If you are not good in drawing that actually doesn't mean anything you can still be great at Illustrator because
there are so many technical things that if you learn and you apply you can
really quickly develop a great skill. The actual most difficult thing is you're not good at hand drawing is to come up with an idea and that's what you see here on my screen this is this is a concept of a character a fisherman which is probably at the moment doesn't look that great but there is the potential for it to look great. And that's because it already has a character personality it's like a caricature of a character but once you start adding colors which is still not the final stage but already starts to look like
oh yeah that's they're starting to look great but the transition from here to here is actually very easy to learn. You have to know a little bit about color theory how to combine colors together which I will also talk about in a bit but it's actually a very systematic thing
so the most important thing is to be able to come up with something like that but to be honest, in the beginning,
every illustrator starts with copying. Everyone who worked at Disney I met
several people illustrators working at Disney they all started with copying you have
to copy others to be able to learn or study just simply look at things, objects and start trying to draw them but once you get to the second stage I said you're still not ready there is still the detailing part which can add an again
another whole depth to the illustration and detailing means adding shadows and highlights
as you can see that's what's being added here and also the textures and little details which makes the whole illustration
more interesting to look at and engaging and here's another quick example just
to understand what I'm talking about. When you have a simple object like this scene here that we have a couple of objects together. This already looks quite nice it could be in a cartoon or something that but very important what colors being used. If I change the colors around that could be a
different style but it doesn't look as nice it's you can feel like things are out of place and
that's not because these are colors are all very similar but they are in harmony. They are selected accordingly to whatever
mood needed to be achieved but that's again still not the final illustration this would be
a basic we call flat colors or base colors. And on top of this you would start to add the details
and now I let me just zoom a little bit closer so when I turn this on and off you see what do I add here I add the shadows right, so cast shadows
are very important because they define depth that's what makes things look more three-dimensional. So without that you don't really feel like there is dimensions or depth to the pillow for example but once you have the shadows immediately makes it
like an object that you would be able to pick up and hold. But shadows are not enough you also need highlights see the difference again when I turn on the highlights
immediately it starts to come alive and all those little highlights here as well
all around the edges we call Rim lights are also very effective and important
to make it more tangible the whole thing. But that's still not all because you can also add Ambient light. So once you have the shadows and highlights
all in place you can still add Ambient light which again adds a whole another dimension to the scene and that's where the cast shadows appear you can see all around and then if I want to make the Ambient light even more effective. I could even use a Gradient in the background
can you see that again another subtle difference but adds a whole lot of dimension to the scene
so if I just quickly turn off everything. That was without any of these lights that I used and this is with all the lights turned on and using the Gradient. Okay, so once again a very simple illustration
if I turn off all the colors you see. In illustration, this is actually a very standard, basic
couple of objects it's nothing complicated compared to some other illustrations that I
worked on if I just show you one where you really have a lot going on I mean for presentations you
can have so much objects this actually is around eleven thousand objects. It doesn't look that complicated
but it's actually a lot of details there it was used for presentation. Now if I go back to our main topics
which I mentioned so once again the four important things Pen, Shapes
Brushes and Appearance I can start with the Pen Tool and let me give you
a very quick example of the Pen Tool, so I'm just going to open up this and
by the way I'll just quickly show this to you if you remember this example I have this file with me
so whoever needs if I can give it to you. This is a great exercise to do if you never use the Pen Tool before to do these and continue them. So if you remember drawing these shapes on your own then you are already good with the Pen Tool
you have a good foundation but here's the trick that I was talking about so the Pen Tool is a tricky one it is something that's very not natural it's not something that like a
Pencil if you use the Pencil Tool in Illustrator you can draw with it quite easily let me just set this
to a little bit more visible color like red. So when you draw with the Pencil that's quite natural
especially if you use a tablet-like what I'm doing now. With this, you can draw almost like a Pen, Pencil on a paper and more importantly, if you double-click on the Pencil you can set it up with these options that I have here so you Keep selected the Path that you are drawing and you also have the Edit selected paths turn on. Why that's useful? Is because if I start drawing something. Let me just show you this again so drawing with the Pencil I can continue drawing that line and I can even draw over sections that I had before. So you can see that that is quite natural
the way we would expect to draw. This is what we call automatic drawing tool because
it automatically places down all these Anchor points. When I highlight them like this you can see all those little Anchor points they are created automatically with the Pencil and each Anchor point wherever there are curves you will also get these little things called handles. When I drag this out you can see that these two handles
really control how that Anchor Point is going to look like. Now with a Pen Tool you have to draw these
Anchor points manually. So it's not an automatic tool you have to click, click
and that creates the Anchor points if you want to draw a curved line you have to click and drag and then the next line will automatically be curved as well. So you have to consider how this handle is working if you don't want this to go into
another curved section like it would go in my case, I can just simply click on that last Anchor point
and then I can continue with the straight line again. So this is quite tricky especially as I said
when it comes to drawing curves but look at this instead of drawing curves
what you can do is draw straight lines. Okay, you might say that that's very far from what we need here okay, but I intentionally would go to the points where
this little flame it could be like a logo it needs to turn. So I just go on these main tips and turning points and then comes the important shortcut hold down the Alt or Option key
and notice what happens when I do this I just zoom a little bit closer so you can
see it when I hold down the Alt key and I hover over the path that's when the cursor
changes to this Curvature Tool with which I can click and start dragging it out probably I have to zoom back otherwise it doesn't do it properly. So holding down the Alt key I can drag it out into a curve
and fit it perfectly where it needs to go and look at that how easy that is so instead of really struggling following that path I just put down
those simple points in the beginning and I almost get everything in place I'll show
you how to fix whatever it doesn't go into place but most of them will fall nicely into place
just simply by using this simple Alt click-and-drag and I think I'm better off using the tablet the
mouse is not behaving correctly here. If you have a point where your handles are not in place you just hold down the Command on Mac or Ctrl key and with that you can adjust the handles individually so you can really align it again in place
wherever it needs to go like here I just aligned it like that and immediately
we have a perfect shape. Now you can imagine even that big line, big curve
I would be able to do with the same technique but just to show you how effective this technique is.
This is another quite difficult shape to draw I will just draw one side of it but look at this technique. I start here and hold down the Shift key
that's the only one I haven't mentioned yet Shift will draw straight line and then I hold down Shift key again click again there on the top so we have three anchor points at the moment then I hold down the Alt key we can start here at the bottom start dragging that and that already looks quite good but if you hold down Shift as well it makes sure that this curve is also forced to keep the handles horizontal see
when I don't hold down the Shift it works like that but Alt + Shift or Option + Shift
together I could do that and then the same thing here I can hold down
Alt and Shift together see how it changes so Alt and Shift together that is it
and then continuing from that point I just click at the bottom and again Alt and Shift together
and there you go we have half of it. So if I would do that with the Pen Tool
without using shortcuts I would have quite a trouble doing it as nicely as this and especially with such less amount of anchor points
remember I had one two three that's it. Three points having all this shape created. So learning to work with the Pen Tool
and this few shortcuts will help you and there's obviously lots of other methods
but I don't want to spend too much time on this I just would like to mention also another thing which came out with Creative Cloud version of Illustrator which I found very useful. When you select an object you can switch
to the Direct Selection Tool the shortcut is A when you do that you will get these little corner widgets this little circle show up around each corner point and with them, you can click and drag to change the corners so from sharp corners
you can turn into completely rounded corners but more importantly, you can select individual points as well I normally do a selection like that and then
you can change just that one individual corner point and if you double click on the corner widget that's
also useful because then you get additional options where you can actually dial in the value you wish to use plus you even have inverted roundness and chamfer as well which cuts it off and when you use round options you even have a different rounding option
called relative and absolute and the cool thing about this is these are always going to be available these are live changes, so whenever I come back to this object even if
I add colors on it let's just say I use a color or I could do changes to the stroke whatever I do these will always be there for me to make changes to and remember if you have the whole object selected you change all the points but if you select multiple points only the ones you wish
to change then only those will change so if I select half of it then I can change only half but the other side stays. Okay, so that's about the Pen Tool
in general and working with paths but now let's switch to the next topic and obviously I will.. I will be able to answer any questions at the end so stay until the end and I will answer
any of your questions if you have any so drawing symmetrical shapes is another tricky thing in Illustrator but let me give you
quick 2 quick techniques to do that first of all again mastering the Pen Tool can be very useful you might think that this heart shape needs
quite a lot of anchor points to draw I can do it in two anchor points and I'm not trying to show off I'm just trying
to tell you that if you learn how to work with it then you can do these things so for example here I would start by
just setting up my handle points holding down click and dragging the first anchor point hold down the Alt key you can already set up that v-shape then go just below the other anchor point draw one side of your heart and hold down the Alt key again split the bottom handle and then you click
and drag on the top and look at that with two anchor points we drew the heart
an it looks quite nice as well it's symmetrical because I took care of making these handles symmetrical but that's obvious is something that you don't really have to learn to do because again this
is all about using the Pen Tool but what if you are not that good at with the
Pen Tool you can still draw things perfectly symmetrical. You just have to do the following thing this is one method that I like but I will show you another one as well
which might be even more effective. So I will just click at the bottom point hold down Shift key this is crucial you want to make sure that line is straight and holding down the Shift-key make sure that it is now I'm just going to change the color again maybe
to something very different for our stroke maybe a bright blue will do and I will also make sure using the
Appearance Panel so we can see while I'm drawing so there is my line and then now I do it
slightly differently I will continue this line here and then I will just click and drag actually
it's just hold and click and drag out the handle like that and come to the other side that looks already better like that and then we can finish off and click and drag
and then just a just holding down the Command key I just adjust it slightly let's say that's the heart shape that we wanted pressing Shift X can swap quickly the stroke
and fill color on a selected object so I started off using for the stroke now becomes the fill and once you have one side and you make sure
that the center point is completely vertical that's when you use the Reflect Tool which is O the shortcut you click in a center point you can click
anywhere on the symmetry line and then you click and drag and hold down Alt and Shift or Option Shift and that's going to keep it completely symmetrical and duplicate Alt is to duplicate Shift is to keep it symmetrical. Yeah, my heart is not as nice as while did in
the beginning with just two anchor points but once you have two halves it's still not joined together
so what you want to do at this point having the two selected you use the Shape Builder people who uses illustrator for a long time probably
would use Pathfinder which is great as well but Shape Builder is even faster that's the tool here in the toolbar you select both sides and just draw over the two
and then it becomes one shape at the moment it doesn't want to become one shape maybe it's because just move them around too much here there you go now is one shape all right. Now another technique would be if you want to see
automatically while you are drawing the other side so it's like a simultaneous symmetrical drawing this is slightly more tricky Here what you need to do first of all is to draw a straight line again You can even use the Line Tool for this you just draw a straight line and once that line is placed down you put it in a group that's when you need the layers to see make sure that what you are doing is going to set up correctly. So Cmd G or Ctrl G is going to make a group from that line. Notice I don't even have any colors on that line it
doesn't need any colors you will see why. Once it's in the group that's all we need it and then you set up an effect. Illustrator has all these effects and they can be
applied as live effect which is amazing again makes it possible to make changes to them so they are non-destructive. So I go through the Effect Menu and I go under the Distort and Transform and I choose Transform Transform is a very powerful effect if you learn one
effect in Illustrator this should be the one because with this you can do so many different
things what I will do here is I want to reflect the X-axis so I want to reflect that way and I would like to make a copy so not just simply
reflect while I'm drawing but I want to copy it already and then I can decide whether I want to draw on
the left side or on the right side of my symmetry I will draw on the left side so I set up my reference
point to be on the right side that makes the center of symmetry this empty line that we created That's all you needed to set up so reflect X
copy one and set that point up there that's all you need. Once you click OK this effect is set up on this group look at this the Appearance Panel tells me that the effect is here and if I click on this I can always make changes to it and if I come up here you can also see
that whenever you apply an effect to an object Illustrator will fill in the circle meaning that it has
something more than just a simple stroke and fill. So the appearance remember don't forget the
appearance is a very important thing that we use. So once you have that ready. You go into the group itself and you
start drawing so I'm going to use the Pen Tool now and what I will do is I will set it up just so we can see it
into a stronger color something like that and I will start drawing from the bottom
and holding down Shift I can draw straight lines just like that. Now when I go in here I can see already that I made a mistake because
I didn't lock that line there that's also something that you should do before you do anything else you lock that one single line that doesn't have any color at the moment. Okay, so locking it make sure that you don't actually continue drawing that. Instead, you are doing a separate line and what's important is and that's the last step you see I started drawing but it's not I don't see a reflection of it on the other side the reason for that because this path that I'm using
has to be placed within the group. So if I drag this here within the group and I zoom back see it's already there. So that's all I needed to do and now if I continue drawing so whatever I do here I'm just going to continue using the Pen Tool.
Whenever I place down a new section I see immediately on the other side and I can come up here in the center point and there you go We have the symmetrical shape, just to show you this in action if I keep drawing the same line you can see
that is all happening simultaneously and that's a very effective thing again if you are drawing
anything that needs to be symmetrical I'm talking about Batman logo for example and anchors all kinds of things which can be extremely useful and the good thing is
once you have a group set up like that you only have to put your line into that group so this group you do it once once it's set up with the effect and with everything that way I've done it.
So just to show you if I delete this whole path as long as I draw a new thing and it's placed into that group I can draw straight away in symmetry. Okay, that's another effective thing again still using Pen Tool of course but it's this is something to do with symmetry
which is very important in illustration. Now Shape Builder I already mentioned and
here's a good example why to use the shape builder. Once again everything can be created from simple geometric shapes and if you don't believe me now you will believe me at the end of this session but for example, here's a simple speech bubble. To draw a speech bubble you might find it difficult
but if you just use three circles select all three and using the Shape Builder. You join together the parts you wish to keep
just simply drawing over them and then hold down the Alt or Option key
and draw over the parts you don't need you immediately have your speech bubble.
That's how simple it is. I can do the Vodaphone logo just as easily. If I select these one two three four circles
I can create exactly what you see on the other side. So I just hold down Alt remove what we don't need the excess and then just simply draw over the remaining parts
and there you go we have the Vodaphone logo. And the same way Batman of course and also you can do the Twitter logo look at that
have you ever thought of that was actually created from purely circles and that's a very common thing designers do and the reason why circles are so effective
it is because they are the purest shape ever. Okay, they are like the most ideal shape in aesthetics a perfect circle and if your actual illustration is made of only perfect circles is going to look very I would say balanced, harmonious it just really works. Okay so you can see I'm not going to do that it would
take a little bit longer to do it with the Shape Builder but there's all the circles that was used for the Twitter logo and there's so many others the Apple logo is also only using circles, perfect circles. If you look into it you can find the actual original sketch which was made of only circles. So working with shapes it's very important but here's another example one of my favorite things to just actually like practice on is doing these Celtic crosses
they almost like riddles for designers or illustrators. How to do them. Now I show you very quickly how I will do it and then
you can always watch the recording back if it was too fast. So what I'm doing here is again just using three shapes. So all to get this you need three shapes and not complicated
shapes, you need these very simple shapes a circle and two rounded rectangles. So let me just do just that. I'm going to start drawing from the center I have these guides here
for just to make sure that I draw them correctly. So holding down Alt and Shift together when you are drawing a circle you can start from the center point and then draw it outside and the same applies to the other tools
like Rounded Rectangle Tool you click in the middle. You just probably want to make sure that you
deselect that shape that you already have or maybe just remove the fill color
and then you don't accidentally draw over it. So I'm just going to get rid of that. So I can draw my other shape starting again from the center point. Probably even easier if I just lock it. So starting from the center point why is it not drawing strange, let me try drawing a circle here. Okay, was just stuck. Okay, so if I start drawing holding down Alt again I can draw it and by the way with the Rounded rectangles if you use up and down arrows you can change how much roundness you want to use on them these are completely rounded but you can see
holding the up and down arrows I can change the roundness of them I'm going to use a full roundness here and I'm going to just place this back holding down Space by the way
you can move shapes around while you are drawing them. Okay, so setting that up I should have kept it in the middle, let me start again.
So start from the middle holding down the Alt I can draw a perfect shape like this
and then I will use the Reflect Tool. Click and drag holding down Alt and Shift together I have a duplicate quickly it's similar to the other technique that I showed you before. So now I have all the three shapes together and I'm going to turn off my guides and look what I'm going to do, instead some people I see this like a lot of illustrators
are still falling in the same mistake. Whenever you have shapes similar to these they
would draw the circle on the perimeter and then they would draw the one inside and also for this rounded rectangle they would draw two for each, so they would draw one outside and one in the middle instead what you can do is just use a bigger thicker stroke
set it up to roughly the width that you need and this is a stroke so you can't really work
with strokes as well as with filled shapes but if you go to Object and choose Expand you can turn your strokes into fills and then immediately
you can work with them completely in a different way and what I'm going to do here is I'm going to use a fill color
on this and maybe the stroke as well slightly differently. So you already see that switch with
the Expand was especially important step but now I can just use the Shape Builder Tool coming back to our
good old Shape Builder that I use with the circles as well and I know this because I've done this several times
but all you need to do is to learn how the knot is created and see what I am doing here all these different parts I'm joining together so you can see the way it is up there I'm going to join
these lines as well together, I made a mistake so you don't want any shortcuts you just go over these lines one by one and then you do these lines as well so just going over those and there you go that's the Celtic Cross. And now comes the other Tool which I love to work with and that is the Live Paint Bucket Tool. It looks like this like a strange tool to work with in the
beginning but it's actually extremely useful because with this although these objects are not really separated well I could still click on the parts which I wish to change in colors and I could very quickly amend them and immediately stands out a bit more. Now let's just put another color in here and you're probably thinking about the choice of colors that I'll use here it is horrible, horrendous but what we can do is once you have your colors in place you select all this and there's another one of my favorite ones is the Live Paint, sorry Recolor Artwork. Once you click on that you get a list of
all the colors being used in that illustration even the black outline which by default stays black but if you want to change the color on that you have to click on that little - turns into an arrow and then you click on here and you say yes and then even that color can be changed but instead of changing it here I go into Edit here on the top and then I get a color wheel
I love color wheels again perfect shape, circle and then I'm going to start changing them around one by one see how
quickly I can set them up and if I want I can even rely on harmony Color Harmony techniques I could choose maybe Analogue colors if I want to create something like that or I can choose Triad which is
quite similar to my horrible colors in the beginning or I could use Complementary colors and once you choose a Harmony you can move them around all together at the same time and that's quite nice but you can also change back to no Color Harmony at all by unlocking the colors first and then you can again change them individually but also if you come up with the color setup let's just
say I will do a bit more closer colors in this time if you like a combination of colors and you would like to keep that
but changing them all around the wheel that's when you lock the colors together and once they are locked they can be moved around the wheel together so let me just do that now you see how quickly and easily I can change all the colors at the same time. So this is another great thing if you're not confident
with choosing colors use the Recolor Artwork option. Okay, so that can teach you a lot about colors and if you want to save the color setting that's another favorite of mine you click on this option
here new color group save the settings and then you can come up with another setting let's say this one Okay, I can just click on yes. So okay if I need to change back to that I've just come
back here and I can always use the one that I saved I amended the one that I wanted to save but you can see the point
that as long as you save each of the settings that you like here's new color group I can always
switch back and forth between them very easily. Okay now, let's not waste more time on shapes
so that was our second category. Appearance is essentially a style being saved. So if I select this one let's say and I apply the Graphic Style
that's actually a combination of fills and strokes. So you get this panel called Graphic Styles by default and
you can find lots of different settings here that you can open up and you can try them out like let's say Artistic Effects if I open that up you can see we have all these different styles.
Now these are all using combinations of the fill colors and strokes so whenever you use
one of these you will see the combination here in the Appearance Panel and that's why learning to work with the Appearance Panel is so important because you can save any appearance and apply it easily by just using the same again from the Graphic Styles Panel And that's how professional illustrators work they
have their set of different appearances and they apply them and just to show you another quick example here. Look how quickly and effectively
I can draw roads if I just use the Pencil Tool here and I have my layer selected start drawing, obviously, it would be quite long to set
this up to make it work so I saved the appearance that we need and there you go there is the road and I can even keep
continue drawing that remember the Pencil I can change direction and go over and amend parts as well you can even hold down the Alt key and smooth out sections while you are drawing and this appearance is quite complex it has around
six strokes as you can see, set up in a specific order and that's how this is working. Okay, so working with Appearance can make illustration much easier as long as you learn how to work with the Appearance Panel. So last but not least I have another like roughly ten minutes and I'm going to attempt a full illustration I don't think I will be able to get to the end but I wanted to prove to you that drawing with circles can be very effective. If if you look at this illustration you probably go out so cute but this is actually all, round shapes all perfect circles I didn't use
anything else just the Circle Tool and obviously combine it with Gradients and Shape Builder and the other things I showed you today then actually nothing new. Whatever I've done today is exactly the same thing I would do here so let me just try to quickly mock up the head
obviously would take quite long to do the whole thing but if I start with a brand new illustration and once again let's see how I would do this. I would start with the circle which is going to be the head okay then I select the Direct Selection Tool
select these two points the left and the right points and with that using the arrows on the keyboard I can shift it around slightly. So we can already get a slightly different shape here and then I can also select this handle points
and I can round them out a bit more so I started with a circle and you can say I'm cheating but I'm making changes to the circle because I
needed a slightly different shape but then if we look at the example we have here we need to have also the eyes and the ears.
Now the ears are quite simple they are almost perfect circles so I can just do a circle up there and then
I can draw another one as well quickly on top of it before I go any further at this point I would already
set up the colors just so we can see what is going on here I'm going to use a Gradient on the fill color so I will use the Gradient Panel alright and while this fill color is selected I click on that and I change it to Radial Gradient and I'm going to go a
little bit fast so you might find it difficult to follow again it's doing quite strange things illustrator today I don't know what is it doing again here it's supposed to be a perfect circle in the middle let me just try to okay, it actually has two gradients how could it be all right, don't know how that happened but yeah
so there's our Gradient I'm going to change the color to a brighter grey something like that and then we can play around with the center point maybe increase it out something like that. see what I told you about lighting this almost looks like 3D immediately just by applying
Gradient shadows around it and highlight in the middle I select these two shapes and move it behind the
head and I'm going to use the same gradient for the ear but I'm going to go into it and change it to a darker Gradient so I will turn this one and that color also to a darker Gradients something like this then I can select this other shape and using the
eyedropper I can pick the same color already and there is one of the ears already we can distort this slightly if we want do something with it and then using the Reflect Tool
we can already reflect this onto the other side shortcut was Alt Shift to make sure it duplicates and keeps it straight let's draw quickly the patch behind the eye again it can be the same shape but now again I use the Direct Selection Tool and I shift these points around slightly and you can even switch to the Pencil Tool and look at that with the Pencil Tool I can draw over the edges slightly and I could create a much more customized shape for the eye. Then I will draw the other circle on top of that which is going to be the rim so I just come back
here you can see we need that one there and then we need to have another circle another useful shortcut Cmd C, Cmd F or Ctrl C, Ctrl F is going to Copy and Paste exactly in the same position I'll use the eyedropper to pick the same color from the head and then I can use again the same technique and create the iris. So for the iris I'm going to again change my Gradient and I'm going to use from the outside a little bit darker blue
so I'm just going to switch to colors and the darker blue and inside I will make it brighter blue like that and let's make it a little bit cross-eyed
that always makes things more cute. So if we have it like that and then we add the pupils and I'm going to use again same color or maybe for that we can use completely black like that and this won't be really realistic without a
reflection you always have to have a highlight a point of the brightest detail where light gets reflected so I'm going to add that in there alright that
immediately makes it a little bit more lively and then what I will do now is I select everything in the background group them together and I lock them Cmd+2 is the shortcut for locking meaning I can't select anything in the background
now so I select everything that's made up the eye group it together and again use the center point here
Alt Shift and drag it on to the other side. Now at this point, if you feel like it's too close
you can always select the eye and use the arrows on the keyboard to move it around
let's say move it three points to the left three points to the right. So we are getting there now we need the nose, the nose is slightly more tricky but again I'm using
staying true to what I said I'm using the circle all right then I'm going to pick that same color up there then I use the Direct Selection Tool and just move it down slightly there you go another shape created from that. Then comes the mouth so I'm going to do another circle duplicate this and holding down the Alt key you can quickly duplicate and then using the Shape Builder holding down the Alt key or Option key you draw over the parts you don't need and you immediately
have the shape that we wanted to create here we can move this behind the nose something like that and then we just need to reflect it again so using the
same method that we did before Alt, Shift, Reflect and we have the mouth as well in place and then after this is really all about just continuing the same methods and every detail here even that little detail on the top
using the same method just to show you very quickly I can draw a circle once again use
the same color from here Alt click and drag and then select these two Alt draw over and we have one of those little fur piece that can go up we can also delete using the Eraser Tool
you can delete the parts that you don't need very quickly. So there's one. Alt click and then rotate to duplicate rotate again and so on and so forth. So I think my point is proven with this
that anything can be created from simple shapes. So the whole thing that I'm trying to explain here is that you don't actually have to have a freehand drawing skill in Illustrator it's great to have it but if you have a reference image you probably most likely will be able to recreate it by using shapes or combinations of the tools that I showed you today. So that's really what I wanted to get to at the at the end and just to show you an example when you have a sketch
that you have on paper of course that can always help and if you are good at hand drawing
then this is what I would recommend to do to get your drawing place it into illustrator
and then you can go over it by tracing it. What you need to do is once you place the image in you
double click on the layer and you turn on this option called Template. Template will dim the image automatically and on a
separate layer on top of it you can start drawing and once again here just to show you for example drawing the arm it would be so easy as long as you use
the right tool like the Pen Tool in this case and then I can just increase the stroke size so once that's selected I can increase the stroke size and here's another useful tool to learn. There's a tool called Width Tool with which you can
vary the size of the stroke. So you can add again a little bit more dynamism instead of
just having a straight line you can create width points on this and immediately you get a little bit more interesting shape. Right so obviously the whole thing here would be
I would be able to draw with the same techniques but one last thing that I also find useful when I draw
again I could use a simple shape like the rectangle. Okay, I can use these little points here in the
corner point to create the curves the way I need it So instead of drawing around it I could always
start from a simple shape and see how quickly I can adjust everything into the right size that I need
without actually having to draw this with the Pen Tool but this is the useful technique if I have a shape and on top of that, I need to have another
shape which is closed inside it what you can do is to use this method called Draw Inside if you click to that it will force Illustrator to draw inside the
shape you currently have selected. So if I now use any tools with another color and I draw for example a circle that circle will automatically be kept inside that previous shape until you go back to draw normally. So that is again extremely useful for example if you have like a ball shape and I'm just going to use the same color from there or maybe just select this acting up again okay you can imagine that drawing
with the same technique you can create so many easy techniques when you need to overlap shapes together. So as I switch back to this remembering that
the main tools that I talked about today were these four but obviously, it's a combination of these and also it's get to know these tools
and the shortcut that comes with them. So that was really my best I could do in this short amount of time
I could spend the whole day obviously showing you techniques. I hope you found it useful and I'm glad you join me today. Thank you, thank you.
