Adobe Illustrator CC – Advanced Training

1. Introduction To Adobe Illustrator CC for beginners : Hi there, welcome to this Adobe Illustrator Advanced course. My name is Dan, and I'm an Adobe Certified Instructor... and Adobe Certified Expert in Illustrator. Now this is an advanced look at Illustrator. So it's not for people who are brand new to the software. It's for people who already understand the fundamentals. If you already know what an Anchor Point is, and how to adjust it... then this is the course for you. Now on one hand, this course is all about... getting your productivity, your speed, and your work flow up. On the other hand... this course is kind of project based. We'll learn the tricks and tools that we need to... kind of build some of those... really beautiful styles that are trending in InDesign at the moment. So even if you consider yourself a pretty heavy user of Illustrator... I promise, in this course, I will blow your Illustrator mind. We'll learn advanced Anchor Points, and Pen Tool tricks. There's a little fun section on mastering lines and strokes. We'll learn the quick way to take... hand drawn sketches, then vectorize, and color them. We'll master Depth and Perspective in Illustrator. Creating semi flat presentations like these. We'll set permanent default fonts and colors... and turning that dreaded Hyphenation off once and for all. We'll learn how to take spreadsheets... and connect it with Illustrator to make beautiful graphs and charts. There's a Color Mastering section... where you'll learn to make quick color adjustments... Gradient missions, and blending it all together nicely. Your creativity will be doubled... when you finish the Transform, Distort, and Blending section of this course. Double, I tell you. There's an entire section in here... dedicated to speeding up your personal work flow... as well as speeding up Adobe Illustrator. Two tones, Repeating Patterns, Advanced Typography. There's lots, I just want to go through it all in the Intro... but I need to calm down till you check out the outline for a full description. Just one more, I promise it's a good one; this one. Animated GIFs. Cool, huh! So if you know that there is much more potential... to be unlocked inside Adobe Illustrator... join me, and together we'll become Adobe Illustrator super heroes, together. 2. Getting started with your Adobe Illustrator advanced tutorial: All right, welcome to the course. This is the Getting Started video. This, if I'm honest, is a bit boring, but hang in there... there's a few important details we need to cover before we get started. All right, let's go. To get started, the first thing is... you need to go download the 'Exercise Files'. There's a link on the screen here, go download those. Optionally, you might go grab the Cheat Sheet. It's at bringyourownlaptop.com There's a Resources tab along the top here. There is an Illustrator Cheat Sheet. So go download that. It's free, it's a PDF. Print it off, stick it next to your computer while we're working. Next thing to do is we're going to change our units... so, our measurements, like inches and centimeters. Confusingly, the new version of Illustrator... kind of deals with things a little bit differently. To explain that, under-- normally what you do is, you go to 'Illustrator CC', 'Preferences', 'Units'. This is on a MC, if you're on a PC, it's under 'Edit'... and 'Preferences' down the bottom here. So if I go into here, and change my units, and say, I'm going to use... inches, or millimeters, or pixels. This doesn't really matter anymore. If it feels good, you can click on inches. Basically what happens is, when I create a new document... this thing over here, really-- you can see, pixels is up even though I picked inches. Why is that? It uses the last units you used. The document that I created previously was in pixels, so it just used pixels. If I made something now, and changed it to inches... it would by default be inches... the next time I open up this window. So that's how it works. Another thing to be aware of, if I go to 'Web'... you'll notice it just switches it out to pixels. So you just got to keep an eye on this every time. You can switch afterwards, it's no big deal... but when you're going to Print... and Mobile, and all these other ones, it really wants to be a different size. So just go change it here. Let's say I make a Print document, but I want it to be inches... click 'Create'... and let's say it's not what I wanted, I was doing millimeters. With nothing selected, over here, this is the really easy way to do it. You can go change it in here quickly. Another thing I want you to do is, up the top here... you're probably set to 'Essential's, right? So it probably looks a little bit different from mine. I'm going to go on 'Essentials', click 'Reset Essentials'... because this is like, out of the box what it looks like. Now I love that little Control Bar along the top there. Most people did, it kind of just turned off with this version. They kind of replaced it with the Properties panel, which I love... but I also like that top bar. So for this course I'm going to turn it on. So, with 'Essentials', we go to 'Window'... and just make sure this Control Bar on the top is actually up there. It's just handy. Now what you might do is, once you've kind of got your Properties... your Panels, the way you like, you can go save them. You don’t have to, but if you want to, you can go to 'New Workspace'... and you can see, they already have one called 'Dan', it's already used. I'm going to replace it. Click 'Dan'. Just means that if things go wrong later on I can go to 'Reset Dan'... and it goes back to this, and has a nice little Control Bar along the top. Now there's going to be some of you... who are using an older version of Illustrator. You can totally do it, pretty much-- pretty much everything is like one thing. The Puppet Tool, you can't do... but if you've got an older version of Illustrator... it will work perfectly for 99% of this course... except, we're going to be using this Properties Panel a lot. And that didn't exist in earlier versions. So if you are, this thing won't exist. You'll have to do a lot more... of opening up here, and opening up the specific windows. So I'm going to 'Reset Dan' just to show you what I mean. If I grab my 'Type Tool' now, and draw stuff out, draw a box up... you can see, over here, I've got my Fill, my Stroke, and my Font... whereas if you're using a previous version... you can either find it at the top here... or you go to 'Window', and you have to turn on... under 'Type', you can turn on the 'Character Panel'. So I'm going to use this because it's quick and awesome... but if you're like, "Oh man, it's going to be Appearance Panel". Just to have a look what it's called, then find it up here. You will find a specific tab, or a specific panel that will control that. Another thing just to cover is-- I've got stock images that I used for this course. There's a mixture of stuff that I've made personally... and you're totally allowed to use that for your own Portfolios... and show people that you've done it... but in terms of the stock images... they're very clear, which are the stock images. Basically, with the photographs that look professionally done. Any of the hand drawn sketches are mine... but you're not allowed to go off and start using... without going and paying for the stock images. Just be warned, you can definitely do it for this course... and show people what you've done... but you can't go and use them commercially afterwards. But what you can do is... there's a section in this course... where you can get free commercial use images. Just switch it on for those, or some of your own images... and you can start totally using a lot of this for your Portfolio. Another thing to do is, in your Exercise Files... there's going to be-- well, throughout this course, I'm going to say, projects for you to do. Sort of homework. Now, there will be-- I'll do it in the videos and explain it... but there's one place in the Exercise Files. There's a folder called Class Projects, and it has a Word Doc in there... plus all the images, everything you need to do those projects in one little piece. Just so you know, there are projects, you don’t have to do them, obviously... but there is a folder for them. I will describe them as we go through the tutorial course. All right, that is a boring video. We're going to skip on now and start making some stuff in Illustrator. Thanks for hanging in there. Let's go and get started now. 3. Trick for redrawing hand drawn images in Adobe Illustrator CC : Hi there, in this video we're going to show you how to do this. Put in a drawn image in the background, fade it out... lock it, make a new layer like this... all instamatically with one of the Illustrator features... because what I tend to do is... say this drawing here, I draw it in my notebook... I take a photo with my phone... just because I'm better with drawing... often with the pen, than in Illustrator directly... then I just redraw it in Illustrator, but I want to stick it on its own layer... that I can redraw over the top, maybe wash it out a little bit. All right, let's go see how to do that in Illustrator. First up, we're going to make a new document. We're going to go to 'File', 'New'. We are going to go to 'Print'... and you can use either A4 or US Letter, depending on where you are. I'm going to use 'Letter', and I'm going to go 'Portrait'. The big thing to just make sure... you are using kind of the new dialog box that Illustrator comes with... is down the bottom here, there's this one called Advanced Options... and by default, anything under the Print Tab wants to be CMYK. Web, you'll see over here, wants to be RGB... and the resolution needs to be 72. So that's just something you need to be aware of... when you are picking from these defaults. I use Print mainly because I like the shape of-- I'm used to this shape, US Letter, or A4. I'm used to this shape, so I just want to start with that.... even though it might be going for Digital, or going out to Web. So you just got to make sure, whenever you change it... go into here, and say... actually I want to make sure it's RGB if I want it to be RGB. Now just so you know, if you are kind of... not really clued up about RGB versus CMYK... it's best to use RGB to get started with... because CMYK is a limited color range. Doesn't have the really strong greens, or Madonna pinks... the real kind of fluorescent colors. So it's best to work in RGB, and maybe switch it up to CMYK later on. It becomes a little bit more washed out... but starting with RGB is generally how I work. The other thing is, when you pick Web... you probably want to switch it up... to maybe 300ppi to get the resolution really high. You can change this later on, no big deal... but it's just something to be aware of... when you are playing around with a new document window. Let's click 'Create', doesn't really matter as long as it's in RGB. The next thing we're going to do is put that kind of washed out drawing. I do my drawings in my book, take a photo with my phone... then just kind of jam it on a page, put it on its own layers, wash it out... make a new layer, and draw on top of that. So that is big drama, takes a little while... so there's an easy shortcut to do it. So if we go to 'File', 'Place'... in your 'Exercise Files' there's one called 'Curvature Tool'; find that one. Down the bottom here - you probably can't see it - click on 'Options'. Just click on this one that says 'Template'. This does all he work for us. Let's click 'Place'. So brings in our file... you'll see, in our Layers Panel... so you might be on Properties, switch to 'Layers'. It's created a layer, it's locked it. It's faded this out for us, and created a new layer that we can draw on. All just super quick and easy. When you've drawn it, you can turn this off... because you probably don't want it to go to print. So that's just a really quick little getting started trick. All right, let's get into the next video... where we start drawing these guys using some of the new tools in Illustrator. All right, I'll see you there. 4. Curvature Tool vs Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator CC: Hi there, in this video we're going to redraw this whale... in this weird flowery thing that I made. We draw it like this, not using the Pen Tool. We're going to use the new fancy improved Curvature Tool. You are going to test it, you might fall in love with it, like me... and you might be abandoning the Pen Tool. All right, I take that back... Pen Tool, I'm sorry, but you're very hard to learn. And the Curvature Tool, pretty easy. Let's go and learn how easy it is in this video. We're going to show you the difference... between the Pen Tool and the Curvature Tool. We're going to focus on the Curvature Tool... because probably most of you doing this advanced class... has at least got the basics of the Pen Tool. We'll do an advanced video right next so we can get skilled up with the Pen Tool. But for the moment we're going to look at... why you should give the Curvature Tool a go. Now if you are handy with the Pen Tool, like I am... I found the Curvature Tool like... at the beginning I was like, "Ah, why do I need the Pen Tool?" In fact, it's quite amazing, what it does... so throughout this course, my request is... just to give the Curvature Tool a go throughout this one, it's pretty cool. First of all let's look at the Pen Tool, which we know, and love. I'm going to draw-- we're going to start with this guy on the right here... we're going to draw the basic. Let's say I want to draw this circle. 'Pencil' is click and drag, for a curve. And, click and drag for a curve. Click and drag for a curve. I'm trying my best circle, okay? It's okay? Let's do the same thing with the Curvature Tool. Now, Curvature Tool, you just click once for a curve. You can see, once I've kind of finished my first-- I've got more than two points here, it starts doing an ugly curve. So I'm going to click another time... and another time, roughly in the corners here. You can see, just does, by default, nicer curves. Let's have a look at some of the pros and cons for the Curvature Tool. Remember, the circle here, we click once for a curve. Let's say we want a corner, so what we do is we double click for a corner. Along here, there's a long big curve here... about half way along, I click once, because I want a curve. Then you can see, once I start dragging out... I get roughly where I need it to be, and I can... Remember, this is a corner point as well, because it's a change of direction... I double click. Up here, I've got two kinds of curves. There's one going this way, and one bending around. So I want one there for a curve, and maybe one there for another curve. Messed it totally, that's all right.. I'm back to the beginning here. This is the way, but when it joins back up... you just click once to kind of finish it off... whether it's a corner to a curve. Just kind of click once to join it all back up. What you'll first of all notice is that it's a pretty sweet curve, right? It needs some adjustments. You can adjust it-- and the cool thing about adjusting it... this is probably its biggest, awesome trait. Watch this, if I start dragging this one... what you'll notice is... can you see the line underneath here. A kind of pointer, watch this line while I'm dragging this top one. Can you see, it actually flexes. So it's not only adjusting this one... it's actually adjusting the next one to continue a nice smooth curve. I can drag this one and try and get it a little nicer. Drag this one in. Don't know what I'm trying to do. I guess, the difference would be is... if I try to do that in the Pen Tool... so, Pen Tool, I'm going to click once for a corner. I click and drag for a curve. Click once, it's not going to be too bad. It's not a hard shape to do. I should have given it a Fill, click once. The difference is, if I grab the White Arrow... and start adjusting this... you can see, it does nothing to affect this line here. You end up with this kind of, really kind of... Well, just not as balanced a curve. So I find that the Curvature Tool just ends up... making my drawings look a bit nicer. Now if you love this control with all these handles... never fear, they are still here. Watch, I can click on these corner points, they are still here. They're just kind of hidden from you. Remember, the biggest thing is that, if I change this one... it influences the one above it, so things just end up looking nicer. So remember, double click for a corner, click once for a curve... double click for a corner. No, don't double click. So if I accidentally do it, that's fine, I can double click it again... and it goes back to being a curve, so, if it's a curve... double click, corner, double click, curve, kind of toggles it in and out. I go back to here, and it's a curve, no it's a corner, double click. I should get rid of the Fill here, I will, for this one. And there's a curve, so click once for a curve, click once again. You can just see, pretty nice curves. What we're going to do now is redraw this whale. We're going to use the Curvature Tool. We're going to work our way around... nothing really new from what we've done here... but this is the shape we're going to use for this class. So, this is the one I really want you to do. If you skipped this one, I really want you to do this shape. Let's draw it together. So double click for a corner. And half way down here, click once for a curve. We're going to adjust it later on. And I'm going to double click for a corner. This Fill here is driving me mad. I'm going to go to 'Properties'... I'm going to say 'no' Fill. I should have done it at the beginning, that's what I said I was going to do. So, curve, click once... double click. Clicking once for a curve, double click for a corner. This curve's just kind of slight here... so I'm going to click once about here. Maybe once in there, and you're like, "What is it doing?" It's not till you go out here, to where-- I'm looking for the change of direction, because that changes there, right? So I want kind of half way in there, I'm looking for the Apex, really. So I'm going to click once, click once. Man, look how good it's looking. Double click. If you're like me, the Pen Tool, you get good... but you've got to really fiddle with it afterwards... using Direct Selection Tool to get any sort of... lovely curves through here. This one has a slight depth, so click once. It has a bit of a corner there, click once. And double click for a corner. It's coming out pretty nice. I do say so myself. Double click. Click once, double click. The curve, I probably want it here. Then, this one here, probably can't go all the way out here... so I'm going to double click for a corner. That's probably what I'm going to have to tidy up. So double click. There's a slight curve here, click once. Give it a Fill color. I'm going to give this one a Fill color of blue, just because it's a whale. I'm going to continue with drawing this now with the Curve Tool. Let's have a look at adjusting this thing. There are times when you're like, actually just didn't do what I want. You can grab the Curve Tool, and go in, and go-- actually this guy just needs to be maybe up here. I can try and get him to blend a bit nicer. They'll work, or I can undo, and grab my White Arrow. The Direct Selection Tool, grab this guy and go... what's going on here, and go... this guy needs to be coming straight out of the back of this one. And this one needs to go a bit higher. So it's up to you how you best want to do it... but let's continue on. Double click, click once. Double click. Click once. Pretty nice. Double click for a corner. Click once, double click. I'll show you one little trick, because this is getting boring. It's great, but let me show you a little trick you can do. Say you want these-- For some reason I draw these leafy things all the time... if you've watched me in my tutorials. Leafy kind of things. It's meant to be water, by the way. But what I can do is... see this guy here, I can grab the Curvature Tool... and remember, if I want to change it from a curve to a corner... remember, if I get it wrong, I just double click it. I find that's kind of cool. Especially that one, that kind of leafy shape, with one end pointing. Especially if it's balanced, it's quite tough to do. Now if you're getting bored you can skip to the next video now. I'm going to delete that. I'll just go double click. Click once, double click. Click once, double click. Click once, double click. I'm going to zoom in. Double click. Curve, Double click. One click, double click. Click once, double click. Driving myself mad now, click once. I'm just getting to the inside, but that's okay. You get the idea, right? How awesome are we? This one needs a little bit of adjusting. I'm going to grab the Curvature Tool, and say, you my friend, come down a bit. If yours is snapping... that's one of things, it's like... "Why are you doing all of these things, and snapping?" There's two ways of getting around that, you can zoom right in... so if I hit 'Command +', or 'Control +' on a PC... so zooming right in gives you a lot more control. You can see, it's not trying to snap now... just because it's kind of filling in the screen... or you can go to 'View', and turn 'off' Smart Guides. I use this shortcut all the time. It's 'Command U' on a Mac, or 'Control U' on a PC. And if you're further out, it's not going to try and snap as much. So I'm going to turn it back on, the Smart Guides, and do some adjustments. The only thing I need is my eyeball. Last of it. I'm just going to give it a 'Fill', draw my eyeball. And you're like, "He's not going to use the Curvature Tool, is he?" I am. You should use the Ellipse Tool... but we're proving a point, click once, click once... click once, click once. It's not a perfect circle, but it's not what I'm looking for, for this guy. I'm just looking for a little bit of weirdness. The Stroke... I've got a Stroke and a Fill, and I'm going to put this one back in. I'm going to grab the 'Black Arrow'. I'm using the Eyedropper Tool just to steal color from him. That my friends is the Curvature Tool. In the next video, let's get into some super advanced Pen Tool stuff. If you're like me, and you're good at the Pen Tool... try the Curvature Tool at least for this class. I bet you, you're going to find some nice things about it. All right, I'll see you in the next video. 5. Advanced Pen Tool Tricks using Adobe Illustrator CC: Hi there, it is Advanced Pen Tool Tips and Tricks time in Illustrator. Now if you are a bit afraid of the Pen Tool still... you might want to check out the Essentials course. Goes through the Pen Tool a lot more, kind of... I guess, a bit more of basic understanding. This one here is going to jump straight into the... you're an okay user of the Pen Tool, and you want to take it to the next level. So get a notepad out, there's a few shortcuts and key combinations... to make this work and go fast. Let's get in there, redraw this little doll thing... and make it look like this. All right, let's get started. So Advanced Pen Tool time. Let's bring in an image, so 'File', 'Place'. Let's bring in, from your 'Exercise Files', one called 'Pen Tool'. Where are you, Pen Tool? There you are, there. Make sure it's a 'Template', click 'Place'. So it's on its own layer, and locked. Next thing is, under 'Properties'... let's grab our 'Pen Tool' from our 'Tool Bar'. Make sure we've got a Fill of 'none'. We'll have a Stroke of 'black', that's fine. One of the first things we need to do when using the Pen Tool... is turn 'off' the Smart Guides. So 'Command U' turns it off... otherwise it starts trying to snap to things... and you'll lose your Mojo. Now first trick is for better curves. Say I want to do this curvy bit down the bottom here. You might be at a habit... or the way you were taught, by clicking once for a corner... clicking and dragging for a curve, then a corner here. Now that is fine, but often you can get nice curves... by using handles out of these corner points. So I'm going to start by clicking and dragging out... and I'm dragging out a curve. I'm dragging towards the line I want to go. Roughly about there. Then watch this, I'm going to drag out... and I get the same line with less Anchor Points. You'll find that if you have just two Anchor points, using handles... it will just give you a nice smoother shape... than you would get from doing two corners with a curve in the middle. The trouble it runs into, if you want to change direction here... because it's a corner, right? We knew it was a corner when we drew it. So that brings me on to my next shortcut. If you've got a curve where you want it to be a corner... you can just hold down the 'Alt' key on a PC, or 'Option' key on a Mac. You can see, I've broken it up there. I'm going to go up to here, and I want it to be a curve still... so, I'm going to click and drag out. I can break it again later on... by holding the 'Alt' key on a PC, or 'Option' key on a Mac... and breaking it as I'm drawing... rather than drawing it out, then having to go back to... the Convert Anchor Point Tool, or the White Arrow. Just a nice handy extra trick. So that's one way of doing it, let's show you an even better way... and the way I normally draw is with the Pen Tool. So I'm going to click and drag out here to get this first curve. Click and drag out. And instead of doing what we did before... is draw it, and then come back to it... and break it using the 'Option' key, or the 'Alt' key on a PC. You can actually do it here. Before you start-- before you get it kind of roughly where you want it to... just hold down the 'Alt' key on a PC, or 'Option' key on a Mac, that same key. Before you let go, and it actually snaps it while you're going. So I'll often do this. And drag out. Let's say I want to keep these curves... Doing a real rough job to speed through... but I get to here, and I drag it out... then I hold 'Alt', just bring it up this way... because I know that's going to get me roughly where I want to go. And we're going to get to this point. So 'Alt' breaks it. We get to this point... and I know-- I need it to be really long to get that existing curve, right? But I know that this top point up here, you can see... you're like, "Man, it's gone too far", and you'll end up-- you'll have your methods to fix it up. What you can do is, watch this, while I'm dragging that one out... if you hold down the 'Command' on a Mac, or 'Control' key on a PC... you can-- it still keeps it locked... but it brings this handle in, so that the extent is not as far. So, while you're dragging... you can kind of shorten one of them by holding the 'Command' key. I know these are all a little bit tough to remember... but you've got your notepad next to you, and you're going to just spend-- whenever you're doing your next drawing, you're just kind of like, "Okay." You might only use two or three of them... but I find I use all of them, it just makes my Pen Tool experience a lot better. Another one we're going to do is... say I get along here, and I start drawing... and it's just not quite on the line, right? What I can do, before I let go, just hold down the 'space bar' key... then when I move my mouse, it's moving the Anchor Point. So I can continue on to get it perfect. That's going to be it for super shortcuts. What I'd like you to do for your project is to finish off this drawing. You can use the Pen Tool or the Curvature Tool... which we learned in the previous video, it's up to you. Just kind of a rough drawing, don't worry if it's not perfect. I'd like you to do it, because we're going to use it as an example later on... to kind of color it in, show you how to color in a hand drawn drawing. One of the things that you might run into is... like how do you want to complete this now. You're going to get to this point here, and go... "Do I go down here, or up this way?" So let's just turn it into a pilot piece. What I mean by that is that, I'm going to grab my 'Black Arrow'... just click off in the background... and I'm going to draw it as a separate line. We'll join them all up later on using... some cool tool called the Shape Builder Tool. I'm just going to click and drag down here. Do I want it to join? Yes, I probably do. You can see here, I'm not worried... that it doesn't go around, completely joins... we're going to go through and connect these up a different way. So, Pen Tool, let's say this line here, there's this kind of hand... what I'm going to do is, click once, and just click once there. That's going to be enough for what I need. I'm going to use the Pen Tool now. I'm going to draw a curve. A curve. Curve. What I might do is just overlap this a little bit... because, do I want to get them a perfect line there? It becomes too hard to draw that way. So we're going to overlap that... and what I'll do is I'll draw that foot over the top... and we'll trim that up using the Shape Builder Tool. So that's the kind of technique I want you to use. Just make sure everything is-- don’t have to overlap completely like this. It can be close like that. We'll show you later on, there is a magic way of joining those up. I'd like you to go through, draw all the lines you can see here. Don't stress too much about it... but this might be a really good time... to practice your super amazing, fantastic new advanced Pen Tool tricks. All right, I'm back. I was just drawing this, and I thought... actually there's probably more I can add to this video... because one of the big problems is... let's say we're using any of the tools, I'm using the Pen Tool... is if I kind of-- say I want to click over here... it's going to really want to join up to this tool... or join up to the end of these lines... and you're like, kind of, "Stop connecting up." The easiest way is-- so the Curvature Tool is the worst for it, right? If I start down here, and I put one there, one there, I want to go to this... it really wants to kind of do stuff with this, and you're like... "Oh, what happened? We're just doing this line." The easiest way is just to go, zoom in real quick. So if I click there, it joined up. I've really exaggerated these lines, you can see, they all overlap. We'll tidy that up in a future tutorial... but we click once... and where it gets in here, where it really wants to join, just zoom in. I'm using 'Command +', you might use 'Control +'... and just click in here, it gives you, I guess, a bigger room to kind of-- so it's not kind of trying to guess these lines. I often do that, zooming in, just to make sure... it doesn't join up with other lines. Another thing I realized while I'm working is that... to deselect you can go to 'Black Arrow', or hit the 'V' key. The shortcut I use the most is holding the 'Command' key down. You can see, we get the 'Black Arrow', and just click off in the background. So while I'm drawing-- Let's say we want to draw this line. So click once, I'm using the Curvature Tool, click once. I've got just a nice curve. It keeps on joining, so hold 'Command' and just click off in the background... so I can start again. And again, it's going to really want to join that line. So if I zoom right in... holding 'space bar' to click and hold, and drag this around. Just going to start, kind of exaggerate this. I'm going to try avoid this line here. Click once, click once. Click once, click once. Go to 'Curvature Tool'. Built for making weird flowers. Click off in the background. One last thing before I go is, when you get to the end of your drawing... because we're going to color this in later on... you’re kind of left with an ugly looking drawing. A lot of things overlap, and it's not very nice. Nice little easy trick is... I'm selecting it all with my 'Black Arrow'... holding down the 'Alt' key, or 'Option' key on a Mac... and just making a duplicate. And with it selected, just go over to 'Stroke'... and pick something down here where it says Profile. Let's pick something nicer, like this first one here, the 'Width Profile'. Just gives it a nice kind of hand drawn look. I've bumped mine up to '3pt'. Looks a bit better. Like I said, Shape Builder Tool... we're going to make this, fill it in, and do some cool colors. All right, that's it for Advanced Pen Tool stuff. I'll see you in the next video. 6. How to draw flowing curves in Adobe Illustrator with the Width Tool: Hi there, in this video we're going to take the Width Tool to the next level. We're going to take this hand drawn logo... and amazingly vectorize it. Same with this one here, we're going to take this Pen Tool drawing, and... do all this kind of cool blobby bits to the ends. All right, let's go learn how to do that now in Illustrator. I've got open the 'Width Tool1.ai' file. We're going to draw this kind of curve in the middle here. Here's a logo I made a really long time ago for a company called Arctic Kiwi. It just has this really nice kind of New Zealand coral shape in there. Mountains, that's what it's meant to be anyway... but we want to get this curve, we're going to use the Width Tool. We'll look at some of the advanced Width Tool features. First of all we need to get this kind of curve shape. Now that can be the hardest bit, right? I'm going to use the Curvature Tool, it gives me kind of nicest curviest line. We're practicing the Curvature Tool, remember? I'm going to click once. Now if you kind of put two, not enough curve points in... I'm trying to be really sparingly. And if you know, the least amount of Anchor Points... generally gives you a nicer curve. That's good, but it's not following the line as I wanted it. So what we might do is, I'm going to undo... and just kind of add one or two more extra points... instead of going all the way, down to here, I'm going to kind of maybe get there. Maybe there. Then, there. There. You'll see, as it comes around... kind of reaches back, and influences the line. Thank you, Curvature Tool. Now if you get it close, and you're like... "Actually it's kind of close, but not what I wanted"... you can use the White Arrow to adjust it. But let's say it's really bad... and you've got something that's not what you wanted. Actually let's do a duplicate over here. A nice little trick before we do the Width Tool... is, with it selected, if you've got something that just doesn't flow nicely... you can use the 'Object', 'Path', 'Simplify'. Doesn’t always work, you can see, there's just kind of a tiny adjustment. I felt like it's just a nicer curve there now... especially across the top here, it's kind of peaked to across this. You can play around with curve position... and decide on how much-- Don't worry too much about where it is in this slider... because it just kind of changes the shapes. So, just kind of drag along until you find... like, "Actually I think that's quite nice." We're kind of liking it about there. Make sure Preview is 'on'. Also know that sometimes I use it, and it does make a big mess of it... but I'd say, 80% of the time it makes it a little bit better. You can see, I'm liking that curve now. Goodbye, you're in-- I'm going to turn the background on, try and line him back up. When you are drawing this, don't worry too much about the background drawing... because that's just hand drawn... like it was my good guess, to try and make it nice and curvy. But we want to get something that looks perfect and vector. Don't worry too much about it. Now we're going to look at the Width Tool. The Width Tool is this one here, it's like a harp or something. Click on him. And the easy way to do it is to find somewhere... kind of the fattest point of that line, I'm going to just drag it out. So that's a pretty cool thing, if you've never used it before... but lot of people have. So there's a few things you'll need to watch out for. It is, if I zoom in... because I used a Font size of 1, and a Stroke width of 1pt to start with... you can see, it's got kind of flattened, it's not what I wanted. So afterwards, you can do one of two things. You can just grab it, and just drag it in, to get it to be nice and tight... or you can just start with a really small weight font to start with... before you start drawing it. Up to you. Other things to know about the Width Tool, you can have more than 1 point. You can see, you can kind of adjust this one now... having lots of different points. If you get something in the wrong place... you can just click, hold, and drag the center of it. You can see, you can kind of move it around. I'm going to delete these by clicking it. I'm just hitting 'Delete' on my keyboard. Grab you as well, delete him. Another thing we can do is... let's say I want this outside to be just a bit bigger. Say I want it about there. You can hold down the 'Alt' key on a PC, or 'Option' key on a Mac. And you can grab either of these sides. You can see, they work independently of each other. If I let go of it, they start working together... while I'm holding down the 'Option' key, or the 'Alt' key on a PC I can kind of adjust just this one to get it kind of how I want it to be. So lots more awesome Width Tool action to come, but let's just finish this off. And I want to run into one of the problems that people do have... and a little cool shortcut to fix it. Let's say I'm using the Curvature Tool. I want to draw these lines, but I want to draw them as separate lines... because what happens is, click once, click again, click there... and it's joined up, that's easier, I can click off. Now I want to click down here. You, I don't want this to join up. Because it does kind of weird stuff, it just wants to do separate lines. The quickest way to fix that is, with it selected with the 'Black Arrow'... hold 'Command' on a Mac, or 'Control' on a PC, and hit '2'. It just locks it. It's kind of locked in the background now. Back to the Curvature Tool, click once, click once. Then at the top here, it's not going to try and join it. If we hold 'Command 2', it just locks it again. So it's kind of-- easy to put him on its own layer. Again, you, stop doing that. I'm going to go 'Command 2', all locked. So I can just continue on my merry way. I probably want to join some of these lines, but that's okay. So you, my friend, 'Command 2'. Then I grab my Curvature Tool. Click once, click again, back at the top there. Now you're thinking, "These are not joined." So, nice little trick is, let's make sure to unlock them all. So under 'Object', there's 'Unlock All'. For some reason that shortcut doesn't work on my machine. It's been done by something else... but what we can do is grab all of these Anchor Point at the top here. So I've used my 'White Arrow', I've just selected them all. Then I can go over here, the 'Align Panel', let's say I want to align there. 'Align Vertical'. And 'Align Center Horizontal'. They just overlap each other now, perfect. So let's move on to our next Width Tool example. So the second example, open up 'Width Tool2'. And we'll do this kind of [size Scott style] kind of words. Check out [??]... he's got amazing stuff, like it's total copy of that type of effect. What we're looking for is... we're looking for these kind of tear drop ends, and nice curves. There's two things we're going to do, let's do the tear drop one first. So I'm going to grab-- We'll use the Curvature Tool... because I find it easier for doing these curves. Click once, click twice. How many do I need? I've practiced this a couple of times, teaching it... so, kind of know I need a little bit more than I normally do. I want to kind of come around here, and then, maybe... there. Now I could use the White Arrow to tidy these up... but I'm happy, roughly how it is. What you might have run into problems is-- mine didn't have a Fill... if you're finding it hard to draw... just turn off the Fill before you start drawing. Next thing I want to do is... turn the Stroke Weight way down, so it's nice and thin. Let's grab the Width Tool. There he is there. We're going to have a couple of things, one is the Star Point. What you'll find with the Star Point, suppose you drag it the wrong way... and it's like, seems to not work... just drag it the opposite way, so I'm dragging it down. So that's my kind of first part. It's doing a pretty good job, right? The next bit is, I want that tear drop end. So what we'll do is-- I'm going to zoom in close on this tip. And you need two parts, I'm going to draw out one part. Now it just kind of looks like a regular line... but just behind it, drag in a skinnier bit. It kind of makes like a little tuber thing. Yours might be working by default, it's probably not... but if you click on the line... go over here, Stroke, and click on the word 'Stroke'. By default it's set to the unfortunately named Butt Cap. You want to go to the next one called 'Round Cap'... and it will give you that kind of look. Breaks this end, but we can fix this end the easy way by lobbying it off... but it gives you that nice kind of tear drop shape. That's kind of what we're looking for, for this drawing. Now you might be a master with the Pen Tool... and spend a while getting this curve... because it's pretty good, but it's not perfect. I'll show you a way, say this one here is quite circular, I want to kind of-- I'll show you a trick that I use to get a reasonably perfect circle. I'm going to start with an Ellipse. You might have to hold down the 'Rectangle tool'... and grab the 'Ellipse Tool'. I'm going to draw an Ellipse. Now, shortcut, if you hold down... the 'Alt' key on a PC, or 'Option' key on a Mac, it starts from the center. And hold down 'Shift', it will give you a perfect circle. That's what I'm looking for, right? Now remember, my thing underneath is just a hand drawn one... so it's never going to match up perfect, so don't-- We're not looking to try and do that, right? We're looking to get it close. What I want to do is slice this into bits. Now, I don't use the Knife Tool very often... see this shortcut, this Scissors Tool... I said knife, I meant scissors. So if you can't find it, it's hiding underneath the Eraser Tool. And he's really good at going-- click once, and click again. And what it's done is, if I hit the 'Delete' key twice... it deletes that chunk. You might have the wrong bit deleted. So you might have to select with the Black Arrow... and delete the bit you need to go on. You can see here, I've kind of got the beginnings of this going. Now I want to continue it on. So I'm going to use the Pen Tool or the Curvature Tool. Where's the Curvature Tool? I want to show you something. Curvature Tool is like, "I want to be this side"... because that was the last point drawn. And you're like, "No, I want you to be this side." I'm going to grab the 'White Arrow', and I'm going to say... click on you. Now if I go back to my Curvature Tool, it says... "I defy you, and do whatever I want," and go back to that first one. So I find this is a little bit of a bug. If you can think of a better way than this hack. What I do is, I click on this thing, click on it once... and then go back to my Curve Tool, and it goes... "Did you mean this guy?", and I'm like, "Yes, I did." So I use the Pen Tool just to click it once. So what I'm looking for now is probably one about there. I'm just going to follow this guy down the middle. Now I want it to follow down the center... I want it to be straight, don't want it to be a big curve like this. So I'm going to double click. Then here, double click. It didn't do a great job there... so I'm going to go back, and maybe just adjust it. Try not to wreck it too much. It's looking okay. You might now go with your White Arrow, and tidy this up. There's a couple of bits. Whole mad stuff, we're not getting perfect circles. Width Tool helps. I'm using the White Arrow... the Direct Selection Tool just to tidy it up. I feel like I'm kind of there. Might need a little bit of work across. What I might do as well is turn this one underneath off... because it's kind of influencing where I think it should be. Same thing again. So, I've used this circle to get the bulk of it done. Now I'm going to turn down my 'Stroke' to something really light. I'm going to grab my 'Width Tool'. I'm going to-- I might need to turn that back on now. Just turned it off. I want a big chunk this end. Probably want to match it about here... because I want the font to be the same width... to about there before it gets kind of skinny. What am I doing? It gets a bit thinner across here, so I'm going to tighten it up about there. Then I want to do this little blob bit. Let's practice that. So I want to go, you... to get the kind of end piece, then just a bit further back. So I want that last part of Anchor. And, a bit further back. I'm just going to tighten it in. You might find it like, Holy Molly... goes to a, maybe a bit too big, you just chuck this in there. Awesome, I am happy enough. What I might do is trim it up, I want it to be a bit further back... so 'C' on my keyboard to get the Scissors Tool, so it snaps. 'Black Arrow', grab that chunk, don't need him. I need my blob back here. It's working properly, right? I'm drawing a little circle here. Switch these guys around, it's kind of the thing I'm looking for. Zoom out. How perfect is it? It's pretty good. Cool! So, what we're going to do now is, draw these letters. You can totally easily draw these, but you draw them separately. This L, I draw with just the Pen Tool, the Curvature Tool. And I draw these two things separately using the Width Tool. I will join them up in an episode... probably two videos after this one, actually no, the very next video... where we start merging different kind of shapes... like this Width Tool, with just regular shapes. So what I'd like you to do is keep practicing on a few of these. There's a few of them that changed direction. In this case, I'll probably just do two separate lines. So I'll do one that came out of here... and stopped there. Now I need to lock it and put it on its own layer, and draw another one. That will be really easy to do with the circle. I should have done that one, would have been real easy. I did this one that kind of curves as well. But you get the idea. Some of these ones change direction. And I totally do that in one big, long line. I'd like you to practice on a few of these... and we'll finish it off in a future video. All right, on to the Shape Builder Tool, which I keep talking about. We'll finally finish off a few of these drawings in the next one. All right, let's go do it. 7. Mastering corners with Adobe Illustrator CC corner widget effects: Welcome to the Corner Extravaganza. We're going to turn corners into curves... by using these weird little targets that appeared. Now that looked a little underwhelming. It gets a little bit more exciting... but you should stick around... because some of the tips you're going to learn here... are going to help us later on in the Advanced course... so hang around, let's learn about corners. So Corner Options have been around a little while. A lot of people just ignore them. I'm going to grab my 'Rectangle Tool'. I just got a plain document open, nothing fancy. I'm going to draw a box, and it's these guys... these little targets in the corners. If you can't see yours, they're under 'View'... and they call them 'Corner Widgets'. So you can turn them on and off. They can get annoying, a little bit... when you're using Pen Tool, and stuff, or the Direct Selection Tool. So what they do is-- all I do is drag them in, and I get rounder corners. Not particularly fancy, we can fancy them up a little bit... by grabbing the Direct Selection Tool... the White Arrow, clicking on just one corner. And you can kind of do one side, click on the other side. That's kind of cooler. Where it gets nice, or more advanced... is holding down the 'Option' key on a Mac, or the 'Alt' key on a PC ... and just clicking one of these guys. Whatever you've got selected. And you can see, I can change it from ??... but you get the idea. So it works for rectangles, it works for anything. Grab the 'Curvature Tool', and we start doing weird corner stuff. And you'll see that, if I have my White Arrow here... whenever there is a corner, you can see, I can kind of flatten it out. And that's going to come in real handy later on... when we start joining things with the Shape Builder Tool. That was a pretty bad example... but let's look at the Star real quick... and we'll look at a couple of other options. Don't leave. So I've got a Star, I'm going to drag it over here. I'm going to grab the 'White Arrow'. You can see, there's corners everywhere. I can just kind of turn them up... or I can select just this one, hold 'Shift', and grab all of these guys... and just do the outside ones. It does get better than this, I promise. How much better? There are some extra options. If you double click any of these guys... so double click any of the targets, you get kind of corner options. You can decide on how-- how relative... or absolute. Just different kind of corners. Depends on how the Anchor Points make it. You can obviously change your Anchor Points here as well... and if I go back to the 'Radius'... you can kind of push it in and out, instead of dragging it. Let's click 'OK'. One thing you might run into is... if you're drawing something, say a random shape. I grab the 'Pen Tool', I'm just drawing randomness, right? And if I double click on any of these points... it gives me this kind of Corner Options Panel. You might get, if you're dealing with... say a regular shape, like a Rectangle Tool... it's still a primitive shape, Illustrator still knows it's a rectangle. You can see up there, it says, "I'm a rectangle, not a random shape." Now if I use the 'Black Arrow', and double click on any of these guys... you get a slightly different window. It controls the-- you get a bit more control here... but you can see, these are the corners, and these are the corner options. So it's no real difference, just-- I'm going to increase this up... and you can see, I'm looking at the top right angle over there. Just so you know, you might look at a different window... than I got just a second ago. Now the big thing to do in here though is... say if I-- I'll make this a lot bigger. Scale Corners, I can't remember if it's on or off by default. I've not played with it too many times... but the difference is, if I grab my 'Rectangle Tool' now... and scale this down with 'Scale Corners'... and I'm holding 'Shift', so it scales proportionately... it gets smaller. Whereas if I turn that off, and scale it down... you'll notice it eventually turns into a kind of a weird circley egg thing... because it's trying to maintain those corners. So, turn those on and off as you need them. If you can't get this thing to open up, just go to 'Window', 'Transform'. You end up at the same place. One thing might happen though-- you saw I double clicked it. It might end up looking like this to start with. If you double click the word 'Transform', gets smaller before it gets bigger. So big... medium... little bit... tiny; I'm not sure why that one's useful... but anyway you get the idea. You can keep double clicking that way to get the different options. I'm going to click 'Scale' on, seems like a better way of working. Now what I want to do before we go, I'm just going to go back to-- remember, our whale from earlier? It really annoyed me, this nose here... so I'm going to click on it, and I'm going to-- Remember, I'm using my White Arrow, if I use the Black Arrow... I set the whole shape, and I don’t get those little targets. So I'm going to grab this... and I click on just this corner... and that's what I wanted for my friend, a little snubby nose. I'm going to go wreck a few other bits... but you are fine to carry on... and now I'm going to grab you, and just track you down there... so it's just on this top bit. Looks terrible. Kind of looks a little bit more like water. My whale's not like flowers. All right, you get the idea, right? So Corner Option's useful. We're getting that more and more useful as we get through that course. So yes, we need to introduce it now. All right, let's get on to the next video. But before then, I'm going to undo. I'd rather, not like he's ejecting flowers. Anyway, that looked terrible. Okay, now we're going to the next video. 8. The best creation tool in Adobe Illustrator CC the shape builder tool: Hi there, in this video we're going to use the very best creation tool... in all of Illustrator, in my opinion, the Shape Builder Tool... to make this whale circle-y special thing. All right, let's go build it now in Illustrator. First up, let's work out what Shape Builder does, or replaces. It's the Path Finder Tool. We love to hate the Path Finder Tool, right? I want to join these shapes up, or knock them out... and you end up kind of... you know you can select only two at a time. You have to do some copying and pasting, and have versions, and you're like... "I'm going to click on this one." Not the one, undo. Have everybody done that, or is it just me? I do the undo, click on them all, see which one works. That can take a while, right? So this tool replaces that. Goodbye, you guys. Hello, whale. Let's draw you with the Shape Builder Tool. Basically what we're going to do is... kind of like we did with the Path Finder Tool... have two shapes, and kind of cut them out... but we can do multiple shapes, and there's some great perks. You might have already used the Shape Builder Tool, and that's okay. I'm going to try and do a bit more advanced techniques here. So let's get started with-- I'm going to grab the Ellipse Tool. I'm going to have 'no' Stroke, and a 'black' Fill. I'm going to start in the center. Kind of hold down the 'Option' key and 'Shift' to start from the center. If you're on a Mac-- sorry, I'm on a Mac. If you're on a PC, hold down 'Alt' key and 'Shift', and start dragging. You can go and start from the centers. Not perfect. I'm going to use my arrow keys to tap it around. That's kind of a good start. I want to draw a line across there. Just going to grab my 'Line Segment Tool'. I'm going to click, hold, and drag. You can use the Pen Tool, doesn't matter. Maybe the next thing I'll do is-- I guess I want this... big kind of like rolly, wave, kind of fan type thing. So what I'm going to do-- I'm going to show you how I would build it. So I'm going to copy and paste this. Now if you use 'Command F'... there it is there, or 'Control F' on a PC... and paste it back exactly where it gets it. So I use that often rather than copy and paste... because, watch this, paste just puts it in the middle of the window. Bad. So 'Command F' on a Mac, 'Control F' on a PC. And what I want to do is... actually I want to just-- I'm using my arrow key. I want to kind of try and line up that. Probably have to make it a little smaller. Holding 'Shift'. What I want to do is-- you're looking at this area here. I'm just trying to get some sort of nice curve. We could use the Width Tool... but we're using the Shape Builder Tool, because I reckon it's going to do... probably a better job. Only because I want to keep this complete circle absolutely nice. The design kind of calls for this whale to be this round bit. So I've got that bit. Let's start with that. Actually I want to lob that bit off, I'm going to use the Line Segment Tool. And I'm going to say, you, just draw a line through here. I'm going to select it all with my 'Black Arrow'. And what I might do, just to make it easier for you guys... is, on my 'Layers Panel', just turn it off to see what we're doing. So if you've never used the Shape Builder Tool... be prepared, this thing is awesome. Here it is there. Hard to describe that one, right? That's the icon, Shape Builder Tool. What we want to do is, there's two kind of modes... there's adding and subtracting. In this case, down the bottom here I want to add this bit. So all I do is click, hold, and drag across... and join these two bits... and I want to add that bit down there. Kind of make that one solid shape. You can imagine using the Path Finder Tool, need lots of undos. Now I want to slice these bits off. So what I do is hold down... the 'Alt' key on a PC, or 'Option' key on a Mac. You can see, our cursor gets a little minus '-' there. So I'm going to drag across it, drag across you. Drag across. You can see how cool, quick, and easy it is. I've built that first little path now. I'm going to turn on that layer again. Let's start doing the rest of it. I'm not going to build every single thing with Adjust Shapes. There's a couple of curves in here, I'll probably use the Curvature Tool for. Let's do the hard stuff first. So you can move on if you're getting bored of this. So what we'll do is join this circle up the top here. I'm going to grab the 'Ellipse Tool', draw a circle. Kind of starting at the center there. Now, a cool little shortcut is... when you're kind of getting things lined up... it can be a little hard when there's a Stroke Weight on it. We've got a Stroke Weight of 1, I think. But if you hit 'Command Y' on a Mac, or 'Control Y' on a PC-- I'm also going to turn the background layer off. It just gives you kind of really fine detail. The long way is under 'View', and it's called... This one here, Pixel Preview, versus-- not Pixel Preview. Outline, there it is at the top there, versus GPU Preview. So that's the thing we toggle between. I use that one all the time, 'Command Y', or 'Control Y'. I'm going to go back in. What I'm looking to do is just get this thing kind of close to here. It's never going to be perfect. I'm just trying to grab the edge and get it kind of touching here... so this curve is going to look nice. I'm going to select both of them. I don't have to come out of a Wireframe Outline mode... to keep using the Width Tool. Now, the Width Tool is one-- I say, the Width Tool... I might say that a couple of times in this course, I don't know why. I say that all the time, it's the Shape Builder Tool. So, it's 'Shift M', it's one of the shortcuts, write it down. It's actually one of those ones you use all the time. I'm going to click, hold, and drag across all these guys... and you'll notice along here, it's done a pretty good job of lining this up. I'll do one more and see if I can't fix it... or I can't make that look a little worse, so I can show you how to fix it. It's all looking okay, 'Command Y'. Let's look at this. I should have really had that on to draw out a circle. I'm okay with that. My drawing in this is a hand drawing. What I'd like to do here, is I'd like this to join up to this bit. Let's grab the-- I'm going to deal with two Ellipses again. I'm going to be able to use it, how? Corner Options, which is cool. I'm going to draw a circle roughly in the center here using my tricks. Roughly the right size. That feels a bit right. Be a little bigger. I'm going to have another circle. It's going to be a lot smaller to get that kind of inside radius. Now I'm just banging it around, trying to figure out... needs to be a bit smaller. There's times where Smart Guides can be a little painful. At the moment, I'm going to leave them on. Just using my arrow keys to tap it around. I want this to kind of line up here, and what I'll do is-- actually I'll make it even a bit smaller. And I'll have this... I want this a bit smaller. I want this kind of corner, you can see here, it just kind of corners in. And I want it to be smooth, and that's why Corner Options are going to help. So, you... Quit messing about, Dan, and just do it. I'm going to lob it off, probably about here. I'm going to grab all three of these guys. With my 'Black Arrow', remember, 'Shift M' is our cool tool... and I'm going to drag you guys. Drag these guys to join them up. I want to minus that. Goodbye to you, drag you across. I've kind of got rid of lots of bits. There's this kind of junk going on here... so I'm going to go to 'Command Y' just to see what's going on. I'm going to zoom in. I'm going to drag across these two guys to join them up... and I'm left with this. Now I'm going to grab my White Arrow, and remember, those Corner Options? This is where this is super handy, right? So, I'm going to click on just this point here, and tidy it up. Can you see, kind of just flows it around a lot more. Happens quite a bit. Nice, easy way to kind of fix those terrible joints. I could fix this one, I don't want to in this case, because-- but it's just an easier way than... you've probably done it before... and you've spent ages with the Pen Tool, and Anchors, and trying to delete bits... Man, it's a pain. So that's your handy tip. Let's continue-- any other hard bits? We're going to do the circle thing again here. What other hard bits? They're the same thing here with the Corner Options... let's do that one next, before we do that. So I'm going to draw-- I'm trying to match these two Ellipses roughly. A bit bigger. Something like that. 'Command C' for copy, 'Command F' for paste and place... right on the top of that. Make it a bit bigger, this curve. That feels okay. Select both of these guys, 'Shift M'. I'm going to minus that bit, minus that bit... join these guys here, join you. Get rid of that bit, join these. If you've forgotten the shortcut already, sorry about that... it is 'Alt' for PC, and "Option' for Mac, to minus. Otherwise it just works by joining. I'm going to grab our 'Arrow Tool'... and down here, I'm going to click on just this point, and I'm going to tidy that up. You can see, how nice... you can see a perfect circle, look at that, handy. Same thing is going to apply to this. We're going to draw that with the Curvature Tool. Let's draw-- this is probably the last thing... that would be useful for you before I start actually just filling it in. I'm going to grab my Curvature Tool. Now Curvature Tool has a really weird shortcut, I use it all the time. It's a really hard one to learn, it's Shift and Apostrophe. I think it's Apostrophe, I think that's what you call it... if you hover above that... it is Shift plus that little tricky thing, I'm pretty sure that's Apostrophe. So, Shift and that. I'm going to draw through it... because if I get close to this, it's going to try and join it. Remember that shortcut we had before, if I select it with my 'Black Arrow'... and go 'Command 2', it locks it, if you're on a PC, it's 'Control 2'. Now I can go back to my Curvature Tool, and I can click once there. And I'm going to click once there. I'm probably just going to go through... I'm not going to do this at one go, I'll cut this out with a circle. So I'm going to about there, then I want to go down to about... you can see, it's locked, but I can still follow that path, which is really nice. So, about there. We totally missed it though, let's bring him down. Yes, it's a bit good. 'Black Arrow', click it from the background. I'm going to unlock them all. Sometimes my shortcut doesn't work, so 'Object', 'Unlock All'. They're all unlocked, I can select him, 'Shift M'. Actually I don’t really need to, like... change him. If I click on him, at least he's another shape now... if I grab my 'Black Arrow'... this guy here is a separate shape, so I can color it later, I might just do that now. Don't worry about this little speckly line. We'll do that in a sec, actually we'll just do that now. So he's part of this thing here. So what ends up happening is, the line's trying to go through here... it doesn't know at all, when it's going to the edge, it's going like... all the way out, and all the way bent to give it a nice pointy edge. If you don't want that... I don't really mind it at the moment... because I'm probably going to get rid of the Stroke, but you might not. So with it selected, go to 'Properties', go to 'Stroke'... and you got options along here for the way the corners are handled. At the moment, it's got this kind of mighty joint, which is this spiky thing. I can round that off, which just be nice... or I can kind of bevel it off, which gives it a hack at the end. It's hard to tell. You have to zoom right in, and use this tool to see what happens... but have a play around with them, see which one will work for you. Let's tidy up a few bits and pieces. Let's draw the little thing here. I'll use my shortcut, 'Shift-Apostrophe'. Remember, double click for a corner, click once for a curve. Click once for a curve, double click for corner, click once for curve. Click once for a curve. Click once for a curve, and then, actually... you really want to hit double click for a corner. That's just one click to kind of finish this thing off. Am I happy with it? Yes, so now it's turning the background layer on and off. That's good enough. Let's slice out the circles. I'll use you, I'll duplicate him, and I'll use the same one across here. Now duplication is, 'Black Arrow'... and while I'm dragging it... holding down the 'Alt' key on a PC, or 'Option' key on a Mac. Now the Smart Guides is battling with me. I'll just tap it up with my arrow key. Select all of you guys, 'Shift M'. I'm going to say, I would like to join you guys up. And I want to hold down... the 'Option' key on my Mac, or the 'Alt' key on a PC... to delete all these guys. Now there's a couple of things, this thing's going up the top here. I feel like I want to go and redo it, so that... because it's still not what I said, it's kind of not lining up. So I want to go back and look like a professional... and know exactly what I'm doing... but I'm going to leave it in here... because you might run into the same problem. How to fix this? No idea... but we're going to just try and make it do again. So I just selected both of them, gone back to my Shape Builder Tool. Join them up. You can kind of see, it still wants to be two separate shapes. I'm not sure what that is. 'Command Y'... now he's in there, he's looking good. I don't know. Now let's ignore that for the moment... and we'll go color this thing and see if it runs into any more problems. Let's do this circle here. Goes down the center. I turned these off way too early. If you're doing yours, and following along, don't turn this off early... because I have to move my curves up around. It's all right, remember, 'Command Y' to go to outline. And we're just going to get this to-- Now, I'm going to leave that little bump in there... to show you how to fix that. It's a cool way of doing it. So, 'Command Y', 'Shift M'... almost done the same thing. Interesting. So what I want to do is tidy these up, so I'm going to grab my 'Pen Tool'... and there's a couple of corners I want to get rid of. I'm going to go back to my 'Outline View'. 'Command Y', or 'Control Y' on a PC. I want to get rid of these guys. So, with the 'Pen Tool', nothing selected... it's got the minus '-', just kind of does it by itself. I don't want to get rid of that one... because he controls a lot of this, I'm going to get rid of you. Now we've got a problem of this kind of flowing along here. The easiest way to do it, is grab the 'White Arrow', click on this guy. He has a handle at this side... but he has nothing on the other side, so the easiest way, what it does is... a tiny little handle there, can't really see. So with it selected, I'm going to go to-- is it a curve already? I'm going to say, "Be a curve." You can see, it kind of extends that little guy out... and has it made it perfect? Not quite. I might have to do some manual adjustment. Often that little-- just make it a curve, we'll just fix it right up. I'm going to say I'm happy enough with it. I might have to play around with the handles. This tutorial is getting really long now, so I'm going to leave it. Let's do a couple more of these... then I'll go and fix this by myself, and come back. Actually I'll do that now, let's see if it's working one last time... and then I'll pause and try fix it, and give you the ?? So you two, join. You're still separate, join. Still separate. I'm going to pause it now, I'll be back in a sec, figure it out. It's got me stumped. I'm just going to leave it there... because you might run into the same problem. I remember, when I drew it before-- Might be just that version problem. How bad? In your comments, let me know. Did you run into it, or is it just me? No, just me, or leave it. If it's for everybody I'll contact Adobe, and we'll try figure it out together. Let's look at finishing the last little bits off. So I'm back from the future. I couldn't work it out when I was originally fixing this video... and I got in touch with Adobe to help me. And made me look like a fool, but I'm back, humble pie-- these two things are still separate, remember, I had that problem. All it is, is the options in your Shape Builder Tool. If you double click it, you get this option... it was on Gap Detection 'Large'. I was messing around with that on some other project... and I left it along. Turns out it causes that problem. So change Gap Detection 'off', click 'OK'. Yours is not going to have this problem by the way, probably just mine. But now with it selected, I can go back to my Shape Builder Tool... and everything should be good. Nice! I already have both of these selected. We still have a problem. So now they're joined, and they stop being separate. One thing you'll also notice that I turned back on,... was, if I double click, I turned this off previously. This thing here, where it says... Cursor Swatch Preview. Turn it off because it's annoying, it's the thing just above the cursor. See that, if I double click it again it shows me the coloring just above it. I find that a little bit annoying, so I turned it off. We'll turn it back on now. Continue watching Dan floundering. But there's some good tips in there, continue watching... and now we'll learn. All right, back to your regular scheduled programming. We'll do this bit down here... and actually what I'll do is reuse the shape. So I'm going to drag this across here, we'll show you how I work, right? I'm just going to slice this bit here using the 'Align Tool', select all of that. My Shape Builder, goodbye; goodbye, you two, weirdos. And I can get rid of these bits. So I've got this thing, I'm going to-- I should have officially gone in, like, use the proper flip... but I just often do this. I know, you shouldn't, but, flip it across. I'm going to shift all these curves, who's going to know? You all are going to know, you're watching. Put it on a little bit smaller. Maybe make it a bit bigger. I'm messing about, we can fix that curve, right? So select both of these guys, 'Shift M'... and I'm going to drag across there, across there... and grab the 'White Arrow', come down to here... and say, you my friend need to be just a bit nicer. Grab the Target, not the Anchor Point. Just trying to flatten it out. Now if you find it doesn't flatten out really well... you can see, there's an Anchor Point there... and there, they're both trying to do stuff. So what I might do is... this guy here doesn't seem to be doing a whole heck of a lot. So I'm going to grab my 'Pen Tool'... and by default it will just try and minus it, which is cool. Now with my 'White Arrow', my 'Direct Selection Tool'... now gives me a bit more of a nicer curve there. All right, last little bit here, Curvature Tool. Double click for a corner, click once for a curve... click once for a curve, double click. Click once for a curve, once for curve... and the weird one, when you get back... when you double click here, it does it wrong. Just click it once to kind of finish the line. And that's the weird little thing there. Have I missed anything? Oh, this guy down here. I'll join you guys up. Turn it off, Layers. I think it's like coloring time, and avoid these guys. So let's do a couple of things. We're going to do some Gradient. You might totally move on now, because I'm just going to color it in... but you can watch if you like... but I'm just going to color it in. I'm going to turn the background 'off', because I don't need you anymore. I am going to make another Layer. Actually I'm not going to make a Layer, I'm going to... you should put Layers in, right... but I'm getting into the habit of just grabbing the Rectangle Tool... and filling it with color, and locking it. Super handy, that was super quick. Send it to the back. Shortcuts to send to back is... at the moment, it's way above my whale, right?... but I can, with it selected, with pretty much any tool... I can hold 'Command Shift' and hit the first of the square bracket '[' So look at your keyboard, just next to P there's the first square bracket. So that's 'Command-Shift-[' sends it all the way to the back. If you're on a PC, it's 'Control-Shift-['. And the second square bracket, ']' sends it to the front. Back, forth, back, forth, all the way through. So that's what I want. I'm going to lock it using 'Command 2', or you can use 'Control 2' on a PC. I'm going to stop giving the shortcuts. You'll be going mad soon, but... we'll do a lot of it later on, we've got lots of videos to go. He's in the middle because that's where I want him to be. I am going to give him some Fill colors. I want to start by selecting, or just give it all the Fill. Now I'm going to-- because it's basically only a couple of shapes... I'm going to get rid of the Stroke... and that's going to avoid my problem of joining along the top there. It could be that ??, maybe. These guys here, I'm going to do a lighter color. Just some sort of lighter color. This guy here is going to be the same color. He's my Eye Dropper Tool, just to select from that. And this guy here is going to be lighter too, just because. Is it cool? Yes, it's all right. One last thing I'm going to show you. We'll put Gradients in this thing. Good old Gradients. So I'm going to draw a big kind of circle in the background. It's just for show, right? It's just, I wanted to... I want to pick 'black', actually I'll go to my Swatches... I'll pick this one. Maybe lower down the Opacity, it's just kind of, like a... I guess a look that I want. I just want to kind of lower it down. Send it to the back. Send this guy to the back. He's locked. See, he's the come forward one. What I could do now... I just want to crop it so it's not hanging around the edge. There's two ways of doing it, I can grab a 'Rectangle Tool'... just drag it out. Drag it to the edge properly, select both of them... and hit 'Command 7', or if you're on a PC, 'Control 7'... and that crops it, and that's cool but you end up with this kind of... it's a cropped circle, and sometimes it runs into problems, right? So I'll show you how to do it with the Shape Builder Tool. You probably can imagine how this is going to work. 'Shift M' for the Shape Builder Tool, it's going to delete that bit... and inside. Now send him to the back. That's kind of it for what I want to do with the whale. And now if you have joined, and yours look different... you can totally go in a different direction in terms of the flairs. You could do the whole thing slightly different, and different colors... but I'd like to see it, and I'd also like to find out... if you had the same problems with the joining bits. But yes, send me-- I'd like to see what you've done. Either Instagram, Twitter... or here on this platform... there's an option for posting your projects. All right, happy whale making... not hunting. 9. More shape builder goodness: Just when you thought the last video of our Shape Builder was long, there's more. There's a few special tricks