fill new pencil strokes | If you have chosen this option, then if you select a fill color before drawing with the Pencil tool, Ai will fill all subsequent Pencil tool paths with the fill that you selected. |
| Keep Selected | The path will stay selected after you release the mouse button to finish drawing the path. |
| Alt key toggles to Smooth Tool | Makes pressing the Alt-key invoke the Smooth Tool instead of drawing an unconstrained straight line. |
| Close paths when ends are within: | Set a value for how close you must get to the starting point before Ai will close the path. |
| Edit selected paths Within: _ pixels | Set a value for how close you must get to a path before a gesture counts as retracing and correcting the path trajectory. |
Because of the imperfections of freehand drawing, working with the Pencil tool is an inherently iterative process of drawing and corrective redrawing. Fortunately, with the default Edit selected paths option selected in the Pencil Tool Options dialog, you can refine a path by simply drawing over it with the Pencil tool. There is no separate editing process; just draw over imperfections until they look the way you want.
To draw a free-hand path in Adobe Illustrator:
Hints
Adding Straight Lines with the Pencil Tool. To use the Pencil Tool to draw a straight-line segment (either by itself or as a continuation of a free-form path): Alt + click and drag. When you Alt + click, the cursor will display the Straight-Line cursor modifier. When you release the mouse button, the tool will draw the line.
To use the Pencil Tool to draw a straight-line segment constrained to a 45-degree or 90-degree angle either by itself or as a continuation of a free-form path: Shift + click and drag.
Further Smoothing a Free-form Path. The Smooth tool is an alternative to using the Pencil tool's iterative (Keep Selected and Edit Selected Path) workflow to reduce the number of anchor points in a path. However, the Smooth tool works on any path.
To smooth a path with the Smooth tool:
Erasing Part of a Free-form Path. In contrast to the Eraser tool, which cuts a swath the size of its brush into any object, the Path Eraser tool is designed specifically to erase parts of a path by using a tracing gesture.
To precisely erase parts of a path:
Join Two Paths with the Pencil Tool. To join two parts of a path or to rejoin two parts of a path after you have created a gap by an erasure.
Tools for drawing closed paths include:
Live Shape tools programmatically generate all of the anchor points and control handles needed to create common geometric shapes from a few properties that define the shape. You can supply the defining parameters, quantitatively via a dialog box or visually via gestures of a mouse (or a tablet stylus).
Using these tools not only provides a faster way to create basic shapes, but Illustrator has largely eliminated the need for using tools other than the Transformation panel to move, scale, rotate, reflect, or shear Live Shapes.
The operation of all Live Shape tools is similar, so let the following example stand for them all.
Suppose that you want to generate a rounded rectangle using the quantitative method of supplying the parameters in a dialog box. You would simply click the Rounded Rectangle tool, then click on the artboard (which makes Ai pop up the dialog box. Then you enter the three defining properties of a rounded rectangle: height, width, and the radius of the corners. From the three parameters Ai, will generate 8 smooth anchor points and 8 control handles placed at exactly to correct locations to create a perfectly symmetrical rounded rectangle, a process that would be slower and more difficult to do accurately with the Pen tool.
If you want to work visually, you simply click the Rounded Rectangle tool (Ai changes the cursor to a cross hair) and instead of clicking on the artboard, you click and drag diagonally with the mouse. As you drag, Ai uses your mouse coordinates to deduce the defining properties and then sends them to the shape tool's program, which will place the control points and render the shape.
While drawing a Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, or an Ellipse (i.e., when the cross-hair cursor is active), the following modifier keys are helpful:
In a typical workflow, you want to make some adjustments to a newly created shape before considering it final. For example, if you have just created a rounded rectangle, you might decide that the corners are too big, or that two of the corners should be chamfered or that its center should be aligned with the edge of another element. You can make any of these common adjustments either quantitatively or visually.
You can quickly adjust Live Shapes quantitatively via the Transform panel dialog (Window > Transform), which provides a form that includes fields showing the current values of all the properties that are applicable to the currently selected Live Shape. When you change a property value, the shape will change immediately to reflect the new setting.
The accompanying example illustrates using the Transformation dialog, to alter the corner radius.
Provided that you have enabled Bounding Boxes (View > Show Bounding Box) and Corner Widgets (View > Show Corner Widget), you can use these features (see below) to visually adjust the shape's width, height, and corner radius.
In addition, as of Illustrator CC 2015, Live Shapes provide on-art, Live Control Widgets. You can select a tool for a particular shape and use the tool's on-art widgets to adjust special features. Furthermore, you can use the Bounding Box, Corner Widgets and on art control widgets without leaving the tool that you used to create the shape.
Live shapes differ from a closed path created with the Pen tool in the following ways:
The Transformation panel nicely exhibits the properties that distinguish a Live Shape (e.g., created with the Rectangle tool) from a shape with the same structure created with the Pen tool.
To convert a Live Shape to a path and vice versa:
By default, whenever you select one or more objects Ai displays a Bounding Box surrounding the selection. Since when you create a shape it is selected, unless you have Bounding Boxes disabled, you will see a newly created shape surrounded by a Bounding Box. Bounding Boxes allow you to quickly transform an object visually by dragging handles.
To transform objects with a Bounding Box in Adobe Illustrator:
To use the Corner Widgets or the on-art Live Controls (such as the Polygons widget for increasing the number of sides), you must have Bounding Boxes enabled (View > Show Bounding Box, Ctrl + Shift + b).
Rectangles, stars, and polygons have Live Corner Widgets. You can change the style or the radius of a corner; and you may do so quantitatively or visually.
To change the style or radius of a corner quantitatively in Adobe Illustrator:
To visually change the style or radius of one or more corners in Adobe Illustrator, you must be aware of two things:
To simultaneously change the radius of curvature of all the shape's corners,
To visually change the radius of one or more corners:
To visually change the corner style:
These three tools are related in the following ways:
You can create a rectangle either quantitatively via a dialog box or visually by mouse gestures.
To create a Live Rectangle with precise dimensions via a dialog box: in Adobe Illustrator:
Note that you can enter arithmetic expressions in the dialog box fields. For example, to make a rectangle that is half the size of the one in the accompanying figure, you could enter 225/2 and 175/2.
To adjust the type of corner, click the icon next to the corner radius field in the Properties > Transformation panel.
Note that rectangles that you create with the Rectangle Tool are basically the same as rounded rectangles that you create with the Rounded Rectangle tool. Both have bounding boxes and corner widgets, but in Live Rectangles, the corner radius is set to 0.
To draw a rectangle visually with the Rectangle tool in Adobe Illustrator:
You can create a Rounded Rectagle either quantitatively via a dialog box or visually using mouse gestures.
To create a Live Rounded Rectangle with precise dimensions via a dialog box: in Adobe Illustrator:
Note that you can enter arithmetic expressions in the dialog box fields. For example, to make a rounded rectangle that is half the size of the one in the accompanying figure, you could enter 225/2 and 175/2.
To adjust the type of corner, click the arrow next to the corner icon in the Window > Transformation panel
To draw a Live Rounded Rectangle visually with the Rounded Rectangle tool: in Adobe Illustrator:
You can create a Live Ellipse either quantitatively via a dialog box or visually by mouse gestures.
To create a Live Ellipse with precise dimensions via a dialog in Adobe Illustrator:
Note that you can enter arithmetic expressions in the dialog box fields. For example, to make an ellipse that is half the size of the one in the accompanying figure, you could enter 225/2 and 175/2.
To draw an Ellipse visually with the Ellipse tool in Adobe Illustrator:
Unlike Rectangles, Rounded Rectangles, and Ellipses, which are box-oriented (i.e., their size is defined quantitatively by the width and height of a box that contains the shape), the Polygon or Star are radius-oriented. That is, the Polygon is defined by the radius of the circle that contains the shape and the Star is defined by the radius that contains the interior points and the radius that contains the exterior points. Furthermore, when drawing with these radius-oriented tools, you draw not from corner-to-corner of a containing box, but from the center of the shape to the circumference of a circle that contains the entire shape.
The accompanying figure graphic shows the relationships among the radii that define the polygon and star in their respective dialogs and the width and height parameters that define circles generated with the Ellipse dialog.
You can create a Polygon either quantitatively, via a dialog box, or visually by using mouse gestures.
To create a Live Polygon with precise dimensions via a dialog box in Adobe Illustrator:
Note that you can enter arithmetic expressions in the dialog box fields. For example, to make a polygon that is as wide as an ellipse like the one in the above (Draw an Ellipse) figure that is 225 pixels wide, you would have to have a polygon that has a radius that is half that size. Instead of entering 112.5, you could just enter 225/2 and get the result shown in the accompanying figure.
To draw a polygon visually with the Polygon tool in Adobe Illustrator:
You can adjust a finished polygon in any of the following ways:
You can create a Star either quantitatively, via a dialog box, or visually by using mouse gestures.
To create a Star with precise dimensions via a dialog box in Adobe Illustrator:
Note that you can enter arithmetic expressions in the dialog box fields. For example, to make a star that is half as wide as an ellipse that is 225 pixels wide, you would have to have a polygon that has a radius that is half that size. Instead of entering 112.5, you could just enter 225/2 and get the result shown in the accompanying figure.
To draw a Star visually with the Star tool in Adobe Illustrator:
Clicking and dragging with the Blob Brush tool creates, not a line, but a closed path that is filled with the stroke color that was in effect when you started drawing. For example, suppose that in the Appearance panel you set no fill but a red stroke, and then you click and drag freehand horizontally with the mouse. Ai will draw an automatically smoothed, closed path with a red fill that is as high as the default width of the tool's brush and as long as the length that you dragged the cursor. Illustrator calls this object a Blob.
When you are drawing with the Blob Brush tool and have both a stroke and a fill defined, you will draw with the stroke color, i.e., the stroke color takes precedence over the fill color. However, if you deselect and reselect the object, the Appearance panel will show that you have created a closed path with a fill.
You can also enhance a blob by creating another overlapping blob. Ai will automatically merge the blobs (provided that you draw with the same color). Furthermore, the tool's default behavior is that you do not even need to select the old paths before you merge blobs. The result is a more complex closed path. But, if you switch colors or create a blob, that does not overlay another blob of the same color, Ai will assume that you want to start creating an entirely new blob.
You can also create a Compound Shape (a shape with a hole in it) using the Blob Brush. In the accompanying figure, the path on the right part of the figure is a clone of the one on the left, except that it has been painted in, thus eliminating the hole, and thereby creating a simple closed path.
You can adjust the degree of smoothing as well as the shape, size, and orientation of the tool's brush via the Blob Brush Tool Options dialog box. To open it, double-click the Blob Brush tool (which is grouped with the Brush tool; or alternatively, if the tool is already selected, press the Enter key.
Ai's default, behavior is that when you draw a new shape with the Blob Brush tool that overlaps an existing blob of the same color, Ai merges the new blob with the original blob, even if the original blob was not selected. You can change this default behavior by checking the Merge Only with Selection option checkbox, which tells Ai that if you erase or add new strokes, they should only affect the selected object. If you choose this option, you will probably want to also check the Keep Selected checkbox (in the upper left of the dialog box), which tells Ai that after creating or extending a blob, it should remain selected.
Note that any calligraphic brush works like a Blob Brush.
To use the Blob Brush in Adobe Illustrator:
Hints: