Drawing with Shapes in Adobe Illustrator CC - LIVE stream #1

okay so welcome everyone it's Martin perky niak from yes I'm a designer and this is my first live session so sorry if it's a little bit slow or boring I'm trying to show you a few useful techniques some of these you might have seen before in my videos and I will try to also keep an eye on the chat so I have this here on the side and I will try to respond as much as possible but at the same time also concentrate on the techniques I want to show you today that's the main aim of this live session but I will have parts when I stop concentrating and looking at my work and I will ask you questions and then I look at the chat so feel free to comment as much as you want I will try to go back and reply depending on how many of you are actually actively chatting and I can see there's a lot of you already joining in so that's really cool no one is here to moderate the chat so sorry if there's anything coming up please try to be polite and to each other as well and to me so don't say anything that you wouldn't normally say so I would like to introduce a bit what we are going to do today and this is going to be obviously mainly shared screen so I'm going to switch to my screen now as well and you should be able to see what I'm going to do so this example is something I used in my courses before and I really like the way I can explain a lot of features with this simple example so you can see on the left side drawing that I've done on paper I think I can't even remember it was a couple of years ago actually when I've done this and then on the right we have the vectorized version now a lot of you probably join me on or watch me one of an earlier recordings of an actual live seminar or present and this I think wasn't included in that so you probably haven't seen this only if you've joined me in one of my courses so what I would like to do is to guide you through this process as I vectorize this and trace over manually of this drawing but before I start on this I show you a very simple example as well and this is another favorite example of mine where I show how to work with shapes and simple techniques so if you have a simple shape like this umbrella that is something you can very quickly recreate by using shapes instead of trying to use the pen tool although the pen tool is great and it can be used for so many different things whenever you can try using shapes so if I draw for example a circle and by the way I'm using the keyboard shortcuts all the time so I'm going to try to tell you whenever I use one like now I'm holding down the spacebar so that's a big problem when you start drawing a circle it's already something a lot of people have problems with because you never know exactly where to start so there's two techniques either if you want to draw a circle try to get roughly in the middle of a shape and then if you hold down the Alt key you can start drawing out I can see some you are asking to reply yes I'm recording this so yeah it this is all recorded so it's going to be available later on as well but if you want you can ask questions in this live session I'm going to try to pay attention to your commands whenever I stop for a bit between techniques explained so holding down the alt or option key you can draw shapes outwards from their center point that's already useful and you can see I almost got a right having it set to the center point but and even that the technique is to start drawing wherever you want your shape but then before letting go hold down the spacebar so spacebar can help you to move and whenever you let go spacebar but still holding down the mouse you can then move the shape around freely and you can see how nicely I can align this to the shape that I need so I have that outline up there and by pressing the question mark of forward slash on the keyboard I can very quickly remove the fill color so now that I have my outline which I can by the way set to maybe red just so we can see it better that's going to be a shape that I'm going to use to recreate this so the next step is to draw another circle and once again look at this if I start drawing and I realize that it's not close enough I just hold down the spacebar move it closer and constantly align by pressing and letting go the spacebar when I'm ready I let go and then comes the next trick holding down switching to the selection tool by the way that's also something I always do and forget mentioning but I press a V on the keyboard and that way I can move the shape and by the way before I go any further is the sound quality good is the video quality good because as I said this is the first time that I'm doing livestream so I'm not hundred percent sure what's going on I hope it's enjoyable and I have a quite good microphone so it should be good sounds good looks good brilliant thank you very much so coming back to here once I selected the selection tool that's V on the keyboard by default then you can start duplicating by holding down the Alt key again Auto option and then click and drag your shape now if you also hold down the shift key then you can make sure that the shape that you are moving or duplicating in this case is going to move only in one direction either to the horizontal direction or vertical or diagonal you can also do 45-degree diagonal angles so it's basically constraining or restricting the movement so moving it to the side like something like that when I let go that creates the duplicate and now I have two of them but if I have a repeated pattern of the same sort of shape instead of again duplicating I can use another shortcut which is command or control D D as duplicate so it's easy to remember it and that just repeats your lost transformation in this case it was a duplication so again I do control command D and there you go I repeated the last change that I did so just to show you this this is under the object menu and it's an brilliant option it's the transform transform again I'm going to try something again it's something I use always in my tutorials and I want to test whether this works in the live stream if i zoom into this part here I want to see whether this actually works so let me just zoom back again so object transform transform again does this actually zoom in in a live stream that's the question once once you can see what I've done just let me know in the chat so whether it worked the zoom option works brilliant thank you so much there is obvious really a little lag between the stream and how I do it so that's as I can see around 10 seconds difference so if I respond a little bit later that's because of that difference in time so it's brilliant that the zoom works I'm not going to zoom much because I have it set to a full HD resolution so I hope as long as you are watching it on a bigger screen and not on a small phone you should be able to see what I'm doing but still sometimes I might zoom in when I want to show something tiny or something difficult to see so the object transform transform transform again is the feature that I use and it can be used for so many different things so if I create a shape let's say like this rectangle and then I increase the size of it so let's say I just drag it this way and then I c'mon D you can see I can increase the size with the same proportion every time now if I then try let's say having a shape and then duplicate it while holding down the Alt key you can duplicate and create I mean duplicate and create a copy of the same shape and then if I use the ctrl D just do this again so it's a little bit confusing so holding down alt click and drag duplicate and then if I use the control that you can see it's going to duplicate that but it gets even more interesting once you start using other techniques instead of just simply duplicating something let's say you start rotating a shape the rotate tool is here on the toolbar R is the shortcut so with that if I click anywhere on my artboard and i start clicking and dragging this shape if I hold down the Alt key I can create a duplicate via rotating and guess what if I now use the control the oh c'mon D is going to keep rotating my shape and repeat the rotation that I've done before how cool is that so you can create amazing repeated patterns even in a concentric alignment or arrangement and of course it has so many different ways of using this now as I said and that's this like applies to everything when I show you a simple technique like the control D it's not limited to the way I'm using it so here I used it in a horizontal line now I show it to you combined with the rotation tool or the rotate tool and I used it in a concentric way but always remember that the techniques I show you can be combined with anything any of the other tools in Illustrator so it's really up to your creativity and your the time you spend exploring these and playing around with this and you will probably be able to come much more fun and more useful techniques as well specific to what you need cool so let's move ahead we have our five circles or ellipses and I'm going to select them all and then what I will do is to switch to the shape builder tool now this is my favorite to also allow me a swim on this so that has the shape builder right there shift M is the shortcut but you can customize the shortcut of M any tool in Illustrator I can show you that quickly how to do that so if I select this I will be able to work with it but by the way if you go to edit keyboard shortcuts that is where you can find the tools and for each tool you can customize the shortcut so if something like the shape builder is my favorite tool I can decide to change it to let's say s sorry I'm using the wrong one that's the one let's say s now it's conflicting with the scale tool but to be honest I never used the scale tool in Illustrator or hardly ever touch that tool because I use different ways of scaling objects so if I don't use that shortcut why have it set to such a cool key like the s so I rather use that with the shape builder so I'm going to click OK and then I will save this as a set and everything that you customize needs to be saved as a keyboard shortcut set but now you can see the shape builder tool is set to s so it's much faster to select it in the future so when I have the object selected and this is important if you don't have anything selected you won't be able to use the shape builder tool it even gives you this cursor that tells you that sorry mate you can't use this right now because you don't have anything selected so you have to select the shapes that you want to make changes to and then I press s I'll customize shortcut now I can start combining things I like to actually start removing things or subtracting things first with this tool and that's just simply by holding down the Alt key and notice how the cursor will change when I hold down alt or option we get the - which is what we need so alt click and drag I can draw over and remove all of these quite quickly and easily and we end up having just a remaining part that we needed in this case but let me go back one step and show you another way of using this tool if I combine the Alt key or option key with the shift key together I can also click and drag over sections or areas so it's like a marquee selection which will remove everything that falls under this selection so that's alt shift together used with the shape builder tool cool yeah I can see far is saying that it's probably the Pathfinder that you use the minus front and intersect tools they are great and you can find them in the window Pathfinder panel so we have the shape modes here we have the Pathfinders or options and you actually have even more options here if you go into Pathfinder options you can find additional settings so this is a brilliant feature as well and sometimes when I you when I have like really complex examples I might still use that but the shape builder I found much more intuitive and faster so I actually since they I think in the introduced this tool in cs4 since then I've been using this most of the time so now that I have my shape I'm going to do another trick with the another shortcut it's shift X shift X can swap your stroke and fill colors or the attributes and so yeah I can just see some some of you are joining right now we are going to finish this little drawing here I'm tracing over a pixel image and I'm trying to recreate it with vector shapes but then I'm going to move on to drawing a more complex character illustration and if we have time I might even go into shading it here on the right you just see a flat version of it but I'm going to try to add shading to it as well so if you're interested and to to see this live and to be able to ask question just stay with me and if we feel free to use the chat you should play the Bezier game that's a brilliant idea from Nero I can do that we can we can we can do that at the end just remind me I love that game by the way I haven't played it I don't think I actually went through the whole game but it's such a cool way of practicing the pen tool so cool tip there and just remind me to get back to that at the end so let me just come back to our lovely umbrella and the shift axe that I showed you so shift axe is to swap between feel and Stroke attributes so that's just essentially whatever you have on the stroke will become filled and vice versa so that's great we have now our field ready but how I do the actual handle is very different to the way I have done the the actual canvas or than the topic of this umbrella so what I normally do is look at the shape that I need to recreate and try to come up with the easiest possible technique so I could go through and use the pen tool and draw it like that which obviously would take long and I would have to refine it and so on and so forth so that's a bit too slow because we are dealing with a slightly easier shape in this case I wouldn't go to the pen tool and once again I can see that this is actually almost like a rounded rectangle or a section over rounded rectangle so that might be actually a better way to approach it so if I switch to by the way if I don't respond to an answer don't worry I will get back to them I will always stop for a bit and reply to questions whenever I get to like a natural stop so the rounded rectangle tool is cool because with that what you can do is draw a rectangle but while you are drawing it you can use the arrows on the keyboard and this is the right and left arrows so while drawing just moving it to the side with the spacebar remember I showed you this already today in this video holding down the spacebar you can move shapes around while you are drawing it and if you are using the rounded rectangle tool you can use the left and right arrows to quickly switch between completely rounded corners or sharp sharp corners and if you use the up and down arrow just pressing that or press and holding it you can adjust again still whilst drawing a shape how much you want the radius to be so you can increase or decrease the radius of your shape now I'm going to use the full roundness in this case and I'm using the spacebar again to align it and notice what I'm trying to do here is to have the shape align to the center line of the handle so I was just using the spacebar to align it like that and when I'm ready I let cool now the reason I did that on the center line because if I now go up onto the stroke option and start increasing that you will see that I can very quickly get to the same type of shape and of course all I will have to do is to remove the unnecessary parts so let me just reach the color on this to something else so we can see it better and that is probably not standing out enough maybe use green is not good try to avoid using green on red because for some people that might be difficult to see that's a general tip for graphic design so green on red or red on green is probably the most common colorblindness problem and in Photoshop actually there is a way to simulate colorblindness let me just switch quickly to show it to you that's quite cool and if you want to make sure that your design is something that people will be able to see I mean make sure that colorblind people can see it well as well then you you should try this out so I have let's say a red background red is by the way a very useful color because it's it's a very strong and quite aggressive color but it really helps to get attention and it's an engaging color to work with red black and white like the combination of these three colors highly effective and you would see it used in advertisement and a lot of branding like even YouTube itself is using red as its main color and Google so it works this definitely works but especially because of red being such a common commonly used color in design you have to be very very careful of how you use other colors on top of it and sorry if I'm going on a tangent here but this is something I thought I want to mention because not many people know about this that you can actually test how it works for colorblind people so you have your two colors and then if you want to check how this would work for colorblindness all you have to do and this is by the way in Photoshop I just reach to Photoshop you go to the View menu and then you can go into the proof setup and under that you will find color blindness protanopia and I can't pronounce the other one it's deutero no PL or something like that ever pronounce that so if I choose the first one we get a preview of how colorblind people will see this two colors on top of each other and this is not actually what they see but this is giving you a simulation of the contrast that they will see and if the two shapes or two colors in this case are too close that means that they will have trouble seeing the difference between these two elements so if I switch to the other one that's just as the other one so this was one and the other one the other one is actually getting closer so for those type of colorblindness people with this type of colorblindness might find even more hard to see these two colors but this is still a healthy amount of contrast but now let's see what happens if I start changing color and this is the key then you start desaturating your colors so I start to fall in somewhere in the middle so the saturation drops down to around 50% or even below that for both of these colors so let me just change this also and reduce its saturation that's when it starts to be very difficult to see for colorblind people so I can see to switch back to the other one as well and we can probably stay to the second option because that's the more difficult one to see so if I use these two colors on top of each other and maybe it's text on a background it might be very difficult to see for that person who is looking at it and of course if I start changing the color I might even be able to get to something that's even more difficult to see so even though it's green on red now it's almost impossible to see and just to prove that to you if I go back and remove the colorblindness option by removing proof colors you can see it's actually two different colors but even for someone without colorblindness it is not providing enough contrast anyway so I wouldn't use these two colors normally but now we know that if we have to work and make sure I mean we work for a campaign we have to make sure that it is accessible for everyone make sure that you check the colorblindness for it so that was a complete tangent I'm going to show you things like this whenever I do live streams and let me know if you if you don't if you don't like that or let me know if you're not interested in theory in design I think it's useful so instead of just focusing on techniques it's always good to learn a little bit about theory and something you can apply to whatever you do in these creative applications so coming back to the shade that we created I'm just going to pick a color that is definitely different to what we have behind it so just you can see what I'm doing cool thanks a lot guys thanks a lot for your vote for tangents cool so the shape that we created is brilliant but we need to be able to subtract from this so I only need one side of it so I just show you that we need that shape what we have in the black background so I need to cut off from this and this is where it it is important to learn another very very important technique and that is expand now expand is one of those features that you find it by the way under the object menu but this is one of those features that a lot of Illustrator users are scared off or not really sure when to use it essentially what expand can do is to simplify shapes and even if it's just a simple stroke so this shape doesn't have any special attribute on it no effects nothing like multiple strokes or multiple fields it's just a simple stroke but even when you use expand on a simple stroke you can use it to convert your stroke into a field so why do we need that you will see it in a second but if I use expand you see it asks me what I want to do I can just choose it to expand both fill and Stroke attributes and when I click OK you will see that now we have a field shape so I created essentially like a a chain link shape and or you can think of it like a ring and along it in the ring but now it's not a stroke anymore so I don't have the stroke attributes you can see no stroke color and no stroke size this is very important now this is a field shape and why is that important because from a field shape I can very easily subtract by using the eraser tool for example shift e is the shortcut for that and with this you can whatever is selected you can delete from it or you can hold down the Alt key and delete with a selection and see how quickly I can get to the shape needed so holding down alt with the eraser tool you subtract bigger blocks or chunks of your current selection so this using the eraser tool combined with the expand technique can be extremely useful again I'm hoping this is something you will try it yourself and try to use this for different things so I'm showing you a very simple example here but this can be applied to so many different techniques it's really just up to you how you are using this technique so coming back to what we have here now we have these two shapes ready and I can use the command or control square brackets to move this currently selected shape back and forth and by the way just another reminder about the eraser tool if I want to erase from everything on my artboard I make sure I don't have anything selected yet the shape can be anything it can be an ellipse as well so it doesn't matter how you use it all right I'm going to just show you this quickly and I just started explaining so if you don't have anything selected but then the eraser tool will erase from all your shapes as you can see but if you want to erase from a specific shape like the red shape in this case I can select that and then if I use the eraser tool notice that it won't actually affect the D selected shapes or the shapes that are currently not selected so it automatically isolates the eraser to work with the current selection that's very very important remember that as well alright so we have this quickly recreated and just to run through again the whole thing I'm going to do this much faster so for those who have just joined recently let me show this again very quickly have I done it and if you want this whole video is going to be available the recorded version on my channel so whoever is asking how am I then done something can over watch it back but I just want to show you how fast this can work if you know what you are doing and that's the whole point of my channel and yes I'm a designer is all about this trying to teach you to work effectively to be able to create without boundaries so to be able to do something that you have an idea and you can immediately create it without struggling so I'm trying to get you to that point because it took me more than 10 years to really master these tools and even now I'm coming up with new techniques and realizing that oh I haven't used this before let's just test it out but I'm constantly trying to improve myself and I'm trying to share the best ways of doing things so let's see how fast I am you can even time me so if I want to recreate this I'm going to do exactly the same techniques as before I'm not going to really explain what I'm what I'm doing but you should be able to watch the recorded version of that so let's see starting in three two one alright so we have our shape one shift X that's true the next one and duplicate old click and drag conmen do ctrl deselect all shape builder tool holding down alt and shift subtract shift X for this shape here that's good let's do the rectangle rounded rectangle tool I drew that one and I need to Center shift X to have the stroke shift-click on the arrows to quickly increase the amount that something I haven't mentioned before I might come back to that expand then eraser tool having the current selection I'm not affecting what's in the background changing the color to other we need let's say blue sand to the back and done so that was probably I was probably around and minute maybe less you can tell me if you've actually time me how long that took but yeah that was something I showed here which I forgot to mention before that when you drew a shape and let's see it has a stroke attribute and it's set to one point if you want to quickly increase it instead of clicking on this one by one hold down the shift key and you can increase it by ten point increments so that's extremely useful and that actually applies to most of the arrows on the interface so if you hold down shift key it's much faster to increase the stroke attribute there Combe all right so I wanted to actually focus on a more complex illustration yes the shape builder behaves the same way in cs6 the only difference yes Diego is asking a very very good question the only difference in cs6 about the shape builder is that you can only use it on straight lines so when you have a few shapes place down just add a couple of shapes here so if I have this selected and use the shape builder in the new version I can draw freely while in cs6 you would only be able to draw along a straight line unfortunately this free drawing mode of the shape builder will only work in CC so sorry about that but still cs6 has almost everything that shape builder offers in the Creative Cloud version cool now let me have a look at your comments and let me rest a bit just explaining a few things I'm going to continue with this drawing of the robot afterwards so we will come back to this just having a look at some of your questions and I'm also going to turn on my camera so you can see me I just might move this to the left side so you can see it better all right so you should be able to see me and also the illustration in the background that we are going to come back to you so having a look at your questions if you have any questions you can ask now alright that's the shape yeah I reply that what strategies do you take to learn and consistently use new shortcut keys well shortcuts are really just just something that you shouldn't force yourself using it so only use a shortcut if you actually find it useful so although I know probably hundreds of shortcuts I don't always use all of them and I tend to alternate as well I mean sometimes I do things with a shortcut then I realize that there's even a faster way than a shortcut so I don't stick to using them and I'm not trying to force myself to memorize them it's more like a natural build-up so you learn shortcuts let's say I showed you a few short yesterday you try them out and then you implement them into your workflow if they actually turn out to be useful then keep using it and don't force yourself trying to use shortcuts all the time of course they can save you a lot of time but it's not something you you need to force yourself it should be like a natural build up I can see more questions are coming in and that's just one thing I also wanted to mention and I'm probably going to mention this a few times in in these live sessions that when you learn something let's say you learn something today from me my my experience is that I can really master something if I practice at least three times as much as much I've spent learning a new technique so let's say I showed you a technique in five minutes at least spend 15 minutes practicing that it's even healthier if the proportions are want to fight so if you see something let's say you see a tutorial that that was one minute you should spend five minutes practicing it or for a ten minute video you should spend 50 minutes practicing without that amount of time and ideally straight after you've seen it or straight after you read something of seeing something on YouTube you should spend that much amount of time yeah as long as you do that the things that you've learned are really going to be implemented and you will it would come natural after that it will be part of your skill set all right so let me have a look at the questions I hope that made sense so one to five healthy ratio one to three still good one to zero worst so make sure you don't just watch videos or live streams and then just just simply okay that's cool make sure you practice and try it out hello from Russia welcome thanks a lot for joining so cool let me go back someone a super say that said I saw something using I think the reflection tool reflected around Anchor Point do you know the shortcut is we used to move the reflection anchor all right I can show this to you quickly so let me just create an artboard here and show this very quickly I will try to do it above my head so you can see it so when you do reflection this is why the way is probably not from this stream it's from one of my videos if you have something like a shape circles are always a good one to start with so if I put down a guide using the rulers command R is to get the rulers then place the guide down and then if you want to move your shape you press all the shortcut for the reflectable then you click onto the guide on which you want to reflect this shape too so that's the center of symmetry now I can now drag this shape around and holding down the Alt key will make sure it's duplicated and holding down the shift key make sure that it is kept symmetry symmetrical or kept on the same horizontal plane or direction so alt and shift are the two shortcuts that I used and that way you duplicate and keep on the right side on the exact right side you're drawing cool I hope the hope that made sense and hope that's what you asked Russell or Reysol is asking what is expand well if you watch the recorded version of this I explained it I think quite well but expand essentially is a way of simplifying your shapes in Illustrator so if you have a complex appearance it can simplify it alright I can see some of you f is asking about three-point perspective it's a really good good question or good request I will make a note of that and I won't do it in this session but I'm going to talk about that maybe in the next one I I can maybe do a whole session about drawing in perspective not just in Illustrator but in general understanding how a perspective works that's actually a good one let me just make a note of that by the way if you have any any good things like that let me know and I can come back to it alright so cool thanks for that and unfortunately I can't do the webcam Smoller at the moment but I'm going to switch back you don't have to see me all the time just while I'm answering your questions I will have it on in the future I will set it up better and then it would be smaller cool all right I think I think I replied to most of the recent questions all right there's one more question how to make quick shadows yep that's also something what I'm using to stream I'm using teller streams what's the name of this via cost via cost is quite a cool application I'm currently not using the pro version but I'm planning of upgrading so if you guys like me doing streams then you can you can try that out I mean sorry I can upgrade to that in the future so I'm using a lot of different things for drawing you can see here in the background I have the big Cintiq Cintiq 27 this is an amazing tool as well I only use that and it's connected to my computer I only use that one I really need to do like photo retouching or illustration so that is obviously the professional tool that I use but then I also have the vacant in to us for it's a quite old one but this is still something I use on a regular basis and it's here next to me if I feel like I switched to it but I also use a mouse so I'm I'm not like ignoring Mouse whenever I work that's it did really depends on the preference so I would say probably 20% Mouse 80% tablets that I work with and yeah I tried the iPad pro I have an iPad pro as well and pencil Apple pencil drawing with that I'm planning to doing streams on that as well and different tools and different applications not just illustrator so these are all some things that I might come back in other streams that welcome everyone whoever is joining right now and yet thanks for like replying to each other zooming in and out via command or control + + - and let me see what is the difference between object expand and object shape expand it's actually the same thing so it gives you the same same change so if I go to object shape expand shape no actually sorry this is this is something different I might come back to this this is a little bit more complicated to explain how this works especially because I don't have the example ready but that's a good question as well I might come back to that a little bit later alright so let me come back to drawing and I'm going to switch back to just showing my screen again I think you've seen enough of me for one live stream so coming back to this example I am going to use the just switch back here as well so I can see your chat okay just give me one second okay cool so the example that I wanted to show you here I'm not going to walk you through this because we are already running a little bit out of time so the session I plan to be one hour and it's already been going on for almost 50 minutes so I will just do another 10 minutes of this and I might do the full one in another stream in the future so what I wanted to show you is the essential technique whenever you need to recreate a drawing that you've done either on paper or you did like a sketch and digitally is that how you approach adding all the elements so this is this works well workflow is mainly for illustrator but whatever a vector application or even Photoshop you use you should think about always drawing on top of each other drawing shapes or elements on top of each other so the difference drawing in digital format to drawing on paper is that you have layers or you have you can arrange your objects on top of each other and why I mean there is that even simple things like the head in this case I would draw things quite differently then I would draw these on paper so for example if I want to draw the head I could use many different techniques to draw that I could use the pen tool and start drawing around and following the shape and align my drawing on top of that so that's obviously one technique you probably are familiar with and I'm just going to quickly finish it and obviously this can be done with less anchor points as well by the way if you are interested to learn how to use the pen tool I might do like one live session of that as well in the future specifically on the pen tool but you can learn quite a lot about the pen tool if you check out my videos like learn to draw anything in Illustrator that has quite a lot of useful tips already on that but let's say we have our shape like that and then I use the ellipse tool to draw another shape on top of it like here now you know that already that we can hide or subtract elements like this one we could select the two together and they use the shape builder tool alt click and drag and I could quickly remove that line from above so that's already a useful technique but what if I then want to move the shape around while obviously is going to be a separate shape thanks to the shape builder but the way I can change this around will be a little bit difficult so it's not aligned anymore and it's slightly difficult to make adjustments to it without messing up the outer line so what you can also do is have another really cool technique called drew inside so if I want to make sure that line appears only within this current shape that I drew there is this mode here on the toolbar called drew inside shifty is the shortcut when you switch to that you can use any tools including the pen tool or the shape tools and you can start drawing inside your current selected shape so if I use the ellipse tool for example and draw you will notice that I don't even need to use the shape builder it automatically keeps it only visible within the previous selection or the selected shape that I started using so now if I double click on this I can move that shape around double click by the way is the isolation mode I can move this shape around and I can refine it I can change its size and when I double click outside is still going to be within the a shape cool I can see there's a lot of questions and as conversation between you guys sorry if I don't reply straight away and I guess you can also reply to each other but I'm trying to focus on explaining the draw inside technique so let's see what happens if I change the main shape to a filled color so if I add the filled color on that that's how it looks and I can remove the stroke color from it now if I double-click on inside this and I try to select that shape that we created I can also add that different color on that maybe this one so you can see that we can actually have few colors and it works the same way so essentially draw inside creates a clipping group in Illustrator so clipping group is visible here in the layers panel there's my clip group within which the clipping shape is the original one the head and then within that we have the top of the head which we can easily move around I used a shift up and down right and left arrows to move shapes around quickly as the shortcut I'm using and you can see as long as you select the shape from within a clip group by clicking on the little circle next to it then you can move it around even without double clicking and entering the isolation mode also make sure you don't just click on the names of a shape or element in Illustrator if you want to actually select it make sure you click on the circle next to it okay that's the way you select something so that is now created and we saw the example of the draw inside method so if I want I can press shift X on these shapes just so we can get back to the original colors I mean seeing just the outlines so I select that other shape as well shift X is the way to swap and then we can see the original tracing behind cool just checking your comments all right so if I now want to continue drawing this I will draw probably let's say in the neck now here's another that you can use if you have a longer shape like the neck you can actually draw again the inside of that and when I have the pen tool I can use the spacebar to move anchors around violin drawing so if I draw a path section like that I can then have it selected and increase the stroke size like this and I can also decide how I want the stroke endpoints to look like so I can have them round it in this case that's probably a better solution and I can maybe move this point at the bottom up a bit I'm using the arrow keys again to align it so instead of drawing around that shape and drawing the outline I just drew the inside of it because once I have a feel color on the head I can just have this one behind all the other shapes so I'm just going to choose a very different color so we can see it and I send it to the background control shift or command shift square brackets you can send front or backward all the way to the back a shape that you have currently selected and then if I have a color on this shape again shift exit you can see that's how it's going to look so you don't actually need to make it that shape really accurate the ending of it just make it go underneath the other shape and that way you can make sure that there won't be any gaps between them and the same thing applies to everything else I would do in Illustrator so what just once again the same method here quickly showing it to you on the arm I can draw with the pen tool using the spacebar I can move it around so there's my arm and in this case I'm still going to use the stroke attribute but I use also another really cool tool called the width tool this is the width tool shift W is the shortcut for it with which what you can do is to resize certain parts of your stroke so you can make your stroke thinner at certain parts like that and some parts thicker so I can increase this part or make it smaller and I can add as many points as I want so you can create a more dynamic stroke than just a simple flat one point size at each point cool now if I then use this circle I can Drew on top of this and if I wanted to make sure that these shapes are above my previous object then it's just simply a matter of organizing them so if I have this on top or I have it behind okay so you don't have to be accurate with the end points of your shapes you just simply have to decide what's in front and what's behind so always keep that in mind whenever you draw things in Illustrator alright so as I said I don't want to go further into this example this is something we will probably do in another session we covered quite a lot in this session already so you will be able to watch the recorded version of this and you will be able to see what I've done and in next time when I have when I do a live session I'm going to show you maybe did the full process of doing this character or I might show you something different but this was more like a test this whole first attempt at doing live-streaming so I hope you found it useful and if you have any questions before we finish and I have another few minutes left so if you have any questions please let me know and I will try to reply in the comments and also I just wanted to mention that if you like what you've seen today and if you want to see more from me I would really appreciate if you help out either on patreon you see the link under the video to my patreon site and you can decide how much you have or how much you can spare to support my channel and support me doing more of these five sessions and also just simply uploading and publishing generally more videos on YouTube or if you want to learn from my recorded and more structured courses you can also find a link to my courses where you can subscribe for $19 a month at the moment and you can access all my courses and those courses are very thorough I mean I go through everything and it's really structured more than a live session like this but of course a live stream is something where you can interact with me so let me just have a look at the questions that you asked and I will try to reply and might even show you some of the techniques that you asked about if we have time for it so how you choose color and color combination for object yeah that's all about color harmony that's another big topic I'm planning to do in another stream so make sure you subscribe to my channel and then you should get notified when I start a live stream color in general is a big topic but choosing colors in Illustrator I usually do with the recolor artwork so I start off using just random colors and then I refine my colors with the recolor artwork and I'm going to show you that in another stream for sure all right let me see Frankie is asking would you say it is essential to go to design college to become a graphic designer in the future no I don't think so although this really depends in which country you live and what type of college are we talking about but I think becoming a graphic designer and a lot of things these days but I can only talk about the profession that I have becoming a graphic designer is really it really comes down to the passion and the motivation so how motivated you are and how disciplined you are to learn on your own because you can learn so much things online I mean even this thing what we are doing now when I started learning about Adobe products there wasn't any live streams or even good tutorials at all on YouTube you couldn't find anything I was learning from books and I was learning from the very first like video trainings from total training and Linda back then they didn't even have online subscription models they just had the DVDs so I had to buy the DVDs and learning from them and I mean it's unbelievable the amount of resources we have and I'm talking about myself as well I'm finding so many useful content daily on YouTube and on other sources as well it's just incredible and I think College is great for those who are less disciplined and less able to force themselves to stick to a routine and learn and process what they learn because watching a video doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to learn anything from it learning is about processing what you've seen and applying it so if you are good at if you have a good self-discipline and if you are motivated and passionate about what you want to learn then I think you can learn anything completely at home on your own and I'm not saying you should do that because it's also not healthy it's good to interact and talk to people show them what you've done but if you feel like it's easier for you to do everything from home and then I feel I think like it's it's definitely something that you can learn to a certain extent and then of course if you want to be really good at something I think it comes to the point where you start interacting with other professionals either online or or in like an agency that you start working in or to actually start working on real projects if we also teach you a lot but yet to come back to the question I don't think a college or even a university is necessary I'm een I have a University College it's not really necessary you I know a lot of designers professionals who didn't have any any training and still became amazing and they learn these products really well and then they've learnt about the theories that you would normally learn in college or university so it's really up to you how motivated you are okay so cool yeah College College is good for networking definitely and university is the same or short courses is the same okay cool someone joined from Budapest that's where I'm from originally as well from hungry so that's great [Music] Faris is saying south of the industry to doing character design for living now brilliant that's really cool if you want you can share your link to your portfolio if you have one feel free to share it here in the chat I don't mind alright so I think if there's anything really urgent you wanted to ask you can but I think today's session was all that I mentioned so far and I hope you found it useful and I'm going to try to improve everything like the topics and the way I structured these live streams in the future so I'm happy to like any any feedback you give me I appreciate it and I'm happy to do streams on different topics so if you have any suggestions let me know I here in the comments or also you can get in touch with me through my website I have my email there and once again you can check out patreon as well if you become a patron of mine I'm going to do polls so questioning my patrons about what they would like to see content on so if you prefer to direct me in a way then patreon is the place to do that cool so thanks a lot guys for joining once again and if you miss the stream the recorded version will be available and hopefully I will start the next stream soon I will try to do it as often as possible and you are also thanks a lot for joining again and I will see you in the next one cheers guys

Channel: Yes I'm a Designer

Views: 90,385

Keywords: adobe, adobe illustrator, drawing in illustrator, illustrator cc, creative cloud, vector drawing, graphic design, drawing, illustration

Id: fAkFiVlpUlY

Length: 61min 13sec (3673 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2017