Amanda's Tutorials

Bezier curves tutorial #1

Imagine your computer screen as a grid of tiny little squares. These are called pixels. Paint programs like MS Paint, Paintshop Pro, or Photoshop let you draw on your screen by changing pixels one by one as you go over them with your mouse cursor. To change a line you've drawn, you need to draw over it, or erase it - either way, you're still changing the image pixel by pixel.

Vectors work quite differently. Instead of drawing a line of pixels, you create the idea of a line with points on it. This line is called a bezier curve.

Here is the same curved line, shown three times.
The top image shows the line by itself.
The second shows the image with bezier points. Notice how they occur at each change in the curve and at the beginning and end of the line.

Each point has its own control points, which you can use to change the curve that happens there.

The third line shows the points' own control points. The control point on the left will change the curve to the left of the point, the one on the right will change the curve on the right. Notice the the end points only have one control point because they only have a curve away from them on one side.