Illustrator Beginner Tutorial

hello everyone my name is dave casuto instructor for learn it and welcome to our intro to illustrator class i'm so excited to be teaching you all all of the amazing tools that illustrator has to offer now what will you learn you ask well being an intro class we're going to just start from the basics understanding the tools panels and illustrator workspace how to create a new document then we're going to move on to how to use all the fancy selection tools including the elusive direct selection tool we'll also cover vector illustration using shapes the pen and pencil tool applying brush strokes and saving swatches and gradients we'll also do a deep dive into type and topography and show you all the tips shortcuts and tricks to make you more proficient and more creative using illustrator now this course is designed to be an interactive hands-on course so occasionally you'll hear me say hey pause the video and practice on your own so make sure you download the class files from the link below to do so this will ensure you get the most out of the course and learn the program in a more experiential hands-on manner now i'm looking forward to teaching you all the cool things that illustrator has to offer so stay tuned and get ready to learn if you're enjoying these videos please like and subscribe if you want to earn certificates and digital badges please become a member of our patreon the link is in our video description if you have any questions you want answered by one of our instructors please join our off-site community the link is in the description as well and as i mentioned this course does have exercise files you'll find them in the video description below so where should we begin let's imagine that this is our first day of medical school and we need to know where all the body parts are we need to know our anatomy so when we are doing an examination where we're doing some kind of surgery we need to know where things are in illustrator and a lot of adobe programs we have something called our workspace this current workspace is called the essentials workspace and that essentially is giving us our tools over here on the left hand side as one column and you can see over here on the right hand side i have my properties i have my layers panel and i have my libraries panel now if you click over here in the far upper right you're going to see this little dude right there when you click on that you're going to see all of these different individual workspace types so depending on what you're doing you may have a variety of different preset workspaces these are things that illustrator just gives to us so if i were to change let's let's just say to topography everything's going to change dramatically to look very different let's try another one and click on this let's go over here to painting and look at that a lot of very very different stuff what i'm going to do now is i'm going to go right back to essentials and i'm going to click on that again i'm going to say reset essentials in case i've made some modifications to that it is all set back to where the default is okay now what we're going to learn how to do is pretty much just customize these things so in the upper upper left hand side you're going to see that little double arrow right there that is essentially going to allow me to make this go from one column to two columns because i really like that i like that how that's set up a little better easier for me to navigate through all of these little icons here and notice how it kind of groups it together don't get to go up and down so i really like that and we're going to be going through all these things in in subsequent lessons on the right hand side you'll see again i have my properties panel i have my layers panel and i have my libraries panel okay that's great fantastic now i like those there but there's other ones that i might want to see that are not here so how do i bring up other panels for me to work with up on top here you will see i have this little menu here called the window menu and that is essentially the factory for all of our panels live all right so you'll see that there's a lot a lot of panels for me to work with i want to essentially bring some of these in so i can work with them over and over and over again right have easy access to them so let's for example bring up the appearance panel a very important panel in illustrator i want that and then notice it comes smack there in the middle i can just drag this from the top move it wherever i want that's great go over to here let's go to window let's bring up artboard absolutely another very very important one i love that all right and now let's maybe bring up let's just say color and let's bring up swatches great and this is just many many many that's available as you can see now you will notice that a lot of these come with their own little sort of brothers and cousins and uncles that like okay swatches like hey if you want me you got to get brushes too you got to get symbols too okay well do i want those right now i'm not really sure if i do so for example they're symbols i don't even really know what a symbol is am i planning on using symbols i don't know maybe later on but right now i know i don't need it so very simply right click on the tab and choose close and that goes away do i need brushes right now i don't think so i'm going to say close okay very good now i'm going to keep that as is and now do i need something else like color guide i'm gonna get rid of that but i noticed that these two color and swatches should kind of be together so very easily i can then just join these right there just by clicking and dragging waiting for my little blue halo and then bam now these are one of the same all perfect just like that love that that makes me very happy now let's see what else we can do with some of these other ones right so let's just say for example my asset export i don't want that so i'm going to right click on that and say close but notice when you right click you get a lot of other options right to close it to close the whole tab group like we have a tab group here that would close everything you can minimize it oh that's kind of cool or i can double click to then expand it out again i can right click and i can say collapsed icons and that makes it nice and small so it's just kind of even smaller that so it doesn't take up as much room okay that's kind of neat so i'm gonna keep that there just for future reasons okay and then i'm gonna go over to here to appearance and then you'll see i have a few other options here in the upper right you can see i can click on this which also collapses to icons click on this it brings it back and then click on my x and then notice that goes away like oops what happens when you accidentally or even intentionally remove one of your panels guess what we go right back to where we started go to window and what was it that i let go of was it appearance yep bam there it is and it's back again okay now let's go ahead and bring back another one you can see here i have a bunch of other options here i can work with so let's just bring up for example info that's a nice one all right have that there right now let's start customizing this a little bit more let's say i want to bring these guys into their own little kind of panel areas for example so let's just say for example i wanted to have swatches and colors on their own kind of section over here these guys have their own section why can't these guys so you'll notice that when i drag this over here into this little area you'll notice i get this like blue halo here come way down to the bottom right i'm gonna get a blue halo down there come over to here i'm gonna get another blue halo so this is gonna give me some choices in terms of where i want to place these things potentially okay you'll notice i do with this one i'm just going to go and simply click and drag i can move this over here if i want to but because this is an icon i want you to notice something kind of neat if i move this right here in the center and i let go notice how it creates a very different looking panel compared to how these are so if i want to have like access to all of these guys here but smaller versions rather than having to take up all this space i can then just move this wait for my little blue halo and then bam i can do that i can do that and then i can also move these guys here just the same and you see very nice nice and neat i love that i love it so much that i want to save this so right now this workspace is just called essential workspace i want to make a new workspace for myself just say new workspace i'm going to call this dave's faves and click ok and now when i click on this you will see there it is dave's face now when is that going to come in benefit for me how am i going to find an advantage for this at some point let's say i go crazy with all this here right like i move properties over here i got layers over here i accidentally delete libraries oh my god things are just insanity not ex at all how i wanted things to be when i started off so idealistic in the beginning what could i do very simply i go back to where i was before over here to my workspace and guess what i've still have dave's faves selected so what i need to do is reset whatever workspace you have here i like to think about this as the mary poppins effect right where it puts all your toys everything in its place everything place for everything in place for everything in its place or something more articulate than that so i click on that and then watch what happens everything goes exactly back to where it was awesome love that okay now let's do one other thing i'm gonna go over here to window and this time i'm gonna bring up something called my control my control bar so i click on that and you'll notice that this little guy now appears way up on top that we did not have that before so i say to myself like okay well you know i just added on something really critical and i want that to be part of dave's faves so what do i do i go back over to here and then guess what i'm going to do i have to say new workspace and then literally type it in again exactly word for word it's kind of like a save as but you see a name already exists click ok to overwrite you know if you can see that right so you can see all right good so it recognized that that's exactly what i want and then it overrides it so then i'm going to do any kind of reset or something like that then it's going to always remember that i have this new option there as well all right so please pause the video get your workspace all set up again go to essentials at first reset essentials and then try to have yours look like mine as much as possible all right and then we come back we're going to do a little bit more overview of what's what on the screen and then very soon you'll be illustrating in no time welcome back everybody hope you had some good luck and experience working with your new workspace and yours looks like mine so let's get a little deeper into what some of these panels do and how they can make our lives easier and more creative so let's start off over here on the left hand side where we have our tools panel and you'll notice here our tools panel has a number of different individual icons that accomplish a number of different things right just think about the tools panel as like a toolbox each tool has its own different purpose so if you're going to hammer something you're going to use the hammer but then when you're done hammering you put it back and you grab the screwdriver so each of these little individual icons have a different purpose and then therefore you have to change when you want to change something else so let's just start off over here you'll see this is the move tool this is our direct selection tool notice you a little tool tip for each of these that's great some things you might recognize like the rectangle tool right and just all these things you can move your mouse over and you can see exactly what they do you'll also notice that when you move your mouse over it they all have little letters next to them these are the keyboard shortcut that you use in order to access them so for example this is v so if i literally just type v not control v not command v notice that we'll access the move tool if i hit a which is right next to it that selects the direct selection tool if i hit t guess where that's going to take me it's going to take me to the type tool so you'll want to start to kind of memorize these things as you go along okay so very important now over here on the bottom you're going to see there's some other options for color we're going to get into those in a lot more detail later on now one of the more important panels that you have in illustrator is the properties panel okay so coming all the way over here okay this is invaluable this is going to come up in so many so many different capacities depending on what you're doing so for example like i'm doing nothing right now and i have properties of my entire document like what what's happening here really wow so this is actually telling me a whole bunch of different things what's my unit of measure right now okay that's cool okay what artboard am i working with here i can go from these three different artboards i have here we'll talk about artboards in more detail later on i can very easily add on rulers and grids just by simply clicking and then look at that my ruler now just appeared and now i'll be able to see oh you know what i don't really want to work in these units of measure so i can go ahead and go over here to inches notice how that changes let's change this to pixels okay great fantastic so now i'm able to see how i can work with my properties panel on a much larger scale and as we go through the program as we go through more exercises we'll be coming back to this within this perspective now let's just say for example i'm working on this bottle notice when i click on the bottle my properties panel now changes okay it is based on the context of what you click on then your properties panel will they'll change based off of the context of what you've actually clicked on okay now if i double click on this you'll see i'm now inside of this bottle and you'll start to see even more stuff within this object that i can see the properties of like the color of it if there's a stroke there's any opacity all this kind of stuff out here i'm going to double click in this white area again and now i'm back to my main canvas right so the properties panel is incredibly valuable you'll also see that we have our layers panel i have three layers here let me go ahead and click on my little eyeball there like okay that makes my avocado go away that makes my bottle go away and this makes my pepper go away okay and we're going to again do a lot lot more on these individual ones all right as we go through the program we're going to be exploring all these individual panels and much larger degree okay now another thing we'll want to understand here is our what we called earlier our control remember this is the control we brought that in last minute in the last exercise and you're going to see the control overlaps a little bit with what we see over here in our properties panel so let me go ahead and go to my avocado i'm going to double click on that to get into my green and then notice it shows me this green fill color and it also gives me some other options for making my stroke a certain size just essentially stroke as your outline and then you can do all kinds of other things with the stroke style and blah blah alignment etc but notice how there's some overlap some people like to work with our control panel some people like to work with our properties panel all right totally up to you i just want you to know that both of those options are there for you all right now some other basic interface things is we want to understand how we can zoom in and zoom out now i like to use the keyboard shortcut but i do want you to notice that way down below here you're going to see is the option of how i'm zoomed in currently okay that's great so you can see fantastic i can zoom in this way to go in let's just say 300 like oh man okay where am i now i don't even really know so let me just come right back to where i was before that was a little bit disorienting and i come right back to that that's why i like to either use the keyboard shortcut or a combination of my mouse and keyboard shortcut so if i use the keyboard shortcut of just controller command plus plus that allows me and to go in and then minus minus allows me to go out but if you hold down the alt or option key and you have a little mouse wheel or even your track pad you can zoom in exactly where you want so i'm going to come right to the center of the avocado pit i like how much i'm going i'm like 200 400 800 percent in there right amazing so i have that i'm all set up ready to go all right so so use all these different you know tools that whatever you find um comfortable for you all right now you'll also notice to the right of this right way down again on the bottom you can see here it says this that's a selection what does that mean okay it means whatever kind of tool you're working with it's going to show you what tool you're in so i change that now i'm in the selection tool direct selection tool click on that so that's kind of nice you kind of know like what am i looking at again case you kind of forget or maybe you're working on two monitors something like that you can always look down there to see where you're at and then you'll see down here you will see all my different art boards as well so we're going to be talking about artboards but you can see avocado bottle and pepper one two three those are my three different art boards that i'm currently working with just think about them as pages but we're going to be talking about artboards in a very large degree momentarily all right so this will get you going for some just like basic basic things in terms of our zooming in terms of our moving in with our artboards etc i'm going to show you one last thing as you're moving in let me just move in real real close one really critical keyboard shortcut i'm going to go ahead and type this out for you here is to simply just hold down the spacebar and then you're going to click and drag right as you do that why that essentially allows you to pan across the canvas right so watch as i do that if i hold down the space bar notice how my hand now appears and i click and drag still holding down to the space bar i let go and it takes me back to the tool that i was just in okay see that holding the space bar temporary access to this little hand tool i like to call it the pan tool and you can see i can go ahead this way notice i can go in a very very non-linear way to go wherever i want all right now the last thing i'm going to show you is how we get out of this how do we get out of this to go back to our basically like our main sort of best fit window and that is going to be control plus zero think about that as like ground zero okay if you're on the mac that's gonna be command plus zero so what does that look like let me just try that so control plus zero and look at that i'm now best fit on the current artboard that i'm in right now okay so watch let's zoom in again controller command 0 takes me right back all right so you're going to want to write a few of these ones down um some of these keyboard shortcuts you may have seen over here that are going to be very valuable for you how to actually zoom in how to zoom out how to pan and also how to come right back to a best fit because these things are going to serve you immeasurably as you get more and more deep into the program and if you want to be more efficient and a little more expert i highly highly recommend you do that if not now at some point in the very near future start to incorporate like one or two or three of these keyboard shortcuts you know a day and just really only do those like really perfect it until you get it until you feel more comfortable with it alright so pause the video practice this and we'll see you in the next exercise now before we begin creating our new documents in illustrator let's get some things out of the way about what illustrator is even used for and how it's different than other programs within the adobe suite adobe makes a number of different kind of main programs like photoshop and indesign and illustrator and other ones of course like premiere and after effects but now the ones that kind of work together for the most part you will see are going to be illustrator indesign and photoshop now photoshop as the name implies works very well with photos right also known as bitmap or raster images whereas illustrator works well with vector images and also creating vector images now indesign is a layout program and it works well with actually all three of those things all two of those things and all three programs can kind of come together now that said there is an abundance of overlap between all three of them okay more than ever you will see that you can actually create vector images in all three programs you can manipulate bitmap images in all three programs okay so it's actually really nice that adobe has done that for us so we have access to be able to do that now what is the difference between a bitmap and a vector you ask i can hear you thousands of miles away asking that same question on the right hand side we have what is known as a bitmap image okay this is basically pixel based all right so this has millions and millions and millions of pixels but it's finite so if i were to make this super super big it would start to get a little bit grainy or pixelated as opposed to a vector image right which is if i double click on this um a little bit more of a smooth type of graphic right if i were to actually make this bigger and bigger and bigger because of the vector technology it essentially has a mathematical program built into it that it resets itself so therefore it does not lose any of its of its graphic quality all right so when you are creating graphics inside of illustrator you are essentially creating them as vector graphics now you can bring in these bitmap images certainly and you can have them work together side by side but when you're drawing graphics like this and this and this you will see how nice and smooth they are and watch how nice it is when i get really really close up you don't really see any pixelation if i go over to these guys here and i come in there you can see how it starts to get a little bit kind of grainy you see that i'm like literally looking at what a pixel all of these little squares are pixels pixel is just a contraction for picture elements right that's what we're looking at here so you see that we're kind of just really looking at a molecular level of these images whereas with vector images vector graphics we don't have that all right so we're going to be learning how to create vector images from scratch using a variety of different tools but i want to just kind of get that out of the way just so you understand what illustrator primarily does how it can potentially work together with the other adobe programs and what may be some of the limitations you might see um when you are working with bitmap images versus versus vector now you will see that the vector also has just like one color three colors or whatever so you have certainly like millions of colors as well but it's not going to get the same detail as a bitmaps you wouldn't necessarily make a photograph out of a vector all right so just understanding there's pros and cons but really you want to think about it not really as pros and cons but sort of like usage and application for both of them all right so just want to get that out of the way digest that and we'll see you in the next video let's now discuss how we create a brand new document now when you're working with illustrator it's going to be very similar to other programs potentially where we're going to ask you how big you want the document to be potentially what's the color profile but it's also going to ask you things like well what artboard do you want to use and maybe what kind of bleed do you want things like that and possibly even you know our units of measure you know that kind of thing so we want to kind of think about these things ahead of time and looking at my document here you'll notice i have three art boards and you'll also notice that here's the size of each individual one by pixels right you can see this my unit of measure is measured in pixels etc so what we want to do now is create our own new document knowing what we know now and let's just see what that dialog box looks like so many times when you just start illustrator it's going to come up give me the option to do a new document we're going to do directly from this interface by going to file and new but also notice the keyboard shortcut big fan of keyboard shortcuts so you'll hear me talk about that a lot control n or command n takes you now to something that might potentially look like this now i want you to just not get distracted by anything down below i want you to get distracted by this you can see here i have a number of different tabs here saved mobile web etc and they're giving me some nice little sort of presets so if i go over here to mobile you'll see there's some nice little presets based off of the different phone sizes and you'll also see the different units of measure there go to web different kind of presets right so maybe i'm doing a mock-up for a website great it's all set up for me ready to go go to print notice how it's a different unit of measure this time it's in points okay and then film and video art illustration etc you'll also notice that illustrator is very generous enough to give you a whole bunch of different templates to work with so definitely check those out if you're feeling comfortable with that all right now you'll also see here is saved so you may actually have some that you've been saving so you can use them over and over and over again okay so that's what we're gonna do we're gonna create a new one and then we're going to go ahead and actually save it so i don't have to actually create it all over again so i'm going to go over to here just choose print and again here are my presets i'm going to go over to this side and now make my custom changes on all these different things here that i have available to me so for example i want to make this in inches notice how it now changes that's great and i want to change the orientation from portrait to landscape that's great love that and then here is the thing i was talking about before is working with art boards okay how many art boards do you want okay so for right now i'm just gonna say two so you can see how you do it we're gonna have a whole discussion on artboards in a little bit all right then we also have our bleed okay so you might have something that looks like let me come down to one of these templates like this right here how you want it to bleed off the edge here so if you're going to do that you typically are not going to say zero you do want to go a little more than zero so it goes off the edge so when you are printing it you don't accidentally get a little sort of like white sliver there or whatever the color of the paper is okay so just keeping that in mind then you also want to think about your color mode all right notice here i have just two choices rgb is if you're going to be doing something on the web or print it before it's going to be on a screen and then cmyk is for when you're going to be printing it okay because on the screen our screen the screen that you're looking at right now is broken up is as red green blue that's like the magic that it's doing from the screen and the magic that the printer itself is doing is through cyan magenta yellow and black maybe some of you have changed your printer cartridges before and you said why is this weird colors i've never used before wow interesting so that's how it's made up okay now it's very important to establish this ahead of time what is going to be the goal for your uh for your project is it going to be printed or it's going to be on the web and then you're going to want to choose your color profile accordingly all right and then also notice here is raster effects that's the word we just used earlier um with our with with when we talked about you know illustrator vector versus raster objects or bitmap so you want to decide how high quality is that going to be for for vector it doesn't really matter but essentially how high quality is going to be and typically this is going to be for print you want to be pretty high like this and if it's going to be for screen notice here's 72 ppi so really up to you you'll know what your projects are all right now i'm just going to go ahead and click on create and now you see here i have two artboards all ready to go you can see it's set up in inches i love that that's great and then guess what i can do all kinds of other things here like i can turn my ruler on here i can turn my grids on okay i can do all kinds of really really good stuff here all right so that's just the basics of creating something in a little bit we're going to learn how we can actually create something but also learn some basic selection techniques we have a lot more to go just want to get this out of the way so everybody's super comfortable with how to even get started all right so pause the video practice that and we'll see you in the next lesson now before we actually start creating some things let's get some of the basics out of the way and one of the most basic fundamental skills you're going to have in illustrator is selection and i know it sounds very very rudimentary but it is very important because in order to affect it you have to select it so we really want to understand that when you want to manipulate something edit something it has to be selected and there's a lot a lot a lot of different ways to select things and there's some other nice little chips and tools that we're going to be getting into as well in terms of selection that's kind of more than meets the eye so let's see what our basic selection tools are here you can see here is my regular selection tool this is my direct selection tool and again if you go between the v and the t they just switch up okay so you can go ahead and switch these back and forth by the mouse or not okay or you can use your keyboard shortcut that just appears right there with the tool tip now you will also notice that as i change you'll notice also my properties panel changes now just again keeping that in mind understanding how the properties panel works now i haven't even selected anything and we haven't even talked about what's the difference between these two now this regular selection tool will select an entire object right pretty much like what you expect a selection tool to do in any other program you've worked with that's essentially what selection does and that's going to allow me to now just simply click and drag move it around it's also going to allow me to resize it so if i hold down the shift key while dragging on the corners here i can then resize it why did i hold down the shift key because i wanted to constrain the proportions right just like that see that if i don't then it gets all wide maybe i want that but again up to you i'm just going to do command or control z to undo or just go to edit and undo okay so very basic to be able to do that now i also might want to rotate so i'm still in the same tool now watch what happens now when i move my mouse to the corner here notice i get this kind of little button hook if i click and drag now i can now change the direction and rotate this little shape okay so it's kind of kind of squiggly to get there now another nice little tool is if you hold down the shift key as you're doing this watch what happens is it locks in place like every 45 degrees right and that's pretty cool so i know i want to be exactly like that i can do that or let's go 90 degrees cool all right so that's holding down the shift key as i am rotating all right so pretty neat now let's take a look at some of our other options here this is your direct selection tool and this is going to be one that you'll be using just as much if not more than our regular selection tool because we are working with these vector images all of these are vector images all these are individual shapes you might hear them called and if you are working with the regular selection tool you can't manipulate these individual parts of it to really get a custom shape but you can with the direct selection tool so watch what happens now when i choose this right here i get i'm going to zoom in a little bit i get these like individual little path points right these individual path points or maybe you hear them called vector points let's go to this one this one has a lot of path points wow let's go to this one okay just a handful here so notice whenever there's kind of a curve or whatever that's where you're going to see these little path points you'll see here if i move my mouse over it it kind of lights up a little bit that's great all right cool so that's how we can select our individual shapes we're going to get into in a little bit how we can work a little bit more fluidly with our direct selection tool at this point kind of want to get that out of the way now if you right click on this you'll see there's a few other options here like you have a group selection things could be grouped so you can then just go ahead and it just works on the whole group right there so bam that's going to kind of overlap between this in future exercises we're going to see how this is really going to help us then you also have the lasso tool this is another selection to be able to do right so if i choose this now watch what happens when i just kind of like lasso through i'm just going to basically just touch this notice how that's now selected okay but i want you to notice that what isn't selected is this part down here okay so you'll notice that there is this little area right there that's hollow where this area is filled right essentially telling me that this is selected this is not so let's just do that again but this time i'm going to lasso over the entire thing and now everything is now filled okay so just kind of keep that in mind that the lasso tool can be really helpful but many times if you accidentally don't select or you don't touch a certain part of it if you don't go like through where those anchor points are then you may not actually be selecting what you think but notice how i don't even really have to touch anything as soon as i now close up my loop everything now gets selected if i would just hit delete right now everything then gets deleted i'm just going to undo that and then come right back there all right so those are your nice little basic selection techniques all right and we're going to come back we're going to do a few more but just practice that and we'll come back in the next lesson let's now discuss another tool called the magic wand tool which is going to help us with a different type of selection that's going to make things potential a little more efficient for us so in this document we have a lot of different colors and a lot of different strokes and sometimes we want to just select sort of like things like similar things that are on the page here for us so if i want to choose like all my blue right now and all the shapes that are blue i have to like go over to here and i remember we learned about the the lasso tool and i can just kind of just go through man that that is a big pain i got to go through all that i guess you know you can also use this the shift tool and heard about that you can hold on the shift key you can do that all right and that that or maybe even the commander control does that work you know it's not really as good as i'd like it to be so what we're going to learn about is this guy here the magic wand tool the magic wand tool so before we even do it before we even execute what it can do we're going to learn about something within illustrator that's going to be very important to do for all these tools which simply that you can double click on one of these icons to then see all of these options that are hiding there a lot of other adobe programs don't have that ability when you double click on a lot of these icons you actually get a whole bunch of options that pop up that are reflective of that tool so the magic wand tool is going to allow me to select similar things but i have to choose what am i actually choosing in this case notice fill color is chosen so when i choose the magic wand tool and i choose this fill color guess what every shape that has that blue fill color will then get chosen that amazing so cool let's do this now i'm going to choose just stroke color and let's just choose all the ones that have white so i just simply click and look at that all of the white shapes get chosen it's the coolest thing maybe it's all the ones that have stroke weight etc now why is this important because let's say my client comes in and says hey dave um we're not doing white strokes anymore you know that's so 2020. we're not doing that anymore so let's just change it to black oh cool now i can do that for every single one of them because every single one of them is chosen same thing for fill color all right and then you know some of these other maybe potentially more complex ones that you're working with in terms of stroke weight opacity and blend mode all right we're going to be getting into those in subsequent lessons but i want you to understand how amazing the magic wand tool is for doing selections okay so now that i see that all these are selected let's just say i hit delete they're all gone okay so you have to select it to affect it that's the way that i wanted to affect it right so very very cool all right so again we learned that you can double click on one of these icons to get more options and then we actually executed it based off of what we chose and then we did whatever we wanted to do to affect it so go ahead and pause the video practice that maybe with some other tools that you have available other projects you're working on or certainly use this one okay and we'll see you in the next lesson okay well ready or not we are now going to learn how to do some basic illustration and we're going to start off just by using some of the shape tools that illustrator gives us all right so you will see on the left hand side where our tools are we have this little box right there and you'll notice that tiny little triangle right there which is indicating to me that when i right click i have a whole bunch of options here to draw out in terms of what shapes i want to work with now you'll also notice that illustrator gives this nice little little arrow here that's going to allow us to do guess what click on that and then tear that tool away so therefore i don't have to keep going back here to then go ahead and draw out what shapes i want okay so i don't have to actually keep going here and then i don't want to choose a polygon this time i can just go right to here and work with that all right now let's start drawing out some shapes so if i just simply click on that right now i'm going to draw out a rectangle now you'll see i'm going to just click and drag here and then i have a white rectangle okay that's great now why did that come out white let me go ahead and delete that let's discuss what's actually happening before i even like start going crazy with all this and waste my time this is coming in white because if you notice here i have a white box right there and you also notice i have a white box right there telling me essentially what the fill color is going to be so do you want that to be the fill color maybe not you'll also notice that there's another option here which is telling me what my stroke color is going to be what is the stroke stroke is essentially just the outline just the outline of that shape so i don't like to do white in this case because white is going to be on top of white so i'm not going to choose white i want to choose a different color so i'm going to simply just double click on this and then it pops right up to my color picker and you'll notice here i can choose from any number of color hues over here on the left hand side and the left hand side i'm going to choose my different shading of that set of hues okay we're going to get into more detail on colors but just while we're here let's just understand how we can work with this here is all of our different cues and then here is going to be the shading and then you can also change all of the little brightness options of what that's going to be now you'll also notice that there's going to be these options over here on the right hand side for is it going to be rgb and or is it going to be cmyk or is it going to be our hexadecimal values now you will need to know what those things are your design team or whoever is going to tell you what that's going to be and you're going to say hey what's the cmyk value and they'll give you those four numbers hey what's the rgb value and they'll give you those three numbers or they're going to give you the hexadecimal number and you will put that in okay so totally up to you but i want you to notice here how that changes on all levels for all of these okay so let's just choose this nice pretty purple color i'm going to click ok now notice what's going to happen i'm going to have a purple fill and a black stroke and i'm just going to simply hold down the shift key so i can have a perfect square great wonderful okay love that now one thing to understand is that if i click right now notice what pops right up right and that's something that's going to make you go nuts right like oh it's asking me to draw a rectangle i don't want to do that so what i want to do is just either come back to my move tool you notice here is selection right and that's going to kind of give me sort of like a neutral place to be and you'll also notice that under select there's the option to deselect if you want to and notice the keyboard shortcut and that's the same thing so essentially takes you to kind of like a nice neutral place as you're doing this all right so therefore you don't accidentally keep getting that dialog box to pop up i can guarantee it's going to happen like a million times to all of you uh the first like you know week or two all right now let's try a different one right click actually i don't even need to do that because guess what this is sitting here waiting for me fantastic and this time i'm going to choose a different color click ok and hold down the shift key and beautiful wonderful fantastic i can move this however i want i can resize it coming from the corners that's great lovely so cool let's check out some other things here let's go over here to the polygon tool and then watch what happens now when i just click and drag it's going to give me kind of like a well is that what i want i don't know is that how many sides i want so maybe i don't know so let me actually delete that let's see what we can do now to get different sides watch what happens now when i click and drag and i start tapping on my keyboard where you find the arrow keys it's going to allow me to add or subtract sizes of the variety of different polygons i can work with okay let me do that one more time so you can see that in action click and drag and then watch this up arrow is four five six seven eight down down down all the way back to three so as i'm clicking and dragging i'm just tapping on the keyboard you see that just tapping on my arrow keys okay so that's great love that and here we are okay so nice nice little set of features there for us to work with in a really cool way as you're clicking and dragging on this all right now if you do have the polygon tool and you don't like to use that you could then just simply click and it's gonna ask you hey how many sides do you want and i can say okay you know what i want eight size nine sides okay i click okay and then it just draws it out for me so you have all those options however you want to do it i like the first way because i think it's pretty slick and i can see it on the fly but again up to you now you'll also see here that if i wanted to change the color like i don't want all of them to be the same color so if i want to change my triangle to be a different color i can then go back to here and then choose a different color different hue different shading okay that's great and you'll also notice that i could choose from here as well notice this one takes me to what's called my swatches which we're going to get to in a little bit but these are all basically just like saved colors right i click on let's say that one great fantastic and also you'll notice one more option here is in my appearance panel which you should all have up right now and you'll see it's another way to get to getting to your swatches panel just make that orange you can see how easy that is all right now the last thing we're going to talk about in our shapes is this beautiful star menu all right so this time i'm going to access the star menu from here so you can see what that does and guess what i can click and drag on the star and while i'm doing that i'm going to hit plus plus plus how cool is that to then have the first bit of my lisa simpson haircut all right that's awesome fantastic of course i can rotate this resize it and do whatever i want to do with that okay now the star is slightly interesting because i might not want my star to look exactly like this i know how many sides i want but there's something called the radius that i can play around with so when i choose this and then i do my alternative by just simply clicking you're going to notice and i now have a bunch of different options here for my different radii okay so i have my nine points but let's just go ahead and just make this go maybe about 10 inches all right i'm going to click ok and now whoa look what that did okay that's my radius going outward just like that let's do another one all right let's bring that back down to three and then this one let's make that five inches okay and you can see oh okay and that's the radii going in from the center okay so we're going to learn how we can customize each individual point if you want to right if you want to kind of really customize this i just want you to see how you can really kind of go crazy with the different stars right so you don't just just keep the ones that they give you you can again play around with the different radii and explore what's going to be best for you all right let me just bring this over to here so it's not sharing the art board with the other one let's just show you one more this might be coming up which is the line and line's pretty simple let me just go ahead and just hold down the shift key that gives me a perfectly straight line and i can change the color of that which is a stroke and i can also change the width and do all that stuff so now that we understand also a little bit how the line works how you can actually use this because this is essentially as a stroke you should understand that these all have strokes on them too you can barely see them you can't really see the color but each of them has strokes on them and later on we're going to get into much more detail on it but i want you to notice in case you missed it that there are some strokes here so if you go over here in the upper upper left you'll see here's the option to change your stroke you'll also notice over here on the far right in my appearance and properties panel you'll see here it is to be able to change the width of our strokes so let's just do that again from my circle and i'll do it this time i'll bring this up up up and this time i'm going to change the color of my stroke to something very different let's make that yellow and click ok and pretty cool now i'm able to see okay cool i can manipulate shapes in a variety of different ways i can draw my shapes i can choose my fill color i can choose my stroke then i can manipulate it afterwards and then i can manipulate the stroke width and the stroke color all right so we learned about how to draw a number of different shapes now why is this important for when you're working in illustrator for many people working with shapes is the building block for just basically creating your characters right it could be an icon it could be so many so many different things like looking at our avocado like this started off as a circle and our pit started off as a circle and you see we just kind of built around that notice how there's this label as a square this bottle started off as a certain way and we're going to learn how we can do some of these things even make rounded corners and do all kinds of other things in just a little bit so these are the basics of our shapes pause the video practice up and we'll see you in the next lesson so as we've seen so far shapes are definitely definitely a necessary part of your design of any kind of project you're working on documents big or small just for a variety of different reasons just to maybe frame things for visual interest for decoration whatever it is okay now drawing out your shapes there is more nuance than just simply clicking and dragging and illustrator gives you a lot of pretty neat shortcuts to be able to accomplish a variety of different goals and they're a little bit hidden as are a lot of the shapes that we have access to so we can see here of course we have all of our basic shapes and we also have some other ones right that you may not have noticed before like our spiral tool our grid tool our polar grid tool so let's now discuss some of these little nuances so for example let's say i want to draw out a perfect circle going concentrically from the middle so i'm going to go over to here to my ellipse tool and i want to draw this out concentrically from the center of this circle of this shape so we're going to add on another modifier which is the alt option key while holding down the shift key so i'm going to move my mouse right here to the center and then i'm just going to hold down the alt option key and then bam look at that see it grows out from the center i let go and you can see perfect okay and of course i'd want to fill that in so i can really see it okay lovely amazing okay we're gonna learn how to work with guides and grids and stuff um in future lessons to really make that where we start off in a perfect place but for right now just understand that's pretty neat let me do that one more time and i'm gonna just this time do it with a square and what am i doing again it's a perfect square because i'm holding on the shift key and it grows out from the center because i'm holding down the alt or option key okay so i'll do that again bam bam and let's just see watch it grow amazing love that that is so cool all right now let's go ahead and explore some other features so let's go over here to my star tool watch what happens now when i click and drag out from here and then notice how i'm getting a certain number of spikes so watch what happens when i hit the up arrow whoa that's so cool the down arrow very cool right so what are you trying to get so the arrow key is allowing me to now manipulate how many spikes i'm getting on my star right really really easy to do but incredibly valuable for being efficient and also being a little more creative okay so try those little nuances okay so in that same vein using our keyboard shortcuts or up down and arrows let's go ahead and just explore some other ones here like the spiral tool relatively basic right so watch what happens now as i click and drag actually before do that let's make sure that i have some kind of thing to work with so let's make this a little bit bigger i'm going to make it so it has no spill right there thank you very much okay now if i click and drag now notice i can just click and drag to get my spiral in such a certain way but now if i hit the up arrow see that i can actually make it much much more spirally okay and i can make it go further out like that or come in like that whatever you're trying to do pretty neat and there you go okay and then of course you can play around with brush strokes on this you can play around with your strokes in general you can do all kinds of different things we're going to learn about in future lessons but you'll see how neat that is with some modifiers let's try some other ones let's go over here to our rectangular grid tool really good for organizing your content in a very structured way but as the name implies it's going to create sort of like a table if you will but how does it create a certain number of rows and columns is really up to us if i click and drag now notice what i'm doing here with my keyboard i'm going to go up up up and what is that doing adding on more rows taking away rows go to the right adding on more columns okay so wow pretty cool pretty quickly and easily and you can see very nice now i can just structure my content however i please that way all right and then let's now just talk about the polar grid and that is going to be right underneath here and then this one is a little more kind of detailed if you will but still pretty cool nonetheless okay so let me go ahead and draw out my polar grid and you'll see as i go up up up see that how it adds on kind of more sort of latitude lines i go down down down just like that or look at my little pie segments now more or less see that so what are you trying to create and now i can kind of make it just very simple to do whatever i like okay so you have all the creativity in the world to be able to do something very very detailed okay and then of course i can fill this in maybe i'm going to add on a stroke maybe a thicker stroke you can see how it sees every single one of these lines and the shape and everything like that as one unit okay so it's pretty extraordinary like how we can execute something so complex so easily all right so you want to practice all these right so just know that there's a lot of tips and tricks sort of under the hood by adding on little modifiers like our alt key or option key on the mac our shift key then also try to put it out there where you're going to then use the up arrow key and the down arrow key just to explore and see what happens all right but then the last thing i want you to do and again this is going to be just sort of like a cultural thing if you will is always remember just to double click on an icon within illustrator to see what options sort of like live underneath there that may give you more options than you realize and also help you execute a little faster so for example if i go ahead and double click on the polar grid here you'll see oh this is giving me a number of different options if you know exactly how many concentric dividers you want how many radial dividers you want you can play around with that here however you want you want to fill in the grid right yes or no so you want to play around with all of these because many of these options including our rectangular grid and we saw from our star earlier they all have other options kind of like living underneath there okay so highly highly encourage you to experiment have fun and we'll see you in the next lesson in this lesson we're going to discuss the direct selection tool in a little bit more detail and just see what it can do for us um in terms of just being able to manipulate our shapes in a little more kind of like nuanced way right we've discussed a little bit about how we comparing our regular selection tool and our direct selection tool now let's really see it in action so we have this nice little beautiful shape here and i'm just going to simply click on my shape and you'll notice here okay great these little anchor points now appear see that anchor point anchor point there's another anchor point there okay that's great now what do they do for us i want you to notice that when i click on this little anchor point right here i'm gonna get these little handles that appear here click on that one handles that appear here click on this one no handles huh interesting how about this one hmm what about this one way down below no handles what is the difference between all these ones that i've just selected one is a curve and one is not right it's just a corner so illustrator will treat each of these a little bit differently depending on the type of line or the type of shape that in fact is so let's go with something very easy and obvious to work with here is a very very obvious just little corner that i can work with right so if i wanted to now manipulate this and just that point right there if i click on this i want you to notice how this becomes dark blue just like that you see that that is now showing me that that point is now selected and because i have the direct selection tool chosen i can now manipulate this right so i click and drag and then wow look at that how cool let's try this one i'm just going to marquee over that sometimes that's easier and then bam i can make this go crazy just like that awesome fantastic i love that so cool just kind of treat it like taffy now you'll notice that the one down here right below it is not a corner so it has a little curve so therefore when i click on it i'm going to get these little handles here okay so again taking a look at these little handles here you will see that they're going to give us some power over these individual curves these handles are known as bezier handles and they're going to allow you to control the direction and the magnitude and the degree of the curve as you click on these right so if i click and drag on this little guy right here you'll notice how my curve can go out like that or in like this if you want to pretty cool come into here and this time i'm actually going to bring this inward i'm not just going to click and drag in a circle i'm just actually going to bring it in so it's a little shorter so that actually affects how my curve goes right so you'll notice that as i'm moving in my curve then reflects that right you see that how my curve now reflects that now it does it on both sides we're going to explore how we can kind of manipulate that a little bit more but at this point it's really about controlling how these guys work as you move them around so let's just now do another one let's come over here to our heart and let's just see one more or i'm just going to drag this up or drag this back up okay and you'll see also how these lines how they compare with each other makes this more symmetrical now these guys also have something in the middle and the one you see the one in the middle the little path point it's very similar to how it works when you're working with just a regular corner is that it's a lot more intuitive where you can just kind of move it up and down okay but it stays with the curve and then you can also make it more concave or more convex however you want to do that you can go to the left you can go to the right okay you have all that kind of control to manipulate the shape and because this is a vector shape guess what it doesn't get pixelated at all so i can make this just go totally crazy go excuse me go in this direction and just drag that sorry just make sure you have the actual anchor point chosen and just click and drag outwards like that great and now i can just go nuts all right so this is a nice basic overview of how we work with the direct selection tool and if we come back to our shapes here maybe something a little bit easier to work with let me go over to my star and let's say i want to manipulate this little point to go up very simply select that come over to here select that come over to here maybe i'm going to make this come inward come in like that okay that's great okay i have this come in again select it make sure it is solid blue and make this go out and i'm really starting to kind of come together maybe this is going to go in like this so you can really just start to customize this however you like but it's really important that you are selecting your individual anchor point using the direct selection tool to then be able to manipulate it accordingly however you like now we're only now working with what with our our corner points but let's say for example i'm working with this shape right here and i want to manipulate this to like start making a face so i click on that all i got to do now is click and drag this down and there i am okay so now i've got an alien right or maybe i got a guitar pick you know so it's just like okay it started off as a circle and now it's something completely different okay and these shapes are obviously very basic and the shapes that we're working with here relatively basic and we come over here to these you'll see that sometimes they're going to be a little bit more complex so if i go back to my direct selection tool i choose this and you say okay wow there's a lot of anchor points here you know so i might want to manipulate these in such a way and i have the option to because i have all these little individual anchor points to work with all right so as we start moving forward and start drawing things out in a more complex way we're going to learn about how anchor points really work for us how we can add anchor points how we can remove anchor points etc okay at this point i really want you just understand how we can work with the selection tool to be able to manipulate it then once we start drawing it out then you're going to use a combination of shapes our direct selection tool and guess what the pen tool and the pencil tool all right so pause the video practice this get incredibly comfortable with the direct selection tool because it is something you're going to be using a lot a lot a lot in this lesson we're going to talk about how we can work with scaling and maybe a little bit more sort of precise way all right so you've probably already seen how i can just select an object and i can scale this right so if i just hold down my shift key and click and drag from the corners great i can do that fantastic i can do that same thing and notice how they're all individual layers i can select them and my bounding box comes up wonderful now you do have some other scaling tools that you can work with so if i right click over here you're going to see that there is rotate scale reflect etc we're just going to work with scale for right now notice the keyboard shortcut is simply just s so that's pretty cool so i'm just right there so if i just hit v takes me back to my move tool if i hit s that takes me right to my scaling tool now what's nice about this is that i could be anywhere on the screen here and then watch what happens when i hold down my shift key and just click and drag i don't actually have to like touch it i'm just like automatically inside there okay it's great make sure i'm not holding on the shift key in this case right because it's automatically set to do that and bam there you are i can go ahead and resize this however i want not even touching the graphic pretty cool let's now do this guy here and this time so i don't leave the scale tool i just held down the control key for a split second or the command key on the mac to be able to activate this okay so hopefully that makes sense right because now i'll look at this i'm back in my scale tool without having to do anything at all and then i'm going to now just click and drag and then he is now bigger he is now smaller see that bam bam just like that let's do the same thing with this one hold down the command or control key to then release selection of this and then simply click on a new object and now i can just do my thing clicking and dragging just like that okay so pretty cool now i've created kind of some scale and some vantage points okay some perspective this guy looks like he's way in the back all right very nice all right so that's kind of your basics of scaling i mean it's really really kind of easy to work with right and then it's an easy one to remember as far as your keyboard shortcuts now you will also see like we've seen in some of the other tools including the eyedropper and the magic wand is that if you double click on this you're going to get a whole bunch of options here in case you wanted to work with these right so if you wanted to actually know your exact amount that you're going to actually like make it bigger this is 135 bigger than it was before or maybe that your vertical and your horizontal are going to be a bit different you can do that if things are not coming in the way that you want to and in terms of your scale and your strokes you can say hey don't scale in this way or do scale in this way because sometimes if you got scales those are going to get excuse me sometimes if you have strokes those are going to get too big you still want it to be as one you can say hey don't do that so therefore you'll be fine okay so therefore you won't lose that and then you can always preview it based off of what you have here okay based off of what you've chosen now there's another really cool thing we get into this a little bit more in my advanced class is the ability to copy so maybe you don't want to make any changes to this particular one but you want a copy of this pretty neat that you can do this so if i just say uniform and this time this is going to be let's just say 80 percent and then i say copy notice what that does i now have a new one that's separated out from my other guy there okay so pretty cool so it's not just a basic scaling thing it gives me the option to guess what i can duplicate it and also resize it all the same okay so a lot more nuance than you might realize so remember use the scale tool use your keyboard shortcuts and then go where you need to go accordingly as far as resizing it and then double click on it to go a little bit deeper if you like alright so pause the video practice that and we'll see in the next lesson now we just talked about the scaling tool within this same little family is also the rotate tool and we've seen how we can rotate very easily just by simply clicking on it and i can come to my corners here and i can rotate this no problem so maybe that's all you like okay that's great but now let's go ahead and see if we can do it a slightly different way i right click on this notice here is the rotate tool notice also the letter r if i want to activate that so again if i just hit r that will switch over to rotate and i can be anywhere i want right on here i don't have to touch it right i could just be right over here and then now look at that upside down donkey all right go that way all right great wonderful fantastic let me go and do the same thing with this little guy here hold down the control key to deselect this at the same time select this one then at the same time still stay in my rotate tool and then bam there i go all right so love that that's pretty cool but let's say i don't want it to rotate exactly how it's been rotating like because you notice here it's rotating right from that center sort of fulcrum right so i don't necessarily want that okay so i might want to do it a little bit of a different way so what i'm going to do is hold down the option or alt key and just simply click in the corner of where i want it to be and two things happen number one that little center point of where it's going to rotate around then moves over here and then it gives me the option to now even rotate it if i want to be able to see what that's going to do okay it's pretty cool so maybe i want his feet to always remain the same right where they are i want to do that all right and then also notice here i can copy it right so then therefore i can have like several of these in a future lesson in my advanced class we're going to learn how to build a mandala or a flower or whatever you want it to be and we're going to learn how we can actually rotate and copy at the same time so it's pretty neat let me cancel this and you'll notice that my little fulcrum there is still there and i can still do that manually i don't need to actually have that dialog box up and now bam there it is and his feet remain the same okay so again a lot more than meets the eye when you go into your rotate tool and also your scale tool and of course if you double click same thing as what we just saw earlier it pops right up okay so that double clicking is kind of unusual within illustrator that you don't see it in other programs so you want to just kind of experiment just say hey what would happen if i double clicked here what would happen if i double click and then bam you'll be very surprised pleasantly to see all the options you have there all right pause the video practice that either on this document or anything else that you have available okay see you in the next lesson in the next few lessons we're going to learn how to draw this avocado but now before we start getting our hands dirty with that let's have a nice little overview of how we work with layers to help us better organize our content now if you don't have the layers panel up already go over here to window and then bring up layers and then what i'm going to do is i'm just going to bring layers out here so we can all see it together and this particular document has one two three main layers because i have my three little artboards there all right we'll talk more about our boards in a little bit but i want you to see okay that's very good so i have these here now if i click on this little flyout menu here it's going to open this up to what the content is of that particular layer now this is just known as layer 4. now understand how illustrator works is that when you start creating new things in a particular layer it just creates new content within that layer essentially like little sub layers get automatically created so many people when they create something they never actually add on an additional official layer what illustrator calls a layer but new content that gets generated so for many of you you may only be looking at things that just have like one layer just like this and you have a lot of stuff inside of it okay and it's still called layer one but there's a lot of content inside of there okay up to you how you wanna organize things i like to be nice and structured with things i wanna name these i also wanna maybe group them potentially and you want to separate things out that might be type you know maybe bitmaps maybe your logo images whatever it's going to be you're going to give it some some context and some structure so what i'm going to do is i'm going to rename this by double clicking on it and i'm just going to say all right very good fantastic and then i have a nice little grouping here okay everything is grouped together as one and by the way grouping is pretty easy i'll just kind of give you a nice little quick overview of grouping while we're here let's say i want to group these together i'm just going to go ahead and just hold down my shift key select this and if you just right click on it you'll see i can group these together and then therefore these are now grouped you can also just simply select two items and then just do command or control g on your keyboard okay so g for group all right so just a little sidebar there all right and then they will become grouped in your layers panel as well all right now i want you to understand about when you're working with layers i want you to notice this little area right there okay that's telling me what in fact is selected you may think that something is selected just by virtue of you clicking on the actual layer itself but in fact this is not selected but when i click on this little guy right there notice this gets selected see how i have this little circle there that will actually select the objects on that layer so watch what happens again i click on the avocado is that selected no it looks like it is but when i click on the circle watch this see that all the content gets selected in that layer itself or whatever we have going on there notice how that's all selected okay it's all group so that makes it easier all right so just understand that because that can be a little bit confusing for folks all right so notice also how they all have different colors associated with them so if i go over here and i double click on this next to where it says avocado this is going to give me a whole bunch of layer options okay you'll see how this is a nice pretty color blue this is also blue my bounding box because that is in fact my layering color so it tells me the bounding box is the same color as this layer cool so i know what i've just selected right and of course you can change these to lots and lots of other colors all right of course you can change the name of it as well down below you're going to have a whole bunch of options here that you can now control of okay this is the layer i just created is this going to be a template layer oh my god look what happens when i make something a template layer it actually makes it so the image becomes dimmed it becomes locked it is showed it is preview but it's not going to be printed oh let me just unclick that and then okay that's pretty cool because it's going to automatically do a whole bunch of things when would i make something into a template layer let's say i want to trace this you know which we're going to do in a little bit and i want to be able to say hey listen let's make this look exactly like what's underneath here because it's a bitmap image i got it from someplace else maybe you drew it yourself and you want to be able to trace it and then make it vector you can easily do that by making something a template and then that will dim it to whatever so it's kind of hiding in the background then you have all these other options here in terms of do you want to show it do you want it to be previewed right inside of the layer itself do you want to be locked and when you do print it do you want to be printed okay so just know what your options here i'm going to click okay i'm going to keep it as it was before because i want you to notice that within my layers panel i have the option to actually turn off the visibility that's essentially the same thing as when you said show and that's going to make it disappear just because maybe it's getting in the way i just want it to go away this is going to guess what lock it if i wanted to lock it right here from within the layers panel i can do that and then when i try to click it can't do it can't do it can't do it now when i unlock it now absolutely i can do that all right so you might want to do that with other things again that are competing with whatever objects you are working with all right now you'll also notice that here's another option down below that you may want to create a new layer altogether for yourself right so i'm going to create one just called type so i click on that and now i double click on this i'm just going to say type that's great and then i double click again to change the color because i don't want it to be any of these other colors here so so far i got blue and i got green and i got red let's now make one that's just kind of um pink okay and click okay and now that's gonna be pink whenever i select it fantastic that's great and now whatever i do now while this layer is selected it's gonna end up on this layer okay pretty straightforward right that's pretty cool so if i typed just go do a quick little type here all right i'm going to say yummy all right and there's obviously way too small okay there we go all right i'm just using a keyboard charcoal that i'll teach you later on to be able to make that nice and big but you can see there it is my little color there let's come there and then notice it's going to be right there fantastic it's inside of there love that pretty cool starting my layer management right now sometimes you want to move things around from layer to layer so and you're going to want to do that for a number of reasons number one is for organization purposes because it just belongs someplace else right it's like okay you know what i accidentally drew it inside of the text layer and it needs to be in the avocado layer oops what do i do okay or it actually went into the template layer i didn't want to do that it needs to be on its own layer so it's really easy to get these things out so let me just show you let's say i wanted to bring this type or this yummy inside of avocado very simply i click and drag on the circle and just bring it down below there you go and now here it is inside of the avocado let's bring that back select it bring this back up and now it's inside of type okay so really nice really straightforward super important to do the other time you might want to do this is when you have a um what we call a range or for our layering if we don't want things to be above or below something we would actually work with how things are arranged on here right so let's just say for example i wanted yummy to be behind this i could now move this entire layer below and now you can see it's actually below my avocado all right so definitely important stuff not the most glamorous of all things in illustrator but it is an absolute must to really understand how layers work layer management um why we work with layers etc all right so the last thing i'm going to do here is just simply get rid of this layer i don't need it right now so guess what there is my little trash can i click on that are you sure you want to i'm going to say yes great and it is gone all right so practice that really get to know your layers stay organized with your content practice pause the video and we'll see you in the next lesson now this avocado has certain colors associated with it so before i even start drawing my shapes i would like to have these colors readily available and saved so what i'm going to do is i'm going to work with my swatches to save my colors okay so if you bring up your swatches panel under window and then you go over here to swatches you'll see i have a number of different saved colors preset from illustrator okay great but what i want to do is i want to actually save these colors so i can easily access them when i draw it myself so very simple process what we're going to do now is simply go over to here to a new tool that we have not worked with yet it's called the eye dropper tool okay notice the eyedropper tool what does an eyedropper do it basically just sucks things up so with that chosen i'm going to go over here to this little color and you'll notice that my swatches panel now has that color available for me and very simply i'm just going to drag that down here into my swatches and it's good to go how cool is that now i can also move this other places we're going to talk about how we can get organized in just a little bit but let me just start grabbing some other colors as well so eyedropper let's grab that guy and wonderful let's go ahead and grab this guy how easy is that so let me just drag that down very cool and now let's get this color and then just drag that down love that and let's get this color and drag that down wait for my plus sign and okay and that should be enough for us because what we're going to do is we're going to have some of these guys overlap and you're going to see how the colors are going to come together accordingly all right now like i said i'd like to organize all of my my avocado colors into kind of their own thing so if you select one and then you hold down the shift key and come over to here you see where it says new color group click on that i'm just going to call this avo colors and now bam there that is ready to go and when i'm ready to draw something out you'll notice i'm just going to close this out let's just say i'm ready to draw out a shape of sorts let's go back to my shape options where are you shape and you'll see here when i click on the drop down you can see all my avocado colors are right there ready to go alright so pause the video use this file and then save some of your colors that you want to use for your swatches and then also make a group out of it we've talked about color so far where we have created our colors from the color picker and we've also saved some swatches where we saved all of our swatches for our individual avocado colors but now let's go a little bit deeper where we're going to work with global colors right so global colors are going to allow us to make kind of a universal change that's going to link up to those colors okay so let's just see what i mean by that so let's just say for example i wanted this color to be let's just make it up here it's going to come over to here and that's great that's wonderful and now i'm going to bring this into my swatches panel let's go there that's fantastic but now when i move my mouse over it you'll see number one it doesn't have a name and number two it is not what we call a global color so if i double click on this now you're gonna see here there's no name for it okay and also the color mode was not accurate so i'm going to first change the color mode to cmyk before it was in rgb and i'm also going to call this something what i want to call it crimson red and then i'm going to choose global you're going to see what that means in just a few seconds so i'm going to click ok that's great and now i'm going to go over to here and then choose that and this time i'm going to hold down the shift key choose that one and that one great love that looks very cool but then somebody comes along and says oh you know what we're not using that one anymore we're we're doing a totally different color and um sorry you just you just gotta change everything it's like ah man well guess what because i have made this into a global color and you'll notice actually if you zoom in a little bit you'll see that little triangle there as a result of me working with the global color i'm able to do guess what i'm going to change this and notice this is crimson red okay and then let's go back to my cmyk still crimson red and then watch this as i change this to be something completely different i can click preview to see it and say oh that's pretty cool but i'm gonna turn that off again and watch this click okay what that is so cool because i said global okay that allowed it it likes to switch back so just be aware of that because usually it's the color space that you start with right so i was not inside of rgb i'm in cmyk now okay so just keep in mind keep an eye on that but the key thing here is the fact that i chose global and i create my color it's gonna make it so everything that had this crimson red associated with it will then be changed all right now if i come back over to here and then i'm just going to change this to [Music] army green right and again come back over to here make sure that's global good wonderful and let's do that one more time because it's so fun let me just change that now to this click okay and just like that very cool keep in mind there's a lot we can do with our colors choosing our colors from the color picker making them into swatches so we can use them again and again they're saved then we can also group them like we did with our avocado and then you can name them and then also make them into global colors so that way they're linked up when you want to make a change you can change it on a global level across the board so everything's linked up all right so pause the video practice that and we'll come back in our next lesson we're going to learn about how to make patterns so working with colors can definitely give us a little bit of texture right where we can see just adding on colors and different types of colors is super important we're going to talk about gradients in a little bit but working with patterns can be something that can really give you a lot of flavor especially if you're a clothing designer or any kind of real designer that you want to have something a little bit unique now i'm going to make a pattern based off of something i already have here illustrator gives you the ability to make patterns that are custom based off of something that you've already created and you can blend them all together to be able to do this so you'll notice here i have all of these little vector images right that i can now select okay that's great fantastic and i'm going to make a pattern out of these okay so you'll also notice that i can just do this and that's great they're all selected okay that's just with my regular selection tool now how do i make this into a pattern very simply we're going to go over here to object we're going to come way down to pattern and we're going to say make i know strange language but i do that and as soon as i click on that you're going to see it says the new pattern has been added to the swatches panel very cool any changes while in the pattern editing mode will be applied to the swatch upon exit okay that's great what does that mean oh that's what they're referring to that just came out of nowhere so i click ok and now whoa my screen just goes nuts on me so first thing i'm going to do before i even explain anything is let me just make a name for this okay so i'm just going to call this flower that's great and you'll see essentially what this craziness is showing me is what my pattern is going to look like so just imagine this big page i had here this is giving me a nice little preview of it this is where i started from this is my original but i'm able to see okay this is what it might look like on this blank document okay you'll also notice that this is the beginning of my pattern this is where it's going to be saved inside of my swatches panel right there so that's pretty cool so i can access that anytime i want now let's just check out some of the options that i have here to be able to play around with what i have here what i've selected because maybe i like what i did but i also want to kind of manipulate it a little bit so it's maybe just not as you know linear you know want to be a little more random a little more dynamic so when i click on this area here for tile type you can see here you can now manipulate them so they're going to be a slightly different layout and structure so keep your eye on some of the shapes when i do this you'll see oh okay things just kind of shifted around a little bit didn't they let's try a different one okay oh okay interesting so as you're doing that things are just kind of getting offset more or less kind of from the center all right now we can take a look at some of these options here you'll notice here i can now make this uh let's just say two inches okay and then notice how the width is getting a little bit wider some of these let's just make this 1.5 okay and you'll notice okay they're kind of a little bit further away from each other let's actually go i'll even smaller through that oh that's interesting a little bit of a different shape right so you'll see here how it's now becoming from length from portrait excuse me from landscape to portrait so really depending on what you want so let me just do again three and then let's do two and then let me say size tile to art and then oh okay you know what maybe i want to bring that back to where it was okay now i'm gonna uncheck that and see what other options i can do to give me a little more control on this so let me just make this again a little bit wider i'm going to say 2.2 and you see okay that makes it kind of go that way but now i could now move this over here if i want to and just notice how everything kind of shifts i can actually manipulate the individual parts if i want to see that that goes over there and then if i want to i can then say size tile to art and then it expands out that much more okay then you also have here your h spacing your horizontal spacing and your vertical spacing let's see what that does let's just bring this up like half an inch you can see okay great that's my h-spacing it's making things a little bit wider making things kind of split apart a bit let's make this my b spacing also same thing all right maybe you want to have a little less crowded you can absolutely do that as you apply your pattern all right so let me come back to this bring that in here and let's just maybe overlap these a little bit see what that does let's bring this back to zero and zero and then okay now you can see all right kind of interesting play around with things however you like now this last part is going to be about your overlapping right so you can see how this these guys overlap with each other a little bit if you don't want this to overlap with that you can actually change that a little bit by kind of making different ones overlap whatever's going to be in front or back right depending on where the layering is right in your patterns already okay so you'll watch how kind of some of these will then go above or below so just kind of move this around and just watch how everything changes it's going to give me the opportunity to then play around with however i want how everything's going to go accordingly i can even make this bigger and watch again how everything changes and of course i want to i can even change the color of this if i like all right so now i'm going to close this out go over here i'm going to say done i'm going over here in the far far far upper left i'm going to say done and now what's happened now not a whole lot except for the fact i now have a new pattern all right if you move your mouse over it but you're going to see here it's going to be right over here move your mouse over it should tell you this is my flower okay so now when i click on this i'm gonna click on flower and now amazing now i have this great pattern that i created that i could easily also recreate in a very different way okay but you can see how amazing that is right how cool that i just created this and now it's applying it across the board here now how do i manipulate this it's very simply just come back over here double click it oh my god and i'm right back to where i was and then i can very easily now okay let's just try something else again all right cool and that changes click done and now everything that was on there before has now shifted as a result okay because it's all linked up to this okay so you'll want to choose your own patterns whatever you've got creating on there and just just go to town and just see what you can do but making the pattern is quite simple manipulating it it's really kind of a trial and error thing and then bring it in if you don't like it you can always change it after the fact okay so pause the video practice that and then find the the files inside of our courseware and we'll see you in the next video i'd like to explain something very briefly uh called the expand option that you're going to see in illustrator quite a bit right now what we're looking at here is just a very simple stroke now this stroke happens to have a 200 point stroke on here like what oh my god i can see that there's that line we've done something like this before and you'll see okay that's great and i can make this smaller i can make it bigger and you can see it just makes it bigger or smaller let's bring this down to just like 18 okay great i'm going to undo that undo that bring it back to where i was great so you can see no tricks up our sleeve this is just a very simple stroke but now what if i want to do some things to this like i wanted to actually like fill this and actually put another stroke around this and do all kinds of different things maybe i want to put a gradient inside of this i can't really do that when it's a stroke i don't really have the kind of flexibility and functionality as much as i would if this were a shape okay so i want to convert this to a shape and that's essentially what expanding or expanding the appearance is going to allow us to do so how do we do that when i click on object way up on top here you're going to see there's this option to expand so essentially what it's going to do is going to convert this which is now a stroke into a fill so i click ok and now very simply you'll notice i get all of these little anchor points here because this is now one big shape no longer a stroke okay then i'm going to have the ability to actually put a stroke around this and do all kinds of wonderful things that's going to give me you know a little more creativity and a little more functionality a little more options to work with okay because now it's a shape so many times things are starting off as one type of object using one type of of element but you want to expand it out so that it becomes a shape to give you a lot more functionality all right so we're going to use this exact same shape to discuss gradients so if you haven't gotten to do this yet pause the video take this shape that we have here inside of our gradient strokes image and then make it into expand it into a shape and then we'll come back and do gradients now as promised we are going to discuss gradients this is going to be the first of two discussions on gradients now what is a gradient gradient is just one color that blends into another color and then it puts a whole bunch of colors in between okay so you can see over here in the far upper right of my window here if you zoom in you're going to see i've got a few different kind of default gradients that i can apply from my swatches panel we're not going to do that because i want to be able to create it from scratch and show you how that works so you will see over here in the lower left of my tools panel let's go way over here you're going to see there's this option to apply a gradient you'll see to the left of that is just my apply color here is applied gradient and here is apply no color at all so let's choose the shape that we just created and i'm going to simply just click on this gradient and you'll see just like that a few things happen it now applies its default gradient which is just essentially black to white which essentially just fills it in black to gray to white that's what a gradient is okay another thing that happens is my gradient panel now automatically opens up which is pretty cool i kind of like that now if you don't see the gradient panel for whatever reason if it doesn't show up you can always go to window and choose gradient and then bam that pops right up fantastic now let's see what we can do to get the gradient that we want so you'll see that there are a few different types of gradients we can work with there is the linear gradient there is the radial gradient and there's also the free form gradient which we're going to do in another lesson now you can see if i click on the drop down they've got some preset gradients for me that i can work with i can simply click on that oh that's pretty neat go to there all right that's pretty cool great so you know if you're working on something like that where you're just like hey i want to have a gradient that's going to be like a nice blue sky or an ocean something like that you can see the settings are already there for you i'm going to go back to my white and black and you'll also see that down below i can now change the angle of my gradient to say that you'll see how that changes let's go to 180 see how that changes okay pretty neat and then you'll also see how i can change these two options here which are my different colors so if i want to change the colors of this if i double click now you're going to see this little window pops up and because this is just white i don't get a whole lot of options here except for black and white so what i have to do is click on my little flyout menu here and then i'm going to go to cmyk then all my colors now appear and i'm going to make this let's just go over here to red that's great and then i'm going to go over to here again double click and then let's make that go to green all right and you can see i'm going from red to red red to red to less red to more green okay great or if i want to choose my color exactly maybe i want to do like bright red to dark red okay kind of interesting but i'm going to play around with this a little bit more by using this little diamond here to say hey listen i want a little more of this kind of like darker red or maybe you want a little bit of that okay so you have a little bit of texture so you can see what the gradient is doing for me let's now apply a slightly different kind of gradient which is going to be a radial gradient i choose that and then i'm going to go ahead and just maybe have some different colors here so i'm going to come over to here and i'm going to choose let's just say a lighter blue here and then i'm going to choose a darker blue so let's go to here and we'll see oh that's kind of interesting so now i'm starting to see what the difference is what is the difference linear gradient it just does like a line right very simple line and depending on the angle you choose that is going to make it go where it goes right so it's going to go 45 degrees the line is going to be 45 degrees a radial gradient is just a rounded thing you can see how it's starting from the middle and it's going outward just like that okay now let's say i kind of like this but it's not exactly what i want all right i want to have more control over my gradient how can i do that there is this really awesome tool called the gradient tool just like that looks like a little black to white gradient so what i'm going to do now is now manipulate this simply by clicking on the gradient tool and guess what all i need to do is just start clicking and dragging where i want it to begin and end see that i'm going to start over here this time i have a little more subtle thing here maybe i'm going to go over to here okay i'm going to start in the middle here and then kind of just have it like a little blast off thing all right that's kind of interesting right let me try that now with my linear gradient you'll see i could do the same exact thing let's just have it go from here to here oh i kind of like that maybe i'll just do it from here to there okay interesting but again i'm still not satisfied because what i'm trying to do maybe is have something a little bit more kind of complex so i can actually add on more gradient colors to this if i want to so i can literally just click anywhere on here to add on what we call gradient stops if you like so i'm just going to click click click ok that's great and let's just play around see we can do adding on some more things here so let's go from a very very light blue just bring that down to maybe a little bit less light all right so just kind of inch that down okay and then maybe just for fun i'll just kind of throw in a little bit of a hue see what that does okay and now let's go a little bit more of that okay interesting kind of liking this all right and now kind of like that all right let's just see what that does now after i experiment with now with my gradient tool let's go from top all the way to the bottom and now you can see i've created this cool little sky i like that and now it's kind of coming right into like the ocean for example if i go the opposite direction notice what that does right very different maybe if i stop right here i'm still going to get a little bit of that dark blue and you see they're good enough to show me let me just back out a little bit they're good enough to show me what these individual colors are right that i'm working with here so if you wanted to change those you can simply click on them and then notice there we are and then you can change that to something completely different okay so there's really really a lot you can do with this okay by with gradients you can be super creative of course you don't want to go over the top but you know gradients a lot of times they have a purpose you know you can be like illustrating with it but many times you might have a gradient that's going to be just sort of like a background for something you know you might just want to have like just a gradient as a shape let me just find my shapes so i'll just do something like this and i'm just going to put it as a nice little background so i'll be able to see it underneath my avocado base here okay let me just bring that down into this layer and let me go out and just unlock these unlock that and then bring that all the way down so i can see it inside of here let's bring that way down below great now that looks pretty cool but let's just have a little bit of texture here so i can just make this shape here into a nice little gradient so making sure nothing is selected of course except for my backdrop there and just making sure that only this is selected very good very important and i click on that and all right on my way but not exactly what i want so i go over here to my radial gradient and you can see how it's now starting to kind of form a little bit of a sort of a halo around it to kind of really draw the eyes of my user right into it so i can choose different colors i want to and go over here to my cmyk and then maybe i have these saved someplace but let's just do a little bit of dark green and then over here i'll make this a little bit more on the wider side all right and guess what i can do next is i can reverse it so i'm going to reverse it just by going over to here and now oh okay kind of like that again that's a nice little halo effect and maybe i want a little bit more of that halo i can do that so i click on this and go to my gradient tool and then just get a little bit more light or a little less light just playing around however you like okay and then making sure when you make your selection that only the object you like is selected so therefore i don't get accidentally get everything else here so i can now just manipulate this just a tiny bit you can see that pretty cool just like shining a little bit of light on that so just think about if you had a model if you had a logo if you had you know a product that you're selling that working with a gradient of that's a radial can actually just draw some attention to that object you know but very subtle it's like a little halo okay so practice that a little bit when we come back we're going to work with a free form gradient so so far we've talked about two different types of gradients both our linear gradient and also our radial gradient okay so the linear is just going to go in a straight line but all kinds of different angles if you want and the radial gradient is going to be rounded right so you can see how we can go from the center and outward and also you can reverse it and again you can play around with it using the actual grading tool to just manipulate the direction and the magnitude of where it's going to go in this lesson we're going to learn about the amazing free form gradient and that's going to give you all kinds of different control over where you want your gradient to be and to the certain extent of where you want it to be all right now i'm looking at this ocean where there's a map there and i want to be able to manipulate this so it's going to really look like a map would look where there's going to be kind of maybe darker waters around here lighter waters out here whatever it is so let's see how i do that making sure that my gradients panel is up go over here to window go over here to gradient bring that up fantastic and remember earlier we talked about these first two and i promise you we talk about this third one which is the free form gradient so as soon as i click on that you'll see everything on this background now turns into something that i didn't really ask for okay let's not worry about that because we're going to be able to change that no problem so i'm gonna now just start clicking on all these different places of where i think i want the different kind of colors to be don't worry about getting it perfect for right now okay great now you'll notice also if i decide i don't want these anymore i could just go ahead and select them and then hit delete you get some extra ones there just hit delete and they're gone you can also move these around move this one closer okay and you'll notice as i'm doing that the color also changes of whatever that gradient is now these are not my favorite colors this is not what the ocean looks like let's hope not the ocean doesn't look like where you live so what i'm going to do is now actually change this to what i want so if you double click on this now you're going to see it's going to take me to my color picker essentially so i can now choose this color oh i love that that is fantastic okay great and you'll notice what it does you'll see that i go from this kind of whatever blue outwards out like that so you can say oh okay pretty neat so let's go ahead and double click on that again say all right very cool i can change that if i like so let's go ahead and do one more time let's now choose that same ish kind of color but let's maybe come in a little bit closer to here and we'll see what that does you'll see as these kind of move around they're kind of blending in with each other so the gradient goes from one color and it pays attention to the other colors near it so let's just watch this okay all right nice i can see what you're doing there okay let's go back to this one and let's try some more maybe do a slightly different way just to really kind of get the feel for like what the tool does and then maybe i'll move this one a little bit closer and this one's going to be darker than the rest of them because maybe when it's by land it's going to be different wow that is really cool adding on some pretty cool texture so let's go over to here and this might be a little bit lighter but i still want it to be blue and i want it to blend in with whatever's next to it again free form so i'll just finish this off just come over to here and then simply double click on it and just find the color you like just picking and choosing whatever's going to work for you don't worry about it if it's not perfect all right and let's do a little bit more simply double click all right now sometimes you might want these to kind of be spread out a little more sort of diffuse so if you'll notice here on the outside of this is the option for me to now spread this out or bring it in see how it changes so you can see how it becomes a little bit more kind of spread out so let me bring this over here we'll see what that does bring that over there see what that does maybe come out we'll go in let's do some more notice how they're all talking to each other and let's do one more and then guess what i can also choose it from my swatches if i have a save swatch all right and this one probably doesn't belong it's kind of manipulating things a little bit get rid of that one all right and look at what we did look at where we started compared to where we are right now really gives you all kinds of control and this could really be on anything this is just a map that we've chosen here but this could be just like you know an animal it could be a flag it could be just a logo whatever kind of creativity you want to do right so i mean just really start to think about this you know this is just a lot of the similar colors but you can just go as crazy as you want with like lots and lots of other colors and just see how they blend in together when you kind of move them closer to each other and what kind of things can be created so i'm going to go and undo that bring it back to where we just created that and you're good to go so gradients are an incredible tool you'll see them in pretty much everything and maybe it's you're just making a logo maybe you're just making an icon for an app or something like that you'll see gradients everywhere from the more simple to the more complex alright so experiment play around have fun and we'll see you in the next video now a key part of working with illustrator and being very organized is understanding art boards now i've alluded to artboards when i gave my initial overview and tour of the program now we're going to get a little bit deeper into artboards now why do we create artboards could be for a number of different reasons maybe you're going to mock up a number of different versions different prototypes for your projects could be that you're printing multiple pages you know you just want to stay organized in a particular way now for me i have three art boards here and you'll see that i have this avocado i've got this little bottle here and i also have this little pepper here these are three individual artboards right to the naked eye they look like just three pages right and that's kind of essentially what they are now how do i know that i'm even working with artboards how can you even tell that these are artboards number one you'll see that way down lower left you'll see way down there you're gonna see right now that says one when i click on that you can see one two three oh okay there are these individual art boards that i can very easily go to right so just like going from one page to the other let me zoom out a little bit so we can see all three of them okay now another thing you might want to do is actually bring up the artboards panel that's not open for you right now so go over to window we'll open up two artboards and we're gonna see oh very good now i can actually see each of these i can go directly to them i can rename them right so all that stuff there great great let's don't do that show you that in just a second okay click on that click on that and if you were really zoomed in this could be a really good way to just navigate from one to the other okay see great so just going right in there so it's kind of a good one to have you'll also notice in the artboard panel i have the option to create a new artboard if i want to and also to delete an artboard if i want to all right so let's just again zoom back out the next thing i want to show you is the artboard tool the artboard tool so if you look over here in our tools you'll see that there is this little guy right here supposed to look like in our board when you click on that you'll see all of your artboards that are currently labeled now show up with little bounding boxes here and this is actually really critical because a lot of times people get kind of confused and like well i have the artboards panel up but how do i understand where my artboards are how do i deal with them how do i move them around how do i rename them how can i now manipulate this and how can i really understand it and that is making sure the artboards tool is then selected all right now i may want to now manipulate these to kind of change the order of things a little bit so notice my artboard tool is selected and i might want to have this down here that's a better structure for me great and now this is going to go over to here okay good oh i like that much better because this is just the way i want to show it and now let me go ahead and create a new artboard come over to here and now i want to move that down here wonderful that's great now of course i'm going to change the name of this but i want you to notice that as a result of me now being in the artboard tool i can now do a number of different things to the artboard right you'll see that i can manipulate the size of it so this little transform bounding box now appears and i can actually just cinch that in because maybe i don't really need it to be so big at all right just printing out more than it needs to so i can just manipulate it however i like okay so let's go ahead and do that but just know how easy that is and again very important because i'm working with the artboard tool to be able to do that now i have this artboard 189 i'm just going to very simply change that to some nachos simply double click on that and then that's ultimately going to be nachos very cool it's really very very simple then i would start putting my content inside of that artboard and then therefore it's going to stay in there and then when i print it out you're going to see everything will be part of that page if you will okay now if you want to get a little more advanced with your artboards you can see that there's this little icon here to the far right if you just double click on those they're going to give you some good options one way to rename it you can go through here change the width and the height very similar to what what i just showed you earlier and then also your orientation and then do you want to show some of these things here do you care about showing the center mark the crosshair all that stuff here you can definitely do that if you like just turn these things on if you want to click ok and you can see all right good maybe that's a little more organized of how you want to work okay and when i'm ready to export i can go over here to file export and you're going to see there's this option way up on top here for artboards so maybe when i'm ready to export i don't want to export all of these right so i can just uncheck this and uncheck this and i'm only ready to export just this artboard if i want to great and it's going to export it to a particular folder whatever i want to do great and i'm good to go so they do really give you that option to be able to do that giving you that control over what i want to save what i don't want to save okay so kind of valuable to just know how we can really master all of our organization understanding the value of art boards to be able to again really structure your content where you want it in addition to everything we've done with layers but you might want to put individual pieces of art in one art board because maybe it's going to be a different size different page size you know what have you it's going to have kind of different properties all together maybe you're experimenting with different prototype different different comps you might want to play around with it accordingly all right so having all those different artboards can help you with that okay so remember can be a little bit confusing because you have to actually access your artboard tool to see all these here as well as seeing your artboard panel be able to access them individually and if you want to go a little extra you can just click on this area here and if you want to get rid of artboards all together you can just go ahead and click on that and also you can move them around however you like while it's selected just bring that over and great and i can move this over here okay so go ahead and pause the video practice that have fun with it and hopefully you see the value in this for all your projects and we'll see you in the next lesson now there might be times that you'd like to just export or save one particular image that's living within your file so for example if i wanted to just have this little pepper here i could then export that as its own individual file pmg or whatever that file format is so if i simply just right click on there you're going to notice there's this option to export selection when i choose that you'll see this nice little dialog box pops up and some of what we've seen before when we looked at our artboards what do you want to export i'm just going to click on assets and then notice what i just right clicked on there is right there fantastic that's great you can ask me where do i want to save it to fantastic wonderful super happy with that and it's also going to ask me what type of file type do i want to save this as so notice i can do png i can do svg i can do pdf right i can do jpeg all kinds of different things and also notice with jpeg you can ratchet it down in terms of your compression levels now just in terms of what these things mean png is good for transparency and if you have a jpeg around it it means that that transparency is going to be gone meaning that this outside is going to be saved as white okay and then svg is a scalable vector graphic okay very important stuff to be able to make your image come in nice and smooth especially if you're going to put it onto the web and you think people are going to look at it in mobile devices um so it does work well on the web okay it might be a little bit bigger it might be a little bit harder to work with so just understand before you do that just make sure you you get how to work with it okay and then pdfs or just pdfs so however you want to do that totally up to you all right so i could just click on export and it's going to save it to that particular folder right i save that there and then bam i'm good to go now let's now see how we can do it and maybe a different way to go a little more complex so with this selected i'm going to go over here to window and this time i'm going to choose asset exports and you'll see that there is now a new tab called asset export and then i could simply use the same one if i want to all right so just going to be right there okay that's great and the other thing i could do is guess what i can add on to this so if i want to just start collecting things i can now collect this and add it onto here as well all right now i want you to notice that in the lower right over here i have a few different options this is just hey generate a single asset from the selection that's great but you also may want to generate multiple assets from the selection so i have this here and i'm just going to click on that and now oh look at that now my avocado comes in and now i have both of these so maybe i just want to have these individual ones maybe they're on the same artboard and i just want to be able to collect them all be good to go and then ultimately save it export it as whatever kind of file type you want okay so lots of options for you to work with pause the video practice that and we'll see you in the next lesson in this lesson we're going to create this avocado and we're going to be using some basic shapes we're going to be using some of our swatches we created but more importantly we're going to learn a new tool called the shape builder tool to be able to create all of these really kind of like perfect little edge kind of shadows around all of this okay now if you look inside of my current layer you'll notice here i have all of these like little individual layers that are basically kind of creating that illusion of depth within all of this right so all of these are their own individual shapes you can see them just double clicking in there to get into them right because they're all kind of grouped so you can see here i'm going to create that now let's see how we create that first thing that i'm going to do is i'm going to duplicate this so if i create a new layer down here and i'm going to duplicate this entire layer by holding down the alt or option key and simply clicking up and putting that in there that's great i now have a duplicate of this layer and i'm just going to call this avo trace making sure this is selected go to my move tool and then i'm just going to bump that over with my arrow keys also holding down the shift key and now that's there for me to actually trace okay that's great now i'm keeping two on here because i don't really want to mess up this first one that i did okay so i'm going to keep that there but this is going to be designed to be traced so what i'm going to do now is just lock this and also lock this so i don't mess with it at all all right so very cool now i'm going to create another layer and this is going to be avo new okay so just imagine this is something that you know it's just a you know bitmap that you got someplace but you want to make it into guess what you want to make it into a vector image so how do we do it alright so you're going to learn not only about that shape builder tool but you're also going to learn maybe some techniques that you may not have thought about how to actually create shapes and kind of a nice way now before we start building let me just go ahead and choose my color i'm only going to use three of the colors for now um not including the pit and let me just simply draw out a circle to start off this little back part here okay so i'm just going to kind of eyeball it for right now holding down my shift key and my alt or option key on the mac and try to get it as kind of center to that bottom part as possible and do your best okay not bad let me just undo that alt shift and maybe try again all right that's pretty good again it doesn't have to be perfect and happy with that but now i need to move this part up here so it looks a little more avocadoy so again i go over here to my direct selection tool i'm going to select this guy making sure that this is isolated again using my arrow keys with my shift key it's going to go farther faster it goes about 10 pixels and we're doing pretty good right to get to the tip not bad at all now these guys need to go up as well so what i can do is i can click on each of these collectively right holding down my shift key and again with my move tool selected just go ahead and bump that up okay and then i'm just going to make this guy go out a little bit now you see that's coming together and then this guy same thing just using my arrow keys very good looking for a little bit of precision if possible and then finally down here i can then make this guy go out a little bit wider using my bezier come over to here using my bezier not too bad okay and by the way to keep it straight as you use your bezier also hold down the shift key all right now of course i could kind of maybe perfect this a tiny bit more if you're kind of following along there okay not bad again holding down my shift key nice that fills it in do one more again really kind of understand how the tools work why they're doing what they're doing great i love that that is fantastic it's good to go so notice where i am what layer i'm on so now what i'm going to do in order to set myself up for the next steps with my stencil is i'm going to duplicate this i'm going to clone it by holding on the alt or option key and just bring this over here okay and i'm just going to call this guy here my stencil all right so i don't get it confused with the other ones it doesn't even really matter what color it is you can change the color because you're really just going to use it to act as a stencil now let's come back to here and then we just call this like base or something like that so we kind of know what it is good idea just to always work with your layer management and name things so this is now set up ready to go and now i need to make this little inner part here and so what do i do how do i do that super simple i'm just going to go ahead and copy this you can go here to edit and copy great and now next thing i do is just say edit and i'm going to say paste in front and now there's this here again as base hmm not sure if i want that so i'm just going to say second level okay so that's very clear what that is now let's choose a color for this and i'll just choose there that's great and now i'm going to bring this in concentrically so when i do that it's going to kind of fit the perfect shape of where it started from so earlier we did shift and alt to work concentrically we're going to do the same thing watch this click and drag in and nice we're on our way all right so that's all you do okay notice how it came in from the corners and the center stayed in place all right if you want to go a little bit more outward you can absolutely do that play around with whatever you need to do okay so that's pretty good i'm happy with that now let's do our first little kind of sliver here and we're not going to do the entire thing i just want you to learn the tool so you can see how this works we'll do one little level on the back part of the avocado and then we'll do this little pit and then you can practice as well i'm going to give you um another thing that you can practice on i'm going to give you another tool that you can try to create based off of another exercise and i'm going to provide for you okay because the best way for us to learn this is to practice okay all these exercise files so now let's now say i want to have another one that's just like this right whatever that's going to be another one another one another one just like that on top on top of the top of that so i'm going to copy this and again going to paste in front and now there's another one right here and why did i do that i did that so i can then sliver right through that particular one right so hmm okay kind of hear you what you're talking about but let's see what's going to happen now i'm going to introduce you to this little guy right here this is my move your mouse over it'll tell you your shape builder tool it's incredible it allows you to kind of use little stencils to either combine things or also take things away i'm going to again use this as a little stencil say hey listen i don't want all this part here right because i want to kind of just you know kind of move away move away move away from that part so with this now selected i'm just going to move this to kind of like create the shape of the element that essentially i'm going to sort of you know keep and also what i'm going to remove so they're kind of covering each other here all right and let's do that that's great and both of these now need to be selected so i'm going to hold down the shift key select this guy and now go over here to my shape builder tool and you'll notice i have a little plus sign here next to it i move my mouse over it things get kind of like gray and all that i actually want to remove it i don't want to add to it so i hold down the alt key notice i get the minus sign click and then click and now i have that little little thing there but what i need to do with that is change the color of that so then it becomes reflective of what i am now trying to do okay so let's click away so we can really see that nice that is pretty cool now think about when you might want to do this think about shadows right of like on a person on a vehicle on a product right on just anything anytime you want to add on a little dimensionality but you also want to conform it perfectly to something that already exists notice how nicely that just goes around that we're going to do something similar with this avocado pit okay so this time let's do that one more time see how that's going to go and i'm going to choose this i'm going to choose my color this time which is this brown guy that i created all right and then i will just now draw it out and i'm just going to do the same thing with my little circle and then just make it kind of overlap a little bit and now let's just come to you with my direct selection tool you can always hit the a key if you like and just bump that up a little bit let's not be super perfect here and just a lot of times i like to count how many i do so i do it on both sides so i'm just going to go ahead and just say one two one two great and then this guy let's bring that down as well and that does not need to be perfect really because hey you know what this is nature nature's not entirely perfect okay so again this doesn't have to be exactly like this but i might want to create something like this to be able to kind of just sliver this in so it's going to be a very similar process for me okay where i'm going to just copy paste in place i'm going to use this as my little stencil so let me just get that there right so i just clone that guy and then i clone this again by copying and pasting and front and again that new guy is only there so i can then just remove it all right that's really the only reason it seems excessive but that's essentially what's happening here so let's now move this right on top of here and then get whatever kind of like shadowy thing you need and then i'm going to click on this so i have both and now use my shape builder tool hold down the alt key bam bam and now there's that sliver that now needs to be made a little bit darker so i'm going to double click on that and then let's just bring our brightness down a little bit darker for that element click ok and now cool nice and you see how perfectly that fits in with my pit okay so we're really making some progress here it's starting to look very cool starting to look like it really has some dimensionality it's very smooth and everything now you have another exercise that i want you to try to emulate in addition to what we've done here which is this potted plant set here now there's a lot to work with here and it's pretty much just basic shapes and we've now just put other shapes on top of other shapes and we've just changed the color of them and we've removed certain parts of it that's all we've done really it's not as complicated as this may seem like some of these shadows here right you can see that's just a shadow but notice how it fits perfectly underneath the pot another one here right so you can see this fits perfectly inside of here as well okay and then look at these guys see this this element right there that's because of what we've done in terms of to make it fit right on top of it inside of itself okay and even like the creation of this pot down below was the effect of working with the shape builder tool all right i want you to really practice the the tools and the fundamentals of what we just did working with our avocado and then apply it to the potted plant and see if you can create this on your own okay so pause the video really practice this because these tools are invaluable they will help you in almost every capacity take a look at vector images all over the place they're not just basic shapes but they're also little shadows to create the illusion of dimensionality and depth okay so have fun and we'll see you in the next lesson now in this exercise we are going to discuss the pen tool and i'm going to make this as painless as possible this is something that really stresses a lot of people out so let's make it so it's not super stressful for you and just kind of really make it so it's it's understandable and kind of logical for you to work with now the pen tool does not necessarily work the way a pen actually does in real life the pencil tool does you'll see that in another exercise but the pen tool is a little bit more sort of unique in its style so let's bring up the pen tool first of all you'll see there it is and i can right click on it you can see bam there's the pen tool so i now have this activated and we're going to now create some basic shapes using the pen tool but before i do anything at all i want to establish well what's my fill and what's my stroke so i'm going to say i don't want any fill at all so i click on the fill and then i'm going to choose this guy right here where it says none i don't want to have a fill because i'm going to keep it nice and simple where i just have a black stroke so let's just say i want to just do a shape with some corners it's super super easy you simply just click on where the corners are going to go so click once go to here go to here go to here go to there and then wait for my little circle to close out my loop and bam i now have a shape that i can now select and i can move this around and do whatever i want with it okay and i can rotate it you know i can come back i can even add add a fill color to this if i like okay great so now it's as easy as that okay so just about the corners in this case now let's discuss how we do something with curves all right so with curves it's a little bit more nuanced okay because earlier remember how i just click click clicked now instead of just click click clicking i'm going to click and drag so watch what happens now when i click and drag and then i come over to here watch what happens now it's like oh it kind of gives burst this nice little curve here so now i'm going to click and drag again i'm going to come over to here click and drag again notice i'm going straight down and then click and drag again and then commute it finish it click and drag again okay and you'll notice because i am working with curves it gives birth to all those little bezier handles that we've talked about before okay so it's a pretty relatively simple thing once you sort of like master it you know i mean i don't want to minimize you know kind of the frustration and the oddness around the pen tool but it really is matter of just simplifying it just click click click or click and drag as you're working with things all right now there might be some times when you want to add on anchor points and we're going to do that in the next exercise but i really want you to just at this point really just practice working with just click and then click and drag click click and drag and just kind of move it around and you will get that muscle memory as you move things around in a nice you know kind of fluid quick way and again remembering am i actually putting a fill in there am i just doing a stroke am i doing both right totally up to you all right and then if you didn't get it right don't worry about it because guess what you can always go back to your direct selection tool and then manipulate it however you want to like oh man i should have done that great oh again this is a little bit too far over to the right okay great so i can now select this and then i'll just do that okay great that's super easy so don't worry about it when you're working with the pen tool it's not about perfection a lot of times people just kind of trace around it and they do a very rough little sketch around it and then they just fix it later on in the direct selection tool all right so practice that maybe you want to have something that's underneath it that you're going to trace but practice that and we'll see you in the next exercise we talked about the pen tool now we should talk about the pencil tool where does the pencil tool live how do we work with that so you'll see kind of buried inside of one of these guys here you'll see oh there it is it's inside with my brushes sometimes you got to kind of fish around for these but i like to actually use some of these keyboard shortcuts notice here is n for pencil or maybe you want to kind of fly this out like i showed you earlier and just kind of have that ready to go now i'm going to use the pencil tool pencil tool as i said earlier is going to be a little bit more intuitive to what you want to do some of you may just decide to use the pencil tool right now because again it's just a matter of like clicking and dragging to kind of draw something out so again let's make it so i do not have a fill and this time i'm going to go up to here to my control bar and i'm just going to say no fill that's great and this time you know what let's make that a little bit thicker that's great and choose my pencil tool and watch this just i'm going to make a nice little wavy line cool see how easy that was nice how about i make a little circle come over to there nice okay actually that wasn't very nice because i need to close my loop okay did you see the first time i did that i did not close my loop let me try that one more time let me just show you here look at the little circle that happens as soon as i meet it see that illustrator is like okay that's where you started from let's close the loop if you don't close the loop then you can't fill it in with a color because it doesn't recognize it as a finished shape okay now as i do that you'll notice okay pretty cool i have all of these individual path points okay that's great love that and i'm pretty much good to go and i can now fill this in with whatever i want and you know that's really kind of all i want you to take away for right now because this is sometimes all you will need to do when you're just drawing something out maybe you're tracing something you just start with this okay don't stress about it don't worry too much about how to get perfection understand the bezier handles and all the anchor points just use the tools that are comfortable for you understanding your strokes understanding your fills and more importantly understanding how we can use our direct selection tool to then make changes to these to what we want on these little path points see that so i can now control this however i want see that click and drag and that's going to go there oh that's cool okay i can use my little bezier handles all right i can just manipulate that however i want sometimes it's a little hard to click on great there you go fantastic all right so now this was the pencil tool but i was able to do something very simple but actually or similar as what i did with my pen tool but just by clicking and dragging all right so pause the video practice that and we'll come back with more stuff now i would be remiss if i did not talk about how to be a little more structured a little more organized with how you actually draw some of these things out to have some perfection with your drawing so this is going to go the same for whether it's the pen tool or the pencil tool what i currently have here is this little grid system set up here you guys just turn that on so you can turn that on turn that off and i'm doing this here so i can now just kind of snap to my grid options right whether it's a shape that's on there or i'm just going to go ahead and draw some things out so if you know you're going to draw out like either a shape or a square or something like that you can use these little grid options right so whether it's pen whether it's pencil whether to shape anything else these little grid options are going to really really help us so let's just do a very simple just basic drawing and i'm just going to simply click and then notice how it's going to allow me just to go right there and then go let me there you go it snaps into place i want that good thank you very much and you can see how now i'm able to be a little perfectionist about it okay this guy's in the way so i need to just move him out of the way are you waiting for me patiently love that okay so you can see all right that's pretty cool right so i'm just going to hit enter and now notice how nice and even that is okay because i'm using these little guys right here right our grids to be able to now be structured with all that if i were to be drawing out a shape of some kind let's now just click and drag and then bam that's going to go there now you want to make sure before you even like set out to do all these things to make sure that your snapping is in fact an option here so if you look over here on the right hand side way over here you have these snap options to work with you'll see here is snap to points snap to grid okay and then snap to pixels if you want things to snap to each other okay so let's see i'm going to simply click and look at that how it just kind of now does that okay first time not so much i was kind of eyeballing it they were acting as what they were doing but now it's really doing it before i had to kind of just really eyeball it now whatever i draw look at that it's snapping to all those squares as a result of that okay so very very cool the next thing you might want to do is work with um guides you might want to work with guides to make sure that hey when i draw something out i want everything to be sort of in line with each other and they can actually snap to the guides so in order to actually work with guides we need to make sure that our ruler is visible so in order to bring up the ruler just click in kind of the paste board sort of the neutral area up here and then come over to here and then choose the ruler so i choose that there's my ruler that's great and very simply in order to create a guide all we do is click on the ruler and drag down and then notice how you can actually lock that also to any one of these grids and then got to make sure that it is now visible okay so you'll notice how mine was not visible so i had to make sure that this was in fact visible so you can see here my gods were hidden sometimes they're not so we want to make sure that they are in fact visible okay because that can make you go crazy let's bring this over here again and just say all right i am now going to make stuff go here here and here so let's just do for every one of my peaks i now have this all set up to be now all aligned of how i want to do this now let's say oops you know what our valley is going to be right here so i can very simply move this up oh no but no i can't weird why can't i do that because guess what my guide is locked see that by default it will be locked so i unlock that come over to here and now i can drag that up and now that is a perfectly nicely set up set of structure and organization for me to work with all of my content there all right so before you go any further with all your drawing make sure that you've mastered your guides and your grids making sure that you're snapping make sure you unlock them make sure that or if you want to unlock the unlock the meadows and also make sure that they are visible as well now some people like to go so far as to put their guides on a completely different layer okay so that might be something that you like to do so i might want to just do this and say guides because then they're not going to be interfering with anything else that i'm working with and then you can see also when i select them now they turn red so it also stands out so it's a little bit different from my other elements on the page which are now blue okay these are highlighted in blue these are now highlighted in red see that it's all about making this a more fluid process for you okay so make sure before you move forward that you're all set up and you're comfortable with grids and guides see in the next lesson so far we have drawn out our shapes using the pen tool the pencil tool and even the shape tool but now sometimes when you use some of these tools in particular the pencil tool you're going to see that you maybe sometimes get more anchor points than you want to meaning it can just be like a little bit sloppy and a little bit sort of like bumpy etc so as an example let me go over here to my pencil tool and i'm just going to just kind of draw here you know just like i'm just kind of really trying to like trace something here and i'm just kind of doing whatever and i'm just not having a great time doing it but i'm doing my best i don't have like the steadiest hand all right now no need to worry because there is an option within your pencil tool called the smooth tool does everybody want the smooth tool what the smooth tool is going to do is smoothen these out so you don't have so many anchor points so i click on that and i'm just going to simply just click and drag and notice i get a little smoother right so less of these now i might have to do a little more than that okay great all right fantastic maybe some more over here but now before i go further with my smooth tool let's see how i can see my options for my smooth tool if you double click on the smooth tool guess what hey how much fidelity do you want in terms of your accuracy versus the smoothness so you know what i want real smoothness right because my accuracy is not going to really get me anywhere in this case i just really want a smooth line here oh great so let's make that really smooth so then we've changed basically the kind of like properties of my smooth tool so i click ok and now when i do it click and drag see that that is way more powerful oh my god that's so much better let's do some more here nice okay how about this one oh man that's that's point oh look at that and it's got a big curve there nice i'm gonna keep going with that smooth that out nice so you can see what i'm doing here maybe i want to go even further cool you can see how that looks so much better since when i started okay so use the smooth tool pause the video practice that we'll see you in the next video now at this point we have talked about strokes to a minor degree and we're going to have a few lessons on strokes and even more detail in a little bit but i want you to see kind of how we can work with strokes a little bit more kind of nuanced so of course you know how we can we can increase our strokes that's great but i guess you bet you didn't know say that again but i bet you didn't know we can even have more nuances over here by changing different elements of the stroke notice how it now made it how is just a little more kind of a different width different widths kind of going this way different what's going that way okay kind of cool kind of interesting let me come back to this and guess what you can also go a step further by now doing something like that so it looks more like kind of a charcoal situation and guess what you can even do something like that or do something like that these are all known as strokes right or brush strokes okay so there's a lot you can do we're going to get into these just a little bit deeper in just a minute okay but i want you to notice at least at the basic level what you can do with these okay so notice i can now even manipulate the two of these kind of coming together where i have a combination of not only this particular denim seam stroke and the variable width around that stroke all right so now let's see what we can do to be a little bit more i don't know a little more controlling over it so what i'm going to do is i'm going to introduce you to this really amazing tool called the width tool the width tool so let's just do that on this shape right here and i'm going to make that a little bit bigger just like that that's great fantastic love it and when i use the width tool let's just see what it does i'm going to click on that and you're going to see it's going to allow me to then control the width rather than actually using the variable width profiles that i have up here i can actually do it here and notice when i move my mouse over these individual parts let's say i want it to be a little wider right there oh my god that's so cool oh you know what i went a little bit too far all right let's just bring that again and then wait for that little guy to come up and then let's just do that okay and let's bring it out one more time let's bring on another one i click there and that's going to go a little more in all right let's get a little more creative okay and then oh interesting so i have that kind of control to do this so now i go to here and i'm going to make this go a little wider see how it's kind of active to be able to do that so you have that kind of control to change how you want your width to be so if we go over to here choose my variable width tool now let's see what i can do to make this part just maybe go a little bit wider out nice that's much better or i'm going to come over to here and then just choose this to just kind of pinch a little bit over there let's do one more let's go over to this one where i have this nice little snake here so i'm just going to make sure this is chosen and then go to my width tool and then guess what even though this is just a very simple line i can control how wide this is going to go so wherever there's a curve that's going to get a little wider nice okay this one maybe not so much right so i can kind of just snip that in oh that is very cool let's go ahead and make this go also a little wider just click and drag out nice okay so now i've taken a very ordinary little wavy line and i'm able to actually make it into a different shape maybe you're making a mustache or a snake or you're making a road something like that it's kind of curving out giving it some perspective and what did i do i use the width tool to be able to control that right so that's just a very basic introduction to working with the width tool in a little bit we're going to show you how you can actually work with individual brush strokes and go even further than what we saw here all right so pause the video practice that and we'll see you in the next lesson now let's get a little bit deeper into our understanding of working with strokes all right so we talked a little bit about how you can work with our strokes as far as the width and the color and then also our variable width and also we talked about some of these guys here all right fantastic that's great now sometimes what i like to do is let me just dock this here i like to make sure that my stroke panel is up so i always have access to it so go to window go to stroke that's going to be here and then i don't see a whole lot of options until i click on my little panel menu show options and wow there you go so i want to see that all the time now these strokes are yeah sure they're interesting right they're boxing something kind of whatever they are but i'd like to have some more interesting brush strokes for me so where do i find more interesting brush strokes when i clicked on this drop down i showed you maybe about like three of these but there are so many more than what's showing on here okay so remember here i just did that all right that's pretty cool i can do that do that all right yeah maybe maybe not go back to that one all right good i'm bored what can i do to get more brush strokes you'll notice here in the lower left this little guy right there a little library is going to show me a whole bunch of different types of strokes that i can do if you want to convert things to arrows you have that artistic right we have all these different things that we can work with different categories and different subcategories so for right now let's just choose border and then border decorative for example and you'll notice it actually spits out a new panel called border decorative i'm going to make that nice and tall and you'll see whoa those that's a lot holy cow who knew you could do that but what i want you to notice before we even execute anything at all is that i can now toggle throughout all of my brushes my brush libraries very very easily so watch this rather than having to go back to where i started from i can now just go through all of the brushes available and i am just like blown away that is so cool look at that little ants and coffee and film things and hearts and holy moly and some calligraphy look at that little banners you know and all of these they are going to be linking up to any kind of stroke you create it could be a very simple line that maybe you want to make a little banner heading like these guys right here and you just want to do something like that right i'll show you how to do that in a second but it's again it all starts with a stroke so let's go back to where we started banner decorative and i'm just going to put a decorative banner on this guy right here i'll just choose that and wow amazing very very different very easy very cool very creative nice i like that pretty cool and i can make that bigger i can make that smaller of course the size of the shape is going to determine hey is this something you want to do or not now you'll also notice because i brought out my strokes panel here i have all kinds of options for that so if i now choose what my corner options are going to be or my alignment options are going to be it may allow me to then decide whether it's going to be on the outside or not so you'll see some of these are going to be grayed out just depending on what the actual border is going to be so if i click on this notice it lights up and then i can now put those on the outside the middle all that some of these won't allow you to do it because they're very kind of like beefy decorative and they just just doesn't allow it but if you play around with it you'll notice that many of them in fact will have a lot of great potential so maybe you want to choose one that's maybe a little bit more kind of subdued than that one okay maybe this one isn't okay see okay great not so bad and then just play around with it i can just go ahead and bring my weight up and then bring that down all right so awesome so easy to change this to so many now let's go back to just drawing out a basic line all right so i'm just going to do just a basic basic line and we'll see we can do even though it's not a shape even though it doesn't have a border around it we'll see how these little brush strokes are going to be able to be applied the same way all right so my line is going to be living inside where my rectangle and all my shapes are and i'm just going to simply hold down the shift key and click and drag and go over to here and guess what let's just find one of those little banners there okay not too bad good to go and i click on that and whoa i just created something pretty incredible and i'll just go ahead and make that a little bit bigger and then i can go over here to my regular move tool and then make that a little longer let's minimize this move that out of the way and wow look at that now you have a nice little banner that no one would ever know that you didn't draw that right i mean it's really kind of incredible how easy it is to draw out these very cool individual shapes okay but they're not really shapes all they are are essentially just these individual strokes that have a brushstroke living on top of it okay so very very cool all right in a little bit we're going to learn about how you can then add on new anchor points to then even manipulate some of these things okay to go even further with it okay even though this is just a straight line we can learn how we can manipulate these things to really kind of take this home and then maybe even want to change the color on this by doing what's called expanding the appearance of it so it's like oh my god wow so many options but they're not necessarily obvious so we're going to get into those in just a little bit but at this point i really want you just to take away the fact that we can bring in new brush strokes very easily and we can very simply use our brush stroke library and then bring them in you'll see that there are like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them really experiment with them love to hear and see what you've created and hopefully you find this is as fun and as pretty straightforward now as i do because you'll see that there really is a method to the madness all right so pause the video have fun and we will see you in the next lesson now in the last few lessons we've talked about working with shapes and the direct selection tool and also working with all of our different anchor points and all that good stuff but sometimes when we're working with these things we might want to kind of manipulate things a little bit more you want to kind of have them a little more nuanced maybe you want to make this straight line into a curve maybe this guy here you want to add in some ridges things like that so what you can do with anchor points is essentially add on more anchor points so you might have a shape and you want to make it a little a little more complex so if you click on this shape here you'll notice that there is literally just one line here right that's all this is right this is just one stroke we created and of course we put this little banner around there and there's just two anchor points here one on this side one on that side and with just two anchor points i don't have a whole lot of flexibility to do things with this okay because i can't like curve this i can't really you know do anything except for maybe resize it but i might want to make this a little bit more complex so if you when you think about anchor points when you think about adding on anchor points i'm going to give you this little analogy which is your own human body if you look at your arm right now you'll see that from your shoulder all the way to your wrist there is a little elbow right there in the middle okay think about that elbow as like an extra anchor point one anchor point is your shoulder another one all the way goes to the end of your arm to your wrist and then in the middle you have something that gives you that kind of flexibility to bend your arm think about your wrists you can bend your wrist as a result okay look at that look at your knee okay it's like think about it like a joint that's going to allow you to have a little more flexibility with what you're working with okay so let's see how we can do that working with this little banner here so what i'm going to do is add on a new anchor point okay so if we go over to here where our pen lives you're going to see here's this option to add an anchor point now for some of you who don't have the option that i'm showing here and some of these other options that are missing you'll need to go down here to edit toolbar that's these three dots and they come way up to the top when these options come up and then you can simply either add on all of your advanced tools by clicking on this or you can very simply just drag them up and bring them over to the toolbar if you don't see the options you want in this case some of you may not see the add anchor point tool okay so i'm going to click on that and you'll notice now my cursor now turns into a pen with a little plus sign on it and i'm going to do now is add on an anchor point by simply clicking where i want that anchor point to be and again thinking about this as like a new joint for yourself so i'm going to click on that and make sure you get it right there on the line or else you get a little error message like that so you got to go right very precise to get it there it's very intolerant so you'll see sometimes you'll get that error message don't freak out just try again or zooming in is really helpful okay now you'll see when i go back to my direct selection tool i can simply just select that i'm going to use my arrow keys just to nudge that up a little bit or to nudge it down a little bit okay great i'm going to come back up keep that straight and when i do that you will notice that it is a corner when i do that so you'll see if i zoom in a little bit that it's a corner like that which isn't bad not exactly what i want i want it to be curved i want it to look like a nice little kind of curved banner so what do i do i'm going to convert this to a curved anchor point okay i don't want it to be like a hard one so there's a number of different ways i can do this number one i'm going to bring this out here and this time i'm going to just tear this out just kind of showing you with other tools and you'll see i have two options to do here i can either choose this anchor point tool which is kind of a strange name but essentially what this is going to do it's going to convert this and i can just simply click and drag to make that into a curve so now when i click on that you'll see it's now a nice curve you can see that let me go and undo that and some of you maybe you don't want to do it that way maybe that's a little bit too challenging or maybe not your cup of tea so let me just undo come back to where i was and instead i can use this option to convert way up on top here we'll notice how you have the option to convert either the corner to a curve or a curve into a corner so now what i'm going to do is just make this into my curve and now guess what it is now a nice curve so you have those two options you can do so if i switch that back watch this it's no longer going to have those bezier handles so when i choose this see now it's a corner i come over to here and now it's curve just like that see selected easily done so you have choices right so now i can make this as curvy as i want to and i can make this go out you have all the control in the world so let's now bring this down and bring that down you'll see pretty cool you have again all the control in the world all right so next thing we're going to do is we're going to work with a maybe a little bit of a different shape which is going to be this little pretty graphic down here which is a very complex graphics if we take a look at the layers we'll see that there's actually quite a bit happening within these groups okay wow a lot of stuff happening here and also a lot of stuff happening here now what that's telling me is that i gotta really drill down so what this is known as coming into what's called isolation mode so i want to make like the edge of this glass maybe a little bit kind of curvy so i'm just going to very simply do the same thing as i just did with a simple shape on a more complex shape and make it even more complex than it is now because this is a group i need to actually double click to get deep into this right double click you'll notice that things change over here in the upper left i'm now inside the group keep double clicking keep double clicking keep double clicking and now guess what if you look here i am now in what's called isolation mode and i'm inside a group inside of a group inside of group finally getting to this path and then i click on my direct selection tool and you'll notice all of these individual path points that i can now work with right so when i click on this here you can see that's one kind of path point here's another one that's a curve okay here's another one that's just a hard angle and then here's another one's a curve and i can play around with these just to see what i can get now that i know how to add on anchor points now you will note that you can also delete anchor points just right next door to that so let's just see what i can do now just to make this a little bit more interesting notice i'm going to click oh not close enough right it's very very intolerant right so just be aware of that got to be right on top of it okay not too bad and now now that i got these anchor points guess what i'm able to now manipulate this and maybe a slightly different way i'm just going to kind of bring this out here bring this out here i'm just using my arrow keys all right let me hit the plus sign to then just say hey listen let's add on one more anchor point and then maybe even do another little kind of fun little jive there okay and then come back to my direct selection tool i'm gonna hit the a key this time and now let's see what i can do here and now i can not only do that but because this is a curve i can now manipulate this even more so so i'm getting kind of a more interesting glass and i before i just had kind of a straight line i'm able to really really manipulate this to be something different okay so you'll see how you have all the control in the world of how you work with your shapes all right so again what did we do we just added on anchor points okay that's it sometimes we converted our anchor points because they were a hard angle and sometimes they were curved and we made it into a hard angle right into a corner all right so you really want to play around with this we have some files for you to work with here or find some files on your own and really just get comfortable with it because this is really the cornerstone of so much that you work with in illustrator okay now i'm going to come back to where i was i'm going to simply click on this to go all the way back and now i can see my beautiful image there okay practice up see in the next exercise let's have a quick discussion about transparency or opacity so transparency is basically what we can see through opacity is what we can't see through now you'll see this great little illustration here has some nice little sort of translucence right it has the ability to kind of see through some of these shapes so i can actually make this look like a glass so transparency or opacity is very easily done so when i select this i want you to notice this is now selected this little individual shape to create these little kind of stridations right within the class i want you to notice over here inside of my properties panel i have this thing called opacity now right now it is at 30 let's bring that up to 100 so you can see exactly what it does and what it doesn't do oh wow that's interesting didn't see that coming bring this over to here and oh wow look at that 30 oh i see so it was white and it was bringing through it whatever layer was underneath it because of the 30 opacity let's try this one let's go a little bit deeper and you'll see this one is also 30 this one see so you can see how these guys work together to create this illusion of depth to create the illusion that there is something behind it so they can all kind of work together so if you look at the layers themselves you'll see that there's all kinds of stuff hiding underneath it you can see all these layers here and as a result of being able to see through this through our lower opacity we're able to create the illusion of glass all right so you want to play around with that you can kind of create some you know more creative things with it my goal for you right now is just to understand how we actually apply transparency into our graphics into our image all right so you can play around with this image or try with something else it works really nice to have a banner that maybe something is behind the banner and you want to be able to see through that banner maybe you have a seascape or a cityscape something like that and you can make that come through all right so we'll do one example like this i'll bring this down and let's just say this guy here is above right what i'm working with here let's just go just like that and if i bring down the opacity on this which is now 100 you'll be able to see a nice cool effect as a result of me just simply bringing down the opacity all right so practice that have fun and we'll see you in the next exercise we are now going to discuss the basics of type and topography and all the elements that you can use within illustrator to modify your type format it and really ultimately have control over the layout of your type so very simply i'm just going to go ahead and click on my little t over here or i can just simply tap on the t on my keyboard and that gets activated and very simply i'm just going to draw out a text box so i'm just going to draw a text box right there and automatically you'll notice that some type automatically comes in there like oh wait a second i didn't ask for that illustrator gives you this little placeholder type right text content copy right so if i don't want that to do that anymore i can go over to my preferences so if you're on a windows computer if you go to edit and you go over here to preferences you'll see this option for type now if you're on a mac you can click on the illustrator menu in the upper left click on preferences and then go to type and if you don't want that to do that anymore you can just say hey do not fill type objects with placeholders so you would just not do that and then you will not get that message anymore you will not get that set of text anymore all right but i'm going to keep mine just because i don't want to type anything out i'm good to go with what i have so we need to see more or less what this does right it puts in this little placeholder text fills it in from beginning to end and i want to change this i obviously don't want it to be this color so how do i deal with that there is a number of different ways to work with type you'll see based off of the context of what i've selected i'm going to see options for my type up on top here great all that stuff there okay amazing lots and lots of cool stuff right there you'll also see within my properties panel also more options down here pretty much the same thing and likewise if you go to window and come way down over here to type and i'm going to open up to let's say character you'll notice that character has the paragraph panel as well with it i'm just going to close down open type for now and then you will see fantastic good so maybe you want to just have this kind of floating there all the time so i'm just going to do a nice little triple click you see that triple click selects the entire box it's kind of nice or you could simply just highlight it and from here i could then just choose whatever type i want to apply pretty cool and then we're going to go over some of these things in just a little bit but before we go any further let's see how we can change the color so we can actually see it what we're working with and that's pretty much the same thing how you work with color and shapes so we're going to find our little color picker over here or go over here if you want to find a swatch double click on that and then i'm just going to choose white okay go over to there and then go all the way over here and then just notice you have your rgb values you have your cmyk great fantastic click ok and then i click away all right pretty good pretty happy with that now you will notice that because i made my type a little bit bigger i now have this little plus sign telling me that uh oh the text box is not big enough anymore so i need to fix that so very simply just like we do with any kind of shape i'll see great now i'm good to go i could have also made that wider i could have also decided to make my type a little bit smaller to make that fit in okay now let's talk about just some of our basics of formatting so we have our character formats and we also have our paragraph formats so some of these you've probably seen before just your font type notice also when i click on that i have the option to select all kinds of different fonts but also note that i can also favorite some of these as well so that i can come back to them anytime i want okay so for example if i love this one right here this minion variable i can click on that to add to favorite i can come down here let's try another one of these let's go to that one okay fantastic good good good love all that but now when is that going to come into play it's going to come into play when i actually just show my favorites essentially i can filter this out to say hey listen only show the ones that i've now just favored it okay i can clear that out as well and then to the left of that you have all kinds of other filters depending on the classification serif sans serif script handwriting you know all that good stuff there so really up to you you can choose whatever you want but it's really nice it allows you to get to these very quickly it also shows you well what's the history of the fonts you've worked with oh great i forgot all about that one or i really like that one good now i can see that again and again and again all right so maybe just for now i'll choose this kind of fun one that's courier prime all right and then uh oh i have a problem here now what can i do again i'm going to do a little triple click i can now either make my type a little smaller you see that over that's getting a little bit too small i still want to make that readable but then i could start working with other things like my leading right what is my leading leading essentially is line spacing so notice the space between these lines so i'm just going to ratchet that down smaller okay cool it's still readable but it now has just less space in between it so therefore it fits inside the text box okay so letting is essentially line spacing right so that's really kind of all we need to worry about for right now but now let's check out some of these other guys here right like our kerning and our tracking what do those mean all right so i may actually have like some text that's a little bit too close to each other right that's actually making the text like not so readable if you will so it's like an i and an l that might be a little bit too close this u and this m you can see that there maybe i might want to make that so it's not so close together and that is where kerning comes in right where i'm going to be able to increase that space between the two of them so now i'm going to increase the space just by going up to let's just say 50. okay very good you see how that just added on a little bit more 75 okay good that's a little bit easier to read it's hard to kind of mistake the word as other words if you want to entertain yourself go ahead and just type out kerning fails and you're going to see some slightly r-rated stuff in there but pretty humorous nonetheless of how kearney can actually be really effective and if you overlook it it could also mess you up so check out kerning fails if you want a a good laugh all right now let's see what tracking does and um i'm going to just put in some big type here and i'm just going to k say come see us friday night all right and let's change all that to a different color all together let's make that white and let's choose a nice big blocky font let's go to here and of course i can make that size nice and big all right great but i want to make this kind of like spill straight across on my text box so that's where my tracking is going to come in so if i make this go like that notice what it's doing okay so oh that's pretty cool oh i really like that so it gives me all the control that i need to be able to just have this look a little bit different look a little more like a title if you will okay so let's now just see some other things we can do let's go over here to our paragraph panel and we'll see that there are some other again possibly similar things that you can work with in terms of your alignment left center and right you also see some options in terms of indenting from the left from the right maybe you want a first line indent so let's just see what those things look like so with this text box selected i can just bump that in okay i like that i'm just gonna rather than moving the text box i can actually just move the type inside of there all right let me just put that back what if i want to have a first line indent what does that look like so maybe you want to do kind of old conservative way how we used to do it great that's the traditional way to indent maybe you want to do that or again it's really about control however you want to do it as well all right now let's bring that back down to zero and now this part here is actually kind of nice when you have more than one paragraph okay so let me just put in a new paragraph right here and i want to have some space in between this paragraph and this paragraph so i can do either paragraph spacing before or paragraph spacing after so if i just go just bump this up a little bit that gives me some nice control over how my stuff is spaced out between it so rather than having to like put a hard return or do something a little bit more sort of manual i can use my paragraph tools to be able to do it okay so lots and lots of really good stuff here all right and then the last one we're going to do is this hyphenate which i think is actually kind of important i'm just going to go ahead and just click anywhere in the paragraph and then just uncheck that and then notice my hyphenations go away look at it before now see it after look at these half hyphenations nope i don't like that and get rid of it okay so super easy working with type is really really nice so we're gonna just do a couple of lessons on this and then in some future lessons in the more advanced class we get into working with styles okay and if anybody has worked with indesign before you'll see that paragraph and character styles can be incredibly valuable as well in terms of saving time and then being very efficient all right and also being consistent across the board all right so pause the video practice this up get familiar with both your character and your panels of paragraph and then all the other stuff on the right side your your properties and everything on the top as well and have fun see in the next video so what we're going to do in this lesson is learn about type on a path so right now you see that bilbo watches you as you sleep is inside of this circle okay do you see that and this circle is a path but what you don't know is that there's an actual official path that is inside of the circle that you can't see but the type conforms to that path now remember what a path is the path is pretty much just like any vector shape that you can kind of go around right so it could be just a simple line it could be a triangle it could be a circle like this could be anything like we could even do one around bilbo's ears if we want to around a mountain top okay so you can do it along as whiskers if you like this is the path that we might be typing around okay so how do we actually do that i'm going to just blot this out and i'm going to create a new layer and i'm just going to call this type on a path great fantastic i'm there i'm good to go and i'm going to draw out a circle that's just going to be a path that's just going to be right in the middle here and then come out and then i'm going to type along that path all right so let's just choose our circle i'm going to make it so i have no fill and a black stroke very good and then my stroke doesn't even need to be that thick it's no problem but of course it's not going to matter in a little bit and then i'm going to just draw out from the center and you may actually use a guide to do this maybe that's something you wanted to do ahead of time totally up to you but i'm just going to just eyeball it for right now and just draw out my circle concentrically we've done this in a few other exercises by holding down shift and alt or option if you're on a mac and then notice that it's coming in nice little circle there i'll just bump that up tiny bit okay love that and then maybe i'll just bring that tiny bit smaller make some room for my type and then great good to go now let's actually do some typing along that path so how do i do that i'm going to go over here to my type tool but i'm going to right click this time you'll notice here is this type on a path tool all right very good and watch what happens now when i simply move my mouse right over that line i'm going to get this i bar with a little wavy doodad right there okay i click on that and you'll see uh-oh pretty cool but okay brought in all that placeholder text which is no problem because i wanted to see how big it was anyway so then i can just take a look at that font okay great no problem and now i can just simply type right over this so bilbo watches you as you sleep look at that look how cool it is how it's conforming to my circle right the circle that i just drew and then notice i can still select my text like i normally would with anything else and then i'm going to use my keyboard shortcut which is just control shift and then the little it's the period and if you're on the mac it's command shift and the period or of course you can go up to here to do that all right and then maybe i want to change this to a different font altogether all right and then i'll make that nice and big okay pretty cool all right now this obviously is not how i want it so i can use some of my tools like my tracking to make it spread out a little bit further so let's do that let's get a little review on how we do that so let's go over here to window type and i'll bring up my characters again right and then watch this how i can now just make this go a little bit more said okay pretty cool i like that now it's still maybe not perfect for you and this is maybe the trickiest part of working with type on a path and that's being able to move it along the path how you'd like to move it so i'm going to go to my direct selection tool and i want you to notice these little guys right here there are two little what i call bookends this is the beginning of your type in a path and this is the end believe it or not right and oh that's weird oh that's right because i started off with a lot of type so it's like oh i just brought that in now the thing to notice and this is incredibly important is this when i move my mouse right over here to the edge right there notice how underneath my arrow i get like a little line with a left pointing arrow and i move my mouse over to here i get another one with a right facing arrow i'm going to move this one just down a little bit because that's my end end and this is my beginning beginning so now if i go to here wait for that and then i can now move this along the path so let's do that so you can actually see it so you've got to be sometimes actually pretty close to get to it try not to click on this because it'll ask you if you want to move it someplace else just wait for that it's really important to wait for that or else you get a little message or like i don't want to do that at all okay and now notice how i can just see where it's going to go it's perfect love that right and awesome now let's go ahead and just shrink it in a little bit more and watch as i've changed the shape the text comes with me okay very very cool right and now just for fun let's change the color to whatever okay let's maybe just do it red he's scary all right and then again just for fun let's put a nice little stroke around it i'll just make that black maybe a little bit thicker let's see let's zoom out a little bit get rid of this guy don't need it all right i'm pretty happy with that you'll just play around with whatever you like in terms of your font and everything the takeaway here is it is super easy to do type on a path and to be really creative with it okay and then you don't need to actually see the shape you just have it you know zigzagging and wavy going around in a circle you know whatever kind of projects you're working on all right so pause the video practice that and we'll see you in the next lesson in this lesson i want to introduce you to the appearance panel appearance panel is pretty incredible to give you lots of information but also allow you to really make changes right there on the panel itself so if i go over here to window you will see i have the appearance panel and you'll see it says no selection when i click on this right here you'll notice now it has my characters that's selected and it's telling me that i have a stroke of two points and i also have a fill of a particular color i can simply click on this and then i can actually make a change to that thing that i have selected oh great so if i want to make this a little bit thinner i can absolutely do that if i wanted to change the color to one of my swatches i can actually do that and actually find all my swatches right within there i'm going to keep this as is okay and the same thing with my fill all right so you'll want to kind of keep an eye on your appearance panel regardless of what you're actually doing whether it's a stroke something like that but it could be you're working with more like graphic styles you know and all kinds of other different elements maybe it's a gradient so you can really see what's going on but also control it so let me show you one thing you might decide to do and that is going to be maybe putting multiple strokes on something okay so in order to actually do this the way that illustrator wants me to do it as far as adding on multiple strokes is i have to remove this stroke and kind of start from the beginning so i can work with my appearances accordingly so let me just delete this one right here and you'll see that no longer do i have a stroke on here but now what i'm going to do is i'm going to select this whole area just like this i'm selecting the type itself but i'm selecting the whole text box if you will all right now if you'll notice over here in the lower left there is this add a new stroke and also add a new fill and then in my advanced class i talk about some of these effects that we can apply as well all right so very simply i'm going to say add a new stroke and that comes up okay pretty cool i've already done that before no big deal and maybe i'm going to make that bigger all right and maybe this time we'll make it a different color okay pretty neat but now what if i want to do multiple strokes so guess what i can add on another one just like that and now notice i actually have two strokes happening simultaneously and all i did really was just duplicate it okay that's really all it did but what i'm going to do for this top one is i'm going to make this black and i'm going to make that grow a little bit so now you'll be able to see that didn't come in black okay there we go now i'll be able to see both of them simultaneously one is kind of shrouding the other so let's make this one a little bit bigger and they'll be able to see oh pretty neat now i can actually have something a little bit more interesting for me to work with let me just make this even thinner so it doesn't kind of blot it out so much alright let's go over to here and now okay not bad and then i think maybe i would choose a different font to make this a little bit more interesting looking so let's just try that and let's maybe he's like military okay very good and then come over to here and if you recall i can now move this guy down a little bit and then don't run into this right very important and now let's go to here very tight there okay and then i'm going to do a triple click on that and then just make my font a little bit smaller and then of course remember i can play around with anything in my paragraph and also in my character another way to get to your character panel and then let me just bring down my tracking so that's going to be a little bit closer together maybe even they overlap a bit going negative and then lastly let me just do this last one here just drag that so it's kind of equidistant all right pretty cool i like that so if we zoom in we'll be able to see i now have two strokes happening simultaneously on this set of text why because of my appearance panel all right so if you're planning on doing something like this start off with no content on there right and then just apply all of your content particularly with strokes on here as well okay and if you want to do any one of these to experiment with add a new fill add a new effect go ahead and do that all right and likewise you will see by the way that you have an appearance panel here but it doesn't necessarily give you all the same kind of options and functionality so we want to work with the appearance actual panel not the appearance section within the properties okay so hopefully that's clear all right so pause the video practice this right and practice it with the circle if you want to if text is a little bit too much just by having kind of multi-layers to be able to just have some more dynamism and some more visual interest okay see you in the next lesson now we are ready to finally export our content save it as maybe another file type and maybe we want to package it could be pdf could be just another adobe illustrator could be an eps file let's explain what that is now if you are exporting we talked about one way you could do it is just simply just to select your object and then you can right click notice here is this export selection we also discussed how you can go through your window and then go over here to asset export and you can export these as individual objects if you like right so go back to an earlier video on that but you can see very easy we can do that now if you're going to be exporting your entire document and maybe all of your artboards in such a way you can do it in a number of different ways now before we even get into that let's talk about how we can preview what it's going to look like now you will see over here in the far lower left is this change screen mode if you simply click on that you're going to see there's this presentation mode or just simply shift f so i'm going to click on that you're going to see oh because i have these three art boards it allows me just to go through these one by one right kind of cool so you can see that before you even send it out you know what's going to look like nice and clean there's nothing extra in there if you don't want it pretty cool there's a few other options in here as well if you want to do just normal screen mode where we are at here and then full screen mode with menu bar okay all right you can do that let's switch that back and let's go over here to normal again go to here and then full screen mode and that takes you to that okay and then i'm going to hit the escape key to get back out of it you also know that you can hit the tab key as another thing to do and you can also hit just the shift tab key which just gets rid of all your kind of like major right-sided panels okay so i just bring that right back so there's going to be some kind of like precursor things that you do now if we are ready to now save it and package it and everything you can go over here to file and you'll see there's an option for export if you want to export export for screens it's going to come up it's going to be very similar to what we just saw before and even in some earlier lessons maybe you want to export all of your artboards only some of your artboards just some of your assets if you want to these are in our assets folder where are you going to save it to and essentially what kind of file format do you want to okay save it as right now if i click on file maybe i want to export in a very different way let's go ahead and just do a save as and then maybe you just want to save it as a pdf notice also you can save it as an ai file which hopefully you're doing already and then here's also an eps encapsulated postscript maybe you are doing that because you're sending it to somebody who does not read illustrator files maybe it's an older illustrator file maybe it's just something that they're just a it's a vector reading program like maybe it's a 3d a 3d printing device could be so many so many different reasons okay and we talked about svgs earlier scalable vector graphics maybe you want to do that as well okay so you'll know when the time comes but you can very very easily do that so if i wanted to save this as a pdf right now i can click on save do you want to replace it i already have that there i'm going to say yes okay very good let's just change that to avo yes and i click on save and now this pops up to a bunch of my pdf presets okay so essentially what do i want to do in terms of my compression my security my bleeds all this good stuff here all right so what's my compatibility i'm going to make it the most recent one if possible go right here to compression how am i compressing my images do you want to down sample at all totally up to you how do you want to work with your marks and bleeds do you want them shown up but when you do send this to the printer are you going to have some bits of information in there that you want that to be clear and then if we go over here to output this is really about your color conversion if you need to do this at all you'll see here go ahead and convert it maybe some of your images are not cmyk you want to convert them to rgb and let's just jump over here to security that might be hey something a little bit more important for you is hey do you want to require a password to open the document yes or no cool or do you want to use a password to restrict editing okay including like any kind of editing at all right printing all this kind of stuff here that you can do here so if you choose this it's all going to light up what do you want to allow happen maybe you want to have it maybe you don't but you can simply password protect that all right and then this is just going to give you a summary of everything you've chosen and then you click on save and now that's going to be saved as a pdf for you to send that out package it whatever you want to do afterwards okay now you also will notice that there is in fact a package option for you when you click on that it's going to give us you know everything here in terms of where it's going to go what's going to be the folder name it's going to create a new folder and then if you're working with links right so a link in this case is a link that's linking up to an outside document image or whatever that you have placed into your illustrator file you want to copy that so that therefore when you print it out your printer will actually have access to those links so therefore you don't have to reset that all over again okay same thing for fonts right you don't want to have to actually have low quality for your images you don't have low quality for your fonts or they can't find the fonts and they accidentally choose a different font right or maybe it's intentionally because they don't have it just know that that's what packaging is going to allow you to do because when you do in fact package you're going to see that it's going to then create a new folder with all of the links that you've created based on things you've placed as well as all of your fonts that you're using i'm not really using any of these things in my document but i know how easy it is to do that so i'm going to go ahead and click on package they're just telling me some copyright stuff here i'm going to say okay all right package created successfully and then i can just say show package and then you can see there it is there's my pdf it created all right there's some instructions potentially if you want to put that in there right then i'm pretty much good to go all right and then with this guy more or less be the same thing but it's going to see you're going to see here it's not going to be several pages it's just going to be just one page all right so let's just take a look at what we created open up to my pdf and now you can see one two three individual pages and that looks pretty slick all right so congratulations we are on the tail end of this class please practice watch this as many times as you need to and use the courseware and then please come back with any comments or questions we're happy to address anything in the channel and we'll see you in the next lesson i hope on illustrator advanced good luck and have fun thank you for watching everyone this concludes our introduction illustrator class congratulations we covered a lot in this class we learned how to draw vector images from scratch modify your drawings using various tools including the direct selection tool the shape tools anchor point tools the bezier handle we also learned about layer management colors swatches and gradients we also covered some pretty neat tips on working with brush strokes typing on a path how to create both simple and complex illustrations and of course a lot more now there is a good deal more illustrator to learn so please check out our other video on advanced illustrator where we dive into even more creative features like symbols live paint tracing 3d type filters special effects and a lot more thank you again and hope to see you in the next class thanks for watching don't forget we also offer live classes and office applications professional development and private training visit learned.com for more details please remember to like and subscribe and let us know your thoughts in the comments thank you for choosing learn it

Channel: Learnit Training

Views: 7,679

Rating: 4.9834709 out of 5

Keywords: illustrator cc 2021, tips and tricks, adobe illustrator, illustrator 2021 tips and tricks, learn, illustrator, learn it, learn it anytime, learn illustrator cc 2021, illustrator 2021 tutorial, illustrator tutorial, vectors illustrator 2021, patterns illustrator 2021, shapes illustrator 2021, artboards illustrator 2021, tutorial, guide, learnit, graphic design, adobe, creative cloud, draw icons, create infographics, draw logos, brushes illustrator 2021, help, how to use illustrator

Id: feUBW6aUP0w

Length: 204min 53sec (12293 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021