Build Faster, Better Vector Logos & Illustrations: In Adobe Illustrator

1. Intro: Hello, my name is Jon Brommet of Crusoe Design Co, and welcome to building faster, better vector logos and illustrations in Adobe Illustrator. Whether you're a novice, that's just dipping your toes in Adobe Illustrator, or even if you're a professional that's using Adobe Illustrator often, chances are you're not building your vector shapes as cleanly or efficiently as you could be. I've been working as a graphic designer professionally in the print industry for over 15 years and I've seen all different types of files come from amateurs and even big design agencies that just aren't really up to snuff. In this class, I'm going to be showing you a ton of different and useful ways to build better vector shapes. These will be useful for illustration, logo design, branding, custom type, and just about anything you can think of in Adobe Illustrator. With somebody with a keen eye, you may be wondering why is my guitar sitting on top of the light table. There's a reason. You see, this here is my favorite guitar. It is named Apple Phone, he became Lucio, and I love playing it and for that reason, I've decided to use it as my class project not only because I love this guitar, but because it features a lot of really unique and difficult-to-draw shapes. This is something that a lot of people would just attack with just the pen tools to try and get these nice curves, but there's a more efficient way to do it. Sometimes the pen tool alone isn't enough and isn't getting the job done as quickly as you can. I welcome you to draw any instrument or really anything that you love and hopefully, something that's going to challenge you to try and learn the tools that I'm showing you in this class. Develop a way to make your vector shapes quicker, faster, cleaner as I've said a few times. If you'd like to know more about me, I'm a graphic designer and illustrator and I've worked on a wide variety of design work over the past 15 years professionally. I now specialize in logo design and branding as well as merchandise design. I've worked with bands like Blink-182, brands like Hi My Name is Mark, and RPM Training Co. I collaborated with great companies like New Era to produce my own merchandise, and lately, I've been really diving into the disc golf world, working with brands like Thought Space Athletics to create custom illustrations for stamps and more. I'm also a long-time Skillshare top teacher and I've taught nearly 75,000 students, who've watched over two million minutes of my content. But enough about me. When you're done taking this class, you're going to have the confidence to be able to open Adobe Illustrator and know that your ability in your vector shapes quickly and efficiently, and if you need to send them to someone, you know that you won't be embarrassed to do so. I hope you'll keep watching and check out the rest of the class. 2. The Class Project: All right, let's talk about the class project. As I said in the intro video, I'm going to be drawing this Epiphone BB king, Lucille guitar. The reason why I chose this guitar is not only because I like it, because it has interesting shapes. The body has some interesting cutaways, some different shapes, kind of egg shapes, big fat body. Got a lot of different things going on, all the way down to this headstock. There's a lot of different shapes, a lot of different cutaways, and unique things about the shape that goes into making a guitar. It's something that I think is not always the easiest thing to do in Adobe Illustrator. Trying to get your straight lines right is sometimes easier than getting really precise, nice smooth curves, especially if you're using things like the pen tool. I, experienced in using Adobe Illustrator sometimes are getting their lines as smooth as they could be, and I hope that this class will show a unique and good approach to not only getting your lines clean and smooth, but doing it efficiently. We're going to be doing that by using the Pen tool, but also using it in combination with shapes, Pathfinder, Shape Builder tools, and then we're also going to show a lot of unique ways to not only the image trace, but we're going to be using radial tools, we are going to be using different types of Type on path things. We're just trying to show a lot of different information that you can hopefully use all those different pieces to build your own custom logos, your own illustrations, your own lettering, whatever it is you're going to be doing in Adobe Illustrator. Hopefully, you'll be doing it a little quicker and with a little more fun after taking this class. I look forward to seeing whatever your class project is. Please do upload it. It's always fun to see what you guys create. It doesn't have to be a guitar. It can be a guitar. But whatever it is that inspires you whether it's a musical instrument, or something else. But if you're having a hard time picking something, pick a guitar, pick a musical instrument, get drawing. Because the way to get better at anything, is by putting in the practice, not just watching the content, it's certainly helps, but doing it yourself. You'll be surprised with the kind of muscle memory you'll pick up by interacting and doing the lessons that I'm showing you in this class, even if it's not exactly, if you're building something slightly different, I hope all the tips will make you a little bit more confident, and efficient while using the software. Do keep in mind that although this class is going to be more aimed towards beginners, novice, intermediate users, users of all skill levels will learn and pick up some new tips. I know I do it all the time still watching content myself. Even though I use Adobe Illustrator so much, I'll be surprised when I see someone's doing something in a different way I hadn't thought of. Often it's worth it. It's good to know. I hope you check it out and let's get into the videos on the screen. No more of my face, don't worry. 3. Guiding The Way: Hello, welcome. Thanks for checking out this class. I hope you guys really enjoy it. It's been a minute since I've taught, so hopefully there's lots of new ears and eyes and hopefully some existing ones as well. I hope you guys enjoy this class. Let's just jump right into it. One thing I will warn you is that this time, this year, my allergies are extra brutal. This year they're just the worst they've ever been. There's no breathing through my nose. My voice is fairly nasally, but it's going to be extra nasally for this one. My apologies. If you hear me breathing in between my sentences like this, [NOISE] it's just because I need to get some air. The first thing that we want to talk about is guiding the way. Basically what that means is I want to be able to use Smart Guides whenever I am using Illustrator essentially. I think Smart Guides are probably one of the more important tools to have. Definitely a lot of beginners don't use it. Some of the intermediate, advanced, I'm sure they're using it constantly, so some of you will already know what this is, but for those that don't, I want to show you what it is and why you need it and why it will be so useful to you moving forward. To start with, we want to turn our Smart Guides off by clicking View at the top of our menu here and then going all the way down to right here where you see Smart Guides. Once you've selected that, if you were to hit View again, you'll see that there's a check mark. That means it's turned on. Now, one of the things I always talk about in all of my classes is the importance of quick keys or smart keys, however you want to call them. That is basically just little shortcuts to turn things on and off and switch to different tools. In this case, you'll see over here on the right-hand side, it's a little cheat sheet letting you know what the quick key is and it is Command U on a Mac. Anytime I say Command, on a Mac, that's that button with that little symbol on it. On a PC, you'll just use the Control button. They're basically interchangeable. Command U or Control U on a PC. From now on I will basically only hit the Quick key. I will not go back to this menu again because it's slow. My hands are already on the keyboard, so it's way more efficient to me. One of the easiest ways to know that you have smart guides turned on because they're hidden, there's nothing anywhere telling you that they're on, is by highlighting over top of things. As you can see, on this guitar, as I highlight over things, they're lighting up, they're having these blue lines on them or in the middle of the stroke and that tells you my Smart Guides are on as I'm hovering around. Now, that alone is not so useful, but one of the things that's most useful for Smart Guides is this. I'm going to switch over to my rectangular tool, which is the letter M on my keyboard and I'm just going to draw out some random square, let's say, I'm going to hold Shift and that'll make it a perfect square. Now I'm going to switch over to my arrow tool, that is just V on the keyboard. Some of these things I won't say later in the class, you're getting real warmed up here. We're going to click Drag and I'm holding Shift and Option, which would be Shift and Alt on a PC and that drags this shape over here. I'm just copying it and basically pasting it on the right. Now, I'm going to turn my Smart Guides off, Command U, which would be Control U on a PC. I'm going to drag this over and I'm going to try and butt up these two rectangles perfectly. It's right there, it looks absolutely perfect to me. Now, the problem is it may look perfect here. No, when we zoom in, we can see it here that there is a gap. Sometimes what will happen is you'll go the other way and you go over top of it and it looks perfect, but if you go into your wireframe, so that's View and down to outline, which is Command Y. For now, I'll just hit Command Y. You would be able to see, oh no, they're not banging on. This is just a lack of precision. This is something that can really come back to bite you and we'll see even more in a moment why. But having with our Smart Guides on and now hit Command U, let's drag the shape back over. Now let's drag it and as you can see, you'll get this little purply pink line and that means that bam, it is snapped directly exactly on top of that line. We can go into our wireframe, we can zoom in indefinitely and we know that that is bang on perfectly aligned. That is one of the great things about using Smart Guides. One of the other examples of using Smart Guides, which you'll see a lot in this class is I'm just going to use the ellipse tool, that's L on the keyboard. Just going to select that color for a second. I turned my Smart Guides off. Let's say that I want to start a line with the Pen tool. I'm hitting P on my keyboard and I want to hit it directly in the center of the circle, but I'll start it just over here. I'm guessing, well, maybe that's where the circle is and I draw out a line like so. Let's just fill it with this green color for the moment. Now, of course, if I were to go into Smart Guides or even select this, you can see I'm miles off. This is the center of that circle. You can see I'm not even close. Let's just delete this line like so. Now that we have our Smart Guides on here, you can see like that. As soon as I switch over to my pen tool, as I hover near the shape, even near it, you'll see it goes bam, every time that line just shows up that color, now I know I am dead center on that circle. If I click here and I draw over here, I know for sure that this is exactly dead center of that circle. There's a ton of little hidden reasons why Smart Guides are useful. This is just a couple of quick examples. Yeah. Please make sure that you have your Smart Guides on as it will be invaluable for the rest of the class, but do know how to turn them off because sometimes they will be annoying and they'll try and snap you to things that you don't actually want to snap to and that's when you just hit that Command U or Control U and boom, you've got it turned off and you know that you're ready to rock. You can turn it back on whenever you need. 4. Hidden Template: There's a lot of different ways to set up your file when you are creating vector shapes. In a lot of cases, you're going to want to either trace an image, or more often than that, you're going to want to trace a sketch, so something you've drawn out, whether it's for a logo, hand lettering, whatever it is, and you're going to want to be able to reference that. Now, one one the easiest ways to do that is to just paste or import it onto your page and start drawing over top of it. But it can get a little bit confusing. Let me just show you an example here. I'm going to hit Command N to make a new art board. This is going to default to whatever setting that I had last. It doesn't matter. For this case, I'm just going to hit Enter. Let's just zoom in here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hit Command V to paste. I'm basically pasting this guitar. This is a photo that I got online of the exact same guitar I have. Just saves me photographing it myself and trying to get it accurate. Now, do know that I'm only using this for my class and for what I'm doing. You do have to be careful when drawing over top of existing photos if you didn't pay for them, if you don't have the licensing for them. Just be really careful. You want to try and usually just do it with your own photography. But this is just a fun example to do for this class. I'm not going to turn around and sell this or anything like that. Now that we have this pasted here, whether this is a sketch or a drawing, or so on, let's just say you're going to come in here and you're going to start drawing over top of it. But the problem is that it can start to get a little bit messy, especially, let's say we're going to draw over here and we're going to make our little rectangle shape for this bridge, and then maybe we'll start chopping up pieces. Don't worry, I'm going to explain what I'm doing shortly, but this is just a real quick example. But what happens is, it starts to get messy and you can't really see what you're doing in relation to the image behind it. What some people will do is they'll turn the opacity down, and you can do that up here while the image is selected, say 50% and they'll lock it, so that's command and the number 2. Also control 2. You can see that this is not locked, so I can't select it. That's a little bit better. It's a little less in the way, but it still gets very distracting, especially once you start getting layers on top of layers. Let's just say, for example, I started drawing this body. Again, don't worry, we're going to go over all this very soon. Now you can see, I really can't see what I'm doing at all, I can't see the guitar. It's frustrating, and so I'm trying to get to it. If I hit Command Y in a Y frame, it just shows the outline of the image instead of actually being able to see the image, and it's just a pain in the butt. Sometimes I'll do this, especially if I'm being lazy and it's something simple, but a lot of the times it can be annoying. To unlock this, if we select it, you'll see the lock appear over here. It's because I hit that command 2 button. I'm going to click that little lock and it unlocks this image. I'm going to put the opacity right back up to 100% and I'm going to show you what I think is a much better way to do this. Let's just delete everything I just made there. Now with this perfectly centered to my art board by clicking up here, I'm going to align to art board and I'm going to click this here, horizontal align center and vertical align center. I know that it's now dead center in my art board. What I'm going to do is double-click onto this layer that I'm on. We can call it anything we want. We can call it source, for example, so it's our source image, our source sketch, whatever it is. This color and most of these other things don't matter as much, but try and copy my settings for the sake of it. The main thing we want to do is select a template and then we'll leave dim image at 50%. You can change that to whatever you want. At first glance, this might not look that interesting, It's just faded. You can't draw on this layer because it automatically locks it since it's a source layer. So now we need to go down and hit right here, our create new layer. Now we can start drawing on this layer. Now here's the advantage. Let's just imitate what we did before. Let's just go over here. I'm just going to make this big oval for the moment. I'm not worried about accuracy. I'm going to make it black, and now I want to draw the bridge on top of it. But I can't see that because it's hidden. Because we have this as a template, now if I hit Command Y, I can actually see the image through my drawing. This is a huge, huge advantage. I can come in here and I can start to draw all of these shapes one-by-one, however I want to do them. Then, at any moment, I can hit command Y and I can pop out of those, and I can start to edit and go back and forth, and at any moment I can see my finished artwork, if you will, or my artwork at that moment, and I will hide that image. What I've actually done here is I've gone ahead and preset that up. What's cool about this, I think, is that you can see this is my finished artwork, of course, it's already been completed. But whether it had or hadn't, I'm really getting a good idea of what my artwork looks like right now. Whereas if I hit Command Y, it reveals that there is an image beneath it, and that's the image I was using to trace off of. You'll see that it's not exactly on the image and I'll explain why. It's basically just because it's a photograph, so it's not identical, it's not perfectly straight. I want my vector to be really symmetrical and clean, which the guitar actually is, but the photography is not. Anyway, hitting Command Y, I can just jump in here and I can see exactly what I want to do, what I'm tracing over. If I hit it again, I get to see exactly what my finished artwork is. I find this to be a really great way to reference what I need to reference at the moment. Then also just see my finished artwork and you can just jump back and forth, much like using your smart guides, just turning them on and off by hitting Command Y on and off, or Control Y on a PC. I can easily see exactly what I'm doing, what my art is going to look like, and I can finish and edit it. I think that's pretty cool. Another little smart key I'm going to give you is let's say we're zoomed in here and we just want to get zoomed out so we can see our full art board. If you hit Command or Control and the number zero, it will center your art board and fill the screen nice and cleanly and quickly, and that's just a nice way to get in and out. You can zoom into a little section here, let's say, and then just right away hit that quickie and you're back out and you can see everything nice and easy. 5. Unusual Shapes: Boy, the amount of times I don't have to just edit out myself flowing into a Kleenex. But there's a lot of work. We're going to talk about Unusual Shapes and the Pen Tool Tips. For me, the key of creating any unusual shape is to try and do it as quickly as possible and as cleanly as possible. Now for those of you that are experts, I'm talking 10/10 people with the Pen Tool, you can just jump in and you can make a shape that's pretty darn accurate and pretty clean. But most of us aren't that clear. Most of us are not going to make that perfect shape. Let's just say for example, that we look over here. Even let's toggle on our source image. By hitting ''Command Y'', I will just zoom over here. Here's our shape. I'm just going to use my Pen Tool quickly, go like this. We can get it pretty accurate. But what will happen is if you're not really super experienced with what I'm doing, It's hard to know exactly where to put your points. You see now I'm getting some issues here. Where do I go back and correct that? It's even harder than what I just did, if you don't have experience with the Pen Tool. I have a good idea of where to place my points. Let's say I don't have as much experience, I just started doing this, this is definitely the beginner way to do something. You just going to keep drawing points and as I click, I'm clicking and dragging out these arrows. What will happen is it'll be good from far, far from good, old Cliche. If we go back here, let's just fill this. You'll see that these are junky. There's some like uncomfortable corners. It's just not as smooth and clean as it could be. Again, my strategy is always, let's have perfect and clean can we make this, but also do it quickly. That is why I have these shapes drawn out here. We can actually move these out of the way. I'll show you exactly how I did this. Basically my strategy when I'm creating something is instead of jumping into the Pen tool, I want to try and make it with shapes by taking away and adding. The quicker and easier I can make it with shapes, the better it is. But it's more difficult with a complex shape. This is easy with something like a moon, let's say. Here's my moon. Let's just turn this to white, and I'm hitting ''Shift X'', which flips my stroke to my fill, sorry. Now I have this moon, this full moon. What I want to do, is I want to make it a half moon or something. What I'm going to do is, option click ''Dragging that Same Shape''. Let's just make this one black so that we can see what the moon looks like, shrink it down, so on so forth. This is really straight forward, really simple. It would be crazy to even try to make this with the Pen Tool because I can make it so fast with just the ellipse tool, I can really quickly create this. Then if we want it to be one shape, we've got multiple ways of doing this. One of the ways I like to do it is using the Pathfinder. We're not going to go over every single Pathfinder tool. I've actually done an entire class on Pathfinder, If you do want to check that out. For now, I'll just do divide. I'm going to shift and click on ''White'', which means I'm selecting that. Then I can hit ''Delete''. Now I've got just this finished shape. But you can see that was way faster, way cleaner and smoother than if I have tried to do that with the Pen Tool would have taken a few minutes. Of course I slowed it down to try and explain it. But I can snap that out really fast. What's way more complicated is this really unusual shape. This guitar here is a very strange shape. You've got this egg thing going and just lots of pieces. Try and visualize what is the easiest way I can create this with shapes. Since the thing is all smooth, it's very curvy, I'm going to be using the Ellipse Tool basically exclusively. I will bring out the Pen tool when and if I need it. By clicking and dragging here, you can see that I'm getting this circle or ellipse. If I hold shift, it makes it a perfect circle, if I let go of shift, I can create any oval shape. A really important key is if I hit ''Spacebar'', see how where I'm dragging, it starting from this center point where I was. If I hit ''Space'', I can actually move that point that I started. It's really easy to move the shape around my Canvas. Now let go of space and it will snap back to right here. In this case, wherever I left. If I were to hit the ''Option key'' or Alt on a PC, it'll actually go from the center of that drawing point. You see that the rates center. In this case, I'm going to let go of that and I'm going to drag this out and I'm using the space bar to move this shape around. The goal is to try and get this body as perfect as I can. Now you see here how I'm snapping to things like don't want it to snap to. This is when it's a good time to hit ''Command and U'' to turn those off. Now the problem is because I'm holding this tool, holding the shape as I drag it around, I can't turn off my smart guides. I had to let go, turn off the smart guides, and now I can start moving this again by grabbing that arrow there in the corner. Let's just delete this. Now that we've got our smart guides turned off, let's start over. Do note that in a course where I'm explaining efficiency and speed, I actually have to go really slowly. Slowly I'm explaining it well. May not seem as efficient and fast when I'm explaining it. But if I just come in and do this myself, I can do it in a few seconds and be ready and done. As you'll see, it's going to be near impossible to get the shape perfect because again, it's a photograph of a 3D real life objects, so it's just never going to be flawless. We're going to make it flawless, but that's okay. We're going to say that that shape right there is close enough. Now we're going to draw another shape. We're going to try and hit this little cutaway just as best we can and get that shape nice. Now we're going to try and get up here and just fill this as much as we can. This'll take a little bit of rhythm, a little bit of getting used to here. But the main thing I'm going to try and do is just get a decent amount of this shape, this unusual shape that the guitar is mapped out with these shapes. Right now it might not look like much. But now I actually have everything I need the cheat sheet using the Pen Tool really efficiently. Basically what I'm going to do is using my smart guides with them turned back on, I'm going to grab my Pen Tool here, and I'm going to click right here that is the anchor as the dead center of this bottom large oval that we've made. I'm going to click and drag out. I'm just holding ''Shift'' and I'm clicking and dragging. Now, shift is important because I wanted to go straight up and down. When using the Pen Tool, 90% of the time, if you can, your shapes will be best if you are either exactly up and down your arrows here, or exactly horizontal. Horizontal or vertical, those are your key thing is if you can nail it, so that your points are either horizontal or vertical, they'll be really cleaned once in a while 45. Once you start getting anywhere in between, that's when you're flirting with fire, but sometimes you have to. You're just eyeballing this right now. We don't really know where that's going to go out, but that's okay. Now here's the cool part. You may not have known where to draw your next point before, but now that we have this cool guide, this circle here, I'm going to click exactly in the center of that, which it will snap to. Again, just holding ''Shift''. I'm just going to drag out my arrows. You can get a little bit of an idea what I'm doing here. Let's just zoom in. I know it's a little hard to see. Then coming up here I'm going to click and drag while holding ''Shift''. Up here again, I'm just snapping exactly to the center points of these circles I've already drawn. Then up here, snap. Then you go up here. Now, I'm going to do one more that's basically in the center of this circle. I'm just holding Shift and will click there. Now if I come down here, what the heck, I'll hit "Click" and then click. Basically, now, what I've done, thanks to those really useful shapes that I've done there as I know exactly where to place my points. The idea to get your smoothest, cleanest shape, you want to use the least amount of points as possible,` and we have these circles to reference. If any point using my direct selection tool, which is the letter A, is right up here on my toolbar. I can come and I can drag up this arrow, I'm holding Shift. I can come over here and drag down this arrow as needed. Let's go Command Y so we can see our reference image and you can just play with those handles, getting them up and down to try and get it as accurate and perfect as you want it. Sometimes you'll have to drag this one down and this one up and so on to get them exactly perfect. This one really went sour, so pull that out there, and we'll grab this layer and pull it back. But now you don't actually need these shapes anymore except for we're going to leave that bottom one but you can see we're getting really clean, really smooth lines and they're nailing it pretty darn close. You can, of course, move these things a little bit using your arrow keys up and down or Shift with your arrow key up and down to really move it fast. But more or less you're getting the shape almost perfectly and really cleanly and really quickly. I want to use this bottom half here instead of redrawing this shape. There's a few different ways I can do this. One of the ways I could do this as grab the bottom corner of the shape that I just drew and I'm going to click and hold Shift and drag it all the way down past that ellipse. Then with that shape selected, I'm going to hold Shift and select my other shape here. Now using Pathfinder, I'm going to click Divide. Now one thing I like to do here is I will go Command G or Control G on your PC and that is grouping all of these things together. It's just keeping it clean. Now you can see, if I select over here and then select back, it's all grouped. When I double-click, I go into isolation mode, so I can't select anything other than the things that were in that group, and I can just select this part of this circle and this part and hit Delete. Now, I'm left with just this one side of the guitar and what I could do is click over here and hit the Unite button, and now we know that this is one nice shape. It does add a little point here that's a bit unnecessary and there are ways to remove it, but for this case, it's pretty smooth and clean. Now the other option, the newer option that replaced the Pathfinder to some degree for a lot of people, is something called the Shape Builder tool. I'm just going to undo what I did. I'm going to hit Command Z and I'm just going to hold that for a moment. So we're right back to where we were. Already over here, we're going to hit our shape builder tool, which is Shift M. I think they ran out of letters so the M does not make a lot of sense, but as you see here, Shift M, we get that shape builder tool. Now, as I select over things, you're going to see some different things happening. What we want to do here is we're going to select both of these together and hit Shift M. We've got that tool. And all I want to do is hold down the Option key, which should be Alt on a PC and we're just going to drag this shape and let go and you can see it, deletes it and drag another shape and let go. Now you can see that it nicely cut that out, but it's actually left these as two different shapes, which is clean and nice and pretty easy to deal with. Now, what you can actually do with these two, I'm going to hit Shift M again, is as you can see, there's a plus sign now beside my arrow, it will just select these shapes here. Just like that, they're all nicely grouped together. This is now one clean piece. This is how I tackle drawing, an unusual shape. Now, luckily, this guitar is very symmetrical, so a lot of the times we're going to be using the mirror tool. Now, I have a lot of actions set up as quick keys by using my F tools and this is something again, that I taught an entire class about. You'll hear me say that for a lot of different things because I've taught a lot of classes [LAUGHTER] but if we click and drag over here and hold in Option and let go, all I have to do is hit F2 on my keyboard, and it nicely flips that shape and makes it nice and easy for me. All I'm doing is just saving a little bit of time because what we could do is come over here to my toolbar, click and hold and go down to reflect right there. Hit somewhere, hit Enter, and then click Vertical, and then click Okay, and there it is. Now as you can see, it is flipped or as you click and drag or click and hold here you can see the shortcut to the reflect tool is O, so let's undo that. We could have clicked this, hit the letter O, then hit Enter, then it would be vertical. It is fast. Let's do that again. O Enter, Enter in this case. It's pretty fast. But I like to try and think things really smooth. I've set it up as F2 on my keyboard, you can see just flip, flip, flip and F3 flips the other way. I've taught this exact method in my actions class. If you do want to check that out, you can record actions here and you can set them to quick keys. You can see I have F2 and F3, and it's just really easy. My action class, I do think is one of the probably most underappreciated classes. Sometimes what will happen is as we're moving this body around, I'm trying to get these two points to snap right directly together, but we've just got too many things going on. I've got too many pieces in this document that Illustrator is trying to snap to, and this can be very irritating, but the best bet I find to do is to select both of these pieces. Let's just zoom out here and we're going to drag them away over here. I have a little more confidence that it's going to work over here because I don't have anything that's vertical to this and hopefully, as you can see now those snap together really nicely. Using our shape builder tool, we can just select both of these, make sure they're both selected. And just go like that and now we know that we have one nice piece and then we can drag it back. One of the things we can do here is with a line art board, we'll just hit Center Command O and we know we're right back to where we want it to be. It's a bit of an annoyance that you have to do that but that's the one downside of smart guides is once in a while, it does not know what you're trying to do exactly. Now, that we've discussed creating something like this body shape, which again, I think is really unique, and I know we spent a lot of time just explaining how to do it, but once you get the hang of it, you'll be able to do it really quickly and making it an odd shape will feel a lot more natural by using shapes in combination with the pen tool and sometimes you can get away with using shapes on your own. You may have seen one of these trendy things on where someone made a logo and they use a billion different circles and things to actually build that logo out and so they were perfectly on top of each other. For example, if you zoom in here, this circle ended perfectly on that circle, and so on and so forth. There are ways to do that, there are ways to make it clean. But I find it's super time-consuming and again, when I'm creating vector shapes, basically anytime my goal is to do it really quickly and efficiently, but also still really have that high-quality, really clean smooth line. Teach their own. Some people want to go crazy with these ellipse tools. I feel like it's a little bit of a trendy thing. But this is how I like to do it. 6. Unusual Shapes: Part II: Now that we have done this, we've got this body done. We're going to just zoom up to the neck. That's what I have over here. We can just bring this over. It's basically the exact same system. All I've done here is drawn this. You can see right now it's snapping to things I don't want to, so I'm going to turn off my smart guides. Now I can draw this right where I want. You can see that I've done some things a little bit off. We can move this over and knot over. Again, the idea for me is to get the general shape of the guitar and get the general shape of the illustration that I want but you can move things around. But the idea here is once again, that I'm using the circles to just get my quick shapes. Right here, because this is getting a little bit weird. I just came in with the pen to click, click, and we're done. This has done something that I didn't actually draw like that. Sometimes it'll be funny, so we'll just delete this. You can see here we've got our point, and I would come up here, click and drag at this high point. We've got a nice horizontal line. Then click here, and then what you can do is come back and play with these handles. Sometimes you have to come down here. Now, if you click here and you don't actually see a handle, sometimes the handles are hidden, well let's delete that one. Sometimes these handles are hidden there. What you can do is using your pen tool, we're going to hit "Option" and we're going to drag out. Now you'll see that these handlebars are back. Again because I have smart guides off, if I drag this handle and you can see it's not snapping to there. I don't know exactly where it is. If I turn smart guides back on, I can bring this handle, snap it dead on to that point, which is nice. Then I can come in here and I can finesse this line, but this is the goal to try and make things really cleaned. Then I would just bring that down, all the way down here. Using the exact same concept as before, we can use our shape builder and really build out the shape really quickly, or if you're more comfortable, you can always use the pen tool and just come up here, hit "Unite". This is one of the downsides. You can see it's adding a ton of different points for some reason from using this circle. It's ugly, but it looks beautiful and smooth and clean. Again, another little weird illustrated glitch. Using the exact same concept as you can see, we've got this weird shaped headstock. It's nice, symmetrical, and clean. Now getting into these tuners here, and don't worry about the terminology. This is my guitar after all so I understand what the terminology [LAUGHTER] is. These tuners are actually a little bit different. This is a newer version of this BB King Lucille guitar. If we go back in our outline mode, you can see here. See that it looks a little different in this reference photo? But I wanted them to be like my real guitar. That's why I took a photo of them and I drew them. Again, exact same principle as I was just using rectangles and circles and pen tool to map out that shape. Doing some circles here. I want this be a flat dead on shape. That's why I'm not trying to add any three-dimension. I'm just making it with this bolt nice and flat and the circle, the washer underneath it real flat, the head of this circle real flat, and that's what I've done. Then I just change the colors of these. You will see too that sometimes what I'll do is I will map out my color palette just off the artboard. You can do it right on your artboard two. Let's just select it all first like so. Actually, this is another key that I forget about sometimes explaining this. If I were to try and select these right now, I click and drag over here and I'll grab this image which I don't want, it's hard to select all this stuff. You could come over here, click, and then now hold Shift to de-select all this stuff. Now you get to it. Another real good trick is to go Command Y. Now I can click and highlight over just what I want and it will select just that stuff and it'll ignore everything outside of it. That's really nice and useful. Then what I can come over here using my eyedropper tool, make this gold. Then I had a little bit of variance just so that the golds stand out as different shades of gold. You can play with this to your liking, of course, in whatever you're doing. Then to bring images up and down, I'm using Command Shift and I'm using the square brackets. They're just underneath the Delete key on my keyboard. If I hit "Command Shift Up", then that will be the topmost layer. If I hit "Down", that's the down most layer. If I just hit "Command" then I can hit it "Up" a million times, it will slowly bring it to the front. Otherwise, it will snap to the front of the back. The other way to do this is to go to Object Arrange. You see what we're doing. We're bringing to front, we're sending to back or forward and backward, and there are your quick keys right there. The arrow is Shift, in this case, the Command key, and then those square brackets. That is exactly how I made those tuners. Let's just get into this neck shape really fast. This one is pretty easy. If we click up here and we'll just draw a rectangle, click and draw there. Now if we zoom out and we're just going to use our normal arrow tool and we bring this down, you can see a guitar neck actually gets wider at the bottom. Again because this photo isn't dead straight either, it's all skewed and off. But the cool thing you can do here is using our direct selection tool, I'll hit this point and then I will hold Shift and click this point so only these two points are selected. What some people will do is hit this point, hold Shift, hit the right arrow once, twice whatever. Hit this right arrow once, twice whatever, and then maybe, not holding Shift 1,2,3 in and then go over here 1,2,3 in until they feel like they have it perfect. That's the slow inefficient way to do it. The cool way is to select this whole Shifts like this. Now I'm going to use my Scale Tool, which is S on the keyboard, but it's over here as well. All I have to do is click over here and drag and I could hold Shift and it is going to pull these points apart, exactly centered, but not the points at the top because these are all I selected. I would just pull these apart and make sure I get the lineup where I want it. Again, it's not going to look perfect because this photo is not perfectly taken. But this is the idea that I would get that there. Now the other thing you might notice is at this point things are not all aligned to each other. I'd select this body, select the neck, select the headstock, and either align it's center, as you can see here, to the artboard or to the selection. The artboard, obviously it's going to align these dead straight to the actual full size artboard. If it's over here but I still want them aligned to each other, then I would go selection. Another cool little trick is, let's just say these are like this and the body is exactly where I want. I would hold this headstock. I'm holding shift to click the neck and shift and click the body. If I hit "Option" and I click this body again, it is now making it the key object. You can see here the symbol changes. Now if I center it, it will center this and this exactly to this object. Then, of course, to get these to snap together, you could just pull it down, snap them in. You could do the same trick I did before, or just pull this in, snap. This is how you make really clean vector graphics. I know this one was a little bit long, but this was tackling a lot of interesting things and a lot of challenging things so I wanted to make sure that I explain them all as carefully and clearly as I could. Hopefully, if you actually put this into practice, I know that's the hardest thing. When you watch it, you think you've ingested it, you think you know what you're doing. If you actually put this into practice and get used to it, I think it will really help using Adobe Illustrator for you 7. Save Time With Style: It's time to talk about saving time with style. We're going to do this by using the Appearance panel, eyedropper tool, graphic styles, and things of that nature. One of the things I wanted to just talk about is I've built a few things on this guitar sort because I don't want to bog you down with boring things. It's pretty easy to of course make these. These are just circles, so I'm making ellipse tools. This I use the same idea, this is the Picard. Same idea as I did the body. This little guy is all just rectangles on an angle. There's no beautiful quick way to do them. All I did is draw a stroke and then using my pen tool and then I would just click and option drag down. Again, because I have my reference image, this is actually another thing to note, I just did it there. If I'm double-clicking and I'm within a isolation mode, the problem is if I hit "Command Y" you'll see that I'm losing my reference image which can be pretty frustrating. Unfortunately, you want to double-click to get out of that. Hit "Command Y" and your reference image will come back. But the essential idea was I would draw the stroke, drag it down, draw the next one. Same thing with these pearl inlays. Again, they're not lining up exactly perfectly because of the photography. I'll explain that a lot of times, but if you're wondering why that's why. Here again I'm just using the rectangle tool, so we're just not going to go too crazy. But one thing you may notice is the rounded corners. There is a rounded corner rectangle tool that you can use, but what I like to do is drag out my rectangle tool whatever I need. Then using my direct selection tool which is A on my keyboard, you'll see these little circles appear in the corners. Then right now, all four are selected so I can click and drag. You'll see this little half circle or quarter circle show up near my mouse. If I click and drag it's allowing me to get that radius right there. I can get the radius dialed into exactly what I want. Really smooth and clean just on the fly and at any point I can also just undo it which is nice. If you want to do it to only one point, just click away and then select the point you want around and just do the same thing. That'll round just one point. That should explain basically everything other than the strings. The string is going to be the exact same method as we found there. You can see I've dragged them up there. Another little tool just to add things to your arsenal and things to your toolbox that you can use in the future. Let's just drag this guitar out of the way for a minute. Using our wire frame, what I'm going to do is using my pen tool. I'm going to click right here where the string is here, and I come all the way down. The string is bend from this point. You can see they're going off. We're just going to click the bend here, right there. That's our string. What I would want to do is of course you can just easily click drag this over, move this to where that string hits, and so on and then you want to try and do it again and again. But another method that works that's really clean and fast is if we take this and we're just going to put it all the way over here to this final one and make sure that it's basically a line center there and that it's a line over here like so. Or if we're really lucky and it's an exact opposite, we can click and drag and we can use our rotate tool to flip it and bring it in here. In this case that doesn't quite work, but if it did it would be so smooth and convenient. We've got that there and then what we can do is we are selecting both of these. Let's just make them more obvious so you can see them. This is a cool little feature. It's not really going to save you any time for what we're doing here, but this is something that you could use in the future for another purpose. It's just adding a concept, again, to your toolbox for something that you could use. Basically what I did is I made a blend. What it's doing is it is trying to merge these two things, but because it's just a stroke it's basically just copying and pasting it. What's cool about this is you know that these points are going to be nice and centered in-between. If I grab just this point and I drag it over here, you can see some crazy stuff happen, but no matter what, these are all going to be really clean and in line. If you want to make sure it's an exact amount of steps, that's an important thing. You go to Object, you go down to Blend; that's what we were doing and you can release it to get back to your original two lines that we had. Hitting "Shift" I got them selected or you can make it. Again, you can memorize these quick keys or we can go down to Blend options here and we can turn it from smooth color which is where it's set to specific steps or specific distance. We can make sure that we have the exact amount of strings that we want. In this case, we're putting forward because it's not including your outside lines for some reason, it's only the amount of blends in-between the specified steps. We've got four strings in between and the outside ones. That has a nice, smooth, clean neck for the strings. Again, maybe not saving your time on this project, but it'll save you time for some project in the future. I'm sure that's how you use that. We're just going to undo this. We're going to get into Appearance panel. I know I say this a lot, but I've actually taught an entire class on the Appearance panel. I said this recently about one of my other ones, but I think it's literally the most underrated class I've taught because the Appearance panel is a lifesaver sometimes and I'll explain why. Here's a photo of my real guitar. You can see here this is binding and so this is really thin, nice basically strokes that are on the edge of the guitar and they just look really nice. This guitar needs a gouache, but anyway they just look really nice and they jazz it up and make it fancy looking. Essentially, I want to mimic that on this guitar and there's a number of ways that you can do this. One of the ways you could do this is with a bunch of individual rectangles that you could tirelessly click and drag out and draw. Sure, these are all individual shapes. Basically I have a black shape on top of white shape, on top of black shape, on top of a white and blah, blah, blah over and over again. The problem is if at any point you want to start to change these, it's really tedious and it can be really tiresome. It's not so bad when you're just drawing a rectangle, but if you're drawing an intricate shape it can be really problematic. Here is a quick example. I don't know what I'm drawing, I'm just making something up. Let's just say this is our shape. I don't know what that is. One of the ways that we could have done what I've done here is make this now the black and we can go to Object, Path, Offset Path and we could choose to make this whatever in two pixels. Let's do one. Make that white. That's there, and then do it again and so on. You could just do this a bunch of times. I'm going to make this black and so on. The problem is if I come here and I realize, you know what? I don't like this. This needs to be rounded, so I round this. Well now I have to select this part and I got it. Oh, no, it's not working because it's added extra stuff. It's a mess. I'm trying to match all that. Is a huge pain in the butt. Naturally, the best way to do this is to add strokes. With the same shape selected, all I would normally do is come over here, make sure I select my stroke. You can do that down here too. We're going to add a white stroke to it just like so, but the problem is most people are like now what? I got to make another shape underneath this that has a stroke on that and so on. There is a better way. Here it is here. This is using the Appearance panel. You want to go to Window and you want to click "Appearance". I have it over here docked because it's something that I love to use and I use all the time. As you can see, what I've actually done is I've added a bunch of strokes all into one image. What's really cool about this is if I click this, let's say I want to round this corner, click this around this corner, you can see I'm rounding just that corner and everything is smoothly cleanly following it because they're just a detailed intricate stroke. I can come in here and I can go, you know what? For some reason, I want this color somewhere in-between to be green. Right there I want that one green, and then in this other one let's make it this purply color. You can come in, you can change it, and at any point it's just completely non-destructive. I could come in here, I could undo this, and I could, of course change these colors back to black, the same shade I've already got there. That's another little quick tip. If you want this to be the exact black of your fill because sometimes blacks are weird and different, if you click that foreground color and you drag it over top of your stroke color and let go it will ensure that those two colors are the exact same but that is why using the Appearance tool is extremely cool. You may wonder like what? How did I get from this to this? Let me just show you real quick. Let's go back to this weird shape that I drew here. I'm in the Appearance panel, this is what it looks like. Basically all I'm doing is I've got this stroke here and I'm going to set it. It's up to you where you set it, but if we click the Stroke button either up here or right here then we can choose where the stroke is aligned. In my case, I can align it to the inside, outside. It doesn't matter. I think I had my other one all inside. I see everything was to the inside. Who cares? It doesn't matter. Let's do everything to the outside this time or center, wherever you feel like. What you want to do is we're just going to hit this plus button here, so we're duplicating it and this is big. This is where we're going to change the color, so make it like orange or something. You can see this is the topmost stroke, so that's why we're seeing the orange but the white is hidden because of the same thickness. We're going to change this to two. If we click and drag over here and we drag it underneath now you'll see the white and then the orange, so that's pretty cool. We can make this that black instead. Then if you actually hit "Option" while you're clicking this Duplicate button what's cool is it will add it automatically underneath , so now you're saving you time. You don't have to drag it down every time. Lets just do white and now add another point and option-click. Again, that would be Alt on a PC, click here; add this, and just continue on that as much as you want and then you have to just keep making each one thicker. That is how you do it. Again at any point, I can change the shape and everything is going to change along with it. That is the awesome thing about using the Appearance panel. It does way more than that. Again, I've taught an entire class on it. Again, one of the nice things about that is let's go over to our head stock here. Let's just clear all this stuff. Delete, delete, delete. Let's make it, I don't care pink, let's say. This is our head stock. Head stock has the same thing as the body in this case. There's a few different ways you can do it. If you were to hit your eyedropper tool which is the letter I on your keyboard and click the body, sometimes it will match it perfectly, sometimes it will not. You see how that stroke is now different? It doesn't look the exact same. Down here I've got this really intricate stroke. I'm going to undo this. One of the things you can do is hit the eyedropper tool over here on your toolbar, double-click it and you can see what exactly what it's copying and what it's not copying. In this case, it wasn't copying the appearance. If I select "Appearance" and make sure that's turned on, see eyedropper picks up, eyedropper applies. Appearance is selected. If I come down here and I click here, it should pull all of that. You can see it has now copied that more accurately, so that's great. Sometimes having the Appearance on is actually annoying, so I'll turn that back off. Another option that we could have done is by using our graphic styles. I've got this objects selected that has all of these strokes over here. I'm going to Window, and I'm going to go down to Graphic Styles. Again, I actually have that docked here. Here are just some of the default ones that come with it. With this piece selected, all you have to do is click and drag this into your graphic styles panel. I've already done it as you can see there. You can name it if you want by double-clicking it, and then we'll select the thing that I want to apply that to. I can either just click here or even click and drag here if you want to do it the slower way for some reason. That's just copying that appearance directly to another objects, so that's really convenient. That's exactly what I did as you can see too on this. Picard is I would click and drag. Again, if you just right-click it, you don't really have to drag. Then going to my Appearance panel I changed all of these colors to brown so they're not black anymore, but it has the exact same patter. Just a smooth efficient way to do it. Eyedropper tool, Appearance panel, and graphic styles can really save time especially the Appearance panel it's one of my favorite things in Adobe Illustrator. It's crazy. I want to even just divert this class and show you all the different things it can do, but I won't. At some point, please do check out my appearance panel class. I think it'll blow your mind especially the things that I can do with typography. Very cool. Let's move on. 8. Dashed Strokes & Repeat Radial: Dashed strokes and repeat radial. Have you ever heard the really grotesque expression? There's more than one way to skin a cat? I don't know why we have to skin cats to make that point across. We could just say, there's more than one way to do something. Anyway, there's more than one way to do something, the expression works, the metaphor is just gross. Anyways, here are a couple of different ways we can handle these knobs down here. As you can see, if I zoom in, I'm going to go to my wireframe. The knobs are just a little off because they're 3D. But the beauty is there's a couple of different ways that we can make this. What I've done, I've taken photos, sometimes see how I've got this nice clean circled that I can reference. I've shown what I can do here, but I'm just going to build on top of this for the moment so basically all I want to do is get these little dots, these little strokes, I guess, that are actually differentiating the numbers. Then of course I want to put the numbers and I want to do this the most efficient way possible. I could show you all the inefficient ways to do that. But let's save time and get right to it. Using my ellipse tool, I'm going to click and basically what it looks like the center. I'm going to drag and I'm going to hold option which would be Alt and Shift to make a perfect circle. Again, because this is a photo, it's not the exact same. For now, let's just make it a white stroke. I'm sorry that turned to fill. If any point you want to change your filter, your stroke will just hit Shift X and that will flip them. Now, here's a really cool way to basically manipulate a stroke. If we go over here and you will see the option dashed line. We're going to select dashed line. You can see these big lines with big gaps. That's not exactly what we want. We're just going to play around here, will make the dash two points, let's say and then we make the gap four points. It will just start to play around with this for a second until we get something that we think is accurate. Another thing you can do is select in here and use your arrow tool to push up and that will increase the dashes. Let's say this feels like it's getting a little bit close. Now here's the point where we can actually increase the weight and you will see that the stroke gets a little bigger and then we can come in here and bring this in. C out snapping That's a little annoyed right now. We'll turn our smart guides off. We can bring it in something like this and then we can always rotate and manipulate it to get you going. As you can see, we're getting pretty darn close and again in a perfect world, you drag this over here. No one will ever know that it didn't line up flawlessly on top of this piece. But you do know that you have nice accurate spacing and you've got those strokes all lined up nice and clean. That is one way to do this. But it's still a little bit weird because we've got this gap here. We can also want to count. Without being too ridiculous. We're going to count the strokes 21. There's 10, you'd think there was double, that'd be 20. But anyway, there's 21, 21 of these little strokes. So then you can try and count it over here. See how many you got here. Then you want to delete the ones you don't have. You can try and get really crazy and use your pen tool here, delete this, and start figuring this out. But now you're getting half strokes and bottle. The other thing is you can expand appearance. Sometimes you have to do that multiple times for some reason. Then you can select the pieces, delete them, so on. That works. It's actually pretty good. This is a nice way to do it rather than use rotate tool. There's lots of reasons why I do prefer this and why I've been using it for many years. That's a pretty accurate, fast way to get what you need, especially if you skip the cilia experimenting. At some point, Adobe Illustrator created this new tool that's really unique and interesting and that is the radio tool. Now I'm using a slightly older version of a Mac. If you get some points, you see weird hover. I saw it there for a second. I'll get like hover grays that I saw for a second anyway. That's just my computer very weird so it's not actually there. What I've done here is essentially I've come in and I've drawn a shape. Let's just say it's a rectangle. Then let's just make it a different color. I'm going to select these two top points of my direct selection tool and I want to round them. I took a second different asset, whatever. I've got that basically wouldn't want. These ones are actually a little bit thinner or a little shorter as you can see there are ways to mess with that. You could actually have done that with this, duplicated it and then made, remember when I made the stroke length here, do it again and make the stroke shorter. There's definitely, there's lots of different ways to do this. But anyways, so if we go to option and we're gonna go down to repeat, and we're going to click the radio button. This thing is pretty darn interesting. What it's doing is it's repeating that along this path. If we click this, this is adding the exact amount of instances. This is really cool. You don't actually have to count. It's just telling you this 15 instances of that shape right there, 20 instances and so on so that's pretty neat. Now, obviously this is too small, it's not lined up by one, so we can click and drag this out. Then we can start to move this over top. You can see that for some reason my shape is reversed. It's not what I want. If we come down here and we double-click this shape, you can actually rotate it. You can edit the shape and it'll automatically edit along the entire path. That's pretty neat. It's just automatically doing everything for us. We can drag this out and try and line it up to whatever we think is right. Now I said 21, 21 was actually from there to there and so another thing we can do is we're just going to rotate this around and you see these little brackets. This is really cool. Now we're live deleting brackets. We're coming over here and we're getting rid of this space and everything is still automatic. We can come over here where this arrow is now and drag it back up to get to 21 shapes. Again, it's still going to take a little tweaking and playing around with. Now I think you're seeing this, see these weird highlights over here. I'm not sure if it's picking it up, so it's snapping and look at that. Anyway, that's just my computer glitching out a little. But I guess this new radio tool likes to mess with it. But regardless, that's basically how you would build that nice and clean and pretty fast. Again, you know that there's exactly the same amount of space between all of these. You're not getting any weird half shapes and there's exactly 21 because that's what I set it to. This is actually a really neat feature that I haven't really used much before and I think I will double with using more. Again, I like it. I think it's a neat idea. Now the number part, the number part might seem weird as well. There's a few different ways to do this as well. One of the ways you could do it is quite simply make a circle again, drag it out. Let's go roughly to the bottom of all the numbers. Now, using my type tool, I'm going to go inside of this circle and when I get over here, I'm going to hold Option. There's of a weird squiggly line before the rate and the t so I'll just go 1, 2, 3 and C here. Again, just make the color weird. If I grab this with my Direct Selection Tool, this line up here and drag it inside. Now I text will be towards the inside of that circle, which is nice. This is my starting points so I can drag this over here and this is my endpoints I can drag it way over here. Started at 0, 1, 2, 3. You can see that this is a bit too big. This is and also the greatest font for this. But we can use whatever we want. We'll start over here and you can add spaces if you want and try and get that as close as you want, or if you need to hold. Let's just bring up my type tool here, it's Command T. You can also adjust right here, the kerning by hitting Option and the left or right arrow keys. I will get that pretty much bang on and just repeat this process until you get these numbers exactly where you want, which I've already done through the magic of time right over here so we've got the numbers all perfectly lined up. That's basically exactly how I would make my volume knob. This guy is funny little chicken head thing they call it. I built that chicken head just normally using the pen tool and some circles, it's pretty straightforward. Another method you could do, again, if you want to get crazy and started doing that half circle thing that I did. The main reason for the half circle thing is the way that these numbers are actually a line is unusual. Sometimes you want to rotate to your advantage. Whenever you're drawing, sometimes it's going to save you some time to get that thing rotated to the right way so it makes sense to your mind. As you can see these numbers, let's just delete this. I don't know if I'm going to be, I'Il explain this clearly. But the center of these numbers goes out to see how the center of this 10 goes this way, center of the six goes this way, center of the five goes this way. They're all in different angles because they're all aligned to that circle. See that the centers and different points. But here they're basically vertically up and down. There's a few different ways to do that too. One of the ways you could do it is I've gone ahead and I've drawn the number five. I've got my five right here, of course, and I've taken that picture and I'm cropped it. I would drag and hold Option Shift to get my number down here. Now I'm just going to rotate it holding Shift, like so we're going to go to centered. Grabbing these to hit Command G to group them, and then I want them perfectly centered in this circle so I'm selecting the circle option to make it my key. And then I want those nice and centered like that. Now we can do a little bit of math and there's a few different ways, but we're going to hit rotate, so our hit the Enter. We're going to get this. We're just going to move it basically until it hits that three. So it's saying 17 in this case. Yeah, it's over top of the three. What's cool here? So we hit Copy. It leaves the thigh where it was and now it copies it there, so that's what I've done all the way over here. You can see I've just hit Enter, hit Copy and I've repeated that over and over again, Enter hit Copy. Then you know that these are aligned exactly how you want. Then you can simply just come in here with your direct selection tool and delete the numbers you don't want, and then go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, whatever. That's a nice quick way to do the numbers two, opposed to what I showed before. Technically these numbers have rotated here, like I said, they're going straight up and down. Another little cool fact that you could do here is come in here you can see that this is on an angle, but at least you know, this space is pretty even. If we come in here to our Transform, we can see that this letter has been rotated 345 degrees. If we just go in there and hit zero, now we know that it's exactly up and down. These are now perfectly spaced, but still exactly up and down and that's just a quick, nice way to do it. Otherwise, you wouldn't be trying to guess where they are and try and line them up on a circle and trying to figure out and guess how much space there is between. Again, there's more than one ways to skin a cat. Gross expression but it makes sense. 9. The Bridge: Pathfinder Vs. The Shape Builder: I actually explained this a little earlier in the video, the idea of the pathfinder versus the shape builder tool. I don't want to beat a dead horse. Again, what is with these really gross analogies with animals? Why are we killing animals to make our points? Anyway, I didn't invent these expressions, sorry to use them. Here's that bridge that I've drawn from my photo of my guitar, again rotating to my advantage. If I actually drag this over here and I set this back to zero, you'll see that this bridge right here is actually on an angle. But I don't want to draw it on an angle because it'll be less accurate. What I do is I rotate it so it's not on an angle, I draw the whole thing straight and then I rotate the thing afterwards. Rotate to your angle, that has a really good useful tip for when you're drawing. Now here, I did the exact same thing that I showed when I was building my body and all the different parts of the videos we've shown before this. I basically have these different shapes. Here, I just use the rectangular tool, basically like this. I would select these two points around them as we've shown earlier in the class, and then I'd make little rectangles, I'm using my source image, of course. Then if we hit "Command D", it'll paste the next piece directly in the exact same distance as the one before, so we hit "Command D" a bunch of times. Then if you have to adjust that, like say that this isn't right. You could bring it over here and you can make sure that these are all equally spaced right up there by distributing center, and then by selecting this so we can use our Pathfinder or Shape Builder Tool and delete it. If we undo that for a second, we can make sure that this is centered by option clicking, center it right here, then using the Pathfinder. This is all stuff that I've actually taught earlier in the class. But this is exactly how I built my bridge, and Here I added this little neural pattern, you can see here. I added that just by adding a stroke with a dash, which believe it or not, we've already taught early in the class. [LAUGHTER] I just want to show you quickly how we got to the bridge. I'm curious to know what's your experience and what you've done, do you prefer the shape builder or the pathfinder? That's a tough one I'm used to the Pathfinder, it's always been there. The shape builder is pretty convenient. I don't really see the point of having both of them, I feel like we just need one. Let's move on. 10. Custom Lettering & Dissecting Fonts: Custom lettering. This is actually, I think probably one of the most difficult things you can do in Adobe Illustrator is to create custom lettering. If you've hand-drawn something in a script and then you want to make that, there's two different versions one is quite complicated and one's a little more easy. This font up here, it's actually a monoweight. It's the same way along. You could use your pen tool, you can use your pencil tool, and you could draw this out and it would actually probably pretty painless. This guy is very complicated because this is more based on traditional calligraphy so you've got your thins, you got your thicks. This is when it takes a master to really get that down and make sure all of those things are nice and smooth. It's very complicated, it's very difficult to produce. It's something that you would think about when you were drawing this Lucille. Lucille, by the way is the name of B.B. King's guitar. There's this old story that B.B. King when he was coming up he was playing at a bar and a fire broke out and he ran in. After running out, scared of the fire, and it was literally burning down the building and he ran out and you realize, oh my God, I left my guitar in the building. At that point he was quite poor and he decided it'd be worth it to run back into a burning building to get this guitar. Again I can't recall maybe the '60s. He risked his life for his guitar and he got out and of course he lived for a long time and he became a very successful musician. But he right away, realized the error of his ways and how silly it was for him to risk his life, for his instrument. He could have bought another guitar. He found out the reason why that fire started was that two men were fighting over a girl named Lucille so he decided to name his guitar Lucille, to remind him to not do something so foolish ever again. That name stuck so he had many different Lucilles over his career many different than these black guitars but the name stuck so all of his black guitars went by the name of Lucille. Now I've owned this guitar for, I think sixish months right now and it's the guitar I love. I dream to get a guitar like his, he's got a Gibson one. If you know anything about music, Gibson's the more expensive version of an Epiphone so I went with a less expensive version, but I'm not going to spend $10,000 on a guitar right now. One thing I did notice as I was doing this, this guitar is so nice and so clean and perfect, but as I was always drawing this class out, I realized this doesn't say Lucille at all. [LAUGHTER] It looks like Lucule or something. This is poorly done. I think they blew it, this thing. Now, that's not a nice line. Again, this should be an L, it should go all the way up to here. That should be I, L, L, E. L-U-C-I-L-L-E and instead it looks like a U because the L is not big. So I guess my guitar's Lucule, [inaudible] talk to Epiphone about this one. Anyways, re-creating this can be so challenging. There's a lot of different ways to do it, and because custom lettering is so complicated, I recommend you take another class. I haven't done a lot although I think it's something that you really have to devote a ton of time to to get custom lettering done. If, especially if it's script. San-serif fonts, flat font, straight fonts, those are way easier to do, even this Epiphone thing. But something like this, to actually do it nicely. This is not done very nicely, [LAUGHTER] but if it were, it's really hard to do without some experience. If you were to try and draw, one thing you could do, I think which is pretty handy is instead of using the pen tool, here's my pen tool. This is how I would try and tackle it, something like this. Again, now we're not using those straight up and downs like I'd like, so it's rather do this and plot your points slowly. Again now there's no way you can get this upside in it, so this is going to have to go on an angle. Anyways, and then you would come back in here and try and really just finesse this to depth. Another really good tool that is very useful and often overlooked because of the pen tool is actually the pencil tool, which is the letter N on your keyboard. What's really cool about this is if you double-click it, you can crank that all the way up to smoothness. I'm actually using my trackpad. I'm one of those weirdos, I don't use a mouse, I just use my trackpad. If I click and draw here basically, you can see I'm getting some jaggedy lines because I'm human and I'm drawing with my finger on a trackpad. But as soon as I let go, those lines smooth out really quite nicely because the pencil tool is automatically doing it. It's adding a little more points than I need, but that's okay. Then you can come back in and you could add those. Using your pen tool, you could click to delete some points and drag out and again, so you could really slowly build this, play around with the width of it and get it done. If you do have interest in creating your own fonts or doing your own custom lettering, I'm going to show you what I think is a very cool tip. This is how to learn from the pros. Not all fonts are created equal, so make sure you have a quality font to try and look out. Usually, a font you pay for, usually one that comes on your system. Most of the free fonts, they're not going to be made with the same amount of attention and care as an expert that builds these. But this font is called beloved script. I just like that it's a nice font, and what's cool about this and cool about the Adobe Illustrator is you can see that this is a live font. I could actually make this say, Lucule. It looks like my guitar says, darn it. Now if I want to turn this text, I may not allow it to be editable anymore. I'm going to hit "Command Shift O." We're just going to turn it to outlines. What's very cool about this is that I can now see how they actually made this font. You can actually now see all the points that are in the font. You can see how it was made, the overlaps. As you can see in a lot of instances when they were making their points here, you can see how the arrows are just going straight up and down, you see that? This crazy curve has arrows up and down, side to side and side to side only. No 45s, no weird angles. You'll see it. Oh, look, they had to cheat it there and they can make it work for that angle. But for the most part, that's how they're building it and that's how they're getting these beautiful, smooth, really clean strokes. I think this is actually a really great way to learn. If we just click there, see these arrows, this person knows what they're doing. They've spent a lot of time and effort to try and make all of these lines vertical and horizontal so that it makes a really clean, smooth line. These curves, bezier curves, I believe they're called, are beautiful, and so that's a great example and it's a great way to learn by basically dissecting a font that you already have. Especially one made by someone that knows what they're doing. Such a great way to learn. This is Edwardian Script, is basically the script they use in the, so we zoom in right here you can see there's Baby King is actually etched into this metal plate, and that's an Edwardian script font. That's what I used for that. This is a really old classic fonts, so same idea. We can come in and see how this is built. Now it is way finer, way more detailed. You'll see there's some 45s and different things going on. But this is why this is so complicated and so difficult to draw and make clean. This is such a clean, perfect, smooth curve and if you select it, you'll see that someone had to come in and draw all these points and they had to make sure that it goes from thick to thin and do it clean. I'm not currently having current this or anything, so some of these points aren't lining up. But stuff like this takes a lifetime and a devoted person to master this specific art, so it's way too much for me to go over in this class. For that reason, what I did for what I wanted to do is I came in here and I just live trace this guy. I'm going to explain more about live tracing soon. I basically just did a quick trace and really just quickly mocked in this L. Didn't do a great job on this part. I feel like this is the one part that I cut corners because I wanted this thing to be done and it's so small there. I should have spent more time, but if I redrew this thing from scratch, like I said, it could have taken me hours just on this text alone. This is the problem when you're a little bit of a perfectionist. But you want to move efficiently and quickly. Dissect letters, it's a great way to learn custom lettering. 11. Dissecting Logos: Much like the last video, we're going to take the same idea of dissecting fonts and we're going to apply it to logos. In this class and the title of it, I use logos and illustration. Although essentially mostly just showing you an illustration and how to make this guitar. Again, it's not about making this guitar, it's about how you would tackle a problem like this and all the different tools that takes to tackle this problem so that you can use those same tools to build anything you need to build an Illustrator doesn't matter what you're designing. Logos, different types of illustrations, basically anything you're going to create, you're going to be using these tools a lot, especially certain ones, pen tools, circle ellipses, those sorts of things. That's why I thought that this would be a great subject because it's a little tricky, it's a little unusual. There's lot of different moving parts and pieces and it gives me an opportunity to show you a bunch of different tools at work to make one overall piece. What can we learn from dissecting logos? Well, clearly the same thing. The problem is here again, you need to make sure that you're getting a good quality logo, a good quality file. A lot of these companies have been around a long time. Here's this Epiphone one for example, and this is pretty sloppy. We have this run into this earlier with our headstock when we cut out that circle from the shape that we built and added a bunch of unnecessary points. We left it because it's headstock and it's just this little illustration we're doing for fun and to learn. When you're creating a logo, you don't cut those corners, so you go in there and you clean these all up. Also something like this could be cleaned up by double-clicking here. I can either use my Lasso tool or I could just use my Direct Selection tool. I'm going to click and drag, select all of those points. Simply just come over here and hit this remove point. Now I've removed all of those points. It's going to be much cleaner, nicer line. You can just apply the same thing everywhere. It's not the worst in some spots, but there's definitely some unnecessary points. Most of the times those are going to make a lower quality design. That doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't a file somewhere that this has made nicely. You see how that curves, that curves pretty ugly too. But honestly, you'd be surprised at how many of these big companies do draw up these logos. It's an original thing. Someone hand drew whatever decade and then someone that doesn't know what they're doing quickly slapped together on the computer and then slowly that just gets used forever. Sometimes they don't even realize how bad it is because they just kept using it. Someone that's not trained for this thing doesn't come in and realize like, this is really messy and this could be fine and a lot smoother and nicer. Then probably one day they'll hire somebody that specializes in this and they'll spend many thousands of dollars getting this cleaned up if they haven't already. The Apple logo is another great example. Another really cool tip at least I thought was a cool tip is using Helvetica. This comes pre-installed on Mac. If you have it you can just select Helvetica regular. If we go to type glyphs, it'll show all of our different letter options in this font. You can actually go down. We'll just select here, double-click on the Apple logo, because some people call it the command logo, the Apple logo, or Apple. My keyboard doesn't actually have it, but you saw the command and the Apple logo on the command key. Instead of saying Command C, people would say Apple C. I guess they got rid of that. But anyway, you can hit Command Shift 0, just like we did with type. Now you can see how this was built. You can actually see it's really quite sloppy. This is a lot of unnecessary points and angles. I did some investigating and I found a more official version of the logo. I also noticed that's really tight and clearly that's been fixed or maybe this wasn't built by the same person. Now if we click this, you can see that boy, that's much nicer. Sometimes you're going to get the 45s, but for the most part we've got the horizontal and vertical lines. You can see that you're getting a really nice, clean, smooth shape. Again, these are just great ways to learn. Now you might be wondering, how did I actually get these logos? How do I get them so that I can actually dissect them? Well, one of the main things you want to try and do is get them from the original source. There's a few different ways to do that. Depends, of course, on the company. If we go to epiphone.com, for example, one of the best things now is in modern websites, sometimes what they will do is because they want it to scale to a bunch of different things they'll use SVGs for their logo. If we come over here and we try and click and drag on this logo, that's not letting us grab it. Sometimes we'll get lucky. Sometimes I go down to the footer, look at that, see, come down to the footer, click and drag that logo. I'm using Safari by the way, so it might not work the same for you. Now, it's being a pane. I'm going to click and drag this and I'm going to drop it on my desktop and then I'm going to open it in Illustrator and that is how easily you can get a nice vector logo. You can see this one is actually a little nicer than one I had, doesn't have quite as many extra points. But this still is a pretty sloppy curve. Anyways that's a really quick awesome way to get official logos from the company instead of using like brands laurel.com or something. Now that doesn't always work. When that doesn't work, let's go to Apple, for example, and let's say we want to use this Apple logo. As you can see, I'm clicking and dragging. Looking down here, there's nothing. Anyways, I looked all over the site and I couldn't easily find one that I can just grab. What I will do is I will do whatever, Apple, then I will type PDF. I'm searching Google for Apple PDF. What I will do is you want to make sure that the website that you're sourcing is directly from Apple. You can see I've already clicked a couple of things and I made it down here to support.apple.com/manuals. Well, let's just click this. Something new, like we'll go with an Apple watch and you'll see here underneath some of them were seeing the option for PDF. I'm clicking PDF, and this doesn't always happen. A lot of companies will rasterize our logo in here, but this is a great tip I'm going to download this PDF, and I'm going to try opening that PDF in Adobe Illustrator. In this case we can just use page 1 because we saw the logo on page 1, and then whatever. Then hit "Wireframe", and look at that. We've got a logo. Let's get rid of this box, we'll select, delete. I'm just using Direct Selection tool. There is your logo. We can now copy that and bring it back over to our original file. Paste it. That's how I got it. That's two quick ways to get logos that if you do want to use them for whatever reason, don't do things illegal. But if you want to dissect them and look at them then either SVG is right off the website or PDFs directly from the source are the great ways to get the best quality version of the logo you're looking for so you can study it and see what they did. Really just try and find tune and recreate it. Again, if you put in the work and you actually try to recreate something, try to build things from this class. Try to recreate a logo. If you put in that work, you'll be surprised at how much more you'll learn than just watching me do it or getting the general idea. There's a reason why this class I'm working on with guitars. A cool thing about guitar is that most guitar players learn and get better at guitar by playing other guitar players music. They take someone that they respect and they look up to, and they are basically trying to recreate that song on guitar and that'll teach their hands to do things and their minds to do things that they weren't able to do before. That's how you get better at guitar. I think in art, that's something that people don't think about a lot. I admit I haven't done it enough. But I think we could probably learn a lot by redrawing or rebuilding logos or artwork by artists that we really admire because it'll teach our hands and our minds to actually see what they did. If you just look at a piece of art, you can appreciate it for sure. But if you were to actually try and rebuild it, I think you'll learn a lot more about what it takes to actually build that. It's something that will make you a better artist, better anything. I think you can do that with a lot of different things. Dissect stuff, try and learn from it. That's how you get better. Let's move on. 12. Effective Live Tracing: We're almost near the end now, so we're going to get into the last little bit which is using image trace. That's another way to make vector shapes fast. Somewhat cleanly, it's not as clean as what we've been doing in this whole class. But I think it's worth noting, something that I do all the time. A lot of my illustration work is actually hand-drawn. I don't do a lot of this kind of illustration anymore than I am actually showing in this class. Because I like things to be a little bit imperfect. I have a weird OCD thing where if I'm drawing a logo or certain things, then I want them to be so precise and so perfect. I want the shapes, the curves, everything is smooth, perfect lettering, that stuff. Then I have this other side of me that likes old vintage hand-drawn, hand-created work, and I find myself doing that a lot and allowing those flaws to be shown because they were made by real person with hands. That's only becoming more interesting now with things like AI's existence, because AI is getting really good at slowly perfecting things. Sometimes that flaw, it reminds people that you're human. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, we will get so deep, but we'll show you how I image trace. One thing that I often do here, as you can see, is it looks like this is all perfectly cropped, it's actually not. As you can see there, things are going off of my art board. This is another trick that I use all the time and I actually set up a quick key for it, that is, if you go view and you hit "Trim", we've set up a quick key there for command and just dot i, so boom, and I can just turn that on and off so it'll hide all of the clutter off of my art board so I can really focus and see exactly what my finished art is actually going to look like. That's trivial, super useful I think. Okay. Let's get into Live Trace, like I said, this is something that you constantly. A lot of the work that I've been doing lately is illustration on the side anyway, for a disc golf company. Again, when I'm drawing these, these aren't the highest runs because they're Instagram. I like to draw everything hand-drawn and most of the time I prefer to use my iPad, so I'll be drawing in Procreate, this my current favorite, it has been for years. Then I need to make these vector because the quality is better, we can use it for all different stuff afterwards. A lot of time to redraw all these in vector shapes, like I've been doing in this class would just be so tedious and time-consuming. This is where Image Trace comes in, you're not going to get quite the same accuracy, but you're going to get a pretty decent vector shape really quickly. This is actually something that is a bit of a plug to me because I want a better system. I find Procreate to be the best drawing app, at least that I'm used to, and there's a disconnect between drawing raster and creating vector afterwards. Either I need to experiment with some other apps, I've heard Adobe Fresco is good, where I'm drawing straight vector, or we need something better. I will admit that image trace has come a long way than it used to be, but nonetheless, it's still not perfect. Props to my wife, Jess Brahman. She actually drew this cool watercolor of these flowers. I sought it sitting around the office and I thought, hey, I'm going to use that. I got permission, of course, but I redrew that. Basically all I did is I took this photo with my iPhone, I brought it into Procreate and I traced it and I added a different inking style on top of it because I didn't want to do the watercolor thing, and that was all done in Procreate. This is just a raster image, so you can see here as we zoom in, we're getting all pixelated. There's a few different ways to do this. When you have an image inside of Adobe Illustrator, you will see these options pop up here where you have image trace. If you were to just straight click Image trace, sometimes it'll tell you slowly if this is high res, I try and draw my work in high res because I think it's vectorizes better in image trace. You can see it did a pretty decent job actually, because they art work that I have here is really clean. But if we go up here and we hit the image trace panel, this is where we can come in and really customize or clicking advanced here and really customize everything to make this work as efficiently as possible. What I would do usually is I play around with this threshold because I want some of these lines to not get too thin, sum to be too thick, blah, blah. The more paths you use, the more accurately it will look more like your artwork, but again, it's adding a lot of points that are unnecessary. You want to try and find the average there. Same idea with corners, so just play around with these, see what looks good. Something that I used to do a lot, which I'll show you in a second, is I would put the noise to zero because I would think it would add in little accuracies. But then what I also ended up learning, it gets a little sloppy, see in here it gets a little see some weird stuff going on. If you actually turn that up back to say 10 points, for example, see a lot of times it'll get rid of those little sloppy things. I would do this for some reason and then I'd have to go in and clean those up. Honestly put that noise backup. That was a mistake I can find. You can play around with these methods, fill strokes, those things. I don't mess around with strokes too often, it'll try and turn it into strokes that are editable instead of fills, usually doesn't work well. Ignore where it's nice, it'll just turn this into a nice black image, in this case. This is pretty decent, so normally you would just click Expand and you're done. But again, the idea for me is to always do everything as efficiently and quickly as possible. I'm just going to go backwards one step here. Once you've done that and you're happy, click up here where you see preset and you might see something called Jon's trace. That's because I click this right here and I saved as a new preset. Once you have a preset that you like, save it because it'll save you a lot of time in the future. Let's just say I've got back to where I would just add that original image and I see the Image Trace button. What I do to try and save time, now that I've defined my preset, I hit this little arrow beside the Image Trace button, and I go down and I click Jon's trace, you're going to still get to see that error message which you can in turn off. I hit Okay, and most of the time, if not all the time, it is very accurate right from the get-go because it is the settings that I want. I am going to go in and edit this and change that, and then once I get this to where I want, I will just save over the preset or save a new preset and then you can hit expand and you're done. That's going to save you a ton of time. You will notice one of the issues with using this is there's going to be tons of unnecessary points, and if you turn the points down too much, then most of the time it's not going to be as accurate. Again, there's a little bit of a balance between quality and speed when it comes to image trace, but it is a lot faster than recreating it from scratch in Adobe Illustrator. Then if I was going to fill this, there is a live paint bucket. But for the class, what I did is basically make a gray, let's do a brighter one that's easier to see. Put it behind using quick keys I showed earlier. Then selecting both of these things, I'm merging them down here, double-click, and then basically just go in there quickly, just delete the stuff I didn't need. Take a second, make sure I got that right, but then you can come in here. Another neat little trick, if I double-click in here, you can see each of these pieces differently selected. You can actually go to Select Same Fill Color, and that will now select everything of that same fill. I'll group that for the sake of it, Command G, and Now you can just quickly change the color of all of those. Another thing you can do if you don't have two similar of colors, is you can use Y, which will activate your magic wand tool. Just with one click, it'll grab all the same color in your art board. The problem you'll run into there is let's just say I've got this color, let's come in here for a second and just grab some stuff and we'll do one shade darker, whatever, one shade lighter, this thing. Sometimes if you click with the Magic Wand, it'll get confused and it'll select everything, see how the shades are different. Whereas if you select this and go to Select Same Fill Color, it will not grab those light different shades that we just colored. There is a little bit of inaccuracy difference between those two options, as long as you have those in your mind, you'll be able to use them pretty efficiently, I think. Hopefully you find that useful because it is something I do all the time. I think will most likely be my next class. It'll either be me loving and praising Adobe Fresco because it saved me so much time, or it'll be me finding a newer, better way to live trace things more accurately, faster, better maybe straight to the iPad. If that seems like a class you're interested in, let me know because I'm going to have to do some deep dive and really experiment and learn the best method myself before I can show anyone. Still got a little bit more to talk about but we're basically done. 13. Outro: Thank you so much for taking the class, I really hope you guys enjoyed it. This has shaken off the rest for me. I definitely do my classes without a script per se, I have a very good plan. I don't have a script side, it's not saying things word for word, just because I don't like reading like a robot, but that does sometime make my classes a little bit longer. Let me know what you think. Let me know if you think there's anything I can improve on. If you do take a moment to review the class, that would be super. It really helps to get the class seened, it would mean a lot to me, especially if you want to leave nice reviews that's always preferred you do have to come over here onto my profile, click "Genre" and click "CrusoeDesignCo" and somewhere over here, I think you'll see a Subscribe button. Please do subscribe and then you will be notified and you'll see when I put out new classes, which is something that I plan to do a couple of times, a year now. Not too often. But I want to keep teaching and I hope you guys want to keep learning. [LAUGHTER] This may look a little different, of course, as I put out new classes, but the stuff's supposed to be hidden and only seen to me, but now you get to see my crazy starts. As you can see, I have taught a ton of classes. There's a lot of different ways you can jump from here if you're more interested in logo design process, how to customize fonts, which I've talked a little bit about building lettering, but this is specifically in a non-scrapped, students really enjoy it. It's under an hour. These are some of my most popular classes. The pen tool, an entire class about that, I did quite some time ago, one of my most popular classes. Then if we scroll down here, we've got illustrator speed course. This was really great, and entire class devoted to actions. I feel like this is only 30 minutes and I think this will pay off crazy if you watch that. For 30 minutes, there's a lot of information packed in there, a lot of ways to get you thinking about things that you repeat day in and day out, that you can actually speed up with a click of a button by making Adobe Illustrator do the work for you. This is again, an entire class about the appearance panel. Again, I think it's super useful, but it didn't get quite as much love as some of the other classes. If you click "See More" button, you can see some of my other classes. I've done a lot of classes. I hope you guys check those out and please do follow me, crusoedesignco on Instagram, that's my most active platform. I don't post like crazy, but that's where you'll find me. I do have a Facebook if people use that anymore. I do dabble in YouTube. Sometimes I'll put out little short form, stuff that I can't make a longer video of. This one's gotten almost 40,000 views and it's a less than five-minute video, about larger Canvas size, an illustrator. I tried to do like little quick tip videos in there and I really appreciate. If you follow, check those out. I think that is all. Do like, do review, do subscribe, do whatever it is you do on this platform that I can't remember because I'm rusty. Again, sorry about my stuffy nose, but the show must go on. Thanks everyone. Talk to you later.