How To Get Started with Adobe Illustrator CS6 - 10 Things Beginners Want To Know How To Do

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of the Adobe Creative Suite podcast my name is teri white and in this episode we're going to take a look at how to get started with Adobe Illustrator cs6 10 things beginners want to know how to do now the challenge for me here is that while I've been using illustrator for the last 25 years yep since version 1.1 I believe it was I'm not an artist I don't consider myself and you know I don't draw by hand I don't doodle I don't create artwork by drawing but I do create artwork all the time and illustrator by drawing by using the tools there so while I wouldn't pick up a sketch pad and sketch something out because it would look horrible that's just not my forte I've used illustrator for tons of things for thousands of projects throughout the years because of what it does and what it's for now let's talk about that for a quick second for those of you who are new to illustrator I get this question all the time well if I have Photoshop why do I need ulster what's the difference well in a nutshell there are two drastically different programs for the kind of art they create yes there is some overlap Photoshop is pixel based everything you do in Photoshop the end result are little tiny squares that make up an image illustrator on the other hand is vector based art mathematical lines and curves you're drawing with objects and therefore its resolution and dependent and you can scale up an illustrator logo from something maybe that's the size of a business card to the size of a building in a skyline in New York City and it would look as good as it did on that small business card whereas a photo would begin to fall apart the larger you make it so that's the biggest difference in scientific difference between the two now let's get in and see how to get started for my brand new illustrator users assuming that you've had very little use or maybe you've even opened it now just for the first time so if you're an illustrator Pro you probably know a lot of this but if you're just getting started with illustrator this is what you would want to know how to do the first ten things so I've launched Illustrator cs6 and the first thing obviously you're going to want to know how to do is start with a new document now you have new from template and you have new new from template means you're going to basically take a piece of artwork that you're going to trace in Illustrator so maybe it is a photo but you want to make a vector version but I'm just going to start with a blank page we're just going to say new and here's where you have to make some decisions not only of course the name of your document what you can do here or when you save it but more importantly the profile what kind of art are you creating is the art for print that means it's going to be color separated is it for web I mean it's gonna go on a web site web banner some type of web work is it for a device maybe it's going into an application on your you know that you're going to create for your iPad or your Android tablet or smartphone is it for video or film maybe it's a logo that you're going to animate in Adobe after-effects where you're just going to put as a lower third in Adobe Premiere a basic RGB and Flash Builder so lots of choices here to decide where you're gonna start and if you say well I'm going to print it and do some of these other things and I would probably go ahead and say start with print but if you say now this logo is just pretty much for on-screen use then I would probably pick one of the other ones so I'm just gonna go ahead and start with web now by the way let me show you the difference if I do pick print it's going to change the color mode to CMYK even though we aren't really doing pixels per se it's gonna set the default for 300 pixels per inch if we output it as pixels and if I choose web or any of the other ones it's going to choose RGB and the difference here is it's choosing giving me screen sizes by default or display sizes versus if I do print it's giving me standard print sizes so that's kind of what it's setting you up for what are you gonna do with this artwork once you do it now let's now know that design Flyers for example and straighter you know from start to finish they want to make the whole flyer there well that probably your print job and you probably set it to something like eight nap by 11 or or larger but if it's for again for a screen size probably pick web or something else now of course that's gonna make the color mode RGB which is going to give you the most colors versus CMYK and you can always convert it down by the way if you choose later to print it you can always change the color mode to CMYK your colors may shift a little but you can do it so I'm gonna go ahead and say just give me a standard web document using their false 960 by 5/9 60 by 560 and the other thing that we're going to talk about a little bit later our artboards we're not going to jump into that right away but we'll click okay and there's my artwork okay so that was number one setting up your new document making that choice print web device whatever number to actually drawing objects and again we're going to talk about the difference between those objects versus pixels so typical illustrator projects that people are teaching always usually start off with a box because it's a concept that everyone can understand so if I just draw you know with my hand not really holding down any modifier keys I'm gonna get a rectangle or if I'm really careful maybe I can get a perfect square but when I let go that is now an object on my page I can pick it up I can move it around I can resize it I can do whatever I want to do with it and I'm going to go ahead and draw a second one and of course now I have two objects on the page overlapping each other now we're going to jump into we're going to talk about number three and number four but I'm just gonna pick this object up first to show you the difference so I can pick it up and pick up this one and move it around pick up this one and move around those are objects on the screen versus if I had painted those with pixels they would be on the canvas and it wouldn't be as easy to select them and move them around or pick them up so I'd have to always in Photoshop for example if I wanted to be able to do that and layers whereas here I can work on one layer for everything or have many layers for different things it's up to me now the next thing number three number three stroke and fill now when I first created these objects my last stroke and fill when my fill was white and my stroke was black so that means that this rectangle has a white color in it and has a black stroke around it just like the one that's already on the page so if I say remove the fill for that selected object now I can see through it I can see the rectangle behind it if I say give it a different fill let's do this I can choose a different color and now it's got that color on it but it still has the black stroke I can click and toggle back and forth between these two to change whichever one I want or I can just go up to the control panel and change them individual individually so I could say well give me a orange stroke on that and make the stroke thicker so we can actually see it so stroke versus fill that's normally the next thing people want to know the difference between that's number three and your fill can be patterns it can be gradients it can be solid colors you can lower the opacity of either one you can do all kinds of things so even if I go back here to the fill I can say that I want to lower the opacity of that fill so that it now becomes transparent so stroke fill the fill was the inside the stroke is the outside all right let me undo that last one I did and now let's talk about ways of selecting you have two selection tools you have your missus number four by the way if you're keeping track this is your selection tool and your direct selection tool now I look at it is the easiest way to explain this as your selection tool is when you want to select an object and you want to pick up that object move it around so no matter where I click on these objects I can click on them and move them around provided I'm clicking a part of the object so if it had a fill of none I'd be clicking through it but whether I pick it up on the stroke or pick it up on the fill I am moving it now you also notice that when it's selected I have these handles these handles allow me to quickly resize or reshape it if I want to keep it proportional then I would hold down the shift key and that will reshape it with its or resize it with its current proportions as I pick it up and move it around or grab one of the corner handles to size so that's what your selection tool does now let me DES elect which basically means click off of it onto the canvas onto nothing and then I'm going to switch to the direct selection tool and think of the direct selection tool as allowing me to directly manipulate a part of that object so if I go to my direct selection tool it will auto highlight any of the points that make up this object so there are four points that make up a rectangle or a square one on each corner so when I click one of these points it is now selected the other three are white the one that's selected is blue that means I can now reshape this object by grabbing the points and directly manipulating them so that's why it's called the direct selection tool because you can directly manipulate any of the points or paths so for example if I just pick up that path I can move it around I'm directly manipulating so selection tool versus direct selection tool so if I go back to the selection tool now I'm picking up the entire object moving it around I am if I come off to the side here I can rotate that object I can do all kinds of things to the object as an object but I am no longer directly manipulating individual points or paths so that is number four select versus direct selection now let's go to number five combining shapes now there are a couple of ways to do this I'm going to delete what I've got here and we're gonna switch drawing from the rectangle tool the ellipse tool and I'm gonna teach you a couple things right off the bat here first of all we're going to go back to know Phil and we'll go to actually to set our defaults we'll go back to a black and white and then we'll say no Phil okay so now we are what we draw from here on out will have no fill but it'll just have a black stroke now I'm on the ellipse tool which is normally for drawing ovals or circles and if you want to constrain your squares your circles your triangles whatever you're drawing with - a perfect shape hold down the shift key that will force it to be a perfect circle so I cannot distort that to an oval while I'm holding down the shift key when I'm ready to let go you always let go of your mouse first in this case by the way I'm using a Wacom pin and then you can let go of the shift key and speaking of pins I'm doing this whole thing on a Wacom Cintiq you definitely want to invest in some type of tablet if you're gonna work in Illustrator or Photoshop for that matter and do a lot of detailed work I'll get into that in a few minutes on one of the next ones that's coming up as to why that's important but just note that no matter what tablet you buy if even a fifty dollar tablet is better than a hundred dollar Mouse any day any day of the week it's just going to give you more control more abilities to draw with okay so I know just to have a better experience using the Adobe products with the tablet okay so now that I've got this circle I want to draw another circle now illustrator has what we call smart guides so things that light up as I come around and touch different or not even touching but hover over different areas so if I start at this point at the top here and I started drawing a perfect circle I'll hold down my shift key when I get to the center point of this shape it will highlight and let go oops let me undo that and let go too soon but it will highlight and let go to let me know that hey you're in the center if you let go right now okay so same thing here if I hover over this point and draw another one hold down the shift-key and when I get near the center and let go I know that that circle is a perfect circle from the bottom of the circle to the center from the top of the circle to the center now I want to select all of these with troops no one to draw a new one let's go back to our selection tool let's just simply drag a selection around all three objects and now I could use basic align functions to align these objects so I just brought up my alignment panel from the top here and we're just going to line the center's so now I know that those are perfectly aligned from the center point now that they are perfectly aligned I'm going to grab my ellipse tool one more time and now I want to draw a perfect circle from the center of this top circle now if I start if I hold if I hold down and start drawing it will do it from the center in the direction I draw out in but if I hold down my option key or Alt key and hold down my shift key I will have a perfect circle from the center point so option says draw your box your rectangle your circle your oval whatever from the point where you first clicked and started dragging shift again makes it a perfect shape perfect circle in this case now a lot of times we draw things that we want to have another one another circle five circles 10 circles whatever and we want them to be exactly the same but we don't want to have to keep drawing them over and over again so I'm going to show you this is a bonus one it's not one of your 10 but it's one I use all the time and that is I'm gonna hold down my option or Alt key with my selection tool and drag the one I just did and that will give me a perfect shape perfect selection perfect drag duplicate of the one I just did because I use my guides that light up automatically so now I've got these shapes here and I'm going to select them all again with the selection tool and we're going to combine them in together and together like a I borrowed this technique from my colleague Rufus he does this all the time and I think it's pretty cool so one of the new tools to combine shapes with is the shape builder tool and once you make a selection the shape builder tool will automatically identify anything you hover over as a potential shape that can be combined so if I want to combine this circle with the bigger circle underneath I just click and drag between the two and that will combine the two so that's giving me the beginnings of my yin and yang and again would do the same thing over here drag and that is combine the two so now those are without me having to draw a perfect circle oval ish swishy thing it just did it for me by combining the two shapes now I want to use the one on top which is just a black stroke with no fill on top of another black stroke with no fill I want to actually use it to cut out the shape underneath so using the same shape builder tool all I do is hold down my option or Alt key and you'll notice that instead of a plus sign I get a minus symbol on the tool so now if I just click that will cut out that shape underneath okay so now that we've done that the next thing we need to do is start filling so we'll use our selection tool and we'll select the one on the bottom here and we'll just fill that with black oops didn't select only the one there we go and we'll fill that with black now there we go and I will select this one and how am i filling it well I'm using a shortcut I'm basically taking the black stroke and toggling it using this little curved arrow which says switch them so instead of a no fill a black stroke making a black fill with no snow stroke so I'm just basically cheating and just toggling the two so now it's a black circle with no stroke and a white or I'm sorry black shape at the bottom with no stroke just by toggling those two so that was a quick way to combine multiple objects and if you're just looking for something simple you know maybe you don't want to create a yin-yang if you just even took something like that and then you took something like this and you just said hey you know I can't draw shape like that freehand it's just easier if I select those now and use my shape builder and just come up the shape builder and just combine them so now that shape if you're drawing the top of a toilet maybe that see if it's now been created okay and again I can reshape these because now it's one thing or use my direct selection tool which would be a better thing to use in this case to just combine the top down so and of course since this is one shape no matter how I drew it I can always rotate it and get the look that I'm looking for so if you were trying to make your own custom lowercase P I kind of did that for you alright so that is combining shapes and again once they're combined they work as one piece just as if you'd drawn it that way so even if you want to direct select to directly manipulate any portion of it you can so you can directly manipulate any of this to reshape it to your heart's content because now you have access to the points that you've drawn okay so that was combining shapes number five so I'm going to select all this now and just delete it and now we're going to get into number six which is using what if you want to draw something that's not a square or a circle or triangle or polygon or something like that well there are lots of freeform drawing tools I did a whole tutorial on how to use the pen tool you can look that up on my youtube channel but the pen tool is basically for drawing straight lines by clicking point to point or and by the way we want to give that a stroke in a fill there we go or by drawing curves by dragging out these points so you can create or trace around pretty much anything with the pen tool the pen tool is probably one of the oldest tools in illustrator because this is the way people used to trace things and still do all right so that's the pen tool now if we here let's get back to our defaults if we go into the line tool the line tools for drawing lines and those lines can have any any kind of here let's go to the weight here they can have any kind of thickness to them they can also if you go to your stroke panel let's expand that out there we go if we show our options here they can even have arrowheads and you can customize the endings as well so you can create lots of cool lines paths whatever to draw your particular illustration now of course we already talked about the shape tools rectangle rounded rectangle ellipse polygon star flare pencil is one that I would have used back in the day to kind of maybe freeform my way around something that maybe easier to do than using the pen tool and using exact Bezier points or if I if I feel lucky enough to try and draw something I could use the pencil to do that again a lot easier with a tablet then trying to do that with a mouse but since then illustrator is introduced and enhanced a couple of new tools so let's go to the blob brush the blob brush is actually I used to use a pencil more often but now I use the blot more often when I am trying to kind of draw something because I just like the fact that it it's kind of giving me here let's look at the outlines here it's giving me a filled path so instead of the line tool or the pencil tool just being a solid stroke this is giving me a path that can be filled alright so and it can be expanded there there for so let's go back to by the way that was command I for outline command Y or control Y for to turn it off all right if we double-click on the blob brush options we can control the size we can control the shape we can control the angle you can also set these to be random or pressure sensitive and now I can get a different kind of stroke including the one that I use perhaps for a signature so blob brush is great for a free-form drawing and again the advantage here is that your object becomes a path that can be manipulated and adjust it as needed so that is the blob brush and last but not least the one that I probably use more than any of them is the paintbrush and the reason I say more than any of them is because you can have custom brushes so lucky I'm not an artist I'm not really going to draw a lot with this tool however I could but more importantly if we go to the brushes panel there are some basic default brushes here so the basic brush is the one that we just drew the charcoal brush is kind of cool for getting that charcoal look to it and here if we double click you know we'll leave that the way this okay well double click this and we will go and make a let's make it fixed with a little bit bigger click okay and now whenever you make an adjustment it says hey do you want me to fix the ones that you already drew or you want to leave those alone we'll leave those alone to draw new ones there we go that's more than you can see more of the charcoal effect there and next if you're and of course we added bristle brushes that kind of give it the illusion of being painted even though those are still vectors those aren't pixels but if you you say hey you know that's still drawing and I don't draw then you can load up different brush libraries we go to the flyout menu from the brushes panel we can go to open brush library where there are a lot of cool libraries that come with illustrator so for example if I go to decorative banners and seals this is a panel I can add any one of these I want but let's just click on one and now hey I need a banner there done I need a different kind of banner that goes that way done so these are actual brush strokes I need a seal done so I'm clicking in some cases and dragging and others to get my seal there we go so these are all brushes that I can use that are built in and if we go back to the brushes library open brush library they're all so cool bristle brushes that you can use and here let's do one more brush library let's go to artistic artistic there are all kinds of borders to buy artistic calligraphic and these are all the different ones that I have open so you can have it have a good time doing all of these cool brushes okay so that's cool okay as you can see you can have a lot of fun with illustrator even if you can't draw like I can alright so with that we've talked about pen pencil brush and that was number six now let's talk about how to trace so in this case I'm going to close my blank document because I'm going to open up a document that lets me talk about a few more things and let's go to recent files and let's go to this one okay first and foremost this particular document has a area page blank blank eerie on the page here that I want to actually put something on and what I want to put on this page is something that I want to trace I want to actually put something on a page that is pixels so not drawn with illustrator at least not yet so we're gonna go to our file menu in place and it's going to let me go to my hard drive and grab anything I want I'm gonna go grab the Greenleaf JPEG so JPEG right off the bat lets me know that that is that is pixel-based that is not vector so when I choose place there it is it loads it onto the page for me I can scale it of course so let's go ahead and scale that down holding down my shift key to maintain proportions but if we zoom in on that now we can see more here we can start to see the anti-aliasing around the edge because these are pixels this is not a vector work now what I want from this is an actual vector rendition of it now of course I could put that on a layer lower the opacity make a new layer on top of it and start tracing around each leaf until I've got it traced it might take me 20 minutes might take me an hour might take me two hours depending on how how intricate I want to be or I can use illustrators tracing abilities to trace this for me so let's close the brushes panel let's go up to the window menu and come down to the image trace panel so with image trace new and cs6 it's been enhanced to be a lot faster easier 64-bit all the great things we want and to give us much better results so the preset right now is on default I can choose any one of these presets or adjust to my ours so let's start with this simply let's actually just do low fidelity photo so what is doing right now is analyzing the photo for me I don't have to do anything else and it's figuring out what it looks like in tracing it done that was it if we now assume in on this this is now vector I can make this as big as I want it to be and it will never lose inequality I can scale this to my heart's content I now have a vector rendition of those leaves just by clicking an option in image first if I want maybe a grayscale just do shades of gray it will analyze it again because it has to look at the shading and colors from the original photo and then it will start to give me shades of gray so again zooming in on that that is my new vector that is now grayscale I could also say just give me actually as a preset for it just give me let's do line art actually it's gonna do it but I want a different one that's not the one I want I want silhouettes so so let's just basically mix it into black you know you know no shades of grey just black and white okay so now that I've done that if I want to actually now go into my vectors that it created and get to the individual points and paths that I can manipulate like I did with the direct selection tool then there's one more button I'm gonna press at the top here called expand when I expand it that's saying okay take what you that beautiful thing you drew and now let me mess with it so now that that's been expanded I can go into my swatches which is where we save colors and I can make that it's undo let's double click on this to get into it there we go and now we can make it whatever color we want okay why might you trace something other than the obvious benefit of now Spectre and its resolution independent well I'm gonna throw a bonus one in this is not part of the tin but it's one that I do get asked all the time and that is using and making patterns so for example if I select this piece of artwork here let's back out of it and we select this piece of artwork we can now say object pattern make and that will bring up the new pattern making interface for illustrator and this interface basically allows me to do whatever I want so I can take this object and I can duplicate it holding down my option key just like I did with the circles I can rotate it I can fill it with a different color I can fill it with a gradient I can stroke it if I want to I can scale it if I want to and whatever I do it will update the pattern so I can drag this one up here I can rotate this one I can now give that one a different color just so it stands out I can lower the opacity if I want so it stands out kinda more like a background color and again I can keep doing this even introducing additional elements in here if I want to to make my new pattern now once I've done that and get uh swatches here go back to my pattern options if I want to make any changes there but I can I can say that I'm done basically at the top here I'm done making my pattern and I get back to my standard illustrator but what it is done for me is if we head over to a different artboard where I've got an illustration here that was drawn I can go into my swatches now and it will be the last swatch and I can fill that with that pattern so vector-based patterns resolution-independent scale them to whatever size you want another bonus not part of the top ten but what is part of the top ten as layers and artboards so let's talk about our ports first since we're here all right artboards will be number eight if i zoom out i'm just pressing command - by the way and ctrl - on Windows it will show me six individual panels these panels would be pages in another document like InDesign or artboards is what they're called in Illustrator and you can have multiple airports remember when we said give it a new document how many artboards do you want that's saying I want to start off with two three four or five ten twenty airports and the artboards will be when you do it that way they will all be the same size by default but you can make a new artboard or you can change an art board using the artboard tool so the artboard tool allows me to go in and draw a new artboard so now i've added page seven I can make that new artboard whatever size I want I can also give it a preset so I can say make that a letter size our port and now I have a new page to create on so Y multiple artboards because people in Illustrator create campaigns of artwork so they might have the flyer the mail or the web banner or the all these different documents and all of them would be on different artboards so that when they export it as a PDF or print it they will get a print of each different artboard just the same reason you make multiple pages in any other document all right so now let's talk about layers let's go to let's get out of this let's go to this artboard we just create it let's zoom in on it and let's do something simple will create our filled circle and we'll create another shape and this time we'll just simply fill that one with solid color here alright and we've got now two shapes if we go to our layers panel which is this is number nine our layers panel shows us oh actually this is a bad example because this one already had a bunch of layers let's make a new document kind of went you wouldn't have all those layers in yours let's start from scratch alright so new couple new objects here and you see right off the bat on the layers panel it started with layer one but the layers here are unlike Photoshop layers in that they have sub layers so when I and here let's fill this one with something different so we can see it better so when I twirl this down I will see both objects here let's select this one to make it a different color so we can see that one as well and I see both objects on the sub layers of layer one and that what's cool is you can control the individual objects so I can turn that sub layer off even though I didn't turn the layer one off if I make a new layer so now I have a layer 2 I of course if layer 2 is selected and I start creating things on layer 2 they will automatically be on layer 2 here let's make it totally different there we go but if I want to move something between layers I can so I turn they are two off completely off of course it's completely off if I say hey I want this blue circle this blue object to be on layer 2 I can target it by selecting the clicking a circle so now it's targeted and then I can drag down a little blue rectangle up to layer 2 so now layer 2 contains those two objects layer 1 only contains the one object so that's how layers work inside in a nutshell how they work inside illustrator you can get a lot more fancy especially when you start grouping objects because the groups show up as sub layers and you can move things in and out of groups that way so that is number 9 we're at the end number 10 so now that you've done all this you've got a good handle on starting with illustrator what kinds of things can be drawn what you can do with it how do you get out of it meaning what do you get out of it so obviously we can go up to file and print but what if you want to hand a document off to someone what do you do well if I go to file and save that's going to let me save it as an illustrator file as an EPS as a PDF or template I'm not even going to confuse you with these other two or these other three or four right now just know that illustrator EPS PDF are going to be your most commonly used options template means it's going to save it so you can open it back up without saving over or editing or messing up your original but the three you're going to use the most for save our illustrator EPS PDF now illustrator that's a simple one to explain that means I'm gonna work on it again save it as an illustrator document close it come back tomorrow open up the illustrator document everything's there keep working EPS is it can it can still be worked on but you're gonna save it out in that format to put it in another program that can't handle illustrator documents luckily if you're working in an Adobe workflow be going from illustrator to InDesign for example you can place the illustrator document you don't have to save it as an EPS but if you were saving it to put in some other for and non Adobe program then you might need to save it as an EPS for that program to accept it and of course we all know what PDF is portable document format that means that it can be opened up with the Adobe e-reader it can be viewed on mobile devices and pretty much anyone can see it even if they never heard of illustrator that's what you would save it in now those are the save commands one more file export you have a lot more formats you can export to if eps illustrator and PDF aren't enough so you can go all the way back to a month or Macintosh pict format the Oh backing me pre OS 10 days you can save it as a JPEG so you can make it raster just get rid of all your vectors make a JPEG version of your image you can save it as a Photoshop file and that's kind of interesting because that will try and maintain as much as you can keep all your layers so that you can open up in Photoshop and do Photoshop effects on it and of course some of these other formats are kind of self-explanatory AutoCAD if you're going AutoCAD Targa's of common video format tiff common print format so forth and so on so illustrator can save out in just about anything you need to save out in for any purpose now one more thing if we go back to save I just want to point out that you do have the ability to even save down and what I mean by that is if I click OK now to save it as an illustrator to see a 6 document because that's what I'm using but you can save it all the way back to illustrator 3 so if you're trying to make it compatible for someone with an older version of illustrator to open it back up you have the ability to save it down for them now of course the further down you go the more things you may lose as far as being editable in that format so if I save it in a format or if I use variable widths for example and I save it as cs4 well those variable lists wouldn't be editable as variable with inside cs4 because cs4 didn't have that feature so just note that you can say back the appearance should stay the same and a bit of edit ability remains questionable so that's it for this episode of the Adobe Creative Suite podcast my name is teri white I hope you learned how to get started with Adobe Illustrator and you're no longer frightened by it it's a cool program even though that I don't even though for people that like me that don't draw I can create artwork in it all the time thanks again and we'll catch you next time you

Channel: Terry White

Views: 4,638,319

Rating: 4.9286137 out of 5

Keywords: How-to (Conference Subject), Tutorial, Adobe Illustrator, Terry White, CS6, Creative Cloud, Creative Suite Podcast, Illustration, Graphic Design

Id: Kgmu8RwLi28

Length: 41min 54sec (2514 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 03 2013