Getting Started with Adobe Illustrator for Beginners Tutorial

so in this video I'm going to be covering the basics of getting started with Adobe Illustrator and when you're brand new to illustrator it might seem like a very intimidating tool but once you spend some time with it and get used to it it's actually not too bad with that being said let's just get going so first up this is the intro screen when you open up illustrator and this is the screen that you are probably seen when you get started so on this particular screen it offers some different presets as far as sizes of files it also shows files that you've had opened recently so all this is available at the very first step and it might be very likely that one of these presets is exactly the right size for you but if it's not there's a couple different options about how to change what your artboard size is going to be or what the overall space of the canvas is going to be that you're working on so one way is clicking more presets which will open up a brand new dialog box so there's some recent sizes there but you can also just type in the width and the height and it could be either points or inches or centimeters or pixels whatever the case might be for your work and just for a general reference points inside illustrator is essentially the same thing as pixels which is probably why they have pixels all the way at the bottom there so don't worry too much about that so you can either select one of these items or enter in your own size of a document and also name your document so I can just write tutorial and have that document name ready to go but I'll also say the artboard or canvas size in illustrator doesn't really matter that much because you can work outside of the artboard or the canvas and that's actually how I work most of the time so just put something in here and then hit create and this should go ahead and just make that document once it gets going here alternatively you can go to file and then new which will also bring up that dialog box or if you're on a PC you can hit ctrl n for new or if you're in a Mac you can hit command n for new so different options there and also if you want to change the size of your artboard as you get going in the top menu there's a button that will say document setup you can click that which will then let you alter your artboards by clicking edit artboards so now in this very top menu you can change the size of the width which is right here and the height which is right here there's also this little chain-link looking icon that if you click it'll link these together so if I right mm and hit enter it'll make it 2000 by mm automatic aliy and if you click it so it has a little cross going through it which means it's no longer active that means you can edit these independently so they won't automatically scale both at the same time but that is it for getting started with the overall artboard setup and I just hit the escape button to go back to this and leave that edit mode so hit escape if you have to do that but one of the major things that will be very helpful for you getting started with illustrator and all the cool effects that you can do in it is the properties window which I'm moving right here on my screen and if you don't see the properties window on your screen just go to the window option in the top menu and when you click on window in the top menu about two-thirds of the way down there will be an option for properties if you don't see a checkmark just click it it'll show up somewhere on your screen if you do see a checkmark it means the properties window is somewhere on your screen so you just have to find it and I say the properties window is important because that's where essentially you can control a lot of different effects or styles depending on what you have selected in the tool so let's get going creating some very basic things and then we can kind of walk through some of the different options there so one really big thing is type a lot of people are going to want to create type in this tool so in the tool bar on the left hand side there is an icon that looks like a tee and if you hover over it it'll say type tool just click that which will select the type tool alternatively you can hit T on your keyboard to type something so now the type tool is selected and if you click once on your screen it's going to put some lorem ipsum filler text or at least it will probably do that so I'm just going to go back to my toolbar and select the selection tool which looks like a black arrow and I'm going to select that because now that'll select the type which is super tiny on this screen so there's a couple different options that you can do to make that type bigger or smaller depending on it's appropriate for your screen size one is in the properties window when you have that type selected and if you don't have that type selected you can also is click hold and drag one the black arrow is selected to then highlight it which will make the properties window automatically bring up a character section so in the character section of the properties window the top one will be the font name which you can click and then find a specific font alternatively if you know the name of the font that you want to use you can to start typing it so I'm using montserrat black I always click that that'll select the overall font and then below that the font weight will be shown so right now it's set to black which is very very bold and this one doesn't have a different option because the font in this case is montserrat black but if you're using a font with multiple font weights they will be shown there and then just below that you have the actual font size which right now is 12 so you can click this box and then select from this set of pre-made options you can hit the up arrow to make it larger or the down arrow to make it smaller or just type in a brand new value like 200 hit enter which will automatically scale that font up so that is one way of going in here and doing this alternatively when you have it selected using that black arrow if you go over to any one of these corners you can effectively stretch out the type so what you're going to want to do is at least for me I tend to use the corners but you can use any one of these and then just click and hold it when you see your arrow change so it looks like two arrows point in different directions as you hover over one of these little boxes on the sides or the bottom and then as you scale up you'll notice that it probably will look really stretched which I assume is not something that you want for a font so if you hold shift when you do that and then start scaling it'll maintain the proportions so it scales perfectly so that is one way of also scaling visually very very quickly and this is how I tend to scale almost all of the time when I'm working because I just like seeing that effect happen in real time and if at any point in time you want to change what your type says you can either double click when you have the arrow selected which will just bring it in to edit mode so it's really easy to type as you would in any other tool alternatively you can go back and select that type tool or hit T to select that type tool when it's not selected and then just click anywhere and that will go ahead and let you edit that text once again so that's a really quick intro to editing and adjusting the size of text there is also some additional options in the properties window which will seem a bit more advanced but they're actually pretty straightforward so in the option right here just to the right of where the font size is there is an option for the letting of the type and the letting is basically the distance between this baseline where the type sits on top of and the one below it so if you want to make the gap between these two words smaller you can just hit that down arrow and shrink in that gap down you can also take a guess and change it to a different number I'll do 225 in this case and hit enter so that's one way of shrinking that and if you want to make the text get spaced out more between each and every letter just below the letting there's an option for the tracking it'll look like VA with an arrow pointing left and right essentially the bigger the number the more spaced out the type is the smaller the number the more scrunched together the type is and also below the character window you have paragraph which is very similar to any text editing program so you can adjust the alignment so left center aligned and then right aligned which might move your text around a little bit so be prepared to have to reorganize it and then there's also options for justifying so three different options there you can play around with it but it works essentially the exact same as Microsoft Word or Google Docs or any of those text editing programs so that is it for what I am going to cover on text and I'm just going to move this off to the side by clicking and dragging it and also if you want to move around your overall space just hold the space bar down which will convert to your selection tool or the black arrow into a hand or you can then click hold and drag around the document and move stuff pretty easily and also while I'm on this general train of thought if you want to copy and paste text that works exactly the same as pretty much any other program anywhere so ctrl C on a PC or command C on a Mac will copy that object so it could be text it could be a shape command V on a Mac or ctrl V on a PC will paste it so that's one way of doing that and also control F on a PC or command F on a Mac will paste it in place so exactly where you copied it from so those are three different ways to quickly copy and paste in different ways inside illustrator and that will apply to absolutely any object that you happen to make here and next up I'm just going to cover the shape tool which is directly below the type tool in the tool bar so right below the T you'll see what looks like a rectangle almost certainly the rectangle will be there by default but it's possible you will see another shape so by default it's the rectangle tool which you can hit M on your keyboard to also select but if you click that and then you just move over to your artboard and start dragging you will start creating a rectangle automatically so that is certainly one way you can go about doing this but let's say you want to make a perfect square as opposed to a random shape of a rectangle in that case when you click hold and drag just be sure to hold shift which will make it scale proportionately in the exact same way that the type did so that's one way of making perfect shapes if you want to do that and an even more advanced thing that you can do when you have that shape selected is as you start drawing hold alt on a PC or option on a Mac and it will essentially just make that shape draw from the center point so as I make this larger you can see that it gets larger from a center point or if a let go of that it does it from a side so if you have a reason to draw perfectly from some center point maybe you're trying to align something centered that's one way and then you can hold alt or option to do that while also holding shift to make it maintain being a perfect shape so a lot of these shortcuts work perfectly well together and that's something that a lot of people do if you want to remove shapes you can either hit V on your keyboard to bring up the selection tool or that black arrow or just click it in your tool bar and then click on shapes and hit either delete or backspace both of which will remove that particular shape and also to duplicate shapes just like what I did right there is if you hold alt on a PC or option on a Mac you click hold and drag with that selection tool from a shape or even type and then let go it duplicates it so that's a really fast shortcut and to change the colors of shapes or type it all works the exact same so with this selected I tend to use the color swatches in the tool bar although it also has a fill option inside the appearance window portion of the properties window but I tend to use these so the fill is what will typically be in the front and you'll know it's the fill because it is a fully solid box and that is the primary color so if I double click on that to bring up a fill it'll bring up this color picker where you can just move over these different colors find a color that you like and hit OK alternatively there are options for HSB which is a type of color RGB and then CMYK which are also just different color modes as well as hex values which are super helpful if you're trying to do this for the web or trying to exactly copy a color where you happen to have that hex code ready to go so you can change the colors at any point in time and then what is typically behind that fill is the stroke so if you click that once it'll bring it up in front and then you can tell us a stroke because it's a box but it has a hole missing through the middle and the stroke serves as an outline of the overall shape so to change the stroke color just double click you can pick any color you want I'll do this a bit more of a dark color for the stroke and then hit OK and you might run into a situation where you change the stroke and for whatever reason it becomes white regardless of what you've selected just double click it again and change that color so now what I'm going to do is just zoom in a bit by hitting ctrl + on a PC or command + on a Mac alternatively to zoom out its ctrl - on a PC or command - on a Mac so it's a really fast way to zoom in and out so right now we have a basic shape but let's say you want your stroke to be thicker and the stroke is just this black outline of the shape all you have to do is select it using that selection tool and then in the properties window which we opened up before now in the appearance section you can see there's a stroke option with an option to the right which says one point which is the thickness of that stroke so you can just hit the up arrows to make it more thick or the down arrow to make it more thin there's also a drop-down menu or you can type in whatever size you want just like we did with other options here so all that is perfectly available and you might run into a situation where you don't want a stroke or you don't want the fill back over to the toolbar just below the options here there's a few different options there's one for gradient so if you want gradients you can click that I won't cover that in great detail here but to the right of that there's an option that'll say none it'll look like a white box with a red line diagonally running through it if you click that it'll remove the stroke if the stroke is what's currently selected or if you click on the fill you can hit that to remove the fill so if you want just a stroke or just a fill that's one way of doing it or in this case there's nothing showing up at all although if I highlight over where that square was it's still here on my screen so it still exists and if you make changes that you don't want to make just like in any other editing program hit control Z on a PC or command Z on a mac to undo that and you can do multiple undos at once so you can go back quite a few steps and one final thing I'm going to show which will also seem kind of like an advanced feature but it's super simple and it's a reason that illustrator is so powerful is I'm going to zoom in quick so we can see the edges here of this shape so when this shape is selected I'm gonna make the stroke a little bit smaller to make this more apparent there are these little circle looking things when you have that selection tool selected in each one of the corners of this particular shape and if you click hold and drag inward on those circles it'll round the edges and alternatively if you've rounded them and then you click hold and drag that outward it'll make it less rounded until you go back into a perfect square shape so that's one way of very quickly rounding corners and let's say you want to round just one corner this time just click one time on the corner you want to round and then drag that in and you'll round only that corner so that is a cool feature there or if you want to round multiple corners at once click one corner and then hold shift and then click the other corner that you want to round at the exact same time bring those in and you can just go ahead and do those so in that case did just the top two or the bottom two stayed the exact same way that they were before so that is one way of going ahead and rounding corners which is a very powerful tool and also very very easy to do inside illustrator but that is enough for this square shape I'm going to delete that and go back over to the tool bar menu and this time instead of doing the rectangle I'm just gonna click and hold where that rectangle is to show you that there are other options including starting with a runner rectangle there is an ellipse tool which either draws an ellipse or if you hold shift while drawing will make a perfect circle and then I'm going to click and hold here once again to show you the polygon tool so by default this draws a hexagon or a six-sided shape but if you have that polygon tool selected and you click just one time on your screen it'll bring up this dialog box that lets you either set a radius so the size of the object or sides so let's say I want a triangle instead of a hexagon I can just hit three sides hit OK it'll bring up a triangle for me and then I can just go ahead and scale that by using the selection tool dragging over those corners and making this bigger or smaller and holding shift if I want that to stay a perfect triangle and let's say you want to rotate around the shape so that it rotates into a different orientation just go ahead and select that selection tool or the black arrow and then go over to basically any one of these different corner options until you see your arrow turn into two arrows that typically look like they're on an arc or curving around or if you go into a center point they'll also look like an arc but they'll have just a different orientation to them so if you click and hold when your cursor looks like that you can rotate an object around so that's a really fast way to change the orientation of your object or type or you can do that and then hold shift which will make it snap to perfect 45-degree angles in case you want to be a bit more precise or perfect with what you're doing so that is a good basic intro to the shapes there and just like the other shapes the same thing applies when it comes to rounding corners so you can do that with any shape that you create at least I think with any shape you create for example with the star I'll just check to see if it lets you do that really quick in which case let's see I don't see those options on the star so for most shapes you can go ahead and round the corners quite easily at least if they are different polygons or squares and while we're here I'm just going to show the direct selection tool very quickly which is the white arrow in the toolbar alternatively if you hit a on your keyboard it'll select the white arrow so the white arrow is for selecting specific points in an object as opposed to selecting the overall object entirely so I can click hold and drag around an object with a white arrow just like I would with the black arrow and the white arrow is technically called the direct selection tool but I typically just say the color of the arrow as it's a bit more simple but the main difference is if you highlight over a specific point in the path and a point will typically look like a tiny square if you click that just one time it'll select only that point so now if you click hold and drag when that point is selected over that point it'll adjust how that point looks so that is one way to adjust shapes like right now I just made an arrow pretty quickly by converting the way that hexagon looked so you can click hold and drag those points freely using the direct selection tool or the white arrow or if you select a point just once and hit backspace or delete it'll delete that point so it opens up your object and now this object is no longer solid as you can see there is a missing stroke on this line so this this is no longer a fully enclosed object and if you want to enclose it once again after removing a point you can just drag over the two points that have that open edge using the direct selection tool and then right click or if you don't have a right click button you can hit control and then click and then from this menu select join which will join those two points together so one way of doing it alternatively if I just highlight over this entire corner because I know the point is right here but sometimes it can be painful to select exactly on the point you can also drag over that point and only that point and then hit delete or backspace and it will do the same thing so alternatively can go to your toolbar and select the pen tool from that and with the pen tool you can click where that anchor point was so just click one time on an open anchor point or you can either click and then draw brand-new shapes by just clicking once or you can then go to the open point and below the pen tool icon it will look like a tiny little circle to the right of it it'll probably be very hard to see on my screen but that means that this is just closing that shape off so that is also a way of closing things and it's possible if you start drawing with a pen tool you will see what looks like continuing extended lines I disabled that option on my particular version of Illustrator but if you just click over an anchor point that has this little bar looking things tending out it'll remove that handle so that you can just draw totally normal I think by default it'll try to make it automatically look nice but the pen tool is far too complex to fully cover in this video without making this video even longer so I will link to other videos that have made in the past about using the pen tool if you want to dive in to that more advanced part of Illustrator and I will say the pen tool is critically important to becoming really good at using illustrator so you will want to learn that tool at some point in time but I'm not going to spend too much time here because I do have dedicated videos about it so after this I would encourage you to go ahead and watch those and just a couple of other basic things that I will cover before letting you just start making your own stuff and find other tutorials about other things you have questions about in the tool bar there's also a paintbrush tool which functions very similar to a paintbrush in most programs so in this case you can click hold and then just draw things so this draws lines in this case and if you're clicking holding and dragging and you want to make an enclosed shape you can just hold alt on a PC or option on a Mac and when you stop the place where you started it'll automatically connect these so now this is a solid fully filled in shape where you can then click on that fill make it a certain color that's not a great color I'm gonna make it a different color but that is one way of drawing like that as well this almost looks like a really weird smiley face what does beautiful artwork that I have made alternatively if you want to draw a different way that's extremely similar to drawing in like Microsoft Paint or Adobe Photoshop you can click and hold over that paintbrush tool and then select the blob brush tool and the difference there is the blob brush tool which is difficult to say in a row is that it just draws in everything filled in sort of like you are making a typical shape so in this case it only uses the stroke so I can just go ahead and change this to a different color and then perhaps zoom in a bit more but if I just draw in the shapes you can see it doesn't look like a bunch of points or little dots on your screen and when you let go it's just a fully enclosed overall shape so this functions very much so like any other paintbrush tool in a non vector program where illustrator is a vector program which just behaves a bit differently than something like Photoshop or paint so that's a different way of drawing inside the tool that's also very very intuitive and if you want to add a stroke to this it works just the same as it would in any other object in Illustrator so you can double click on that stroke and then select a color and hit OK which went ahead and applied that stroke and also if you do that and for some reason it does not apply a stroke you can also just have the stroke in the foreground and then click on the color in the furthest left in that panel which right now is set to black which will automatically apply a stroke and then you can double click on that once again and change the overall color and of course you can go back to that properties window and change the stroke size of the stroke at any point in time it's all fully adjustable there's one final thing that I want to show so with this I'm going to quickly change the type to be white so you can see that there is something weird happening here or if I bring this type over this box like let's say I want the type to be on top of the box but it's not right now you can't see the type at all even though it exists it's effectively behind that shape so one way you can go ahead and fix that problem if you happen to encounter it is just right-click when you have the object that's behind another object selected or alternatively let's say it's in front of the object and you want it behind just right-click or control-click if you don't have a second mouse button and then go to arrange and from a range go to bring to front which will bring that object to the front and if you want to do the opposite just right-click or control-click go to arrange and then send to back which will send it behind that object so that is something that you might run into that I thought would also be helpful to share before I end but there you go that is the final tip that I will have for you today so don't forget to check out the description if you want to see the pen tool tutorials that I have done in the past and also my channel has a ton of other tutorials that you can check out on many much more advanced things so I try to explain all those in a way that are beginner friendly so if you want to check those out feel free I'd appreciate it and if you found this video helpful I'd also really appreciate it if you would hit the thumbs up button to like the video and let me know that it was helpful also consider leaving a comment about what you found interesting or if there's other things you want to learn in the future you can let me know in the comment section so I can consider doing those or if you have any questions where you need some help with something that you're stuck on either I or someone else in the comment section might be able to help you and also if you want to see more content like this in the future consider subscribing to my channel I do my best to keep putting new content just like this but that is it for this video I do wish you the best of luck and learning illustrator it's a super cool program to learn but that's it for now thank you so much for watching [Music]

Channel: Matt Borchert

Views: 212,495

Keywords: adobe illustrator, illustrator, illustrator tutorial, adobe illustrator tutorial, getting started with adobe illustrator, illustrator for beginners, illustrator for beginners tutorial, adobe illustrator for beginners, adobe illustrator for beginners tutorial, illustrator tutorials for beginners, adobe illustrator tutorials for beginners, getting started with illustrator, design, graphic design, design tutorial, graphic design tutorial

Id: AinkCNooh2A

Length: 26min 29sec (1589 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 21 2020