Free Adobe Illustrator Advanced Tutorial Course

hi youtube this is a free extract from my larger illustrator advanced course you can check that out on bringyourownlaptop.com also there's a link in the description for the exercise files those are free to download so go and download those all right uh yeah enjoy the video [Music] hi there welcome to this adobe illustrator advanced course my name is dan and i'm an adobe certified instructor and adobe certified expert in illustrator now this is an advanced look at illustrator so it's not for people who are brand new to the software it's for people who already understand the fundamentals if you already know what an anchor point is and how to adjust it then this is the course for you now on one hand this course is all about getting your productivity your speed and your workflow up and on the other hand this course is kind of project based and we'll learn the kind of tricks and tools that we need to kind of build some of those really beautiful styles that are trending in design at the moment so even if you consider yourself a pretty heavy user of illustrator i promise in this course i will blow your illustrator mind you'll learn advanced anchor point and pen tool tricks there's a really fun section on mastering lines and strokes you'll learn the quick way to take hand-drawn sketches then vectorize and color them we'll master depth and perspective in illustrator creating semi-flat presentations like these we'll set permanent default fonts colors and turning that dreaded hyphenation off once and for all we'll learn how to take spreadsheets and connect it with illustrator to make beautiful graphs and charts there is a color mastery section where you'll learn to make quick color adjustments gradient meshes and blending it all together nicely your creativity will be doubled when you finish the transform distort and blending section of this course double italia there is an entire section in here dedicated to speeding up your personal workflow as well as speeding up adobe illustrator two tones repeating patterns advanced typography there is lots i just want to go through it all here in the intro but i need to calm down you can check out the outline for a full description okay just one more i promise it's a good one this one [Music] animated gifs come on [Music] so if you know that there is much more potential to be unlocked inside adobe illustrator join me and together we'll become adobe illustrator superheroes together all right welcome to the course this is the getting started video this if i'm honest is a bit boring but hang in there there's a few important details that we need to cover before we get started all right let's go alright to get started the first thing is you need to go and download the exercise files and so there is a link on the screen here go download those optionally you might go and grab the cheat sheet okay it's at bringyourownlaptop.com there's a resources tab along the top here there is an illustrator cheat sheet so go download that it's free it's a pdf print it off stick it next to your computer while we're working all right so next thing to do is we're going to change our units okay so our measurements like inches and centimeters confusingly and the new version of illustrator kind of deals with things a little bit differently so to explain that and normally what you do is you go to illustrator cc preferences units okay and this is on a mac if you're on a pc it's under edit and preferences down the bottom here okay so if i go into here and i change my units and i'm saying i'm going to use inches or millimeters or pixels okay this doesn't really matter anymore okay feels good you can click on inches but basically what happens is when i create a new document this thing over here really you can see pixels is up even though i picked inches why is that it uses the last units you used so the document that i created previously was in pixels so it just used pixels if i made something now and change it to inches it would by default be inches the next time i opened up this window so that's how it works another thing to keep aware of is if i go to web you'll notice that it just switches it out to pixels so you just got to keep an eye on this every time you can switch it afterwards it's no big deal okay but um you know when you're going to print okay and mobile and all these other ones it really wants to be a different size okay so just just go and change it here let's say i make a print document but i want it to be inches okay i click create and let's say it's not what i wanted i was doing millimeters with nothing selected over here this is the really easy way to do it you can go and change it in here quickly all right another thing i want you to do is up the top here and you'll probably set to essentials right so it probably looks a little bit different from mine i'm going to go on essentials click reset essentials because this is like out of the box what it looks like now i love that little control bar on the top there and most people did it kind of just turned off with this version and they kind of replaced it with the properties panel which i love but i also like that top bar so for this course i'm going to turn it on okay so with essentials okay i'm going to get a window and just make sure this control bar on the top is actually up there okay because it's just handy now what you might do is once you've kind of got your properties you know your panels in the uh the way you like them you can go and save them you don't have to but if you want to you can go to new workspace and you can see that i already have one called dan it's already used i'm going to replace it okay click dan just means that if things go wrong later on right i can go to reset down and it goes back to this and has our nice little control bar along the top now they're going to be some of you who are using an older version of um illustrator okay so you can totally do pretty much pretty much everything there's like one thing the puppet tool you you can't do but if you've got an older version of illustrator it'll work perfectly for this like 99 of this course except we're going to be using this properties panel a lot and and that didn't exist in earlier versions if you are this thing won't exist okay and you'll have to do a lot more of opening up here and opening up the specific windows so i'm going to reset dan just to show you what i mean okay if i grab my type tool now and draw stuff out draw a box out you can see over here i got my fill and my stroke and my font whereas if you're using a previous version you can either find it up the top here or you go to window and you have to turn on under type you can turn on the character panel so i'm going to use this because it's quick and awesome and but if you're like oh man he's going to the appearance panel you just have a look what it's called and then find it up here you will find a specific tab or a specific panel that will control that cool another thing just to cover is i've got some stock images that i use for this course and there's a mixture of stuff that i've made personally and you're totally allowed to use that for your own portfolios and show people that you've done it okay um but in terms of the stock images you'll they're very clear which of the stock images okay and basically any of the photographs that look professionally done any of the hand-drawn sketches are mine but you're not allowed to go off and start using without going and paying for the stock images okay so yeah just be warned you can definitely do it for this course and show people what you've done but you can't go and use them commercially afterwards okay but what you can do is there's a section in this course where you can get free commercial use images just switch them out for those or some of your own images and then you can start totally using a lot of this for your portfolio another thing to do is in your exercise files there's going to be well throughout this course i'm going to set kind of projects for you to do okay sort of homework now there will be um i'll do it in the videos and explain it but there's one place in the exercise files where are you here okay there's a folder called class projects and it has a word doc in there plus all the images everything you need to do those projects in one little piece so yeah just so you know there are projects you don't have to do them obviously but there is a folder for them but i will describe them as we go through the tutorial course all right that is a boring video that we're going to skip on now and start making some stuff in illustrator thanks for hanging in there let's go and get started now hi there in this video we're going to show you how to do this put in a drawn image in the background fade it out lock it make a new layer like this all instantially with one of the illustrator features because what i tend to do is say this drawing here i draw it in my notebook i take a photo with my phone just because i'm better with drawing off often with you know with a pen then in illustrator directly and then i just redraw it in illustrator but i want to stick it on its own layer that i can redraw over the top maybe wash it out a little bit all right let's go and see how to do that in illustrator okay so first up we're going to make a new document we're going to go file new and we are going to go to print and you can use either a4 or us letter depending on where you are and we're going to use letter and i'm going to go portrait and the big thing to just make sure when you are using kind of like this new dialog box that illustrator comes with is down the bottom here there's this one called advanced options okay and by default anything under the print tab wants to be cmyk web you'll see over here now it's to be rgb and the resolution needs to be 72 so that's just something you need to be aware of when you are picking from these defaults i use print mainly because i like the shape of like i'm used to this shape us letter okay or a4 i'm used to the shape so i just want to start with that even though it might be going for digital okay or going out to web so you've got to make sure whenever you change it go into here and say actually i want to make sure it's rgb if i want it to be rgb okay now just so you know if you are kind of uh you know not really clued in about rgb versus cmyk it's best to use rgb to get started with because um cmyk has a limited color range okay it doesn't have the really strong greens or like madonna pinks none of that real kind of like fluorescent colors so it's best to work in rgb and maybe switch it up to cmyk later on becomes a little bit more washed out but starting with rgb is generally how i work the other thing as well as you pick web you probably want to switch it up to maybe 300 pix 300 ppi okay to get the resolution really high you can change this later on it's no big deal but it's just something to be aware of when you are playing around with the new document window cool all right let's click create doesn't really matter as long as it's an rgb and the next thing we're going to do is put that kind of washed out drawing right so i do my drawings on my book take a photo with my phone and then just kind of like jam it on the page put it on its own layer wash it out make a new layer and draw on the top of that okay so that is a drummer okay takes a little while so there's a easy shortcut to do it so if you go to file place okay i'm going to bring in in your exercise files there's one called curvature tool find that one and down the bottom here you probably can't see it click on the word options and just click on this one that says template this does all the work for us let's click place so it brings in our file you'll see in our layers panel so you might be on properties switch to layers is that it's created a layer it's locked it it's faded this out for us and created a new layer that we can draw on all just super quick and easy when you've drawn it you can turn this off okay because you probably don't want it to go to print so yeah that's just a really quick little getting started trick all right let's get into the next video where we start drawing these guys using some of the new tools in illustrator all right i'll see you there hey there hey i hope you're enjoying this video so far if you are please click the like button and maybe consider subscribing to the channel there is plenty more to come in this particular video but i just wanted to remind you that this is like a small part of a larger course that i run called adobe illustrator advanced there's a link for the full course in the description if you're interested this particular video is about 15 of the full course so there's lots to do plus i have an illustrator essentials course there as well for those of you who are self-taught and could use a little run through of the basics what you're seeing in front of you now are the things that you do in those courses also if you decided to subscribe to those courses you also get access to my photoshop indesign adobe xd premiere pro after effects and dreamweaver courses all right that is the little sales pitch over continue on with your video and have a good time i'll see you in a sec hi there in this video we're going to redraw this whale in this weird flowery thing that i made okay and redraw it like this not using the pen tool we're going to use the new fancy improved curvature tool okay you are going to test it you might fall in love with it like me and you might be abandoning the pen tool all right i take that back pen tool i'm sorry but you are very hard to learn okay and the curvature tool pretty easy all right let's go and learn how easy it is in this video okay so we want to work with we're going to show you the difference between the pen tool and the curvature tool we're going to focus on the curvature tool because probably most of you doing this advanced class is at least got the basics of the pen tool we'll do an advanced video right next so we can get your skills up with the pen tool but for the moment we're going to look at why you should give the curvature tool a go now if you are handy with a pen tool like i am and i found the curvature tool like at the beginning i was like ah why do i need another pen tool but it's actually quite amazing what it does so throughout this course my request is just to give the curvature tool like go throughout this one it's pretty cool first of all let's look at the pen tool which we know and love i'm going to draw in we're going to start with this guy on the right here we're going to draw the basics so let's say i want to draw the circle okay pencil is click and drag for a curve and click and drag for a curve click and drag for a curve i'm trying my best circle okay bare circle bare circle bare circle okay so it's it's okay let's do the same thing with the curvature tool now curvature tool you just click once for a curve click once for a curve you can see once i've kind of finished my first you know i've got more than two points here it starts doing a lovely curve so i'm going to click another time and another time roughly in the corners here you can see it just does by default nicer curves and let's have a little look at kind of some of the the pros and cons for the curvature tool so remember the circle here we clicked once for a curve but let's say we want a corner okay so what we do is we double click for a corner okay and along here there's a long big curve here about halfway along and i click once because i want a curve and then you can see once i start dragging out okay i get roughly where i need it to be and i can remember this is a corner point as well because it's a change of direction i double click cool up here um i've got two kinds of curves okay so there's one going this way and then one kind of bending around so i want one there for a curve and maybe one there for another curve missed it totally that's all right and back to the beginning here this is the way but when it joins back up um you just click once to kind of finish it off whether it's a corner or a curve just kind of click once to kind of join it all back up what you'll first of all notice is that it's a pretty sweet curve right okay it needs some adjustments okay and you can adjust it and the cool thing about adjusting it this is probably its biggest um awesome trait is watch this if i start dragging this one what you'll notice is can you see the line underneath here i'll kind of point to it watch this line while i'm dragging this top one can you see it actually flexes this is not only adjusting um this one it's actually adjusting the next one to continue a nice nice smooth curve i can drag this one okay to try and get a little nicer drag this one in what i'm trying to do i guess the difference would be is if i tried to do that in the pen tool okay so pen tool i'm going to click once for a corner click and drag for a curve click once so it's not going to be too bad like you know it's not a hard shape to do i should get rid of the fill click once the difference is if i grab the white arrow and start adjusting this you can see it does nothing to affect this line here and you end up with these kind of like really kind of well just not as balanced curves so i find that the curvature tool just ends up making my drawings look a little nicer now if you love this control with all these handles never fear they are still here which i can click on these corner points they are still there okay they just kind of hidden from you and remember the biggest thing is that if i change this one it influences the one above it and things just end up looking nicer all right so remember double click for a corner click once for a curve double click for a corner no don't double click so if i accidentally do it that's fine i can double click it again and it goes back to being a curve so so it's a curve double click corner double click curve it kind of toggles it in and out go back to here and it's a curve no it's a corner double click okay and i should get rid of the fill here i will for this one and there's a curve so click once for a curve click once again and you can just see yeah pretty nice curves all right so what we're going to do now is redraw this whale okay and we're going to use the curvature tool and we're going to work our way around there's nothing really new from what we've done here but this is the shape we're going to use for this class so this is the one i really want you to do if you've skipped this one i really want you to do this shape so we let's draw it together okay so double click four corner and maybe halfway down here click once for a curve we can adjust it later on okay and i'm going to double click for a corner now this fill here is driving me mad i'm going to go to properties i'm going to say fill have no fill you should have done at the beginning that's what i said i was going to do all right so curve click once double click click once for a curve double click for a corner uh this curve is just kind of slight here okay so i'm going to click once about here and maybe once in there and you're like what what is it doing it's not so you kind of like go out here okay until we are looking for the change of direction because it changes there right so i want kind of halfway in there you're looking for the apex really so i'm going to click once click once oh man look how good it's looking okay double click um you know i if you're like me the pen tool you get good but you've got to really fiddle with it afterwards using the direct selection tool to get any sort of like lovely curves through here um this one has a slight dip so click once there's a bit of a corner there click once and double click for a corner that's coming out pretty nice if i do say so myself double click click once double click there's a curve i probably wanna yeah do one there and then this one here probably can't go all the way out here so i'm gonna double click for a corner and that's probably one i'm gonna have to tidy up that's all right so double click there's a slight curve here click once click back in here all right uh give it a fill color and i'm going to give this one a fill color of blue just because it's a whale and yeah i'm going to continue on drawing this now with the curve tool let's have a look at adjusting this thing okay so there are times we like actually just didn't do what i want you can grab the curve tool okay and go in and go actually this guy just needs to be maybe up here okay i can try and get him to blend a bit nicer okay that would work or i can undo grab my white arrow the direct selection tool and grab this guy and go what's going on here and go this guy needs to be coming straight out of the back of this one and this one guy needs to go over higher so it's up to you how you guys want to do it but um yeah let's continue on all right uh double click click once double click click once click pretty nice double click for a corner click once double click and i'll show you one little trick because this is getting boring um it's great so but let me show you a little trick you can do is say you want these like some reason i draw these leafy things all the time if you watched my tutorials too many leafy kind of things anyway this is meant to be water by the way but what i can do is say this guy here i can grab the curvature tool and remember if i want to change it from a curve to a corner remember if i've got it wrong i just double click it i find that's kind of cool like especially that one like that kind of like leafy shape with one end and pointing especially if it's balanced it's quite tough to do now if you're getting bored you can skip to the next video now um i'm gonna delete that and just go double click click it once double click click once double click click once double click zoom in and double click curve double click one click double click click once double click i'm driving myself mad now click once i'm just gonna do it in silence if that's okay you get the idea right how awesome are we okay this one needs a little bit of adjusting i'm gonna grab the curvature too and just say you my friend come down a little bit if yours is snapping that's one of the things it's like oh my why are you doing all of these things and snapping there's two ways of getting around that you can zoom right in okay so i've hit command plus or control plus on a pc so zoom right in gives you a lot more control you can see it's not trying to snap now just because it's kind of filling in the screen or you can go to view and turn off smart guides i use the shortcut all the time it's command u on a mac or control you on a pc and even if you're far further out it's not going to try and snap as much okay so i'm going to turn it back on for smart guides and yeah do some adjustments all right uh the only thing i need is my eyeball the last of it um what am i going to do i'm just going to get rid of full draw my eyeball you're like he's not going to use the curvature z i am you should use the ellipse still but we're proving a point click once click once click once click once click once it's not a perfect circle but it's not what i'm looking for for this guy i'm just looking for a little bit of weirdness okay there you go stroke okay i've got a stroke and a fill and i'm going to put this one back in i'm going to grab my black arrow and i'm going to use my eyedropper tool just to steal the color from him all right that my friends is the curvature tool and the next video let's get into some super advanced pen tool stuff but um yeah if you're like me okay and you're good at the pen tool try the curvature tool at least for this class a bitcher you're going to find some nice things about it all right i'll see in the next video hi there it is advanced pen tool tips and tricks time in illustrator now if you are a bit afraid of the pen tool still you might want to check out the essentials course okay it goes through the pen tool and a lot more kind of i guess a bit more of a basic understanding this one here is going to jump straight into the your okay user of pen tool and you want to take it to the next level so get a notepad out there's a few little shortcuts and key combinations to make this work and go fast but yeah let's get in there redraw this little doll thing and make it look like this all right let's get started okay so advanced pen tool time let's bring in an image so file place and let's bring in from your exercise files one called pen tool where are you pen tool there you are there make sure it's a template click place so it's on its own layer and locked um next thing is under properties let's grab our pen tool from our toolbar okay and make sure we've got a fill of none okay and we'll have a stroke of black that's fine one of the first things you need to do when using the pen tool is to turn off the smart guide so command u turns it off otherwise it starts trying to snap to things and you lose your mojo now first trick is for better curves right say i want to do this curvy bit down the bottom here you might be at a habit or the way you were taught by clicking once for a corner clicking and dragging for a curve and then a corner here now that is fine but often you can get nice er curves by using handles out of these corner points so i'm going to start by clicking and dragging out and i'm dragging out a curve i'm dragging towards the line i want to go and roughly about there and then watch this i'm going to drag out okay and i get the same line with less anchor points and you'll find that if you have just two anchor points using handles it'll just give you a nice smoother shape than you would get from doing you know two corners with a curve in the middle and the trouble runs into if you want to change direction here because it's a corner right we knew it was a corner when we drew it and so that brings me on to my next shortcut if you've got a curve where you want it to be a corner you can just hold down the alt key on a mac or the option key on a pc okay and you can see i've broken it there okay and i'm going to go up to here and i want it to be a curve still so i'm going to click and drag out okay i can break it again later on remember by holding the alt key on a pc or the option key on a mac and breaking it as i'm drawing rather than kind of drawing it out and then having to go back to the convert anchor point tool or the white arrow okay it's just a nice handy extra trick so that's one way of doing it let's show you even better way in the way i normally draw is with the pen tool okay so i'm going to click and drag out here to get this first curve click and drag out and instead of doing what we did before is draw it and then kind of come back to it and break it using the option key or the alt key on a pc is you can actually do it here before you start you know but when you get it kind of roughly where you want it to just hold down the alt key on a pc and an option key on a mac that same key okay before you let go and it actually snaps it while you're going okay so i'll often do this and drag outs let's say i want to keep these curves i'm doing a real rough job to speed through but i get to here and i drag it out then i hold alt and just bring it up this way because i know that's going to give me roughly where i want to go okay and we're going to get to this point okay so alt breaks it but you get to this point and i know i need it to be really long to get that existing curve right but i know that this top point up here you can see like oh man it's kind of gone too far and you end up you'll have your methods to fix that up but what you can do is watch this while i'm dragging that one out if you hold down the command key on a mac or the control key on a pc you can it still keeps it like locked but it brings this handle in so that the extent is not as far okay so while you're dragging you can kind of shorten one of them by holding the command key i know these are all a little bit tough to remember but you've got your notepad next to you and you're going to just spend whenever you're doing your next drawing just kind of like okay you might only use two or three of them but i find i use all of them and it just makes my pen tool experience a lot better another one we're going to do is say like i get along here and i start drawing and it's just not quite on the line right what i can do before i let go is just hold down the spacebar key and then when i move my mouse it's moving the anchor point okay so i can continue on get it perfect all right so that's going to be it for super shortcuts what i'd like you to do for your project is to kind of finish off this drawing you can use the pen tool or the curvature tool okay which we learned in the previous video it's up to you and just get a rough drink don't worry if it's not perfect i'd like you to do it because we're going to use it as an example later on to kind of color it in to show you how to kind of color in a hand drawn drawing and so um one of the things that you might run into is like how do you want to complete this now you're going to get to like this point here and go okay do i go down here or up this way okay so let's just turn it into a pile of pieces what i mean by that is that i'm going to grab my black arrow okay and just click off in the background and i'm going to draw as a separate line we will join them all up later on using some cool tool called the shape builder tool so i'm just going to click and drag down here and do i want it to join yeah probably do um but you can see here i'm not worried that it doesn't go around and completely joins we're going to go through and connect these up a different way so pen tool let's say this line here and there's this kind of hand okay all i'm going to do is click once and just click once there okay and that's going to be enough for what i need i'm going to use the pen tool now okay and i'm going to draw a curve i'm going to draw a curve curve curve what i might do is just kind of overlap this a little bit because do i want to get them all perfect align there it becomes too hard to draw that way okay so we're going to overlap that and what i'll do is i'll draw that foot over the top and we'll we'll trim it up using the shape builder tool so that's the kind of technique that i want you to use just make sure everything is it doesn't have to overlap completely like this it can be close like that and we'll show you later on there's a magic way of kind of joining those up i like to go through draw all the lines that you can see here don't stress too much about it but this might be a really good time to practice your super amazing fantastic new advanced pen tool tricks all right i'm back and i was just kind of drawing this and i thought actually there's probably more i can add to this video because one of the big problems is let's say we're using any of the tools okay i'm using the pen tool is if i kind of say i want to click over here it's going to really want to join up to this tool okay or join up to the end of these lines you're like oh stop connecting up okay the easiest way is say the curvature tool is the worst for it right if i start down here and i put a one there one there and i want to go to this it really wants to kind of do stuff with this you're like oh what happened we were just doing this line okay the easiest way is just to go zoom in real quick okay so if i click there oh joined up click there i've really exaggerated these lines you can see they all overlap we'll tidy that up in a future tutorial but click once and where it gets in here it's really wants to join just zoom in okay i'm using command plus you might use control plus and just click in here gives you i guess a bigger room to kind of you know so it's not kind of trying to guess these lines so i often do that zooming in just to kind of make sure it doesn't join up with other lines another thing that i kind of realize while i'm working is that to deselect you can go to the black arrow or hit the v key the shortcut i use the most is holding the command key down you can see you get the black arrow and just click off in the background so while i'm drawing so let's say we want to draw this line so click once i'm using the curvature tool click once so i've got a just a nice curve but it keeps on joining so hold command and just click off in the background so i can start again and again it's going to really want to join that line so if i zoom right in you're holding space bar to click and hold and drag this around i'm just going to start you know kind of exaggerate this and um i'm going to try and avoid this line here and click once click once click once click once go curvature till built for making weird hair flowers okay click off in the background all right one last thing before i go is when you get to the end of your drawing um because we're going to kind of color this in later on you're kind of left with a ugly looking drawing okay all the things overlap and it's not very nice a nice little easy trick is i'm selecting it all with my black arrow holding down the alt key or the option key on a mac okay and just making a duplicate and with it selected just go over to stroke and pick something down here it says profile and let's pick something nicer like this first one here the width profile just gives it a nice kind of hand drawny look of bump mine up to three points looks a bit better like i said shape builder tool we're going to make this and fill it in and do some cool colors all right that's it for advanced pencil stuff alright i'll see in the next video hi there in this video we are going to take the width tool to the next level we're going to take this hand drawn logo and amazingly vectorize it same with this one here we're going to take this pencil drawing and do all these kind of cool whippy blobby bits to the ends all right let's go and learn how to do that now in illustrator all right so i've got open the width tool1.ai file and we're going to draw this kind of curve in the middle here this is a logo that i made a really long time ago for a company called arctic kiwi and just has this really nice kind of like coral new zealand chorus shape in there mountains that's what it's meant to be anyway but we want to get this curve we're going to use the width tool and we'll look at some of the advanced width tool features so first of all we need to get this kind of curve shape now that can be the hardest bit right i'm going to use the curvature tool and it gives me the kind of nicest curves line and we're practicing the curvature tool remember so i'm going to click once now if you kind of put two not enough curve points in okay i'm trying to be really sparingly and if you know like the least amount of anchor points generally gives you a nicer curve and that's good but it's not kind of following the line as i wanted it so what we might do is i'm going to undo and just kind of add one or two more extra points so instead of going all the way down to here i'm going to kind of maybe go there maybe there and then there there and you'll see like as it kind of comes around it kind of reaches back and influences the line thank you guys at all now if you get it close and you're like actually it's kind of close but not what i wanted you can use the white arrow to adjust it or let's say it's really bad and you've got like something that's not what you wanted actually let's do a duplicate over here a nice little trick before we do the width tool is with it selected if you've got something that just doesn't flow very nicely you can use the object path simplify it doesn't always work but you can see there's just a tiny adjustment and i feel like it's just a nicer curve there now especially across the top here it's kind of peaked across this you can play around with curved precision okay and decide on how much or how much don't worry too much about like where it is on the slider because it you know just kind of changes the shape so um just kind of drag along until you find like actually i think that's quite nice so i'm kind of liking it about there and make sure preview is on okay and also know that sometimes i use it and it just makes a big mess of it but yeah i'd say 80 of the time it makes a little bit better you can see i liking that curve more goodbye you're in i'm going to turn the background on try and line it back up again and when you are drawing this don't worry too much about the background drawing because that's just hand drawn like it was my good guess at trying to get it nice and curvy but we want to get something that looks perfect in vector okay so yeah don't worry too much about it so now we're going to look at the width tool so the width tool is this one here so looks like a harp or something click on him and the easy way to do is find somewhere kind of the fattest point of that line i'm going to just drag it out okay so that's a pretty cool thing if you've never used it before but a lot of people have so there's a few things you need to watch out for is if i zoom in because i used uh a font size of one i had a stroke width of one point to start with you can see it's got this kind of like flat end it's not what i wanted okay so afterwards you can do one of two things you can just grab it and just drag this in to get it to be nice and tight okay at both ends or you can just start with a really small um weight fonts to start with before you start drawing it up to you all right other things to know about the width tools you can have more than one point you can see you can kind of adjust this one and now having lots of different points if you get something in the wrong place you can click hold and just drag the center of it you can see you can kind of move it around and i'm going to delete these by clicking it and just hitting delete on my keyboard grab you as well delete them another thing you can do is let's say i want this outside to be up just a bit bigger okay so let's say i want them about there you can hold down the alt key on a pc or an option key on a mac and you can grab either of these sides you can see they work independently of each other if i let go of it they start working together while i'm holding down the option key or the alt key on a pc i can kind of adjust just this one and get it kind of how i want it to be okay so lots more awesome width tool action to come but let's just finish this off and i want to run into one of the problems that people do have and a little cool shortcut to fix it let's say i'm using the width tool uh curvature tool sorry i'm going to draw these lines but i want to draw them as separate lines because what happens is click once click again click there and hey it's joined up that's easy i can click off but now i want to click down here u and i don't want this to join up because it does kind of weird stuff right you just want them to be separate lines the kind of quickest way to fix that is with this selected with the black arrow hold command on a mac or control on a pc and hit two that just locks it okay it's kind of locked in the background now back to the curvature tool click once click once and then at the top here it's not going to try and join it okay if you hold command 2 it just locks it again so it's kind of like easier than putting them on its own layer again you stop doing that i'm going to go command 2. they're all locked so i can just continue on my merry way i probably want to join some of these lines but it's okay so you my friend command 2 and then i grab my curvature tool click once click again and back up the top there but now you're thinking these aren't all joined okay so a nice little trick is let's make sure unlock them all so under object there's unlock all some reason that shortcut doesn't work on my machine okay it's been done by something else but what we can do is grab all of these little anchor points at the top here so i've used my white arrow i've just selected them all okay and then i can go over here the align panel just say i want you to line there and line vertical and align center horizontal and they just kind of overlap each other now perfect so let's move on to our next width tool example okay so the second example is open up width tool 2 and we'll do these kind of like psy scott style kind of whips check out psy scott s i scott for he's got amazing stuff like it's total um kind of copy of that type of effect okay and what we're looking for is we're looking for these kind of like tear drop ins and these nice curves so there's two things we're going to do let's do the teardrop one first so i'm going to grab my let me use the curvature tool because i find it's easier for doing these curves click once click twice how many do i need i've practiced this a couple of times teaching it so i kind of know i need a little bit more than i normally do okay and i want to kind of come around here and then maybe another one there-ish okay now i could use the white arrow to tidy these up i'm happy roughly how it is so um what you might have run into problems is mine didn't have a fill if you're finding it hard to draw just turn off the fill before you start drawing next thing i want to do is turn the stroke weight way down so it's nice and thin and let's grab the width tool there he is there we're going to have a couple of things one is the start point now what you find with a start point sometimes you drag it the wrong way and it's like oh it seems to not work just drag it kind of the opposite way so i'm dragging down okay and so that's my kind of first part it's doing a pretty good job right um the next bit is i want that teardrop at the end okay so what we'll do is i'm going to zoom in close on this tip and you need two parts i'm going to draw out one part okay and now it just kind of looks like a regular line but just behind it you drag in a skinny a bit and it kind of makes like a little tuber thing and yours might be working by default it's probably not okay but if you click on the line go over here to stroke and click on the word stroke and there's by default it sets the unfortunately named butt cap okay you want to go to the next one called round cap and it will give you that kind of look ricks this in but we can fix that end easy by lobbing it off but it gives you that nice kind of tear drop shape and that's kind of what we're looking for for this drawing now you might be a mask with the pen tool and spend a while getting this curve because it's pretty good right but it's not perfect i'll show you a way say this one here it's quite circular i want to kind of i'll show you a trick that i use to kind of get a reasonably perfect circle so i'm going to start with an ellipse okay so you might have to hold down the rectangle tool grab the ellipse tool and i'm going to draw an ellipse now shortcut if you hold down the alt key on a pc or the option key on a mac it starts from the center and hold down shift and it will give you a perfect circle that's what i'm looking for right now remember my thing underneath is just a hand drawn one so it's never going to match up perfect so don't i guess we're not looking to try and do that right we're just yeah we're looking to kind of get it close so and what i want to do is slice this into bits now i don't use the knife tool very often sees the shortcuts this little scissors tool i said knife i meant scissors so if you can't find it it's hiding underneath the eraser tool and he's really good at going click once and click again and what it's done is if i just hit the delete key on my keyboard twice it deletes that kind of chunk you might have the wrong bit deleted so you might have to select with a black arrow and delete the bit you need to go on you can see how i've kind of got the beginnings of this going now i want to continue it on and so i'm going to use the pen tool or the curvature tool we're going to use the curvature tool and i want to show you something like curvature tool was like i want to be this side because that was the last point drawn you're like i know i want you to be this side i'm going to grab my white arrow i'm going to say click on you now if i go back to my coverage so it says i defy you and do whatever i want go back to that first one so i find this is a little bit of a bug if you can think of a better way than this hack okay what i do is i click on this thing just click on once and then go back to my curve tool and it goes ah did you mean this guy i'm like yes i did so i use the pen tool just click it once so what i'm looking for now is probably one about there i'm just going to follow this guy down the middle now i want it to kind of follow down the center so i want it to be straight i don't want a big curve like this so i'm going to double click and then here double click okay didn't do a great job there so i'm going to go back and maybe just adjust it okay and try not to wreck it too much it's looking okay you might now go with your white arrows and just kind of tidy this up there's a couple of little bits oh man it's tough for not getting perfect circles with still helps okay i'm using the white arrow the direct selection tool just to kind of tidy it up i feel like i'm kind of there might need a little bit of work across what i might do as well is turn this one underneath off because it's kind of influencing what i think it should be anyway same thing again so i've used the circle to get the kind of bulk of it done now i'm going to turn down my stroke to something really light and i'm going to grab my width tool and i'm going to i might need to turn that back on now just turn it off okay is i want a big chunk at this end probably want to match it about here because i want the font to kind of be the same width to about there before it gets kind of skinny and what am i doing it gets a bit thinner across here so i'm going to tighten it up about there and then i want to do this like a little blob but remember let's practice that so i want to go yep okay to get the kind of end piece and then just a bit further back so i'm on that last part of the anchor and then a bit further back i'm just going to tighten it in and you might find like holy moly okay it goes to a maybe a bit too big you can just tuck this in there awesome i'm happy enough what i might do is trim it up i want it to be a bit further back so the c c on my keyboard to get the scissors tool and say snap black arrow grab that chunk don't need them and there's my blob back here and i'm kind of it's a work in progress right and i'm drawing a little circle here switch these guys around that's kind of the thing i'm looking for ish zoom out how perfect is it it's pretty good pretty good cool so what we're not going to do now is draw these letters okay you could totally easily draw these but you draw them separately okay there's l i draw with just the pen tool the curvature tool and i draw these two things separately using the width tool and we'll join them up in a in an episode um probably two videos after this one actually know the very next video where we kind of start merging different kinds of shapes like this with tool with just regular shapes so what i'd like you to do is keep practicing on a few of these okay there's a few of them that change direction okay in this case i probably just do two separate lines so i do one that came out of here and stopped there okay and then i'd either lock it and put it on its own layer and draw another one okay that'd be really easy to do with the circle i should have done that one would have been real easy i did this one that kind of curves as well but you get the idea okay some of these ones change direction and i totally do that in one big long um line okay and yeah i'd like you to practice on a few of these and we'll finish it off in a future video all right on to the shape builder tool which i keep talking about we'll finally finish off a few of these drawings in the next one all right let's go do it welcome to the corner extravaganza okay we're going to turn corners into curves by using these weird little targets that appeared now if that looked a little underwhelming it gets a little bit more exciting but you should stick around because some of the tips we're going to learn here are going to help us later on in the advanced course so yeah hang around let's learn about cornice all right so corner options have been around a little while and a lot of people just ignore them i'm going to grab my rectangle too i've just got a plain document open nothing fancy i'm going to draw a box and it's these guys these little targets in the corners if you can't see yours they're under view and they call them corner widgets okay so you can turn them on and off they can get annoying a little bit if when you're using like the pen tool and stuff that or the direct selection tool but so what they do is all i do is drag them in and i get rounded corners not particularly fancy we can fancy them up a little bit by grabbing the direct selection tool the white arrow clicking on just one corner and you can kind of do one side click on the side cool that's kind of cooler and where it gets nice or more advanced okay is holding down the option key on a mac or the alt key on a pc and just clicking one of these guys okay whatever you've got selected and you can see i can change it from an audi to a ninny to a flat e okay but you get the idea okay so it works rectangles it works for anything grab the curvature tool and we start doing weird corner stuff okay and you'll see that if i have my white arrow here whenever there's a corner you can see i can kind of flatten it out and that's going to come in lots really handy later on when we start joining things with the shape builder tool that was a pretty bad example but let's look at the star real quick and we'll look at a couple of other options don't leave okay so i've got a star and i'm going to drag it over here i'm going to grab my white arrow okay and you can see these corners everywhere and i can just kind of like you know tighten them up or i can select just this one hold shift and grab all of these guys and just do the outside ones it does get better than this i promise and how much better and there are some some extra options if you double click any of these guys so double click any of the targets you get kind of like corner options okay and you can decide on how kind of like um how relative or absolute okay just different kind of corners it depends on how kind of the anchor points make it um you can obviously change your anchor points here as well and if i go back to the radius you can kind of push it in and out instead of dragging it let's click ok one thing you might run into is if you're drawing something say a random shape i've got the pen tool i'm just drawing randomness right and if i double click on any of these points it gives me this kind of corner options panel but you might get if you're dealing with say a regular shape like a rectangle tool okay it's still a primitive shape illustrator still knows it's a rectangle you can see up here it says i'm a rectangle not random shape and if i use my black arrow and double click on these guys you get a slightly different window controls the you know get a bit more control here and but you can see these are the corners okay and these are the corner options so it's no real difference just i'm going to increase this up and you can see i'm working on that top right hand corner there so just so you know you might look at a different window than i got just a second ago now the big thing to do in here though is say if i make this lots a lot bigger scale corners i can't remember if it's on by default or off by default i i've played with it too many times but the difference is if i grab my rectangle tool now and scale this down with scale corners okay and i'm holding shift so it scales proportionately it gets smaller okay whereas if i turn that off and i scale it down you'll notice that eventually it turns into kind of a weird circularly egg thing because it's trying to maintain those corners so turn those on and off as you need them if you can't get this thing to open up just go to window and go to transform okay and you end up at the same place one thing you might happen though you saw i double clicked it and it might end up looking like this to start with if you double click the word transform okay it gets smaller before it gets bigger it's a big medium a little bit tiny i'm not sure why that one's useful but anyway you get the idea you can keep double clicking that word to get the different options i'm going to click scale on it seems like a better way of working now what i want to do before we go is i'm just going to go back to remember our whale from earlier okay it really annoyed me this nose here so i'm going to click on it and i'm going to remember i'm using my white arrow if i use the black arrow and i select the whole shape and i don't get those little targets so i'm going to grab this i'm going to click on just this corner and that's what i wanted for my friend a little stubby nose okay i'm going to go and wreck a few other bits but you are fine to carry on and now i'm going to grab you and just drag you down there actually i just want this top bit yep looks terrible kind of looks a little bit more like water my whale's not like birthing flowers all right you get the idea right so corner options useful they're going to get more and more useful as we get through that course so yeah we need to introduce it now all right let's get on to the next video but before then i'm going to undo i'd rather him look like he's ejecting flowers the other way look terrible okay now we're going to the next video hi there in this video we're going to use the very best creation tool in all of illustrator in my opinion the shape builder tool to make this whale circularly splash thing all right let's go and build it now in illustrator all right so first up let's work out what the shape builder does or replaces it's the pathfinder tool we love to hate the pathfinder tool right it's i want to join these shapes up or knock them out and you end up kind of like you know you can only select only two at a time you have to do some copying and pasting and have versions and then you're like i'm gonna click on this one not the one undo have everybody done that is it just me i do the undo click on them all see which one works and then it can take a while right so this tool replaces that goodbye you guys hello whale let's draw you with the shape builder tool okay so basically what we're going to do is we're going to do kind of like we did with the pathfinder tool we have two shapes and kind of cut them out but we can do multiple shapes and there's some great perks you might have already used the shape builder tool and that's okay we're going to go i'm going to try and go into a bit more advanced techniques here so let's get started with i'm going to grab the ellipse tool and i'm going to have no stroke and i'm going to have a black fill and i'm going to start in the center kind of hold down the option key and shift to start from the center if you're on a mac sorry i'm on a mac if you're on a pc hold down the alt key and shift and start dragging you can start from the sentence not perfect and i'm going to use my arrow keys just to tap it around that's kind of a good start so i want to draw a line across there i'm just going to grab my line segment tool i'm going to click hold and drag you could use your pen tool it doesn't matter cool that's kind of it and maybe the next thing i'll do is um i guess i want this this big kind of like rolly wave kind of fern type thing so what i'm going to do i'm going to show you how i would build it okay so i'm going to copy and paste this and if you use command f okay there it is there or control f on a pc it pastes it back exactly where it gets it okay so i use that often rather than copy and paste because watch this copy and paste paste just puts it in the middle of the window bad so command f on a mac control f on a pc now what i want to do is actually i want to just i'm going to use my arrow key i want to kind of try and line up that probably have to make it a little smaller holding shift and what i want to do is you're looking at it in this area here i'm just trying to get some sort of nice curve we could use the width tool okay but we're using the shape builder tool because i reckon it's going to do probably a better job and only because i want to keep this complete circle absolutely nice okay um i know the design kind of calls for this round whale to be all in this round bit okay so i've got that but let's let's start with that actually and i want to lob that bit off so i'm just going to use the line segment tool and i'm going to say you just draw a little line through here so i'm going to select it all with my black arrow and what i might do just to make it easier for you guys is on my last panel let's turn it off to see what we're doing so if you've never used the shape builder tool be prepared this thing is awesome there it is there hard to describe that one right that's the icon shape a little what we want to do is there's two kind of modes there's adding and subtracting so in this case down the bottom here i want to add this bit okay so all i did was click hold and drag across and join these two bits cool and i want to add that bit down there okay so we've kind of made that one solid shape you can imagine using the pathfinder tool to be lots of undo's now i want to slice these bits off so what i do is i hold down the alt key on a pc or the option key on a mac okay and you can see that our cursor gets a little minus there so it's going to drag across it drag it across you drag across you can see how cool and quick and easy it is okay so i've built that first little part now i'm going to turn on that layer again and let's start doing the rest of it so i'm not going to build every single thing with adjust shapes there's a couple of curves in here i'll probably use the curvature tool for let's do the hard stuff first so you can move on if you're getting bored of this so what we'll do is we'll join this little circle up the top here okay so and i'm going to grab the ellipse tool i'm going to draw a circle starting in the center there now a cool little shortcut is when you you're kind of getting things lined up it can be a little hard when there's a stroke weight on it we've got a stroke weight of one i think but if you hit command y on a mac or control y on a pc i'm also going to turn the background layer off and it just gives you a really kind of really fine kind of detail so it's the long ways under view and it's called this one here pixel preview versus not pixel preview outline there is at the top there versus gpu preview okay so that's the thing we toggle between use that one all the time okay command y or control y so i'm going to go back in and what i'm looking to do is just get this thing kind of close to here it's never going to be perfect i'm just trying to grab the edge and get it kind of like touching here so this curve is going to look nice then i'm going to select both of them i don't have to come out of our wireframe outline mode to keep using the width tool now width tool is one uh i say the width tool i might say that a couple of times in this course i don't know why i say that all the time it's the shape builder tool okay so it's shift m it's one of those shortcuts write it down it's actually one of those ones you use all the time okay so i'm going to click hold and drag across all these guys and you'll notice along here it's done a pretty good job at lining this up and i'll do one more and see if i can't fix it okay so or i can't make that look a little worse so i can show you how to fix it so that's all looking okay command y and let's look at this i should have really had that on to draw that circle i'm okay with that um my drawing room is just a hand drawing so what i'd like to do here is i'd like this to kind of join uh yeah join up to this bit so let's grab the i'm going to do it with two ellipses again we're going to be able to use and corner options which is cool so i'm going to draw a circle roughly in the center here using my tricks get it roughly the right size that feels a bit right maybe a little bit bigger okay i'm going to have another circle okay it's going to be a lot smaller to get that kind of inside radius now i'm just banging it around trying to figure out needs to be a bit smaller and there's times where the smart guys can be a little painful at the moment i'm going to leave them on i'm just using my arrow keys just to tap it around okay so i want this kind of line up here and what i'll do is actually i'll make it even a bit smaller and and i'll have this when i say a bit smaller i want this kind of corner you can see here just kind of corners in and i want it to be smooth and that's where corner options are going to help so you quit messing about dan and just do it okay um so i'm gonna lob it off probably about here i'm gonna grab all three of these guys okay with my black arrow remember shift m is our cool tool and i'm going to drag you guys drag you guys to join them up okay i want to minus that goodbye to you drag you across so i've kind of got rid of lots of bits now there's this kind of junk going on here so i'm going to go command y just to see what's going on i'm going to zoom in and i'm going to drag across these two guys to join them up and i'm left with this okay so now i'm going to grab my white arrow and remember those corner options okay this is where this is super handy right so i'm going to click on just this point here and i'm going to tidy it up okay and you notice can you see it kind of like just flows it around a lot more so it happens quite a bit a nice easy way to kind of fix those terrible joints i could fix this one i don't want to in this case because you know but it's just an easier way than you've probably done it before and you've spent ages with pen tools and anchors and trying to delete bits and oh man paint so that's your handy tip and let's continue any other hard bits we're going to do the circle thing again here and what are the hard bits be the same thing here with the corner option let's do that one next before we do that okay so i'm going to draw and try and match these two ellipses roughly yeah a bit bigger something like that cool command c for copy command f for paste in place right over the top of it make it a bit bigger get this curve that feels okay okay select both of these guys shift m i've got a minus that bit minus that bit drawing these guys here join you get rid of that bit join these if you've forgotten the shortcuts already sorry with that it is alt and for pc and option for mac to minus otherwise it just works by joining cool we're going to grab our arrow tool and down here i'm going to click on just this point and i'm going to tidy that up you can see how nice it's even a perfect circle look at that handy same thing is going to apply to this we're going to draw that with a curvature tool let's do this is probably the last thing that will be useful for you before i start actually just filling it in i'm going to grab my width sorry my curvature tool now curvature tool has a really weird shortcut i use it all the time but it's really hard one to learn it's shift and apostrophe okay so i think it's apostrophe i think that's what you call it if you hover above it is shift plus that little ticky thing okay i'm pretty sure that's apostrophe so shift in that and i'm going to draw through it okay because if i get close to this it's going to try and join it and remember that shortcut we had before if i select it with my black arrow and go command 2 it locks it if you're on a pc it's control 2. now i can go back to my curvature tool and i can click once there and i'm going to click once there and i'm probably just going to go through i'm not going to do this i in one go i'll cut that out with a circle so i'm going to go to about there and then i want to go down to about and you can see it's locked but i can still kind of follow that path which is really nice okay so about there totally missed it though okay let's bring him down yeah it's looking pretty good cool black arrow click off in the background i'm going to unlock them all some reason my shortcut doesn't work so object unlock all they're all unlocked i can select them shift m and actually i don't really need to like change him okay if i click on him at least he's another shape now if i grab my black arrow and this guy has a separate shape so i can color it later so i might just do that now don't worry about this little spickly line we'll do that in a sec actually let's do that now um so here's part of this thing here so what ends up happening is the line's trying to go through here and it doesn't know what oh when it gets to the edge it's going like all the way out and all the way bend to give it a nice pointy edge if you don't want that um i don't really mind at the moment because i'm probably going to get rid of the stroke but you might not so with it selected go to properties go to stroke and you've got options along here for the uh the way the corners are handled the moment it's got this kind of miter join which is the spiky thing i can round it off which is might be nine or i can kind of bevel it off which gives it a hack at the end it's hard to tell you've got to zoom right in and use this tool to see what happens but have a play around with them see which one will work for you um all right let's tidy up a few bits and pieces let's draw the little fin here here's my shortcuts shift apostrophe remember double click for a corner click once for a curve click once for a curve double click for a corner click once for a curve once for a curve once for a curve and then actually if you you really want to hit double click right for a corner it's just one click to kind of finish the thing off and am i happy with it yeah sometimes turning the background layer on and off that's good enough all right let's slice out the circles all right i'll use u i'll duplicate them and i'll use the same one across here now duplication is black arrow while i'm dragging it holding down the alt key on a pc or the option key on a mac okay the smart guys is battling with me i'll just tap it up with my arrow key select all of you guys shift in i'm going to say i would like to join all you guys up and i want to hold down the option key on my mac or the alt key on my pc to delete all those guys now there's a couple of things there's this thing up going up the top here and i'm going to i feel like i want to go and redo it so that because it's doing not what i said it's kind of not lining up so i want to go back and look like a professional know exactly what i'm doing but i'm going to leave it in here because you might run into the same problem how to fix this no idea okay but we're going to just try and make it do it again so i've just selected both of them gone back to my shape builder tool join them up you can kind of see it still wants to be two separate shapes i'm not sure what that is command y no he's in there he's looking good um yeah i don't know oh well let's ignore it for the moment and we'll go and color this thing and see if it runs into any more problems so let's do this circle here and we'll start in the center there i trim these off way too early if you're doing yours and following along don't trim them this early okay because i have to move my curves up around it's all right remember command y to go to outline and i'm just going to get this to now i'm going to leave that little bump in there to show you how to fix that that's a cool way of doing it so command y shift m okay oh that's doing the same thing hmm it'll be interesting all right so what i want to do is kind of tidy these up so i'm going to grab my pen tool and there's there's a couple of corners i want to get rid of i'm going to go back to my outline view command y or control y on a pc so i want to get rid of these guys so with the pen tool nothing selected it's got the minus right just kind of does that by itself i don't want to get rid of that one because he controls a lot of this i'll get rid of u so now we've got a problem of this kind of flowing along here so the easiest way to do it is grab the white arrow click on this guy he has a handle out this side but he has nothing on the other side so the easiest way all he does is a tiny little handle in there i can't really see so with it selected i'm going to go to is it a curve already okay i'm going to say beer curve you can see it kind of extends that little guy out and has it made it perfect not quite but i'm going to have to do some manual adjustment often that little just make it a curve we'll just fix it right up [Music] i'm gonna say i'm happy enough with it um you might i'm gonna have to play around with the handles but this tutorial is getting really long now so i'm gonna leave it alright let's do a couple more of these and then i'll try and go and fix this by myself and come back actually i'll do that now let's see if they're it's working one last time and then i'll pause and try and fix it and give you the delo right so you two join but you're still separate join still separate all right i'm gonna pause it now i'll be back in a sec figure it out okay it's got me stumped okay so i'm just gonna leave it there because you all might run into the same problem i've never run into it before and so i'm hoping it's just that version problem how about in the comments you let me know did you run into it or is it just me and then it's just me i'll leave it if it's in everybody i'll contact adobe and we'll try and figure it out together all right so let's look at finishing the last little bits off okay so i'm back from the future um i couldn't work it out when i was originally fixing this video and i reached out to adobe and they helped me and made me look like a fool but i'm back humble pie these two things are still separate remember okay i had that problem and all it is is the options in your shape a little if you double click it you get this options okay and it was on gap detection large i was messing around with that with some other project and i left it on turns out it causes that problem okay so turn gap detection off click ok yours is not going to have this problem by the way probably just mine but now with it selected i can go back to my shape builder tool and everything should be good nice nice well we're gonna have both these selected i thought we'd still have a problem okay so now they're joined and they stop being separate uh one thing you'll also notice that i turned back on was if i double click i turned this off previously this thing here where it says show the cursor swatch preview turn it off because it's annoying it's the thing just above the cursor see that if i double click it again it shows me the coloring just above it and i find it a bit annoying so i turned it off i'm going to turn it back on now continue watching dan floundering but there's some good tips in there continue watching and now we all know all right back to your regular scheduled programming and we'll do this bit down here and actually what i'll do is i'll reuse this shape so i'm going to drag this across here i'll show you how i work right i'm just going to slice this bit over here using the line tool select all of that my shape builder goodbye goodbye youtube weirdos and get rid of these bits cool so i've got this thing i'm gonna i should officially go in like use the proper flip but i just often do this i know you shouldn't okay but um yeah just flip it across especially for these curves who's gonna know who's gonna know you're all gonna know you're watching i probably want it to be a bit smaller okay missing about we can fix that curve right so select both of these guys shift m and i'm going to drag across there across there and grab my white arrow come down to here and say you my friend needs to be just a bit nicer oh grab the target not the anchor point just try and flatten it out now if you find it doesn't flatten it out really well okay you can see there's an anchor point there and then they're both trying to kind of do stuff so what i might do is this guy here doesn't seem to doing a whole heck of a lot so i'm going to grab my pen tool and by default it will just try and minus it which is cool now with my white arrow okay my direct selection tool now gives me a bit more of a nicer curve there cool all right last little bit here curve double click for a corner click once for a curve click once for a curve double click click once for a curved uh once for a curve and the weird one when you go back if you double click here oh it does wrong okay just click it once to kind of finish the line and that's the weird little thing there have i missed anything oh this guy down here okay join you guys up let's turn it off layers all right i think it's like color in time and avoid these guys um yeah all right so let's do a couple of things i'm going to do some great and i totally move on now because i'm just going to color it in okay you can watch if you like um but i'm just going to color it in i'm going to turn the background off because i don't need you anymore i am going to make another layer actually i'm not going to make a layer i'm going to you should put layers in right but i get in the habit of just grabbing a rectangle tool and filling it with a color and just locking it okay super handy oh well super quick um send it to the back shortcuts for sending to the back is at the moment it's way above my well right if i can with it selected with pretty much any tool i can hold command shift and hit the first of the square brackets so look at your keyboard just next to p there's a square the first square bracket okay if you so that's command shift square bracket sends it all the way to the back if you're on a pc it's ctrl shift in that first square bracket and the second square bracket brings it to the front back forward back forward all the way through okay so that's what i want i'm going to lock it using command 2 or you can use ctrl 2 on a pc i'm going to stop giving the shortcuts because you might be going mad soon but um we'll do a little bit later on we've got lots of videos to go he's in the middle because that's where i want him to be i am going to give him some fill colors i'm going to start by selecting all just giving it all a fill okay um awesome and now i'm going to because there's basically only a couple of shapes i'm going to get rid of the stroke and that's going to avoid my problem of the joining along the top there it could be the sole for it maybe and these guys here i'm going to do a lighter color light some sort of lighter color and this guy here is going to be the same color use my eyedropper tool just to select from that and this guy here is going to be lighter too just because is it cool yeah that's all right and let's uh one last thing i'm going to show you one last thing i'm going to show you heaps more i'm going to put gradients in this thing i really want gradients so i'm going to draw a big kind of circle in the background it's for just for show right it's just i wanted to i want to pick black actually i'll go to my swatches i'll pick this one maybe lower down the opacity it's just kind of like a i guess a look that i want i just want to kind of lower it down send it to the back okay send this guy to the back he's locked so he needs to come forward one okay and what i could do now is i want to crop it so it's not hanging around the edge so there's two ways of doing it right i can grab a rectangle tool let's drag it out okay and drag it to the edge properly select both of them and hit command 7 or if you're on a pc control 7 and that crops it and that's cool but you'll end up with this kind of you know it's a crop circle and sometimes that runs into problems right so i'll show you how to do it with the sheet builder tool you probably can imagine how this is going to work shift m okay for the shape builder tool i'm just going to delete that bit and that side now i'll send him to the back all right that's kind of it for what i wanted to do with the whale and now you would have drawn yours and yours look different you can totally go in a different direction in terms of the flares you could do the whole thing slightly different and different colors but i'd like to see it and i'd also like to find out if you had the same problem with the little joining bits um but yeah send me i'd like to see what you've done either instagram twitter or here on this platform okay and there's an option for posting your projects all right happy whale making not hunting just when you thought the last video about shape builders was long there's more okay there's a few little special tricks we're going to do to complete some of the previous drawings we've done and like this guy we did earlier okay we're going to run the line through the middle and split them up and do gradients and over here we're going to show you how to kind of expand some of these lines so that you can add the feet and stuff that we started earlier on in the tutorial series all right first thing you need to do though is go and open up the file called file open and it's in your exercise files it is called shape builder extra go do that now and i will see you in the video all right so some extra shape builder goodness uh i like it that much there's a couple of things we haven't covered one is the first one is like a bit of a shortcut so i've got three circles just happen to be circles you could have lots of circles i'm going to select all three jump to my shape builder tool it's over here in my toolbar and and i can kind of join these up by clicking them all through that's fine okay for three circles there's no big drama but if you hold the shift key down and click and drag you get kind of like a rectangle marquee tool and it just kind of does that all in one big go so you've if you've got lots of objects instead of trying to drag across them and scribble through them all just hold shift drag across all three and that kind of uses like the shape builder where it kind of flattens them all into one solid object cool next little thing that's going to happen is remember this from earlier exercise okay if i select all of this and grab my shape builder tool you'll be like okay why can't i fill the center bit okay you might be like oh it's because there's a gap it's not because of that gap if i fill that gap it still won't work okay so white arrow tool drag it right across okay a bit exaggerated there but um grab my width tool still a big hole you can kind of see why and if i select it all you can see the blue lines here indicating that's with the path or the kind of spine of the path there you can see this is more of an effect it's not a fill around the outside because there's actually a massive gap between this line and this line can you see this here is just like a pretty effect so to what we need to do is to fix that okay so there's two things i want to do i'm going to copy and paste this so i've got a version of it up here because i never want to i hate destroying stuff that i've made because i'll come back and i'm like i want to adjust it and i can't because i've smashed it to pieces so with this selected here we're going to go to object and we're going to go to this one that says expand appearance okay and it just kind of like expands it so it's no longer an effect it's actually a shape running around the outside okay so now okay it might fill okay the gap's pretty big over here but let's grab our shape builder tool okay and it does it fine now another thing i want to show you before we move on is if you double click the shape builder tool you can have gap detention like um by default i think it's on medium but you can crank it right up to large or even custom where you say i wanted to fill ginormous holes okay so you might have an artwork that just needs like that you've done some hand drawing okay and you want to fill it up after a live trace or something like that everything else in here is the one i turn off is this one here cursus watch preview it just gets rid of the colors above my arrow know why that annoys me so much but it does okay and let's look at two things i want to fill this with a white and white i'm going to fill this with a random green i'll fill it properly in a second and i want to kind of split that in half okay so i want there to be a line running down the outside so i've got kind of two colors within here and it's going to be this tool here basically so i'm going to make another duplicate of them okay with my black arrow holding down the alt key on our pc or the option counter mac get a duplicate and what i want to do is actually go to stroke here and go profile uniform i don't want any of that width tool goodness i want to turn the weight down to something really tiny it doesn't really matter what size it is and i'm going to drag it down now and what i want to do is i'm going to click off i'm going to grab this end part of it you can see where it says anchor i'm going to try and jam it and then hope for the best i feel like i might have got that okay so i'm going to select both of these black arrow drag around both okay and what i'd like to do is back to my width tool okay and you can see it's kind of carved into two little pieces you might have to go play around with gap detection to fix that but i'm just going to put in random colors i'm going to do gradients in a second cool so that's kind of where i wanted to start i'm going to select it all say stroke none okay i kind of had to stop myself there i'm going to go off and add gradients to this and gradients aren't particularly exciting i'll do that at the end because there's more important stuff like this over here so what i'm going to do is whenever i'm expanding a line i like to have a copy okay i'm just stick them up here in case i need them later on and what i'd like to do is add the feet to this okay so um we're going to kind of join the two bits and pieces so what i'll do is i'll draw what should i draw first and let's grab the curvature tool okay i'm going to click off in the background so it doesn't select it you'll notice every now and again that my cursor changes from the crosshairs to the pin it's just your caps lock key okay happens to be sometimes you can kind of see my keyboard tells on screen what it's doing okay so what i'm going to do is i'm going to zoom in here and i'm going to double click double click molding shift so it's a perfect line double click double click and a curve in there and i'm going to double click here for another corner okay so that's one side and what i might do is turn the stroke weight down to something a little um here line which is 0.25 okay so that's one side again i want to start on this side what i might do is just kind of overlap it here okay and get it close and double click it so it's a corner not a curve and click once for a corner and remember clicking once to kind of tidy it all up at the end so i've got my kind of rough guides i'm going to just tidy this up using the white arrow okay get it kind of how i want to i'd love to spend a lot more time fixing these up and i'm going to do that while you're watching sorry about that okay um so we've got this now we want to kind of join these two up right so i'm going to i'm going to leave some of the badness in there so i what i need to do is expand this one we kind of looked at it before okay so we're going to go to object expand appearance and now it is no longer i can't use the width tool to fix this now that's why i've got a copy at the top there okay but now i can grab these two grab my shift tool i'm sorry shift m okay for my shape builder tool i'm going to join these two and delete that bit okay and probably join these two and have a look how bad it is um that's not too bad okay i'm gonna go with my a for white arrow and this guy here needs some corner love okay here we go same with this guy some coin i love don't we love those guys when you first see these targets you're like oh what do you do they're uh you can do corners that's okay it's kind of cool but it's when you get into this when you start joining these and you've run into trouble before okay that's a terrible serif dan but i'm gonna leave it i followed my drawing without thinking wow that's bad okay um what's going on down here yeah all right um but you give the idea right learn in principle we had to outline this and we kind of drew this separately so there's a lot in this document where that i would draw the width tool but this bit down the bottom here and the serif and i will draw separately all right and that's where i should end it okay and where you can carry on i'm going to show you what i'd probably do with these serifs okay rather than what i've done currently okay and i'm going to go add gradients to it okay so i'll show you what i do with these serifs because ah you're probably probably into it i bet you you are so i'm just going to draw them straight up okay so i'm going to say that's going to be my serif and i'm going to copy paste this okay and i'm going to spend i'm going to line these both up go center center no just hit it once okay i'm going to use my shape builder tool to join them and remember use my sneaky shortcut shift drag a box across them and we're going to grab my a tool okay i'm going to click on this guy actually i should you can grab more than one i'm holding shift to grab both of those two inside ones i'm going to drag them up okay and this guy here i want to skew across so up here my transform window you might not see it's under window go down to transform okay i'm going to use sku and i'm going to use this to get started now a nice little trick for what they call it share here is because they've got kind of like really predefined ones you're like you're not going to probably find it in there so if you just click in here and use your up and down arrow and i find that's a really easy way i'm just kind of tapping my up arrow and it's going up a degree at a time it's a little bit slow but i'm going to get this kind of working and that's going to be by sarah for the like rest of the job what i'll do is i'll just kind of use it for lots of things so am i happy with the weight of it it's probably a little thick but you get the idea right so i'm going to make a duplicate of it and i'm going to use it a good few times it's actually way too thick but and so i'm going to use it here i'll use it again or else i can use it here okay in this case i want to split it up and open so i'm going to move it out grab my a tool okay and select that guy hold shift grab all of these fellas okay so i've got everything on that right hand side and just use my arrow key tap them across and this is how to build out and that's going to be my say my main serif and this is going to be my thin one i deleted that one go back okay so i'm going to use these two guys to start building out that rubbish one that i'm going to remove so you can see i can do it for yeah there's lots of times i can use that okay all these kind of use our version of it and i can use that as my starting i probably have to lob that bit off i can use hin and i can kind of yeah i guess use it for lots of things to get started to kind of speed things up i'm rambling now all right uh gradients and i'm going to do that you don't need to be around for that i'll get the editor to speed it up actually um all right i'll see in the next video okay that's it that's don't judge me that was the colors i picked see in the next video welcome friends in this video we are going to look at live shape effects basically it makes pac-man and it allows you to kind of add and remove sides to polygons quite easily like that we'll go a little bit further and make a little pie charty donut thing all right let's go and learn live shape effects in illustrator okay so live shapes are only on a couple of objects so there's the ellipse and the polygon tool at the moment okay so let's look at the ellipse first and i'm just going to drag our lips um i've got a fill and no stroke now what we're looking for is see this little target on the side that's our little guy okay it doesn't really matter what tool you're using but look i can drag up drag down pac-man but probably better use for maybe a bar graph okay now there's a couple of options you can do okay so obviously i can drag these around randomly just pick kind of a custom shape or you can type them in the transform panel wants to open up by itself or up the top here if you've got the control panel open there's one called shape they end up with the same kind of options cool what we can do over here probably the most important is that you can invert the pie and type in specific degrees okay you can decide exactly what you want to do and the other thing let's have a look at the polygon tool okay it's the other one that works and it's the same kind of thing this one here has got like this little targets on the outside they decided to style us slightly differently see this random tile okay there's ones in all the corners and they went let's randomly put this guy here okay and you can see plus and minus basically it allows you to kind of i'm going to drag it left and drag it right add more sides remove more sites i use this mainly just to make triangles okay drawing triggers with a pen tool surprisingly hard okay a four-sided one okay all right so you can see what we're doing there any other options for the polygon you might decide over here it's easy just actually pick the size okay and that's about it you can play around with the corners this here is the corner options you can see i want rounded corners or increase them up okay you can see the corners kind of getting round but you could just use this tool as well we've used this corner options in an earlier video okay it's probably a quicker way of doing it now what we'll do is we'll make a little pie graph like i saw at the beginning because that's kind of cool there's a full-on graphing section in this advanced course so go check that out if you want to do you know if you're doing lots of graphs you just want a quick um pie graph this is going to work perfect so what we're going to do one of the things as well is say you want to get rid of it like go away you just double click these guys okay and it kind of turns it back to a regular old circle then you can pull them out again okay double click them to go back so what i'm going to do is i'm going to start with that that's going to be the base of my pie i'm going to copy and paste it so i've got another version and then i'm going to work out some percentages and if your your math might be a lot better than mine i don't know why math i find quite hard but i've got some tricks right and you might be the same as me might be like tricks are good okay like i find if i need to make a slice maybe that's 15 okay so i've got given some data and it says i need to slice that's 15 i find this really handy so um we know that the full degrees is 360 right but if you times it so do a little bit of math in these guys so times is the little asterix um key okay um on your keyboard and then you times it by point whatever the um measurement is so 15. okay so astrix point um or put a period whatever you call it and it just makes it just converts that to the right so 54 degrees is 15 of 360. man i'm getting everybody lost let's try one more time let's say i want one more slice that's 30. okay so all i do is go 360 times 0.3 which is 30 and there you go there's our slices cool so i'm going to color them here we go lovely okay i'm going to stack them on top of each other so i'll put this guy and they they snap into place it's pretty cool pretty easy i find them building separately is easier than trying to do them on top of it now one thing is i need to rotate this one around so i'm just going to rotate it around and it should snap into place and i want to say it snaps easily there we go cool 15 30 whatever's left um so another thing i did do in uh the intro bit there is i kind of made it into a donut so what we're going to do is grab the actually what i'll do is i'll grab this guy copy it remember what's the shortcut to paste directly on top because if i go command v it just puts it in the middle of my stage or control v on a pc you remember what it is it's command f okay on a mac or command or control f on a pc so i've got two of them now right on top of each other i'm going to make this one a bit smaller now i'm going to grab the top corner and i'm going to hold down two keys and hold down shift to make sure it stays the height and width but also the option key on the mac or the alt key on a pc so i've got this guy nothing matches i'm going to change the color just so you can see it but it doesn't really matter what color it is or whether you change it if i select it all back to our width tool which is shift not width tool i say that a lot right it hits the shape builder tool so shift m and i'm just going to delete this guys in the side here cool and that kind of gives me that kind of cool donut shape and because they're all separate i can maybe do a pull out like that actually i'm going to select it all shift in and i'm going to click on this guy once and all it really do does is kind of just slices them out from the guy behind him okay so we're going to do something like that goodbye polygon and i'm going to add some text but yeah i'll do that by myself you can add text all right that is for live shape effects i hope it starts applying to things like the star that would be a cool new addition it might do and the version that you're using in the future but for now it works for ellipses and it works for polygons all right let's get on to the next video all right it is the end of this big section about drawing we've done lots of bits now what i've done though is i've tried to make all the exercises that you do very one tool specific okay so that you're not kind of trying to combine them but that's not real life right whenever you're drawing something you're going to need to mix a few tools up and that's what this guy is okay so it's a drawing i've done i want you to redraw it as best you can using any tool you like i don't mind okay it'd be great to use some of your new skills and the tools that i'd imagine you'd be using are things like the width tool the shape builder tool uh you'd be using the curvature tool or pen tool to do some custom drawing and probably the corner widget as well remember when we kind of like flatten some of those corners and you also so once you've drawn it go through colorize it a little hint if you are not new but stuck in the same kind of color world you might check out color.adobe.com right here okay and in here go to explore and it just gives you some options for colors okay say you decide to go 80s fantastic i clicked on edit colors down the bottom the hex number is probably the easiest one to copy and paste if i copy that and i jump back into illustrator i go to my fill and i click on this color palette here you can see i can paste it in there and that will give me that color and yeah that's your exercise i'd love to see what you do remember instagram twitter or here as a project on the website i'd love to see them in all places actually and yeah see how you end up doing with this drawing all right my illustrator lover uh happy drawing and i will see you in the next section all right it is keyboard shortcut time the advanced stuff at least now there is a pdf you can download print it off stick next to your computer it's at bringyourownlaptop.com and there's a resources tab there so go download that it's free and yeah let's carry on all right so the first two and most useful are command y okay and that just turns into outline mode so i'm on a mac so it's command on a mac or control y on a pc just gets into outline mode now the handy one i use is say i want to kind of color the sky in the inside here now there's all these dots and anchor points and targets everywhere and you're like just go away for a second it's command h or comma or control h on a pc okay and it's still selected okay look i can go over here and pick my color it's just hided hided uh hid all the kind of anchor points even all the handles command h turns it back on okay command h just kind of cleans everything up temporarily ooh pink now x is an interesting one if i click on this guy and can you see over here i've got my fill to the front and if you tap x key it brings the stroke to the front that can be kinda handy it's gonna be handy when we combine it with a couple of other tricks but um it just means i can switch around to who's active okay the other nice thing is let's say that i draw something and what i meant to do is actually give it a stroke of blue and no fill kind of switch around so shift x just toggles it's it basically is a shortcut for this little arrow that we all click okay so shift x is a real handy one another handy one is you're like man why is everything blue just hit d just d on the keyboard nothing no other shortcuts and it just switches it to the default colors which is a fill of white and you can see a stroke of black or you can just see it okay so often i just click on d just to go back to the defaults okay if it's doing crazy stuff all right next shortcut uh let's use let's use this guy so i'm looking at your keyboard right have a look down next to your m key there is a comma a period and a forward slash those three keys are quite useful now uh let's say i want the fill remember our shortcut i want the fill at the front this is remember the x key we did earlier so there are fillers at the front so that's the thing that i'm dealing with now if i tap all three of those keys the first one the comma gives it a fill which is not doing anything at the moment but the period is giving it a gradient just kind of like adds gradients and the next one four slash gives it no fill okay the little slash to it so i use gradient it's a real easy one because surprisingly hard like you're like i want to add a gradient you're like um is there a swatch somewhere do i grab the gradient tool open the panel just hit period and you get a an ugly gradient but you now you can go through and fix it up but now let's say i want to go back to a fill color i'm going to put in my comma okay comma goes back to the fill color and the best one probably is the forward slash right gives it no fill goodbye whale come back okay so those little three keys next to each other let's go into the next one all right so next shortcut is the shape builder tools if i select all of these with my black arrow shape builder tool we looked at this earlier if i hold shift i can just drag a box around them all and it just kind of merges them all in like the pathfinder super handy i'm going to undo the next one is step and repeat okay or duplicate what i did so i'm going to draw out a box i'm going to grab my black arrow hold down the alt key on pc option key on a mac to make a duplicate then i want a few more and then it's just command on a mac or control on a pc and just keep hitting d cool it kind of duplicates the mount i often do this when i want lines okay i went through a phase of like having 80s lines over everything so i'm going to give it a stroke there we go and let's say i want to drag it down a little bit so i'm going to say u and drag it this way okay and then command d or control d on pc and you get just kind of steps and repeats all right the next shortcut is finding things underneath other things let's say i've got this on top of my whale right you're like i want to get to the whale underneath okay for whatever reason let's say i've got the opacity down on this i'm doing some sort of cool effect okay but you need to get to the wall but i can't right it's kind of hidden underneath this box all you need to do to hold down is grab your selection tool and then hold down the command key on a mac or control key on a pc and kind of watch the icon it changes a little bit click on it once and you get this kind of like little weird chevron in there it just means it's going to kind of slick through things and let's say now i can go and change the color of it even though it was hidden underneath okay so just hold down the command key on a mac or ctrl key on a pc and just keep clicking and if you've got loads on top of each other you can just keep clicking and it will eventually get to the layer you need if you need it at the front you could go to arrange bring to front okay or use your shortcut which is command shift and the square bracket the close square bracket that square bracket is up next to your p key all right next shortcut is to do with text okay if i select all this text i want to make it bigger i hold down the command shift key and hit the period key that is on a mac if you're on a pc it's the control shift key and then type period now comma goes down okay you're actually looking at those chevrons on the same keys but you hear the idea right up and down now tracking okay if i hold down the option key on a mac or the alt key on a pc with this all selected okay i can use my left and right arrows to open it up or to track it in you can do it per ladder say that you're worried about the spacing in here just have the cursor flashing between a letter hold down your alt key on a pc option key on a mac left and right okay let's say you want to deal with the leading so i'm going to select all of this okay and i'm going to use that same key alt or option depending on your computer and use up and down rather than left and right for tracking okay you can play around with the leading all right let's look at the next uh shortcut it's going to be holding down the shift key and it's more like a modifier key so if i select all of this and i want to kind of use my x and y okay the first kind of like trick i guess is in here instead of just typing it in just hit the up and down you can see it just kind of like moves it left or moves it up and down in terms of numbers rather than trying to type it in so what we can also do is hold down the shift key and that just kind of times us whatever it is by 10 so it's going up and down by one point if i hold shift it goes by 10 points and it's just a quicker way of moving and that works for all of them so if i click in here for the rotation if i click up once it's just going to go up by one point hold shift and it goes up by loads of 10. okay now that's for any uh yeah lots of things if you're like man i wish this go faster generally just hold down the shift key and do whatever you were doing and it will go 10 times faster another really handy one is i've took my black arrow selected i've just got my whale selected i'm just using my keyboard right just to tap things around but often it moves in two bigger chunks for me okay it's kind of like too far i know it's only moving slightly but it's actually quite a big leap okay left and right so what you do is you have nothing selected click in the background and over here it says keyboard increment if you can't see this because you're in a maybe an earlier version of illustrator jump into your preferences and you'll find it in there at one point it's not it's too big so i go 0.1 and i find that's a nice kind of happy medium because now if i'm moving it you can see ever so slightly it's moving i'm holding it down it's moving full steam it's only a slight adjustment but because of that modifier key shift i can move it in those bigger chunks right i can move it by one point if i need to but mainly i want just a little tap just tap tap tap next shortcut is if you grab this star tool so it's underneath my rectangle tool not that one startup okay if you drag a star out and before you let go of it right so i haven't let go of my star to make it okay so i'm still drawing if you use the up and down arrows okay so it just kind of adds more or less star patterns okay so yeah just up and down super easy all right so now i have a star with no fill good work then all right the next one you probably already know it's command tab okay so if you're on a pc it's control tab and it just toggles you between different programs that are open so i'm just holding down the command key or control key on a pc and it just kind of allows me to cycle through the programs so i can kind of jump between photoshop and illustrator photoshop and illustrator within any of the programs so that works obviously for your whole system let's say i open up a new document and i want to toggle between these two and it's a similar key okay so you hold down the command key on a mac or the control key on a pc and you're looking for the apostrophe key so on my keyboard it's above my tab key next to the number one along the top but yours might be somewhere different often yeah it can be different places so um yeah it just kind of toggles between the tabs that are open that works in photoshop indesign illustrator after effects anything that's kind of adobe that will work and in fact it will work inside word so you're not jumping out to new programs just new windows within that program another handy one and uh like say i'm just i want to show somebody my amazing design right it's just internally in the office i want to kind of like hey look at my whale i tap the f key once and the f key twice and it goes into kind of like full on display mode kind of gets rid of all the outsides you can still work in here if you know your shortcuts i can grab my v key for the move tool and i'm going to grab my shape builder tool uh you know what the shortcut is remember shift m okay and i can start joining these things okay i didn't select at all shift them but you know if you know some of the shortcuts you can work this way i'd work this way if i was maybe doing a kind of a redraw something long and tedious and i knew the shortcuts and i was working on say a laptop where the screen is just really small or like this you can just get present this way if you want to kind of have a bit of both say you want to select on this and change the color just hover your mouse over the side and it pops up for a second and okay and then click back over here and it will disappear again so for presenting and just a good use of space if you've got a small laptop now the last one is uh it's interesting let's grab the star tool you can grab any tool i'm going to give it oh i'm going to use my shortcut and who remembers the shortcut to switch between those two that's right shift x okay so i wanted to have a blue stroke no fill and i'm going to make sure i'm on my start tool i'm going to hold down the apostrophe key some people's might be labeled as the tilde which is that little wave but you're really looking for the apostrophe key in my key it's next to the number one we used it before okay so it's above my tab key next to number one in the top left of my keyboard hold it down and it does that it's really weird just kind of makes multiple shapes as you draw so i was clicking and holding let's grab a different thing and grab an ellipse okay and if i hold down the tilde key click drag around i get this cool huh anybody remember spirograph man i remember when i got a set of that kind of looks like that sort of stuff now anything you hold down any sort of drawing tool you start drawing works with lines as well okay awesome huh but never going to use it i'm going to finish on that amazing shortcut yeah that'll be us remember to download the pdf if you want to and yeah i will see you in the next video hi there welcome to the section all about colors and patterns there's going to be a bunch of videos to do with this and this first video here is about advanced color tips and tricks before we get started all right let's jump in first thing to do is open up color modes dot ai that's in your exercise files um and first thing we're going to do is just recap if i go to file new just be careful when you do click on something like print and go i'm going to make us later and you'll see by default under advanced options down here it really wants to be cmyk which is the kind of yeah for commercial printing that's what they want but what i find is everything that i'm doing has multiple purposes so i'll do an rgb first and then convert to cmyk when it's that particular thing is getting ready for print okay because rgb has a bigger color field or more colors to use so just note that while you're making it let's have a little look at what happens if you let's hit close on that see this thing here this one's set up as rgb i can see in the top here okay if i go and convert this using file document color mode and i say i want you to be actually cmyk watch the color differences can you see how much this washed out i i kind of purposely you know picked colors that i knew would kind of do badly but there is um you know so if you're designing this way in these colors you're kind of making decisions on colors that you know there's just there's not a you don't have as many options so where can rgb before going to cmyk the other thing to note is that you can't round trip which means that you can't start in cyk ah sorry start an rgb convert it to cmyk and then go actually i want to go back to rgb watch the colors just don't come back it's kind of a one-way street so they came back a little bit but not as much i'm going to hit undo a couple of times to get back to the full version so editing uh amazingness we'll have to get the editor to kind of flash between the two okay so uh editor can you flash between this one and this one do it a couple of times there you go so you can't just kind of like go rgb and then come back to cmyk and then flick back across so start an rgb go one way street okay eventually if something's going to print convert it to cmyk okay boring exciting things to do with color and getting your tricks up is let's say i grab this guy and i want to change this color and it always picks the swatches up here okay you can hold down shift and it weirdly converts it to rgb okay or whatever colors you want to work with okay so just holding down shift i click on this guy okay drop them down it gives me my swatches but if i hold down shift before i click it it gives me the kind of rgb spectrum which is cool holding down shift another handy one is if i select on the circle i want to steal a color from here we can use the eyedropper tool but by default it really doesn't want to okay so if you hold down the shift key like we did before and click on a color it will go and steal it so if i have this selected grab my eyedropper tool click on shift and why isn't it working because i've got my stroke at the front dan come on bring the fill to the front remember the shortcut x okay and hold down shift and it will bring the colors through okay so i've stolen some colors from there now while you're working is you can see my color panel has opened okay if yours is not go to window and open up color now what it'll default to cmyk obviously if you're using that but it defaults to rgb and rgb is a hard spectrum to work with right because you're like okay i want to make purple you like me and a bit more red is it i don't know like it's hard to know what to do you can use this down the bottom here and what i find the hardest is like i want to make this a bit darker bit darker i slide these all along or i slide them all down the better color space the nicer color space to work with is called hsb okay it's no different than rgb it's just a different way of looking at it so you're not kind of changing it this these two are very different ways of working hue saturation brightness is just a different way of looking at rgb and yeah that's what it stands for hue saturation and brightness i love it because you click on this you just want to make it a bit darker or a bit lighter okay so you're not kind of having to yeah i guess guess what rgb is same with the hue kind of a hue slider along here and obviously saturation is saturation okay so i often will use hsb rather than rgb when i'm picking colors next thing we'll cover is kind of pre-made swatches so my swatches panel window i'm going to go to swatches where are you there he is okay now you can't change the defaults like you can in something like indesign okay you can't change in forever which is a pain okay but you can import swatches let's say you're working at a company and you just want to have like on the network drive you want to have colors that everybody uses maybe it's the client colors or yeah so importing swatches there's a couple of ways the official way is the ase folder okay so you can go to swatches menu go this little hamburger menu in the top right and go i want to open swatches and i want to bring in another library okay and what people tend to do is they use the ase file it's the adobe swatch exchange and that's one that should use right you're like yeah that's the one that sounds good problem with that one is it doesn't allow gradients in it which is sucky so i never use that one so all you do is and there's no kind of like you don't say you've got a document with all the colors in it and it's an illustrator file you don't have to export a special file all you do is just save the ai file call it something like swatches like i've done in a sec and just import them so if i go to open swatch library and i'm going to bring in other library okay that's going to allow me to find one on my network drive for you guys i've got one in your exercise files and i called it grabian gradients thing there are gradients from gradient okay and it's just the illustrator file okay not an ase file and the cool thing about it is that it's just a regular document click open and it opens up this panel here and it's got all those are all the swatches that we used in this document and these are the ones that i wanted okay and and what you need to do is they're kind of separate right you're like oh man they're separate so what you can do is just select more drag them in and now you've got them as part of this document not the smoothest operation i know i wish we could just update the swatches by default if you ever find a way of doing that you let me know okay drop me an email or leave a comment on this page okay so that's a way of doing it another way is just to use the library so if you're cc libraries we'll do a full video on that later on looking at the advanced things but i've got a library called my library say i'm in photoshop okay and photoshop here i want to use my eyedropper tool and i'm going to steal this kind of yellow color see it is there in my foreground color okay over here i can say plus and so i want to add that foreground color there he is there and cool thing about it is in any adobe program now there's that color ready to be used okay it's a it's probably the easiest way to get things around and you can set your library so i've got libraries for lots of businesses that i do work for so let's look at instructor hq and there's the colors so it kind of gets around this not being able to do global swatches they're just in here always ready to go and this thing here is interchangeable with after effects indesign premiere whatever you're using that's probably the easier way to share colors a second ago i mentioned grabient okay and i kind of ignored it these colors here these gradients i am so back into love with gradients i hated them not hate's a strong word but you know we all went through our phase of like ah it's all about flat colors flat design now it's kind of like oh man some gradients and there's a really cool site i'll jump to it now all right so this is gradient okay uh grab gradients love the name and and it's just nice looking gradients you can look at them and go hmm there's a couple of pages of them and if you find one you like okay it's got all the css and stuff for it but for illustrator you're probably best to um just click on the first color swatch grab this hexadecimal number copy it and then in uh illustrator okay let's say that i've got this gray this guy here okay and i want to bring this color in okay i'm going to add a gradient remember our shortcut remember what shortcut is period okay and it's added a gradient let's grab my gradient panel here double click this guy and there's the hexadecimal number that goes in okay so there's that first color i'm going to drag them off and the second color here there we go cool all right next thing we'll look at is kind of global colors versus pantone and let's look at global colors first let's close down a lot of these windows so i've got my swatches panel open what is our global color basically to look at them it's this guy here see this thing that has a little white cross a little white kind of cut out at the bottom of it that is called a global color the difference well the difference between the rest of them is is that it kind of updates let's do a for instance so i'm going to do a circle here actually i'll do this circle i'm going to grab my eyedropper tool and i'm going to hold down my shift key okay and i'm going to pull this blue okay actually i want to get rid of the gradient remember your shortcuts okay remember comma is the for a full color get rid of the gradient so hold down shift i'm going to grab that yellow and i'm going to say i want you to add to swatches this little new swatch button by default okay i'm going to do this option here that's going to be global okay i'm going to click ok i'm going to do another one okay i'm going to grab the blue and that is a swatch but i'm not going to make it global cool so i've got two colors that i made you can kind of see them there there's that first one and there's the second one global not global what ends up happening is i've got these two circles i'm going to fill one with you so i've got two colors all right global not global if i have nothing selected and i go and change one of these if i change the global one i go in here and decide actually i want it to be a different color you'll notice that it reaches back into the document and adjusts all the colors whereas this one doesn't okay if i double click this guy and say actually i want this to be remember hsb bit i just want to darken it up okay i've darkened it up the swatch but that's the you know where it's being used has not updated okay so that just something you need to know about by default now in the new version of illustrator by default it really wants to make them global and i find that's probably a nicer way of working the other color option you might find is a pantone color and they look slightly different okay and they're very hard to find okay you go into swatches you really want to find a pantone color if you've not used pantone they're just pre-mixed colors okay they're often bigger brands use to make sure they get color accuracy across lots of things so it's under open swatch library so into the burger menu right and open source library color books and here they are here okay the probably the most common are pantone solid okay either coated or uncoated whether that's paper you're using shiny or a matte finish okay there are if you're using color bridge obviously use these ones there's cool neons and metallic colors but these are they're the oldest but still probably the most commonly used and this thing opens okay and you've got your pantone colors say we're using 032 032 red okay and i'm just going to add that to my swatches library so that when i'm designing i'm using that specific color it's pre-mixed pantone guarantees it's going to be that color red forever okay and you'll only use these pantone colors when you are doing physical printing okay you can use pantone colors for going out digital but there's no guarantee of color okay it's only when it goes out to like offset commercial printing not printer in the laserjet just commercial printing i'm gonna close that down you'll also notice is that it's a slightly different kind of variation of the it's got that kind of global white slash but it's got a dot in it as well that kind of like instantly i can see which of the pantone colors all right two more handy tips is let's say i'm going to make two more circles uh okay and i'm just going to randomly mix colors so i'm going to go i'm going to brighten it up a little bit and i'm going to pick that color and i'm going to pull that color and let's pick something in here something really obvious line it up and there we go ugly colors there but you can tell they're not swatches yet right okay because they haven't been added okay so um if you want to gonna say actually i just want to have this document grab all the colors stick it in the swatches panel and so that i can use it and maybe to import to another document okay so what you can do is you can just go to the swatches panel i've got nothing selected and say can you please add all the colors that are used in this document to the swatches panel and notice a big chunk of new swatches get added okay and in this case it's added not just those two colors there okay you can kind of see when i click on them see that they're highlighted there because they're global colors and it's also added the colors that i used in this gradient which is really handy okay you can see that was the gradient that was already there but the colors that make it up are now added another useful tip is um you can go into that same option and say actually just get rid of select all the unused okay and you can see these i haven't been used and i can delete it yes get rid of them all okay so say you are working and you want to create like a company-wide illustrator file that people can pull colors from is you probably don't want all the junky rgb colors you just want the ones specific to your brand mine are looking a little messy but you get the idea right another cool little trick is say you've got purple and you've used it like a hundred times um i'm just commanding okay it's all over the place you don't have to go and find it all what you can do to switch out this one is a little trick say and this guy here i want to swatch out for an obvious color that pink all you do is click hold and drag it but you got to hold down the option key okay and you can cut it's a little bit hard but if i put it right over the top of it it goes and swatches that one out for that one i have two of the same now which is not great but it's yeah that's the way to kind of go i want you to replace with you completely i find that handy if i've got say a pantone color okay and i want get rid of you buddy just drag that kind of corresponding cmyk color on top of them and it will replace it holding down the option key on a mac and it's the alt key on a pc alright last bit of this advanced color nerdery is that you can now in the new version of illustrator you couldn't do this before is you can put gradients on strokes and there's a few things you can do and first of all at the moment if i add a color to it or gradient to it it's doing it to the fill so i'm going to undo and remember our shortcut because the moment remember we want to bring the fills at the front strokes the back do you remember what it was the x key x key watch the little swatches down here just brings the stroke to the front and then i'm going to say i'm going to pick on you okay say i've decided okay i've decided i like that color the most and so the by default it goes on a stroke which is really cool but there's a couple of options so under properties click on stroke okay actually not in there at all it's under window and it's under gradient so in here what you're looking for is these options so and at the moment it's just kind of filling it left to right okay so if i click on this guy and i say actually i want to do the same thing i'm going to fill them up it goes left to right it's a bit more obvious in the spiral if i select on it and i click on this second option it's going to apply along the stroke so it kind of flows along remember earlier in this course i said we did keyboard shortcuts a little while ago and we're like uh remember command h that gets rid of all the lines remember command h on because it's hard to see the gradient command h turns all the anchor points off just a little easier to use if you move to your direct selection tool as well it's still selected so i can mess around with it but i can see it a little easier and that brings up that last option across the gradient can be handy okay so it's going kind of left to right rather than along it or just going completely across it all right so that's going to be it for color goodness i'm going to hit command h just to turn this back on and i guess we get lost later on but yeah that's it let's look at more color stuff in this colors and patterns section all right let's go to the next video hey there so color themes in illustrator as under window and if you go down to color themes and basically all it is it starts on create okay and you can jump across to explore and depending on your internet connection it can take a little time but explore is the best option and what we're doing is we're just looking for colors that you know just excite us or get us out of our kind of common nearly used colors i totally use the same colors at the moment i'm just using all the gradients from gradient i'll move on i promise but um at the moment i say i need to pick some new colors for this this guy here you can see where i got these colors originally where is he there there lindo okay so when i was picking these colors there i just went to this went i need some different colors and i picked them from here so a cool thing you can do is say that you decide that you can pick these most popular in the last month or all time and let's say that you like this one here you can click on it and say i want to add it to my swatches okay and now you can close that down but now i can click on this make a duplicate and with it selected i'm going to go into here and go to my swatches and there's that kind of group there so i can actually go make a different color version for you yep pretty exciting i love it though it gets me out of my kind of color gloom and a bigger version of that is color.adobe.com let's jump to it here and when it loads up you and create okay go to explore and if you want to it's quite nice to sign in using your adobe id why would you do that because say that i like this color here gets all 80s and i can click on it right i can say actually you i want to click on edit and i can go through and copy these hexadecimal numbers over or the rgb but actually what i want to do is i'm going to go back to explore and i want to go to this one that says save okay and it says i'm going to stick it in my my library okay you might have a special library zoo that's fine for me and i'm going to click save and the cool thing about that is that now hopefully if i go to illustrator and i click on another version and i go to my libraries and i go to my library there he is there here's the zoo okay so you can actually click straight from this okay i can go in here and just start clicking colors make sure the fills at the front okay you it's a bit hard um but say you do like these as you use them they'll be added to your swatches panel now you can right click them and say add to swatches so depends whether you want to use libraries or you like to find them in here there's that new group all right why did i show you that it's just yeah just to get you out of your funk for colors if everything is green and gray like it is for me or gradients at the moment um yeah just a nice way to do new colors all right let's get into the next color video hi there in this video we're going to take this kind of hand drawn done with a pencil in real life drawing and go and do this where we fill it with color easily making it all kind of victory and nice all right let's go and do it now in this tutorial okay so there's going to be three different types there's going to be a hand-drawn one where if i zoom in you can see like it's just kind of a pencil drawing and and these guys here we drew earlier in the class right and i'll show you the pros and cons working with these so for this guy here we need to first of all vectorize them basically it's called live trace okay say or image trace if you select on them and over here there's one called image trace if you're using an earlier version of illustrator it's at the top there image trace it doesn't matter okay click on it and best results pro try different ones but normally it's just black and white logo will work okay and the cool thing about it if i zoom in now it's actually vector shapes that i can fill it's not quite ready because you need to expand it otherwise it won't work okay now it's lots of pieces if i go to outline view command y or control y on a pc it's actually vector now i need to color it we're going to use our super resourceful shape builder tool okay we use it for lots of things and so with it open let's do a couple of things let's open up our window and our swatches now you might what i've done for us in this tutorial is i've cleaned up remember remember the thing we learned in advanced color tips and tricks i've cleaned up our swatches panel just so we've got the basics in here you might to get start with start mixing up colors that you want to color with you can do them on the fly another thing you need to double check is if you double click this tool is that you want to make sure gap detection is on small for the moment we'll look at that in a bit more detail in a second and make sure this i turned this off earlier in the course basically it's the color that appears just above your cursor and i'm not a big fan of it cool so all you need to do now is click on it and color it so i'm going to pick a starting color okay and i'm going to click on it once and it's filled with that kind of off i should pick a slightly more specific color that you can actually see so i've clicked on that and it just fills it up and if you're running into problems with your hand drawn type double click this and play around with the gap detection okay because you can see in here there is gaps that i've got is there any gaps in this one there's a gap right there okay the top right and because i've got gap detection on it's going i'm just going to fill that for you don't worry about it thank you a couple of things i want to do and to speed this up is one is the shortcut that you weren't sure was that useful back in an earlier video remember command on a mac or control on a pc and h gets rid of all of that uh anchor points everywhere you know which is just tidying you up please and another cool little shortcut when you're coloring is can you see just above my cursor there there is actually three little dots the three little squares the middle one's slightly bigger if i go over here closer to this panel here you can zoom right in but can you see over here my cursors it's telling me that's the one i have selected but watch when i hit my left and right arrow can you see i can kind of toggle through the available swatches so it kind of makes it nice to kind of have one hand on your keyboard to go actually i want this to be this color and then i'll go darker color in here for this i'm just kind of using my left and right the color pieces if you're finding it very hard to color keep zooming in i find that the kind of closer you are zoomed the easier it is to get into some of these gaps so i'm using left and right you can see how quick and easy it is to start coloring this thing i don't want white i want this color here i know it doesn't look like much of a color and you can actually you don't have to use these swatches you can just use pre-mix color oh you know make your own so double click this pick a swatch i want to kind of color for my hair flower thing okay and you can click in here you can see i just picked a random color really hard to get zoom right in there we go come on get ya there you go all right so that is how to color it there's a couple of things you'll end up with this white border around the outside okay which you may or may not want and i'm going to hold down the alt key on my pc or the option counter mac and just delete them okay so hopefully now we're going to go to transparency mode that's a shortcut we haven't learnt before command shift d or control shift d goes into that kind of more photoshop style kind of sense of opacity or transparency it allows you to know whether there's white in the background or it's blank okay and let's look at some of these other guys here okay because it's going to run into a few more problems i left a gap there on purpose i've got some overlapping bits so we want to tidy this up so we've kind of moved on from live drawing to kind of just coloring anything and remember these aren't complete shapes right there's big holes this guy just kind of overlaps this so select them all okay let's go shift m for our shape builder tool gap detection is going to be a little bit more important in this case okay because you'll find things like if i double click it and i make the gap detection large can you see it's it's detected a really large gap over here in the here it's decided that hey i can fill that in and if you were watching this whole tutorial series that drove me mad a little bit a little while ago and anyway so yeah you might have to play around with gap detection to work it out for your particular drawing okay so i'm going to click ok so let's say i want to do this again i want to color the hair i'm going to go the green color and i'm going to color the face this color and the eyes are going to be this color okay but i've got all these extra bits okay the overlap so what i can do is i can hold down the alt key on a pc or option counter mac and just click on them these little bits just get trimmed up i love this so much so cool huh can you decide on how kind of detailed you want to get rid of these bits i'm just holding alt you can drag across things okay so there's a kind of a pile of junk here i'm going to hold down alt drag across them all get rid of all of that not what i wanted okay it's getting rid of everything hold down alt i'm going to get rid of these guys i said you could drag across them it's not working very well all right so i'm going to work my way through and keep coloring that there's going to be no difference for this guy what i'd like you to do now is yeah go through and do it but do some maybe some nicer colors i picked these colors they seemed like they were going to be good i even did a demo before i recorded this one and it looked better um anyway so remember window color themes okay find some nicer color themes i want you to fill it play with gap detection delete the lines maybe get rid of the stroke add a cool brush stroke um yeah i'd like to see what you've done so either stick it here as the class project okay i'll there'll be a proper space for it here on the website but also i'd love to see just take a screenshot and send it to me on instagram or in on twitter alright i will see you in the next video hey there i hope you liked it if you did give me a thumbs up uh it really helps out what i do um i've got lots of other stuff here on youtube so consider subscribing and also i want to see what you made okay so you're obviously doing something don't be shy i'd love to see what it is if you're uh if you put it up on instagram i'd love to yeah for you to mention me on bring your own laptop on instagram and on twitter i'm dan loves adobe and also if you like my teaching style and you know you want more advanced illustrator stuff there's the full course okay it's on bringyourownlaptop.com uh there'll be a link in the description also on bring your own laptop is there's a resources tab and there's a free cheat sheet in there free totally downloadable and it has all the kind of we did the keyboard shortcuts and stuff for illustrator it's a pdf you print it off stick it next to your computer it's awesome all right uh continue on bye now you

Channel: Bring Your Own Laptop

Views: 369,767

Rating: 4.9682064 out of 5

Keywords: graphic design, illustrator, creative cloud, illustration, adobe illustrator, illustrator tutorials, illustrator logo design, illustrator tutorial, illustrator basics, adobe illustrator tutorials, adobe illustrator tutorial, illustrator logo tutorial, adobe illustrator basics, dan scott, Free Adobe illustrator advanced course, Free Adobe illustrator advanced tutorial, Adobe illustrator advanced coourse, byol, adobe illustrator course, free adobe illustrator course

Id: DF4P0cjStkM

Length: 130min 44sec (7844 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 03 2020