Your first time working with Adobe Illustrator (or any drawing program) can be full of surprises. Lines and curves spring to life, seemingly appearing out of nowhere. And while Illustrator gives you precise control of line length and corner angle, untrained hands can lose control over these elements rather quickly.

That's why it's important to master what Sharon Steuer calls the "Zen of Illustrator" -- a heightened state in which your fingers dance effortlessly across the keyboard to pick the right tool for the job and your mouse glides across the screen to move points to the perfect position. Then working in Illustrator becomes second nature.

In this chapter from "The Illustrator CS Wow! Book," you'll learn how to attain the Zen of the pen by undertaking a few simple exercises and then practicing the "finger dance," an intuitive path to mastering Illustrator's keyboard shortcuts.

We've posted this excerpt as a PDF file. All you do is click this link "The Zen of Illustrator" to open the PDF file in your Web browser. You can also download the PDF to your machine for later viewing.

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Excerpted from "The Illustrator CS Wow! Book " © 2004 Sharon Steuer Reproduced by permission of Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Peachpit Press. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.