10 EASY Things to Draw in Adobe Illustrator for Complete Beginners

1. Intro: Hi everyone. My name is Zan and I've been in Adobe Illustrator user and trainer for about 15 years. I have a graphic design YouTube channel, and I also have an Etsy shop or I sell my vectors. And I've been putting my stack vectors on stock websites for about five years now in this course, my main goal is for you to get more comfortable with Adobe Illustrator. And to do that, I'm going to show you how to draw ten easy things in Adobe Illustrator. This course is for complete beginners. So you don't even have to have opened Adobe Illustrator before. I've also put these in order from easiest to hardest. So you'll be learning new tools as you go. At some point in this class, you'll be given the chance to leave a review. And of course you'll want to make sure that it's going to be a good class before you do that. But once you've kind of figure that out, go ahead and leave me a review if at all possible. Reviews helped me so much. It helps me to improve my classes and it oscillates mean now that I'm doing a good job. So I would really appreciate it. The designs we'll be creating in this course are just for practice. But it's totally okay if you want to use them in something else you're working on or put them in your portfolio. You can also add them in the class project when you're done. 2. Exercise Files: This course includes exercise files. And one of those files is the complete 10 objects that we're going to draw in this class today. So if you feel like you're getting stuck, go ahead and open up that project file and you can kind of compare it to what I've created and maybe we can figure out where you went wrong. And of course, I'm always available for questions. You can reach out here on Skillshare if you'd like. There are also four new designs in the exercise files that use the same tools that we'll be using in this class. So you can try to recreate those on your own. And you can use us to leave a project. 3. Setting up your workspace: This video is about setting up your workspace. And this is something you might want to do if you want to have your workspace have the same look as my workspace. All right, let's go ahead and open Illustrator. We'll come over here to Create New. And then I'm going to choose Print and then letter. And we'll come over here to create so that we can get the same starting point. I'll come up here to Window and then workspace, and then we'll choose Essentials Classic. Then go ahead and come up to Window Workspace again, and then Reset Essentials Classic. So now your workspace should look a lot like mine, except it might be the dark settings. So if you want to use the light setting like me, you can come out to Illustrator preferences. And then General, if you're on a Windows system, this will probably be under Edit. So Edit Preferences. Now I'll come down here to the user interface and here's your brightness. I know a lot of people like the dark setting and that's totally fine. There's no difference. This is just my preference to make it light. And now we'll come down and press OK. Ok, So now we all have a similar look for our Illustrator interface. I'm going to show you how to customize this so you can get to the panel is you need a little easier. These tools over here are your toolbar. And I like to pull these out so that they sit right here. It gives me a little extra space at the bottom. So to do that, you just grab the top right up here and then just pull like this. And then I just put them back in the same place. Up here is your control panel. Now if you're not seeing your control panel for some reason during the lesson, you'll want to come up here to Window control right here. And all of these panels over here are also available in window. Perusall open this little fly out. So I'm going to click these two little arrows to expand the panels. You'll see color and color guide. And I like these right up here in the upper right. So I'm going to click in this blank area over here to just pull this out like this. And then I'll click on this hob and set it right up there. You can see when you hover over different parts that you'll get some blue areas and then shows you that it's going to snap in between those places. We went to come up here to the very top, you'll see you get a rectangle around everything. But if you move up a little higher, you'll get just a line. And when we see that line will just release and that way it'll snap up to the upper right. Okay, next, I also want my swatches to be over here. So I'm going to click in the blank area, pull it out, and then I'll click on this hop here, hover under color until I get the blue bar and then just release. Now for this next set, the stroke gradient and transparency. I actually went transparency to be separate. So I'm going to click right on the word and pull this one out and that'll separate it from its little group. Then I'll get right on the top and pull it right underneath swatches like this. I want my art boards to be right underneath transparency. I need to pull it out of this group so I'll get right on the word itself and then just click and drag. Come up here to the top and hover right underneath transparency, underneath art boards. I like transparency align and Pathfinder. So I'm going to come up here to Window, and I can choose any one of those. I'm going to choose a line right here. And it'll open this little group that has all three of them in it. I wanted to have a whole group underneath art board. So I'll come up here to the very top. I'll click and then hover until I get the line and release. Now, I don't use properties are libraries very much. I'm going to get in this area of the group and just pull it out. And then I'll just click on the X to get rid of these. If you want to bring them back, you can, of course, just go to Window and find them here. Properties is right here. Okay, so the right side of our panel is all set up the way I want. Now I'm going to work on the left side. I like my character and paragraph could be up here. So I'm going to go to Window. And then these are a little hidden. You'll have to go to type, and then you can just choose character or paragraph. And it'll open that set. I'll click up here on the very top, and then I'll hover at the top of this column. Stroke is already exactly where I went it, so that's perfect. And then I'm going to open my links. I'll go to Window and links. In these, I'll put it right underneath my stroke. Next, I want to separate my appearance and graphic styles. I'll go ahead and click on graphic styles and pull it out. And then I'm just going to put it right above the appearance. Now I have layers and Asset Export down here, and I don't want either one of those to be in the column. So I'll click here and just drag it out, and then I'll click the little X. Now I do use layers sometimes, but not that often. So when I need those, I just hit F7 on my keyboard and it brings them up and then I can hit F7 to toggle them off. Okay, my Illustrator setup is exactly how I want it. So now I need to save my workspace. We'll go to Window workspace. And I'll choose a new workspace. And I'll call my new workspace a. Now I already have a workspace name a, so I'm just going to override it by hitting okay? Now as you're working, you might accidentally pull some things out like this. You might be moving things around. And when that happens, it's hard to remember where they were and that's why workspaces are so great. So to reset everything, we can just come up to Window Workspace and then choose our workspace. Then we can go back to workspace and reset our workspace in. Oh, put everything exactly back where it was. 4. More Settings and Keyboard Shortcuts: In this video, I'm going to go over a few more settings and a few common keyboard shortcuts. So let's open the first exercise file is called Exercise 1 common. I'll go to File Open, and then I'll navigate to the exercise one common file. And I'm going to open this now for you, this might be in your downloads folder. I also add dimension. Another thing about the toolbar. Now I like to have mine as two columns into change that you can just click this two little arrows button right up here. I'll make it one column and clicky. And again, we'll make it two columns. You also might find that you're not seeing as many tools as are shown on my screen. So to fix that, click these three little dots and then choose this little fly out up here. Yours might be set to basic, so you'll want to change that to advanced. Then if it disappears, go to Window toolbars and advanced again, okay, the first common shortcut is the letter v. V will bring you to your selection tool, which is this tool right up here. With this tool, you can click on an object and move it around. So let's click on it and just bring it over here to the little pointer. You'll notice that it goes in front of a little pointer. We can change the stacking order by using our Arrange menu command. You'll want to make sure you have an object selected and then you'll go to object arrange and then send it back. Now it's underneath the pointer. Now when you do that, you can see the keyboard shortcuts are right here on the right side of the selection. Looks so if we wanted to bring this back to the friend, that would be Shift Command right bracket or Shift Control right bracket on Windows. Another very common keyboard shortcut is copy, which is Command C on a Mac and Control C on a Windows machine. So let's copy and then paste this command V or Control V. Those two are very, very common and you can use them in almost any program, not just Illustrator. You can use them in Word, excel, Photoshop. A lot of different programs support this. You can even copy files and paste them like that by hitting Command C and Command V or Control C and Control V, Let's click our gear and delete it. Another very common keyboard shortcut is Command G or Control G, and that is a group. So with our V tool, the selection tool, let's click on this umbrella. You'll notice we've only clicked on this piece up here. And if we move this, the bottom part of the umbrella doesn't move. I'm going to hit Command Z or Control Z to undo that. Now let's group them. I'm going to select them both, and then hit Command G or Control G. That puts them in a group. So let's click off. And when I say click Off, I just mean click on a part of the document that doesn't have anything on it. So this area right over here, it'll de-select everything. And now if we click and drag, we have the whole umbrella and it's moving together because we've grouped it. I'll undo with Command Z or Control Z and other very common keyboard shortcut that you'll use all the time. Is the spacebar, spacebar toggles to the hand tool, and now it's right over here, But I never click this hand tool over here. I just hit my spacebar. When you have the spacebar held down, you can click and drag to move around your canvas. So it's a very handy. The next important keyboard shortcut is the zoom tool. I'm going to hit Z on my keyboard, which will bring up the Zoom tool which is right here. I always hit Z. Instead of clicking over here. It's just much faster. And there are two ways to use Zoom. Right now my zoom tool is set to animate. So if I went to see this heart a little better, I can just click right in the middle of the heart and then drag to the right to zoom in like this. And I'll drag to the left to zoom out. Now I actually don't like using the animated zoom very much. So in this class, I don't use it. Let's go ahead and change it to the non animated zoom. I'm going to go to my Preferences again. That's Command K or control K on your keyboard. Or you can find them under Illustrator on a Mac or under Edit preferences on Windows. So to change this to non animated zoom, I'll go to Performance. And then I'll uncheck animated zoom. And we'll say, okay, so I'm still on my zoom tool, but the difference is instead of clicking in the middle and scrolling right and left, I just draw a box around the thing I went to see closer. So I'll just draw a box right here. And now we're zoomed in. Now it's totally okay if you like the animated zoom better by in this class, you might notice a Zoom works a little differently because I don't have it turned on. Okay, let's hit V to get back to our selection tool right up here. If you wanted to select more than one object, there are a couple ways to do that. You can draw a box around the two things you want to select with your selection tool. Or you can click on one, hold shift and click on another one, and then click on another if you want to select that. Now if you accidentally double-click, you might find that you've got a different view, and this is known as isolation mode. Now, I don't really use this, but it does happen to me from time to time. When it does, you can just hit Escape and get back to your normal view. All right, let's go ahead and select the heart. You'll notice only do that, that you have a little box around the heart with these little handles, that is your bounding box. And sometimes they accidentally gets turned off to turn it back on. You can go to View and then Show Bounding Box. Right now mine is on, so it says Hide Bounding Box or you can hit Shift Command B, Shift Control B on a PC. Now another thing you'll want to turn on for this class is smart guides. Let's go back into our preferences by hitting Command K or control K. Then I'll come over here. It's a Smart Guides. And I went all six boxes checked. So make sure you are as a check to and then say, okay, here are a few terms I use when I teach. I like to refer to these tools by the letter that you can push on your keyboard to get to them. If I say okay, let's get our Z tool. That is your zoom tool and you can just hit Z on your keyboard to get to it. Or if I say that a tool, that's your direct selection tool and you can just hit a on your keyboard to get to it. But I'll always say it's their direct selection tool and here's where to find it on your toolbar. Now I mentioned this before, but when I say click off, you'll want to click in an area of your canvas. It doesn't have anything on it. If you have a big background box, that might be a little hard to do. So There's also a keyboard shortcut for that is Shift Command a or Control a, and that just de-select everything. All right, that's about everything you need to know beforehand. So let's jump in. 5. Star: All right, Now we have everything set up the way it should be. Let's get started in Illustrator. Okay, I'm hearing Adobe Illustrator and I'm going to come over here to create new, will come up here to print. We'll come over here to the preset details and we'll go to pixels. I think I want to make these will make them 500 by 500. So we'll have little square artboards. And we'll have 10 artboards, one for each little thing that we're going to draw. And then we'll create, okay, I'm going to hit Z on my keyboard and draw a box around the first art board to zoom in. And the easiest thing we're going to draw today as a star, and we're going to come over here to the rectangle tool and just click and hold and choose Star tool. Let's click and drag and drop our star. I'm going to hit D on my keyboard to get a white fill and a black outline. I'll get back on my selection tool and just click and drag this in the middle. So if we want to change colors on our star, we can just double-click the white and then choose a color here. First, we'll choose what color we went over here. I'm going to click pink. And then I think I want it to be a light pink. I can choose the shade over here. And we'll say, okay, and maybe we don't want an outline, so I'll click on the outline and get rid of that. Now there are a few other ways to draw a star. So I'm going to go back to my Star Tool and I'm going to click and drag and hold shift, but also hold Option or Alt. And this should give you a different kind of star. And I'll hit V to get my selection tool and just move it over. Maybe we want this line to be blue. Okay, so that's drawing a star, Easy peasy. 6. Moon: Okay, I'm going to zoom out with Command minus or Control minus on a PC. And we'll click on our second art board. On this art board are going to draw a moon. So to do that, I'm going to hit L to get to my Ellipse Tool. Now this is the same thing as clicking on your rectangle tool and choosing ellipse right here. And I'm going to click and drag and then hold Shift to make a big circle. Now, get on my selection tool. And I'm willing to hold Alt or option to click and drag off to the right so you're making a copy when you hold Option or Alt, you can hold Shift to go along the same plane 2. Now you can start to kind of see that moon shape over here. And we'll make it a little bit more saturated. Now I need to get my selection tool and select both of them. And then I'll hit Shift M. Shift M is your Shape Builder tool. And you can combine all these by just dragging across them. But you can also removed parts by holding Option or Alt and dragging across the parts that you don't want. So now we have our moon. I'm going to change the color of this to yellow. 7. Leaf: Okay, The third thing we're going to draw is a leaf. So I'll hit L to get back on my ellipse tool. I'm going to click and drag a circle and I'll hold Shift to make it a perfect circle. Now I'll hit V on my keyboard and I'll hold Option or Alt and click over to make a copy like we did before. I'm gonna go ahead and change the color of this to green. And if you don't see your windows here, you can always come up here to Window and you'll see them here. Like here's window color. To bring this palette out. We've got our T-shapes and I went to get just this little leaf shape in here. So I'm willing to do the same thing we did on the moon by hitting Shift M. And then that'll bring us to our Shape Builder. I'll hold Option or Alt and click this piece and then click this piece. So now we have a little leaf shape. Now I want a stem, so I'm going to hit P on my keyboard, P or Grammy to the pen tool. And to use this on all need to de-select. So we'll hit Shift Command a or Shift Control a to deselect. Now I can click right up here on that top point. And then just bring it down, hold shift and bring it down below the leaf itself and click again. So we just have a straight line right here now. And I'm willing to hit D to get a white fill and a black outline, but I really only want the black outline. So I'm going to bring the fill to the front and just get rid of it. Now I went this to be a lot thicker. So I'm willing to open my Stroke panel by going to Window stroke. And I'll increase this quite a bit, maybe to 17. I'll also select that green color and I'll get back on my stroke and also put a 17-point stroke on this. So now we have a perfect little leaf. So I'm going to group this so that this shape and this shape will move together. I'm going to get back on my selection tool, draw a box around them, and then group them with Command G or Control G. And then I think I'll just hover up here until I get this rotate image and hold Shift and just rotate it 45 degrees. So that's our leaf. 8. Rainbow: The next thing we'll make as a rainbow, and to do this, we'll need to get on the polar grid tool. And that's right underneath this line segment tool. So I'll click and drag. And here it is down here. I'm going to double-click it. To bring up the options dialog box. You can also hit Enter or Return to get this to come up, if you have the tool selected for concentric dividers, I want seven. And then for radial dividers I went to. So we'll say okay, which doesn't do anything. Then when we start clicking and dragging, you can hold shift to make them perfect circles. And you'll probably notice that your stroke is still really thick because of the last stroke you created. So let's knock that down to maybe three over here on the stroke palette. So you can probably start seeing that rainbow shape. Now we need to get rid of some of these parts. So we'll go back to our shape builder tool by hitting Shift M. That's right over here. Then hold Alt or Option. And I'm just going to drag across these pieces that we don't want. That one too. Now we've got our rainbow and we need to rotate it. I'm going to hover over the edge of a corner and then start rotating and then hold shift so it snaps into place. I'll move it over towards the center. And then I went to fill this with color. Now the way the polar grid tool builds this, it doesn't really work the way you would think it would. I've got my group selection tool and if I choose one of these and I fill it, it fills a lot of different ones. So we want to kind of separate this out. I'm going to undo with Command Z or Control Z. I'll select the whole thing and then I'll come down here to Pathfinder. And that's also in window. If you need to find it. Then we'll come down here to the divide Pathfinder, which is in the bottom row. And we'll click that. What this does is it takes everything that overlaps and makes it a separate shape. Now the rainbow is still grouped together, but you can select pieces of it if you use the group selection tool, which is right over here, it's underneath your direct selection tool. So I'll click that and then I'll click off, and then I'll choose that first little shape. I'm going to make that red. Then I'll click the next shape and makes that when more of an orangeish, yellow, green, blue, indigo, indigo, indigo and purple. So now we have our rainbow. Now if you don't like the black outlines, you can just click it and then come over here, click on the black outline here and get rid of it. 9. Pie chart: All right, moving on to the fifth thing, which is a pie chart. Illustrator has built in chart features, so that is really nice. So I'm willing to choose the Column Graph Tool, which is right here. I'll click it and hold it and come down here to the pie graph tool. And now I'm just going to click and hold Shift and draw a shape. It'll look like a square at first, but then we'll get this little spreadsheet in the first cell, I'll enter 55, and then I'll tab, and I'll enter 33. And we always need it to equal 100. So I'm going to put 12 in the third one. And then I'll click this little Apply button. And then I'll just X out of this. And now illustrators made a pie chart for us we can use are a tool, the direct selection tool, to click on each color, bring the fill to the front. And sometimes your color will look like this. If it does select the whole pie chart, come up here to the color, fly out and choose RGB. Now when I did that, I lost all my color, but that's okay. I'm going to use my a tool to select this piece and then double-click the white. And now we have the same color that we had before. I'll make that one in blue. This when purple, and this one a yellow color. And I'll select the whole thing. I'm going to get rid of the outline. And a common way that you see pie charts these days is having an open middle and maybe there's a stat or something inside there. So to do that, I'll hit L on my keyboard to get back to the Ellipse tool, I'm going to click right in the middle and then start dragging and hold Shift and Option. And then I'll make this white. So I'll click my color and I'll come up here to color and she is white. So now we have a more modern way of showing a pie chart. 10. Location pointer: Okay, the next thing we're going to make is a location pointer, like you see on Google Maps. So to do this, I'm going to hit L on my keyboard to get my ellipse tool. I'm going to click and drag and hold shift. And then we'll release. I'm going to hit D on my keyboard to give it a white fill and a black outline. And maybe you will make our stroke a little bit bigger. Now I'll copy this circle and then I'll paste behind with Command V or Control V on a PC. Now I'll hold Shift and Option and grab a corner. Make this so in quite a bit bigger, I'll get on my Direct Selection tool. And this time I'm going to zoom in a little bit actually with Z on my keyboard. I'll hit a to get my direct selection tool back, I'm going to click right on this anchor point right here, and you'll see that it's blue. The other anchor points are white, so that means they're not selected, but this one is. So now I'll hold Shift and use my down arrow to move this on down quite a bit. And now you can start to see that pointer. Look. Okay, So the problem is on a pointer you need a sharp point at the bottom. And to do that, we're going to use the anchor point tool, which is shift C. That'll get us to this little tool right here. In this tool will switch back and forth between a point having handles and appoint being a sharp point. So I'm just going to click once to change this to a sharp point. And that's it. Now there's one more step that we need to do here. Okay, So let's color our circles. I'll double-click on the white. And I'm going to make this Fred. I'll choose this color right here, and we'll say, okay, now you'll notice that this shape in here is also red. We need to punch this shape out. So to do that, I'm going to hit Shift M again for the shape builder tool. And then we'll hold Option or Alt on a PC and just click on that. So it's removing that from this larger piece. 11. Heart: Okay, the next thing we're going to make is a heart. So first I'll hit M on my keyboard and make a square. I'm going to hold Shift to make it a perfect square. And then I'm gonna get right above a corner until my cursor changes to the rotate. And then I'll click and drag and make sure the point is at the bottom by holding Shift. Now I'm going to get on my a tool, which is the Direct Selection tool. I'll draw a square around this point. So this just means I'm selecting it like we did over here. And then I'll delete it right now. I'm actually going to work on only half of the heart. I'll hit P to get my pen tool. I'll get right over this line and then hold Option or Alt. And you should see your cursor change. And when it does, click and drag, and then hold shift. And you'll be able to extend this part into half a heart shape. I'll let off. And then I'll get my selection tool. I'll click on this part of the heart and then I'm going to hit 0. 0 is our Reflect tool. I'll hold Option and click right on this point because I wanted to reflect based on this point. So I'll click that holding Option or Alt. And then it'll give me the exact reflection of that. Now we can come down here to copy. Now we have both halves of our heart. Now these are two separate pieces, so we need to join them. I'll hit a to get back on my Direct Selection Tool. And then I'm just going to start drawing a box up here and select those two points that are meeting there. And then I'll hit Command J for a join or Control J on a PC. I'll do the same down here. I'll join these two points by drawing a box around them with my a tool and then hitting Command J or Control J on a PC. This is looking quite huge, so I'm going to hold shift and make it a little bit smaller. I think I'll recolor this sign to kind of a light purple. Oh, but when I did that, it looks like I had the stroke in front. I actually went the fill in front. So, so I'll flip these so that my fill will be purple. And then I'm just going to get rid of the stroke. 12. Gear: The next thing we're going to draw is a gear or settings icon. I'm going to come over here to the shapes ears are probably be the rectangle tool, and I'm going to choose the Star Tool. Then I'll click and drag. And while I'm still dragging, I'll hit the up arrows. And I can get a lot of points this way. This is looking pretty good. I'll hold Shift to make sure the top and bottom points are exactly across from each other. And then I'll release, I'm going to double-click my color, will choose a light gray for this one. Okay, I'm going to hit V to get back on my selection tool and just kind of center it in the shape. Then I'll hit L on my keyboard to get a different shape tool, the ellipse tool. And I'm going to just click and drag while holding Shift to get a perfect circle right about there. And I went this line to be just any other color. So we can see it now and get back on my selection tool and select both. And then we'll bring out the aligned palette. So go to Window Align. And here it is down here. I've got both selected and I went to align them to each other. Now if you don't see all these things, you can come over here to the fly out and choose Show Options. And then I'm gonna come down here to align two, will choose art board. And then I'm going to choose this horizontal line and vertical align. Now I'll click off and then I'll select just the gray part. I'll hit a on my keyboard to get to my direct selection tool, which will give us these little white dots with a dot inside it. So we'll want to get right on that and then click and drag in like this. Once we've done that, we can come up here to corners on the control panel. Now if you're not seeing this control panel, you can just go to Window control right here. So we'll choose corners. And then I'm going to choose this third one, the chamfer corner. And now we can see the gear start forming. I'll make sure to be on my direct selection. I'm just going to click again on that white circle and bring it in even more. That looks about right now and get back on my selection tool. And I'm going to click just the red circle. This time I'm going to start dragging on a corner and then hold Shift and Option or Alt on a PC to make this quite a bit bigger. Okay, that looks pretty good. Now if I move this red circle, it just has gray underneath. So I'm going to undo that with Command Z or Control Z. I'll select both. And now we can knock out in the center by hitting Shift M to get our shape builder tool hold Option and just click the red area. Now when I select this, we only have a gray fill and there is nothing in here. It's actually been knocked out. So it's really easy to make a gear in Adobe Illustrator. 13. Laurel Wreath: I'm going to zoom out with Command minus or Control minus. And I'll hit space bar to navigate to this art board down here. And then I'll hit Z and draw a box around. It says zoom in. For next item we're going to draw an easy laurel wreath. So first I'm going to hit L to get my ellipse tool. And then I'll click and drag like this holding shift to get a perfect circle. I'm going to get back on my selection tool. And we're going to hold Option or Alt on a PC, start clicking and dragging and then hold shift so that they overlap kinda like this. Then I'll select both of them. And this time I'm going to show you a different way to get this little leaf shape. We're going to come down here to Pathfinder. And we'll go to the path finders part at the bottom and she is divide. So what this has done is made each little piece separate, but they're grouped right now. So we need to ungroup them will go to Object Ungroup. Now we can click and pull them apart. And we actually don't want these two moon shapes. So I'm going to select those and delete them. I'm going to zoom in a little bit on this. And I'll hit V to get my bounding box and up you're not seeing the bounding box, that shift Command B or Shift Control B on a PC. And that should bring up this little square area around your leaf. I'm going to hover over the edge of that and then start clicking and dragging and then hold shift. So now my leaf is at 45 degrees and I went one over here to get kind of a laurel look, I'm going to hit O on my keyboard to come over here to the Reflect tool. And this is underneath your Rotate tool. And then we'll hold Option or Alt on a PC. And I'm just going to click right on this bottom button to reflect it. Now I've got Preview turned on, and then I'm going to hit copy. And you can see it's put it right there. And that's exactly what I went. I went to select both of these now, and we'll come down here to Pathfinder, to the shape mode so that we can make these one piece. And so to that tool unites two pieces that overlap like this. So we'll choose that one. And then I'm going to zoom out. And then I'm going to get right over the corner again and start rotating this way. Hold Shift so it's exactly 90 degrees. And I'm willing to hold Option or Alt to make a copy of this. And then I'll hold shift, so it'll be right along that same plane. And then I'm going to hold Shift and Option or Alt on a PC and make it bigger to see a little bit bigger. So now we have a small piece and a large piece. Now I want to blend these together with little laurels to, so I'll select both of those. And then I'm going to get on my blend tool and double-click that. We could do a smooth color blend. But for this I want specified steps and I think we went six different ones in between there. So I'm going to say, okay, and all that does is change what this tool will do. It doesn't actually do it. It changes what it will do. Now we need to just click on the first piece and click on the second piece and we'll have it perfectly blended together. Now, you might notice that some of these pieces are a little closer than others. So I'm going to expand this right now if we hit Command Y or Control Y, we only see our two pieces and a line between them. But if we expand it will see all those pieces in between. So hit Control Y or Command Y to get back. So we'll come up here to object expand. And we'll do the object and fill and say, okay, now each of these pieces is an object in itself. Now we need to ungroup these, so we'll come up to Object and Ungroup. Now I wanted to have equal space between them. And to do that, I'll come down here to align. And we'll change are aligned to write down here, as I mentioned before, if you don't see this, you don't want to come out to three and choose Show Options. So we'll change this to align to selection. And then I'm gonna come down here to distribute spacing. And I'm going to choose this one. Now everything is as it should be. I'm going to squish it down a little more by grabbing the handles and holding Option or Alt on a PC, bringing it in a little bit. Okay, so now I want to create a brush, so I'll open my brushes. This will also be under window if you're not seeing them. And I'll click and drag it right into my brushes. When I do that, I'll get a dialog box. And I want to choose Art brush for this. And I'll say, okay. And this looks good. We'll say, okay. Then I'm going to zoom back out. And you can see it in my brushes. Now. I'm gonna go ahead and delete the shapes. Now hit L on my keyboard to get my circle. I'll hold Shift and draw the circle so it's a perfect circle. And then I'm going to just delete half of it by getting my direct selection tool and highlighting just this point and then deleting it. I went this to be a stroke only, so I'm gonna switch that. And now I can click on my brush. I think I only want my laurels to come to right about here. So I'll hit P on my keyboard and I'll get right on that line and then just add a point there. Then I'll hit a to get my direct selection tool. And then I'll get on this point and delete it. Now I've got a nice little half wreath, so we'll reflect this. I'll hit 0 to get to my Reflect tool right over here. And then I'm going to hold Option or Alt on a PC and click right here. And we'll make a copy. I'll move this one over a little bit with my arrow keys. And I'll group it with Command G or Control G. Now when I move it, the two pieces move together. 14. Ribbon: The very last thing we're going to make is a ribbon. So to do this, we're going to hit M on our keyboard and we'll just draw a rectangle. And this time I want it to be an orange fill and no outline. This will be the main part of our ribbon banner. And we're going to hold Option or Alt on a PC and drag this to make a copy. And I'm just going to bring it into right about here. That looks good. I went to have a little edge right here. So to do that, I'm going to come up here to Object, Path, Add anchor points. If I hit a which is my direct selection tool and select it, you can see that it's added an anchor point in between all the existing anchor points. Now I'll highlight just this anchor point in here. And I'll hold Shift, and then I'll use my left arrow. That makes it jumped just a little farther. Ok, now I want to duplicate this one over here. I'm going to select it. Then hit O for reflect this tool over here. I'm going to hold Option or Alt on a PC and try to get right in the center of this rectangle. And we'll make a copy. Okay, So we're pretty close now. I'm going to move this down a little bit. And then I think I'll change the color of these two to maybe just something a little bit darker. And I went to send these to the back. So to do that, I'm gonna go to Object, Arrange, Send to Back. Now I need a little triangle shape right in here. So to do that, I'll hit P on my keyboard, P or bring me to the pen tool. I'll make sure nothing else is selected. And then I'll click right on the corner point of this rectangle, come down here and click this corner point, and then make a little triangle shape right in there. I'm also going to change the color of that, so I'll double-click it and we'll make it just a little darker still. I'll say OK, OK. Now I'm going to put it over here, so I'll hit 0 to reflect, which is right over here. I'm going to hold Option or Alt on a PC. Click right in the center again. And we'll copy. I want this part to be a little longer. So I want all these things to move at the same time. So do that, I'll get my direct selection tool and I'm just going to draw a box around all of those points. So all of these blue ones are selected and these white ones aren't. And then I'll hold Shift and use my right arrow to move it over. Okay, Now highlight everything with my selection tool. I'm going to group it with Command G or Control G. And then we'll come up here to Effect Warp and arc. I like about 35 for a ribbon, so we'll say, okay, now you'll notice if you hit Command Y or Control Y that this doesn't look arched anymore. Hit Command Y or Control Y to get back. If you want these lines to match what you see, you can expand it. But just know that once you do that, you won't be able to change the warps at you add it very easily. Right now we can select it, go to our Appearance panel, and click the warp arc to get our options back. And we could change the bend or anything else we wanted to deal. I'm going to cancel. If we expand, these options won't be available anymore, but we'll go ahead and expand. So when we come up here to object, you'll notice they expand is grayed out, but we do have the option of Expand Appearance and we'll just use that one instead. Okay, Now again on a corner hold shift and make it a little bit smaller. Now if you wanted to add text to this, you could use the bottom of this arch. So I'll click right on the edge and then copy it. Then I'll click off and paste in front. So now we just have that arch. I don't want a fill or a stroke on this, so I'll just get rid of that. And I'm willing to use my arrow keys to just move this up. And now we can use our text tool and use type on a path. You'll need to make sure you're right on the path. And then click. And then you can type something. As you can see, it's upside down and it's a really small. So we'll fix that. I'll get to selection tool. And you'll see these three lines. You'll want to get this line over to the far right and move it over like this. And then we'll want to grab this center line and pull it up above the line. Oh, and it turns that I typed the wrong thing. I'll fix that. Now we can change our font, will do Montserrat bold. And then I'm going to make this uppercase. So type change case and uppercase. And now I'll make it bigger by hitting Shift Command and then period Shift Control period on a PC. Also want to center this. So that is Shift Command C or Shift Control C. You can also go to your paragraph palette and find it right here. Let's make it a little bit bigger. And now we'll come to character. And I went to go to the baseline shift because we're a little low. I want to move the hello world up a little bit. So I'll go to baseline shift right here. And I'm willing to use my arrow keys to move it up. We'll click back on our selection tool. And I definitely want this to be white. So I'll click on the black. Choose white and say OK. And that is how to make a nice little ribbon. So that is 10 easy things to draw in Adobe Illustrator. 15. Export to files: Now if you want to export these, let's say you want a transparent background behind them. So to do that, we can come up here to File Export, Export As we'll navigate to wherever we went to save them. We're going to use art boards. And we'll want PNG. That's a raster file that you can upload to a lot of different websites like Facebook or Instagram. We can type our filename and then we will export. When we click Export, we get a new dialog box. And here's where you can change your resolution. If you're wanting to upload these to a webpage, you'll want to use 72 ppi, but if you want to print them, you'll want to choose 300. We'll do Screen 72 ppi and background colors should be transparent if you want to print them. Png is probably not the right file type. You'll wanna go with JPEG instead, but in that case, you would want to choose 300 PPI. Okay, So we'll do this and we'll leave it as transparent background. And we'll say, Okay, now we'll go and look at those files. I want to max, I can just hit Spacebar to preview them. You can see that they have a transparent background except for this one which has a white center. Now when you save your files, you will always want to keep this Illustrator file. So I'll save that. You'll have the 10 PNG files and your Illustrator file. And this is the case for everything you create. You should always keep your Illustrator file and then also your PNG or JPEG files. If you wanted to throw these away, it would be really easy to recreate them with your Illustrator file. But this file is where all your work has kept. 16. Class Project: For your class project, I'd like you to create three of your own designs and Adobe Illustrator, if you're having trouble coming up with ideas, There's an exercise file that has four designs in it that you can try to create. So you can use that file or you can make something completely new. The choice is yours. All right, I can't wait to see what you create. 17. Whats Next: Thank you so much for taking my class. I do have a couple of other Illustrator classes if you're interested in diving deeper into Illustrator and capabilities to them or also for beginners. So please take a look. All right, I'll see you in the next class. Thank you.