Beginners Guide to Adobe Illustrator: The Essentials

1. Let's get Started: Do you want to learn how to create illustrations, flyers, infographics, logos, icons, and so much more, then this Adobe Illustrator beginners course is for you. My name is Kate and I'm an Adobe instructor working at the UK's leading Adobe training center in London. I'm also a graphic designer and a shoe designer who's worked with Jimmy Choo, Sophia Webster, and Nicholas Kirkwood. The way this course works is we'll slowly but surely build all our skills up until we get to the end of the course. We'll create a holistic flyer that covers everything we've learned. This course is aimed at complete novices. You do not need any previous Adobe Illustrator skills to participate in this course. We'll look at the different ways of creating illustrations and icons. We will also be working with colors and fills and we will change a whole color palettes of an existing poster. We will also cover the famous image trace tool, which allows us to automatically convert images into digital illustrations or vectors. We will also be working with text and we'll learn two new text tools. One is a type on a path tool and the other is a touch-type tool. Then we will learn how to save and export our files into print-ready or web-ready PDFs. There are lots of files and exercises that you can download that are available with this course. I will be guiding you with clever shortcuts throughout the whole time. My goal is for you to feel confident in using Adobe Illustrator and for you to go on and create your own amazing Illustrator graphics. Let's get started. 2. Downloading Files: Hey guys, congratulations on starting your first step into your Adobe Illustrator journey. How exciting. What I've done is I've attached a series of downloadable ZIP files, which means that if you double-click on one, it will expand into a folder and you can access all the files inside. What we'll start with is all the basics and essentials of Adobe Illustrator. Things like what is the difference between pixels and vectors, which is pretty important, and then I'll give you a tour of the whole Adobe Illustrator interface. I'll show you what the tools are, what the panels are, what the important shortcuts are, and then we'll start working with layers. Then I'll show you how to create very basic shapes and modify them and convert them into icons. The way this course works is, we'll slowly but surely build all our skills up through practice exercises. Once we have acquired all our new skills, we'll put them to the test and use them in a holistic flyer that practices everything we've learned. I'm excited and I hope you are too. Let's get started. 3. Pixels vs. Vectors: [MUSIC] Hey guys, are you ready to start your Illustrator introduction course, so am I. Basically you'll see a series of lots of zip files. But what we'll start with is the first zip file, zero-one basics. A zip file is basically a compressed folder, which means that if you double-click on it, it will open up a folder. Then you can double click on that and you'll be able to access all the files inside. Now we'll be working with all these exercises for the first start of the course. Now in each folder, I've attached another folder with older versions of Illustrator. If you double click on that, you'll see all the exact same files. But for older versions, these could be for 2015 CC or it could be CS6. You pick depending on what version of Illustrator you have and you can access these exact same files. What we'll start with is, what are pixels and what are vectors? Illustrator works with vector graphics and these are digital drawings essentially. You need to know what the difference is between pixels and vectors to be able to really manipulate it. If we could double click on 01 pixel versus vector, it might look slightly different on yours if you're using a PC. It might say AI in orange, which is the Adobe Illustrator logo. Just pay attention to the name of the files. Double click on that, and you've just opened this file let's look at the first art board. This is called an art board and currently we have four, 1,2,3,4. I'll give you the first shortcut you need to know. If you are using a PC, most shortcuts starts with control. If you're using a Mac, most shortcut start with command. I'm going to Command or Control +, and that is a shortcut for zooming in. Go ahead and Control +. Now, if it's zooming in in the wrong area, that's totally fine because I'll give you the second shortcut and that's holding down the space bar. It's called the Grab Hand tool, meaning that you can literally grab the page around and move it around so you have a better view. Now if you need to zoom out a little bit, that's Command or Control -. Perfect. On the left hand side, you've got a pixel image. We need to make sure that we go to the selection tool. Now the selection tool is the tool you always need to be on and the shortcut for that is V, which is why I call it the very important tool. Because when I press on V, I remember it takes me to the selection tool. If you click on this image, you can literally drag it around and you can see that it's an image. The bounding box is around the lemon. But the second one on the other hand, if you click on it, you will see lines. These are called puffs in Illustrator. If you zoom in even more, if you hold down command or control, you might see all these little dots. Now these are called anchor points. Whenever we have a digital drawing, it's made of anchor points and paths. Now if you scroll down, you will see more examples. Again, this is an image. Then on the right, even though it might look super identical and it might look like an image or a pixel, it is actually a vector because if you click on it, you will see all these tiny little shapes and these tiny little anchor points and how awesome is this? I basically did this with something called image trace, which automatically converts a pixel-based image into a vector with a click. That's it, super cool. Now, another thing you need to know about pixels is if you zoom in considerably more, and more you will see all these tiny little squares and these are called pixels. Every pixel has another color and it has another location. It pertains a lot more information. The files are way bigger than vectors. I've added a few more. If you zoom in on the tomato depending on how you would like to call it. Again, a picture zooming in CDOS pixels. If you scroll down on the right, it's a more simplified tomato illustration or vector. It's made out of shapes and less colors than a pixel image. Then the final one, this is an identity, a picture or a pixel-based image. Now, this one on the other hand, looks really cool. Looks very detailed, doesn't it? But if you click on it, wow, and has all these little shapes and colors, and it's actually a vector, which means that we can change each little section. We can modify it, we can play around with it and we'll see that later on when we start editing illustrations. If you want to fit to screen, you can press Control 0 and fit it to screen and that is it for pixels versus vectors. 4. A Tour of the Interface: Now before we move on to any exercises, what we'll start with is we'll go to Adobe Illustrator and I'll give you a tour of the Adobe Illustrator interface. I'll show you what the panels are, what the tools are, the quick shortcuts, and how to create or open a new document. This is the Adobe Illustrator welcome page of the latest version of Illustrator. Over here you've got quick presets, which means that if you click on any of these, it will quickly open it up into a new document. If I click on that new document, A4, let's click on the little x for now. Now below you'll have all the recently opened documents. Now you might not have any because you've probably never used Illustrator before or you might have some different ones if you have used Illustrator before. Now in Learn, you have existing Adobe tutorials. They're free and they're inside Illustrator, so it's super useful, isn't it? You can literally click on any of these and it will open up into a browser and you can scroll down and have a look at all these. Very cool. Then you can click on home again and I'll show you how to create a new document and later we're going to open our exercise files by clicking on ''Open''. Let's click on "Create new" and if you don't have this option, you can always go to file new. Again, this might look slightly different on a PC. Just look for file and you'll find new under it or click on "Create new." This is the new documents setup Window. I'll explain briefly what all these settings are. At the top, you have the intent, which means the intention or the purpose of your document. Is it for mobile? As in are you going to publish it for an iPhone? Or the viewer is going to view it on an iPad, on a Google Pixel, etc. These are existing presets, so the format is all set in that size. Now if you click on Web, you have web related presets and they give you lots of options. If you click on print then you have your typical A4 or letter for the US, etc. Film and video, you have even more. This is the one I'm currently using for filming, for recording, and you also have art and illustration posters, and again, A4, and lots of other options. Now let's go back to mobile for a second. Now below, you will have free templates. Who doesn't love free stuff? Now, this comes with your license, and it's only available for Creative Cloud members. Then if you click on any of these, it will let you download them and it will open up in an Adobe Illustrator file and you'll be able to update the content and have your logo and your text, and your colors there. Great. Now let's click on Web. Now, on the right-hand side, you'll see all the settings, which means that you can choose the page size. If you're ever working with a particular page size or a brief you're given and you need to enter the measurement of your page here, this is where you do it under width and height. It will often be in pixel if it's for web, or it could be in millimeters or inches if it's for printing posters and stuff like that. Now here you have orientations, so you have portrait and landscape. Over here you can add multiple artboards. You can increase that or decrease that and have fewer artboards. Then you've got the bleed. Now, this is only for printing purposes. It's when you want your graphics to bleed over the page so that there's no whitespace, so it literally goes to the edge of the page but for that you would have to be in millimeters and the bleed setting is often three millimeters. That's the industry standard which means that you'll have a three-millimeter allowance and you'll have to line up your graphics to the three-millimeter bleed line and then you can trim it later or you send it off to the printers and help trim it for you. Just remember three millimeter. Now, when you are done, you can just click on "Create", and that will be your new document sets. It's a random page size, but that's fine. That red line you see over here, that's where you would line up your graphics and that will be trimmed later on by the printers. Again, this is just for printing purposes. A few shortcuts. Zooming in and zooming out is very important and you need to do this quite regularly. For PCs, it's Control, and for max, it's Command of a rule. Zooming in would be Command or Control plus and zooming out would be Command or Control minus. Fit to screen is Control or Command zero. If you're zooming in a lot, so Control plus or Command plus and you need to move your page around you can use a Grab Hand tool by holding down the space bar and clicking and dragging to just move it around. Now I will give you a list of all these shortcuts which you'll be able to download. It's in the project files that you've downloaded and you can access that and you can either print it out or have it on your computer somewhere. But either way, I will be telling you a lot of useful shortcuts throughout the whole course. Now a little tour of the interface like what are all these scary-looking panels and all this information. One of the first things you want to do is go to something called a workspace. This allows you to choose how your illustrator will look like. Over here you have a word. Mine says essentials classic. Yours might say something else. It's usually next to search Adobe Stock. Again, it might look slightly different for a PC. If you click on it, you'll see a dropdown menu of all different types of workspaces. Now, if you go to Window and you go to Workspace, you'll see the same options over here. Let's go back here. If you click on another option, you'll see your interface change accordingly. You have essentials classic, you have painting, which is, if you want to paint, a lot of painters and illustrators use Illustrator to paint. Well if you choose painting, you will have all these brushes and color swatches and you'll have lots of painted-related tools. If you select printing, it's the same thing. Now for this purpose, we'll just be using essentials classic because it's nice and tidy and it has a lot of options over here. Now what it changed was the panels. These are called panels. If you click on a panel, you can expand it, you can see the information, and you can click on a panel and drag it out and expand the panel by clicking on the Window on the arrows. Do the same. You can also press "X", so it goes away, but then your interface starts to look messy so that's where you want to go back to Essentials Classic and reset Essentials Classic and they will come back. Now if you are using an older version of Illustrator this might look slightly different but no problem. In the latest version of Illustrator, you have something called the Properties panel, which is very useful. You can change a whole load of settings like the metrics and how many artboards you want and you can click on the rulers, which means that if you click on this, you'll see those guys rulers. Or the shortcut for that is Command or Control R. You also have the grid, which is great for measuring and for geometric shapes and you have the Pixel Transparency Grid, which allows you to see whether you have some random stuff in the background and if it has a clear background. Don't worry about the rest it will confuse you for now, so we'll look at that later. Over to the menu bar over here. Here we have stuff like Illustrator Preferences and File Open, File Save As, File Export. We'll look at that later. We have Edit, which I don't use often because I use the shortcuts personally. What's important is Window. Window is where all the panels live. If you can't find a panel, it will be under Window and it's the same pretty much for all Adobe software. It's the language. Now, on the left, you have the toolbar. For each individual action that you need to do. You need to go to the specific tool for it. If you need to select something and move it, you would go to the very important selection tool with the bracket. In the bracket, you'll see the shortcut and it says V. Now that's the same for each tool. If you hover over a tool, you'll see what it is and a shortcut in the brackets or yours might look a bit different. It might look like this. If you click on the arrows, you can have two columns. That's really up to you. If you right-click on a tool like this is the rectangle tool to draw shapes, you'll see variations or different options of that tool. Now you can go back to the selection tool as a default. You can zoom out or zoom in just so you can see it a bit better. Now, this is pretty much it for the tour of the Illustrator interface. See you soon. 5. Working with Layers: Now we're going to open an existing document and we're going to talk about layers and arranging layers, which is pretty important for Illustrator. What we do is we go to File, Open this time. You can go ahead and find that basics folder and we'll be opening two object arrange. Click on Open and voila. What I've done is I've added some shortcuts on the right-hand side, things that are very important, like undo, control or Command Z. The selection tool, which is this tool, locking an object, which I'll show you another way to do it, and bring forward and backwards. These are the same shortcuts as in Photoshop as well. Let's look at those little hands. We're going to need to open up the layers panel. The layers panel is over here. You can click on that. You can expand the panel just by clicking and dragging. I'll make it a little bit bigger so we can see better. You have a whole bunch of layers. First of all, you have the layers that I've created. All the guides here, keep them locked, hence this little lock button. Then you'll see all layers of each hand. It's all in a separate layer. Now can you see the little eye here? That's for visibility. If you click on the eye so you no longer see an eye, it will hide that layer. You can hide the layer, show it, hide and show. You could do the same for each layer. Now, if you want it to lock a layer, you would click in the section between the eye and that little blue thing. You'll see a padlock and you've just locked the green hand, which means you can't click on the green hand, you can't select it. I often lock layers, mostly for backgrounds. When there's a background and I don't want it to move, then I would lock it. Now another thing you need to know about layers is the more layer is at the top, the more it's in front or it's closer to you. The green one is closer to you than the gray one. If you were to move the green hand, let's say below the blue hand layer, it will come underneath it, just like that. Under the pink hand, it will come underneath the pink, etc. You can play around with layers. Now, another way to change the order of layers is to click on one of them, so the green hand, and then use this shortcut, bring forward or bring backwards. You'll see the green hand is highlighted here so you know this is the layer we're talking about. Now, you can also right-click and then you'll see a range. You'll have that option here with the shortcut on the right-hand side. Bring to front, bring backwards, or use a shortcut command square brackets. As you can see, it just goes much faster. We're to bring it back and front square bracket to the right. There it is. You can do the same for each. That's how you move layers around. Now what we'll do now is I'm going to show you how to create a background, a color with a rectangle. We'll look at the rectangle tool already and we're going to bring it to the back or to the bottom layer and we're going to lock it. Pretty simple. First, can you see the fill? This will be the color of your rectangle or your background. If you double-click on that, click, you can change the color. It could be, I don't know, you pick. I'll make it a little bit weird and nude. Then I'll click on okay, and that will be the color that will be applied. Then if you go to the rectangle tool, you just click on it. You can click and drag and align it to the background. Now, obviously that rectangle is hiding everything underneath it. If you click and drag to the bottom, it will be below everything. If you wanted to lock it so that you can't move it, you would have to click on the lock here and now it's locked. Now, remember we are on the rectangle tool, so it's very important that you always go to the selection tool to deselect. Now if you wanted to select your hands, the background wouldn't be in the way. Let's go to x now and close this. Don't save. We're going to go back to File, Open, and we're going to open the other object arrange. It's exactly the same, except it's with nice shoes. I'm a shoe designer, which is why the shoes. It's the same principle, except over here, you now have folders. I created two. They're not folders they're like layers, and these inside are sub-layers. You've got a text layer, if you click on the little arrow, it's closed, and you've got a shoes layer. If you click on the little arrow, it's closed. Then everything inside are sub-layers. You've got the green shoe sub layer, the blue shoe, the pink. Now each of these sub layers have further sub, sub layers with all the collection of shapes. But don't worry about that. That will just confuse you for now. It's the same principle. I would like you to click on the green shoe, make sure you're on the selection tool, and use a shortcut just so you get familiar with it, command or control square brackets. You can play around with the order. Now, I want you to repeat the whole process of creating a background, changing the color, and locking it just like we did before just so you can practice. 6. What is the Blend Tool?: The next thing we'll cover is how to duplicate an object or shape or illustration. Then we'll cover something and that's called the blend tool, which is pretty cool. You'll see. If you could open up 01-Basics and double-click on 04 Transform and Blend. Or you could go to Adobe Illustrator, and you could go to file open and open for transform and blend. Click on "Open". Now, as usual, I have placed some shortcuts at the bottom and I'm just going to zoom in so we can see the shortcuts better. It's the usual undo selection tool and then I'll show you a few other tools. The key tool we'll be using here is the selection tool. Because what we'll do is we'll select this object. There are a couple of ways of selecting an object. Either you can click and drag and select a selection area around it. It will select everything that goes into that selection area. Or you could just click, and to de-select, you click away. Would like you to click on this house and normally when you would like to duplicate something, you would go to copy, paste. Edit, copy, edit paste. But it would paste in random spots. There is a way quicker tool to do this, and it's called duplication. The good news is it's the same shortcut in each Adobe software. The shortcut is alt and drag. If you hold down the alt key, you'll see two cursors, a black and white cursor. That means that it's about to be duplicated. You click and drag and you let go. That's how you duplicate. I want you to undo this. Control or command Z. We're going to do this again just for practice. Alt and drag. Now, don't let go yet. If you hold down the shift key, what it will do is it will duplicate it over the same axis. Straight down as opposed to up and down if I let go of the shift key. Shift key straight down or straight up, then you let go. Now, don't do anything. Don't click, don't enter nothing. Because what we'll do now is repeat action. Repeat action allows you to repeat the last thing that you did. The shortcut for repeating action is control D or command D. Go ahead and do that. Control D, control D, control D and control D. That is awesome, isn't it? Well, let me just delete that one because it goes over the border. Now, if you wanted to duplicate all of these, but into rows, you would have to click and drag a selection area that goes over all the houses. Now they're all selected because of the bounding box. Now we're going to do alt and drag and hold down the shift key so it doesn't go straight down. Then the same thing. Control D or command D control D, control D. If it's not straight, it's because we might have just gone a millimeter away. But that's how you duplicate and repeat action. Now we're going to do the exact same thing for the second page, which is an illustration of a lamp that I created. Remember, go to the selection tool, select your little lamp and go alt and drag. Don't let go, hold down the shift key and command D or control D. Then same thing. Select all the lamps, click and drag, and then alt and drag below, and then command or control D. Now we have a whole collection of lamps. That's pretty easy and pretty useful tool for repetition. Now for the blend tool. Let's hover to the final page and I'll show you the blend tool, which is really cool. It does a similar thing where it repeats whatever selection you have. In this case, it will repeat it in-between those two. But it will also blend the color which is really cool and it will look really good. We need to go to the blend tool which is here or shortcut W. I want you to click, select that blend tool and then click on the first house, click on the second house, and then it will just look like a rainbow. Absolutely fine. We need to tweak that. We're going to go to the blend tool and double-click on the blend tool. This will open up our blend tool panel. Now, always tick on preview just to make sure that you can preview what you're doing. I would like you to select specified steps. Now I'm going to show you a little trick. First, if you wanted to change a number of steps, you could add 10, for instance. Just type 10. To turn it into effect you can just click here and it will happen. That's pretty cool, isn't it? Now, another trick that I use is if you highlight the number and you press the up or down key on our keyboard, you can increase or decrease the number and that is amazing. They've got lots of houses and they go from one color to the other in a gradual way. It's like a gradient. Then okay. Now let's do the same for the others. We click on this lamp, we click on this one. We don't actually need to do anything else because it just applied the same settings as before to this option. Now, let's do the circle and that funny star. We go click on one, and whoops. If that happens, just undo. We just have to go to the selection tool and deselect it first. Now we can go to the blend tool, click on the circle, click on the star. We're going to have to change this by double-clicking on the blend tool, ticking preview, changing the specified steps and adding a little five. Now the cool thing here is it doesn't just blend from this fuchsia to this RNG color, but it also blends the shape. You can see it goes from a circle to a slightly more starry, more starry to this star. That's pretty cool. I would love for you to practice this using your own illustration or own images, anything you want, and just have a nice play with it. Well done and see you soon. 7. Drawing Basic Shapes: Now, before moving on to some new exercises, I want you to open the recently created document and if you don't have it on, that's totally fine. You can just go to File, New, and just pick an A4 and then create, and that's absolutely fine. Now let's talk about simple shapes first, because the next exercise will have simple shapes in them, so let's cover it. Over here you have the rectangle tool. I would like you to click on the rectangle tool. Over here, you can determine the color of your rectangle. If you double-click on the "Fill", this will be the color that the rectangle will be filled with. I love picking pink colors. Then you can click on "Okay." This is a stroke. Now, this will be the border of your rectangle. If you double-click on that and you choose another color, that will be a weird rectangle. Make sure you click back on the Fill. Now to create a rectangle, you click and drag, and there's your rectangle. Then you can click and drag again and create another one and again. If you would like to create a square, you need to hold down the Shift key. Now the only thing you can do on the Rectangle tool is draw rectangles. If you wanted to change a rectangle by going to the selection tool, you would have to go to the selection tool and then you'll be able to change it. We go to the rectangle tool to draw rectangles, and we go to the selection tool to move, to change the size of rectangles. Then to select a rectangle, you can either click on it or you can click and drag and create a selection area. Now if you wanted to select all rectangles, you can click and drag a selection area around all of them, and this will select all of them. Then you can move them. Deselect click away, or alternatively, if you would like to select them, you can also click and hold down the Shift key the whole time and then click on the other rectangles, just like when you select folders. Now click away and let go. Now for resizing a shape, you can click on it and you'll see the bounding box, and then you'll be able to click and drag and you can already distort your shape. If you want to resize it using the same proportion, you can drag from the corners and hold down the Shift key, and this will keep the proportions and allow you to resize it on the same scale. You can also rotate your shape by hovering over the corner and rotate it, and hold Shift for 45-degree angle. You can also move your rectangle by pressing the arrows on your keyboard, just like a Game Boy or something, PlayStation. You can press up and down. Now let's look at some other shapes. If you go back to the rectangle tool, you have rounded rectangle, you have an ellipse, we have all sorts of shapes. Let's go to the ellipse tool. Now to draw an ellipse, you click and drag, to draw a circle, you hold down the Shift key. If you hold down the Shift key, you draw a circle. If you let go of Shift, it will no longer be a circle. Now let's go to the selection tool. Get in the habit of going to the selection tool and select all your shapes and press "Delete" to clean up your page. Literally the Delete key on your keyboard, and let's go back to the ellipse tool. I want to show you a trick. If you hold down the Shift key, you draw a circle but from the sides, now to draw circle from the center, you have to hold the Shift key and the Alt or Option key and you'll be able to draw from the center as opposed to from the side, from the center. That's that. Now let's go back to the selection tool and select all our shapes and again, delete. Now for the final little part of this tutorial, let's look at some other cool shapes. Let's look at the polygon tool first. I would like you to click and drag and don't let go yet. Now with your other hand, press the upward arrow on your keyboard and you'll increase the number of sides for your polygon. The downward arrow will remove the number of sides. You can even draw a triangle. Pretty cool. Now let's go back to that tool, and this time we select the star tool. I would like you to click and drag and don't let go. The same thing, press the up arrow on your keyboard. You have loads of little sides to your star. Or press the downward arrow to remove the sides. That is pretty much it for basic shapes. We'll do an exercise next on basic shapes, which is slightly more complicated, but it will be very good practice. 8. Drawing Icons with Basic Shapes: Now that we have learned to work with shapes, we're going to go one level up and learn how to manipulate these shapes further by creating these little houses. You can go ahead and go to Number 1, Basics, and open 5, Creating Shapes, or you could go to Adobe Illustrator, go to "File", "Open", and open 5, Creating Basic Shapes. Now again, if you are using an older version of Illustrator, you can always come back here and find that file that you need. So 5, Creating Basic Shapes, and open. As usual, I've added some shortcuts over here. If you zoom in Command or Control plus and as usual, you'll see the quick shortcuts. Some we've already used Undo and the Selection Tool, very important selection tool. Now, I'll explain to you what these other shortcuts are and why they are important. Let's go over here. What I'll do is I'm going to demo a few of them and you can follow me, and then you can finish the rest on your own as an exercise. Now, we are currently on the Star Tool. At least, I am. It would be great if we right-click on here, and select the Rectangle Tool just for now. I would like you to make sure that you have no fill by clicking on this little tiny red strikethrough, this will remove the fill or the color inside the shape. The stroke can be black, that's absolutely fine. The first one is really simple. We just need to recreate this rectangle, so we can start with one corner, and we drag it to the other corner. That's one done. Now for the second one, it's slightly different. We have these things called anchor points. Anchor points are there every time there's a corner or a curve, we'll talk about curves later. But a rectangle has four corners, so four anchor points. Now, this shape has five anchor points, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. What we're going to do is we're going to start with a rectangle and we're just going to add an anchor point, and then we're going to move it. We're going to make sure we're still on the Rectangle tool and we're going to click and drag and create a rectangle. Now that we've created a rectangle, we need to add an anchor point over here. Now, this is completely new. The way to add an anchor point is to go to the Pen Tool, the one that looks like a fountain pen, right-click, and then you have Add or Delete Anchor Point. Now, I personally never go here because I just use the shortcuts, which are super easy to remember. Plus and minus, plus to add an anchor point, and minus to delete an anchor point. What you do next is you just click and you make sure you're on the path. Exactly, you make sure you're on the path. That happens a few times. What I do is I just zoom in Command or Control plus, and I just make sure that I really click on the path. There we go. Now, I don't know if you remember, but the Selection Tool V or the black cursor allows you to select shapes and move them and distort them. But we have another tool called the Direct Selection Tool, and that is to directly select objects and move them. In this case, with the direct selection tool, you can select anchor points and move them. Now, the shortcut for the selection tool is V, and the direct selection tool is A. We're going to click on the direct selection tool, click on the anchor point, and that's how you select the anchor point. You'll see that this one is highlighted and the others aren't, and then you can either click and drag up, or you can always use the arrows on your keyboard to move it up or down. That also works. There we go. 9. Drawing Icons Continued: This one is pretty easy to do, so I trust that you can try and do it yourself. Now, let's move on to this one. We're going to go to the rectangle tool, and we're going to click and drag, draw the first rectangle, and now we're going to add an anchor point, plus, or by going, right-click "Add Anchor Point". You can add an anchor point around here. You're going to go to the direct selection tool or A, to select directly the anchor point, and then we click and drag. Now, these are pretty easy, so I'm sure you can handle them. I'm just going to zoom out a little bit more to see what else we have in store. Now I'll show you this one because it's a little bit more difficult. I'm going to go to the rectangle tool again, and I'm going to click and drag, and then I'm going to go to plus on this tool. I'm going to add an anchor point. Now to move it, I need to go to the direct selection tool, click on the anchor point and drag it down. There's a lot of complex shapes you can do by creating simple shapes at first and just modifying them. Let me do this one now. I'm going to go to the rectangle tool and I'm going to click and drag. Now because there are already four anchor points, I don't necessarily need to add an anchor point, I can just go to the direct selection tool and just move the existing anchor points and align it. One more, click and drag rectangle, and again, go to the direct selection tool, click on the anchor point, and there we go. Now let me show you the next one. Click and drag with the rectangle tool. This time we need to add two additional anchor points for one here and for here. We go back to the "Add Anchor Point Tool", we click and we click again. Now to move the anchor points, we go to the direct selection tool, click and drag, click and drag. Let's move on to the triangle. Now I showed you before how to create a triangle using the polygon or star tool, but let me show you with the rectangle tool. What you could do is draw your rectangle, and you could go to the "Add Anchor Point Tool" and add an anchor point in the middle. Then we need to get rid of anchor points, so we go to the "Delete Anchor Point Tool" or minus, and we click and click and delete the unnecessary anchor points. I'm going to do one last one with you, and then I trust that you will practice and be really good at it by the end of this exercise. Go back to the rectangle tool, click and drag. Now we might need to add a couple of anchor points, one for here and one for there. We go back to "Add Anchor Point Tool", click over here, we click over there, and then we move it by going to the "Direct Selection Tool", and we just need to move this one. Now "Command 0" or "Control 0" to fit the screen. Enjoy the rest of these practice exercises and I'll see you soon. 10. What is The Pathfinder Tool?: I hope you enjoyed learning all the basics and the introduction. What we'll do now is go a level up. We'll learn how to create illustrations and icons or decorative elements using something called the Pathfinder tool, which is very useful. There are two ways to create illustrations and icons. One of them is a Pathfinder tool, which we'll cover now, and the second one is the Pen tool, which we'll cover later. Both are excellent ways. You get to pick which one and you might even use a combination of both tools to create your ideal illustrations. I'm excited and let's get to it. 11. The Pathfinder Tool Explained: What we'll cover next is something called the Pathfinder. It's an absolute must in Adobe Illustrator. It's just a really clever way to create shapes and icons and illustration without using something called the Pen tool. Now if you have 02-Pathfinder the zip file, you need to double-click on it, and it will expand into a folder. Double-click on that, and you can access the files inside. You have the links, which will be the images of the files and the older versions of illustrator. Now we're just going to open the first one so you can either double-click on that or open it in Adobe Illustrator, and if you need to zoom in command or control plus. What I'll show you is each section of the Pathfinder tool. Then we're going to use our new skills and apply it and create these little icons. Let's start here. What the Pathfinder tool does is it takes multiple shapes and converts it into single shape, either by joining or subtracting. Now, what you need to do is go to the selection tool and select the first set of shapes. Now there is something slightly new in Illustrator called the properties panel. What's cool is that things appear here, quick actions or the Pathfinder or a line. All we have to do is go here and look at our famous Pathfinder tool. Now if I deselect my shapes, the Pathfinder tool will no longer appear here. If I select both shapes, it will now appear. The main ones we'll be using is the first one, which is Unite, and the second one. If you click on the first one, you will see that your shape is now joined or united in Illustrator's words. Now let's move on to the second set of shapes. You can highlight the second set. I'll select the second option of the Pathfinder minus front. That means that it got rid of the shape in front. Now we can select the third one and click on the third option, that is intersect. It's kept the intersecting bits. Now the fourth one, and the fourth option, exclude. It got rid of the overlapping bits. Now we can try the same options with the next one on your own. First option, second option, third, and fourth. Pretty easy. Now let's look at this little collection of shapes. Again, you can select the first one and it will join all of these and get rid of the holes. Now if I select these ones, and then I select the second option, it will literally drill holes in that rectangle. Pretty cool. Now another example, you have a collection of rectangles, but if you join it, it will become a single shape. Now in the second one, same thing, you can select, this, click on "Unite" and it will become a single shape. Now for the third one, the A, it's actually a-shape and a little triangle on top. That needs to be cut. We're going to select these two shapes and then click on the second option. Then for the last one, this is super cool. It's just a collection of a bunch of shapes, but look what happens if I selected all, and then I select the second option of the Pathfinder tool, and it's a block of cheese That's a little bit advance, so I don't expect you to know this by now, so well done. Moving on. Now we're going to put this to the test. If we could go to "File" "Open" can open up 02- Pathfinder folder and select "02 Houses." Again, you have the little shortcuts here so you can always refer to them if you get lost. We are going to recreate these little houses, these icons, using the Pathfinder tool and everything we've learned so far. You can either create exactly the same and try and match it up or you can just try and do your best and create the same proportions. I'm going to zoom in more so we can see better. To start off, I'm going to think of the outline or the silhouette, and then later on I'm going to drill the holes, the windows. To start off, I'm going to go to the Rectangle tool and I'm going to try and draw this rectangle. Don't worry about the fill and the stroke we will change this later. Now for the roof, I'm going to draw another rectangle. I'm going to use the technique that we used before, where we add an anchor point and then we delete the other. To add an anchor point, either plus or click on "Add Anchor Point" Then you can click in the middle. Then to delete this anchor points, you go to Minus or Delete Anchor Point tool. Click. Now, as you can see, I need to resize this so I can go to the "Selection tool" and I can click and drag and resize it. Now we have two shapes, and we need to turn it into a single shape. What's important is that our two shapes, they need to overlap. Either they should be aligned or overlapping. Now, look at what happens when I click on the first step in the Pathfinder tool, it gets joined. Now for the roof, I'm going to click and drag and create the little chimney. Then once I've created the rectangle, always go back to the selection tool. Select both shapes now, and then click on "Unite" Now I'm going to do the second one. Again, I'm just going to do the silhouette first and then we'll look at drilling the windows later. I'm going to go to the Rectangle tool again, click and drag, and again a second rectangle. Now we need to add an anchor point here and delete the others. Now this is just the way my brain works. This is just the way I would do it. You might find another way to do this that might be more clever. Anyway, I'm going to add an anchor point here, and then I'm going to go to "Delete Anchor Point" and delete this one, and that one. Whoops. Now again, we need to adjust some things here. I can either go to the Selection Tool and change it around. Actually that works. Or I can go to the Direct Selection Tool to click on an anchor point and I can move it up. We're using lots of skills that we've already learned. Now, instead of clicking on the Pathfinder Tool, I'm already going to go and draw the little chimney and then I'm going to go to the Selection Tool and I think this needs to be a little bit smaller and I'm going to highlight it and unite. Now I'm going to demo one more and then I expect you to finish 1,2,3,4,5, the first fives. We're going to go to the Rectangle Tool again and we're going to click and drag, maybe a bit longer, can align it later. Then going to draw another rectangle and same thing. Now I'm just going to press plus, which is a shortcut for the add Anchor Point Tool, much faster. I'm just going to press minus on my keyboard again much faster. Make sure you actually properly click on it. Now I can move it or distort it. Now for the little chimney, click and drag. Now if I go to the Selection Tool, I can still distort it because clearly it needs to be a taller house than the other ones. That's about right. Not to worry too much about detail, it's open to interpretation. Now I'm going to select all three shapes and there that's better. Select all three shapes and click on the Pathfinder Tool and voila. Now for the windows. I'm going to go to the rectangle Tool. But let me show you a little trick before. I'm going to draw a square first for the window. Then what I'll do is I'll use a trick that I showed you. Going to go to the Selection Tool. Maybe zoom in a little bit more, CMD Plus, and I'm going to duplicate this. Remember Alt and drag. Then I'm going to press CMD or CTRL D and that was a bit too far. I can make it a little bit less far and CMD or CTRL D. I've got three windows. Then what I can do is elongate this door and I've got a door. Then one more, I can go to the Ellipse Tool. Remember if you want to draw an ellipse from the center, you hold down the Alt key and the Shift, and it will be a circle. Now, what I like to do is select the silhouette or the background and change the color so I can see a little bit better what's going on. Maybe we can make the windows another color. We can see a little bit better what's going on. Double-click on the fill and I don't know, a random color. Wow, interesting. Then if we select the whole house and we go to the Stroke and we get rid of the stroke, we've got this. That's actually nice on its own. Now, let's select everything and drill the holes in the windows by clicking on the second option of the Pathfinder. Cool. Let's do the next one. I'm going to go to the Rectangle Tool, and now it's going to be pink, but that's absolutely fine, that works too. We are going to go click and drag and draw a rectangle. Then I can either draw another one right next to it, zoom out so I can see a bit better. Then I'm going to draw another rectangle and then one more for the door. Again, this is my interpretation, so it doesn't have to be exactly the same. I'm going to go to the Selection Tool so I can move things around and something like that. Now if I select it all and I click on the second option, minus front. There we go. Of course if I want, I can get rid of the stroke, the border, and then I can double-click on the Fill and change the color. Super. Now I want you to do the next three houses just for practice and by the end of it, you'll get really familiar with the Selection Tool, with adding anchor points, and with the pathfinder, which is what we want. Let's move on to the last two, the skyscrapers. What I'll start with is, like before, I'll do the silhouette. I'll do two rectangles. I'm going to go to the Rectangle Tool and then I'm going to draw another rectangle. We can resize them later, no problem. Now for the little windows. Now what I'll show you now is something we've already learned actually. We're going to learn how to duplicate a window and then repeat action. We've done this before. Going to click and drag and draw a window. Again, it's going to be my own style. Then I'm going to go to the Selection Tool. I'm going to move in a little bit, zoom in a little bit so we can see better. Then I'm going to Alt and drag and CMD D, CMD D, CMD D. Now for the other skyscraper, so I'm going to draw a little square holding Shift. This might be a bit too big. Then I'm going to zoom in because otherwise it could give me problems. Alt and drag and CMD D, CMD D. I'm going to select all four click and Shift. So click Shift, hold down Shift the whole time, Alt and drag and then CMD D, CMD D, CMD D. This is super cool. Gets a little bit off center, but that's fine. For the final part, I'm going to select all of these and click on the second option, the Pathfinder Tool to drill the windows and the same here. That's how you work with the Pathfinder Tool. Well done. 12. The Pathfinder Tool: Icon Design: Before we move on to the next Pathfinder exercise, I just want to make sure that you have access to the Pathfinder tool. If you have the latest version of Illustrator at the properties panel, and the Pathfinder will be available here. Now if you don't have this option, that's absolutely fine. You can either go to Window, Pathfinder, and remember Window is where all the panels live. If you click on "Window", "Pathfinder", you'll have the same options here, so this is exactly the same as over here. Now feel free to change the colors, make everything pink, I love pink and that's it. Now we're going to move on to the next Pathfinder exercise. I'm just going to close this. Now feel free to save this. If you wanted to save it, you would just go to File, Save As, and then save it as an Adobe Illustrator file, and that's it. I'm just going to close that. Now let's open the next exercise. Either open or file open. Same thing. We're going to create magic suitcases now, so three suitcases. This is one step further from the Pathfinder tool. One, it's a little bit more challenging, which is fun, and two, it involves rounding corners of shapes, which is super useful and it's used a lot for icons. Zoom in Command or Control plus. These black lines are the guides, so they'll remain there because I have locked this layer. There is a rounded rectangle tool, but I don't use it very much. Let me show you why. If I select the rounded rectangle and I try and draw it, it does a pretty good job, doesn't it actually? But if I try and draw the little handle, see, it doesn't quite work. This is why I like to draw rectangle first and then make it into a rounded rectangle. I'll show you how. I'm just going to delete that with the Selection tool. Now, what I'm going to do is remove the fill and have a stroke that's quite bright, like maybe red because it's very easy to see. A lot of Illustrator use red when they trace over something and then, Okay, and now I'm going to go to the plain rectangle, might zoom in a little bit more. I'm going to click and drag and draw my rectangle pretend it has corners. Then I'm going to round the corners using widgets. These little circles and the corners are called widgets, super cute name, and if you can't see this, you would have to go to View and makes sure that hide bounding boxes there, if it says show, just click on them, hide edges. Basically makes sure that everything is on display. There it is, Hide Corner Widget, so this means that it's currently on. If it says show corner widget, you would have to click on that. The way to round the corners is you click on one of those widgets and you click and drag towards the inside, and it's rounding it, super cool. Now if you need it to adjust it a little bit, you can always click and drag and adjust it. Great. Now let's do the next one. I'm going to start with this one, top one, and I'm going to click and drag and create a rectangle. Then again click and drag on the corners. Now for the last piece, I might zoom in a little bit more. I'm going to click and drag, create my rectangle, and then round the widgets. Zoom out. That's that part now. Now for the Pathfinder, so what I like to do is I like to go to the Selection tool and I like to give my shapes color because I find it much more easy to determine what needs to be cut. I'm going to select all these shapes, double-click on the fill, and change the color. Again, pink. But obviously, you don't have to go [LAUGHTER] with think. The way I would do this is in terms of patterns. Would think first there is the handle and then there's the rest of the body of the bag. Start with the handle one step at a time. I'm going to select the handle. This shape is in front of that one. Which means that if I click on the second option of the Pathfinder tool, it will cut into the back piece. Now I'm going to select both and I'm going to join. If you wanted to get rid of the stroke, the border, you can just do that and voila, a pink suitcase. Then you can go ahead and do the second one and the fourth one, whilst I'm going to demo the third one. Let me zoom in a little bit more. Now I'm going to go to the ellipse tool this time because they're ellipses. I'm going to Alt and drag and try and align the ellipse, not too bad. Again, I'm going to get rid of the stroke, the fill. I'm going to add a red stroke just because it's easier to see. Ready now I can see that it's not perfectly aligned, so I'm using the arrows on my keyboard to line it. Next, zoom in, always easier to zoom in. I'm going to do this circle so I can either try from the side. Not bad. Then I'm going to do the other circle and that's not ideal. Again, I can move my arrows pretty easy. Then if it still needs to be adjusted, I can go back to the Selection tool and adjust it. Now for the final shape, it's the little rectangle here. Now, again, I find it easier when I add color, once the outline is traced. I'm going to go to the selection tool and I'm going to select all these shapes and I'm going to add a little fill. Now again, I'll start with the handle separately, then we'll do the rest. Select these two and then click on the second option of the Pathfinder tool. Nice. Then select these two. Again, second option of the Pathfinder tool. Nice. The final part, select all shapes and unite them. Maybe get rid of the stroke and voila. Don't worry that you can still see the guide, it's on purpose there because it's in a locked layer behind. Great, so I trust that you are able to do the rest. Now, the final thing I'll show you is how to do these little circles, but you already know because again, it's duplicate and repeat action. Let me show you. Can start by zooming in and creating a little circle. Tiny one. There we go. Then what we can do is like before we Alt and drag and make sure you're on the Selection tool, Alt and drag, shifts so it's straight, and then Command or Control D and just keep going until it reaches the end and that's not bad, is it? Now, based on what we learned before, I'm going to show you another way to do this. Let's just copy these two so we don't have to draw them again. The two ends and then Alt and drag down. This time I'm going to show you how to do this but with the Blend tool that we covered before. It's all coming into sense why we learn all these things in Illustrator. Remember the Blend tool was here. To apply the Blend tool, you have to click on one, you click on the other, and it's going to join and blend all these shapes. Now to modify how many circles you want, you would have to double-click on the Blend tool, make sure preview is on, go to specified steps and I don't know, maybe type 10, see what happens or maybe a bit more, 15 and something like that. Once you're happy with the amount, you can click on Okay. That is it. Enjoy doing the rest of the exercise, and well done, and I'll see you soon. 13. Let's Talk Colour: Okay, so well done on creating the exercises with the Pathfinder tool. How exciting. Make sure you keep practicing because practice is key with the Pathfinder tool. What we'll cover now is color. We'll cover how to save your brand or company colors in something called swatches. We'll also learn how to store them in something called CC libraries, which is like a cloud where you can store all your data, things like logos and colors, and images, and stuff like that. What we'll do after that is we'll start working with color. We'll have a flyer that will change the complete color palette using fill and stroke. Let's start working with color. 14. Saving Colour Swatches: [MUSIC] Now we're going to cover how to work with colors, so that you can change the color of your recently practiced exercises. Again, we go to open, because we're opening an existing file. You should have the color ZIP file. If you double-click on that, you can open it up into a folder and you'll have the same files here. We're going to start with 01 color. I've created this exercise so that we can see how to add colors and save them for our brand guidelines. Because often you need to reuse existing colors so there's consistency with your brand and it's always that exact same color. Swatches. That's what we'll work with. Swatches is over here. Swatches is basically a place where you save swatches of colors. Like when you save fabrics, a little swatch of a fabric. Well, it's the same but for colors. You can either view it as a list or as a thumbnail view. That is up to you. For now, I'll show it as a list and I'm going to expand it and we have a lot of colors here. This is the new version of illustrator and has a lot of color. The next thing we need to do is click on this little square, and we're going to make this yellow by using the color picker. If you double-click on fill, you'll get to the color picker. You can move the sliders up and down and look for yellow. Click on "Okay". Now how do you save this in your swatches? You go here and you'll see the little plus. If you're using an older version of illustrator, it will look like a little folded paper in the icon. Either way look for a new swatch. If you want, you can call it yellow and okay. Now, I want you to do the same for the orange one. When you're done, we're going to move on to the next one. Now, CMYK. What is CMYK? CMYK is for printing purposes and it's basically a color code. If you're given this code, you know that it needs to be a specific color and it's for printing. I'm going to double-click on the fill and show you. You'll see CMYK over here. This is where you enter the code. I'm going to put this right here, so it's easier to see. Now, CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. It's basically the ink that you buy for your printer, those four colors. Well, that's basically it. Now I want you to type in this value, this code 61, 0, 28, and 0. When you're done, you click on "Okay" and that is your color. Now we can go to add a new swatch, and you can save that in your swatches, and it will appear here. We have yellow and that's CMYK color. What I'll show you next is super cool. Illustrator has lists of lots of existing patterns and gradients and textures and animal skins. I'll show you where to find them. I use these quite regularly. They're very good for decorative purposes. Go to the swatch library menus here. It looks like a few folders, like a library. You have all these different swatches. If you go to patterns, nature, you'll see nature animal skins, quite funky. If you click on the "Hamburger icon", yummy. You can click on "Large Thumbnail View", and you can see them in a little bit larger. Then you'll see a whole list of animal prints. I use these a lot in fashion, especially the alligator one to display fake crocodile leather, vegan. But each to their own. Now you can select the next one and I'll show you how to access gradients. Going to look at, again, the swatch library menu. Go to gradients. These are whole list of gradients. You can really choose, I'm going to go to gems and jewels because, why not? You'll see, these are all gradients. When it goes from one color to the other, and you can access more. These are metals and you can click on these arrows and change. I use metals a lot. In fashion, I use these for hardware, for zippers and buttons and stuff like that in belts. Now for texture, can click on the swatch library menus and again go to patterns, go to basic graphics, and you can choose between dots, lines, or textures. You'll have all these cool textures. Now, these are probably the ones that I use the most to display the texture of something really. You have mesh textures and you can give a texture of a metal, so it's quite rough. That's that. Now we're going to move on to pantone colors. Now, pantone is used a lot for merchandise. For printing on fabrics or anything other than paper, really. It's important sometimes you need to print on a mouse pad, your branding t-shirt, dust bag, and etc. Just so you know, if you click on this shape and then you double-click on the fill, you have CMYK; cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, which is for printing. But you have RGB, which is red, green, and blue. This is for web. Then you have pantone, which is for materials and merchandise. How do you get this pantone color? Again, you go to swatch libraries, and then you go to color books, and you go to CMYK, solid coated, which is probably the most popular one. You'll see a really long list of pantone colors. All you need to do is type 5435. Click on that color and that's that. It's automatically added in your swatches. Now feel free to do the same for the other two. Now, when you've opened this file, it's very possible that you had a warning message and something like this image wasn't linked and you can't access this image. It's possible that now your document doesn't have this image. If that's the case, absolutely no problem. I'll show you how to place this image in. You would go to file place, and you'll see the image right here. You can click on "Place", make sure link is ticked. You can just place the image here. That's it pretty much. The next thing we'll learn is the eyedropper tool. You might have already seen the eyedropper tool because it's very famous and it's on a lot of software. I would like you to click on the first square. What we do now is we go to the eyedropper tool. It looks like a puppet of the thing you put in your eyes. A shortcut is eye. Now click on the purple maccaroon and voila. Now, to do the next one, you have to go back to the selection tool. You have to select the new shape. Then you go to the eyedropper tool and then you click on the blue maccaroon. Now if you wanted to save these colors so that you can reuse them, you can always select them. The ones you want. From yellow, and maybe here. Then you can click on this little icon. It will add it to your library. You'll see that it just added the two colors you created in the library. It won't add all the existing gradients because that's already an illustrator. It won't let you add it, but the colors you've created can be added here. Now, libraries is a way to store your content. It's like a cloud. You create all these colors and you can add your logo there. It all goes into your libraries and you can access it every time you open illustrator. Very useful. That's it for color, before we move on to an exercise with color. 15. Working with Colour: Now let's do an exercise with color. If you click on Open, and you go back to that color folder, you will see 02 working with color. What we'll be creating is this. We're going to change the color of this one so that it looks like this one or vice versa. Actually, you get to pick which one you prefer. I've created these little posters of a chair, and very girly, very cool. Anyway, open 02 working with color, and there it is. If you go to swatches, what I've done is I've already saved all the swatches. It's just a matter of clicking and then clicking on a color. I'm going to show you how. We need to make sure we zoom in enough. Let's change the color. We'll start with interior. Interior actually has a stroke rather than a fill. If we want to make this like that one, what we can do is try and find which color it is. First time lucky. Then we need to make sure we go to the stroke and remove the border, and that's already done. Next, we select the Zayn, go to swatches, and make sure it's the field that's selected and not the stroke, and then select, I'm guessing yellow. Super. Then for this the same thing, it's the fill. We need to find which blue it is. There we go. Now if you click on these two little pieces I've grouped them. It's going to be much easier to change the color. All you have to do is select it and then click on the correct color. Then do the same for this piece, which I've also grouped. This is going to be a very quick exercise, just to get your color juices flowing. Now for the legs, I've also grouped them so it's just easier to select it and make sure you're on the Selection tool the whole time. We're going to make it black. Now for the next pieces, so this needs to be white. You can click on white. This needs to be white. Click on white. This white and that white. Problem now is, it's a little bit hard to tell where the other pieces are, but if you click you'll see them. The yellow needs to be the other yellow, the middle piece needs to be I'm guessing the other, yeah. Then this piece needs to be yellow as well. Now for D's guys, which I've also grouped, they're lines rather than fills. If you go to stroke instead, go to swatches and make it white, and there we go. Now for the last pieces like dan and whips. See, I made a mistake because I added the color to the stroke. Need to add it to the fill, and click on the other one, and the blue piece which needs to be this one. [FOREIGN] that is a very quick and easy color and fill and stroke exercise. If you wanted to have fun with this and use your own colors, I challenge you to create completely different colors in a whole different color palettes, and choose a different color maybe, and then you can add it into your swatches and make it your own. Congratulations. see you soon. 16. What is the Pen Tool?: Hey, guys. Are you ready for the famous pen tool? I bet you are. The pen tool is an art form in itself, and it requires a bit of patience, a lot of practice, and a lot of fun. I love using the pen tool. What we'll do is we'll trace over existing images and use the pen tool to convert it into a digital illustration, really. That's what the pen tool is for. I'm excited to start working with the pen tool. Let's get to it. 17. Mastering The Pen Tool: [MUSIC] We're going to learn how to work with the Pen tool, which is one of the most important tools in Illustrator. It's for drawing, for creating illustrations, and it's an art. I would like you to double-click on the zip file and it will expand into a folder. If you double-click on the folder, you will have access to all the files inside. If you could open up 01 Pen tool new. Again, if you're using a PC, it will look like AI in orange. But I'm using a Mac, so it looks like this. Double-click. We'll be creating all these numbers. We always start simple with the Pen tool. Start simple, and then later on when you practice, you'll get really good at this. The Pen tool is all about practicing and you never really get it right in the first place. You'd always have to edit, amend, adjust. Anyway, we're going to move on to this page. You might want to zoom in a little bit. Command or Control plus. We have the Pen tool over here and the shortcut is P. Pen tool, P, selection tool, V, direct selection tool, A, adding an anchor point was plus, deleting an anchor point minus. As usual, what I like to do is removing the fill and make the stroke red, which is very easy to see, quite striking. Then we need to go to the Pen tool. Now, this are easy because they have corners rather than curves. First shape that has corners, it's much easier. Now, what we need to do is connect the dots. We click on ''One'', and then we click on ''Two'', then we click on ''Three'', click on ''Four'', five, six, seven. Then to close the shape, you click on the anchor point you started with. Voila. This is number 1. Let's do number 4. Click on ''One'', the starting place, two click, three click, four click, five click. You can count the rest. Click, click and click on the anchor point you started with. Not too hard, is it so far in the Pen tool? I would like you to do the number 7. I'm sure you can handle it. Now we're going to move on to slightly more complicated. We're going to create this heart. Now, as I said before, to create corners, it's just a matter of clicking. But to create a curve, it's slightly different. What needs to happen is the anchor point needs to be placed at the top of the curve or like I also call it, is the peak of the hill. For corners you keep on clicking, but for curves you need to click and drag. I'll demo. I'm going to click on number 1, and then I'm going to go to the next anchor points, and this time I'm going to click and drag. Can you see these two lines? These are called handles and they're like elastic. If I go crazy, they'll go crazy. But if I just do it very subtly and I follow the direction of the little arrow that I created, then it looks good. Now, I'm not going to get it right the first time. I'm going to get it right, and then I'm going to adjust it. No worries if it doesn't look perfect just yet. Now, number 3 is a corner. You just click. Number 4 is a curve, so you click and drag. Number 1 is a corner, so you just click. We've got our anchor points. Now, clearly this needs to be adjusted. To adjust it, we need to directly select anchor points. We need to go to the direct selection tool or a shortcut. We'll start with this one. If you click on the anchor point, you'll see both handles and it's just a matter of pulling the handle. Same for number 4, you click and you adjust the handle, and sometimes you need to move an anchor point around. Voila. Let's go even more complicated now. Let's move on to number 2. We're on the direct selection tool, so we need to go to the Pen tool. Repeat. Again, you start with one, so you click corner. You just click. Number 2 is a curve, so you click and drag. Number 3 is also a curve, so you also click and drag. Number 4 is a curve again, so you click and drag and just do it minimal. You try and align it to this arrow, the same, make it parallel. Then this is a corner, so you just click. Now, it's all corners. Easy click, click, click, click, click. Now again, we've gone to a curve, so we need to click and drag. We can adjust it later, no problem. Corner, click and click. Not too bad. Now to adjust it, I need to go to the direct selection tool. Click on an anchor point, and I can play around with it until I get it right. Let's move on to number 5. Again, we're on the direct selection tool, so we need to go to the Pen tool. Click on a corner, click on the next corner, click and whoops, I'm just going to undo. Edit, undo or Control Z. I'm going to start again. Click, click, click, click. Now, number 4 is a curve, so I click and drag. Number 5 is also a curve, click and drag. Number 6 is a curve, click and drag. Number 7, actually a corner, so click. Eight click. Nine is a curve, click and drag. Ten is a curve, click and drag. Eleven is a tiny curve, click and drag. Twelve is a corner, and then one you click on the anchor points you started with. Now for adjusting, you go to the Direct Selection tool. Where shall we start? This looks pretty good. I start with six, I'm going to move the anchor point, and then I'm going to elongate, stretch out the handle. You can do the same for click and drag. Click and drag. Voila. Now, I trust that you can do number 6 on your own with the skills you've just learned. Don't worry, I sometimes referred to the Pen tool as a Pain tool back then because it wasn't always easy to get it. This just took me years of practice and years of tracing over illustrations and images, and eventually I got it. Now, it's the most satisfying thing in the world. Good luck. 18. Creating an Illustration (Pen Tool): If you go back to the pen tool folder and you look at tracing images, I've added a lot of images that you can practice with tracing. This one is quite a good one for practicing because you have a few curves and you have a few corners. I suggest you try and trace over this or get your own images or even a picture of yourself, a selfie that you would like to try and trace. What we'll do next is we're going to trace this car and we're going to use a Pathfinder. We combine a few skills here. I would like you to double-click on "2 Tracing And Pathfinder". We're just going to do the car, and then feel free to do the other ones. I'm just going to zoom in, and there we go. To start with, we always need to go to the pen tool and we need to make sure we have no fill. Always make sure when you trace over graphics, no fill. Maybe we'll make the stroke red again, always easier to see. Now you can choose where you start. I'll start over here and I'll just click because this is a tiny corner. Now, this is the top of the hill. This is where I'm going to add my anchor points, and there are so many ways of drawing this. This is just how I would do it, but every illustrator has a different way of creating an illustration. That's what makes Illustrator so cool. I'm going to now click and drag because it's a tiny curve. Then I'll move on to the next one, click and drag. Then the next piece, click and drag. Then over here, click and drag. This is a corner, click and drag. This is one long line so you can just click until the next corner. Then this, I always try and add the fewest possible or the least possible anchor points, because the more anchor points you have, the more kinks and bumps you'll have. Try the least possible and the top of the hill or the peak of the hill and click and click. Don't worry if yours doesn't look exactly the same. It's all about practice. See, I've made some mistakes here, which is absolutely fine because you'll love the next tool that I'm going to show you, and it's called the smooth tool. It allows you to smooth what you've just created. Let me zoom in a little bit. For a smooth tool, make sure you go to the selection tool and you have your path selected. The smooth tool is hard to find. It's under this tool, shaper tool, right-click, and it's over here. Now I remember it because I know the shortcut of the pencil tool is N, and it's right below the pencil tool. Then you can start clicking and dragging and you'll see that it will start to smoothen it out. Now to be honest, I was quite happy with the way I created mine, so the smooth tool is not that necessary for me. The better you get with the pen tool, the least you'll need the smooth tool. But it's quite good to start off with. You just literally click and drag and try and drag it in the direction of the path. Now you can do the windows, and I'll show you actually a couple of tricks of doing the windows. Now for the windows, what you can also do, just another way, is you can start by drawing a rectangle and you can use the corner widgets that I showed you before. Again, let me zoom in and you round the corners. You might need to adjust it a little bit. You can get rid of one of the anchor points by going to minus or delete anchor point, click and click. Now the problem here is that it's now a corner, and we need to make this into a curve. We need to go to the pen tool, and I'll show you another trick. If you hold down the Alt key whilst you're on the pen tool, you can click and drag it and it will curve that line, and you can adjust it. Now we can do the same for the front window. It's exactly the same principle. Then the middle window is literally a rectangle with rounded corners, and voila. Now you can do the same for this little one here. Go to the pen tool, click and drag. Click and drag. Here, we might need to adjust this. Direct selection tool and move it around and change the curves. Now for the wheels, I'll show you two ways of drawing these wheels. One of them is using the Pathfinder tool and the other will be another way. Let's draw two circles. Start with one, Alt Shift to draw from the center. Then to draw the second one from the center, you have to deselect it. Go to the selection tool, click away. Go to the ellipse tool again, try and find the center and Alt and drag. You might need to move the arrows down so it's more aligned. Go back to the selection tool. Now, as usual, give the fill a color. Horrible color. Remember, we need to use the Pathfinder tool. To use the Pathfinder tool, we need to make sure that the little circle is in front of the bigger circle, otherwise it won't work. What you do is you either right-click on the bigger circle, arrange, send to back, or you can use a little shortcut that I showed you, Command or Control square brackets. That works too. Now select both circles, make sure you're on the selection tool. Now we use the Pathfinder tool, and voila. Now before we do the second circle, we're going to apply the Pathfinder tool to the rest of our car. Now we're going to select all our shapes and we're going to remove that awful stroke. We're going to go to the fill and just add a little color. I'm going to select those windows and give that another color so it's going to be easier to see. Then that circle as well, you can remove the fill and you can use the eyedropper and copy them. It's a little bit better. Looking nicer now. Now we're going to select the car and the windows. Avoid the little wheel. Now we just click on the second option of the Pathfinder tool, and voila. Now the wheel, you could just duplicate it, Alt and drag, and have it. But I'm going to show you a second way to create this wheel as follows. Instead of creating two circles and using the Pathfinder tool, there is a faster way. You could just go to the ellipse tool and hold down the Alt and Shift like before, and remove the fill and have a stroke. What you can also do is swap the fill and the stroke. I'm going to show you something I haven't taught you yet, and that is how to change the stroke or the border. If you go to stroke over here in the properties panel, you'll see Fill, Stroke, and Opacity. Now if you go to stroke, you can increase that and give it a bigger stroke. You might need to make this a little bit smaller. That is a way to create that. Now if you wanted it to have a fill and a stroke around it, what you can do next is object expand. This means that it will convert this shape into a stroke, so border around it, and it will fill it inside. If I click on "Okay", you'll see that this one is now like that one. It has a fill and you could also have a border, a black board maybe if you wanted to. That is basically it. To create something like this, you use a combination of the pen tool, of shapes of the Pathfinder tool, and maybe expand. Well done. If you wanted to, you could practice it with the more complicated ones. Just keep practicing. 19. What is Image Trace?: Hey guys, I hope you enjoyed using the pen tool. There are lots of images in that folder that you can use to practice the pen tool. If you keep practicing, you'll get very good at it and very familiar with it and you might even love it the way I do. What we'll cover now is the famous image trace tool. You might have heard of it before. It's an automatic image tracing panel that converts pixel-based images into vectors or digital illustration. It's very easy to use and I hope you enjoy it and I'll see you soon. 20. Using Image Trace: [MUSIC] We're going to learn about the famous image trace tool, which essentially converts pixel-based image, so any image, into a vector or a digital illustration. Double-click on the zip file. It will expand into a folder, and you can access the files inside. We're just going to use some of these images. Let's go to Adobe Illustrator, and this time, let's click on Open. Go back to image trace, and we can start with a logo, actually. Often people are given JPEGs of logo which is wrong, instead of PNGs or vectors like EPS or AI or SVG. Then they're stuck with a white background, which they need to remove. One of the ways to do this is to image trace it. You click on Open, and there it is. We can change our art board later. If you go to Window, there is a panel called image trace. You have a whole load of options here under Presets. Now, if you click on Preview, you can preview what you're doing. What I do is I always have a look at all the options. I click on them, each by one, one by one. See, this one doesn't do too good job. Let's try black and white logo, not too bad. Technical drawing, it's gone. Line arts or silhouettes. There we go, not bad. The cool thing about silhouette is it got rid of the background, so it does the job for you. Now, to make it really happen, to actualize it, you always have to click on Expand, which will convert tracing objects into paths. There we go. Now, if you wanted to change the color of individual letters, remember that as a default, it gets grouped, so you'd have to right-click and ungroup. Then you could go to the Direct selection tool or the Selection tool. Click on the letter, select the fill, and you would be able to change the color by double-clicking on the fill and clicking on Okay. Now, a little problem here, as you can see, it's gray. The way to change this is to go to the little color palette, go to the hamburger icon, yummy, and select CMYK, and that will add the colors. Then I forgot to select the others, but you can do the same for the others. There we go. Or you could click on here and CMYK. Now, if you want it to change the artboard, so it's landscape, you would have to go to the Artboard tool. All you have to do is click on Landscape and maybe move it around a little bit. Then go back to the Selection tool, always go back to the Selection tool. You can select your whole logo and if you wanted, you would have to re-size it by holding the Shift key, I can move it. Now remember, if you wanted to see whether it has a transparent background, you can always go to the Transparency grid, and you'll see that there is nothing in the back. Now, if you wanted to save this, you would have to go to File, Save As, and you would have to save it as an SVG, which is a vector or an Adobe Illustrator is a vector. Actually, each of these will be a vector, which means that it will still be editable in a digital illustration program like Illustrator. Let's do another image. We go to File, Open, and what image are we going to do? Let's try the macaroons, making me hungry. Wow, It's a big image. You just select it and resize it by holding down the Shift key and click and drag. Just move it up here. Back to window, back to image trace. If you click on Preview, you will have a lot more to play with here, a lot more because you have more colors. Let's try Low fidelity photo. Now will take its time, it always takes time because it's converting every pixel into a path or a shape. That looks like an image, but it's a vector, go ahead and zoom in and see for yourself. Now, how cool is that? Super cool. Let's try another one, let's try three colors. That's pretty cool. Let's try 16 colors. I'm just playing around with this to see which option I like the most. It's all looking very Andy Warhol already. That's really nice. Have fun playing with all the different options of the image trace and trade with different images, and that's it for image trace. Always remember to click on Expand after so that you can modify it, and you can select the pieces and, let's say, change of color or something like that. Enjoy. 21. Let's Talk Text: Hey guys, I hope you enjoyed the Image Trace Tool and that it was fun for you the way it was for me. What we'll cover now is how to work with text, how to format text, how to change the font size of texts, the font color. We'll learn two new tools, one is called Type on a Path Tool, and it does what it says on the tin. The other one is called the Touch Type Tool, which is very cool and it's a surprise and I hope you enjoy it. See you soon. 22. Working with Text: [MUSIC] We're going to work with texts and type and you'll see 07 Type zip, which is a zip file that if you double-click on it, it will expand into a folder and you can access the files inside and we'll be working with 01 type. Again, this might look different on a PC. It might say AI in orange. Just look at the name of the file and that's the one we need. Now, we're going to need some fonts. If you go to the fonts folder, I've already placed some fonts that we can download, so we have them and we have no missing fonts. You can double-click on one and click on Install Font. I already have all of these, so if you could do that for all of them, that would be great and we're ready to go. Open 01 type. To work with the Type Tool, we need to go to the Type Tool. The shortcut is T, and the low, I've added the font name, what it's used for. Let's zoom in a little bit. We're going to recreate this piece of text and what we started with is we start with a text frame. We're going to do one by one, and I'm going to demo how to do all of these. We click and drag and create a very generous big text frame and then you can start typing the text in. [NOISE] Now that we have the content of the text, we're going to text format it. Let's start by highlighting Illustrator Rocks. Now if you're using a newer version of Illustrator, you'll see in the properties panel, Character and oldest information here. Alternatively, you could always go to Window type character and you'll have that same panel over here. Let's start with character. The font is Myriad's Pro. It's ready in Myriad Pro. But if it's not, you can just type it in or search for it. Now, the font needs to be bigger. This is the font size. If I were to increase the font, it would be bigger. You can also highlight this box and press the upward or downward key on my keyboard to increase or decrease. So cool, I love doing that. Now, can you see the three dots? That's always for more options. If you click on them you'll also have these other options, like all caps. Actually I believe this needs to be in bold so you can select bold and whoa, it's a little bit big, isn't it? You can just decrease the font size. Now the next thing it needs to be is in the paragraph section or in the panel would be here paragraph, same thing. Select Align Center because it needs to be in the center. Great. Now for the next pieces, we want to move this text a bit down, don't we? What we can do is click after the exclamation mark and if we go to paragraph, the three dots will have more options. We'll have something called space before and space after, which will add more space after the chosen paragraph. If I were to increase that, text would go down. Now, obviously my whole text frame needs to be moved down. If I go to the Selection tool, I can move the whole piece of text down and I will need to go back to the Type Tool, and click in a text frame to carry on the editing. Now let's add more space after, because it needs a little bit more spacing, doesn't it? Back to paragraph and add more space. Super. Now for this one, so select after Illustrator three dots and paragraphs and add more space after. Great. Now for this old Illustrator it just needs to be in bold, doesn't it? So select Bold. As simple as that. Now for graphics, if you could highlight graphics and obviously needs to be in italic. Now how do I change this color though? Easy. I can just go to my colors and select whichever red I think it is and there we go. That's the first section. The second section is pretty cool. It's using the type on a path tool to have texts in this cool curve. So you don't have to type the whole text, you can just highlight it, click and drag, and then edit, copy or Command or Control C. Now it's copied. Now if we want to paste it in here, we need to go to another variation of the Type Tool. If you right-click on the Type tool, you will see type on a path tool and that's the one we need. You need to start here. You start where the text starts and you just click and now you paste, edit, paste or Control Command V and that's that. Now for the next piece of text, I'm going to select this piece and I'm just going to put it over here for now. We might need to copy this again. What we'll do to create this is we're going to need to create two circles. One is the actual circle, and the second one will be the path for text. What we do is we go to the Ellipse tool as usual and with we want to draw circle from the center, we Alt and Drag and Shift. Now, just for now we're going to swap the film of stroke and what we'll do is we're going to create a second circle. What we can do is edit, copy, edit, paste in front and that means that instead of pasting it, like if I paste in a random spot, it's going to paste it directly in front of the existing circle. There will be two circles if you look. One the original and one is the one I pasted. Now to make it bigger, you can hold down the Alt and Shift and Drag from the corners and there we go. Super. Now we can change the colors and whatnot later, first for the texts so maybe we go to the Type tool now, the plane Type tool and we just make sure that we have this text copied just in case we didn't before or something happened. Then we're going to go back to the type on a path tool and we're going to click over here, like where we think use will start, over here and we paste, edit, paste or Command V. Super. Now we need to adjust this text so what we can do is select our text and we can start making it bigger. We can go to more options, make it all caps. Still make it a bit bigger. We might need to add an exclamation mark as well. Now, if you see a little gap here, this could be because of a number of reasons. It could be that the font is not right, so you can make it smaller. It could be that our circle is bigger and actually that is a case. Our circle is much bigger over here. But that is fine because there is a little solution to that. This is called justify. If you go to paragraph and you click on justify, it will push everything together and the gap will be gone. Now select your whole text and we're going to change the color. If we go to the swatches, you can pick any color you like if you want. Or you could just try and see which greatest thing that's darker gray should be about rights. Then we go to the Selection tool. We select the circle, and we make it gray and we remove the stroke and vola, more or less. You get the gist of it. You can make it with all different kinds of shapes as well. Now for the really fun part, the touch-type tool. What I would like you to do is go to the Type Tool, create a text frame, and type in touch-type tool, and select it all. Now if it looks weird, it's because we're still on the previous setting of justify all lines. We just need to align center and add the appropriate returns. Now we need to change the font. The font for this is Cooper. There it is and we need to make it bigger, of course. I like that. Now the reason this is happening is because something called the leading is wrong. The leading, this is the leading, is the space between the lines. So we need to increase the space between the lines for it to have more space. One of the final touches is changing the color so we go to swatches and we try and find that red again. Now for the fun parts, moving a letter up or down, making it look very cool. There is a specific tool for that and it's called the touch-type tool. If you go to the Type tool and you select the Touch Type tool, it's literally so easy. All you have to do is click on a letter and you can move a letter up or down. Click can move it up. Click can move it down and how fun is this? Click another letter and move it down and you can make this your own if you want, and use your own texts and your own logo and fonts and colors to make it your own. Well done and this was an introduction to text and type. 23. Let's Talk Flyer: Hey guys, we have now come to the time of the course where we put all our newly acquired skills to the test with a big holistic flyer exercise. We'll be using all the exercises we created, the graphics of the houses, of the suitcases, of the cars, and much more. We'll be bringing it in our holistic flyer and creating a little collage of all our skills we've learnt. We'll be learning as well three new things; one of them will be how to work with gradients, the other will be how to work with symbols which are existing free icons inside Illustrator. There will be little clouds that we'll be using as a background, and the third thing is how to use transparency to make the clouds transparent. I hope you'll love it and see you soon. 24. A Flyer: Adding Gradients & Symbols: [MUSIC] Now we're going to create a project advertisement or a flyer that covers the pen tool, gradients, transparency, image trace, colors, and much more. If you could double-click on Project Advertisement, the zip file, it will expand into a folder. You can then double-click on that folder and you'll have all the information in here. You'll have houses, which we'll be placing in this illustration. We'll have a plane and suitcases. If you look at my previous lessons, these are all covered, how to draw these in detail. But feel free to draw them again in detail if you're really keen. Now, we'll be creating this from scratch. We'll cover the pen tool and text and a lot of other different stuff. We'll cover something new. How to add these clouds and make them transparent using symbols. We'd like you to open Travel Project Working file. Click. There it is. This is what we'll be creating. I've already created another art board. It's all set. Now the first thing we'll start with is can you see that the graphics, they go over, they bleed over the page. That's because this one has been created with the bleed line. We're going to add a bleed line to our art boards by going to file, document setup and making the bleed 3 millimeters all around, because that's the industry standards. This is what we'll line our graphics to, the red line. What we'll start with is the background layer. I always work my layers from the back to the front. I start with the back layer and then I go to the next furthest back layer, and then the one in front of it and then the one in front. Until I go to the utmost front layer. To create a background, we just need to go to the rectangle tool. We can just remove the fill, the stroke. It could just be white for now, that's fine. In my swatches, I've added here in safe travel how all the colors we'll need. Now this obviously has a gradient, so I'll show you how to do that. But first, let's create a rectangle. You click and drag, and there's a rectangle. Now, let's make this blue. Now let me show you how to make this into a gradient. If you click on that, the blue is gone, but no worries, we'll fix that. This is the gradient panel. If you double-click on this, it's color gradient slider, color stop. If you double-click, you can then choose blue. Now it's blue. This is great, but obviously it's in the wrong direction. We need to go to the gradient tool this time. What you can do is click and drag and start playing with what you think is right for how the gradient should be. More or less, don't worry, we can always change this later, no problem. Now what's important is that we lock this layer because this layer is going to be in the way. If we don't lock it. We go to layers and we'll see it's highlighted here, this rectangle, we just click on here and lock it. Very good. Now we can close this for now. The next other new thing I'll show you is how to create these clouds. Actually we don't have to create them because they already exist inside Illustrator. We just have to grab them. As usual, we go to the selection tool. Now, here is an icon and you'll see symbols. If you click on it, you won't see these actually, but if you go to the symbols library here, you'll see a whole list of existing symbols or icons. Basically their icons that you can use. If you click on the arrows, you can just go through all of these and you have loads of cool ones. Now, to find the clouds, you will have to go back to symbol libraries menu and go to nature. Under here you'll see loads of nature-based icons. Feel free to use any of these. For the clouds though, what you do is you click and you drag in on your page, and you click and you drag it on your page and another one. You can keep going. You don't have to create the exact same clouds that I did. You can have fun with it and make it your own. I will just for this purpose, try and make it the same. Is it this one? Yeah, I think so. So far so good. Now you can close this and we have our clouds. Now, these clouds are more transparent, so I'm going to have to make it transparent. How do you make it transparent? Well, you select it. Then you'll see here fill stroke and opacity. Fill was the color inside the shape. Stroke is the border, and opacity is how transparent it is. If it's 100 percent opaque, it means it's completely dark and not transparent. If you reduce the opacity, you increase the transparency. I always think of opaque tights. If I buy opaque tights, they're not transparent. You start decreasing that and you'll see the cloud decreasing. Now we can do the second one and the other ones, or you can just select all three in one go. This is possible because we locked the background. Then you can reduce the opacity in one go. Cool. Now let's close this. We will no longer need symbols. 25. A Flyer: The Pen Tool: Now, the next part we'll do is the hills using the Pen tool. I guess the easiest way to do this is to directly trace it over the existing one and then we just bring it to the right. We go to the Pen tool or shortcut P and maybe we'll give it as usual, we remove the fill, and give it a red border, just so it's really easy to see and we can zoom in into this one, and there we go. We start. This is a corner, so we click and we want to place our anchor point at the peak of the hill or the top of the curve and then we click and drag. Then this is the bottom of the curve, so click and drag. So either at the top or the bottom, click and drag, click and drag, click and drag. It's satisfying, isn't it? Click and drag. Now we don't have to make it exactly the same. Click and drag, click and drag, click and drag, and then click. Now, to make it straight, you can always hold down the Shift key and it's going to be a straight line, and you do the same over here; shift and click, and shift and click. Now we need to try and find which color it is, so obviously our stroke needs to be removed, no border and then the fill, we'll go to our Swatches and try and find which of these it is. I think it's this one. Now, to move this to the right-hand side, we go to the Selection tool, might want to zoom out a little bit and we can just click and drag it to the right, holding the Shift key so it doesn't go up or down, just straight. Now that I'm happy with this, and I'm happy with the clouds, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to lock everything, so it's not moving, so nothing will accidentally move it. I'm just going to select it all and go to my Layers and just start locking everything. We are currently working in the working layer and the other one, the original, is in a locked layer. Now, nothing is going to be in my way. Now you can start placing all the houses and trees and start resizing it. We go to "File" "Open" and we can open each of these. Just let's open all of them, so all we'll have to do is grab them eventually. These will be opened in individual separate documents, and I'll show you something really cool now. Let's go to trees. Let's select all our graphics and if we click and drag it to the top of Travel Project, we don't let go, I'm still holding the left button on my keyboard, then we let go on the actual page, this will be placed in my document. Obviously, they're really big big, so let's make these smaller. Hold down the "Shift'' key and you can drag it. Now, if I wanted to make it this color, I could go to my Swatches and try and see which color it was. If you're not sure you can always use the [LAUGHTER] eyedropper, that's absolutely fine, I'll use this one, and go back to the Selection tool. Before I start adding on the stuff all the items, I'm just going to add the houses as well, so we have all of them. Now, the houses are here, so you can do the same thing, you select the houses, click and drag, drag it to Travel Project, drop it over here, and potentially make it smaller. I think everything needs to be a bit smaller, doesn't it? Then, either use the Eyedropper tool or you go to Swatches and try and find that color. Super. Now, feel free to re-size everything. What I'm going to do is instead of just dragging them and just placing them here, I'm going to duplicate them because I might need a few copies of them. So I'm going to go Alt and drag and drop. I'm not concerned with resizing and rotating it, I'm just concerned with placing them, copying them. Now that we have all the elements, let's start resizing them and rotating them. So you can start clicking and dragging and you hover over the corner until you see that rounded double arrow and then you rotate it, click and drag, and just start rotating things. Again, you have freedom to design here, so if you're not happy with the original one, you can make it your own and change the colors, whatnot. Now the bike, again, you need to resize it, make it smaller, and rotate it. Now this bike, make it smaller, and rotate it and I don't know, I feel like the person riding this bike would probably die die because it's such a steep hill, but whatever, we're just being creative, add this house and make the tree smaller and there we go. My houses and my bikes are a little bit bigger, but that's fine, I love trying different techniques and skills. Once you've done that, you can just select all your shapes and delete them, or if you're a bit nervous about it, you can just bring them down, keep them in the pasteboard, just in case. 26. A Flyer: Using Image Trace: If we wanted to make sure that all our graphics aligned on the right-hand side, what we could do is make sure we go to the selection tool and click away and add some rulers so that we can make sure the lines. Now the way to do this is to go to over hear, click to show rulers. At the top you'll see the numbers of rulers. From there you can click and drag and start adding some guides. You can add guides to everything if you want. Even this could add some further texts and more later even for the plane. Now, you can start clicking, dragging with the rectangle tool and create a rectangle over here in the correct color. You can do the second rectangle as well. If it's not there, we can always use the eyedropper. Before we move on to the other bits, which I trust that by now you should be able to do them on your own, what I'll do now is I'm going to show you how to do the airplane and I'll show you how to do windows and then the rest we can all finish on our own. Let's go to the plane. Our plane silhouette is here somewhere. But if you look at it, it's actually an image, which means that we need to image trace it. What we're going to do is we're going to go to Window, Image Trace, and look at all the different options. Make sure preview is ticked. You can click on Silhouettes and voila. Now makes sure that when you've used Image Trace you click on Expand to convert it to a vector. Now, like before, we click and drag and add it over here. Now we need to resize it, so shift and click and drag. If you want, you can literally go over the original one so it's exactly the same. Then you can change the color, and I believe it's actually this one but with a transparency. If I go to opacity and I reduce the opacity, there we go. Next, if you want, you can lock it by going to layers and locking. See that was highlighted. You lock that. That's locked. Next, the window is the little lines. I'm going to show you how to use the line tool, which is fairly easy. You just need to go to the line tool and you need to click from one end and drag it to the other end holding down the Shift key, which means it will keep straight. Now we just need to have a white stroke. You can also make it white, by the way, if you double-click on the stroke. If you click on the stroke, you can click on white and this will make the stroke white. But now we have to increase the weight of the stroke, and there we go. Now, the same goes for the other lines. What I'm going to do is go to the Selection tool now, instead of redoing this line over and over again, what I'm going to do is just duplicate it. I'm going to Alt and drag and hold down the Shift key. Alt and drag, hold down the Shift key. Again. Super. Now we do the same for the landscape ones. We go to the line tool, and it's in the middle of the cloud around here. We click and drag and hold down the Shift key to make sure it's straight, always needs to be straight. Then we're going to go to the selection tool and we're going to Alt and drag like we did before, but this time we're just going to Control D and repeat actions. If you press Command Control Z, it will repeat the exact same last thing that you did, which means that it's repeated. We might need to move a few things around, like the plane might need to move to the left and stuff like that, but I trust you to make this right. Now, please make sure you do the rest by adding the luggages, the suitcases from over here and changing the color by adding a text. Here's a text copy which you will be able to use. When you're done, you have a whole exercise for yourself. Feel free to change the colors exactly the way I did it over here. You can make a whole cool, totally different color palette. [NOISE] You can click and drag and drag the suitcases over here. Make them smaller. Try and get the correct size-ish. Then you can change the color. Actually, you might need to duplicate this one, alt and drag, and start changing the color. You can either use the Eyedropper or not, or you can use the swatches and then this piece. We might need one more to go over here. You can just grab all of these and move them here. Whoops. Oh, I just realized I made a mistake over here. Can you see that this suitcase moved without its studs? What you can do is highlight all of it and maybe delete the guide for now. Highlight the whole suitcase with the studs, and if you right-click, you can click on Group so that it stays grouped together. Problem solved. 27. A Flyer: Adding the Text: Same as before we're going to trace over the existing graphic and we're going to go to the Pen Tool and maybe zoom in a little bit and make sure there is no fill and the stroke is red. Actually, we won't make this red this time because it already is red. Let's choose a contrasting color, maybe blue. We're going to go click and click and drag and click and drag and click and drag. Click, hold down the Shift key, hold down the Shift key and hold down the Shift key. It's not exactly the way I wanted. I could go to the direct selection tool, click on the anchor points and I can always customize it. No problem. That's pretty nice. You want to try and get the least possible amount of anchor points. Then once that's done, you go to the selection tool. You might want to make it red. Actually, that's the stroke, so we will need to remove the stroke, no stroke. Select the film studs and then select that color and voila. Now we move it to the right holding the Shift key so it stays aligned. Starting to look good, doesn't it? Next, we'll work with the logo. The logo is one of these exercises. It's one of these files. Here we go, this one. I would like you to select it and drag it like before and drop it. You might be wondering, well, how do I get rid of this black background? How do I just make it white? Well, that's it. You just have to remove the black background by going to the direct selection tool because it's currently grouped. I go to the direct selection tool. I can directly select just the background and then I can delete it. Then you can go to selection tool and you can move it around and voila. Now for the text, it's very easy. First, we already have the text copy. We just need to copy this. Make sure you go to the Type tool and you select this piece of text and you go edit, copy or Command C Control C and then we go and create a second text frame, and we paste, edit paste or Command V. Remove text copy, make the text white by going to our swatches and choosing white. Now it's just a matter of changing the font. Make it smaller. You can choose your own fonts, whatever you want. It doesn't have to be exactly the same. See I've just made it slightly different. That's pretty much it. I would like you to do the same for the text over here. You can just create a text frame, click and drag, highlight it, change it to white, change safe travel to bold, and there we go pretty much. If you want to tidy up your page, you can get rid of the guides, delete and voila. Congratulations and I hope you have a lot of fun with this and that you use your own colors like I did here and make it your own. Well done. 28. Let's Talk Saving: What we'll do now is we'll learn how to save and export files into a vector format, a digital illustration like Adobe Illustrator, or SVG, but we'll also learn how to convert it into a pixel-based image, like a JPEG or a PNG, which is great for clear backgrounds. Then I'll show you how to package your Adobe Illustrator file, which basically means that it's a folder where everything is going to fit nicely into this folder, things like your images, your text, the Adobe Illustrator file, and the PDF. We'll also learn how to create an Adobe PDF, which is a file that acts both as an Adobe Illustrator file, which means you can edit it in Adobe Illustrator with all the layers, and as a PDF. That's exciting. I'll see you soon. 29. Saving & Exporting: [MUSIC] Now that you have created a piece of artwork, this could be with your own materials. How do you save it? That's what we'll cover now. There's a few ways of saving it. If you go to File, Save As, you can save it as an Adobe Illustrator file, which means that it will be a working file. You can still edit it in Adobe Illustrator. If you click on "Save," it will be a file like this one or if you're using a PC, it will look like the logo AI, which is in orange, which is the Adobe Illustrator icon. Now, if you use EPS Illustrator template or SVG, these will all be vector formats, which means that you can always edit them further in Illustrator. If I select SVG for instance, and I call it safe travel, and I click on "Use Artboards." I can choose which artboard I want to save because currently I have two or I can choose Range which will only allow me to save the one I choose. Let's click on "All" and let's click on "Save" and "Okay" and let's just have a look back at our folder, which is here. Look, I have two SVGs file. One is the second one I just created, and this one is the original one. If I were to open this with Adobe Illustrator, that is it in its own file. Going back to this, let's look at other ways to save it. If you go to File Save As, you'll see, Adobe PDF, and now this is quite new. It's pretty cool. If you click on "Save," I'll show you. An Adobe PDF in Illustrator means that it's a file that will act both as an Adobe Illustrator file and as a PDF. That means that you'll only need to have one file and if you're not sure, it says here in the description, saving an Adobe Illustrator file as an Adobe PDF document, use these settings when you plan on editing the file again in Illustrator, or when you need to place it in a layout applications such as InDesign or when the final use of the file is unknown. You're not sure what you want to do with the file, but you still want to edit it. But you also might need it as a PDF. That's someone that doesn't have Illustrator will be able to open it, then this is a good choice. Just make sure you tick preserve illustrator editing capabilities. Now this will make the file just a little bit bigger because it's still editable. You'll have all the layers and stuff like that and marks and bleeds. Remember we added a three-millimeter bleed mark. If you wanted to include that, you will have to tick all printers marks and it will include the bleed line. But this will only be for printing. It will have these ugly marks that you don't want if it's for a web PDF. I'll show you how they look like. Then you can just click on "Save PDF." Just let Illustrator do its thing. Here it is, it went to my other screen. These are the ugly little marks I was talking about and this is a file for printing. Now if I were to open this in Illustrator, if I go back to my Finder or File Explorer for PC, there it is, my PDF. If I were to open this with Adobe Illustrator, you'll see it says the name is PDF. That means that I've just opened this file and I have all my layers. If I click on stuff, see, you can still modify it. That's cool. Now, let's look at some other ways to save it. If I go to File Export, Export As what it will do is convert it which is a vector file, convert vector files into pixel format. A JPEG or a PNG is a pixel format. If you look over here, you have a lot of options and PNGs pixels, JPEG, you must know its pixels. TIFF is a very high-quality pixel-based image. PNG is quite preferable actually if you use logo and stuff like that, not in this case because this is a flyer, but if you're using a logo, PNG will allow you to have a clear background while still being a pixel. But in this case, we just need JPEG because we don't have a clear background, we don't need one. We click on, "Use Artboards." Again, it will create two separate JPEGs from each individual artboards. Artboards are essentially like pages. What I like about here is that I can choose the quality of my file. Now, obviously, the higher the quality, the larger the file size. If I reduce the quality, the file size will be smaller. It totally depends where you need to post it to or send it to and the restrictions are file size restrictions. Then just press "Okay" and let's have a look at our file back to Finder. It's looking very messy now this file but can you see now I have two JPEGs here and there. They're just plain JPEGs and they can be used for a lot of different things. Now, there is one final thing that you can do, is package your whole Adobe Illustrator document. If I were to go to File Package and make sure I copy links, copy fonts, what it will do is it will create a separate folder with all my information in it. You'll have your Adobe Illustrator file, your PDF, and the images. If I click on "Package" this is just Adobe Illustrator telling me not to steal stuff that is not mine. We're using a lot of free stuff here and stuff that I personally created, so we're all goods. Then we click on "Okay" and show package. Let's see what you got. This is the package, so we have the PDF, which is a lost PDF we used, and the fonts. PDF is both an Adobe Illustrator file as well as a PDF. It's all in there. We didn't use images. Everything we've used is a vector. But if we did have images in this file, there'll be a folder called links, and you'll have all the images and inside that folder, which is what packages are useful to keep all your information in one file. I hope you enjoyed this little saving tutorial, and I hope you go on and create amazing illustrations, flyers, and vectors, and whatever your heart desires. Congratulations. 30. What's Next?: Hey, guys. Congratulations on completing this Adobe Illustrator course. I'm super happy for you and I hope you go on to create amazing illustrations and icons and vectors and flyers and anything your heart desires. You have successfully learned how to create shapes and icons and illustrations. You have successfully used the pen tool and swatches and Image Trace and texts and much more. There is so much you can do with these skills. They are so transferable. Now, if you wanted to learn how to create a brochure and a PDF and a multi-page PDF and booklets and e-book. Then the application for you, software for you is Adobe in-design. Now, you're in luck because I have another course, which is an Adobe in-design course, and it's exactly the same format. If you enjoyed this format, you will enjoy that course. If you have both software together, you use them together, then you're a winner and there's so much you can do with it. I look forward to seeing you soon.