In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques, Deke explains how Bézier curves work:

OK, see you next week!

But really, in the process of developing his upcoming Pen Tool Mastery course, Deke dove deep into the math (as only Deke can) to really try and understand how the Bézier curves featured in Adobe CC applications work. And of course, since he’s both a math major and a fine artist, he diligently, diagramatically draws it out for you:

I’m going to leave the actual explanation up to Deke, but let me just say, if you normally watch Deke with the double-speed option available at Lynda.com, you may want to set your speed back to normal for this particular installation, because the science of this art form comes at you fast and ferociously.

If you use the Pen tool or just want to understand how those control handles work (hint: there’s a third one that the interface doesn’t tell you about), you owe it to yourself to check out this dekeDive.

Deke’s Techniques, geeking out so that you don’t have to…except, you totally want to!