One of the most powerful tools in Illustrator is the Pen tool.

It is also one of the harder ones to learn.

These games will help you learn the basics

Adobe's Pen tool game or The Bezier Game

The pen tool takes a lot of practice to master. Practice tracing these shapes. The column on the left shows where the nodes should be.

How to set up:

1. Create a new illustrator file

2. Create a layer for the reference image

3. Insert the image (pasting a screenshot is easy)

4. Lock the reference layer

5. Create a layer for the tracing

6. Start tracing!

Digital artists use the pen tool to create the lines and boundaries in their art. Often they trace over a reference image. It might be a sketch, a photo or anything else.

The process for this goes:

1. Create a new illustrator file

2. Create a layer for the reference image

3. Insert the image. 

4. Lock the reference layer

5. Create a layer for the tracing

6. Start tracing!

Find an image to trace. You can use these birds if you can't find of one your own.

Color your tracing with the live paint bucket tool.

Once you have the lines you can use the live paint bucket to fill in the color.

The process for this goes:

1. First, finish all of your tracing

2. Select all the lines

3. Select the Live Paint Bucket tool

4. Click on the lines to make them a "Live paint object" 

5. Select a color and start coloring.

When you have finished coloring

1. Style the lines

2. Tidy up the edges

If you don't see the "Live Paint Bucket" tool you need to swap workspaces:

Window > Workspace > Essentials Classic