illustrator and the pen tool

Today I touched Adobe illustrator for the very first time. We mainly focused on the pen tool for the start of the exercise. This tool was completely different to what I had used previously and will take a while to get used to however it did create nice lines and curves. I found it was very easy to miss or do a wrong step whilst using the line tool as different keys/actions change how the tool works in subtle ways.

In the second half of the tutorial we used the classic ghibli character totoro. We had to trace half the jpeg image using the pen tool, then mirror the image. Then using the pen tool again to all the smaller details. For easy movement and reference we grouped certain sets of line such as the eye circles. we then just added simple colour using the fill function. I found this task relatively straight forward, was a good way to put together all the skills we learnt in the morning.