Adobe Illustrator CC – Essentials Training

1. Introduction: Hi there, my name is Dan. I'm an Adobe Certified Instructor... and an Adobe Certified Expert in Adobe Illustrator. Now together, me and you, are going to go through this course... and make beautiful art work together, using Illustrator. During this course, you won't just learn how to use this tool... we'll work through real world practical projects. Now this course is aimed at people completely new to Illustrator... and maybe to Design, in general. We're going to start absolutely right at the beginning... and work our way through step by step. We'll start with the techniques... that you'll need to create just about anything in Illustrator. We'll customize shapes, use the wonderful Shape Builder tool... and the simple to use Curvature tool. We'll form lines, and brushes, plus your soon to be favorite, Width tool. You'll master how to use and manipulate Types. I'll show you all the sneaky secrets that Illustrator has... to discover and use beautiful colors like a seasoned designer. You'll learn how to push, pull, cut, and repeat, just like this. There's even a section in here... where we'll hone our skills by practicing, redrawing these real world brands. We won't forget the essentials like proper saving, and exporting... plus so much more. So if you've never opened up Illustrator before... or you've opened it, and you've struggled a little bit... follow me, I'll show you how to make... beautiful art work together, in Illustrator. 2. Course Exercise Files for Adobe Illustrator CC Essentials: All right, time to get started. There's a couple of things you need to do first. One is, download the exercise files. There'll be a link on the page to download those, you can play along. There's another link there saying, The Completed Files. You don't need these, but they're handy. What I do at the end of every video I kind of save where I'm up to. So that, maybe yours is not quite working, you just want to see how I made mine. You can download that Illustrator file just to check against yours. One last thing, is there's a Cheat Sheet. Right at the end of this course, there is a video version of that Cheat Sheet. You can watch that, whenever you're ready for cheats, and shortcuts, and stuff. The other thing is, there is a PDF version of that Cheat Sheet. You can download it for free from bringyourownlaptop.com There's a Resources tab at the top. Click on that, you'll see Illustrator, plus a load of other ones. Yes, time to start learning Illustrator. 3. Getting Started with Adobe Illustrator CC: Hi there, in this video we're going to look at getting started with Illustrator. Basically some navigation of the interface... and just getting Illustrator set up... so that we can all work together, and you can follow along with me. First thing we'll do is, let's open up one of our Exercise Files. Let's go up to 'File', 'Open'. In our 'Exercise Files'... there is one called 'Getting Started', let's click 'Open'. The first thing we'll do to get everybody kind of lined up together... is resetting our Workspace. Now in the top right here, you can see, it says Essentials Online. Yours might say something different from this drop down. What I'd like you to do is pick 'Essentials'... and then once it's got that little tick next to it, click on it. Then drop it down again, and say 'Reset Essentials'. That will just kind of reset it, and make it look like mine. The other thing that might look little different between yours and mine... is this Tool Bar on the left here. Because my laptop's big enough... it allows me to see all of the tools in one big long line... but yours might be smaller... you might be using a 13" MacBook Pro, or something. It will show them as a double, like this. See this little double arrow here, this little Chevron? You can decide whether you want to work this way, or this way. I'm going to work this way because that's my default... but you might be seeing it just a little bit differently. Next thing to do is to deal with your preferences for units and increments. It's a bit strange in Illustrator... so it's worth mentioning here at the beginning. I've got a document open, I have nothing selected... by using the Black Arrow, just clicking in the background, nothing selected... you can see, the units in this case are set to centimeters. I can change them here for this document, which will say 'Inches'. That's how to change it for this document. Now if you've come from other Adobe products... you'll know that you can go into 'Preferences'... and change your units and increments. It doesn't work that way in Illustrator. What happens is, you create the units and increments... as you create a new document... or, like we did here, you change it with nothing selected. So say I want to make a new document, and I want to make sure it's inches. So I go to 'Print', and I decide I want a 'Letter'. You'll notice that it's defaulted to 'Points', and it always does that. There is a bit of a hack to go through and change it... but we'll just live with points... because that's what Adobe said, even with A4. So Metric sizings, it still defaults to 'Points'. So what you need to do is pick 'Letter'... then go in here, and say, I want it to be in 'Inches'. That will make sure the default sizing for that document is in inches. I'm going to click on 'Create'. Now you might be doing more kind of Web Design... so that units could be switched from inches, millimeters... to something like pixels. Often I work that way especially when I'm doing... maybe UI Design in Illustrator... but we're going to work in inches for most of this course. Now if you need to change the page size afterwards... a really easy way to do it is... down here, there's a tool... it's called the Artboard tool, if I click on it... it kind of selects the Artboard... and I can drag it around, which is kind of strange. You can just make up a size, but often, with it selected... over here, you can see... I can give it a Page Size by changing the height and the width. You can see here also, I can change it to 'Landscape'. Now one thing is, if you're following along with say, something like CS6... quite an older version of Illustrator... 95% of this course will work just fine. The big change for you is... you won't have this Properties panel, you'll have something slightly different. Under 'Essentials', you'll have 'Essential Classic'. And you'll have most of these options. Can you see, there's 'Artboard 1', up the top there. But in the later version, the one we're using now... is they just tucked them into this Properties panel. So you can play along just fine with CS6 or earlier versions... but you just have to know that when I'm using the Properties panel... you're actually using this kind of Control App bar along the top. Now a couple of more things... just to get us used to Illustrator before we start making things. I've gone back to 'Getting Started', you'll notice, these tabs along the top... so this is how to have more than one document open... and toggle between the two. So I'm going to go to 'Getting Started'. I'm going to grab my 'Black Arrow'. Black Arrow is your default, this is the one to use all the time. It's your fall back tool... because what it does is it just moves things around. If I click on this guy, I can move him around. It physically moves stuff, that's his job, the Selection tool. Now the Selection tool moves the thing in its entirety. There's another tool in here, called the White Arrow... or the Direct Selection tool. What this does is it allows you to pick little parts of that object... whereas the Black Arrow moves the whole thing. Watch this, if I click on one of these little dots here... you can see, it's blue, versus all the rest of them that are white. I can move just one part of this little fox here. So we're going to be using both of these tools, mainly the Black Arrow... but the White Arrow will be something that we use as well. Couple of more things that we'll need to work with... is 'Edit', you've got 'Undo' and 'Redo'. So if things go wrong, you can go backwards... you can use the shortcut if you feel like it. It has unlimited undos, so you can go back loads. The next thing is zooming in and out. There's a tool down the bottom here, the Zoom tool, you can click on it. Hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac, to zoom out, or 'Alt' key on a PC. You can see, the icon changes from a plus, '+'... but if I hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac... it changes into a minus, '-', and you just click once. Now I never use that, and you'll find that-- we're not going to do too many shortcuts in this Intro class... but a really good shortcut for in and out... is holding down the 'Command' key on a Mac, or 'Control on a PC... and just tapping the plus, '+' key... and the minus, '-' to zoom out. It's a really quick and easy way to zoom out. Another really useful tool - I'm going to go back to my 'Black Arrow'. - is when I'm moving around, you can drag these sliders here, and that's fine... but you'll find that, just holding down the 'space bar'... you'll see, my cursor changes from black Arrow to the Hand. Click, hold, drag around. So 'space bar', and just click, hold your mouse button... it's a really easy way to move around. Another thing to note in Illustrator... is that we've got something called an Artboard. Now Artboard is just like another page. They call them Artboards in Illustrator. I'm going to zoom out a little bit. Now I'm going to go back to my Artboard tool, to my Pages tool. I'm going to click once over here... and drag out, and I've got a second page. So with it selected, I can click, hold, drag it across a little bit... give it some room, and then over here, I can switch it to A4. I'm going to zoom out. So you can have more than one page. I've got first page, which is kind of a postcard size... then I've got this A4 page. So just think of them as pages in a document. You can export them as pages in a PDF. Or you just might have multiple concepts to work in between the two. So you can have more than one Artboard. One last thing to quickly discuss before we get into making stuff... is the Grouping and Isolation mode. I'll show you this now because everyone gets lost. So I've got this fox here. At the moment it's actually just separate shapes. So what I'm going to do is select it all, so I'm going to hold down 'Shift' key. So with my 'Black Arrow', 'Shift' key, click on these guys. So with them all selected, what I'm going to do is go to 'Object'. I'm going to group them... so they're kind of one little unit that I can move around. I missed that little white bit, but that's okay. But he's grouped, now what ends up happening is... when you're new to Illustrator, especially if you love to double click... with my Black Arrow, if I double click him, weird stuff happens. This kind of grays out, and I can't select on it anymore. I can work on these guys individually... what's happened is you've entered something called Isolation mode. And the way I know, is that it's grayed out in the background... and there's this blue line along the top. And you can see here, I'm inside of this group. Layer 1 is home base, so I can just click on that to come back out. So that's where people often get lost. So we're working fine, working fine... double click... and they get lost in here... and they kind of work on stuff, and things go a bit weird. So if that ever happens, just click on Layer 1... or this big arrow here, up to you, just to come back to home base. Enough boring navigation, getting setup stuff. Let's start making stuff in the next video. I'll see you over there. 4. How to draw in Adobe Illustrator CC with shapes & lines: Hi there, welcome to this video. We are going to draw this lovely fox using just basic shapes. Lines, rectangles, and stars, just really simple stuff. We're going to start with a Template to draw over the top... and end up with this. Let's go and look at that now. In this tutorial we're going to draw from this drawing that I've made. Just to make it simple, so we can all follow along. What I'd like to do is, in Illustrator... we're going to go to 'File', 'New'. Pick a document size, I'm going to start with 'Print'. I'm going to use 'US Letter', I'm going to use 'Landscape'. I'm not going to change anything else, just going to click 'Create'. I'm going to save it, so I'm going to go to 'File', 'Save'. What we'll do for this class, is I'll put everything on my Desktop, you do the same. I'm going to make a new folder on my Desktop. I'm going to call this one 'Illustrator Class Files', and that's all. We're going to stick everything from this class. Let's call this one 'Sleeping Fox'. Let's click 'Save'. Let's leave everything as the default, and click 'OK'. So we're drawing from a drawing, I've drawn it in my notebook, right? And I want to kind of just redraw it in Illustrator. So nice trick to do that is... I've done a scan of it, or we can take a photo of it. I'm going to go to 'File', 'Place'. Now, Place is Import, for Illustrator. Illustrator likes to call it 'Place', click on that. I want you to find your 'Exercise Files'... and there's one in there called 'Sleeping Fox.jpg'. Now before you click Place, click on this one that says 'Template'. What it does for is, let's have a look, let's hit 'Place'. What it does for us, is it brings it in - I'm going to click in the background here ... and it puts it on a Layer... and locks it so we can draw over the top of it easily. Where I clicked on my 'Layers Panel' here, you see, it created a Template Layer... and then a Layer that I can draw on. We don't have to do this, just makes it easy when we're redrawing. For some reason it likes to bring in... and kind of has it a little bit over here, to the left side. I'm going to unlock it, can you see... that's the locking icon, I'm going to click on it. Drag it across to a little bit more in the middle. Something like that, then it will lock it again. And to continue drawing, I want to make sure I'm on Layer 1. Let's jump back to 'Properties'. Now we'll start with this Body here... we're going to grab the 'Rectangle Tool', here, he is here. I'm going to click, hold, and drag out kind of a rough rectangle. You don't get it quite right, jump back to the 'Black Arrow'... and use any of these white boxes here... just to kind of resize it, and get it close to that size there. It's a bit of a guess, don't worry too much. What I'm going to do is pick a Fill color, and a Stroke color. Now yours may be different... yours might have a black line around the outside, and a white Fill. Let's look at changing those. So over here, in my Appearance Panel... there's one called Fill, and one called Stroke. I'm going to click on 'Fill', and I'm going to pick a fox kind of color. Now we're going to use these Swatches here, so you've got two options here. Kind of the rainbow colors, and those Swatches. Let's just pick, just for this class let's keep it simple... and just pick something in here. You can have a green fox, that's okay, I'm just going to have an orange fox. And in terms of the Stroke... the Stroke is the one around the outside, yours might already be black. You might see-- I'll click off over here. You can see, there's a black line... if I select on this, and click on 'Stroke Color'... now I want to use this red line here. This little red line indicates No Stroke, that little red, crossed out. Nothing there, but that's what I want. If nothing is changing... what you need to do, with your Black Arrow... just make sure this box is selected, then make your changes. So that's a rectangle, exciting, and that's its Fill color. Let's get into something a little more exciting... see these little dots in the corner here? These are your corner options. Watch this, I can click, and drag these corners... the little spots there. And you can notice that all of the corners come and change. It's kind of what I want. I'm going to go to 'Edit', 'Undo'. I'm going to use my shortcut for the rest of this course... so it's 'Command Z' on a Mac, or 'Control Z' on a PC. I want to undo a couple of times until it's back. Now what I would like to do is... you can see, underneath here, the drawing... I've just got a corner there, and a corner there. So, what I'd like to do is use my White Arrow. Remember, the Black Arrow is basically doing, kind of big things... moving the whole object. The White Arrow is good for doing little bits within that object. Now what I'm going to do is... in this top right hand corner, I'm going to click it once. You'll notice that this guy is blue, and these guys are white... indicating that these guys are selected. And you can see here, just one little target appears. I can click on this guy now, and go something like that. Same with the bottom left, click on that one, drag it up. Don't worry too much about being perfect... but if you are, if you really do want it to be perfect, what you can do - I'm going to undo a couple of times. - is you can have these guys selected at the same time. So, click this guy once, hold 'Shift'... click this guy once, and you've got two dots. Then you drag one, and they both update. So that's my little thing for his body, let's look at doing the head now. So I'm going to go back to my Black Arrow,... remember, that's the kind of default tool to go to. Click off in the background, I've got nothing selected. The next tool I want is the Polygon Tool... because I want a Triangle for his head, and that's considered a Polygon in here. So I'm going to find the 'Rectangle Tool', click, hold, hold, with your mouse key. Hold it down, and eventually these pop up. We're looking for this one called Polygon, click on that. Now if I just do nothing, it will drag out whatever I last drew. Yours is probably going to draw an actual Pentagon, or a Hexagon... it's going to draw something. I'm going to undo to get rid of that. If you want to adjust how many sides this Polygon has... all you need to do is just click once with your mouse. Click once, and you get these Polygon options. Yours is probably set to 5... and you're probably getting something like that. I'm going to undo again, click once, pick '3' sides. Don't worry too much about the radius, we can change that afterwards. I've got a Triangle. Next thing I want to do is do some Rotation and Scaling. It's best to do that when we're back on our safety tool, the Black Arrow. I'm going to click, hold, and drag the center... so it's kind of in a more usable place. Now to Scale and Rotate... let's look at rotating first. So Black Arrow, have this guy selected just once. Now what you'll notice is... when I'm in the corner, I get this stretching arrow, that's my scale... but if I come just a bit further out, I get this double arrow. So there's kind of no man's land here, too far, doesn't work. Just in, okay, never used to it. So if I click and hold here, I can drag it around, clicking and holding. What I can also do is, undo. I want it to be kind of like... I want to flip it in, like... Is it 90°, I guess, 90°. I want to-- while I'm dragging, watch this. If I hit down, and hold down the 'Shift' key on my keyboard... watch this, can you see? It drags in like nice big chunks, it's 45°... then, 90°, that's what I want. Now in terms of Scaling, same tool, Black Arrow... and if I grab the corner here, and just drag it... I can resize it any sort of shape I want... by clicking, holding, and dragging. Now I would like to kind of constrain it proportionately... so that it's a perfect triangle... because if I scale it down here, it gets a bit long and thin. So what I'm going to do is hold down the 'Shift' key... like I did when I was rotating... if I hold 'Shift' while I'm Scaling, in any of those corners... you can see, if I drag it down... it kind of wants to be the same height and width, it kind of locks that ratio. So I'm going to drag it, kind of in there. Drag it up a little bit, something like that. So, getting close. Now the only trouble with what I've got here... is I can't really see through it... it's somewhat the other parts that I'm drawing. So what might be nice now, is just while I'm working... I'm going to switch down the Stroke... and I'm going to make it a 'black' Stroke... and the Fill, I'm going to change to 'None'. So the Fill, with the red line, and the Stroke with black... now I can see through it. Like we did with the shape down here, we can play with the corner options. So I've got this selected with my Black Arrow... you'll notice that I can't click in the center anymore. I could in this, because it selects the whole thing... but in the middle of this, I can't. It doesn't. You got to select the edge now, because it has no Fill. And like before, I can grab this target here, and it does all the corners. That's not what I want, so I'm going to undo. I'm going to grab my 'White Arrow', and click on just this guy here. Then I'm going to drag him upto roughly the same size that I want. Awesome! Triangles and Rectangles. Let's do the nose now. So I'm going to grab my Polygon Tool... click once, '3' sides, click 'OK', way too big. Grab my 'Black Arrow', holding 'Shift', I'm going to scale it down. Then just in this no man's land, I'm going to try and rotate it around. Now I'm going to drag it down... let me get it roughly the right size there. Now what I can do while I'm dragging this thing around... often you just drag this little dot in the center... it moves it around... and I kind of want to get it perfect in there... so there's a couple of things we need to do when we're working. You'll notice that, by default, this thing... you see these little marks that appears? You can see, it says, intersect. Draws a line up with things all over here. So a couple of things you need to do. Make sure our Smart Guides are on, because they're really helpful. So go to 'View', come down here, and make sure Smart Guides are ticked 'on'. Next thing to do is, just to zoom in. When we're working this far out, on things this delicate... it's just really hard, it snaps at everything. So remember, 'Command +', or 'Control +' on a PC... gets us in nice and close. And watch this, if I have my Black Arrow, and just click off in the background... I don't have it selected, I have nothing selected. If I click in, you can see, I can move my cursor around, it says, Anchor. Anchor is considered like a corner point. So if I click on, and drag this Anchor... and I drag it close to here, you'll see, eventually it will snap in there. It just kind of wants to line up, and intersect. So you can find that's a nice, easy way. It's just got to be zoomed in a little closer. Then, kind of just drag in the corner... and try line it up where you want it to go. And if Smart Guides are on, it's really good... it's kind of snapping in there. Next thing I want to do, is I want this to have a Fill of black... and I want to have no line around the outside. We got a red line. Next tool we're going to use is-- I want to put in these whiskers. I'm going to select on this guy. Even though I've just put the color in... I'm going to move it back to having 'No' Fill. I'm going to give it a Stroke around the outside, so I can see it. Now let's do the whiskers. I'm just going to use the 'Line Segment Tool'. It's a nice, simple tool. Click, hold, drag. Click, hold, drag, click, hold, drag. Just so I've got three lines. One thing you might find... is if you try and draw something kind of straight out of... you can see, if I draw something... then I draw another one to come out that little point there... it actually starts moving it. If you do want to kind of get them to come out of the same point... once you've drawn one, grab the 'Black Arrow'... click in the background... and go back to the 'Line Tool', then you'd be able to kind of start again. 'Black Arrow', click in the background, that's the Line Tool, start again. I've kind of kept mine separate down here, just to avoid that. Next thing I want to do is this little closed eye. Now, we could, if we hold down the 'Polygon Tool'... find the 'Ellipse Tool'. I could draw like an open eye. But my guy is sleeping, so I'm going to delete him. And underneath the Line Segment Tool is an Arc Tool. So click on him, and what I'm going to draw is just something... it's a bit random, the way it draws. I want it to be kind of this way... but let's just click it down, and kind of get something archy... then we'll rotate it. So I've got something like that, grab my 'Black Arrow'. Remember, just hovering out here... I can drag it around, move it down, scale it up. Just kind of work with it until you find something that you like. And in terms of the Stroke, say width, it's a bit thin for me. I'm going to increase it up, probably the same for all of these guys... they're all a bit thin for me at the moment. I can do them individually, and over here, with it selected... this is the Stroke Width, how thick the line is... you can see him get really big. I'm going to go out to something like '5 points'. I don't want to have to do this individually. So I'm going to click on this guy... with my Black Arrow, hold 'Shift', grab him, grab him... So I've got all three of them selected, and I'd like them all to be '5'. Big. So now I can go through and add my colors again... I'm going to zoom out a little bit. So this border here, we can have no Stroke. So I'm going to go back to that crossed out red line... and the Fill here, I'm going to pick my color. It's going to be, I think it was this one. And the head, I'm going to do the same sort of thing. I'm going to have no Stroke. And I'm going to pick a Fill color of that orange. That's the kind of basics to get started. Let's look at a couple of things. Let's look at this ear here. So what I'd like to do is, I'm going to grab my 'Polygon Tool' again. And because it remembers what I drew last time, I can just draw something out... rather than clicking once, and making sure it's got three sides. I know it does now. So I can click and drag out. Now while I'm dragging out... I can hold 'Shift' to get it to go perfect... that's kind of what I want. So something like that. It just needs to be big enough, because what I'm going to do is... with the Black Arrow, grab the center, I'm going to turn it into this ear. So probably needs to be a bit bigger. Just so it kind of sits back there a little bit. So what I'd like to do for this one... is I'd like to have a really thick Stroke, and a Fill of white. So, the Fill, I'm going to change it to 'white'... and I'm going to have the Stroke... and I'm going to pick, maybe just a darker color of that. I'm going to increase it to match the Stroke size. I was using 5 over here for these guys, I might as well use 5 for the ear. I'm just going to pop it there. Now this brings me to the next point of arranging. Basically the last thing you draw is on top. All I need to do is move it to the back. And there's a couple of ways, with it selected, with the Black Arrow... over here there's one called 'Arrange'... and I can go 'Send to Back', and it goes over there. Or often, what I do is I just right click it... and there's 'Arrange', 'Send to Back'. Either way, it doesn't matter. Let's look at doing these stars. There is an actual tool for it called the Star Tool, grab on him. Click once, decide how many points you want. By default it's going to give you a pretty nice looking star. You can change the two radii, the inner... which is the outside part... and then the inner radius, radius 2, is this inside part. I'm going to click 'OK', it gives me a star, I can click and drag it out. So what I'd like you to do is-- I'm going to undo... and just drag out a star, stuff in the center. Here we go. Roughly, don't worry too much about it. You can have more stars, you can have less stars. Something like that, badly drawn stars, little stars. Add more, go nuts. We're going to add a bit more detail, this tail... and we'll add, kind of the grass down the bottom. Basically we've covered the tools that we're going to be using... so you can skip it here. There's a couple of little things that we'll do in here. Let's do this tail first. So I might grab my 'Rectangle Tool'. Can't find him, there he is. Draw something roughly close to it. You'll notice, the Smart Guides here has locked into the bottom, super helpful. You can turn them off though, under 'View', 'Smart Guides'... if you're finding them troublesome. There's a shortcut, it's really, often... to turn it on and off while you're building. So they've given it a really good shortcut. In this case, on a Mac, it's 'Command U' on a Mac... or 'Control U' on a PC. So first thing I want to do is... I'm going to give it No Fill, so I can see through it. And I'm going to grab my 'White Arrow', click on just this corner. Actually I'm going to click on that one, hold 'Shift', grab that one. Let's draw something matching this. Same thing again, I'm going to draw a Rectangle over this guy. I'm going to grab my 'White Arrow'. Click on this one, hold 'Shift', grab this guy. Add that corner point. And we're doing some stuff. And what I want to do is, I'm going to pick a Fill color... so at the moment, the Stroke is orange, I'd like to have the Stroke as 'None'. Fill color is the 'Orange'. And I'm going to have this Fill color, so Stroke of 'None'... and a Fill color of 'White'. Exciting! He was lying down. I feel like, now that I've drawn it, I want to grab this guy. So I selected both of them, clicked on this... hold 'Shift', grab this guy... and I'm going to rotate it around. Holding 'Shift' while you're rotating, remember, like the Head... locks it into kind of 45. Looked like he's sleeping there. You decide. Yes, he looks like he's sleeping there. Next thing I'd like to do is, underneath here is some grass... so all I'm going to do is-- actually I was just going to move that other way for the moment. Grab the 'Polygon Tool', which is still set to Triangle. Draw something, like a triangle. Then grab the 'Black Arrow'. And just kind of shrink it in there, and we're just going to build this. I'm going to zoom in a little bit. Copy, and paste it... so with it selected, I've gone 'Edit', 'Copy', 'Edit', 'Paste'. I'm just going to use my shortcuts to speed it up. And I'm going to draw, resize it. This is where you can just build your own grass. Little bit high, grab that dot in the middle to make sure you move it. Now I'm just doodling. There is one other thing, so hang around, I'll show you in a sec. Copy, paste, move it around. I'm not too worried about these being kind of down here... because I'm going to show you a technique to kind of trim them up. So I'm going to select all these, copy and paste it, make another version. And with them all selected, I can scale them all in one go. So it's going to look something like that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select them all... and I'm going to grab you... and I'm going to grab a Fill of this kind of dark gray color. I'll show you what I'm going to do in a second... you saw it at the beginning, right? So, move him back in. Nice! We've used my drawing now, it's kind of done its dash. We've got our kind of Fill drawing now, I want to go into my Layers panel. Let's just turn the visibility of that off. So this eyeball layer here, if you click on that... you'll notice that it disappears. You can leave it there, doesn't really matter... but I'm just turning it off so I can't see it. Kind of brings me to my next point. I need to resize this. My next point is, when you're scaling things... look what happens by default. So if I select everything, so 'Black Arrow'... drag a box around all of it. Under 'Properties', there's an important thing here. Actually no, before you select anything... there's this one here, 'Scale Stroke & Effects'. So there's going to be times when you need this on... and some times when you need it off. If it's off, look what happens. If I select this, and I scale it down, say I just need a smaller version of him... so I've selected it all. I'm going to scale it down... and like we did when we were drawing lots of shapes... if we hold down 'Shift' while we're scaling it... it locks the height and width... otherwise it gets all kind of stretchy. So shift down, and look what happens when I get down quite small. It's remembered that this is 5 points. And it just does some weird stuff when it gets down to here. It's trying to kind of remember... the actual radii that we used around here. It's doing some strange things. So sometimes you want that... you want to scale it down a bit, and retain the Stroke Width... but I'm going to go to 'Edit', 'Undo'. And with nothing selected, I'm going to turn that on... and it's going to scale those ?? now... proportionately to the size that I've got. Now when I scale it down... I hold down 'Shift', and then scale it down... you can see, these guys, these stars here... they come down, and they're smaller size, they're like 3 points now. So that's just kind of something... you need to be aware of when you're scaling things. It's that sometimes you want them to scale appropriately... and sometimes you want them to actually get smaller... so you'll turn that on and off. Last little thing, I'm just going to... I don't know, maybe just look a little nicer with some rectangles. I'm going to use-- I'll draw a rectangle, it covers kind of the bottom here. It's just going to match the same color as my grass. Actually I might use the Black Arrow... and get it to snap to the bottom of my fox. I'll use the same color as that, so 'Fill', and, which one is it? Lucky first guess. Same with the sky here. I'm going to grab the 'Rectangle Tool', space bar, drag up a little bit. And let's have a nice starry sky. Snaps in. Fill color, I'm going to use another one of the darker grays. That dark. With it selected, 'Arrange', 'Send to Back'. And I might make the stars just white. Even though we've spent ages talking about the Strokes of these guys... goodbye Stroke. And a Fill might be up to... I don't know what I'm doing So that is my, or our fox drawn out of just really basic shapes. There's so much you can do just with those shapes. Now, like I said at the beginning, often it's a combination of-- I've kind of kept this design to a specific shape... just to kind of like, I guess, work through some of the tools... but often you'll find you'll be using things like... the Shape Builder Tool and the Pen Tool, which we'll do in the next tutorial. Also in that process... like, you saw how we kind of started with the drawing first. I do that really often, right? I kind of draw in my notebook... because I find that it's just easier and quicker. Often I don't even do a scan... to redraw in Illustrator, I just get a general sense of it in my notebook. Now my drawing here looked really good, right? It's perfect, it kind of follows the lines. It's never that good. I'll show you-- I'll cut to this shot here, jump across. So here it is, I just took a photo of my notebook. That is the glorious fox. So just kind of draw a little bit, and kind of got it close. I wouldn't scan and redraw, I would just use it as kind of a visual. Then just start drawing in Illustrator... kind of perfected it, I guess, to get a nicer shape. But that's kind of more of a truer sense of my process. I will just do a really kind of a basic drawing... and then draw straight into Illustrator. So that's the end of how to draw basic shapes. What I'd like to do now is challenge you to a challenge. It's to take kind of the same techniques... so you're allowed to use rectangles, stars, lines, those type of things... and create your own animal. It could be sleeping like mine, it doesn't have to be. Just something simple, pick some different colors. It can still be a mammal. So you can use the whiskers, it can still be sleeping. You can use stars, but just pick a different animal... dog, cat, some sort of animal. I'd love to see it as part of your project. Give it a go, I'd love to see what you have done. So when you've done it... doesn't matter how good it is, or how bad it is... please post it as a project, I'd love to see it. All right, let's get on to the next video. 5. How to draw using the Shape Builder tool in Adobe Illustrator CC: In this video we're going to look at the Shape Builder Tool, I love this tool. It's absolutely my most favorite tool out of all the tools in Illustrator. We're going to take this drawing that we did of the fox... with simple shapes, and add some kind of shadows to it. Well, not so much exciting about the shadows... but more of the technique that we used... the Shape Builder Tool to kind of... be able to carve out extra colors within other shapes. I love it. Let's go and learn how to use it now. To get started with the Shape Builder Tool, let's start with a really simple file. Go to 'File', 'Open', there is a file in here... called 'Shape Builder', click 'Open'. Now this file is not very exciting. All it is, is I'm on my Black Arrow... just a couple of circles on top of a rectangle. So what I'd like to do is... I would like to, say this circle to join this rectangle. So I'm going to use my Black Arrow, and select them all... and we're going to go to the Shape Builder Tool, this guy here. He is the absolute best thing that ever happened to Illustrator. What it allows me to do is... you can see, by default there's a '+' next to my cursor there. What I can do is, watch this, I can hover above this... click, hold down my mouse, and just drag a line... and you see, it drags it across all three of these parts. And they are fused now as one thing. That is just awesome, no more Path Finder, and trying to join things... it's really easy, simple shapes... using the Shape Builder tool, and they join. Another cool trick is that... if I hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac, or the 'Alt' key on a PC... you can see, it changes from a ' + ' to a ' - '. So what I can do now is... I want to minus this, and this, I'm holding down my mouse key. I can drag it across those two bits to minus those bits off. So that is its main two uses, joining things and minusing things. It also has another little trick where-- I've got two bits selected, right... and what I can do is, I can pick a Fill color, let's say this... and use it for, not minusing or adding, but just coloring in bits. So I'm going to click off in the background here... and watch this, I can just click on that... and it uses that as the Fill color. Just really handy to go through... pick a color, click off, click in there, and it just fills shapes. I'll go back to my Black Arrow, and now, I click off... it's actually just three separate shapes that have been colored in. Let's use it in a kind of a practical sense now. So let's close this guy, I don't want to save him, it wasn't that exciting. So before we go and create a round kind of custom shape... from the Shape Builder Tool... I'm going to show you how I use it mostly. I want you to open up the 'fox' that we made earlier. If you haven't done that tutorial, you can cheat... go to the 'Exercise Files', and download one called 'Shape Builder 2', open it up. So what I'd like to do is, I want to add some shadows to this. You've seen that at the beginning of this video. So first thing we need to do is, with the Black Arrow... let's just grab this background, and just move it over to this side. Just to make life a little easier... let's go to 'Layers', and turn 'Off' the view of the template. We'll move it back in later on. So what I'd like to do is, I'm just going to start with the head. I'm going to grab the 'Line Tool'... I'm going to draw a line that goes from his ear... and I'm going to go all the way through his face here... just to show you how good the Shape Builder Tool is. I'm going to grab the 'Black Arrow'. And I'm going to have this selected... plus holding 'Shift', and grabbing these selectors. So I've got the head, and the line there, just those two. And go to 'Properties'. I'm going to go to my 'Shape Builder Tool', now I want to color it. So, like we did earlier, with the red and the blue... I'm going to pick a Fill color. I'm going to go to my 'Swatches' here, pick the orange. I'm going to move to this, like color mixer. Pre-made swatches here, color mixer here. I want to make it a bit dark, watch this, this 'K' is black. You can see, if I drag it, it gets a bit darker. I'm going to go to maybe 10%. You can be a bit more flexible with yours. Now, just need to click anywhere out, to close that box. Now when I hover above, click once... and I've got this lovely dark, lovely. That's fine. So yes, cast this shadow here. Now next thing I want to do is grab my Black Arrow... and just click off in the background. There are some bits left over... that thing there, if you've got some black... hanging off the end here, you can just select it, and hit 'Delete'. Don't need that anymore. Next thing I want to do is maybe cast a shadow underneath the chin. Same thing, 'Line Tool', cast some sort of fake Casting Shadow thing. 'Black Arrow', hold 'Shift', so I've got the line, and his body selected. Actually you can't go to Fill yet, you got to go to the Shape Builder Tool. Then go to 'Fill'. I'm going to use that-- you can see it's the last color that I've used, and it's pretty mixed it. If it hasn't, you can go back to the 'Swatches', click this one, go here. Do '10%'. Hopefully you can use the last mixed, save some time. I'm just going to hover above, and get to click out... hover above this, click once. This is going to run into our first problem with the Shape Builder Tool. Grab the 'Selection Tool', click off in the background. You can see, this has ended up above everything, which is fine. All I need to do is, with it selected with the 'Black Arrow'... click 'Arrange', and 'Send to Back'. Now we'll be using 'Send to Back'. You might just need to 'Send Backwards', backwards goes back one step. If I click backwards now, it's not going to quite work... it's probably going behind... I don't know, this, and you can keep going backwards. And it's just one step at a time, backwards, backwards... and eventually you'll get there. I'm going to go to 'Arrange', 'Send to complete back'. Awesome! Now I'm going to do a couple of more shadows... you can follow along if you like. I'm going to grab this, copy and paste it, make it bigger. I'm going to use it like, shadow for his bum. I'm going to select both of these, holding 'Shift'. With my Black Arrow, move to the Shape Builder Tool. Pick a Fill color. Last used color, didn't work. I'm going to go to here and pick 10%. Click off, and then click back on. Back to my Black Arrow, click off in the background... grab him, don't need you anymore, buddy. I'm going to do the same with the tail here, copy, paste it. Make it a bit bigger. I'll use it to kind of make some sort of tail shadow. Select both of them. Holding 'Shift', go to 'Shape Builder Tool'. You will get it after some time... Shape Builder Tool is one of the shortcuts I use loads. If I hover above the tool, can you see, it says, 'Shift+M'. That's both for Mac and PC. If I hold down the 'Shift' key on my keyboard, and type 'M'... it jumps to the Shape Builder Tool. And the Black Arrow is 'V'. So very often, I'm going 'V', 'Shift+M', you can see on my Tool Bar... I'm kind of jumping in between the two by just clicking those keys. 'Fill', I'm going to use this one, '10%'. Click off, and I'm going to say, you... clicking my Black Arrow, which is the V key, delete this one. I'm going to create some sort a line here, now I'm just knocking about. You can skip on if you like. Select both of them. 'Shift+M'. Pick a darker color than I had before for my Swatches. Kind of looks like he's doing custom made shadow from the moonlight. I'm going to grab this one, drag it back in. Snap it up, you'll just notice that it's in the wrong kind of layer order. So I'm going to do a 'Select In'. 'Arrange', and 'Send to Back'. And that's kind of how I use the Shape Builder a lot. I kind of get the basics in with some shapes... then use other shapes... and the Shape Builder Tool to kind of construct some more sophisticated art work. So that's kind of updating an existing drawing. Let's go and make something cool in the next video. Totally with the Shape Builder Tool. It's pretty nice, and it's one of those styles that are trending at the moment. So let's go and look how to do that in the next video. 6. How to draw a fox using the shape builder tool in Adobe Illustrator CC: Hi there, in this video we're going to make this swooshy looking fox thing... using my favorite tool, the Shape Builder Tool. Look at him, he's all made of little shapes, and bits, and pieces. Let's put you back together, fox... and let's go learn how to make you in Adobe Illustrator. So let's start with a new document, 'File', 'New'. You can use US Letter Landscape, or A4 Landscape, it doesn't matter. Click on 'Create'. We're going to bring in the drawing we're going to copy from. So let's save this document, 'File', 'Save'. Let's put it on our 'Desktop', in our 'Illustrator Class Files'. Let's call this one 'Awake Fox'. Let's click 'OK'. Let's bring in the image we're going to redraw... we're going to go to 'File', 'Place'. We're going to use... in our 'Exercise Files', there's one called 'Awake Fox.jpg'. Remember, like in the previous tutorial... we could just bring it in, put it on its own layer, and lock it... and turn the Transparency down. You can do that all in one fell swoop... by just clicking this 'Template' as you bring it in. Remember... watch this, it's created two layers... one's a Template layer, and you can't touch it. And they've dimmed it down, so you can draw on that easily. We're working on 'Layer 1'. Let's go back to 'Properties'. Now, there is no real particular order to start this... but you might as well follow me. So let's start with, say the Polygon Tool. If we click once... we're going to make sure it says three sides. I'm not too worried about the radius at the moment, just click 'OK'. What we can do is, 'Black Arrow', holding 'Shift'... drag it out to the right size, and rotate it around. We did Rotation & Scaling in an earlier tutorial. I'm going to get it roughly in there. Now, you'll notice that the choice has snapped to the edge of the page... and lots of those purple arrows, that's really handy. Sometimes it's just nice to get it close... and use your arrow keys on your keyboard. Just a kind of tap it around with the keyboard to get it close. I'm happy with that. What I'd like to do is have 'No' Fill, and a 'Black' Stroke. So I've got my black Stroke, if you don't... click on 'Stroke', 'Black', 'Fill Color'. Let's go for 'No' Fill color. Now I'm not sure which part to start with, I'm going to start with the ears here. So I'm going to grab and hold down the 'Polygon Tool... and grab the 'Ellipse Tool'. I'm going to draw an ellipse. Holding down 'Shift', remember, gets a perfect circle. If I let go of Shift, it can get a weird shape. It's up to you what you want to do, I'm going to start with perfect circles. Something like that, 'Black Arrow'... remember, I can't click the center, because it has no Fill. So I'm going to click the edge, and kind of drag it. You can kind of see, I'll use it maybe for that one, it's a bit big. I'm just resizing it till I get something close to that part. Using my keyboard to tap it around again. Cool. That will do. I am going to copy it, and paste it. Then move it up, so I've got it kind of here as well. I think I used a slightly smaller one, here we go. Even smaller than that. Trying to match that circle in there. That will do. Next thing I'd like to do is start using my Shape Builder Tool. So I'm going to select everything. So my 'Black Arrow', select everything on the page... and I'm going to move to my 'Shape Builder Tool'. Now what I want to do is... I don't want to add any of these guys... I want to subtract this chunk up here that I don't need. Now who remembers what the shortcut is? That's right, it's 'Option' on a Mac, or 'Alt' on a PC. Hold it down, and you see I get a minus, ' - '... and I can drag across all of that, that, that. Click on him, you can see I can kind of minus those chunks off. I want to leave that, because that's going to be kind of the wider nose. These guys though need, they're doing some weird stuff... so I'm going to join them all. Remember, holding no keys down, will add. I'm going to add all of that to it. I'm going to minus that off, minus that off. Then, yes, it's kind of the basics for it. I'm going to grab my 'Black Arrow'. What do I want to do now? I want the other ear. So I'm just going to copy it, paste it, I got another version. This guy here... can't quite remember, I'm going to all the way turn it around a little bit. Awesome! We've got another set of ears back here. Maybe not so much rotation. Now with everything selected, again, let's grab the 'Shape Builder Tool'. That bit's perfect. Now I just want to join these together, about there. And the nose goes, kind of disjointed with all these little bits. You might have to zoom in a little bit, remember, 'Command +', or 'Control +'. I'm going to draw on all of that together, so it's one unit. Now it starts looking a bit high, because you're like... "What is the drawing underneath, and which is mine?" You might go to 'Layers', and turn this 'on' and 'off'. Just to get a sense of what it is. So the only thing I'm really missing is the circle for the eye. So let's do that, grab the 'Ellipse Tool'... drag this out, why am I dragging it up here? No reason, I'm going to drag it down here. Habit. Move it around, select all this chunk. I'm going to grab the 'Shape Builder Tool'... and I'm going to do-- I want to add all of that together. That kind of worked. On, off, on that bottom layer. It's looking good, now we just need the neck. I'm going to zoom out a little bit. Grab the 'Ellipse Tool'. Try and draw a circle big enough for that outside bit. Holding 'Shift', it feels about right. No, that's way too big. Hold it down. Remember, grabbing the edge, not the center of the circle. It's about him, and there's one stripe, two stripes. So I'm going to copy and paste him. I'm going to use that one. Roughly about that size, paste another one. Actually I don't need to paste another one, as long as I've got two there. Don't need that guy. Go away. So I am now going to select it all. Grab my 'Shape Builder Tool', and I'm going to say, don't need you. Don’t want you, actually I do want you. There's the ellipse there. Why did I delete that one? I don’t need it. So, there was a circle that I was missing. You probably saw it while you were doing it, and went, "No." It is there. We don't need three circles. Now one of the things is going to happen here, if I zoom in... scroll up here, I hold my 'space bar', you see, it doesn't line up here. To make the Shape Builder work nicely, you need to overlap everything. So I'm zoomed in; it's just easier when you're zoomed in. Now I'm going to grab the edge, and try to get him to snap in there. It's reasonably thick, I think. Doesn't have to be absolutely, scientifically perfect... but reasonably close, a couple of pixels. Now I'm going to select it all, and grab my 'Shape Builder Tool'... and I'm going to say, I don't want that. Don't want any of that, don't want that, I don't need that. Delete that, I'm going to come in here. What I might do now is turn off the Template... because I kind of know. Those two I want, those two I want. If you're finding it a little bit tough, don't worry. It is a little bit tough, trying to work out. You end up deleting the wrong bits... like, there's a chunk through here, I'm going to add you guys together. 'Black Arrow', select the background, pretty close. There's some of these Strokes flowing on, that are different sizes. There's a thin one there, and a thick one there. I'm going to select them all, and say 'Properties'... and I'm going to give them all the same Stroke Width of this '0.25 points'. Just a really thin one to get us going. That is looking good. If you find you've got kind of junk in the nose, like this little trim bit... just use your Shape Builder Tool to try and tidy it up. You might even use the Black Arrow, just click bits, and delete it. Now what I want to do is go and color it. I'm going to put in a nice, big gray background. I don’t know why, everything looks better on a dark gray background. I'm just drawing a nice big rectangle, I'm going to fill it with a dark gray. I'm going to have 'No' Stroke on it. I'm going to click 'Arrange', 'Send it to the Back'. Now I'm going to fill this with color. There's a couple of ways of filling it. I can just click the edges, and go fill it... or I could use the Shape Builder technique... like we did in the last video, it's up to you. I'm going to go pick colors, foxy colors. I'm going to mix my own. I'm going to click on the 'Mixer'. I got my 'Object' selected... I've clicked on 'Fill', I've clicked on 'Mixer'... and I'm going to click down here to try and find a foxy color. That's going to be my kind of lead color, I'll pick this one. Front Fill. I'm going to use the pretty mix color... and just make it a bit darker by grabbing the 'K'. Lifting it up a little bit. I'm going to use this kind of back of the head bit... by doing the same sort of thing. I'm going to use that, but lightening it up. Go even lighter. This one here is going to be just... should be white, maybe, but I'm going to use this, like off white... so it looks good. Same with you. And, off white. I'm going to select it all as well. Now if I select all of it... I'm going to end up with the background selected as well. That's fine, because I want to go to 'Stroke'... and I want to say, never use those Strokes, Thank you very much. And that is our cool little fox thing. All done with the Shape Builder Tool... get some nice kind of swooshes and swirls, and it's kind of flowy. Those are words I'm just making up, but you get the idea, right? It's kind of a nice, swooshy thing. So, now it is time for the end, and the time for the class project. So what I've done is, I've done another sketch that you can use... but I want you to go through and use the same techniques from the fox... but we're going to use our-- So 'New Document', use 'File', 'Place'... and you're going to bring in this one called 'Swan'. Yes, that's meant to be a swan. Kind of looks like a swan, kind of a chunky swan. You're allowed to-- it doesn't have to be perfect like this, I guess. What I want to see is a better swan, nice colors. It's totally up to you, you can draw it perfectly if you like... but using the same tools as we did... using the Shape Builder Tool and the fox, I'd like you to go off and do the swan. Again, I'd like to see your projects. All right, that is it for this video, let's get on to the next one. Actually no, you're going to go off and start doing your homework. Draw this one, make him better. All right, see you in the next video though. 7. How to draw custom logo shapes easily in Adobe Illustrator CC: Hi there, in this video we're going to draw this shape here. We're going to use the Shape Builder Tool. I know I've used it for a couple of tutorials already... but it's a really versatile tool. I use it so much that, yes, it gets three videos. The cool thing about this kind of impossible triangle... is that it's super possible with the Shape Builder Tool... and although this video is about five minutes long... it really only takes less than a minute to make this particular shape... given our super powerful Shape Builder Tool. Let's go and learn how to do that now in Adobe Illustrator. So to make our little shape, we're going to go to 'File', 'New'... and like always, 'Letter', 'Landscape', and hit 'Create'. So what I'm going to do is start with some lines. We're going to start with three of them. So I'm going to grab the 'Line Segment Tool'... I'm going to draw out a line. The cool thing about the Line Segment Tool, watch this, I can draw any sort of line... but if I hold down 'Shift', watch this... Shift locks into kind of like 45°, 90°, nicer angles. So I want it to be straight... so I'm holding 'Shift', and just drag a line, about that big. I'm going to have 'No' Fill... and have a Stroke of 'black', and it's going to be of '1 point'. So, 'Black Arrow', I'm going to move it to an appropriate place... and I'm going to make copies. So with it selected, go to 'Edit', 'Copy', 'Edit', 'Paste'. I'm using 'Control C', 'Control V'. Paste another one. What I want to do is show you a couple of things. One is, I'm going to select all of these guys-- actually I'm going to get it to a rough kind of place, like that... but they're not distributed nicely. I'm going to select them all... and the first thing I want to do is... make sure the spacing between them is even. So I'm going to go to-- you can see, by default, under 'Properties' panel, I've got 'Align'. You can see, it only does the basics, I can Align Center, which is what I want. You can see they don't quite line up, so Align Center is great... but the Distribute's not there. So this little dotted line here... that shows you there's more options to that Line panel. I want to show you the basics, the main stuff you need. I'm going to click on this one, you can see, these are a lot more options. In this case, I want to Distribute 'Vertical Centers'. You can see, it just really lines up nicely there. Next thing I want to do is make another copy of these three. So I've got them all selected with my 'Black Arrow'... 'Edit', 'Copy', 'Edit', 'Paste' . And I want to rotate them around. Now, I want it to be a triangle so... I need it to be like-- I can never work out the Maths, so, nice thing you can do in Illustrator... is, see over here, with these guys selected, I've got-- Under 'Properties' panel, I've got this way of changing the rotation. And I know that I need to take 360°, and divide it by 3. So a bit of Math in these things, I do them quite often... because my Math is terrible. So, divide by 3, '/3', hit 'return'... and that's 120. You probably know that already, I don't. I've got this one, I'm going to copy and paste it. And what I'd like to do for this one is... I know that it's 120 times 2, '120♪2'. So that should get me my other angle, so I'm hoping. Hit 'return', there it is there, 240. I should be able to do Math like that. I can't. I've got my kind of basic building blocks for this one. This is where it gets super easy, I guess. A bit mind bending because we're doing like an impossible triangle... but super nice and quick. So I'm going to grab the 'Line Segment Tool', and just draw off-- if you aren't sure of which ones, you've got kind of four diamonds here. Draw off the top of these two... and draw these. You can see, it kind of has an intersect to intersect. It's pretty clever at kind of joining these things up. If yours doesn't, make sure 'View', 'Smart Guides' has got a tick next to it. If it doesn't, turn it on. So that's nearly done, right? I'm going to grab my 'Black Arrow', select on it all... and over to my favorite tool, that's why it gets three videos. Very versatile. I'm going to grab the 'Shape Builder Tool'. And now it's trying to work out-- What I might do to tidy it up is get rid of these excess lines. So hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac, or the 'Alt' key on a PC to delete them. Just drag through these guys... just drag him through, don't need that bit either. Really cool, slicy tool. If you've ever used the Scissors Tool, it's a pain in the bum. This one here, super nice and quick. Now we need to join some bits up. And I had to practice this loads, just so you know. If you're finding it tough, don’t worry, everyone does. Well, at least I did. So I'm going to click, hold, and drag there from the outside to the inside. Outside to the inside, that's why I have to keep turning this up. Outside to the inside. That kind of does it, right? Then I join these guys up. These guys up. I show you just to kind of-- it's a really complex shape... but with the Shape Builder Tool it's pretty quick and easy. I love it. So what I'd like you to do now is... well these are separate shapes, I'd like you to go through and color them. Give it a background color as well. A nice big rectangle... and I'd like to see the design, the build, the colors that you've used. I'd love to see it as a project. All right, that is going to be it for the last of the Shape Builder Tools. Now we need to get on to the Pen Tool and the Curvature Tool. All right, I'll see you in that video. 8. How to draw anything using the Curvature Tool in Adobe Illustrator: Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to learn... how to use the Curvature Tool in Adobe Illustrator. We're going to draw these four guys. So let's get into it. To get started, 'File', 'New Document'. Surprise, surprise, it's going to be 'Letter', let's click 'Create'. Let's save this one, and we'll save it into our 'Desktop'... into our 'Illustrator Class Files'... and this one is going to be called the 'Curvature Tool'. So 'Curvature Tool', that will do. Click 'Save'. Click 'OK'. We're going to bring in our image that we're going to trace. So let's go to 'File', 'Place'. It's in your 'Exercise Files'. Look for one called 'Redraw Image'. Let's make sure it's a 'Template'... because it's going to put it in the background... and grayed out, and lock it, so it can't be moved. Next thing I want to do is, I would like to use a Curvature Tool. Now, make sure, on your 'Layers' panel, you're on this top layer here. We're going to grab our Curvature Tool. Looks quite like the Pen Tool, right? Now, the Pen Tool is-- we're going to do that in the next tutorial. It's like the hard core version. The Curvature Tool is newish to Illustrator... and man, when you're learning, and you're new... there's very little time... we actually need to go through the really hard core tool. So, Curvature Tool, we love you. Making the Pen Tool that little bit easier to learn. So I'm going to zoom in... remember, 'Command +', or 'Control +' on my PC. What do I hold down on my keyboard to move up? Remember, hold down 'space bar', get the hand... click, hold, and drag my mouse. Now we're going to draw our alien. We're going to start with the eye in the middle. Basically it's easier if I just show you, and you get a sense for it... and then we can draw the next ones together. So I'm going to click once on the top, once on the side... and nothing really happens until I move my cursor. I'm not doing anything, it's just connected naturally. Click once, that's all I'm doing, clicking once more... and clicking a last time. Cool, huh! It goes through. All I did was click once with my mouse... and it kind of knew that I was trying to draw curves... because I'm using the Curvature Tool. What I'm going to do is a couple of things before I draw this next one. I'm going to make sure the Fill is set to 'None'. I'm going to put 'black' Stroke, that's fine. Also, what I'm going to do is... under 'View', let's turn off the Smart Guides. So if your text is on, like this, turn it 'off'. Sometimes it's super handy, like we'll do for the crown next... but sometimes it's a bit of a pain. So in this case, it's pain. So what we're going to do is draw this outer eye... and again, we could try... you definitely need more than two points, right? If I click on there, and there, just can't make it a circle. So I could click once, and try do it three. Getting there. It just doesn't get to kind of a nice circle. So a circle or an ellipse needs at least four points. If you have more, the more you have, kind of less smooth it looks. Pretty cool, huh! So give that a go, do those circles. Then we're going to look at these other ones, pretty much the same thing. Let's start at the top here, click once. Click here again. And, where am I looking? The circle is easy enough, it's all four corners. This one here kind of turns in on itself. So what you're looking for is the apex... or where the curve changes the most. So along the top here, that's where it changes, like this curve here. It changes the most at this top point, because it's kind of symmetrical. On this curve, where it kind of changes... it's about here, maybe it could be a bit further up like this. You can click and drag them, like I just did there, and moved him. Then you're looking for this curve this way. And where the middle of it is, just kind of about there... I'll click once, and you're like, "Doesn't work"... but then you move your mouse often, it kind of tries to-- does a pretty good job, right? So, where this curve goes all the way round-- So the Apex of this one changing here is around the corner here. Now, in this case, don't worry about the second line just yet. There's a little bit of faith that goes into this... so it's going to take some practice... but I could add another one here... because there's a curve there, and another curve here... and there's a curve here. That's the kind of Apex of it, and there's another curve there. Another kind of Apex corner there... and you can kind of start to see what I'm doing. I can adjust this afterwards, I know that one's not quite right. Don't worry for your first pass, let's try another leg. Now what I found through my practice is that... the least amount of Anchor Points you can get away with... that's what these dots are... so I know that, if I click on this side, and click on this side... then come up here, can you see, kind of fills up that bottom part for me. So I'm looking for that Apex, Apex of that curve. Apex of that peer, Apex of this curve is about there. There's one kind of there. There's one at the top here. There, I'm just going to go and click them all now. After a while you get kind of confident, you get to know where everything goes. And you see, when I get back to the beginning... that's the little icon, it's actually, you just click on it, and it works... but just so you know, see that little icon, that little 0... it means it's going to kind of complete this complete path. Over here, it's going to be adding a new path. I want that one, that little icon with that 0... it means I'm going to kind of finish it all off. So it's kind of working. So that's the idea with the Curvature Tool. You block in that kind of hard stuff, or the core of it... then you can make adjustments afterwards. Now remember, the Black Arrow, if I click on it... it moves things in its entirety... but the White Arrow, that we looked at earlier on... this adjusts the finer points of it. And what I can do is, there's a big kind of mess over here... so I can click on this. Now what you're looking for is, I'm going to zoom in a little bit. You can see, these Anchor Points here... they've got these things called Handles, that pop out. These handles influence the way the line goes through. So your Curvature Tool's putting these in automatically, they're always there... but the Curvature Tool just kind of hides more, so a bit nerdy... but when we get to a point when we want... some sort of finer adjustments, the nerdiness helps. So what we might do is... you can see here, this curve doesn't actually go to the line properly. So I might have to move the Anchor Points. What influences the line quite a bit though is these Handles. They kind of pull the line. Watch this, if I grab one of the darker dots... you can kind of see, if I'm pulling it in and out... it adjusts where the line works. I can move it left and right. So it kind of influences it, like gravity. So what I'm going to do is drag it down here. First anchor point probably needs a bit of work down here. I'm just going to move it around, so you can do some finer adjustments now. I click on this one, drag it down. You can drag it in towards itself as well, most people forget you can do that. So in close to it, you can see, it's actually quite a tight curve. And the further out it comes, the more kind of exaggerated that curve is. So there's going to be a little bit of finesse that goes in this. Now don't sweat it for your first version. We're not going to make this absolutely perfect. We're looking for just kind of a general understanding of the Curvature Tool... even though I'm clearly in front of you trying to tell you this is not perfect. We're going to leave it there. What you might find is, say you've put in too little... say you've not got enough curves. What you can do back with the Curvature Tool here is... let's say we've got too many... I know we do, down here, there's kind of four in this part here. Just hover above them, and you can click on them, and hit the 'Delete' key. It just gets rid of them. I'm going to click on this guy, hit 'Delete' key. It just gets rid of them. Same thing to add them. Actually not. Actually kind of hover above and see... the Curvature Tool changes to have this '+' here. So I want to add one there. Then I can go to-- I can move it, by just using this. Then if I want to make adjustments again, back to the 'White Arrow'. I said, don't worry about it, and I spent almost like two minutes worrying about it. So that's going to be it for this guy. Let's leave him, and move on to the next thing... because the Curvature Tool is awesome, but it does curves. So I'm going back to the Curvature Tool, I'm at this crown here... and if I click once, click once again... click once again, it's not going to work, right? It's trying to do curves, it's cool, it's like a ?? thing... but it's not what I want. So you can use the Curvature Tool to do kind of straight corners. It's quite easy, all you need to do is double click for a Corner. So double click. Double click your mouse, double click your mouse. double click your mouse, double click your mouse You get the picture, if you forget, and click once... and you're like, "Oops, forgot to do double click"... you can just go back and double click it... and it converts it back to a corner. One click is a curve, like we've already done... double click it, and it goes back to a corner. Double click. Double click, double click. And back to the beginning, that circle that we're looking for. Nice! So that's how to do curves. Our very average looking alien... and our very simple looking crown... which is corners, and we use that by double clicking. Now, Ninja time. Ninja has curves and corners... and this is more typical of what you're going to be doing. I'm going to zoom out a little bit. What I'd like to do is a mixture of both. So I'm going to work through it with you. We'll start down the bottom here, and work our way up. You've got to just kind of ask yourself the question. Until it becomes more of a habit, just ask yourself... is this a double click, or is this a single click? So is this a corner, or a curve? This thing here is a corner, so I got an edgy corner thing, sharp. So double click. This is a curve here, so remember, whereas the Apex, it's kind of-- it's only a small curve, but it's about there. Should I click once for a corner, or double click for a corner? That's right, once for a corner. Now this guy in here, you can kind of see, it's joined the curves. Nice. Now this bit here is our corner. There's a nice sharp change of direction. And double click. Up here, double click, click our crown, double click. Double click. You might be tempted to go all the way across here... but no, we've got to address this curve here. And it's clicking it once, because it's a curve. Here, sharp corner, double click. A circle needs at least four points, so one, two, three. Let's give that a go. It's got one there. One there, don't worry about it... and go like, "Oh, it's not quite working." Then if you come around... look at that, it's looking good. Then you're back to here, and you're like... "Oops, I clicked once, and I got a curve again." What do we do? We double click it, and it goes back to a corner. Click once for a curve, double click for a corner. Double click for a corner, this is a tricky one, because you're like... "Where's the curve?" There's the curve right there, so I click once there... for a curve. Double click here for a straight line. And I double click here. It's kind of a weird one, right? So there's kind of a curve, then a straight line. Let's go to here, curve... double click for a corner. Back to the beginning looking for that circle. And we have some sort of, like squat Ninja. He's like a Lego Ninja, or something. Let's have a look at doing this inside one... because that's, I guess an interesting one as well. The circles, we could just use the Ellipse Tool, I realize... but we're not going to because we are learning the Curvature Tool. Just like at the beginning, we did the eye, it's just four clicks... because they're all curves, and we're doing all corners. It's pretty cool. We got pretty good circles. Now this guy here. So I'm going to start at this curve, because that's clearly a curve. Then we'll go around to here... and this is one of those tricky ones again... where there's a curve finishing, and a straight line starting. I know that because it's curved... but the curved part, that's what making the line curved. Now here I want to double click. I want to double click to get a straight line over here. Click once for a curve. Double click for a line. You can see this, and you're like, "It's not working." It's because we haven't finished the line yet. So double click here to get a straight line. Then back to once, you can see here, it's going to work. Click once for a curve. There's a little bit of, I guess, experience... that comes along with knowing some of these more exaggerated lines... but if you're thinking like... "Why didn't he just grab the Rectangle Tool?... then grab the Black Arrow, and do that?" Because that's exactly what I would do, but we're learning the Curvature Tool. We draw ellipses, and we'll probably do that for the center. Let's look at the next one... actually we're not going to have a look at the next one. You're going to do this one by yourself. I want to see if you can do this. I want you to do him, I want you to color him... and I'd like to see an image of it. So stick it in the comments, or in the projects. I want you to see how this goes. You can fancy him up if you like, or just do him nice and simple. A nice simple icon, give him some color. I'd love to see this guy, to prove you've done it. And if you're up for it, let's color them all... and do some sort of Ninja alien montage. I'd love to see what you've done with these. And yes, we're going to move on to the next exercise. 9. How to draw using the Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator CC: Hi there, it is time to learn the Pen Tool. The Pen Tool is the hardest thing to learn in Illustrator. We're going to do it together. We're going to make this Ninja, make an owl... we're going to make an alien, we're going to make a crown. Let's draw those now together, in Adobe Illustrator. To get started-- no, I'm not going to make you import it again, and make this a template. I'm going to save you some time. Go to 'Exercise Files', open up one called 'Pen Tool'. I've kind of done that for you. Just make sure, under 'Layer 1', go to 'Properties' panel. Now we're going to zoom in on this alien. We're going to build the same things... so there's kind of differences between the Pen Tool and the Curvature Tool. Basically the Curvature Tool does a little thinking for you. It's pretty good, and pretty intuitive, but there's times when we just need to... get the Pen Tool to do exactly what you want. so grab the 'Pen Tool', it's just above the Curvature Tool here. And what we'll do is... you can see, mine's set as a cross, 'x' here... it's because I've got Caps Lock on. Some people prefer to use the Pen Tool like this... and it comes out of that tip of that pen... or you can hit 'Caps Lock' on your keyboard... and you can see, it becomes our cross heads. I'm going to do it just like this. I'm going to zoom in, see my whole guy. So what happens with Pen Tool is that... by default, it wants to do corners. Quite the opposite of the Curvature Tool. So I click once, click once, click once... it's only going to give me-- it's giving me a very interesting octopus. So, clicking once gives you corners. I'm going to undo all of that, get it back. So what you do with the Pen Tool is you click and drag to get a curve. So at the top here, I click and drag. This is probably the hardest thing to do, to get it started... because I click and drag out, but there is no curve... but I'm on my Apex, but once you get out here... you can see, it's kind of... you can see, it's a curve, because it's connected... plus you can see those handles instantly. It was the Curvature Tool, they were hidden. So same thing, on the Apex here, I click. People just click once... and clicking once gives you a corner, for the Pen Tool. So it's not going to work, so I'm going to undo. So, click and drag down. I know, dragging down-- because you want to continue the lines, follow the line, drag that way. That can be a little confusing... so most people drag this way, and move it around. You get a bit of sense for it after we've done our full alien. Dragging it out to get this to kind of line up. Don't worry if you don’t quite get it. You can fix it up afterwards with the White Arrow, it's quite easy. Next thing I want to do is... before I carry on, I want to give it No Fill. So I'm going to the 'Fill' here, 'red line'. Click off. Remember, I'm going to look for... the same kind of technique as the Curvature Tool, for this Apex here. Click, hold, and drag down for the corner. This is going to be clicking and dragging for the whole thing... because there's no curves... sorry, no corners. So here, I'm going to click and drag, and you're like, "Oh no, I can't get it." So don’t worry too much about getting it perfect on the first go around. You can fix it with the White Arrow... and add, and remove Anchor Points afterwards. Same thing here. Click and drag, and you're like, "Ah, it's too big, it's not working." It's okay, we can adjust these afterwards. Get it kind of close. I'm just going to click, hold, and drag on all the Apex of these curves. Click and drag. It's more with the Apex, it's just kind of where the curve changes the most. So the curve changes quite a bit across here, clicking and dragging. Clicking and dragging. Clicking and dragging. Clicking and dragging. If yours is going horribly wrong... and it's still attached, not wanting to work... and you're like, "Dah." What you can do is, go either, undo... so 'Edit', 'Undo'... or 'Command Z' on a Mac, or 'Control Z' on a PC... or you can hit the 'Esc' key, the Esc key says, detach. Stop trying to draw lines everywhere. I'm going to undo, back to here. Again, if you click off, and it's like half finished... what you can do is-- watch my cursor... I've got my Pen Tool, kind of just hovering above... see that little change in the icon there? It gets a bit of a straight line... it is like, "You mean this?" and I'm like, "Yes, that's what I mean." So I'm going to click and drag that to get a curve. Click and drag you, click and drag you. Another one there. I'm just going to work my way around this alien. You, back to here. This is another kind of got to know for people that are new. Is you come back here, and you're like, "Great, it's clicked once." And unlike the Curvature Tool, it doesn't kind of... automatically adjust, it kind of went... "You clicked once, you meant a corner, and I put a corner in." I'm going to undo. It's going to click and drag because I made a curve. Now, yours might not look anywhere near like mine. Mine's not that good either... but yours might be looking a little worse. What we can do, remember... is the White Arrow Tool, the Direct Selection Tool. We can click on these guys, and we can adjust them. So I can click on the Anchor Point., move the Anchor Point along... to make sure it's on the flow of the line... and grab these Handles. They influence the way the line passes through. I can kind of just wave a little around. Don't be afraid to move it around to get a feel for what it does. And kind of start doing these adjustments. In here as well. I'm going to tuck him in. I'm just going to work my way around just to kind of fix this up a little bit. I'm not going to spend too much time on it. I say that every time, and then I spend loads of time... trying to make this thing look beautiful. As much as... I'm quickly on that naff alien. Beautiful, Dan. With this one as well, I've got my Smart Guides off. Just because there can be a little hassle... in using the Pen Tool, trying to free form stuff. Smart Guides, remember, under 'View', 'Smart Guides'. There it is there, I've got them off. Let's do the inside one, click and drag. Remember, that's the hard one, because you're like-- when you follow whichever way you've dragged... if I drag up, I've got to follow the line this way... because it's coming out that way. If I drag down, it comes out over there, you can drag. And with a circle it needs at least four points to kind of look half decent. You can see, with the Curvature Tool, it does a load of fixing up for you... which is quite cool... but sometimes you just don’t want that as well... so the Pen Tool's a lot easier because it gives you a lot more control... a lot more manual. All right, that will do. Yes, I just used the Ellipse Tool. Probably, to get it looking very nice. I'm totally going to cheat now, because I'm bored of this alien. I'm just going to grab my 'Black Arrow'. Click off, click on, copy, paste. My terrible circle is now just going to be a bit smaller. Let's look at the crown, that's where it becomes easy. Pen Tool loves this stuff, don’t have to hold anything down. Just click once, click once, click once. So, with the Pen Tool... clicking and dragging gives you a curve, clicking once gives you a corner point. Awesome! So then we get to our Ninja. Hello, Ninja. I'm going to zoom out a little bit. You'll notice that when you zoom out, and you've got something else selected... it goes, "Hey, did you mean this?" So it kind of zooms out, and moves back up there... and you're like, "No, no, down here, please." You can turn that off under 'Preferences'. We're going to start down the bottom right hand corner with the Pen Tool. And that is a corner, nice sharp corner, click once. Now where is the curve, the curve here is-- the Apex of it is half way through here, so I'm going to click and drag. This is a bit hard, because you're like, "Just need a subtle one." So you end up kind of-- give it a wiggle around, give it a feel for it as you drag it with the Handles. And when you get it to here, that's it. Now, this is going to be a corner because it's a change of direction. And this is going to be a corner, so just click once. Corner, click once, corner, click once. There's a little curve in here, and click, and drag. Curve. Curve it once for a corner. We've got curves again. How many? Like, do I just want one? I could try and do one. Just never going to get the right shape with just one of them. So the final, helmet thing. I'm looking for a perfect circle though. This happens lots. If you get close to the edge, it really wants to jump out. You can let go, give it an 'undo'. Then, zoom in or out, and it will kind of jump back to the center again. So what do I want? I want-- I know through experience that a circle needs four. We kind of did it four, the alien up here. So I need one there, one there, and one there. There's no bit down the bottom, so I don’t need him. We're clicking up and down. That's another one, like, drag down, and you're like, "Which way does it go?" Remember, you want to drag and follow the line. A little one there. Clicking and dragging. Clicking and dragging. Click once for a corner. If you get it wrong, you come around here, and you click once... and you're like, "Now what do I do?". You can just leave it, and we'll show you how to fix those up in a second. Just kind of leave it there, or leave it there. Go to curve, I'm dragging it out. I'm going to try and fix it... but there's a bit of a problem here, so I'll come back and do that. Click once for a corner, click once for a corner. Curve, click and drag. Click once for a corner to get this straight line started. I got a straight line, click and drag for a curve. So that one's a corner, it should be-- so that one's a curve, when it should be a corner... and this one I'm going to draw is a curve. It should be a corner. Go back to here, click once. Now I've got a full shape. Now to do some adjustments, there's two major things I need to fix. I need to change these two. There's a full tool to do it, it's called the Anchor Point Tool. So I click on this. If you're using an earlier version... I think it's called the Anchor Conversion Tool... something like that. So it looks like that in both versions. Click on this guy. And what we're going to do, is we're going to zoom in. And if we look at this guy, and if I click on him once... he was a curve, and now he's a corner. And this guy here is a curve. Both of these are curves, when they should be corners. Let's change something else. Let's click on him, now he's a corner. Let's say I want to make this guy a curve. All I do is click, hold, and drag him. Might have to move him around a little bit. You can see now, he is a curve. So there are-- yes, this tool does both. Click it once to get rid of the curve... and if it's a corner, and it should be a curve, click and drag it out. Give that a practice. Now there's a few things that need tidying up. Grab my 'White Arrow'. There's this guy here. You can see, well you might not be able to see why, but-- I've got this Anchor point here, there he is, he's down here. And the handle's come out quite far, and actually kind of past the point here. And that's trying to force the line to go, like-- I'll show you kind of an exaggerated version. It's trying to go back towards itself. So often with these handles... they can't go past, kind of the next Anchor Point... otherwise they start doing some weird stuff. So both the new guys can be dragged in closer to the home here. Closer to the Anchor Point, and get it like this. And I should go through and fix the head. It is a little bit off. Now if you are looking at things, and you're like... "Man, why isn't it symmetrical?"... because it looks just a little bit wonky. Often, if I click on this point here... to make a perfect circle-- I'll show you what a perfect circle looks like. The 'Ellipse Tool', drag it out. It's made up of the same points, grab the 'White Arrow'. I click on one of them, you can start to see, right? I'm going to select on them all, actually, click on one of them. You can see, I click on this top one... that one's flat, and these handles are exactly the same link And these one's parallel, so that's kind of what we're looking for. You can see here, click open this top point... this guy's flat, which is awesome... but these guys are kind of both, heading off, and an angle. So what I'm going to do is first get them to line up... roughly the same kind of points... so it's roughly kind of about there from each other. And I want to be kind of straight up and down. Watch this, if I'm dragging this guy around, if I hold 'Shift'... it does lock it into, like a nice little thing there. Same with you. Straighten up, buddy. I need both of these top bits. I want to drag in a little bit, and a little bit. Don't be afraid to move the Anchor Point as well... maybe just a bit high in the line. Better. Better. Not perfect, but better. So I would like you, your next mission... is to draw the owl. So I want you to go through, draw the owl, it's complete shapes... and then see if you can use your amazing new Illustrator skills... and show me a version of your owl. If you've done the previous tutorial, just kind of side by side... just copy and paste them from one document to another. I want to see what you did with your Curve Tool... and what you did with your Pen Tool. If they're both perfect, awesome. If one's better than the other, I'd like to hear your feedback about... which tool you like the most. Are you a precision Pen Tool person? The Pen Tool is the one that's been around forever. The Curvature Tool is new, and is it cheating? It's not cheating. You're still drawing, but it's helping you out a little bit. I want to know which you found better. So get them side by side, give me a screen shot. I'd love to see what you're doing. All right, that's it for this tutorial. I will see you in the next one. 10. Drawing with the Pencil Tool in Adobe Illustrator CC: Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to learn how to use the Pencil Tool... to do some kind of creative hand drawn effects. We're also going to take the lines, and make them dashed, and dotted. We'll also do things like this... with that kind of swooshy, add Arrow Heads. Hopefully yours will look nicer than my ones. We're going to go and do that now in this tutorial. All right, let's jump in. So let's get started. Let's go to 'File', 'New'. We're going to have our 'Print' document, it's going to be 'Letter'. It's going to be 'Landscape'. Let's click 'Create'. Let's bring in an image, so 'File', 'Place'. And the difference in this case is... we did before, we're going to use 'Drawing 1'. And in previous tutorials, if we've watched them... we've clicked on 'Template'. And that kind of puts it on its own layer, it fades it out a little bit... and locks it, so that it's easy to draw over the top of. We don’t want the fading part of it. So we can't use Template, we're just going to leave 'Drawing 1'. I'm going to click 'Place'. You can click and drag out. That will give you a specific size... or if you click once, like I'm going to do here... it's going to just put it in at its full size. So depending on your image, you might drag it out... or just like I've done here, click once, and it comes in full size. Also, just to make sure, I've got 'View'... and make sure Smart Guides is turned back 'on'. We turned it off in the previous tutorial. I'll click, hold, and drag it so it kind of lines up. It's a little bit big for this page, but it's okay. So, in your Layers panel, we're going to... manually do that Template part that we did in the previous video. So this one here, I'm going to click 'Layer 1'... and this is going to be 'Background'. This is not essential. Just handy when we're doing this tutorial together. So I've bent it, and there's this kind of mysterious icon here... just kind of empty space, click it, it locks the Layer. So, just meant to know that that's the place to click. I'm going to make a new Layer. There's a little turned up page down the bottom here... I'm going to click on that once... and we've got Layer 2. We're just going to double click 'Layer 2' for this one drawing. I know I'm on this layer because it's blue. So the Pencil Tool is this guy here... underneath the Paintbrush Tool. You might find you've got the Shaper Tool out by default. Click, hold it down, and grab the 'Pencil Tool'. Now the Pencil Tool, by default... is a little bit weird, and a little bit hard to use. So we're going to change that. So let's say I'm going to draw a smiley face... I'm going to draw it around here. Now the weird thing about it is, watch this, if I keep drawing... can you see, it doesn't draw new lines, it redraws over the existing one. Kind of disappears. Kind of a strange thing happens. So we're going to change that by default, so I'm going to delete that. Hitting the 'Delete' key on my keyboard. What I'm also going to do is go to my 'Properties panel'... and I'm going to make sure I've got 'No' Fill, and have a Stroke of 'white'. Just to fit with what we've got in the background here. To change the Pencil Tool options, you just double click on it. So double click the 'Pencil Tool'... and in here, these are things we want to change, like 'Keep Selected'. We want to turn it off. The other thing we want to do is... here, where it says Fidelity... it's going to try and help you out make your drawing look a little smoother... and a little better. I love it right up. Especially if I'm drawing... say, with my mouse, like I am here, or my touch pad. Wacom is a little different. Even with that Wacom tablet, where you're drawing with a pen... I like to crank it up, maybe not as high as this... but we'll go full max smooth. Now when we draw, look what happens. Just kind of makes everything fluid and nice. Probably not the nicest... but let's grab our 'Black Arrow', I'm going to delete him. What I'd like to do here is just some kind of free form. I'm going to do flames out the bike for no good reason... but you can see, when I draw and let go, it's done quite a nice job. What I'm going to do is actually do it one piece, and watch when I let go... it kind of smoothenss that out nice. So my flames are going to be terrible. What I'd like to do is, instead of doing it in one go... I'd like to have two parts. Just going to help us when we do the next bit of example... when we have a little look at brushes. So I'm just going to kind of draw these flames. Now I really want to grab my Wacom tablet here... because this is looking pretty bad. These are meant to be flames, by the way. Looks like a pineapple spring at the back. Totally looks like a pineapple. But that's okay. What we're going to do is look at some of the techniques for Stroke. So, some of the first things you need to know about drawing lines like these... is, with the 'Black Arrow', let's select them all... and because we've got the background layer locked... it doesn't select any of that stuff. So I've got them selected, and over here, under our Properties panel... the basics are Stroke, we got our Stroke Weight... which we looked in an earlier example. I'm going to crank it up to say 6 points... just so I can show you some of the other options for Stroke. Now to open up all the advanced settings for Stroke... you just click on the word 'Stroke'... and it kind of opens them all up. If you want to go a different way... there's a way of opening up that panel forever... by going to 'Window', and open up 'Strokes'. If you're getting sick of having to open it... and you've got a big enough computer... you can just go to 'Window', and 'Stroke'. It's only giving you the tiny options, weird, I know... but if you double click the word 'Stoke'... double click it again... it's got like three modes. Four modes. Small version. Stupid version. Massive version. I don’t know why they've got all these different versions. But if you keep clicking on it, you'll find, that's the big version. I'm going to use this option in here. So collapses back in, and better use of my space. I'm going to click on it... and the first thing we're going to look at is the clapping. So this changes quite a bit of the look. I'm going to zoom in a little bit of my pineapple flames. I'm going to click on 'Stroke'. By default, you're going to have what's called a Butt Cap. Right there, Butt Cap. Unfortunately named, and it's this kind of just flat at the end. If I click this next one, 'Rounded Cap'... can you see, I'm going to go on, off, on, off. Just kind of rounds off the ends, and that's really nice... especially when we go to Lower Stroke... a small Stroke like this, you don’t want to have... like really pointy ends, or the Butt Caps. Just kind of curves it off a little bit nicely. I'm going to go back up to '6 points'. Let's have a look at some of the other options. So Butt Cap is flat at the end. This one here, I very rarely use, Projecting Cap. Kind of goes out past the line, ends here... and it goes back past, so let's go Butt Cap. Projecting Cap, I think it's the same like Butt Cap. Okay, Projecting Cap. Actually I'm going to leave it on Butt Cap. And we've got these corners here. So, lots of these lines aren't corners, they're just straight lines. This one here is a corner, and do I need any of the other ones? I think, just this one here. Look what happens when I change it... from a corner of a Miter Join to a Round Join. Can you see, where it goes round this curve, it's rounded on the edge. So the Joins are different. And this last one here, kind of levels it off, like an edge. I never use that one either... so either of these first two are quite good. I'm going to leave those as is. And what might look good for our flaming pineapple now is... down here, right at the bottom, something called Profile. Profile's a nice way of just changing the line... instead of being perfect all the way along. Click on this one here. It's kind of makes it tapered at both ends. You can kind of see, that gets projected on to our lines. That's kind of why I wanted having separate lines... because you get this kind of pointy ends on both sides... whereas this one here is pointy at the tippy tips... but not quite big through the middle here. Up to you. But have a little play around with the rest of them. So I've got them selected, click on 'Stroke'... down the bottom here, in 'Profile', I can go through and say, I want this one. Just kind of strange. All pineappley. You can flip them, depending on how you want them on the line. And let's have a look at some of the other ones. I'll let you have a look, okay. Points. Other ones, other ones. I'm going to probably go back. I like this one, I think, this Width Profile 5, I'm going to use him. Now there's a couple more things I want to show you... about drawing with Strokes. One of them is Arrows. I'm just going to grab my 'Pencil Tool' again. I'm going to draw, something like that. Meant to be like the wheels turning, that's what it's meant to look like. That's okay. With it selected, I'm going to grab my 'Black Arrow'. I'll click both of these by dragging a box around them. And what I'll do is, go to 'Stroke'... and this one here, Arrow Heads, are quite important, well, quite useful. So, with it selected, the two lines, you've got a beginning and an ending. Really depends on which way you started drawing. Play with both. Then I go to 'Arrow' here. It's kind of not the way I wanted it... so that's actually the end, not the beginning. I want it turning this way. So if you scroll down the Arrow Heads... eventually they turn into the tail ends of the arrow. And this is going to look better for the beginning. Ain't that better? Some are pretty wonky arrows. I'm going for this hand drawn look. So, Profile as well, I might go through and try and make it look nicer. You can see, I added that Profile, the same as this one over here. Just doesn't look the same, if I click off, it's quite thin. Just means the Stroke Width isn't that high. So with them selected I'm going to raise the Stroke Width. Now what happens with Arrow Heads is that... by default, they've got a weird proportion to the line. So, a 4 point Arrow Head's really big. So when I click on 'Stroke'... there's a percentage underneath both of these ends. And you can see, if I scale this one down... it's going pretty slow, so I'm going to twirl it down to maybe... say 20% of the line... and 20% of the line. Why? Because-- That looks a bit weird, but I want to increase this Stroke Width. Maybe flip it across. I don’t know, I've made really ugly lines. But you're getting a sense of it, right? We're going to add Arrow Heads, easy peasy. Next thing we're going to do... is we're going to look at dashed and dotted lines. And we're going to try and make it a bit better. Like, I promise you, when I practice this... it flings at the back, and cool arrows. It's turned not so good in actual practice. So what we're going to do is, I'll do a little Dotted Line around here... so looks like it's cut it, not Dotted Line, but Dashed Lines. So looks like she could be cut out. So Pencil Tool again... I'm going to just draw a really rough kind of line around the outside. Line around the outside. Now stopped at the edge of the desk. And we're going around. Back to the beginning. The cool thing about going back to the beginning, watch this... remember the little icon, with the circle, see that changes there. It kind of shows you it's going to kind of complete it. Not hard, if I select on the line, and I click on the Stroke... there is a Dashed Line. Click on it, magically, dashed. If I click off, Dashed Line. There's a couple of things you might want to do with the Dashed Line. So I've got it selected, I'm going to increase it so I can show you. And back under Stroke... things like the Rounded Cap... can you see the difference between those two... depending on what you want to do. The other thing is that, the Dashed Line here, if you leave-- Just going to do 12 and 12, so 12 points, and then a gap of 12 points. You can increase this, so maybe 22. And it's just going to do 22 points, and 22 points. You can have smaller gaps, say I want 10... just going to have smaller gaps, and larger dots, or dashes. You can do the opposite, so the dash can be quite small, so maybe 2 points. And the gap's going to be quite big. Depending on what you want to do. If you're like this, kind of like zipper details, or Frankenstein stitches... one or the other. Let's go back up, I'm going to do 12 and 12. Now you don’t have to-- if you want them to be identical, you can just leave 12... and it will kind of guess that the number you mean, that the gap is 12. It's a bit dotted lines. Weirdly, there should just be an option that says dotted as well... but it doesn't. Really hard, and even when I'm making them I'm like... "How the hell do you make dotted line again?" So it's a funny old thing. So let's grab the 'Pencil Tool'. I'm going to draw, like tassels from this. I'm going to grab my 'Black Arrow'... select both of these, and get rid of the dashes. So I click on 'Stroke', you might not have yours. So let's turn it off, so a straight line. I'm going to have my Weight, about 4 points. Now, weird thing is, it's dotted, it's actually part of dashed... which doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but if you make the dash '0'... and you make the gap anything, so, '12'... it makes kind of dots. Actually they're just lines. So with them selected, in here... all I need to do is change it from that default, which is a Butt Cap... to a Round Cap. That makes our dotted lines. So you just need to make sure one of them, the dash is 0. So it's actually got no length... but there's a Rounded Cap around it... so it kind of wants to wrap itself around that nothingness. Dotted lines, they're kind of weird. So turn on the dashed line... make sure the dash is 0, and you can have the gap any size you like. 20, we'll just space them out. You can have them really kind of close together. They can even kind of overlap, like that. There you go, for 10. Nice! Zoom out, have a look at our magical drawing. We've learned things about Strokes. We haven't made anything very pretty though. But what we'll do in the next tutorial is we'll add Brush Strokes... and things will get marginally prettier. So let's go and do that now in the next tutorial. 11. How to use Brushes in Adobe Illustrator CC: Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to look at Brushes... where we take kind of ordinary lines like this... and give them lovely, cool, artistic Brush Strokes. They look hand drawn. We're going to add wings, add a crown, we're going to make a star. We're going to fill this star. All sorts of awesomeness in Adobe Illustrator. Let's go and do that now. So it's time to use Brushes. And yes, in between videos... if you're following along, I went back and made my flames a whole lot cooler... and my arrows a lot nicer, just by redrawing them with the Pencil Tool. I couldn't help myself. So what we're going to do is Brushes. First of all we need something to add the Brushes to. So we're going to grab the Pencil Tool. Let's add kind of wings to her. So I'm going to do it in lots of little bits. Now the reason I don’t do them all in one big go, you could... let's do one with one big go. So one really good wing... but whenever smoothing's on, so when I let go... it looks marginally better. I'm going to add more wings on this side... but I'm going to do them as separate pieces. Now I'm just going to show you the difference really. I'm going to draw some circles. You can see that one there completed the circle. We want to see how it works. We'll draw some little more half circles in here. So with my 'Black Arrow', I'm going to select all of these guys. It's a little bit harder now because we've got things all over the place. So you might have to click one, hold 'Shift'... and keep clicking until you got them all... but I can kind of drag a box round them all, these guys. Great. First thing I need to do, is the Stroke's going to be 'white'. And I'm going to open up my 'Brushes' panel. Now before we open up Brushes, it's nice... especially with the Brushes, if you use a smaller size to get started with. Doesn't matter, you can do it afterwards, but let's get down to '0.25'. Really thin line. Now your Brushes, there's lots built into Illustrator. The basics are in here. There are actually lots that you can go and find online. Often they're free. So 'Window', let's go to 'Brush Libraries'. In here, probably the most exciting ones are ones under Vector Packs. These two here, we'll look at these two, plus one other. Grunge brushes vector pack, we're going to do. Then we'll move it off to the side here. I'm going to drag the bottom of it so I can see the different options. Click on the first one. By default it's gone back to 1 point, so don’t listen to me. You can change it afterwards. Go into something a little bit smaller. Now, you can see, that's the smallest option for the drop down... and it's kind of cool, kind of looks quite artistic, right?.. but it's still maybe quite fixed, so you can actually just type in... so, 0.25 is kind of hairline, which is quite small... but I can go to 0.05. Hit 'return'. Getting quite small. I'm going to click off. The difference really is... now we're just looking for things we like, that look all right... so I'm just going to draw a box around these guys... and 'Shift' click these two to get rid of-- I don’t even know what that is. That was a smiley face I drew earlier. I'm going to 'Shift' click all of these, got all of them selected. I'm going to go to 'white' Stroke. I'm not going to lower the size yet, I'm going to pick one of these other ones. You can see-- let's have a look at one of these ones. There's a couple of things we need to be aware of. Is that, because this is such a long line... it's trying to smear itself down quite a long path. Now, some of the problem is the size. I'm going to turn it down to '0.05', like the other one. It's looking better... but it finds it hard, as to what to do at these corners. Just kind of like a really detailed vector brushing. Kind of has to get in and out, and kind of do some weird things. So, ways to get around that. If you've got a really long Stroke... and it's doing strange things at the edges... I'm going to go up to maybe not 1 point... but back to 0.25 just to set an example. We did this earlier, remember, under Stroke... we got these Butt Caps and the Corner options. So let's go to 'Round Join', and it will try and get around the corner... and the ends of it as well. Which is absolutely nothing on this Brush, does it on different Brushes... but this is kind of one of the things you can do, you can see... that might have joined here... it's just trying too much to get around this corner... but when I get to this Rounded Join... it looks marginally better. So you might have to play around with this, depending on the Brush you pick. What I like to do when I'm using the Brush Tool... is use these, kind of like shorter Strokes... because they tend to have a better result. Selected, let's have a look at these guys. Pick one, and pick one. All right, that will do. So I've got my drawing exercises, those guys down. Let's draw one more and look at some of the other Brushes. That will kind of give you an idea of how to go off and find your own. I'm going to grab my 'Pencil Tool' again. I'm going to draw-- she's going to be a Princess. Remember, I'm going to draw them in separate Strokes. You can't really see them, so I'm going to undo them. So before I start drawing I'm going to have Stroke... but I'm going to crank it up to say, 1.2, and see what I'm drawing. So, you. She is not a Princess. More like, I don’t know... some sort of-- could be that's what it needs. Totally what I needed. Now she's a Queen. Let's grab the 'Black Arrow', I'm going to select all of these guys. I'm going to show you another one. Another cool one is under 'Brush Libraries', 'Vector Packs'... in this 'Hand drawn brushes', I'll let you explore those ones. Some of the other ones, lots of these are really... lame's a strong word, but on similar lines. Artistic has some really good ones though. So if we go to maybe Chalk Charcoal, Pencil, or Ink... these are kind of quite cool, click on 'Ink'. I want to show you Ink because these have some-- instead of just Solid Black, they have some kind of textures to them. Can you see, they're a little bit transparent. Now again, I'm going to have to turn the Stroke down... to something a little bit more useful. Where they start overlapping, they start adding kind of extra depth. The reason I want to show you this one... is you run into Brushes that has this line along the top here... and you'll be like, "Oh, awesome." They do weird stuff. These are meant to be used just kind of one off. So I'm going to undo, and pick, say this one here. Then I'm going to click off. These guys here, if I drag them off... means that I can-- For some reason if I drag it across this image here... they're kind of disappearing behind, which is kind of weird. So I'm going to drag it up the top here. That's meant to be used as elements up the top. This is like separate things by themselves, rather than following a path. What you can do, maybe with this guy here selected... he's lot of different options, I can right click them and go to 'Ungroup'. You can keep ungrouping them... until you get kind of the individual paths. Takes a little while, the shortcut might be handy. Well Normal is there, right click one more time, 'Ungroup'. We'll start getting individual elements. I can select you guys, and make you white. Awesome! So that's how they're meant to be used, just as single little options. Let's look at the next part, let's close down the 'Ink Brushes'. And let's look at kind of filling in Brush Strokes. So let's say we're going to draw a star, I'm going to grab the 'Pencil Tool'. Now I'm going to draw-- Watch this, if I let go, you're like, "Where did that line go?" It's because I'm drawing with the Pencil Tool... with a Fill, but no Stroke. So the line is considered a Stroke. And there is no Stroke. There's a Fill, but it doesn't need a Fill. It's there, if I go to my Black Arrow, you can wave your mouse around, and go-- that's a random line, get rid of him. And there is this circle here we found earlier on. I don’t know where he is from. So I'm going to grab my 'Pencil Tool'... and just make sure you're quite purposeful... when you're drawing, 'Pencil Tool', pick a 'Stroke Color'. Doesn't need a Fill, and I'm going to draw kind of a starry thing. My Drawing Tool's helping me out. So with it selected, 'Black Arrow', select all these guys. I'm going to pick a 'Brush'. I was sure I wasn’t going to show you any other ones... but I'm going to look at one more Brush Libraries. I'll use 'Hand drawn brush vector'. So I'm going to grab him. Way too strong, let's get down to a smaller Fill. We're getting there, maybe '1.5'. So I've got this shape here, right, and I want to fill it in. Now, the trick is - I'm going to close these down. - is I'm going to copy and paste this, so I've got a second option. I'm going to keep the Strokes there, but this guy here, these lines... what I want to make sure is I want to kind of fill in the gaps... and what I should have done before I started drawing... is I should have made sure they overlap perfectly, so we'll check that out. Over here, I want to turn it back to a regular line. So over here, where it says Brush, I'm going to say, actually, 'No Brush'. Go up to the top here, and pick this first one. Just a nice thin brush. And they do overlap, so if you didn't do this... you're going to have to make sure the lines overlap at least a little bit. So with them all selected, we're going to go to our best friend... the 'Shape Builder Tool'. We're going to pick some colors for it. So I'm going to go in here, and pick a 'color'. We'll use the 'Color Mixer'. If yours is like mine, and it's defaulted... to just black and white... which might happen quite often... with this selected, I'm going to go to this option here... and pick RGB, which can't be done. So I'm going to pick 'black' first, then go in here, and pick 'RGB'. So I can pick from any of these colors in here... and when I hover over, I'm going to say, that's going to be filled with the green. I can fill in all of these guys. Now they fill in because they overlap. They didn't overlap, that might not fill up. I'm going to pick another color. The reason I do this is... I'm going to select all of these guys now, and get rid of the Stroke. Goodbye, Stroke, by going here, and going to 'No' Fill. These guys down here, left over. Don't need you guys. And I'm going to select this, and put it back over the top. Line it up. So just a nice way of kind of, I guess, adding Fills to hand drawn rough stuff. Shape Builder Tool is perfect for that. Just making sure that the rough lines all overlap. Now one thing you might see, or have noticed... is that if I grab-- say I've got a line, and they don’t quite meet up... say I'm drawing some stuff. So I'm drawing a square, but the gap is-- I'm drawing with a Brush. Great, Dan. I'm going to select all of these, turn it back just to a regular Brush. Maybe this first guy here. You can see there's a big gap here. Mine was probably too big, but you can also see, if I zoom in... there's actually a little gap in between here. What that means is that it shouldn't fill... but there is a little bit of freedom that the Shape Builder Tool has. That's probably too big... but it's going to fill in these automatically. You can adjust that to say, like... give me a little bit more gap joining ability. And you do it by double clicking on the Tool, double click on it. And up here, there's the Gap Depth. So you can go in here, and go from 'Small'... through to 'Large'. Custom, you can make it 'huge'. So I think by default it is small, can't remember. But double click the Tool to change it... and it just gives you a few different options... like this one here is not going to work because it's way too big. If I go in here, and I say, go to 'Large'... it's still not going to work, too far apart. But you get the idea. I'm going to delete those, zoom out, marvel at my awesomeness. But you're getting the idea, right? We're doing hand drawn stuff... and then adding Brushes to add a little bit more realism... to what something is actually a vector, scalable, and beautiful... but can look quite custom as well. So now it's project time. So I've got an image I want you to draw on. I'll show you here, in the Exercise Files. There, it has appeared. What I'd like you to do is... I'm going to set you a task. I want five separate doodles. They can all use the same Stroke, and Brush Style... but I want five things, okay? If you're like, "What am I going to draw?"... come up with a theme. This could be-- you could use a holidays theme. There could be holiday stuff, like Sun, and beach things... or you might go to finance. Might be dollar signs, graphs, and stuff. Just to give you an idea, I guess, of what to doodle, and draw on this. What I want you to do is experiment both with... obviously the Drawing Tool... but look at the Brushes as well. Maybe look at Dotted or Dashed, it's up to you... but I'd love you to go off, have at least five... and at the end, I love it as a project... to take a screen shot... or save it as a JPEG, and send it to me as a project, or in the comments. All right, I will see you in the very next video. 12. How to draw lines with the Width Tool in Adobe Illustrator: Hi there, in this tutorial... we're going to start with some basic lines, like this... then do this to them, with the Width Tool. It's going to take our simple lines, add a bit of dimensions to them... and a little bit of sexiness. All right, that is the Width Tool. Let's learn how to do that now in Adobe Illustrator. To get started, let's go to 'File', 'Open'. In your 'Exercise Files', there is a file called... 'Width Tool', click 'Open'. I'm going to start with the kind of like leaves at the top here. I want you to kind of complete-- I want another leaf down the bottom here, just show you how I drew it. So 'Pencil Tool', I'm going to have a Fill of 'none'. Little stripy line, and I'm going to have a Stroke of 'white'. And I'm going to have the Stroke Width down to Hairline, which is '0.25'. I'm double clicking on my 'Pencil Tool' to make sure the smoothing is way up. And I've turned off 'Keep Selected'. Click 'OK'. What I want to do now is just kind of click and drag, and you can see there... because the curving's quite up high... it's making me look a whole lot better than I am. So we've got a bottom leaf now. What I want to do is... do what we did at the Intro there, and have those lovely lines. And the trick with it, is to get started, with the Black Arrow. It's best to select all the lines, and make sure it's really thin. So the Stroke Weight needs to be at either 0.25, or less. That works. It needs to be quite thin to get started. Next thing we're going to do is, deselect in the background... and we're going to grab the 'Width Tool', it's this guy there. Kind of a bow and arrow, click on it. And this magic tool, if I zoom in a little bit... it means I can grab any point on this line... and click, hold, and drag. If it doesn't, and it kind of just goes nowhere... you're dragging the wrong way. Give it a wiggle. You can see here, beautiful! If you ever tried to do that before with the Pen Tool... you tried to draw one line, then the other side-- I love the Width Tool. So cool, huh! Select on this line, I didn't even select on it... just grab the 'Width Tool'. Just start pulling them out wherever you feel. I'm just going to work my way around this one. It's amazing, you can transform something quite simple. Got the smoothing on to make it look a little nicer. Just kind of giving it some fullness. Now you can do more than one point on a line. I'll show you how to do that in this next part. I'm happy with it. Yes, I'm happy enough with it. I imagined it better, but anyway. Down here, I've got a path that I've drawn. What we're going to do, is with the 'Width Tool'... we're going to end up with multiple widths on it. So I'm going to start with one about here. You can see, it's kind of working its way all the way around. From thickest here, all the way to thin at the two ends. Now that's fine, that's a lucky looking Fill... but what I'd like to do is... I want it to get kind of skinnier along the top here. So watch this, I can click out another line. I clicked the wrong way Click, and drag up. I can make it thicker up here, which is cool... but actually I just want to make it thinner. So, just dragging this point to make it quite thin. Then I got this kind of bolds there, thins there. Then maybe across the middle here, I'm going to drag out a nice thick one. You can start to get these kind of cool ones in place of thick and thin. Maybe, down here I want it to be nice and thin... but over here, I want it to get it nice kind of tailed thing there. You know what I mean, right? So I'm going to drag this nice and big... but potentially I want it to get a lot smaller through here. Then get nice and big again at the end here. Another thing you can do is you can slide these. So say that they're at the wrong point. This guy here, you can click on him, and just drag him around... and you can see, he kind of wiggles his way all around... can't go past that guy... that I've already got there, but you can drag these along, there's another one. I can see, it's kind of moving and adjusting. You can also hold down the 'Shift' key... and drag one side, not the Shift key. Hold down the 'Option' key... and you can drag one side of it at a time. So it's Option on a Mac, or Alt on a PC. And just grab any of these, either side, doesn't really matter. You can just do one side rather than both. Now we've used the Pencil Tool quite a bit. Now to get our curves, we're going to go back to the Curvature Tool... because, I guess this is a font... and I guess I want a little bit more preciseness to it... rather than really hand drawn stuff. So, we're going to grab the 'Curvature Tool'... and before I start drawing, I'm just going to make sure... I've got no Fill, and I've got a Stroke... and in terms of the Stroke Width... I'm going to pick, just 1 point for the moment. It can be hard to know, with the Curvature Tool... how many points you need. It's a little bit of trial and error. If I click once, and twice... I get a straight line, and it's obviously not going to be enough. So if I click once, and maybe, a third... so just three of them. We can see, it's just got a bend in the middle, it's not what I want. So what I do want is... there's two curves, there's one going this way, and one going that way. I want one there, at the tippy top. Kind of one half way through, at the Apex of this curve. It's a very slight one, so I'm going to click once. Then one, kind of at the Apex of this one. Then, it's going to come out here. Click once. Now I get kind of a nicer line. Now it wants to continue on. I can grab the 'Black Arrow', just click off in the background. If I grab my Width Tool now, select on this, 'Width Tool'... it's going to work, to a degree. Well, it's going to work nicely, but what you'll see here is... if I zoom in on the end here... you can see, I got kind of this stubby end to it. It's because I didn't change my Stroke Width before I started drawing. So I'm going to zoom out. I'm going to undo, actually. So before I use my Width Tool... I'm going to make sure the Stroke is quite thin. You can't have 0, but you can have like 0.05, something super thin. I'm using black as well, as my Fill. Now if I grab my Width Tool... I don’t know how many points I need, I might need two. I want one there, to kind of get the top bit. Maybe one more for a fuller middle. It's not what I want, I'm just going to do one in the middle. It's not quite right, I'm going to drag it down. Remember, this drawing is not meant to be perfect. Just kind of a hand drawn, get it going one. So the other thing I might do is that... there's this, like little white width in the middle there. It's a little bit hard when there's something already there. So if I grab my Curvature Tool now... it wants to join up, and wants to do things... so, 'Black Arrow', I'm just going to click and grab the center... just kind of move it off... and we'll get back, we'll move him back in a second. Now, Curvature Tool or Pencil Tool? I probably want the Pencil Tool for this one. I'll grab the Pencil Tool, I just want kind of a curve out of here. We'll see how that works. I'm going to make it a Stroke color of 'white'. Now I'll move this back in. Because I drew it after this black line, it should be on top. So I'm going to move him into position. Using my arrow keys, just to tap it down, something like that. I'll rotate the handle a little bit. Now I'm messing about. You got the idea of what we're doing here. I'll turn the Stroke down to '0.05'... I'm going to grab my 'Width Tool'... and I'm going to drag this out. A little bit hard because there's lots of things... fighting for the Width Tool's attention. So I'll make it something like that, drag it down a little bit. How do I like it? Yes, I like it enough. So what I want you to do is... your task is to go through and finish this. So I'd like you to go through and do this part. One thing, when you're drawing this part down the bottom here - let me have a quick little look with the Curvature Tool. - is that if I draw one... draw one, draw one and come back here... it already wants to join up to that existing one. So you just got to make sure... when you're coming to this end point, is just to stay away... and you can fix that up afterwards with the White Arrow. And you can drag it in afterwards, kind of join up after it's been drawn... and start with that. All of these lines here, the one little hint... I've practiced this already, I've drawn this a few times. So let's go and change it back to black. One thing that catch people out is this 'o'. I only learnt it from practices. Well, how many points does it need? Looks like it needs about four. Seems that works out nicely. Click once, click twice. Again, click again, you get this kind of box type circle. It's kind of close to what we want. That was a bit quick... but yes, with the Width Tool you can... move these and adjust them. See if you can give it a go, give the 'v' a go... the 'e' a go, then do all these extra bits. Go through, color it, I'd love to see how you get it. I've never actually gone through and cleaned that fully myself. I love to see what other people do with it. I know it's not the best one, but I'd love to see. Your interpretation can totally adjust it... and make it as you want... but I'd like to see it as a project. So screen shot it, send it to me, that would be awesome. All right, that is it for the Width Tool. It's pretty cool, huh! Next drawing though is kind of sexy lines, super easy. I love it. Thank you, Illustrator. All right, on to the next video. 13. How to use Type & Fonts in Adobe Illustrator to design a postcard: Hi there, in this video we're going to make this simple post card. We're going to look at fonts that are installed on your machine... and we're going to look at something called TypeKit... which is fonts that Adobe give you. We can download them for free, and use them as part of our designs. All right, let's go and learn how to do that now in Illustrator. Let's make our post card for our text to go on, go to 'File', 'New'. We want a post card size. Now, there is... under 'Print', you can see 'View all presets'... and there's no post card size in here. Under 'Art & Illustration' there is a preset for post card... but if I click on it, and switch it over here... to say inches or millimeters... it's got a really weird ratio. Not what I consider a traditional post card. Maybe that's where in the world, depends on what's traditional. I'm going to just put in '5.8' and '4.1'. That's the kind of a really standardized post card size. If it's in millimeters, very similar, it's '148' x '105'. I'm going to go back to 'inches'. Awesome! Everything, I'm going to make sure it is 'Landscape'. I'll just click 'Create'. Let's put in our background color, so just grab the 'Rectangle Tool'. Pick a Fill color, I'm going to go to my 'Color Mixer'. Up the top here, I'm just going to make sure I'm on 'RGB'. You might be on CMYK. RGB. It's going on RGB for the moment, we'll look at color a little bit later on. Just kind of click through here, and decide on our color. I'm going to pick a bluish green color. I'm going to drag it across the whole thing. I want no Stroke. So I'm going to go in here, and go 'no' Stroke, please. Don't worry too much about the color... because we are going to go and change it in a future tutorial. I say that, and I'm like, "Stupid." A little wiggle. I also want a rectangle on this side. I want to break it into three groups. Two columns for the text, and one on the left here for just-- I'm going to put an image in later on. You have seen that at the beginning there. So, what I want to do is break into three. The easiest way is to copy and paste this. I've got two of them. I'm going to change this to a dark gray. I'm going to go back to my 'Swatches'. Just pick dark gray for the moment. This is going to be switched out again. So, divided by three, remember, we did the Math? These are the width. I'm going to break the link so that the height and width aren't joined... and I'm going to say I'd like the width... just in here, and put a divide by, which is a ' / '... and I want to divide it by 3 there. Hit 'return'. It's just divided it into three. I'm going to use two of these for my text, and this is going to be my Image. What I'd like to do for the moment though is to lock the background. So 'Layers', I'm going to call this layer 'BACKGROUND'. All caps, for no good reason. I'm going to hit the locking icon. 'New' Layer, and this is going to be my 'TYPE. All caps for no reason. So when you're adding Type, there's two types of Type Boxes. Grab the Type Tool, which is this capital 'T'. If you click once, you've created what's called a Point Type Box. Don't worry about the names. Basically the Point Type Box is... a box that just keeps on going. Keeps on going forever, and goes off the screen. Good for titles, and logos, and stuff... but when we want Body Copy, we need a different kind of Type Box. So grab the 'Type Tool' again... and down here, kind of this lower part, we're going to add some Body Copy. If I click, hold, and drag... so up here, I just click once, and I got a Point Type Box... whereas if I click, hold, and drag down here... you can see, you get a box that has-- it's called an Arial Type Box. Basically it doesn't have any kind of end to it, and snaps back around. Watch this, if I resize it now, it kind of expands and contracts... whereas this one here, if I try expand and contract it... kind of a weird sort of function, using a Point Type Box. There's going to be times when you need to convert it too. So I'm going to delete that one. Is that, say I draw a-- I click once for a title in here... and I add some stuff... what happens, let's say, later on I want to make this a lot bigger... so I'm going to go to 'Properties', and make the 'Font size' a lot bigger. I want to break on to two lines, right? So what you can do, is you can change this with the Black Arrow. See this little circle on the side here, that's the kind of conversion tool. You double click it, it changes it into an Arial Type Box... like the bottom one here. Nothing really looks like it changes, except now when I drag the edge... can you see, it snaps down to two lines. Three lines, if there's enough room. So that's what I want this box to be on, I want it to be nice and big. I'm going to add some actual Type, and look at fonts next. At the top here, there's a bit of text we're going to put in. We're going to say, "How to murder a designer?" And we'll go, this will be our 'TIP#1'. How to murder a designer? It's asking them to 'Send it over as a Word doc'. Even that happens. This is just going to leave us Body Copy. There's Lorem Ipsum at the moment, let's say we don’t have that yet. Lorem Ipsum is just Place Holder text, it's Latin. They are actual words, they're just mixed up, they make no sense... but good as a Place Holder until you get text. So let's move him down. What we will do is start on this one up the top here, and look at fonts. First of all I'm going to change my Fill to 'light'. Next thing I want to do is pick a font. So I'm going to drop this down. You know how to pick fonts, there's no big deal. So add a little bit of extra-ness to it. What I really like is these filters. So these are all the fonts that are on my computer. They've been installed in some previous life. So up here, where it says Filter, this can be really handy. I'm looking for a Serif font which has those-- Basically a Serif font has the little feet. They kind of look like Times New Roman. It has little Serifs on the edges here. Let's zoom in just so I can give you a bit of font-nerdry. Go back to our 'Fonts', let's pick 'Times', just because - If I zoom in. - A Serif font has these little feet. These are called Serifs, this is a Serif font. A Sans Serif font is this one here. Sans is without, so Sans Serif is without feet. This one has it, this one has no feet. So, Serif font. Let's look at a font-- I've gone through and had a look about what I want to use already. Now what you can do... at the top here, is once you've picked 'Serif'... you'll notice all your fonts are cut down to only Serif fonts. Super handy, okay? Now the only trouble is, next time you come back in... it's going to have the same filtering on. So you got to remember to probably turn it off after you've used it... to go back to 'All Classes' and 'Fonts'. Serif font. You just kind of scroll through... and you can see my text updating on the side there. So it's best to have your text already drawn like we have. So you can go through and just check it. I'm going to use, can't remember which one it's here. 'Goudy Old Style', I'm going to use 'Italic'. Okay, that's the one I decided I want to use. In terms of the font size, how many are we going to use? '12 point'. Just so you know in terms of font sizes, see the Body Copy down here? Body Copy, a small body copy, or the-- if you open up pretty much any magazine in the shop, it's going to be 10 point. That's like a super common font size. It's legible, it's readable. Looks kind of big, but this is a small post card. The smallest you want to go is about 8 point. That's kind of more business card size... where you have to just squeeze lots of stuff in. So we're going to have 10 points. So that's that font, I'm going to do the same here, use the same font. So, 'Goudy'. You might not have this one, you can go and pick your own. I'm going to make sure it's 'point'. I'm going to move this down... I'm probably going to play with that a little bit at the end. This font here, we're going to look at something called TypeKit. Goudy, that's something that happens to be on my machine already... but what Adobe do as part of your Creative Cloud License... is you get access to TypeKit. Basically what it means is, I can-- with any sort of font selected, I can drop down my 'Character Panel'... and go to this one that says 'Add Fonts from TypeKit', click on him. It's going to open up a website. Already opened it up here. It will ask you to login... because you need to have a paid Creative Cloud License. You don't have one of this, it's not going to work. Basically what we want to do is, go to 'Browse'... which is this first option here... and it's just the fonts. Now there's lots of places you can go for free fonts. Ada Fonts or 1001 Free Fonts. These are fine, but what you'll find is that, I don't know... if I need a font shape like a cactus... I'll go to 1001 Free Fonts, or just kind of like... really fun, but, I guess, free. They don't have a lot of stuff I need for maybe more professional work. Glyphs and Ligatures, and.. like, I live in Ireland, I'm from New Zealand... both the Maori and Irish languages... have all the fodders, and all that accented letters. So I need a more mature font. Something like TypeKit is perfect for it. They're cool fonts, and they're free. So what you can do at the top here, is you can type in... let's say... 'Can you... I like doing this because... before you download you can kind of see what it's going to look like. Sometimes it's a pain, you kind of download one.... then it doesn't look the same in the fonts you need to use it for. So in here, you can also kind of wrangle the fonts into some-- say you only want to look at that kind of Script font... or say, hand drawn fonts. So you can go through and just kind of work out which ones you want. Also, I like-- say I'm looking for headings, so I want kind of a... more of a bold hand writing font - I'm going to turn that off. - some heading fonts. I'm going to turn that off. Another nice thing is, in this case, I want quite a narrow width... because I want to fit a lot of text across the page. There's a bunch of other options. You can have a look through here. The one I want-- I've already had a look through... so I'm going to kind of cheat, and I'm going to go to 'League'. Where are you? 'Lea... There you are. League Gothic, that's the one I decided I want to use already. So this is the font. Now there's a few different Weights, I'm just going to say 'Sync All'. Basically what that's going to do is... hopefully you can see up at the top here, you can see it in a second... that it's downloading on to my computer, and magically, four fonts were added. It's that simple. Also notice that-- Somehow I'm allowed about 323. Just don't ask questions, somehow keep getting more fonts. So let's jump back into Illustrator. Now the cool thing about it is that it should already be installed... so if I go to 'League'... If I can spell league. Now what I might have to do is... I'm going to have to turn the filtering of Serif on... because this is a Sans Serif font, there it is there. Installed and ready to go. It's that simple. They’re professional fonts. There's some really nice ones in there. I'm going to use 'League Gothic', just this one here... and switch it to 'white'. Now you can switch over to the next video... because now I'm just going to play around with fonts and font sizes. I'll give you some tricks; let's do that before we go. I'm going to select all my 'Type'... and I'm going to use 'Command Shift', and full stop, or period '.'... whatever you want to call it. Now if you're on a PC, it's 'Control Shift', and full stop, or period. Just kind of increases the font. I want them up to three lines. So I'm getting it quite big. In terms of the Leading, I'm going to select it all. You can use the Leading over here. If you hover above it, it should tell you it's Line Spacing... it's another word for it. You can decrease it. A shortcut is, if you hold down... the 'Option' key on a Mac, or the 'Alt' key on a PC... and use up and down arrows... I find that's just a nice quick way of doing it. Yes, I'm happy with that. So you are '10 point', you are at '10 point'. I felt like there needs to be something different about the bottom here. Lining him up, now I'm just messing about. If you find that, say I want an extra line in here... just want to fill with Place Holder text... Because it did it automatically for me, let's say you just need more... With the box selected, go to 'Type', and go to 'Fill with Place Holder Text'. Just kind of fills it up. Doesn't really matter if you cut it off. Say I just want an extra line, here you go. I'll put in a full stop there, so it looks like end of a paragraph. Full stop, '.' Awesome! Actually I changed my mind. Back to you. I'm going to lower it down a little bit. I'm going to grab the 'Line Tool', I'm going to draw the line on the side. Just kind of finishing this off. Sure want to be the same length. Now mine had no Stroke, no Fill, so if I click off, looks like it's gone. Basically I want it to print, because there's no Stroke on it. I want to go to 'white', please. One point, probably half a point. Just so you know, when you are printing stuff... if this going out digitally, it doesn't matter how thin it is... but if it's going out physically... I've printed stuff with lines that are really small... so the lowest you should go is this one here, 0.25. I kind of made one that was like 0.18, or something like that... and literally it rubbed off. Like, you put your hand on the page... and it was so thin that it couldn't hold on to the paper. It just kind of rubbed off on people's hands. That was a big printing disaster. So don't go too thin on lines. I'm just using my keyboard now to tap this around. Just look. What do you think, people? Needs a full stop down here. So that is it for Type and Fonts. There is other things in here that I'm not going to cover... like there's space between letters... over here, there's space between letters. There is left align, right align. I'll assume you'll be able to work those out yourself. Let's get in and start doing some ?? path. We'll do that in the next video. So, how di da! See you in the next video. 14. How to curve type around a badge using Adobe Illustrator CC: Hey there, in this tutorial we are going to... make text follow a path, like this curvy one here. We'll also do a badge, where we do the text along the top and the bottom. Let's get into it now using Adobe Illustrator. So what we'll do is we'll work on the side here... instead of on the page we're working... what's called the Paste Area, or the Paste Board. This area here is just a good place to work, and do your design... and then move in to the page when you're ready. To get started we're going to use the Pencil Tool. Now your tool might be set to the Shaper Tool. So click and hold, hold, hold down the Shaper Tool... until you get the Pencil Tool. Also know that I've double clicked the 'Pencil Tool'... and cranked up the Smoothing to full vast. Why? Because it just makes my lines look nicer. I'm going to have a Fill of 'none', and a Stroke of 'black'. And I'm just going to click, hold, and drag... and you'll notice that, because I got the Smoothing up, it looks quite nice. I'm going to grab the 'Type Tool'. And to do Type in a Path, all you need to do is, with the Type Tool... hover above the line, you can see the icon changes for the cursor... and just click wherever you want the text to start. Goes through and puts in some Lorem Ipsum, some Place Holder text. Now the one thing that might happen to you is... it's kind of remembered the last font that I've used... and the color, and the size, if you use a really large font... you might not see anything. It might just be way too big. So you might have to go through and just... kind of lower your font size over here to make it more usable. I'm going to go back to say... I'll use '14'. The other thing is that my-- The last time I used the Type Tool I was using center. So yours is probably going to be Left Align... so it might be down the center. Let's type in some-- let's type in 'You are awesome.' Three exclamation marks !!! So I'm going to select all the Text, pick a Fill color. Some of the adjustments you might want to do... are, with the Black Arrow-- grab the 'Black Arrow'. This Type Line here, there is a... there's kind of like three red lines. There's also these white boxes. Ignore the white boxes. They do weird stuff where they start linking text boxes. It's not what we want in this case. Black Arrow, click off in the background. I'm going to click back on it, and these red sticks are quite useful. So this is the beginning, if I click and drag it now... you're avoiding the white square, you're looking for that cursor. It's like a flat black line with an arrow poking out of it. If I click it, you can change the start position. Same with the end, in this case it doesn't really matter... because I don’t have enough Type to get to the end. And this guy here is the center. This center option is a lot more important when you are centering the paragraph. Means you can drag it left and right. As long as there's room at the ends here to move along. So those are some of the adjustments you might make. One of the things I want to do is... actually I want to undo. Actually I'm going to copy this. Undo. Till I get to have my black line... because what you'll notice is there's no line there anymore. Remember the black line that I drew? So say you want to use that as part of your design. So I'm undoing way back here. I'm going to paste this, so I've got both versions. So you might want to copy and paste that before you start adjusting the Type. Now I'm going to add it so it looks like it's kind of flowing along that Type. I might make the font a lot bigger. I'm going to extend that out. How good is this going to look? I'm just going to add more text, actually. 'You are awesome... because you are you." Lovely, Dan. Couldn't think of anything. I might need a little bit more space. I'm going to have to make my font size tiny bit smaller. There we go. So what I want to do is I want to get this line. I want to make the Stroke white. Kind of like a... I don't know, a Dodges kind of look. Swooshy thing underneath. I made my Type quite thin, I made it white. I'm using my Width Tool. Give me a Width Tool. Where are you? This one here. I'm just going to click and drag maybe that big. Come on, Width Tool. Here we go. Slightly long here. We've used the Width Tool in our previous tutorial. That's the kind of thing I'm trying to do here. Terrible. Next thing we're going to do though is an icon like this... where we're going Type on a Path, it's kind of similar. Well, pretty similar. So we're going to rebuild that. And afterwards I'm going to rebuild this because I don’t like it, but anyway. The way this works is, actually this has to be two - I'm going to ungroup it. - this actually has to be two separate circles. You can't actually draw on the top... then hit a return and draw along the bottom. They're actually just two circles that we line up on top of each other... to make it look like kind of one unit. So that's the first trick. So let's start with an Ellipse. You might need to hold down the Rectangle Tool to get the Ellipse Tool. I'm going to hold the 'Shift' key while I'm dragging it out... to get a perfect circle. Doesn't matter what Stroke it has, or what Line it has, or Fill it has... because when we click it with the tool, like the one down here... it's all going to disappear. So what we'll do is, actually we'll copy and paste it... so we've got two of them to use. This one here, I'm going to grab the 'Type Tool'. Now, this Type Tool can't be used the same sort of way. Remember, we could go in the edge. You have to actually use the official Type on a Path Tool. So hold down the 'Type Tool', grab the 'Type on a Path Tool'. And let's click once in the middle. It kind of does what we want to do, does it kind of reverse. So if I type in now, 'Prevention of'. Depending on this, you might have to select the center line. It's kind of down the bottom... or what you can do to get started... is I'm undoing, I'll just start at the bottom, it's up to you. So if I click down the bottom here... it kind of does a little bit of more of what I want. 'Prevention of... That's all I want. You can move it around with the Black Arrow. We looked at it with this line down the bottom here, remember the center point? That's this red line here, I can decide to stick it down the bottom. It's a little bit fiddly, you can see it jumps around a little bit... but you can drag it around. Depending on how you want it. The other thing you can do is, you can see, I can drag it up and below. It means that it goes on the other side of the Text Box. It's really fiddly, don't worry. I'll show you a more manual way of doing this in a second... but I want mine to be there, and it's perfect. I'm going to use a Font... I'm going to use that League, one I had before. Not under Script, 'All Classes'. 'League Gothic', I'm going to use 'white'. And let's have a look at doing the bottom part. Actually instead of using this, I'm going to copy and paste this one. And this one's going to say... 'Cruelty to Designers'. So, what we want to do is, with it selected with the 'Black Arrow'... there's an option in here, under 'Type', there's one called 'Type in a Path'. And there's this one called 'Type on a Path Options', click on him. Turn Preview 'on', because you want to see what you're doing. 'Flip' is one of them. So it's going to go down to the bottom, that's basically what we want. I'm going to click 'OK', and we're going to rotate it around. We could grab the center point, rotate it around. We could just rotate it normally. Up to you. One of the things we might need to change though is that... this guy here kind of sits on the baseline. That will be considered the baseline, wherever the letter sits. This one here though is on the inside... whereas this is on the outside. So, they're going to look slightly different. So what we'll do is we'll line them up. And let's kind of adjust both of them actually. So I've got this bottom one selected, and let's go to 'Type'. 'Type on a Path'. 'Type on a Path Options', and Preview 'on'. What you can look for is where it aligns to the path. Baseline is where it sits. We're going to go 'Center'. If we do center for both of them, it's going to run straight to the line. Same with this one here... 'Type in a Path', 'Type in a Path Options'. And we'll do center for you as well. Where are you? 'Baseline', 'Center'. These other ones-- Baseline is the default. Ascender and Descender is just... when we've got, say a Type here, and we've got this... then they're referred as Ascender and Descender. The Ascender is everything that appears above. See this thing here, this is called the X-height, just so you know. Where all the lower case letters line up along the top here. Anything above that is called the Ascender. So that is an Ascender, this little dot is an Ascender. Descenders is things that appear below the baseline, they descend. So that is basic topography. Basically you didn't want to know that, right? You just wanted to know how to make this. We've basically made it. So you're aligning center, you're aligning center. If yours aren't snapping, they should just snap easily. If they're not, go to 'View', and make sure Smart Guides has got this tick on. If it doesn't, click on it. And now we're just going to build the center part. Actually let's look at one last thing. I'm going to click both of them. I'm going to go to 'Type'. Can you do both at the same time? You can. So Type in a Path Options, make sure Preview's on. Now 'Effect', there's kind of two you'll probably use, Rainbow or Skew. Basically, a Skew will kind of... I don't know. It depends what you're trying to do. I feel this is like a football... American Football cup launch thing. I don't really like it for what we're doing, you might love it. So, it's that one, Rainbow, Skew... Gravity might be what you want to use. Gravity's a little bit different. It means it's going to time up the font. So it's going to be skinnier at the bottom, than at the top... whereas Rainbow, they're going to be the same size either side... the top and the bottom... and just kind of get closer down the bottom. It's up to you what you want to do. You might not see very much difference, don't worry about it. These other ones, Rainbow, Skew, yet to use. You might like it, Rainbow, Ribbon, or Stair Step. I'm yet to use those ones either. I'm going to go back to 'Rainbow'... and just play around with my 'Spacing'. I'm going to go up a little bit? Well, not that high. I don't know how I got that high. Let's go to '0'. It's pretty cool though, I have no idea how they do that. You can see, if I crank it up, it kind of expands the Spacing. You might have to do these separately... because it's kind of affecting both of these differently. So, you. Let's say I want 10 point for the bottom one, that's what I'm looking at. And this top one here needs something different, 'Type'. 'Type on a Path'. And this one looks like it needs-- Turn Preview 'on'. That tightens it up. So what we want to do is '-10'. Awesome! So I got both of these guys, let's line them up. Centers. Center's there. I'm just going to draw this bit in the center now. So now you can probably move on to the next tutorial... because I'm just going to draw... first of all, on Type. 'Certified'. I'm going to use the 'Tracking'. That will open it up a little bit. Might pick a different font for this, Font size, sorry. There you go, 'Certified'. You... Fill color, 'white'. Line around the outside. I'm going to use the 'Rectangle Tool', it's going to have 'no' Fill... and it's going to have a 'Stroke'. One thing we haven't done yet is-- So I'm going to have nothing selected. Rectangle Tool is there. I've got a Fill and a Stroke. They're in the wrong position, right? You can use this double arrow here to say... I want the white to be in the Stroke... and I want the No Fill to be in the Fill. Does that make sense? Watch this. Just kind of switched them around. So now, that should work. I'm going to grab them all, and center them. So I'll use my 'Black Arrow'. This probably needs to come up a little bit. Now I'm happy enough with it. I'm not. There needs to be more Spacing in this top part. But anyway, we get the feel for this thing now. So what I'd like you to do is to practice. You might have practiced with this one, and followed along... but I would like you to go through-- I've got for you some text to create your own... kind of icon certification stamp type thing. It's in your 'Exercise Files'. There's one called 'Type on a Path exercise'. You think it was a mock association... but there is an association for pet obesity prevention. If you are a perverse organization... I'm not mocking, just seems like a fun thing to do. If you're interested in it, here's the website... but basically I just want you to use that. Turn it into a round-all, kind of lock-up like this... using Type on the Path. You can do whatever you like. Just like to see it. So, as a project, I'd like you do it, and then... post a project in the comments of the Project section. I'd love to see what you come out with. So that's us for Type on the Path. We are going to move on to the next video. All right, see you over there. 15. How to break apart & destroy text & fonts using Adobe Illustrator CC: Hey there, in this video we're going to start destroying Type. Like this Boom up here, we're going to cut the centers out... we drop the inner bit. This 'L' here, we get to wrap around a little bit different. We'll drop the 'p', we'll smash the 'i'. It's really easy to do in Adobe Illustrator. Let's go and do it now. So to break apart Type and start manipulating it... we're going to kind of just work on the top here. I'm going to grab the 'Type Tool', click once, and type the word 'Boom'. Coom, 'Boom' will do. Exclamation mark. I'm going to pick a font, quite a nice big 'Abril Fatface'. That's the kind of font I'm into at the moment. I'm going to make it nice and big with the fonts. With the Black Arrow, it's actually sometimes easier... just to hold down 'Shift', and grab the corner of it. This is my font, I'm going to keep a copy of it... because there's so many times that I end up breaking it apart... and forgetting what the font was later on. So, with it selected, all I need to do, is go to 'Object'... actually no, go to 'Type', and there's one that says 'Create Outlines'. 'Create Outlines' destroys the font. So it's no longer-- you can't grab the Type Tool and edit it. I have to go back to that version, but now it's bits and pieces. There's a few things I can do to it. Remember, the Black Arrow is for moving it around... and the White Arrow, 'Direct Selection Tool' allows me... to see all these Anchor Points, and that's what I want to do. What I'm going to do is just click once on the inside of this. Delete once, delete again, so deleting twice on the keyboard... because I want this kind of, I don't know, stencily style Boom. Just double clicking, well I'm not... I'm clicking once, and then deleting twice to get rid of the inside parts. It's kind of what I want to do. You can also grab it, and say, I want to grab... all of these, and with my White Arrow, I'm dragging a box around them all. And I can select all of these now. I'm not sure what I'm doing now, now I'm really wrecking it. A couple of points, I'm holding 'Shift' while I'm dragging... just to get them move around. Don't like that one, but you get the idea. Next thing I want to do is, let's say that... so that's-- I think that we've done. And what we might want to do is... let's grab the Type Tool, this happens a bit... where you've got a nice font, let's say I'm going to use... I'm going to use Lorem Ipsum... but instead of Abril, I'm going to use Lust, it's quite similar... but there's a Script option. These are TypeKit fonts that you can go get for free. So I'm going to click on this. And I like it, I'm going to copy a version of it. What I want to do is, I want to change the color for no reason. I want this 'L' to maybe wrap around this 'e', or something else. Do something, interact with the Type a little differently. That's where outlining it can be helpful. Remember, 'Type', 'Create Outlines'. And I can grab my 'White Arrow', I can zoom in a bit. I'm going to grab these three points here. I'm just going to drag them, kind of maybe around this 'e'. It's a bit of a long stretch, I could leave it like that... or I can start grabbing, say these handles here, there's this handle. I want to kind of drag it out a little bit. I want you to be down. A little bit more. I'm totally wrecking this, for the Type I prefer. Especially if you made Lust, I'm really sorry for this. You get what I'm trying to do here, right? I'm trying to kind of make it move and do other things. Not my best, okay? But, you get the idea. Any of these can be changed, I can grab this corner, drag it out. I can grab this chunk, make it longer. Now I'm totally wrecking it. I should have grabbed the bottom of this. Oh yes, Dan, you've made a great font. So that is outlining Type, and destroying it. Jump ahead a couple of videos... where we start looking at putting images inside of it. It will be under a category called Images... where we click images inside of that... but for now, that is it for breaking apart and destroying Text in Adobe Illustrator. See you in the next video. 16. What is RGB & CMYK colors in Adobe Illustrator CC: Hi there, in this video we're going to talk about RGB versus CMYK. You might have come across this, you might have not. It's kind of essential, I guess, to understand the basics... so let's cover them quickly. So when you're setting up a new document... you're given the option to pick RGB or CMYK. So if I go to 'Print', and pick one of the defaults... it's going to-- you might not have this viewable. You might have to click 'Advanced Options'. By default it's going to go to CMYK. If I go something like Web, or Film, or... pretty much, any of the other ones, and I pick one of these... it's going to default to RGB. So RGB is a color which is Red, Green, and Blue. Basically those are the colors used for screens to display color. So my laptop in front of me right now uses a mixture of Red, Green, and Blue... to generate the colors that we see... but we know that if we use our printer, the one on our desk... if we have a look... it's going to use Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black... that's CMYK, it uses those colors to mix together. The big difference is, RGB has a secret ingredient... it has light, luminescence. It has light coming out of the screen... that allows it to generate more colors than CMYK can. You'd probably have tried it before... you've printed an image that looked great on screen... but the print's a bit washed out... because your screen has light coming out of it... whereas the paper from your printer has no lights. So it's a different kind of color mode. RGB is a bigger gamut of color, CMYK is a smaller one. Now why would you use both? Basically RGB, as a rule... is probably your best one to use for everything at the moment. Especially if you're going to use something... that's going out via email, or via website. Even if it's going to print, it's probably going to be dual use... so many things, are these days... you'd probably going to want to use it for both... your website, to be downloaded, and to be going to commercial print. If it's something you're creating... like a postcard that's going to commercial print only... you might want to consider using CMYK... but in that case as well, my experience is that... most modern printers will expect RGB. They've got some cool reps and ways of kind of... making, I guess, getting the most out of their CMYK. So often, just use RGB, it's going to be your-- if you're unsure, just use RGB. If you're a little bit more professional, you probably know this already then. And you can use CMYK. Now, let's have a little look at the differences between the two. Let's go to 'File', 'Open'. In here there's one called 'Colors.ai', open that up. So this my RGB document, how do I know? The easiest way, up in the tab here, you can see, it's RGB. The way to change it, let's say I want to be in CMYK... I can go to 'File', there's one called 'Document Color Mode'. You can see, I've ticked RGB. Watch what happens when I change to CMYK. Watch the colors, watching the colors. They wash out quite a bit. It's giving you representation now of what it would look like in CMYK. Now if you're only going to commercial print... and they've asked for CMYK... there's no point being in RGB... but if you're like me... I often dual use things, I'll use it for all sorts of things. I'll start in RGB, and often just send it to the printer in RGB... and depending on your printer... they've got really good ways of converting it to CMYK... to try and restore some of those colors. I hope that's giving you a little bit of understanding of CMYK and RGB. So the rules are, my basic kind of rules are, use RGB... and send it around, it works fine. It works on digital, and works good for printing to local kind of printers. Even my office printer accepts in RGB better, and processes it nicer... than if I send them a proper CMYK official version. But you need to know the difference between the two. Some printers will demand CMYK, and that's fine, that's the way they work. So just make sure you're working in CMYK. You might have to have two versions of the document... one in RGB for digital... and another one in CMYK. All right, let's get into some more exciting stuff about color. Let's get into the next video. 17. How to steal colors from an image using Eye Dropper in Illustrator: Hey there, in this tutorial... we're going to look at using the Eyedropper Tool in Illustrator... to drive colors from the logos. So we're going to start with this black and white version of this postcard. Then we're going to use the logos down here... to drive the colors in these elements. Then we'll use the image to drive some of these colors in these various elements. All right, let's go and learn how to do that now in Illustrator. To get started, go and open up the exercise file called 'Eyedropper.ai'. Grab your 'Black Arrow', and click in this box in the background. Then I want you to go and grab the 'Eyedropper Tool'. It's towards the bottom of the Tool panel. And we're going to steal from this logo first, we'll do the image next... but if you click on-- you're using the kind of bottom left of this Eyedropper. You can see, I can click the purple, the green, the yellow. You can decide what you want to do. I'm going to end up with this kind of Teal color here. And I'm just going to work my way around, 'Black Arrow'... click on this white box here. And I grab my 'Eyedropper Tool' again. I'm going to use the 'Yellow'. And with my Black Arrow, I'm going to click on this text. I'm going to actually hold 'Shift' and click both bits of text. Now I've outlined this text just to make it easy for you. You probably don't have this font. It's just as easy if you have a font selected. I'm going to use the purple. I'm not proud of this color scheme, but you get the idea, right? Let's say I want to do it differently. I don't want to use the image to drive the colors. It's a really nice way of connecting things like these graphic elements to the image. And it's pretty basic again... with the Black Arrow, I'm going to click on this green option here. I'm going to grab the 'Eyedropper Tool'... and all I'm going to do is pick a color from here, just work my way around, decide. You can see, I can keep clicking till I find something that I like. I'm going to go for, there, something like that. I'm going to go through and do the rest of the options... but let's say I really love this color now, and I want to use it again and again... because I don't want to randomly have to click in the images... to try and find it again. What you can do, is you click on 'Fill'... and at the moment it's not a pre-made Swatch... you can't see it in here. If you click on this option here, it says 'New Swatch'... you can give it a name, I'm going to call this one 'Maynooth Furniture Gray'. Let's call it, maybe 'Gray Dark'. And I'm going to click 'OK'. You'll see over here, now it's a Swatch that I get to reuse later on. So I can click off, and say, actually, instead of having to use the Eyedropper... I can go to 'Properties' panel, and I can go to 'Fill'... I can say, there you are, ready to use. I'm going to use that color, I'm going to do a couple of other things. I'm just going to color the rest of it basically... so I'm going to use a different color for this... maybe, I don’t know, I'm trying to decide. Now I'm just mucking about. Let's click on him. I might reuse that same one. So 'Eyedropper Tool', I can turn it into a Swatch... or just steal from the bottom here. And you, I might start using one of the browns, maybe a dark brown in here. What am I doing? Eyedropper Tool. Thank you, Dan. And click in here. It's a little bit hard because it's got outlines. Yes, I get the idea. With it selected, I'm going to add it to my Swatches... so I can use it later on. I'm going to call this-- often I give it the initials of the company... this is Maynooth Furniture, right? MF. So I'm going to use-- I use the acronym at the beginning... because I work on so many different brands... that if I just called it Brown... it's obviously not going to help me later on, so let's give it a special name. This one here, and you can move on to the next tutorial. I'm just going to do this. Awesome! That is going to be it for this tutorial. Let's jump in to the next one. 18. How to find amazing colors in Illustrator using Color Theme: Hey, there In this video we're going to look at color combinations, and we're going to let Adobe help us find new exciting colors that we might not normally go for. Now, I'm not saying these are all beautiful, but I'm saying it's getting me and pushing me out of my normal colors that I normally use. Let's let Adobe show us how to do that now. All right, to find our lovely colors, we're going to open up a file called Color Theme, the AI, that'll be in your exercise files. You can go up to window and come down to Color Theme and open that up. Now, yours is probably defaulted to create. Click on "Explore". It may take a little while to a long time to load sometimes, Sometimes I'm using this panel, and it loads really fast like it is now, but sometimes it does take a long time. What we're looking for is, we're going to switch us two most popular of all time. It's just going to give you some five color swatches that work well together. It just really helps people like me who end up falling back on the same colors. If you're doing this tutorial, you'll notice that pretty much everything is this gray and green. I want to say a turquoise green and just the colors that I like at the moment. It's hard to break out of that. If you come to me, you want a café, you'll probably going to get green and gray and if you want to be a bank, you're probably getting green and gray, so it's not the best move. All you need to do is click on one of the elements and then pick one of the colors. I'm going to say this. It's a little bit weird. Sometimes you go black arrow, click on that. I'm going to pick another color. Click on this early him white. This guy here is going to be the dark green, maybe the dark one here. This guy over here can be the teal and then the logo here, I'm going to switch out to the green as well. Lovely. That's how you do a color options, just getting out of your comfort zone for colors. Next thing I want to do is make a duplicate. Say let's go to the client with a few color options. Grab your art-board tool just down the bottom here. If you click the word "Art board and start dragging, that's just moving it. But if I'm dragging, dragging, dragging and I hold down the Option key on a Mac or the Alt key on a PC, it makes a duplicate while I'm dragging, which is really handy. Here is a black arrow. Now we've used most popular of all time. You can go to justice month. I find this week is a good option. If you've got a month that's pretty close to the all-time ones. Whereas week, just this week, somebody went out. These are the ones that are trending at the moment that people are using. I might go, okay, I'm going to do something like, here is my green, go to the dark color there. Now I'm just coloring it in. But you get the idea. There's a couple of other things I want to show you, and let's do another color option. You've got to make sure you're dragging directly on that little icon there, [inaudible] confused. All right, so we've just used the most popular and most used. It's similar because there's a voting system on the back-end. If you go to color.adobe.com, you can look colors upload it. But this little search option is quite handy. Say I need something for the 1980s. Say MacGyver needs a flyer. For some reason it's a bit buggy , lots of the same colors, but if you scroll down, you can see you start getting into other colors. It's a bit of a weird one, but there's plenty of 80s to go around, especially that first one. Everyone's parents got a ski suit in the cupboard. One-piece ski suit that looks like this. [LAUGHTER] It's the wrong image for it. [inaudible] But you get the idea. What you might do in a more of a practical sense is let's look at one more. Is instead of looking for the 80s, you might look for something like café. You can get café style coffee looking things, you can type in Bank, you can actually type in actual brands. If I put in, what's a brand that I know of, perhaps. Let's put in Google. You'll get the Google colors. Big brands weirdly, you can find lots of brands like I'm from Auckland, New Zealand, it's a tiny, not tiny, but it's unlikely. But there's the Auckland council stuff. There's Auckland cityscape. There's Auckland transport. There's all stuff that people are using and uploading and sharing. You might find your company or something that you are using. Yeah, that's it for the color theme tool. It's just really handy to grab swatches and to bust out of your common green gray funk that you might be in, like me. All right, that's it for the Color Theme tool. see you in the next video. 19. How to make Gradients in Adobe Illustrator CC: Hey there, in this tutorial, together, we're going to make Gradients. Gradients are awesome. Let's go do it now in Illustrator. Working with Gradients, we're going to open up 'Postcard.ai' file. It's in our 'Exercise Files'. You don't have to, obviously we can work with any shape. In this document we're going to work with this background here. In our Layers panel we locked that Layer. So I'm going to go to 'Layers', I'm going to 'unlock' it... so that I can click on this object in the background here. To add a Gradient, go to 'Properties', and where it says 'Fill', click on that. And best, just get started with one of these. There's ugly white and black... then there's ugly orange, and weird other orange. Then there's a sky blue, to white. We can start with one of these, just to start with the black versus white. To change the colors, the easiest way is probably... just with the 'Window', 'Gradient' panel. Where are you, Gradient? There you are. This panel up here, if I move it up... we can just double click these 'houses'. So double click the 'white house'... and you can pick a new color from down here. Double click the 'black house'. You can see what I did there, I double clicked not quite on the house... so it generated a new Swatch for me. If it does do that-- now I've got three Swatches. Which is kind of cool, means that I could pick another color... and have kind of a third transitional color. It's going to be bad. Actually not that bad, I like it. Anyway, if you do want to get rid of one of these, you just click on it... and click the trash can, and that will get rid of it. To add it, just click back on the line underneath. So we've got our Gradients... now we want to adjust the kind of, maybe direction. We'll use this tool over here. Go to 'Gradient tool', give it a click. You can see, there's my Gradient running right through the middle. What I can do is just click, hold, and drag anywhere on this rectangle... and change how I've got it. So I'm using a Linear Gradient. We can go up to 'Linear', change it to 'Radial'. Kind of works differently, right? We're kind of drawing from the center out. It's up to you how you want to do it. We can go way past where we need to be. We're going to go back to 'Linear'. A couple of things you can do, watch this. If I hover above this line, I can actually use these houses. I can double click them here. It's just an alternative for clicking them up here. Doesn't work on all compound shapes, and lots of other things. So I find, just using the Gradient Tool is better when you're new. Yes, we've got our Gradients. Now, let's say I... I did this course-- I've been teaching Illustrator for a long time. Gradients was something like-- For the last 10 years we've been laughing at Gradients. Gradients are so back. A cool little site that I found the other day is this one here. It's called Grabient. All it is, is just nice Gradients. Having a look through, there's a few different options. What's really nice about it is, say that you like one of these... you just click on the start color... copy this number here, it's called the Hexadecimal number. I'm going to click 'Copy'. Jump into Illustrator, and what I can do, is I can click on this house... and down here I can replace it there. Hit 'return', jump back in, grab this one. Grab it properly, copy and paste it, grab you. Paste it down here. You can kind of just borrow Gradients from people. Now I'm going to drag it. You can see, my-- the reason with what's happening with this box here - I'm going to close this down. - is that I've got mine underneath. You might not like that. Let's say I want to start my Gradient from about here onwards. Look at that. Love it. Let's look at a couple of other things that you might run into trouble with. Rectangle's pretty easy, let's look at something like this. This here is an outline bit of text. It's not editable text, we've outlined it, so it's just kind of shapes. Problem with it is that when I add it, and I go to here... you'll notice, it kind of does it individually. What I want is a Gradient that goes across all of them. The way to get around that is... you grab your 'Gradient Tool', just drag across them all. You got to actually grab the Gradient Tool... and drag across them all. That will kind of join them all up. Now we need to open up the Gradient Panel again... because remember, that line that appeared that we can work on the graphic down here. Just doesn't work with compound shapes. So we're going to go here, and go to 'Gradient'. If you're not sure what a compound shape is... don't worry, we're going to cover that later on in the course as well. I want 'Radial'. It's pretty cool. I'm going to drag across them all, and we get this kind of... like, consistent across all three of them. I'm going to pick a color. You can move on now, I'm totally just going to go off and find a cool color. Yes, add it to it. You can skip on to the next video. Ah, I love this. Look at this. Who would have thought I'd love this. If you were to ask me a couple of years ago... "Dan, you're going to be into Gradients?" and I'm going to be like... "No." 80's retro pastels. I'd be like, "No way." This one's got three colors in it. I'm going to grab-- I'm going to click on the line there. Double click. And the last one is this green. If you're finding your colors aren't matching the same as mine... I take it back. I'm not sure I'm into this color as much as I thought I was. But let's say that you don't-- the colors just aren't coming out rich. They're looking really nice in here... but they're washed out in your Illustrator file. It's because you're probably working in CMYK. We covered this a little earlier. What you might want to do is, before you can change the colors... you might go to 'File'... pick your colors, go to 'File', 'Document Color Setup'... and make sure you're in 'RGB'. Change your RGB, then go add your colors. It's kind of like a one way street. You can't just flick it over to RGB, and hope they come back to life. You need to put them back in now. All right, that is Gradients in Illustrator, which I now love... which probably in a year or two, nobody will love again. Gradients, so in fashion, and then out of fashion. All right, let's get into the next video. 20. How to mask an image inside text in Adobe Illustrator CC: Hi there, welcome to this video. We are going to take images... and crop them inside of boxes, inside circles. We're going to do entire multiple shapes... and inside text, and the text is editable. Awesome! Let's go and learn how to do that now in Adobe Illustrator. First up, if you're following along with the tutorial series... make sure you're on your background layer, it's unlocked. Let's just turn the Eyeball on the top layer off. So we're just working on this one layer. We know we're working on this layer because it's blue. Next thing I want to do... I'm going to zoom out a little bit, and bring in an image. I'm going to 'File', 'Place'. We'll stop at this one called 'Desk', and click 'Place'. This is a very big image... so if I click once, it ends up being this ginomous version. So what we're going to do is click and drag it out. I'm going to bring it in. I'm going to drag it, kind of-- it's a bit hard because it's a rectangle, so drag diagonally out. Just make sure it's bigger than this square... that we're going to crop it into. Now with the 'Black Arrow', just move it... so you roughly get it to the position you want. It's hard to see, I know. What we need to do is that the gray box needs to be on top. The shape you're going to use is the Clipping Mask. It needs to be on top of the image. I'm going to click on this guy, go to 'Properties'. Go to 'Arrange', I'm going to 'Send to Back'. I'm going to get him into kind of a rough position. I kind of want to clip. We can adjust that afterwards. Now I need to select both of these... so I'm going to click 'Rectangle Tool' first. Sorry, the 'Gray Rectangle', hold 'Shift', grab the image, so they're both selected. Now over here, I've got one that says 'Make Clipping Mask'. Awesome, huh! Doesn't really matter what the shape is. Let's do a 'Circle'. So, 'Ellipse', I'm going to drag a circle, I'm going to bring in an image. Doesn't really matter if that has a Fill or Stroke. Just going to give it one so you can see it. Let's go to 'File', 'Place'. There's one called 'Drawing 2' that we used earlier on, we'll use him again. Again, I'm going to drag it so it's big enough to go in the circle. Get it into a rough circle position for me. This one needs to be at the back; 'Arrange', 'Send to Back'. Select them both, make Clipping Mask. Doesn't really matter, you can draw with stars, pentagons. Whatever you want to draw with. You can draw something custom with the Pen Tool or the Curvature Tool. Now there will be a time when you want to readjust this image. So remember, the Black Arrow kind of physically moves stuff around. The White Arrow gets in there, right? So if I click on there, click off, click back in there. It's clicked on the image, you can kind of see, it's sprung to life... and I can move this around. So just the size. Actually I need to switch back to my 'Black Arrow'. It kind of remembers that I've got the image selected. Holding 'Shift', let's say I want to get it perfect in there. It will still adjust it. So that's how to get in there and adjust him. Click off. There'll be times where you need to actually just pull him apart. Like, "Come out of there." Happens if you're opening up somebody else's image... and it's clipped, and you're like, "How do I get it out?" With it selected, there's one over here, it says, 'Release Mask'. Click on that, and that's kind of come apart. Now the circle that we had here... remember, I had, can't remember what color we had, it was blue, I think. But it's disappeared, it's still there... but it has no Fill anymore. That's just something to be noticed. I'm going to undo, put it back where it was. Let's look at another way of masking. It is, using multiple shapes. There's a little trick you need to do. So I'm going to draw an Ellipse. Doesn't matter what color. I'm going to duplicate this one. A cool way of duplicating, you can copy and paste... but I like to hold down the 'Black Arrow'... then hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac. You can see, the cursor changes it a little bit. And it's 'Alt' on a PC. So while dragging, I'm holding down the 'Option' key... and you get multiple options. I'm going to have, for these little guys, I'm going to group them. So I can make another set. I don't know what I'm doing, really. I guessed it for instance. I'm going to use this. I'm going to bring in an image. So 'File', 'Place', and the one called 'Color Bomb'. And I'm going to click 'Place'. I'm going to drag it so it's kind of covering this whole thing. Remember, it needs to be at the back; 'Arrange', 'Send to Back'. I select them all, and I go 'Make Clipping Mask', and it doesn't work. So the trick you need to do first... is you need to select everything, except the image. So I selected them all, held 'Shift' to deselect this back one. Any which way you've got, select all of these guys... and you need to convert it into what's called a Compound Path. Now we'll cover Compound Paths properly in the next one... but for you, in this case, all we need to do is, go to 'Object'... and go to 'Compound Path', and just go to 'Make'. Nothing changes with it... except, now when I have them both selected... and I go to 'Make Clipping Mask'... hey, they work. So, make it a Compound Path... That can be any shapes. Like I've just used circles, there could be bunch of random shapes... or outlined text, anything like that. Next thing we want to do is within text. So what I'm going to do is... I'm going to turn my Layers back on, and grab my 'Type Layer'. I want this thing, that I drew earlier. I am going to just move it up here. I'm on my Type Layer now. I'm going to bring in another image. I'm using my shortcut now. I'm getting tired of 'File', 'Place'. You can see, 'Command'-- in my case it's 'Command-Shift-P', because I'm on a Mac. It will be 'Control-Shift-P' on a PC. One of the common shortcuts. I'm going to bring in 'Color Bomb' again. What I'm going to do for this one... is I'm going to drag it quite big over here. I got a plan... for multiple lines. So, Text is pretty easy, right? All I need to do is make sure he's behind. 'Properties', 'Arrange', 'Send to Back'. So here's my Text Layer, you can't really see him. Doesn't really matter what color he is, I'm just showing you, so you can see. So, select them both, then go to 'Make Clipping Mask'. Awesome, huh! You can kind of see it. See the edge there? The reason I did that is because I want to do this. Because it's editable Type I can double click on it... and I can go into here, and go, 'Boom'. Anybody else remembers that song? I had the song cassette. Single, I think it was called. I loved it. The cool thing about it is... I double clicked on it, the weird thing is I ended up going inside the shape. We looked at this way at the beginning, it's called the Isolation Mode. I've kind to go inside of this Clipping Mask. To get back, click on this arrow loads of time until it disappears. You can see, the image, editable Text, the image is there. You can go on and change-- say we want to move the image because it's a bit dark up here. Same thing again, double click it to go inside. Then, if you kind of move around-- you can see, I'm selecting the text, and over here is the image. So I've double clicked to go inside, I'm inside this clipping group. Now I can move this image around. It's a bit fiddly. Not going to lie to you. So have a little play around with it so you can get it to work... but when you're finished... definitely smash away this arrow, until you back out. And, that is Clipping Masks, with Text. We did it with multiple shapes, remember, Compound Path. And just any old shape you like... by just using the option down here. All right, that is Masks. I said that twice. Let's get on to the next video. 21. How to cut holes in shapes using Compound Shapes in Illustrator CC: Hi there, in this video we're going to cut holes in things. They're called Compound Paths. I'm going to zoom in, you can see... I can see through this owl, through the page underneath. I'm also going to do this. Everyone loves a bit of abstract Compound Path making. We're going to do that in this tutorial. So first up, open up the file 'Compound Path' on your 'Exercise Files'. What I want to do is I'm going to bring in an Image. I'm going to bring in an image called 'Old paper'. Drag it out so it kind of covers the background. It's a little big, it's okay. So I want this, now I'm going to 'Arrange it', 'Send to Back'. What I'd like to do is... at the moment there's-- let's say these two eyes, these outer eyes here, with the green... I want them to be holes. If they're white... which is what we've done in the past... obviously we can't see through the background. So what we want to do is we want to put holes in it. So I'm going to select the two eyes, just drag them off... because I want these two selected, so I'm holding 'Shift', click both of them. I'll also do it in one big go, so I want to cut that out as well, the nose... and all from this sky in the background. It comes down to Layer Order. Whatever's at the back, gets everything cut out of them... so make sure that the owl's body is at the back, which it is for us. Go up to 'Object', come down to 'Compound Path', and go to 'Make'. It slices it all up, and we can see through it. Let's get the eyes, I'll move them back in. And we're going to select everything. Deselect the background, I'm going to fill it with 'white'. Just to match what we had there at the beginning. So that's how to make a Compound Path. I want to add a Drop Shadow to it, just because. I'm not so sure about that while we're here. Let's go to 'Effect', and let's go to 'Stylize'. You'll notice, when you add things like Drop Shadows, watch this. I'm going to turn 'on' Preview, to show you the defaults. Can you see, it's kind of bit weird, and you're like, "Hmm." It's all kind of layered, and stuff. So what you need to do first... is have it all selected, then group it. So 'Object', 'Group', and then, if I go 'Effects'... and go to 'Stylize', I can go to 'Drop Shadow'. And because they're all one group... they all kind of act how you imagine they would act. I'm just going to drop this down to something not totally messy. It's still pretty big, Dan. Let's go to the one down here. That's what I want. Let's click 'OK'. So here's my first Compound Path. Next thing I'd like to do is, I'm going to open up a new document. We're going to do that, one we saw at the beginning, with all the squiggles. Same sort of principle. I'm going to open up a document. I'm going to make sure it's RGB. So, twirl down 'Advanced'. Why? Because it's just a better color. Look at the earlier video for RGB, about why. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to grab my 'Pencil Tool'. It's underneath the Shaper Tool, grab the Pencil Tool. If we double click it... make sure the 'Smoothing' is right up, and the 'Keep Selected' is unticked. It's just going to help us, the lines look smoother. I'm going to draw a few different squiggles. What we'll do is, I'm going to draw one initial one, around the outside. Just kind of doing blobby moving around. Watch when I let go. Come back to the beginning, because, you see... right back to the beginning... and it kind of makes it one shape, which is cool. I'm making another one. How many of these do I want? I think I want five. Doesn't really matter. This one's going to have like an extra blob in there. Maybe one more. It's going to go underneath there. I got him down here. Exciting myself. So I've got all my shapes here now. What I'm going to do to make this easier for everybody to understand-- It's easier probably just to go, you're the beginning shape... you're the next shape. Just keeping a nice bit of space between them all... to make it easy while we're working. So I've got all these shapes. I would like some rectangles... so I'm going to draw a rectangle that covers the page. Doesn't really matter how big these are really. I'm going to grab it... and I'm going to stick this-- What have I got? I've got no Fill, I'm going to pick a color. I'm going to give-- I'm going to grab it and select it underneath. These need to be at the back, right? So we need to go 'Arrange', 'Send to Back'. I'm going to have one... two. I'm holding 'Alt' while I'm dragging, that's how I'm getting the copy. We did it earlier on... but you can just hold down the 'Option' on a Mac, or the 'Alt' key on a PC. Here you go, these are all my shapes. Now I'm going to pick some colors because I want to. Let's go to 'Window', we'll use 'Color Themes'. We used this earlier on in a tutorial, I'm using 'Explore'. And I'm going to pick some colors from here. So I will pick this color here. Let's start with this one, this is going to be my Base color. Actually we need one other color, that's what we need. We need five segments. This bold one's going to be this color. Green. Click on this one, it's going to be this yellow color. Peach. I'm going to 'Color names'. So now we need to make them Compound Paths, just like we did before. So we're going to start with this bottom one here. Select both things, go to 'Object', 'Compound Path', 'Make'. 'Select', 'Object', 'Compound Path', 'Make'. You see the shortcut there. It's 'Command 8' on a Mac, or 'Control 8' on a PC. I use it all the time. I've got them all. Next thing I want to do is select them all, and give them 'no' Stroke. Goodbye, Stroke. I'm going to stick them up, you are at the bottom. Your next is going to be some Layer Order issues, hmm, not. We happened to do them in the right order. So that guy's behind that guy. So I just need to make sure... with them selected, 'Arrange', Bring to Front'. Now I'm going to my Layer Orders. 'Arrange', 'Bring to Front'. Just so you know, it's not really a-- it's kind of an intro class for shortcuts... but 'Command Shift', and the outer square rectangle,'['. It's near your P key. It's 'Command Shift' and outer, or the second square bracket, ']'. It's 'Control Shift' if you're on a PC. So I've got all my colors. They're all lined up... and what you saw at the beginning though... there was this nice little effect applied to them. So kind of like-- or, it is the Drop Shadow. Makes this look a little nicer. So, I am going to select it all. I'm going to close down Color Themes... and I'm going to go 'Effect'. Then we go to 'Drop Shadow'. Under 'Stylize', 'Drop Shadow'. We're going to play around with this. Make sure Preview is 'on'. I guess this will come down to the size of your page... kind of squiggles you did. So, by default, it's a bit smaller, '1', '1', '1'. I'm going to go to-- I'm going to pretend like I'm just freaking this... like I practiced this before the video... to try and make it look awesome. '7'. '7'. And this one here looks good at '20'. The Offset is just like left and right, so it's kind of sun shining up there. The Blur is, you watch, it will change from this kind of really hard edge... to a really kind of soft edge. Doesn't look great? It's okay. Let's click 'OK' on this. Now one thing before we move on... is that you might find your machine is running super slow. The reason for that is because-- it's called the Raster Setting. So, if you're finding, like it's just impossible to work... you can go up to here, go to 'Effects', 'Document Raster Settings'... and change it from 300 ppi to this, 72 ppi. The only problem with that, it's going to change the resolution. So when you flip it up with this... so when you go to 'Print', it's not going to look as good... but while you're working, it actually just speeds things up. So now I'm working, I go and resize that, it's super quick... whereas back at '300'... even just clicking the 'OK' button takes forever. There you go. So now when I drag it out, it goes, 'Recalculating', and then-- Like, I got a pretty fast Mac, and it's still pretty slow. So what you need to do is, you can change it to '72'... and just before you go to 'Print', or when you're finished doing... go back to '300', it will look nicer. So I've got this, I've done better ones... but let's say that I like this-- It looks good as a kind of abstract slice rather than the whole thing. So what I might do is, I'm going to grab the 'Rectangle Tool'... and grab, like a chunk of, maybe this. Maybe just that bit. So I've drawn a rectangle along this top, I've selected everything. Then I'm going to go to-- I can't do it over here, with the Quick Actions... because I've got too many things selected... but it still works. It's under 'Object', 'Clipping Mask', 'Make', or 'Command 7'. Now it looks kind of cooler. I'm going to slice down to a little piece. So one last thing we'll do with Compound Paths before we leave. Let's open a file in our 'Exercise Files'. It's called 'Smartphone.ai'. Here it is here. Now this has been downloaded from Adobe Market. It's free to use. I'll show you Adobe Market in a video coming up. Basically... It's cool, it's got a hole cut in it... but, say I want to kind of pull it apart... and I go to 'Object', and go to 'Ungroup'... and that works. Button, it's kind of not part of it now, then I go to 'Object'... I can't ungroup it anymore, but it's still stuck together. It's because it's a Compound Path. There's a hole cut in the middle of it. Actually there's lots of holes. All these guys here, you can see through. There's a page there, they're all Compound Paths. You need to pull it to pieces. Now that we know what a Compound Path is, no problem. 'Object', 'Compound Path... and instead of Make, we're going to 'Release' it. I'm going to click off in the background. Now it's all it's kind of constituent parts. You can go and adjust to change colors. You might want to go back... adjust the edges of this, then make a Compound Path again. It's up to you, but now you know. There will be lots of instances of this... where you're given an image... you've downloaded it from the net, or a stock library site... and it's just really hard to work with. The magic potion is to... go to 'Object', and go to 'Release Compound Path'. All right my friends, you are now a master of Compound Paths. Go forth, cut holes in things. And I will see you in the very next video. 22. How to use CC Libraries in Adobe Illustrator CC: Hey there, Illustrator lovers, it is time for CC Libraries. We've ignored it, this panel over here, next to Properties. I've ignored it this whole course. Now it's time to get to grips with it... find out all the perks... the colors, the free images, the sharing art. Let's go and learn how to do CC Libraries now. So it's time for Libraries. If you can't see your Libraries, go to the 'Libraries' tab. If you can't see it still, go to 'Window', go down to 'Libraries'. Now I've been purposefully avoiding Libraries during this course, I guess. It's hard to know when to squeeze everything in... but it's time for Libraries now. Now by default, you've probably gone on 'My Library'. At the top here, if you're a heavy user like me, we got lots of libraries. So we're going to start by creating a Library. My library's like, it's full of junk like no one's does. Let's say I'm working with a new client, and I click on this... I'm going to go to 'Create New Library'. In here, it says 'Create New Library'. I'm going to give it a name, say it's a client name. I'm working for myself, Daniel Scott, click 'Create', there's nothing in here. What goes in there is quite clear, drag and drop. So I've got this fox here, I'm going to drag and drop him in. Also, know that I'm working from the CC Libraries file. You can open it, or just work on your own file, it's up to you. I've got this thing, called 'Artwork 1'. I'm going to double click it, and call it 'Fox'. So I've got a bit of Artwork. Now, why is this useful? It means that... if I open up a new document in Illustrator, completely new one... it doesn't matter, this Library is still active. I can drag it out, and start using it. There it is there. Awesome, huh! What's also really nice about it, is I can go out to-- it's missing a chunk. How is it missing a chunk? It didn't grab while I dragged it across, it's part of the fox. What I'd like to do now is-- I'll show you one of the perks, it's that it's across software. If I open up 'Photoshop', and I want to use my fox, my part fox in here... I can go to 'CC Libraries'-- So I'm going to go to 'Window'... and go to 'Libraries'. Up the top here, I've got all my libraries... and there's a new one here, called 'Daniel Scott'. There's my half a fox, drag him in. And position him, 'return'. It's brought it through. It's vector, it's awesome. You can do the other way as well. I can click on this background image... and because Photoshop is more of an image processing program... it will be more appropriate to be dragging images... into the Library from Photoshop. I'm going to click him, drag him. There it goes there, this is my bike. Now if I go to Illustrator, I've got my bike. I can drag it out, start using it. Same with InDesign, if I go to InDesign ... and open up a new document... 'CC Libraries', here it is there. 'Daniel Scott', these guys are here, drag him into this. I use this for After Effects... all of these, XD, Animate, Muse... Dreamweaver, to a degree. Definitely Premiere and After Effects. Not so much Character Animator, but lots of these ones. Dimension, really good for using CC Libraries. Nice interconnection. Now there'll be a perk for it. Let's say we've used it in a few products now-- I'm going to go to Illustrator. Actually what I'm going to do is double click on the 'Library Item'. Because I started over here... first of all, I'm going to copy the bits that I lost. Actually I'm going to grab the whole thing, copy it. So this is not connected anymore. That was kind of like, Parent. We created this guy here, fox, but they're no longer connected. So if I adjust this, it doesn't change this one at all... but if I double click 'fox', it will open up in Illustrator. I'm going to add the rest of my fox. I'm going to select all, delete him. Add the rest of my fox, get him to fit in the little box that he's got. Hit 'Save'. Hopefully now-- actually, just do some other adjustments, let's do some 'color'. I'm just going to use this color, and grab the partially blue dog. I'm going to jump out to InDesign, magic, Photoshop, magic. They're all adjusting. So it's really handy if you've got graphic. It needs to be consistent across lots of designs. Maybe a logo. There are times though, when you're like, "Don't update, please." The way to get around that is... in all of the programs, when you're dragging out of the library... hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac, or the 'Alt' key on a PC. What that does is it breaks the links. Now if I go back into Illustrator... I'm still in that editable-- You kind of know you're in an editable one... either by double clicking it... or it's got this crazy name. So I'm going to back in here, and undo it. Put it back to what it was, hit 'Save', jump back into Photoshop. You'll notice that, that one updated. Done here, but this one didn't ... because I used the Alt, or Option, when I dragged it out. That's true of all of the programs, InDesign, Illustrator, After Effects... Any of them, just hold down the Option, or the Alt key... and that will break the link. Other cool things you can do is-- from any of the programs... but let's say this one here... I want these fox colors to use them for different products, right? So I'm going to select on this chunk. I'm going to go down here, and I got the option of adding the graphic. Instead of dragging it in, you can click on 'Add Graphic', this way. I don't want to add the graphic, I already got it. What I want to do is add the Fill color. It's actually a Swatch, you can see there. It's got its Hexadecimal number, I'm going to go through you. I want to add. Can't we go and have them all in one big go yet? I think we can, so I'm just going to, individually. Click on the different pieces. Those are all the colors I want to use. That means, that again. In Photoshop, here's the colors. I can start working using these ones across them all. Another cool thing you can do is you can jump to 'color.adobe.com'. I'm going to jump to it now. Now for me, for some reason when I sign in... today, of all days, when I'm recording, it doesn't want to log me in. For some reason, just with Adobe Color. When you are logged in, you can find a color you like. So I'm at 'color.adobe.com'. I've gone to 'Explore'. It's great. Find colors, click, download. And when you log in, it says, "Would you like to save it to a library?" You say, "Yes," you pick the Daniel Scott library. And it downloads it, and it magically appears in here. Like some of my other libraries, it's full of MF. You can see, there's some of those colors that I've got in here. So it will just appear there. Trust me. Another cool perk for using CC Libraries. I'm going to go back to our file here. Click on this text once. And down, on the '+' button here... I can add the text. I can add that as a graphic, it will just be like a picture. One of the text, whereas this is actua