So far we've talked about different concepts, shear curves, straight lines, paths and the icons for the node and pen tool. Let's start drawing a bit. The first thing I'm going to show you is how to manipulate the hammers. Okay, we've seen before that, once we have traced or segment in this case is full of smooth nodes. And we want to manipulate the segments, we just come here, click on the node tool, and we can just manipulate them. Okay, but that's not the case I want to talk about now.

Just imagine Let's activate the pencil by pressing P, and let's say I'm drawing and the next one will be this one node and say now I want to manipulate this handle. If I play directly with a pencil, it's not possible to, to or with handles, okay, so now if I press A on my keyboard to activate the no tool We just saw, I can manipulate both of them. Okay, so let's just imagine, I want to be faster. Okay, so I'm with a pencil here, and I come here, and I need to manipulate this note. Okay, so what I'm going to do, instead of pressing a on my keyboard, which is going to switch from the pencil to the note tool, I'm just temporarily going to activate the note tool, in order to be able to manipulate the handles. How do I do this?

Well, I come to my keyboard, and I press and hold command. As you can see, now the pencil changes into the note tool. I come over my handle, and I can manipulate it just like I did before. But if I let go command, I again get the pencil so I can keep drawing. That's a faster way to do so. What now, if I instead of wanting just to manipulate both portions of the segment, like I'm doing here, I just want to manipulate these here or that one here.

So what I have to do now is instead of just pressing and holding Command, I have to press and hold at the same time, the either option key in such a way that you're going to be able to see two things. One is that I'm just affecting one of them segments, one of the size of the segments. And the other one thing is that this node is going to turn into a sharp note that before was a soft node. Okay, let's go back there. Let's go to two repeats so you can see it better soft node, I press and hold option and command at the same time I manipulate and it transforms into a sharp note. Okay, the same with this other side of that segment.

If I come here, and I want to manipulate just the side, I'm gonna come over this handle, and I'm gonna just affect this one. Same for all of the notes. Okay, that's the way it would work. You see. Sometimes these notes show both of the handles, sometimes they just show one if you just go over You're going to open up, you're going to be able to see both of them. Okay, you click click on it, you see both of them, okay.

And now you can just manipulate one of them. Now, it'd be great if you follow along while we do the next two exercises really simple, really fast, just with some facts. So follow me. The first thing we're going to do is we come here to view and we're going to click on show grid. Okay, there's also this shortcut, which is command and apostrophe key. Not sure how it's good.

So let's just click on that. Okay, and then we get our grid. So for this first exercise, I want to show you first off the anatomy of this curve. And we're going to find here a couple of sharp nodes and another one in the middle point and another one, soft in both of the higher and lower part. So let's activate the pen tool. And I want I would like you to understand how the pen tool is behaving here.

Okay. So the first thing I'm going to do is trace the first note, which will correspond to these one here, and I click and I'm going to do nothing else, I'm not gonna pull up them, the handles or anything like that, I'm just gonna click here. And I'm going to look for the middle point in this area, which would be more or less here. And now I'm going to hit shift, and I'm going to pull towards the sides, as you can see here, I think this is a quite nice shape. And now you have to notice that once I click here, the pen tool is going to automatically create exactly what I just did before but mirrored Okay, so I click here, and there you go. You have exactly the other side automatically created out of my proceedings.

Segment. And that's the normal behavior when your notes are aligned. So I'm going to keep going and now I'm going to trace the lower side, I proceed exactly the same way Look, for more or less the middle point in here, I clicked and then I dropped in at the same time, I press and hold the shift key. So it helps me to constrain my handles. And I'm going to look for a point that looks more or less appropriate for this I want to drop I let go now, hands free from my mouse or my keyboard. And now if I want to finish it, I click in here and Affinity Designer, the pen tool is going to understand that it needs to mirror exactly what I created before.

So the next exercise I want you to practice is this one which is very similar to the one before and if we look at the anatomy of the segment, you're gonna see three notes. They are absolutely aligned with each other. So if I pull down a ruler here And I place it right there. And I showed you again the three notes, you're gonna see they're aligned. So basically, this is what I want you to understand. Let's activate the pen tool, instead of creating a circle this one segment, we're going to practice with another one, we click here, instead of down here, just take him for granted that this would be or the portion where we're going to trace with a pencil or first part of the segment, and let's click here just to align the second node, we're going to pull randomly wherever we want to somewhere like here.

Now when I click in here, and I align the for note, what I'm going to get is exactly a mirror, symmetrical. same side of the segment, just pulling towards down as the hundred is telling us just predicting that. So we take in here, and as you can see, we have the second part, created automatically. I didn't pull it just Affinity Designer the Pen Tool understood that this is what I wanted to create. Okay, so this is it for this lesson now I'm going to show you how to use the handles the logic behind them