Adobe Illustrator Basics for Beginners

1. What You'll Learn: My name is a Plichinitch and I've been a design geek for over 20 years now and I've been teaching for nearly just as long with courses on everything from photography to Photoshop, and in design to Illustrator. Before getting into graphic design, my background was in professional photography right at home in Photoshop. It wasn't long before I was into in design to illustrator was a tougher nut for me to crack though because it was such a different world. But once I figured out how to shift my mindset from pixels to vectors, I was all in. And now helping others to unlock those light bulb moments is part of why I love teaching so much. And that's what brings me here today. In this beginning Illustrator course, I'll introduce you to the fundamentals of working with vectors and help you understand the core of how Illustrator operates. This class is for everyone, whether you're a total beginner with zero experience, or you've poked around long enough to decide that you are tired of stumbling through it all and you just want illustrator to finally make sense. The key is understanding the illustrator is more about building graphics than drawing them. So we'll start with the basics of shape building. After that, you'll create a custom brush, discover illustrators incredible tools for experimenting with color, and get to know a foolproof and frustration free technique for working with the pen tool by the end, in addition to your completed illustration, you'll have a solid understanding of the basics of illustrator. And an awareness of features and power tips that even some who've been using Illustrator for years still don't know about. Everything you need to complete. The course is included along with the guide to the most frequently used keyboard shortcuts and my silly tricks for remembering them. I'm so excited that you're here and I can't wait for you to take this course. So get ready to learn your way around Illustrator and have some light bulb moments of your own. 2. Illustrator Fundamentals: To be successful in Illustrator, you have to understand a few basic things about the way it works. Unlike Photoshop, where images are made of pixels. In Illustrator, everything's made of shapes. Underneath all that pretty artwork, you can see the outlines that define each and every piece. It's almost like a skeletal system for your artwork. The shapes themselves are made of two things, points. In this case, the shape has four points. Between the points, we see these line segments known as paths. This is the secret sauce, the magic that makes vector art scalable. Because these shapes are defined with math. Instead of pixels, they can be scaled up, down, and back again infinitely. And they'll never lose quality, staying sharp as attack at any size. These points come in basically two styles. There's corner points, like what we see here, creating this rectangle, and smooth points like what you see here in this circle. Smooth points come with these things called control handles. They shape the path as it extends from one point to the next. The control handles work in pairs. Each point has two control handles, one on each side. Each path segment is directed by a pair of control handles, one from each of the points on either side of the segment. Shapes can be closed, like the circle, or they can be open like this line. Shapes can have a stroke, which is like an outline. They can have a fill, or they can have both a stroke and a fill, honestly. They can even have multiple strokes and multiple fills all at the same time. Now that you know that shapes are made of points and paths and that they can have strokes or fills. Let's talk about what I think is the most crucial thing to understand about illustrator. For me, this was the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around. That is that illustrator is less about drawing and more about building with shapes. Unlike drawing with pencil and paper, or even in other apps like Procreate Illustrator, you build your designs starting from the most fundamental shapes. Once you can wrap your head around this, the rest is going to be easy. Here's an example. Imagine two circles. We can combine these circles in a number of different ways. For example, the blue one could be used to carve out from the yellow one, or the yellow one could be used to carve out the blue one. Or we could merge them into a single shape. Or they could meet in the middle and break each other into separate pieces. Including a third piece formed by the areas where they overlapped. Or they could simply meet in the middle to create an entirely new shape. That's the foundation of all of illustrator artwork. It's just shapes made of points and paths. In this course, we'll walk through the process of building this wall clock using basic shapes. Along the way, we'll explore different ways to manipulate basic shapes into something that's anything but basic. In the end, I think you'll be surprised not only by how it all works, but also by how easy it can actually be. Join me in the next video, and we'll get started. 3. Building With Shapes: To get started. When you first launch Illustrator, you'll see something like this known as the Home Screen. You can see there's a bunch of presets right here. You could click on any of these to get started right away, but if you want to be able to fine tune your settings, then you're going to want to come over here and choose new file. We can still access all of those templates, but we can also tweak them. As we talked about, vector graphics are not pixel based. They are independent of resolution. The size that we select for our document or our artboard doesn't really matter. But I find it helpful for my brain anyway to work on a standard page size. In this case, I'm going to come up here and click print from the presets along the top, and I'm going to choose letter. Then over here on the right hand side, we can tell Illustrator what unit we want to work in. You can select whatever you want here. I'm going to choose inches down below In the advanced options, which may or may not be open, you might have to click here to open that up. Let's change this from CMYK color to RGB, which Illustrator very kindly points out is different than the default setting for the print template. But everything here in Illustrator is so fluid and we can go back and forth, which means we can just say, thank you very much Illustrator, and keep going. Let's come down and click Create to make things as easy as possible. I snapped a photo of the clock in my living room that we're going to use as a template. You'll find it among the course downloads. To get it in here, we're going to go to File and Place. Then navigate to wherever you saved it. And what you're looking for is called Clock Jpeg. Down here we can uncheck the Show Import Options and click Place. Now we can see that our cursor has this little accessory. This is letting us know that our cursor is loaded with that file and it's ready to place it. So I'm just going to position my cursor about here. And click and drag a frame just like that. And we're going to turn this layer in Illustrator into a template. And this does two things for us. It's going to lock this frame so we don't accidentally grab it and move it all around. And it's going to dim it slightly so we can better see what we're doing when we illustrate over the top of it. To get to our layers, we're going to need to open our layers panel. It may be over on the side of your screen represented by this little icon, which you can just click to pop open if you don't see it or can't find it. All of the panels can be found under the window menu. If I ever mention something, and I forget to tell you to come up to the window menu, you can find it under Window, and then you just find the name of it. In this case, we're looking for layers. And when we click on it, it's going to pop that panel right open here. We can see that we're on layer one by default. To designate this layer as a template, we're going to put our cursor in this empty area and double click. We can give this a name like clock template. You can see here that the layer by default is light blue. The layers in illustrator are color coded. That means that with this object being on this layer, anytime that it's selected, we see this little blue outline. And that's just a visual indicator that this object is on the blue layer, which we are renaming from layer one to clock template. Now down below here, we want to put a check mark next to the word template. You'll see that that adds a lock. And it's going to dim the image to 50% which we can't see right now. But we'll see it as soon as we click Okay. Of course, now that this layer is a template layer, it's locked, which means we need to create a new layer to contain our clock. To do that, at the bottom of the layers panel, we're going to click this little Add a New Layer plus button that adds a layer. Right here we can see this one is color coded red. We can rename it by double clicking on the words right now where it says layer two. If we double click on that, we can call it clock body and press Enter. So if you're familiar with the layers panel in Photoshop, it's pretty much the same thing here in Illustrator, but unlike in Photoshop, where everything pretty much has to be on a separate layer in order to manipulate it independently from everything else. In Illustrator, everything's already independently editable because that's the nature of vectors. So the layers panel is really more for organization than it is for editability and flexibility. Here. We're going to create the clock on one layer. And we'll put all of the knick knacks on a different layer just to make it easier to work. All right, if we want to collapse this panel, we can click this little double arrow here. And that will tuck it right back in to wherever it popped open from. All right, let's start building. You'll find the shaped tools over here on the tool bar. And your tool bar might look a little different because it can be one single long row, or it can be, excuse me, column, or it can be two columns. So either way, we are going to find the ellipse tool by pressing the L key on your keyboard, The letter L, as in elipse. Now, you may not see the ellipse without actually using the keyboard shortcut because we can see that it's buried here underneath the rectangle tool. That's right. So each of these tools, the ones with the little white triangles in the corner, that means that they are just one of a whole family that's right here. So the ellipse tool lives right here with the rectangle tool. So if we click and hold, we'll get the fly out here and we can select the ellipse tool. But you'll see right here, this is the keyboard shortcut. And that is really the best way to work in an illustrator. So that's what you're going to see and hear me doing as we work. All right, so L for ellipse shapes are drawn in Illustrator by clicking and dragging. As long as I don't let go of my mouse, I can keep shifting this shape around. And if I hold shift, it's going to snap into a circle. Into a perfect circle. And you'll notice that once you let go, if you need to reshape or reposition it, you can grab it from the center dot right here to reposition, or you can drag it from one of the corners to scale it. You still have to hold shift to keep it in proportion. Or if you wanted an oval, you could smush it by dragging any of these handles, all kinds of options. If you just don't like it at all and you want to start over, hit Delete. The main thing is don't be afraid of making a mess because you can always press command or control Z to undo anything that you're not happy with. All right, so when we're ready to actually draw the clock face here, let's zoom in a little bit by pressing command or control plus plus, plus. Let's scoot up to the clock by holding the space bar to give us the hand tool and we can drag, we can really see what we're doing. If we look at the head of the clock, of the black part of the clock right here, and we imagine a box around that circular shape. We're going to put our cursor in this top left imaginary corner. I'm going to click and hold the shift key while I drag about like this. Remember if you make a mistake, you can press Commander Control Z or just hit Delete. Here's another pro tip for you. While you're dragging and holding shift, you can't reposition it, right? You can only scale it if you want to reposition it on the fly. Then you keep holding your mouse, keep holding shift, and you add the space bar. Look at that, and now you can reposition it. But it's hard to see, right, because it's filled with white. So if we look up in the control panel, this is where we tell Illustrator. This is one of the places we can tell Illustrator what we want for the fill and the stroke. And we can see right now that it's got a white fill with a black stroke, and that's why we can't see the clock underneath. So while we're working, let's change the fill color to none. So I'm going to come up here, click this little drop down, and we see all these swatches here. And boy, they're tiny, aren't they? If we want to make them bigger, we can come to this panel menu and we can choose large thumbnail view, or medium, or whatever you want. I'm going to go with large, that way we can see this a little better now. These are just some preset colors, we'll learn more about that later. But here we see a white square with a red line through it. This means none. If we click that and then we click away to close the panel, we can see that we have our circle with the black stroke. But now we can actually see, since we still have this shape selected, let's re use it by pressing command or control C to make a copy. But instead of pasting it, which would just put it in the center of our screen, what we're going to do instead is paste it in front, which is command or control for front. Now it looks like nothing happened, because what it did was it pasted a copy directly on top of itself, which is awesome, because now we can scale it equally from all four sides inward. To make the interface of the clock. To do that, I'm going to put my cursor up here in the corner. You'll see that we get this double headed arrow. And we'll want to hold shift to maintain a perfect circle. And in addition to shift, if we hold the Alt or Option key while we drag inward, It scales from all the sides at once. So we know that this circle is going to be perfectly centered within this circle. We could zoom out by pressing command and control and the number zero. All right, now we're going to switch to our rectangle tool, which believe it or not, the keyboard shortcut is M as in rectangular marquee. And what we're going to do is position our cursor somewhere in here. We want to make sure that it overlaps with at least the outer circle. I don't want to start drawing down here. I'm going to put my cursor inside the black circle somewhere. And I'm going to click and drag all the way down here. Now we need to flare out these points at the bottom, and to be able to manipulate individual points of a shape, we need the direct selection tool. Up here in the top of our tool bar, we see two arrows. A black arrow here, this is the selection tool. And this white arrow here, which is the direct selection tool, this one lets us select whole shapes, and this one lets us select individual points or handles in a shape. So this is the one we want the keyboard shortcut for. This is the letter A, which I remember by thinking that it stands for A. Just let's come down here and I'm going to position my direct selection tool right here on this bottom point. And I'm going to give it a click. Then I'm going to press command plus, plus, plus. So we can zoom in and see a little bit better. This point is selected, and I can see that because it's got a red fill, whereas this one is very hard to see, but it's hollow, which means it's not selected. With this one selected, we can just pull this any old place we want, but we want to try to be specific about it so we can do the same thing exactly on this side with this point selected all by itself. We can use the arrow keys on our keyboard. And I could hit my arrow key a zillion times and move that over, but I'm going to bring it back. Instead, I'm going to hold the shift key while I tap that. Left arrow, Shift left arrow, left arrow, left arrow. That moves it out in slightly larger increments. Let's do the same thing over here. We'll click to select this. And we'll hold shift. And then hit that right arrow the same number of times, which in my case I did three shift right arrow, 123. And then let's zoom back out to see how it's looking by pressing command or control. And the number zero, it's what I call home base. It brings us home and we can see here is our clock. That's looking pretty good. Now, before we do the next part, we want to make sure that all of these three pieces are aligned. Let's switch to the selection tool, That's the black arrow up here. The keyboard shortcuts the letter V. So I think of it as being very important. With the very important selection tool, we're going to click and drag across all three pieces to select them all. Now if we look up in the control bar control panel, we see all these funny little shapes here. These are the shortcut buttons for our alignment options. If we want to make sure that everything is centered, we can click this option right here, so that all three pieces align themselves to the center. The next step we're going to build our first shape. We're going to merge the outer circle of the clock with the body. We need to select just those two things. Right now, all three things are selected. We could click away and then click and shift click to select both of those, or with all three things collected. If I shift click on the interface of the clock, we can see that it becomes de selected. Now I have just these two pieces selected and we're going to combine them using the Pathfinder panel. So again, we'll come up under window and choose Pathfinder. The pathfinder panel is really cool, but it can be confusing. We'll look at it here and then later I'll show you a much simpler way to build shapes. But basically these are the different functions we can apply to these two shapes. And the one we want is this first one here called Unite. When we click on that, you'll see that Illustrator joins the body with the head of the clock. And now we have this cool keyhole shape that we did not have to draw. Can you imagine how hard it would be to try and line all of this up and make a perfect circle if we were just drawing this? That'd be tough. Let's bring some of this to life by adding some color. Let's select this inner circle here up in the control panel. This is the fill. Let's set that to white. Then for the stroke, we're going to remove the stroke. Right now it's black, but let's take it away and give it none. No stroke. Then we'll select the body of the clock. Let's get rid of that stroke. Give that a black fill. Now you'll notice that the white face of the clock seems to have disappeared, but it's just covered up. Illustrator stacks objects from back to front in the order that they're drawn. The outer circle of the head of the clock was the first thing we drew, which put it in the back when we merged that with the body of the clock, which was the most recent thing we drew, which means it was in front. Illustrator put the whole merged piece in the front to reveal the white clock face that's hiding behind it. We need to move the clock body back. With this selected, we can just right click or control click and choose a range send to back. You may have noticed that in the original photo, if I hide this, you can see that this is a curve right where the head joins the body is a curve. We have a very tight, this is called a cusp, where we have a straight line coming in and turning into a curve. To smooth out these areas, we're going to go back to our direct selection tool to adjust. Remember keyword shortcut A for adjust. And we're going to click on this cusp point right here. And then shift, click on this cusp point. When we do that, you see these little funny things we get. These are called corner widgets. All we have to do to add the curves here is select both those points and then pick one. It doesn't matter because they're both selected. Grab the corner widget, and just pull. Isn't that beautiful and awesomely simple? All right, let's review everything quickly while we make a couple pots for the plants that we'll be creating in the later lesson. So I'm going to press M to get that rectangle marquee and off to the side over somewhere. I'm just going to click and drag out what could become a flower pot. Then I'm going to switch to the direct selection tool, the white arrow, by pressing for adjust. And I'll click this bottom corner on the left. And I'll shift, click this bottom corner on the right. Here we see our two little widgets. I'll pick one and pull in. And now we have a flower pot. We can easily make a copy of this by switching to our very important selection tool. And if we click to select our little flower pot, and we hold Alt or Option while we drag, we can make a copy. All right, so you can save your work by choosing file, give it a name, click, Save. When this pops up, go ahead and just click Okay. We'll learn more about that later. What do you think so far? Do you see what I mean when I talk about shape building? In this video, you learned how to draw with a couple of the shape tools. How to apply or remove a stroke and a fill, and how to unite two shapes into one using the Pathfinder panel. We even got to play with corner widgets, but the funds not done yet. In fact, it's just getting started. Join me in the next video, and we will keep rolling. 4. Blend and Shape Builder Tools: In the last video, you gained some experience in Illustrators workspace and got some good practice using some of the shape tools and the unite function in the Pathfinder panel. In this lesson, we're going to add shelves to the clock, which by now you realize that drawing the shelves would be as simple as grabbing the rectangle tool and making some shapes. But rather than copying and pasting a bunch of rectangles and then distributing them vertically to create all the shelves, I'm going to take this opportunity to introduce you to not one, but two awesomely powerful tools because this is a great way to get the hang of how they work. In this video, you're going to learn how to use the blend tool and the shape builder tool in order to see what we're doing. Let's pop back over to our layers panel. Remember it's under window layers. If you don't see it, I'm going to twirl open the clock body layer here. You can see that every object is on its own, little like sub layer now in order for us to see the shelves. Let's hide the clock body temporarily by selecting it here. And then on the left, we can toggle off the visibility by clicking on that little eyeball. All right, with our rectangular marquee tool letter M, let's choose a fill color that's not black because we want to be able to see it within the clock. Maybe just like a dark gray. And we'll leave the stroke set to none. And we're going to come right here and just click from way outside to way outside here. And just release to make a skinny little shelf like this. Now let's switch to our selection tool by pressing V, because it's a very important selection tool. And let's drag a copy of this down to the bottom by holding Alt or Option and dragging straight down. We'll notice these little purple guides on the screen. They are letting us know if things are aligned. So we can see here if I move this out of the way, the purple guides come and go depending on what's aligned with what. I'm going to drop this here. And I want to stretch it beyond the edge of the clock body. So if we need to zoom in, we can press command or control plus, plus, plus. And then if we hover here, we get our little arrows. So I'm going to grab this point and drag to the left. But I want the right side to do the same thing, so I'll hold Alt or Option, and then when I drag out that will extend as well. And then to scooch back and see everything on our screen, we'll do that. Magical homeward bound keyboard shortcut command or control zero. So now we have a top shelf and a bottom shelf. And to create the middle four shelves, we'll create what's called a blend between them. Using our very important selection tool, we can select both shelves by just dragging across them like this. Oops. And I accidentally included the face, so I'm going to shift click to get rid of that. We just want our two shelves selected. And now we're going to find something in the tool bar called the blend Tool. And honestly, I never know what's wet over here. So thankfully, the blend Tools keyboard shortcut is W, as in wow, a blend. And when I press that, then I can actually find it on the toolbar. So before we use this tool, we need to establish the settings we want. And we do that by double clicking it on the toolbar here and here. For spacing, we want to choose specified steps. It allows us to specify how many steps we want in between here and because we want four additional shelves, we will enter a value of four. And click Okay. And notice that nothing happens. All we've done is choose the settings for the blend. We haven't actually created the blend yet. To create the blend, we're going to click once on this top shelf and click again on this bottom shelf. And boom, just like that, it makes all of our shelves. And if you forget all of this stuff, you can also find it under the Object menu by going to Object Blend, and you would choose Make. But now, because ours is made, if we want to undo that, we would choose release. Now that we have this finished here, we can go back to our layers panel and turn the clock layer back on so we can see it Next. We'd probably want to address the overhang that's happening here, right? So why don't we just do what we did before. We'll grab our very important selection tool. I'm going to drag across the shelves and the clock body. Let's go back to our Pathfinder panel again, if you don't see it, Window Pathfinder, and click Unite. It. Come on, Illustrator unit, unit, unite. Nothing is happening. What is the deal? To better understand what's happening or actually what's not happening, let's click a way to deselect everything. Then let's click to select the shelves. And if we take a peek in the top left corner up here, Illustrator is really helpful. It gives us all these little clues. It's actually one of, I think, the most useful things in Illustrator, and that is that it tells us what we're working with. So with this selected, it says blend. But we know this because we blended it, right? So why does that even matter to show you behind the scenes, we're going to go to Outline mode, So you can choose View Outline, or you'll see me using command Y or control Y on a PC to enter outline mode. As soon as we do that, can you spot what's going on? Here We have a top shelf. We have a bottom shelf, but none of the other shelves actually show up in this outline skeletal view. Even though we can see them in the regular view here. They're actually not real. In other words, they're basically virtual like a filter or an illusion before we can interact with the illusion, in this case the blend in a meaningful way, like being able to saw off these overhang bits. We need to make our blended virtual shelves into real shapes, into real shells. Illustrator does not come with a fairy godmother, but it does come with a command that will do the trick. And it's known as expand. So I'm going to click to select our blend. We can see over here we've got the blend. And then we're going to come up to the Object menu and choose Expand. We'll make sure object and fill are selected and click okay. Now watch what happens to our blend when we click, Okay, there it is. Now we can see that there's red outlines actually around all of the pieces. And if we go back to outline mode by pressing command or control why we can see, okay, now we have outlines and we have real shelves which is perfect to get rid of these overhang bits instead of messing around with the pathfinder, which is fabulous, but can just be a little confusing To wrap your head around, I'm going to show you a way easier method and that is to use the shape builder tool. So before we do that, let's add the clock body to the selection by holding shift and clicking on the clock body so all the shells and the clock body are selected. And then we're going to grab the Shape Builder tool, which again, I can never remember which of these complicated icons it is. But I do remember the keyboard shortcut because it is shift M for Super magical. And now I can see, oh yes, here's the Shape Builder tool. The Shape Builder allows us to combine shapes by default. You can see next to my cursor, there is a plus sign. By default it joins things and merges them. And that's not what we want here, we want to buzz all of these off. We're going to switch from join mode to subtract mode by pressing and holding Alt or Option. And you'll see we get a little minus symbol. Now I can just click and drag through all those bits. And when I let go, they're just buzzed off. And then we can do the same thing over here, Buzz. And we don't have to do it in one long swoop. We can do one at a time if we want. How cool is that? And with this tool still active, you can see if we just mouse over the bits, it sees every overlapping piece as a potentially independent shape, which just makes this so much easier than it used to be. I hope you're amazed by how much you've done so far. In this lesson, you learned how to use illustrators blend tool in steps mode to create a series of shelves between the top and bottom shelves that we created ourselves. We learned that some functions in Illustrator like when we used the blend tool here, end up working more like effects and they create virtual shapes that don't actually exist. And we saw how that looks when we switched over to outline mode and we weren't able to see the four shelves that we created with the blend tool. But we also learned that like having our own personal fairy godmother, we can convert illustrators virtual effects into real shapes using the expand command and potentially even more exciting. We learned that we can use the super magical shape builder tool to simplify the process of building shapes. Now that the body of the clock is done, be sure to save your work and join me in the next video where we will start building all the fun knick knacks to fill up the shelves. 5. The Magic of Transform Functions & Effects: In the last lesson, you learned about the blend tool, the shape builder tool, and one of several reasons why you might need to expand certain things in Illustrator. In this lesson, we'll take a look at another effect type of function that is super duper handy known as transform. All right, so now that we're done with the clock body, let's go back to our layers panel again. If you can't find it, go to window layers and I'm going to collapse this to clean this up. So I'm just closing the little drawer here. And then I want to lock this layer so that I'm not accidentally messing with it while we build everything else. So if we click in this little empty area right here, that will lock the clock body layer. And now you can see we don't accidentally grab it, so now we'll need to create a new layer for all of the chachkeys we're going to build. Again, we'll click that new layer button. We see it's called by default layer three and it's green. And if we double click on the words layer three, we can type in chochkeys, which if you don't know how to spell it, is T C H O T C H K E S. How fun is that? And then you press Enter and boom. All right, so now we're going to fill up a few of these shelves with a wonderful collection of books, all by drawing just a single rectangle. To get started, we're going to press M for the rectangular marquee tool, or you can snag it from over here on the tool bar. I'm going to position it about here on this shelf. And I'm just going to click and drag to make a book. And to zoom in on it, I'll press command or control plus a few times so we can see a little bit better. Now, we're going to talk about color more later, but for right now, you can just make this book any color you want. You can come up here and click as we've been doing, and pick one of these colors. Or if you have your Swatches panel open, you can also do it right here. So our goal here is to take the single book and duplicate it to span the width of the shelf. But unlike when we created the shelves in the last video using the blend tool, we don't know how many books it's going to take. So we wouldn't know how many steps we would need. And I don't know about you, but I don't feel like playing Goldilocks to try and figure that out. So if we come up and poke under the object menu here and we come down to transform, you'll see that we have this option here to transform again. And we have transform each. And these are super amazing and powerful and we're going to use them later. But in this case we're going to do things a slightly different way. Because it turns out there's another form of transform that we can take advantage of. And we're not going to find it here in the object menu. The type of transform that we're looking for is actually an naturally we can find it under the effect menu specifically. We're going to come down here to distort and transform. Over here we'll choose transform. Now your settings may vary slightly depending on how thick of a book that you drew. But down here under copies, if I put in a value of seven and I hit Tab, it looks like nothing happened. But if we come up here to the move horizontal setting and we start dragging this to the right, you can see what's going on. This value determines how much each copy is going to shift horizontally. And a positive value moves it to the right, a negative value would move it to the left. It's a balancing act between how far you want to move the copies and how many copies you want to make. If I put eight copies and I hit tab, we could see that it fits. But now I might want to adjust the move a little bit so you can type in a value here, you can drag the slider, or you can use your arrow keys to nudge. But I'm going to just type in actually 2.15 Oh, there it is. Notice that you can also apply transformations to the scale and the angle, and all kinds of other things. So when you're happy with it, go ahead, click okay. But what do we do if we want to change this? How do we edit this? How do we get back here if we retrace our steps and we come up to effect and we come back to distort and transform. And we come back to transform. Illustrator is going to get cranky and say, hey, this is going to apply another instance, because it knows we've already done this once. So it says right here to edit the current effect, double click the name of the effect in the appearance panel. Interesting. Let's click cancel. Where's the appearance panel? Like all panels, we'll find it under the window menu. So we'll choose window appearance here. Here's what Illustrator was trying to tell us. If you're familiar with Photoshop, the appearance panel is kind of like Illustrator's version of layer styles. So this is where you can add and edit effects and you use it in an illustrator, to control the appearance of a given shape in a number of different ways. This is another way where we can apply and change strokes and fills, or even multiple strokes and fills as we'll see later. But you can also apply and edit live effects like transform, which we can see is applied here. This is why Illustrator was warning us, hey, you've already applied transform. We can see that when we look right here. So if we want to make any changes, we can double click and we're right back here. And we could adjust, adjust this to a negative value or change the number of copies or whatever it is we want. Also, if we want to get rid of this, we can just select it here in the appearance panel and trash it. It really does behave like a layer style in Photoshop. All right, so now we have all of these books here, but whose bookcase is made of identically sized books, not mine. So how can we adjust this? If we press V for the very important selection tool and we try to select all of these books, you'll notice, hey, we can't click on these. What's going on? We can click on this one that we drew. But these ones, we can move the whole thing. But these books, we can't select them. I wonder if they too are virtual. Let's go to Outline View by pressing Command or Control Y and they don't really exist. All right, Commander, Control. Why? Just like the shelves, these are virtual and that's why we can't select them. Just as before, we need our fairy godmother in the form of the expand command. We'll come up to object, expand. Now, this time, instead of expand up here, it says expand, appearance. And that's because this was an effect. Remember, we applied it from effect and we went to distort and transform transform. This is treated a little bit differently, but it's the same thing. Instead of choosing expand, we'll choose expand appearance. And look at that. Now we have a lovely shelf of books. For our next trick, we're going to be randomizing the height of these books. And this is one of those things that if you didn't know better, you would get really frustrated because it wouldn't work like you would expect. And the reason is, again, let's look to our top left advisor over here and we see that these books are a group. And you might be thinking, hey, I didn't group the books. And you'd be right. And guess what? Neither did I. Illustrator did. Illustrator loves groups. And it will group things for you whenever it gets the chance. In this case, when we expanded the appearance of that distort and transform effect that created all these books. Anyway, when we made them, real illustrator grouped them. An illustrator loves groups so much that even if we come up here to the object menu and we choose ungroup, we see that it put a group inside a group. We've ungrouped this once, but it's still grouped. Let's repeat object ungroup. Now when we look, we finally see path which means just individual books. That is a really important thing to remember is that when things are acting weird, or a function or command or something you're trying to do is not doing it the way you think. Always look up here and this will tell you what you're dealing with. And there are some commands or things you might be trying to do that will not work at all or will not work the same way on a group. So now that we have ungrouped this, let's make a copy of all of these books. And drag it up here with our very important selection tool, keyboard, shortcut V. I'm going to drag across all the books and we'll make a copy by holding Alt or option and dragging. We're going to need to compress these because obviously they're too big for the shelf up here. I'll hover over the side. Anchor right here. And I'm going to press Alt or Option, so that we can scale both sides at the same time. Now we're going to transform these and we're going to use a different transform. Because unlike the distort and transform effect, which of course lives under the effect menu under distort and transform, this time we're going to use a regular, straightforward transformation, not a live editable effect. Which is why I assume that it doesn't live under the effect menu. It lives under object transform each. This is such a cool function because it's going to apply to each object individually instead of as a single unit. Here, we want to make sure that transform objects is on, not these other things. We want to make sure random is on, so we can randomize the effect down here for our reference point, because we want the effect to happen to the top of the books, in other words, upwards from the bottom. We need to select this bottom reference point. That way the books will grow upwards and down. Then we can come up here to the scale for the vertical scale and drag the slightly to the right until you like it. Also, if you want to play with the horizontal scale, you can also try dragging that maybe to the left, and that will stagger the space a little bit. Some of them will be a little bit thinner or bigger. That's up to your personal taste. When you're happy with everything. Let's go ahead and click Okay. Now here's another cool pro tip for you. Rather than repeating that up there, we can just select these bottom books. We just go to object transform again, which the keyboard shortcut is command or control D. When we do that, we're going to get different random results. But because this was the most recent thing we just did, we can tell Illustrator to do it again. Now we get the same treatment down here. If we wanted to, we could still take this and just scrunch it down. In this video, you learned about the transform effect and how that lives under here. And then you can access it in the appearance panel, which of course now it's gone because we expanded it. You learned how the distort and transform effect is different from the each and transform again, function again. This trans each option is what allowed us to randomize the different heights of the books. And of course, in this lesson you saw that the only thing that illustrator might love more than an overwhelming number of transform options is groups. So much so that it creates them after almost every function that you apply. And even sometimes puts groups within groups. Which is why it's always so important to keep an eye up here in your Illustrator Compass to know what you are dealing with. Okay, so enough with transformations for now. In the next video, we're going to take a look at some fun ways to work with color in illustrator. 6. Tips & Tricks for Working with Color: In the last video, we used a transform effect and later a transform function to create two shelves filled with books. In this video, we'll learn how to bring them to life with color, as well as some great tricks for working with color in Illustrator. Let's start by taking a peek at our swatches panel. If you don't see yours, you can find it by going to window swatches. And yours might look different than mine. I like to have my swatches big like this. But you can change the way your swatches appear by going to the panel menu, which is this little guy hidden way out here. If you click on that, you can choose what kind of view that you would like. I've got mindset to large thumbnail view. You choose what works for you, but if yours looks different, that could be part of the reason why in the panel itself, you'll see some preset colors you can edit. Let me de select my book over here, I make sure nothing is selected. But here in the panel, you can edit any of these colors at any time. If you just double click on it, it will open up this little Swatch options panel and you can adjust the dials here. You can enter in a hex code, and of course you can rename it. Just know that if you make changes here and you click okay, you're actually going to be making changes to the Swatch that was here. In this case. I'm going to hit cancel to create a new Swatch or a copy of a Swatch. You can select anyone in this case. I'll just leave this guy selected. If I want to make a new Swatch, maybe based on this or I want to copy this with that Swatch selected, I can just come click the little plus down here. Now it's going to be making a new Swatch here. You could give it a name like cool new Swatch and we could play with the dials, make whatever color we want. Then it's a good idea to enable this option here for Global. What that means is that later if you apply this color to your artwork and you decide you want to update or change the color, it will update all of the artwork with the new color. So it saves you some time. Now if I click Okay, we'll see that Illustrator adds that swatch here to the panel for additional preset color options. We can click this leftmost button at the very bottom of the Swatch panel. This will open our Swatch library collections and you can see there are tons to choose from whichever you click on, so if I choose Kids Stuff, for example, it's going to open in a separate panel. Then you can work with these kids stuff, colors over here. Or if we want to add, let's say this theme right here. If we want to add this to our swatches panel, we can just click on the folder right here. And you'll see it just adds it. And then we can close that panel. But where do these themes come from anyway? And what do you do if you want to make your own? It turns out there are loads of different ways to come up with color themes. But one of my favorites is to use Color.adobe.com Once you're logged in with your Adobe ID, you will see loads of different tools and tabs, and just all kinds of different ways to come up with color themes. So I encourage you to explore this at a later time. But right now, I want to show you one of my favorite ways, which can be found here under the Explore tab. Here, you can enter keywords, so maybe I'm going to type in Ocean. And now I can browse all kinds of ocean related color themes that were either generated by other Adobe users or sampled from stock images with the same keywords. Once you find a theme that you like, you can click to add it to your Creative cloud library. You could download a J Peg of this color theme. Or if you click on the color theme, you get even more options, including the ability to download this as an Adobe Swatch exchange file, which you could then load into any Adobe app. You can copy this in a number of different formats. If you just need to grab a hex code for something, you can just mouse over the color you want, Click copy. And that hex code is now copied, tear clipboard. So you can add it to whatever Apre in to find that color theme here in Illustrator. Because I added it to my library, I can open my library's tab under window libraries. And if I go into my color themes library and scroll down here, we can see the theme that I added. And if I write, click on it. I can say Add Theme to Swatches. And now it's in my Swatch panel. Another option, if you download the ASC file, Adobe Swatch Exchange. Then from the swatches panel, you can choose the menu. And choose Open Swatch library and then other library. And then you would navigate to the file. To check out another way to add colors, let's add the color theme that I've included for this course. This is a theme I found on Adobe Color and I renamed it, Toby, to load that into Illustrator, you're going to go to the Swatches panel. And from the panel menu, choose open Swatch Library. And from this menu you're going to choose other library. Navigate to the course files and find the file called sorbet. Then click open, and it's going to open in this separate panel here to add this. Now to our swatches, we again just click the folder. And now we have it in our swatches panel. Okay, So we can close our libraries so we can apply the colors by selecting an object and then clicking on a color. We can also select an object and then come up here and we will find that same theme here. And maybe we'll make this one this color. We can also drag and drop from the swatches panel here. Maybe if I want to make the next book orange, I'll click to deselect. Because otherwise if this one's selected and I click orange, then it's going to become orange if I click away. But now I grab the purple swatch, I can drag it onto that book. Maybe I'll make the next one orange. Sometimes if I'm going to be doing a lot of this, I might just hold the spacebar and drag my books closer so I don't have to go so far. And maybe we'll leave that one that color and put another purple here and another blue. Okay, so like that looks good. Then I'm going to do the same thing down here. So just go about making a nice, fun and colorful collection of books in whatever kind of order you want. And I'm going to show you in a minute how we can randomize these to get some different effects. So let's say we want to take these colors and do a little bit of experimenting. We can select all of our books and then appear in the control panel. This little thing that looks kind of like a beach ball. This is the recolor artwork button. And if we click on that, I'll move it out of the way here so you can see. But we have some really easy ways to experiment with color. For one thing, we can take these different baubles and drag them around the color wheel, and you see that Illustrator updates everything. You'll notice that because this link is enabled, it's going to maintain the same spatial relationship between these colors as we move things around. If we uncheck that, then we can move individual bubbles around. And if we make a mess of things and we want to reset, we can come up here and click the Reset button. If we just want to shuffle the colors, the existing colors, maybe we just aren't happy with like the order we put them in. We want to just shuffle it around. We can come over here and just click this button. And you'll notice that it just shuffles those colors around. Very cool. We can click this button here to adjust the saturation and brightness. The colors stay the same, but the saturation and brightness levels, we'll randomize again. I'm going to reset. Another thing that can be handy is to play down here with this slider and these two different views. Color is a combination of three things, hue saturation and brightness. This wheel can only show us two of those three things at a time. If we click this button on the left, we can use this slider to adjust the brightness. If we switch to the second view, here we put saturation on the slider. Now we can drag this to the left and we get less saturated colors. Or we can drag it to the right and get more saturated. I'm going to reset this one more time. And if we come down here and click Advanced Options, we get even more stuff to play with over here. We can apply new colors based on color rules as applied to our base color here. If I come over and click this drop down, we can choose, for example, maybe I want to adjust my color theme to be analogous colors based on this color right here. So I'll click that, and you can see that these colors all update. So this is the original color, stays the same. This color becomes this, this color becomes that, and so on. And now if we move this out of the way, that's what our books would look like. Maybe I like that, but maybe I don't want to apply it right now. But if I want to pocket this color theme for later, I can just tap the little new color group. And now I've got one created right here. One of the handiest ways to adjust color that many people don't know about is from down here under this sort of secret little, not very noticeable menu. If we click on that and we choose Global Adjust, now we can just take all those colors. And for example, we could adjust, yes, the saturation and brightness, but also temperature. So maybe these colors are pretty warm. If we want to cool them off, we can drag them to the left until they cross over, as cool as we want. So there is just an endless way to play with colors and illustrator and the recolor artwork function is very powerful. So if you like your new colors, click Okay. Otherwise, I'm going to tap reset. And then click. Okay. Now, before we move on, let's quickly recolor our two little pots here. Now you'll notice I can't select it, because remember that we're on the chachkeys layer now, and this is on the clock body layer. So how do we move them up? Let's go to our layers panel. And we'll need to unlock the clock body. And then let's use our very important selection tool, keyboard, shortcut V to click, and drag across to select those. It's kind of like throwing a net into the C. We'll select both of those and I'm going to change the color to just, maybe I'll make my own kind of this beige color. But if I double click, I'm going to make that and we'll click, okay. Now we need to move this from the clock body layer to the chokes layer. And the way that we do that is so funny, it just makes me laugh every time. I don't know why. But this is how it works. Because these two items are selected and they're on the clock layer, which we've unlocked, We see this little red dot and this represents our selection. If we want to move our selection from here to here, we just click drag drop. And now we'll see that the lines around these two objects are green because they're now on the chokes layer. So we can re lock the clock body layer by clicking right in here. And now we're all set. So as you saw in this video, Illustrator makes it super easy to experiment with different color rules and all kinds of variations. It's fun. Right, Then the next video, we're going to spit up one of these pots with some line work courtesy of the pencil tool. 7. The Super (N)ifty Pencil Tool: In the last video, you saw some fun ways to experiment with color. So hopefully by now you have some colors you're happy with in your Swatches panel. In this video, we'll learn how to use a tool that honestly used to make me laugh it's the pencil tool. And if you've used Photoshop as pencil tool before, you know what I mean, Like who uses this and for what? But Illustrators pencil tool is fantastic. Let me help you understand why. First of all, the keyboard shortcut for the pencil tool is because it's nifty and it's needle and it's gnarly, which doesn't start with, but you know what I mean, You can also find it over here on your tool bar. So far, all the shape tools that we've seen have been used to create closed shapes. But this time, we're going to be using the pencil tool to create open shapes. Essentially, that means we're going to be drawing lines. When I'm working with open shapes, especially lines, I'm thinking about the stroke color, not the fill color. Because in most cases, open shapes have their fill set to none. So I'm going to set the fill to none. And for the stroke, I'm going to choose a light color, maybe like this beige right here. The pencil tool has some really neat settings that can be super helpful in Illustrator. One of the ways that you can access settings for any particular tool is to double click on it in the toolbar. So let's take a look at the nifty pencil options by double clicking. Here we can see all kinds of different options. The one that we're going to focus on right now is called Fidelity. To help us draw really nice smooth lines that don't look like we've been mainlining caffeine all day. Let's take the slider and drag it all the way to the right. And we'll click, okay. I'm going to pick one of these pots on this bottom one here. And I'm going to just click and drag to draw a series of three lines like preschool level art here. I'm going to click and I'm going to drag and let go. I'll start here and click and drag and let go. Click and drag, and let go. We want to make sure that the lines we draw go well past the pot. Don't try to end exactly on the pot. It's actually much easier to just go past it because as you can expect, we're going to buzz it off in a minute. Now if you make a mistake, of course, you can delete it. Or you could press command and control Z to undo it. But remember that we also have that adjustment arrow, the direct selection tool whose keyboard shortcut is a. For a, just for example, I'm going to press command plus to zoom in here a bit. I don't really like where I ended up with this line. It's crossing this one, so close to the edge, it's not noticeable. If I want to move this line, I'm going to click and I'm going to click right on this endpoint, so that this is selected and the other one is not. Then I'm going to pull it up this way so that I have some space here and that is much better. You can always adjust things with your direct selection tool. All right, now we're ready for the fun part. I'm going to jump in really quick to point out something with our open pencil paths selected. We could shift, click on the pot to add it to our selection, and grab our Shape Builder tool by pressing Shift M, holding down the Alt or Option key to switch to subtraction mode. We could buzz off these edges and everything looks hunky dory until we go to scale this. And you'll notice that if I scale down the pot, we've got two problems. I'll move it over here so you can see a little better. The weight of our stroke suddenly looks huge. And also, we just buzzed it off, but now it's overhanging again. What is up with that? The problem is that we scaled the pot and the open paths that we drew with the pencil, but we didn't scale the live corner effects or the stroke. So let's undo that. There's two ways of dealing with this. One option is we need to tell Illustrator that we want the corners and the stroke to scale along with the pot. We do that from the transform panel, which of course can be found from the window menu under Transform. Here you'll notice two options, one to scale corners and another to scale strokes and effects. Now everything looks great. The strokes scale to maintain the same relative width and the corner scaled so that everything still lines up. The other option is we can expand these strokes. We don't have to. They're not virtual like our shelves and our books were earlier. But it changes the way that Illustrator treats them. So here's what that looks like. The last thing we're going to do before we buzz all this is actually expand these strokes. Instead of just an open path with a stroke applied to it, we're going to convert this into a closed shape with a fill. So here's what I mean. I'm going to select all three of these lines. I'm clicking on one. And then you want to shift. Click the rest till the three lines are selected. Then we're going to come up to object, and remember our fairy godmother. We're going to choose expand. So we're going to tell it to turn the fill and or stroke into shapes. So watch this. We'll click, okay. See it's a line with a stroke. But once we click, okay, it changes from an open path with a stroke to a long, skinny noodle like rectangle. That's a closed shape with a fill. So it looks the same, but it behaves a little bit differently. So now with our very important selection tools, let's throw a net over the whole shebang and we'll get our super magical shape builder tool. So remember, super magical means shift M for the Shape Builder tool. And by default it wants to unite everything. But we're going to go into Buzz Saw mode by holding down option or Alt to get the minus. Now we can just buzz right there and buzz right here. That looks great. And you'll notice if we look up here, this is one of the rare instances where Illustrator did not group it. Can you believe it? So let's group it ourselves by using the keyboard shortcut command or control and the letter G for group. So now we have this group. I'm going to zoom out by pressing command or control and the number zero. Let's switch to our very important selection tool. And drag this down here to the shelf. And we're going to need to make it smaller. At least I do. Your pot might be a better size, but I need to make mine smaller. So to do that, I am shift dragging from the corner to keep it proportional, right, because otherwise it's going to get distorted. That's a look at the nifty pencil tool, and we just used it to draw open shapes in the form of lines in order to keep everything looking good. When scaled, we can either tell illustrator to scale the live corners and stroke along with the pot. Or in this case, we expanded the open path with the stroke to turn it into a closed path with a fill. We also saw that here in Illustrator, you can call up the settings for various tools by double clicking on them, which brought us our pencil tool options. And we cranked up the smooth setting under fidelity to make sure that our lines were nice and smooth and indeed they look good. Right, In the next video, we're going to learn how to take a simple oval and use a combination of the rotate tool and the transform again command to create a starfish sansivero plant to go right inside our beautiful pot. 8. Rocking the Rotate Tool: Now that you know about the nifty pencil tool, let's take a look at another surprisingly handy tool, the Rotate Tool. In this example, we're going to be using the Rotate Tool followed by the transform again command to turn a simple oval into a starfish sansiveria plant. If you don't have your little flower pot selected here, use your very important selection tool to select it. And then we can zoom in by pressing command or control plus, plus, plus. And remember that we can also adjust the position of our artboard in our screen here by just holding down the space bar and dragging. So we just want to have a little room to work over here. I'm just going to build over here and then we'll move it over. So we're going to start by drawing an ellipse. And you may recall that the keyboard shortcut for an ellipse or an oval is L. So I'm going to press L to get the ellipse tool. We don't want a fill color or I mean a stroke. We don't want a stroke, but we do want a Phil. So I'm going to select this nice cheerful, bright green. And I'm just going to click and drag to draw out a nice oval leaf like this. So if you're familiar with starfish sands of areas, they kind of look like a sunburst coming up in the morning like on the horizon. So it's like a fan shape. So we have this spindle here, and then we're going to have a series of spindles reaching out like this in a fan shape to create this plant. So the next thing we want to do is rotate this. So we can press R for the rotate tool, which apparently this is the icon four. This one is easy to recognize, so I can find that one. All right, and with the rotate tool, you can click and you can rotate, right? Like we can just spin this stuff any way we want, but we're going to get a little bit more precise with it, so I'm going to undo that rotation. And what we need to do is tell Illustrator where we want to rotate around. Like, what do we want the pivot point to be? In this case? I want the pivot point to be right about here. So I want it to be in line with the center, but not the center and not quite the end over here. I'm going to pick a spot about here in order to open up our options and designate this as the pivot point. Instead of the default here, which is the center. I'm going to hold down Alt or Option and click that's going to bring up our options. And you can see that it moved the pivot point to the spot right here. Now what do we use for the angle? How would we know, right? Like how are we going to figure that out? Well, like so many things in the world, the answer is math. And like so many other things in the world, not my strong suit, but thankfully, Illustrator is going to do the math for us. So like I said, this is going to be a fan shape, right? And a fan shape is half of a circle. A circle has 360 degrees. If we take half of that, we get 180. So I'm going to type 180 and I'm going to say I want 180 divided, so I'm hitting the forward 180/6 for six spindles. And you'll notice if I hit tab that we get this little preview. And the spindle, the leaf rotated downwards. It's like an Underworld starfish sans area fan. That's fine. That's one thing. Illustrator calculated the result as 30 degrees, so we need to rotate 30 degrees, but I want it to go 30 degrees the other direction. So we do that by clicking in here and hitting Minus. Now if I hit Tab, you'll see it goes the other way. So that's good. But I don't want it to just take this circle or oval and move it, or rotate it. I want it to make a copy and then apply the rotation. So instead of clicking okay, I'm going to click Copy. Then we see it made a copy. Now we could repeat that whole process a bunch of times, but why would we do that? When we know under the object menu there's something called object transform. Again, what this does is it takes whatever we have just done that could remotely be considered a transformation. In this case a rotation definitely counts because that is the last thing we just did. We can just say, hey Illustrator, do it again. Command D transform again. I'll click on that again. We have a third spindle, so now I'm just going to use my keyboard and press command or control D. And again and again and again until we get this perfect little star burst fan shape. And look at that, we have a cute little sands of a starfish, sands of area. It's important to point out that these are all separate little spindles and so we want to group them. And also, it might bother some people to have this little bits under here. What we can do, of course, we'll grab our very important selection tool. Throw a net over all of that, and let's get our super magical shape builder. So I'm going to press Shift M by default, remember it wants to be in merge mode. Let's hold down Alt or option to get the minus mode and buzz all that off. I'm going to zoom in a little further because you can see there's these itty bitty shapes. Yours may look a little different because we didn't all precisely set our same rotation point. So we've got our nice little starfish, sands of area. We've buzzed off any bottom bits that we might not want. Now let's group this by pressing command or control. You can see that it is a group. Now let's use our very important selection tool to grab this whole thing and drag it over here to our pot. And now we may see that we need to scale it, so it overhangs the pot a little bit. To scale it proportionally, we hold shift, right. And to scale it from both sides at once, we hold alt or option. Now look at that. Healthy little Sansa, starfish, Sandsaia, so cute while we're here, let's group the Sansivia plant with the pot that it's in with the plant selected shift, click on the pot and let's group them by pressing command or control G. One more thing while we're here. You'll recall that we've grouped this, right? We have one group is the pot itself and the little line shapes, that's a group by itself. And then we have the group of the San Siveria plant. And then the whole thing is grouped together. So just imagine, for the sake of learning that you wanted to get in here, and I don't know, move one of these little spindles. So you might think that you'd have to ungroup, ungroup, ungroup, make your change. And then regroup. Regroup, regroup, right? And that would be a lot of work. Instead, we can actually crack open this group and we can get in and make our adjustments and get out without having to ungroup it. You can see here, this is a group to crack it open or drill down into the group, we're going to just double click on it and check it out. Everything kind of grayed out. And now we are inside our group and we know we're inside because everything is great out. But also because if we look up here, we have this little breadcrumb menu. So this is showing us that we're on the chokes layer and we're inside a group. But you may recall that this is still grouped. So if we want to move one of these spindles, we've got to crack open this group too. So we'll double click again. Now we see the pot grays out. Now we're inside the plant group and we can see here now we're on the chochkys layer in a group and in another group that's nested inside the first one. So now we could make our change. Like maybe I'm going to make the spindle taller for some reason. So we'll do that. And then to get out of here, all we have to do is hit Escape. And you'll notice if I click on this, it's still grouped, so we didn't have to ungroup anything. If we just want to make a little change like that, you just double click. And then if I want to change here, then I'm going to double click the pot. And then I could move around these things for whatever reason, but I'm going to undo that because that looks kind of weird. All right? And then you just hit escape and you're out of there, and everything is still grouped. It's an amazing little trick and for whatever reason, a lot of people just don't know about it. Okay, so that was cool, right? Let's practice that same exact technique one more time to make the face of the clock. So let's zoom out by pressing command or control. And the number zero, select the white part of this clock, which we can't do because it's on the clock body layer which is locked. Let's unlock the clock body layer and click to actively choose the clock body layer, because we want the face of the clock to be on the clock body layer, right? So now we can click to select this shape and then zoom in on it by pressing command or control plus plus a few times. All right, so this face of this clock, you can see here's the original. It just has these little dots and the hands right here, which is super easy to create. Again, we're going to use our ellipse. Press L for ellipse, let's choose a black fill. And when it come up here, and you'll notice the smart gride, right? These little purple lines if you don't see them. You can make sure they're turned on by going to view and making sure there is a check mark next to smart guides. And conversely, if they bother you, you can turn them off. But I like them. I'm looking to put my cursor right here so I know that it's going to be aligned with the clock. We can always align it later. But it's nice when you can just do it on the fly and it saves you a little time. Remember that we're going to make a perfect circle by constraining our eclipse using the shift key. And I don't want to drag a circle out to the side because this is the center point, right? To draw a circle from the center, we hold Alt, or option shift to make a perfect circle. And Alt or option to drag from the center. And I'm just going to drag a little dot. Now we're going to repeat the same exact process. So we'll press R for the rotate tool. And remember we need to select the pivot point. And we do that by putting our cursor in the area where we want the pivot point. And you'll notice because my smart guides are on, it's telling me this is the center of the circle, so that's a good place to put the pivot point. So we'll hold down Alt or Option while we click to set the pivot point and open our options. Now here we want to move 360 degrees around this whole circle. So we'll type 360 forward slash divided by 12 hours. And we'll hit copy. Looks good. Then we can just repeat that by holding command or control D. Do it again. Do it again. Gin, gin, gin, gin, gin, gin. That's it, We just made a perfect clock face. Now we can draw in the hands, let's switch to our rectangular marquee by pressing M. I'm just going to draw a little skinny shape. Now. See, it's not on center because I wasn't paying attention to the guides. But I can move it while I'm still drawing. As long as I don't let go of my mouse and I hold space bar, then put it here And I want it to go past the center point, right? Like I don't want it to end right here. I want it to be a little bit longer. I'm going to have that pointing right up at the top. And now we're going to make the hour hand. Let's copy this by pressing command or control and the letter C. Then instead of just pasting it, which will put it here, that's not what we want to. It's called paste in front, which basically just pastes it right on top of the original. The keyboard shortcut is command or control and the letter for front. Now we don't see it because it's right on top of the other, But we can rotate it. Let's switch to our rotate tool by pressing R for rotate. And we can see this is our pivot point, but we want the pivot point to be here This time we don't need all the options, we just need to reset the pivot point. So we can just click, then you can set the hour to whatever you want. It could be 05:00 It's 05:00 somewhere. I don't know. I think I'll just go with 04:00 That's a fun afternoon time. 04:00 on the nose. And the hour hand of course should be shorter. So I'm going to switch to my selection tool if you're having trouble seeing the little grabby point that's in between the corners here. You just need to zoom in more. I'll hit command or control plus. Now we can see this point here which will allow me to shorten it that is looking super. Let's go ahead and lock that clock body layer back up. Then let's make sure and click the chochkys layer so that it is active. Again, that's a look at how to use the rotate tool combined with the transform. Again, function to create perfectly spaced and equally rotated objects around the pivot points of your choosing. Nicely done. In the next video, we're going to return to the appearance panel and learn how to apply two fills to a single object at the same time. We'll take a look at illustrators built in pattern swatches. 9. Adding Multiple Strokes and Fills: In the last video, you learned how you can use the Rotate tool combined with the transform. Again, function in some pretty useful ways. In this video, we're going to look at the appearance panel to add a pattern to our other flower pot. And I'm suddenly realizing we don't need this reference image on anymore. I don't know why it's still here. We can hide that by clicking this little button right here, and now it's gone. That's super. So this is the pot that we're going to be applying a pattern fill to. Let's use our very important selection tool to select it and drag it over here to the shelf. And I'm going to scale it down once again by holding shift to keep it proportional and dragging downward like that. So we're going to put another different plant here later. And it's going to be a fun spilly kind of plant. So we want to leave some room for that. And we should be on our chochkys layer with the other layers locked. Make sure that pot is selected. And let's zoom in. And let's zoom in by pressing command or control plus, plus, plus, so we can really see next. Let's open our appearance panel. If it's on your screen and it's not already open, it might be collapsed down to a little icon like this. So it looks like a sun. And we can click on that. Or of course it lives under the Window menu under Appearance, Because this object is selected, we are looking at the attributes of that object. If I click on something else, then we're going to be seeing different attributes. Here. We want to make sure we've got the pot selected. We can see that it does not have a stroke, it does have a fill, and we are going to add another fill to it. Remember that the appearance panel, if you're familiar with Photoshop, it's very much like the layer styles. And we can use it to apply effects and all kinds of things including second strokes or fill. Down here along the bottom here, we can add effects here, we can add a new fill. And here we could add a new stroke. In this case, we want to add a second fill. So we'll click this button here and we get to say, hey, what do we want to fill it with? Now obviously if we just pick a color, then we have two fills, but they're right on top of each other and we can only see one or the other when we hide them. We're not going to fill it with another solid color swatch. We're going to fill it with a pattern from this little drop down. You can see there are some patterns that are already loaded. At least in my swatches. Yours might look different, but what we're going to do is go back to our libraries here. This is the Swatch libraries. It's different than our Creative Cloud Library, but we're going to click on this and these are just oodles, more of different swatches. And you'll notice one of them is a collection of pattern swatches. And they come in three flavors. We're going to go with basic graphics and I'm going to choose basic graphics textures. Here in this super micro panel, we can almost see what the options are. I'm going to stretch this bigger, and remember we can make these thumbnails larger by coming here to the panel menu and choosing large thumbnail view. We can see somewhat better. But we can apply these by just clicking on them and look at this, all these cool fun patterns are here. Now it's important to point out that these patterns are on a transparent background or transparent fill. So if we change the color of the fill of our pot, it will show through the pattern. Not all patterns are created this way, but that's how these patterns are. So I'm going to go with this one here. I think this is called bird feet, which I just love. So I'm going to select that and feel free to explore here and play with these. There's some really cool options, but I'm going to select that and close because I want to show you how this works over here. As you can see, here's our fill color. If I change that, we can see that it shows through the pattern which is on top because the pattern just contains these black bits. And then these areas are just empty. If we drag the pot over here and we hide the pill, we just see white. If we drag the pot down here, we see the books in the background. So basically this pot is empty except for this like see through pattern. Okay, We'll set it back on the shelf and give it a fill color. I guess I'll go back to beige or whatever I had before. And the other thing I want to point out is that the order matters here because the pattern is transparent. We can see the fill color below. But if we drag that solid fill and put it on top of the pattern, then we can't see the pattern because the fill is covering it up. You just want to keep that in mind. That's why I say it really operates like Photoshop layers panel, in that it has layers for these effects. The effects are layered, but also because this is where we can control those effects and things. We can still control the fill color out here, but it will depend on what's selected in our appearance panel. If I select the fill here in the appearance panel, then we see the pattern fill here. If I select the color fill, then we see the color fill here. You might notice up here in the control panel, we now see this little caution symbol. This is letting us know that whatever fill is selected right now is not the top one. It's letting us know that there is another fill up above it. And in order to get to it, you can click on that little caution arrow and that will switch to the top fill, in this case, the pattern. But I think it's good to just be in the habit of working with multiple fills and those types of things in the appearance panel, so you always know exactly what's going on. The appearance panel is also a great place to do some investigative work, so if you're ever working on someone else's file or a stock illustration and you can't really tell what's happening. You want to look, of course, look up here in the top left because this tells you lots of important stuff. But also, if that doesn't answer your question, then you also want to check the appearance panel because you might find out that whatever object you're trying to work with has an effect or something applied to it. And you would need to work with it from here first. So in this short video, you got another look at using the appearance panel in this case to apply a second fill, specifically a patterned fill. In the next video, we're going to learn how to build a very healthy looking house plant using a custom designed scatter brush. 10. Creating a Custom Brush + "Draw Inside": In the last video, you learned how to add multiple strokes or fills to an object using the appearance panel. In this video, I'm going to show you how to create a custom brush and give you a peek at a super cool feature called Draw Inside. Okay, so we're going to be creating another plant to fill up this second pot. In a moment, we'll create the custom scatter brush for the leaves of the plant. And then we'll use that brush to stroke the paths that make up the plant. But before we do all that, we need to create those paths. So let's revisit our nifty friend, the pencil tool. So we'll press for pencil and we want to make sure nothing is selected. And we'll set this to no stroke, the fill color, you know what doesn't matter, because it's going to get replaced with leaves shortly. To make it easy to see, I'm going to choose green. Remember that we can double click the pencil tool to bring up these options and we can smooth out our lines if we choose. So I'm going to click Okay. So now we're just going to draw a little series of lines that will eventually get filled with leaves. You don't have to draw anything pretty here we are just trying to create some different paths for our leaves to go. Just draw a series of lines, something like this. If you don't like any of your lines, you can delete them. Of course, you can edit them with our Direct selection tool that we use to make adjustments. So you could click with that tool and grab any of these points and adjust their handles if you want to reshape them. But we really can't tell what this is even going to look like yet, because we have to create the leaf brush. And then we will stroke this path with our fancy custom scatter brush. Let's make that over here in just some empty space. We're going to make a leaf using the ellipse tool. Yet again, we're going to press L for Eclipse. In this case, I'm going to give it a nice fill and no stroke. Let's hold shift and we'll just draw a little circle like this. Then we want to duplicate this and slide it over slightly. Let's press V to get the very important selection tool. Then we'll hold Alt or option to make a copy. Shift in this case will keep the second circle aligned with the first. It doesn't go in some weird direction. Up here, Alt tells illustrator to make a copy and shift tells illustrator to keep that copy aligned with the original. Now we see we have two circles and what we want is this leaf shape in the middle. If you want a more narrow leaf, then you might want to move your second shape over. It might be hard to tell. Actually, with a fill here, if you want to flip flop the fill and stroke colors, you can click this little button right here that just inverts whatever was. Your stroke will become your fill. The keyboard shortcut for this is shift X for X change. Here you can see the shape in the middle. Maybe a little bit better. If we want it to be narrow, then you'd want this circle to be further away. If you want a wider leaf, you can pull it in closer. All right, but now we're ready to have our fill. So I'm going to select these both again and inverse these colors back so that they have a nice fill. We can use our Shape Builder tool, or if you want to just warm up to the Pathfinder panel, we can go to the Pathfinder panel. Window Pathfinder. And the option we want is this one right here intersect, which is going to leave us with this lovely leaf. Now we want to enter a special drawing mode, so that anything that we scribble in here is only going to be visible in the leaf. So we do that with this little button right here. So this is where we normally are. This is draw normal mode, and over here we have draw inside mode. You'll notice when we click on that that we get this funny little box around it. Now if we grab our pencil tool and set the fill to none and a stroke color to something noticeably different, like maybe the darker green right here. Now what we can do is come up here beyond the tip. And I'm just going to click and drag a line like that. And when I let go, we see that the line, even though we colored outside of the lines, it's clipped. To the boundaries of the leaf. This is one way to create what's called a clipping group or a clipping mask. But let's get a little bit fancy with this stroke here. We could just leave this, but then I couldn't show you guys some of the art brushes that are pretty cool. So we're going to open our brush panel. So window brushes, and this is just a few brushes. Of course, there are many brushes. If we go to the little library collection down here, there's all kinds of brushes upon brushes, upon brushes. And you can make your own, and you can buy them and download free ones from all over the place. But we're going to keep it simple. And right now, we're just going to apply this charcoal brush. If you don't see this here, then you want to come to your panel menu and choose Show Art Brushes. And that will make sure that this is visible. And then we can click on it, and you can see that by clicking it applies this brush to our stroke in our selected color. How cool is that? And then when we're happy with this, we can back out of the special drawing mode and go back to normal drawing mode by just clicking right here. And then if we grab the selection tool and click away and click back, you see that we just have this. And even if we try to select something out here, we can't get it because it's just not accessible to us here. And I'll show you how to get back there in a minute. But this is our leaf and we're going to use this to stroke all of these paths that we drew. So we might want, this leaf is huge for this plant. When we create the brush, it's going to be created at whatever size we make this leaf. I think I want mine to be a little smaller, maybe like this. And now to turn this into a brush, all we have to do is click and drag it to an empty area of our brushes panel and let go. And then Illustrator is going to ask us, do we want to turn that into a scatter brush, or an art brush, or a pattern brush, or there's calligraphy and bristle brushes too. But we're going to choose scatter brush and click. Okay. And then it's going to present us with all these options. So first thing we can give it a name like house plant. That's our brush. And over here we want to randomize this brush, right? So it'd be great if the leaves were kind of just going every which way here. So to do that, we want to randomize the size. So we'll choose random spacing, random scatter, random rotation, random. And we want this random rotation to be relative to not the page but the path. Now up here we have these settings. So here these are kind of like guard rails for these settings. So for example, for the size, we could maybe say, okay, Illustrator, we want it to be random, but we don't want it smaller than 92% of its original size. And we don't want it bigger than 113% So same with spacing. We can adjust the spacing. Maybe we want to just keep it 91, 96% scatter. I don't even know, honestly. We won't really know what this is looking like until we try rendering it for rotation. I'm just going to let it go everywhere from minus 180 to plus 180. It can just go wild if we wanted to, we could apply some colorization according to a number of options here. But we're going to leave all of this alone and click, Okay. Nothing has happened. We've simply created the brush. Now we do not have any idea what it looks like on the plant yet. So let's use our very important selection tool to throw a net over all of that. Being careful not to get the pot right. We just want these paths. And then we'll come over here and click to apply our leaf brush. I think because I drew such swirly lines, there's not room for all the leaves to be in there. We have a couple of choices. We can double click the brush right here. That will reopen our options. And maybe I want the spacing to be way less. Maybe I want all of this like really close together. That looks, looks like a very healthy happy plant. So here we can reduce the spacing. So we're compacting the wiggle room that we're giving Illustrator for the spacing. And we also might want to readjust the scatter so we can tweak that. We can click, okay. And then Illustrator is going to ask us, hey, you made a change to this brush, and you already had used it to make this plant. So do you want to apply the changes to the plant or do you want to just leave the plant alone and just update the brush here in the panel? So I'm going to say apply and now that new brush is applied here, or the edited brush. So that's one way you can double click on the brush to bring this open. Or you can also just keep clicking on it here to re randomize and see if you get a result that you like better. Another option is to use our direct selection tool. So that's a for adjust. And then of course we can get in here and click on any of these points. And you'll notice that as I extend this line illustrators adding more leaves. So if I want to bring this in, I should probably do it this way. And let's see, what else could we maybe expand here if I'm trying to fill this in, maybe I want to get rid of this anchor point here. So I'm going to press the minus key, which you can see gives me a pen with a minus. And then I can just click and cut off that point. So if there's any like strays that you want to prune off, that's a really easy way to do it. I'm going to use my direct selection tool and just kind of move this guy in so you can just fiddle with this. You know, you can play with the brush, you can move entire paths, or you can move just certain points. You can also change the design of the brush. So it's tempting as it is to select this and get it out of here because we're done with it. But if we wanted to edit the artwork of this brush, we'd either have to create something new or keep this bit around. So for example, if I want the stroke inside here to be finer and I wanted to edit this, we can break into this clipping group using the very important selection tool. So I'm going to select that. And then here's the leaf. But if we double click it, you can see we're in this isolation mode again. But instead of a group, it's called a clip group or clipping group. And now we can select this stroke here. And maybe instead of a full point, I'm going to reduce that to a half of a point. And then I'll press Escape to get out of the group. Now you'll notice nothing changed over here. So what we can do is if we want to take this new leaf and replace the existing one, we just option drag it on top of the existing brush. And when we let go, it's going to ask us, hey, do you want to change any settings? And we'll just say yeah, it looks good. And now it's going to say, hey, you've changed this brush, but you're already using it. What do you want us to do with the existing strokes? And I want to apply it. And there we go. We just edited the artwork that was used for this brush, but we kept the existing settings. Another cool thing we can do to create some separation here is as long as we've got all these leaves selected, we can use the appearance panel to add a drop shadow to these leaves, so we can see the individual leaves a little bit better because the drop shadow is in effect. We'll find it in the appearance panel. Effects also appear under style. Here we're going to go to style drop shadow. You can experiment with the settings that you choose here. I'm working in inches. Yours would be different if you're working in pixels or millimeters, But this is what I'm going to go with. And click. Okay. So can you believe you just created a plant that is so cool? As for this little bit over here, I'm going to just grab it. And what I tend to do with these things is just put them off on the pasteboard somewhere. And then I don't have to worry about them. Or if we want, we can select it, go up to our layers, and if I twirl this open, we can see it's right here. And I know that it's this because it's selected. And that's what this little button here means, this little green dot. So if I don't want to see it, we can just hide it. So coming up next, there's one tool we haven't talked about yet, and it's often thought of as the most iconic illustrator tool, but for a number of reasons, it tends to scare newbies off, but it doesn't have to be that way. So what is this tool and how can you use it without fear? I'll show you in the next video. 11. Making the Pen Tool Painless (For Real!): In the last video, you learned the basics of creating a custom scatter brush. In this video, we're going to explore the most iconic tool of Illustrator, the pen tool. Now, if you've tried your hand at working with a pen tool in the past and you found it frustrating, I totally get it. It can be. It takes a lot of practice and it's not everyone's cup of tea. But what if I told you there was a way to use it that's essentially fail proof so easy that it feels almost like magic. It sounds too good to be true, right? But I will prove it to you as we use the pen tool to draw an elephant. Now, I promised this class was about shape building and not drawing, and I meant it, but you've likely never tried drawing this way before. It's not so much drawing as it is a game of connect the dots. So to get started, we're going to place another image in here as a template. In the course files, you'll find a text document that contains a free download link for this image that we're going to be using of an elephant. Once you have the image, download it, then we're going to come up to file and place. Then you're going to navigate to wherever you saved the downloaded photo of the elephant, select it and choose place. Now again, we're going to see our cursor loaded with an image. Which means we're ready to place it by clicking and dragging to create a frame for it to live in. And let's go back to our layers panel. And we're going to create a layer for this to serve as a template. Let's click the New Layer button. And with this image selected, we can transfer it to the other layer by clicking and dragging the little dot up here. And now we see it's this dark blue color. And we can rename this elephant template, because we want to be able to draw on top of it. And we want to put the elephant that we draw on the chochkeys layer. We need to drag this layer below cho keys. We'll double click to bring up the layer options and click to turn it into a template before choosing. Okay, now we see it's locked and dimmed. And if we go back to target the chochkeys layer, now when we draw our elephant here, the elephant will end up on the same layer as all of our chochkeys. Let's get to know the pentool. The keyboard shortcut is for pen. For us to see what we're doing right now, let's leave the fill set to none and also set the stroke to none. Now instead of attempting to draw or trace over this elephant with the pentool, we're going to think of the elephant as a constellation in the sky. So here, imagine that the anchor points we're going to create are the stars. And just like the constellations in the sky, the stars do not perfectly represent the image they depict, right? Like sometimes it's a pretty loose representation at best, so there is no pressure here. So let's just start by picking some spot somewhere. And I'm going to choose this little divot right here where his head meets the top of his ear. And I'm going to click to set a point, and that's it. We're just going to work our way around just by clicking to set points as we go. So contrary to what you may think, you actually get better results here the less points you create. So keep that in mind and also notice that the floor that the elephant is walking on is slopes a little bit downhill in this image. So we can take advantage of this moment to recreate the floor and put it where we want it to be instead of where it is. Just keep making your way around point by point. Now when we get back to the beginning, you'll notice if we hover our cursor on top of the anchor point that we started with, we see a little circle appear below into the right of our cursor. That lets us know that when we click here, it's going to close the shape. That's perfect, that's what we want. So go ahead and give it a click and look at our amazing elephant. It doesn't look quite so great yet, right? But here comes the magic. So now that our initial constellation, or our rough shape, is complete, we're going to switch to a tool called the Anchor Point Tool. And it's buried over here below the Pen Tool in our tool bar. So if you forget the keyboard shortcut, which is Shift C for starry constellation, you can come over here. And if you press and hold on the Pen tool, you will find the Anchor Point Tool right here. And you'll see that the keyboard shortcut is Shift C. We can use the anchor point tool to curve the segments, the paths between the anchor points by simply clicking and pulling them. Check that out. Now we can just work our way around the image. Clicking and basically just curving in any of these paths as we see fit. It really is that simple. Just take a minute, work your way around until you get your constellation, adjust it. Now there's a couple of things to point out if we decide that we want to move or reposition any of these points. Of course, we just press a to adjust with our direct selection tool. And then you click to select a point, and then you can move that point. Another option is if you have clicked away and you realize that you made more points than you need, you can get rid of a point by tapping the minus key on your keyboard, which will switch you to the minus anchor point tool. Then if you click on any point, it will disappear going to undo that. Actually another thing you can do, for example, right here, this point, the curve coming in here is pretty sharp, right? So it's like it curves down and then up to like a little tip and then it rounds out this way. So there's a couple ways we can fix this. One is using that same anchor point tool. We can just redraw this. So if we click on it and then pull, you'll see we get the directional handles. This is what allows us to make curves. The longer we pull, the more extreme and more dramatically our lines get pulled in whichever direction. This is one way that we can smooth out this bump right here. Another option, like over here, is the same situation. And I should point out that this line was drawn going around this way. So if I click on it and I drag this way, I'm getting a loop here. You see that? So basically I've twisted the path, and if that happens, all you need to do is swing it around and pull the other way, and then you can adjust from there. So we've learned how to move the points using the direct selection tool or get rid of a point by using the minus tool. If you want to add a point, you can hit the plus key and then you can just click somewhere on the path and it will add a point. And here you see it puts in the handles and everything. So we can add points, we can take away points, we can move points, we can redraw the control handles for the curves as they come and go from the points. And also, of course, remember this little trick, if we click with the direct selection tool on one of these foot points here, I'm going to hold shift and actually select them all. So there's eight points here. And what I'd like to do is round them out. Remember we have these little corner widgets we can click and drag inwards on any of those. Look how quickly we just round it off all of the footpads. And that'll work on any curved point. If we want to add a little piece for his tail here. Let's just go back and get our pen tool. And anytime that you see this little asterisk next to the pen, that means you're about to create a new path. So instead of trying to join on this path, I'm going to just come like inside somewhere and click to start a new. And I'm again just creating a constellation right here with the pen tool. I drew a constellation of his tail. And then I'm going to grab that anchor point tool by pressing shift C for starry constellation. And just smooth this out a little bit. Not a ton. I'm not going to worry about the inside parts because we're going to merge these shapes in a minute to make this all easier to see. Let's throw a net over our two shapes that we've drawn. And let's add a stroke, just a simple black stroke so we can see a little better. Okay, so the next thing we're going to do is draw the ear in here to provide some separation. So if you want, you could use the pencil tool here, but I want to show you something about trying to draw an open shape with the pen tool. So if we click up here to start our constellation for the ear. And we can click our way around very simply, like this. I think that's pretty good. But you'll notice that we can't really let go of this. We have this web coming out of here and it's like, how do we just end this? Good question. You hit the escape key and that will snip the thread. And now we just have an open, so you don't have to do that with the pencil tool, but you do with the pen tool. Now if we want to smooth this out, I'm going to switch to my starry consolation tool, shift C. Let's just smooth out this ear, give it a little bit of a shape. All right, so we just want a line that we're going to use to create some separation. Now if we want to thicken this line up, we can select it by switching over to our very important selection tool. And click away and click back on it. We can see here the stroke settings. Maybe instead of a one point stroke, maybe we want to thicken it up to a two point stroke. Now we need to combine the elephant body with the elephant tail. And then we want to cut out this ear. But it's not going to work very well as this is an open path with a stroke. And that just doesn't compute as nicely as we've done before. We're going to put in a call to our fairy godmother, who's going to come and convert this. Instead of being an open line like this, it's going to become a long, skinny rectangle with a pill. So we'll come up to Object, Expand, make sure we have fill and stroke selected, and click Okay. Now we are ready for the Shape Builder tool. So let's throw a net over everything here and press Shift M to get our super magical shape building tool. And we want to merge the tail with the body, because the default mode is always in merge mode. We can just click and drag across like that, and we see that this is all one shape. Now we'd want to do the same thing down here, drag across that, to turn that into one shape, we want to add the head here. So drag through there. Now we want to cut out this. So now we got to switch from merge mode to buzz cut mode. And now we're going to buzz that off click to buzz this inside piece and buzz right here. And we can still totally edit this. So for example, I think I want the ear to come up higher right here. So I'm going to press Shift C for my Star constellation tool. And I think I'm going to get rid of this point. So I'll hit minus and click to erase that switch back to my anchor point tool, shift C. And then drag this up a little bit, but I'm really liking how this looks with the ear coming up a little bit higher. All right, Now, last but not least, this has a stroke applied to it. Let's switch to our selection tool by pressing V for very important selection tool. Let's throw a net over that whole thing and set the stroke two none. The other thing that I want to explain real quick is right now we have two shapes, right? We have the head and then we have the body tail. And we merged them, but we can see that this one is still a path. And this one is what Illustrator is referring to as a compound path. We have two paths. We have the outer path, that's the whole elephant, and then we have this little inner path that makes the doughnut hole. Those two paths together make the shape of the body. That's called a compound path. But a compound path can also be when you have two shapes that are disconnected, but you want them to be viewed as a single shape. Not just grouped items, but actually a single shape. We need to add the elephant head to the rest of this compound path. Let's select it by shift, clicking on it, come up here to object, and we'll choose compound path, Make. Now instead of saying mixed objects, Illustrator tells us that this whole thing is one big compound path. Illustrator sees this as a single object, not a group of multiple objects, but a single object composed of three paths. We've got the one around the head, the one around the whole body, and the one that cuts out the little negative space, the doughnut right here. And I just realized our elephant is the same color as our clock. So it's going to disappear the minute we put it here. So I'm going to go to my swatches panel and choose a dark gray instead of black. And I need to scale this down. So remember we scale by holding shift and we can put him wherever we want on the shelf. And of course, we don't need this template over here either, so we can hide the visibility of that by clicking right here. So pat yourself on the back. You just drew an elephant by making straight lines like a constellation. In the next video, we're going to learn how to save and export our work. 12. Saving and Exporting: In this video, we're going to take a quick look at options for saving and exporting our work. To save it, choose File Save As, give it a name. I'll call this name Three. Down here is where you choose the file format. The native format for Illustrator is, I then click Save. Illustrator is going to give you some additional options. The main thing to know here really is just if anyone ever specifically requests a backwards compatible file, this is where you would find those options and then click okay. So in addition to saving our work, we need to be able to export it. And there are several different options. If we come up to file export, you'll see three choices here. Export for screens is just what it sounds like. So here we would see all the usual options. The main benefit to export for screens is that it allows you to export in multiple formats, at multiple scales all at once. And it includes presets for IOS and Android devices. You can add a scale, so for example, if I want to export this as a ping, a scale of one X means it'll export at its standard size. And if we click the Ad Scale button here, we can say in addition to that ping, we also want to export one that is three times the size. And maybe that's also a ping, or maybe that's a Jpeg or any number of other files. So this is really useful especially for developers and anyone who needs multiple formats at multiple sizes at once. The other more direct option is file export. As here, just as you would expect, you find a location and you choose a format. The main thing to point out is this use Artboards option. If I choose Ping for example, and I tell it to use the Artboard and I click Export, you're going to see in this little preview that it is going to export the whole document and the file will be sized to the artboard. Here we can choose whether we want the artboard to be transparent or black or white, or what if we go back and choose file export. As we don't use artboards, you'll see that illustrator basically shrink wraps the final file to the artwork itself. But you should know that any visible artwork will be included. If you have crafty bits out here on the edges and they're not hidden in the layers panel, they would end up being included here as well. And that can just get confusing. If that happens, you just need to hide it in your layers panel or restrict the export to the artboard. The third option, safer web. This is handy if you really need to dial in a very optimized file size. You can fine tune the quality settings, you can change the size, and you can preview it in your web browser. That's the three main export options. The other thing that's really handy is the Export Asset Panel that can be found under Window Asset Export. So what's super cool about asset export is that it allows us to export pieces of our art or the whole thing. But generally, it's really handy when you need to export pieces because you can do it all at once. So let's say we just want to export our plant and the elephant with them both selected. You can drag them to the asset export panel. And when you drop them, you see that they each land as their own object. And we can give them a name too. So I could click here and type elephant. And here we could type Plant. And then if they're both selected here in the panel, and we choose export, here in Finder, we can see elephant and plant. That is super handy if we wanted to export these two things as a single unit. If we select them both and we option drag them to the asset panel, you can see they come in as just as they are in this position. And then they would be one single asset like this. That's a look at asset export. In this video, you've got to look at saving your file three different options to export under the File menu, as well as a quick peek at the Asset Export Panel. 13. Next Steps: I'm so glad that you joined me for this course. We covered a lot, didn't we? From setting up your first document, to saving and exporting your work. And along the way, you learned how creating art in Illustrator is more about shape building than drawing. You gained an understanding of the general way that Illustrator operates, including some of its quirks. And you got to know the core tools, functions, and shortcuts that make illustrator illustrator. I hope you come away from this course feeling super great about everything that you've learned and confident that your illustrator journey is off to a fantastic start. I can't wait to see your creations and how you put what you've learned here into practice. So be sure to share your work with all of us in the community. And feel free to tag me on social to where I can't wait to cheer you on. Speaking of sharing your work, you may have noticed that there's still a few empty spaces on some of our shelves for your class project. Use what you've learned in this course to add a few more chochkys to the collection and balance out the composition. You could even go beyond the clock itself and give the clock a space to live in. Where would you put it and how would you style it. Have fun with it. And be sure to post your finished project to the community where you can reach out to me anytime for help. If you get stuck you have questions or you just want to share your latest triumph, I will see you there. Thanks again for joining me and until next time, happy shape building.