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by egypturnash 1015 days ago
For example, to draw rough surfaces, point-to-point lines are the most efficient way, with a ton of points.

I usually just draw a quick simple line and tell Illustrator to rough it up for me. There's a lot of ways to do this; "use a custom brush" is a common one, so's "apply the Roughen effect". These will dynamically generate a buttload of virtual points in the vicinity of the basic path when it gets rendered; the editing view is still just a handful of points. Much easier to edit, much faster to draw. If I need precise, human-defined jagginess to a path, then I whip it out with the Pencil, and push it around with stuff like the Puppet Warp tool, which lets me drop a few pins into a complex set of paths, and distort it based on how I move those around.

Illustrator's Pencil tool actually performs a certain amount of smoothing on the raw positional input from the drawing tablet. There's a slider for how much it does this. I have it right in the middle of the range and it makes for a pretty nice compromise between catching every deliberate motion of my fingers/hand/arm across the tablet, and throwing away the little irregularities that I would be working hard to eliminate if I was working in pen and ink.