Even after using Illustrator in Intro to Digital Media, I could not have been more unprepared to work with the pen tool, but luckily the directions were available on the template itself.

I found it easy to keep up with the directions and successfully draw the shapes I needed to. I’m happy I could understand so that I wouldn’t waste much time trying to figure out the controls.

The only real trouble that I had with the pen tool was that it would sometimes not give me the expected results, even if I had tried every curvature mode that I could think of. I also found it hard to memorize these tricks, so I’ll have to come back to the document and brush up.

I’m not looking forward to using the pen tool in the future, but I know I’ll definitely need to. In those cases, I expect that it’s to carefully dissect an image to grab some elements out of it and use them elsewhere, and I suppose that goes for many images from nature, which is not very geometric by default.

I think that the Lab 5 screencast helped me through this the best. I think it’s interesting that I was so lost before using screencasts that they help me a lot more when I end up watching them.