Illustrator: session two

Today in Illustrator I learnt some of the different ways to use a pen tool. We started off by opening up a training document and tracing over the top of the different shapes, just to get used to the idea of anchors and the way the curves worked. 

Need to make sure when using the pen tool for lines that the no fill is selected. When a shape is finalised (even if its not met the anchor point) press enter to finish it. 

 We then got a tororo trace to practice going around, this was slightly harder as there was no instructions on how to get what kind of curve. I outlined the whole thing but if i wanted to make it simpler I could have traced half the image, copy and pasted it and the path - joined it to make a whole silhouette of the character. Path joining is like merging layers in photoshop. 
We looked into the layers, and how you need two layers and that they are different colours. We named these layers so it was easier to distinguish each one. 

we then had the rest of the session to practice tracing around our own images, as I didn't have any of my own that I wanted to scan in, I just found a google image picture of an owl and decided to trace round that. I turned the opacity down so it was easier for me to use pen tool around it. I traced around the silhouette first as it works better than going into detail on the first trace. 

Once I had traced around the outline of the bird I went into it and created more outlines of its feather, face etc. I then filled it and hid the bottom layer so now I have a finished illustrated owl. I filled it with block colour but there are different brushes that I can use.