Transcripts
1. Class Intro: Everyone, welcome to cosplay sewing school and digital pattern drafting using Adobe Illustrator. I just want to go ahead and introduce you to this course and how it's going to be laid out. So we are going to be learning first a little bit about Adobe Illustrator itself in how to use it if you are not familiar with it. Now, if you are already familiar with Adobe Illustrator, you can go ahead and take a look, but you can kinda quickly snoop through the tools. You might find something new that you haven't learned yet. I hope you are excited and ready to get Learning onto the first lesson.
2. Creating New Files: Let's start by taking a look at Adobe Illustrator itself. Now all I have done is actually opened Adobe Illustrator. So let's take a look at all of the main interface here. Up in the top we have our file menu where they'll be kind of the basic File menu type stuff at it. Object type will be going over all of these later on in the course. Up here in the middle, we have the templates that are available to us whenever we want to create a new item, also known as presets. Down here we have the recently used documents and that's just a nice little quick way to go ahead and find what you were working on last and you can see I was working on all sorts of stuff. So the first thing we're gonna do is open a new document. So let's go ahead and click Create New. And what we're gonna go ahead and do is look a little bit at this window. So here we have the presets. And up here you'll see there's a bunch of different tabs. We have mobile web, print, film and video, art and illustration. We're going to work off a web form or a web preset here. And so I just want you to know that I notice as a print item that we're making, but this would be a little easier to work with. It as far as sending out to printers goes, you'll be just fine. We're not working on anything that is going out for any special treatment. If you do send these out to print their likely gonna go to blueprint printing. Alright, so let's go ahead and click web large. And that's going to be the basis for what we're going to end up making here. So let's look at the preset details. Up here. We have basically with this filename is going to be, I'm going to call this pattern art board. Okay? Then the next thing we have is we have width and height orientation number of Art Boards. And this nice drop down, which is going to tell us what measurement that we're gonna be using. I'm gonna go ahead and select inches. And now you'll see that the width here changes to 26.6667 inches IN fringe and height here is now in inches. So we're gonna go ahead and make this 36 and we don't have to type the ion in there. And you can use tab to go between. You're gonna go to 36. And the orientation here is going to show us as technically this could be either essence, its square can be portrait or landscape. But on squares it'll default to portrait. And we're just going to go ahead and select one art board will worry about what in our board is as we continue forwards the bleed, we don't need to worry about that as a printing thing. And as far as the color mode, we're just gonna go with RGB color and screen 72 PPI. I would leave this alone for the purposes of what we are doing here. So let's scroll down and hit Create. And what this is going to do is make US a brand new report.
3. Save As Template: Okay, so we created a new file. And so before we go any further, what I'm gonna do is make this into a template. That way if we need to make another one just like this, we don't have to go through all that setup again. So what I'm gonna do is say File, Save As template. And I'm gonna go ahead and actually select a place on my computer that makes a little more sense. And I'm just gonna go here and I'm going to put a new folder real quick. And I'm gonna call it Adobe templates. And I'm gonna save this as pattern are bored. And now you'll notice that this became pattern art board that AIT. So let's go ahead and close that. And let's say File and New from template. Navigate back to where we were with our template here. And if I can find it there we go and select that. And that is going to go ahead and give us our art board straight out. Now, if you wanted to add anything else to this template, you could, you could add a logo in there, all sorts of nice stuff, but that just teaches you how to make a template.
4. The Main Workspace: So here you can see the main workspace for Adobe Illustrator. So we're just gonna kinda get the lay of the land here. So up at the top we have some menus and these have various things in it. We ever File Edit object, which will see this is a pretty important menu type select effect. And we won't be going too much into this view, which is going to show us different ways to view within the application window, which is a very important menu up here because this is going to show how we're going to access some windows and you'll see what Windows we're gonna set up here in a second, as well as the help menu. Next up here, we have our Arrange Documents and this just lets us kinda see how the documents that we have open are arranged that I rarely use. Actually, over here, we have the get familiar with Adobe Illustrator. There's helped tutorial. So if you are new to Adobe Illustrator, that is definitely something that you may want to take a look at. The workspace bar here, we'll let us select from different workspaces. These set of workspaces are gonna come with Adobe Illustrator. Up here are some workspaces I have created for my own personal use. We're going to create a brand new workspace, which is gonna give us a combination of how our side menu looks, our top menu looks, and our windows and menus that are open here on this right side. If you want to search for something in Adobe Stock or in the help, you can also search up here. Let's talk a little more about the interior of the interface. Up here is what's called the control bar. This is going to change based on whatever it is we are doing within Adobe. So first thing right now this is set up to basically have some standard stuff here that you'll see when nothing is selected, including our document setup, our preferences, and a few other various things. Down on the left we have our toolbar. So we can actually expand our toolbar and collapse or Toolbar. We can also drag our toolbar out. And then this will let us move it all over the screen and put it wherever we want. And then we can read dock this back where we want it. I have a pretty big screen, so I keep mine in the single layout. If you have a smaller screen like I do on my laptop, I will keep it can chew ROS makes a little easier to see. Down at the bottom here, there are these three buttons and that allows us to edit our toolbar or if we are looking for a tool because sometimes I'm looking for a specific tool and I can't find it. You'll see it highlights that tool for us over there. And if this tool wasn't in our toolbar, we could actually turn it on or take it away from this menu. Anytime you see this little symbol up here with the three bullets that tells you that there's some more stuff that we couldn't do. So for instance, we could make a new toolbar. We can click Manage toolbars and come up with our own toolbar. Right now we're just gonna go ahead and use the standard toolbar. And the right here we have our windows, which remember I told you up here, the windows that we can control. And out of the box in the Essentials classic, if you are brand new and have just started Adobe Illustrator, you can navigate to this Essentials classic because this is what we're going to be basing our Primary Workspace on that is going to be for our pattern manipulation and our pattern drafting. So right here we have the properties window. Properties window is pretty useful, just generally tells you about whatever is going on and selected. If we have objects selected, it will change as we move throughout. Libraries is going to be basically objects and things that you either have locally on your computer or you can browse shared libraries on the web. That's fine too. We're not going to use libraries very much. Then over here, we have another set of menus. We can expand or collapse those same thing here with libraries, we can expand and collapse. We can also pull these out. And we can put them back. So we can put them back in their own doctor menu. We can have several deep like this, or we can combine them into multi tabbed groups. So this lets us really set up our interface the way we really like it down here at the bottom, I just want to take a little look at this is our zoom. So there's multiple ways to zoom in Illustrator, This is one of them. You can do a select on what you want, like maybe 50%. Or we want to fit on screen that will go ahead here and do that. This is our art board selector. And an art board is basically just a space that you're putting your, it's the white space that will become a page. Essentially what you're putting on here so that your paper down here is a little space where it's gonna go ahead and tell you what exactly it is that you have selected on your screen.
5. Making the Basic Patterning Workspace: In this lesson, we are going to learn how to create our workspace. And the reason we want to create a workspace is so that we have tools at our properties, windows, and all of the layout of the screen. So everybody's kinda working in the same space. So I'm going to start from one of the predefined Adobe Illustrator workspaces. And you can find your workspaces up here at the top. So I'm gonna go ahead and click essential Classic. And if for some reason your essentials classic Workspace doesn't look like this. Go ahead and go up here and click Reset, essential Classic. And that is going to take this to the weight looks stuck out of Adobe Illustrator. First step in making this look the way you want is to get rid of some of these windows that we're going to either be putting in a different place or we are going to be not really using and I just want to kind of get them out of the way so I don't have to see them. The cool thing with Illustrator, if you look up here is you can make as many workspaces as you want, which is really, really cool because then different tasks you can do different things. So for instance, when I'm doing graphics art stuff, or maybe making a YouTube thumbnail, I'm going to use a different layout or a different workspace than I am when I'm pattern drafting. So we're gonna go ahead here and close these windows. I'm going to drag this out just so you can see that you can drag these and move these around. I'm going to right-click and click Close. And then I'm gonna do the same thing here on libraries. I'm going to right-click and click close. Next. I'm gonna go ahead and expand this panel just so we can kinda see what we have here. We have our colors are colored guide, swatches, brushes, symbols. We have a nice little assortment, but we're gonna go ahead and do here is because we want to have everybody with the same exact workspace working so that you can complete the assignments in this course, the same exact way idea. We're going to close a few of these things that are just more than what we need onscreen. So let's right-click enclose the Color Guide. We are going to close brushes. We are going to close symbols. Click on it first and appearance. And don't worry if you were to lose the is because we can reopen them again at any point. And the loose graphic styles and layers we're gonna close. Okay? So we've closed a bunch of them. Now we're gonna go ahead and figure out how do we put the windows back in that we actually want to use in our workspace. So to do this, we're gonna go up here, so window. And here you can see pretty much everything that you can do in Adobe Illustrator. All of the windows that you could possibly open are located here, including information about our toolbar, your extensions, which will open those extension windows if you have any. You know, you can switch workspace from here. So this is a very handy area. Get used to the window toolbar up here. It's really useful. So we are going to open properties back again. And what I'm gonna do is just drag this right up over here. And we are going to do type and paragraphs. So we're gonna go window type paragraph, and that's going to open up the character and the paragraph, the open type we are not going to need. So I'm gonna go ahead and close that. And we'll organize here in a second. And we're gonna go ahead and click window navigator. And this is useful for moving around your workspace and for zooming. It's a nice little trick for zooming. And the info comes along with it. We're actually going to pull info out and do that a little separate. So I'm gonna go ahead and collapse this here. We're going to put properties in here. I'm gonna go ahead and put kick paragraph in here, the character, the navigator. And we're going to leave info here just for the moment. Now, we're going to work on a second floating toolbar, or I should say not toolbar. We're going to work on a second floating panel set up here where we are going to have a few groups and we're going to get the tabs so they come together. And so we're gonna go to Window Align and we're going to put a line over here with info. We are going to then put the window document info. This is a very tricky and fun one to have available. So we're gonna go ahead and put that there. And actually I'm gonna move info out of here just for the time being so we can get this all exactly the way I normally use this. And then we're gonna go to Window appearance. We're going to pull appearance out and we're actually going to put it up in here. Then the next day we're going to do is get the Pathfinder and we're gonna make a second group underneath. So did you see how I did that? You just drag that and you'll see that little blue line. And now we have the Pathfinder there. So we're going to then go over here to transform, and we're gonna put that in the window. So now if we move, these are collapsed or expand this, they act as one group. And then the last one that we want is we are going to need the Layers, window, layers, okay? And we'll pull that out there from that menu and put it in the bottom here. So I'm gonna go ahead and put info back here on the right. And I'm going to go ahead and close attributes. And now what we're going to do is create a new workspace. And I just want to show you can keep this, this way or this way expanded or collapsed. I keep this expanded to pull over top of my interface because I need these panels, most specifically the other ones I use less than this. If you find that you are using some more than the others, go ahead and rearrange this, how ever you feel happy. So what you're gonna do is we're gonna go up here to the essentials classic where you saw that that workspace selector. And we're gonna say new workspace. And then you're going to type in, we're gonna call it basic patterning. And I already have this workspace made. So if I go ahead and click OK, it's going to overwrite that workspace. So I'm gonna go ahead and click OK. And now if I go up here, I could say go to essentials and my whole screen is going to change. Then let's go back to basic patterning. And now I have that just exactly the way I want it.
6. Toolbar, Control Bar, and Artboards: In this lesson, we are going to be learning about the tools in the toolbar. So the toolbar is this thing coming down the left side. Typically, you can expand it or collapse it to make it one row or two rows. You can also drag it out and keep it wherever you like on the screen. We're gonna go ahead and dock it. That is correct word back over here and I am going to hood and keep it as two rows. So let's go down through these tools. The first tool is the selection tool, and you can also press the V key on your keyboard to get to that tool. And that tool literally just selects things. Next up, we have the direct selection tool, which you can hold down and also see the group selection tool. You can access this tool using the a here, and I will have a download of the shortcuts for you in the lesson plan below. Next up, we have the magic one tool which we won't be using very much the lasso tool, the Pen tool. This is our best friend for pattern drafting. If you press and hold, you'll see the pen tool. And this actually tells you what its key is here. The pen tool is P. You press a key on your keyboard. The anchor tool, the anchor tool here is a plus and the delete anchor tool is a minus, and the anchor point tool is shift c. And so these are all different tools that we're gonna go over what they do when we get into using the pen tool. But these are all modifiers. Essentially two points are anchor points that we will select and make for our pattern drafting. Over here we have the curvature tool. I'll show you guys a bit how to use that later on in the course. Next, we have the type tool, so I need to have we want to use text, we call it type in Adobe Illustrator. If you press and hold that, and by the way, anytime you see that tiny little triangle down at the bottom corner, that means there's some more tools here. And you can also expand these out like that if you want to keep them available. We're gonna go ahead and put that back. So here we have the type tool. We're generally going to just be using the standard type tool. There are all these other cool type tools, but they are not for this class. We also have a line segment tool, as well as these other extras. We'll primarily just be using the line segment tool. Over here we have the Rectangle tool which has the magical letter of em. Don't ask me why. The rounded rectangle tool and the Ellipse tool which makes circles and ovals. So these two here, the rectangle and the ellipse, are definitely going to be used a lot for our pattern drafting. We have the paintbrush tool. We're not going to use that very much. Shaper, eraser. You kind of get the, you can scroll onto these, that you can roll onto these and they'll tell you what they are. So we're gonna kinda just go down and see these. Most of these were not going to use during this course. The eyedropper tool we will be using. This allows us to collect information basically about the appearance of an object and duplicate it into something else. And I will be showing you how to use that later on. We also have the measure tool, which of course can measure something on the screen and also very useful in pattern drafting. And then we'll come down here, the art board tool. So let's talk a little bit about what is an art board. So in our board is any stating that is this white area on the screen, basically our paper, our drawing space. So the art board tool when we press it is going to go ahead and give us access to our art board. Now, if we wanted to make changes to it, we can drag it and shrink it. However we like. We can also move it around. Now, I am going to zoom out here really big and show you that there is a lot of empty space on this area where we can go ahead and make more art boards. And we can also then drag here and make as many art boards as we like, as well as select pressing the Delete key to delete the art boards that we no longer need. And when you are done with this tool, you can go back to the direct select tool and that will, or the Select tool and that will pull you out. So I'm going to press Control 0, and that is going to bring this back to fit on screen. And then let's go down and talk a little more about these, these tools. On the left we have the hand tool. When you click the hand tool and you drag and pull, It's going to move your art board around on the screen without moving any of your art work. So it's similar to scrolling or to put, dragging the bars down here, just a whole lot easier. You can also access this tool by holding down the space key. So let's say we were in our selection tool and now we want to move around. You can press and hold space. And now we can move around and we let go. And now we are back to our regular puncture. The zoom tool is here. You can press zoom to get in. We can hold ALT. We can zoom out. So that lets us do there. And then we can also zoom into an area while holding out it will with our scroll wheel. And this will let us zoom in and out wherever our cursor is located. Down here we have the fill color. So when we create objects here, they have to have some knowledge of their appearance. So the fill color, if we double-click that, that's gonna go ahead and bring us up. Our color picker could pick any color we like. If we do not want a fill, we can select the none here and that will put that little red mark there. And that means there is no fill. Here is the border or the stroke. So if you double-click that, we can bring that up, select the stroke and the same thing here. We can select None. If we want to go back to the default, we can click that button there. If we would like to switch these, we can swap them. Clicking this button. Now, down here we have a few other things. Just something to look at here is this Edit toolbar. So if you click that, it's gonna go ahead and show you this nice little extra window, which will also let you find a tool. So if you're missing a tool and you can't find it back in there anymore and you need to get it back. You just click those little three dots and you can then find your tool back again. Alright, so up at the top here is our control bar. And what our control bar does for us is this will change as we are working with various objects. Like for instance, let's put a circle here. And as we click that object, you'll see that control bar changed. This is just gonna give us a whole bunch of stuff that seems relative to work with for the objects. So for instance, it's easy access to the fill, the stroke. And as well here we can click this stroke and then we can get in here to the line way. We can make it a dashed line. Set this spacing on the dashed line. We can add arrowheads, so we can work with the stroke from in there. Now, we can also set the profile of the stroke and the definition of the brush we're generally not going to mess with the is also the graphic style. Over here, we can see the alignments as well as the shape properties, the width and the height, as well as access to the Transform tool. But you'll see a lot of this is overlapping, right? For instance, the Pathfinder and the Transform tool has the same information down over here. So Adobe Illustrator gives you these things in a number of ways. I also want you to take note of this symbol up at the top. Anytime you see this chain link symbol that is to constrain or not constrained the width and height. So one constraint is selected. It will keep the width and height of the item if we change it up here. So let's say constraint is selected and we want to put in ten inches. Now, you're going to see that went to 5.5495 inches, which was to keep this the same proportion of height to width. If we take that off, we could make this seven inches. And now you're just going to see the width change versus the height change. And you'll see that bar here and a few other places in the interface. So anytime you need that, you see that chain link that's that constrained width and height proportions, which sometimes we went on and sometimes we went off.
7. Document Setup & Preferences: Welcome back. And in this lesson we are going to learn how to use the documents setup, and preferences menus. So up here at the top on our control bar, we have two buttons, the documents setup and the preferences. We can also reach these by going to the File menu and selecting document setup or the Edit menu and going into preferences. So let's first talk about documents setup. Documents setup is going to be where we set our units. Now, remember we set the unit in the very beginning, but if we wanted to go back and change that unit, we don't have to make a brand new file. We can go in here and select what unit of measurement we would like to use. Bleeds. We don't need to worry about all of this stuff down here is very printing related. Right now, we're focusing on the tools we need just for pattern-making. So the next one here that we're gonna just kinda take a sneak peek at is edit art boards. And remember when we click that at an art boards tool over here, that's going to bring us up the same exact user interface so we can press escape or recipe to get out of that tool. And let's go in to preferences. So this is the Adobe Illustrator Preferences menu. There's a whole lot of these and a lot that you can tweak and play with, but we're not going to worry too much about that. I just want to highlight a few things. First one is scale stroke and affects. I keep this unchecked. Otherwise, as you scale items or objects bigger and smaller, their stroke and their effects. So meaning the line weight that's on the outside of the object is going to also scale with it. That can be very, very annoying when we really just wanted outline, that is a one or 2 outline. And we want to now make something bigger. And now that scale has changed on the stroke and it's very irritating. I find it very irritating. So make sure you uncheck that here at least for our lessons. And the next thing we're gonna go ahead and look at here is the units. And you can also change your standard units of measure for this document here. And the grids and guides if for some reason, when we start doing grids and guides, that the color is difficult for you to see. This is where you would go in and change the color. Different people, like different colors for their grids and, or guides. And so that's basically what we're going to talk about here in that document setup and Preferences menu.
8. Grids, Guides, and Rulers: In this lesson, we are going to talk about rulers. So the first thing that we need to know about rulers is by default, they won't be on. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to press Control R. And that is going to give me my rulers. In my rulers are what looked like actual, real rulers that go across the top and down the side of my document. And what this is going to do is let me see the measurements. As I zoom in, you'll see these increments and measure come across. So we have 111 eighth, 101 quarter, 13 eighths and so on. And we can then decide where we want to start with a 0 at. For instance, in this document, by default the 0 is centered and the 0 would then be up here at the top. That wouldn't work very well for our case. So what you're going to do is drag from that top left corner, and then you can drag this to anywhere you want on the screen, for instance. So the top right corner of our document and now our X and Y 00 is located here in this portion. Now, if we would like to turn our rulers back off, momentarily, we can press control are, and control are. Now once our rulers are on, then we can create something called Guides. And guides are just, on principle. They're invisible to your final products and they will help us to place objects and move them around on the screen. So it should create a guide. We are going to go and click with your left mouse and drag and pull to where we want it. And now we have a guide that is coming here from this side. Now let's do the same thing from the top. And we have another guide there. Now, we can move these guides, but sometimes you won't be able to use those guides and move them. So if you can't right-click on a guide and you will see the menu here. There is a Hide Guides, lock guides, and release guides, options. So if lot guides is on, once I've made that guide, I cannot turn it. I can't move it. I can't select it. It has become locked. So if I went to unlock it, I would right-click and select unlock guides. In which case, now I can select and move the guide you're going to see going forward is, is a very handy, handy thing because oftentimes we don't want to be able to select and move our guides. The next thing is going to be Hide Guides. And there are many times we want to turn our guides off because there's just too many lines on the screen in its too much. So that's how we show and hide our guides go back here and click Show guides. Now, another option in Adobe Illustrator to use, I don't generally find that I use this as much. But if you are used to having a gridded paper when you make patterns in real life. Then you can go ahead and select show grid here. And then in the preferences were going to go two units and grids. And we can select how much we want a grid line. Let's say we want a grid line every one inch with eight subdivisions. Then that gives us a grid line once with eight subdivisions. So that means we have the one asynch marks. So we can zoom in here, we can see one inch, this is our half inch. This would be eighth quarter and so on. So that can be very helpful, like I said, especially if you're the kind of person that typically plots are drafts on a gridded are graphed paper. I tend to not like this. It's a lot of lines on my screen, but you should do whatever works for you. So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to say hide grid. And I am going to select these guys and remove them, pressing the Delete key, we no longer need those, and that completes our lesson on grids and guides. So I want you guys to go ahead and turn on your rulers, turn on your guides and drop in some grids and guides, and we will be back here in the next lesson.
9. Select and Direct Select Tools: In this lesson, we are going to go ahead and learn about selection tools. So the first tool we're going to look at is the basic selection tool which I already have selected. That's the black arrow up there. And I can click anywhere on a shape with no space. And then I will deselect all of my objects. And if I single click, that will let me select single objects. Now, I can look here and see that the control bar changes with each selection. And that is because it's going to give me some information that I can use to do quick changes to that object. We can also drag and do a marquis or a selection box basically, and select a group of objects. We can also select an object and then do things like change its fill or its line shape or width or any properties about it. We can also rotate tools. If you hover your mouse over the corner, you've got the rotate icon show up here. And if you click and drag, you'll see you can rotate a shape simply using that. And if we hold shift, then we can rotate in 45-degree increments to be able to accurately do this. This really helps if we are say, turning a shape 90 degrees. Like that. We can also shift click or highlight like that. So now we're going to shift click and we can press the Delete button to delete Control Z brings it back. Now let's look at the direct selection tool. So we're going to press a or click on the white arrow here. And that will bring us the direct selection tool. So when we single click on an object using the direct selection tool, we'll see the anchor points here pop up on that object. So if we zoom in, we can go ahead and click that. And you'll see that the little handles here, these are called handles pop up. And we can manipulate these handles individually. See if you click out or you don't click on them and you have to click back again. You can also hold Shift while you manipulate these to move them at a set of 45-degree angles and pull out and push in to make changes. Now, that is a point that is curved. If we were to go to a point-to-point over here and we click on a single point, we will see that there is an interesting little icon here. And what that's going to let us do if we pull it is round the edge. And you'll see now that needed to curved points, this one and this one. And if we pre, curve and pull that out again, we can go ahead and make that into a straight line. So when these points are straight points, there are no handlebars. If they have curved to them, then you will get your handlebars. You'll also see there's only one handlebar On that point. So let's go back and go over to the shape here. And I want to show you how you can remove one side of the handle. So let's say you wanna make one side pointed and the other side curved. You can pull that handle all the way into the point. And now you have clicked that rock, and now we have one side here. Now you'll notice that the icon came up here to curve that point and that's going to show up for us anytime that is available. That's actually a relatively new ish feature of Adobe Illustrator that I really, really love. Now what I want you to do is go ahead and pull up this file and play with the selection tools until you feel comfortable.
10. Rectangle, Ellipse, and Line Tools, Arrowheads & Dashed Lines: In this lesson, we are going to learn about the rectangle, the circle, and the line tools. So let's start with the Rectangle tool. So you can find that in your toolbar here or by pressing M. And if you just click and drag, you'll see we can drag and the shape of rectangle we like. Now, if you hold Shift and drag, then we can make squares. If we hold ALT in drag, we can make squares that are centered. So meaning that these rectangles or squares are pulling from that middle. But she'll see that could actually be rather useful. And if we hold Shift Alt, then we are forced into constraint for portions or I0 square that way. So let's go ahead and select all of these and clear them from our screen. We can use our properties. We can select those changes are colors, et cetera. So let's work on the same thing with the circle tool or the Ellipse tool. I always call it the server tool. I know it's specifically the Ellipse tool, so l for ellipse. And here we're going to look at the same thing. If we click and drag, then we are getting just a generic oval is shape. We hold shift, we will get an exact circle. We hold Alt. We are creating a circle from the center aisle shift. And we are creating an exact circle from the center and not just an oval. So these shapes work exactly the same. We can rotate them. We can then use the directions tool and select and play with these shapes. So that's the circle or ellipse tool and the Rectangle tool. So I'm going to select all of these and delete them. And then we're gonna go one more time into the line segment Tool. And over here you'll find some other tools too that are pretty handy, dandy, fancy, but we're just gonna talk about the line segment tool. So to use this, you just click and drag. And now we are making lines. A line segment, unlike a pen, will only make a single line. Now, if we hold shift, we can make our line on 45-degree increments, which is extremely useful when we want to make straight lines. Now, another cool thing about the pen tool is if we press the P button, we can click an end and continue the shape. So this does lead us intermingle and Intermix our tools. Another thing we're going to talk about here while we're in the Line tool is a little bit about the Stroke panel. And if we want to make a dashed line, now anytime you have a stroke which is basically an outline on the shape, you can do this. So a dashed line, you just check mark this here. And what we are going to do then is let me move this over just a little for you so you can see that better. Is say how far apart we want the dashes in the gap. So we could say maybe 310. And then that would give us a shape that looks like this, where we have tiny little almost like dots. We can go in here, selected again, and go back and we could say maybe just give it a 3 and then that's little tiny dots there. We could give it 12. And so when you only say the dash, the gap will be equal. So we could say 12 and to a near straight line or a near non dashed line. Now, let's say that we're fine with our dashed lines, that we needed to have arrowheads. Maybe we're marking the grade, right? So let's draw a line here, and let's hold the Shift key. There we go and press the V button, select that shape. And then we are going to go up to the stroke here. And let's take off the dashed line and add some arrowheads. So when you click the down button, let me scoot this off to the side so you can see that better. The stroke and the Down button. And now you're going to see a selection of default arrowheads. So let's pick arrow three. And arrow three. We can actually pick different arrows here. We can also scale using either a constrained scale, meaning that it has to say to the exact height and width are the same or same in proportion, we could say 50, 50%. There we go. So now that's constraining it that way. We can also say where we want to aligned. We should go beyond the path or within the path. So if you saw that, that means this arrowheads gonna go out over the edge of that path. This arrowhead stays within the edge of the path. So those are nifty handy things that we can do to lines. And that was the rectangle and Ellipse tool. So what I want you to do is go ahead and play with these tools. Make their outlines or your lines dotted or dashed. Go ahead and add arrowheads to them and play around and just get used to the interface.
11. Pen Tool: In this lesson, we are going to learn about the Pen tool. I want you to start with a blank canvas or blank art board and the size of your choosing. We're just going to be practicing here with the pen tool. So I, what I want you to do is go ahead and press P. That's going to take us to the pen tool. And then what you're gonna see is there's like a little star by it. And that just means that we are at the start of a new shape. So go ahead and left-click anywhere you like. Left-click, left-click, left-click and make a few shape size, shape sides here, then click and hold. And now you'll see those bars that we had, those handles drag out. So let's drag some handles there and that way. And then go ahead and click back on your very first, you're going to see a little circle there. And what that means is you're closing the shape. If we were to end right here, then the shape would be open here. We're going to close the shape. So now I'm going to just press a V for a second and I'm going to put a little bit sick or stroke on that. So it's easy to see and move this very funny shaped object over here. So to play with parts of the Pen tool first, I'm gonna go back to the direct selection tool. I'm going to get a little weird, but it does work. And then we're going to go ahead and hit the PI button. And now what we can do here is we can start playing with the shape that we made. So if we hover over anywhere on the line here, we're going to see there's a little plus. When your pen marker as a plus, click it, that's going to add another point onto your line. Now, if you wanted that to go away, you can hover over here and you can click the minus button. You can also come here and it use the add anchor point tool which is access with the plus. And that will go ahead and move it, force it into that add anchor point tool where you can just keep clicking. Now, if you do not click exactly on your path, you're going to see this message. No big deal, just click OK. Let's scroll in here and make some more points. First RV button back again and scroll out and look at our overall shape. Let's select it here and go back to our a with our direct select. And what we're gonna do is use the anchor point tool. So the anchor point tools, part of the group of tools in the pen tools section. And what this is going to do is allow us to change points from curves to straight. So if I single click here with our nice little arrow selected, that's gonna make that a point. If I click it, single click, it'll still make that point. Click it and drag. And now we have curves. So if you have something that you need to convert, That's how you do it. So we can go back to the pen tool, draw another shape here. Make it cross. We can go in here, we can draw an open shapes are drawn opens shape just kick escape. Or you can press V. And now we have an open shape. And you'll see that those properties are readily changeable just like we explored before, as well as using all of our Direct Selection Tool Options here like making fancy curves, kinda looking like a neat little cloud shape, and pulling things back in an out, Selecting multiple points and moving them at the same time using shift or with a selected mark key with the mouse. And so that is the basics of the Pen tool. So what I want you to do is go ahead and make your own funky cool shapes using your pen tool until you get comfortable. Go ahead and make some delete some, just play with it because it's a tool we're gonna use pretty often.
12. Curve, Rotate, & Measure Tools: In this lesson, we are going to play with a few additional tools like the curvature tool and the measure tool. And so to do this, we're going to first start with P with our pen tool, and we're going to draw a rectangle is shaped, just use all straight lines and close that. Now I'm gonna go ahead and press V, just kinda move this in the middle. And over here I'm going to get my curvature tool, which you can use the keyboard by pressing Shift tilda. All right, so let's just go ahead and press that. And what that's gonna do, this is a really nifty tool, is if you drag from any line, you can actually curve. If you have things like this area. And we can curve, and we can curve, we can make some pretty cool shapes this way. Alright, so let's look at some other tools here, like the rotate and the measure tool. So the next thing we're going to look at as the rotate, which we're going to press R. And that is going to give us the ability to then churn this by clicking and dragging however we like. But that's not the true power of the rotate tool. The true power of the rotate tool comes when we single click a space. And now you'll see this, see that little weird teal colored crosshairs there. That is going to be the center of our rotation. So if we click and drag now, we can drag from a corner. And this is going to be a really pivotal he, he, he went thing that we'll use during our pattern drafting. And the last one for this section is the measure tool. So the Measure tool is going to be found with the eye dropper. And we're gonna click that. And then what you're gonna do is you just take it and drag it between two places anywhere you like to see the actual distance. And you'll notice the Info tab came up here, the info window. And this is going to tell us that the distance from here to here is the width and the height of that. So for instance, this is 26.5 inches. This is the angle 59.082. So this is a pretty useful tool. It's not going to help us as much as we would probably like because we can't measure curves. Also, if you'll notice whenever we're going on the diagonal, it's gonna tell us a width of a certain amount and a height of a certain amount, which is actually going to be here to here. So it's useful on the straight this way or this way, not so useful in other cases. But I will show you a work around for that in just a little bit. So go ahead and practice using the different tools that we saw here.
13. Type Tool: In this lesson, we are going to be learning about the type tool. To go into the type tool, we're gonna go ahead and press the T for type tool looking button here. Or we can actually press the T button on the keyboard. Then the way the type tool works is a couple of different ways. The first way, we can actually just zoom in just a little bit and single click. And that's going to create a line of typing texts. And it will start with some Lorem Ipsum code. And all that is is just some text that's kind of gobbledygook that puts us with something basic. And now we can change that text. We can hit Enter and put line breaks. We can add any kind of texts that we would like. So if we're done adding text, go ahead and hit the escape key. And what that will do is put you back into the selection tool. From here, we can rotate using the little rotate handle. We can size. Now what you're gonna notice here is when we pull this, the text is not changing its lines to fit. This is actually resizing the actual text itself. So this is going to work a lot like a common sort of standard object. And that if we pull from here, we're going to stretch it. We can shrink it. We can play with this text as we want. If we hold shift, we can go ahead and make it bigger or smaller. Now, let's say we wanted to change this text well, with the, with the selection tool selected, we can go ahead and double-click on the line of text and that's going to put us into tight mode and then we can press escape. Another option is to press the T and go into the type mode and then hover somewhere on your text. And that's going to go ahead and put you back in that text to change or type on it. Now, let's say we want to mess with the font. And to access the font. We can either go up to our top control bar here, or we actually placed in our character and our paragraph windows over here. So we could select this and then select the drop-down here. And this will give us a little preview and our texts will change as we go over it. So let's just, So let's a little bolder font here. Oh no, I didn't want that. I can also work from up here. So let's select a font. Here. You have some font styles, depending on the font you're using, you'll have different choices. So let's say black. Then next thing up here is how large the font is. Now, notice that this box only goes up to 72, but that is not as big as it goes. We can start typing. So 200, for instance, we can type whatever number within reason that we wanted in there. So let's go ahead and control C, control z. There we go. And we're just gonna move this up here. Now, the font will show this as a blank here on the character and up here, because now we have multiple selected. So if we come in here and we highlight by double-clicking, and now we can see those there. The next thing that we're gonna talk about is the leading, which is essentially the space between the lines. So let's look at down here for instance, and let's go ahead and set that to 12 or set that to 48. And what that's going to do is put the space between this line and the line above it. So it's always setting to the line above. So you'll notice if we came here and did the same thing, it wouldn't actually matter because there's no line above that. The next thing we're going to talk about is the kerning between the two characters. So kerning is something that I generally rarely mess with. You would need to. Typically I keep it on auto, but this will change the distancing between the characters. And if we set its optical, We can then mess with the Kerning. And like I said, I rarely mess with current Nick. The next thing down here that I do mess with is the tracking. So tracking is how far apart the letters are. So if for instance we put this to minus 75, you'll see those letters shrunk very, very close together. And if we take this up to say 200, now the letters are pushed further apart in the line. Now, Liam want to do is show a little bit more of the options here. So I went up in that top corner on that box with the three, with the several lines there. And I hit that and with left-click. And now we can see there's some other options here. So I had selected Show Options and that was how I got the additional options to come up. Now, this is the vertical scale on the letters. So let's say we wanted the letters to a 100% tall compared to their width. We can do that. We can also set this. Let's say we went to 50%. This is looking really silly. Now, if we want to now have the baseline shift, that would mean that detects goes above or below. You can have a negative baseline shift and that is going to move the text up compared to where the baseline, meaning the place that's the bottom. So if you imagine on the lined paper you probably used when you were learning to write, that's the baseline where the bottom of your letters are. So now we have moved that down. The next is the characters individual rotation. And let's select some characters here. Let's rotate them 30%. So now each character is rotated individually by 30%. Additionally, down here we have the language. So that is going to be for the spell check. So if you are speaking a language other than English, or sometimes if you get downloaded stuff, which I often do to as templates to play with, you might find it isn't a different language and your spellcheck collect really weird. And that's why down here, we have the ability to change to all caps. And this will just superficially change everything's all caps so you don't have to actually put caps lock on and tight. We can change to small caps, meaning that if we go here with a capital a and lowercase a, these will all be in caps, but the larger a, the capital a because physically larger on the screen. We can also do superscript or subscript and underlying. And so these are a lot of the basic function. Okay, so let's talk about another way to use the type tool. So to use the type tool in what's called the area text mode or area type tool. We're going to click with our left-click and drag. And what you are going to see is that we now have some learn IPS and text, which has filled up our type tool. So let's play with this a little. Let's delete a couple lines. Enter, enter, enter, and see what we have going. So let's look at our paragraph settings. I think I did not reset those all the way there. We're gonna come back to that, so don't be worried if that went fast. So now we have this type tool, this area texts. Now if we pull on the handles, were going to see that the lines of texts will reorganize now because we no longer have just a single line that is being treated as such. If we wanted to resize the characters in here, we have to now resize those with the character menu. So the next thing that we can do, which is interesting with an area type tool is we can turn the text, but in this case we are not actually rotating the text inside. We are rotating the box that's text is in so the text itself will not turn on its sides. Let's go ahead and hit Control Z there and return. And the last thing that I want to look at here before we move into the character settings pretty deep is the little icon down here. Now when that box turns red, that means there is something called over set, text. Over set text is when there's texts that leaves the textbox and you cannot see it. So if we click this now see how it made that quote of boxy icon, it's going to turn into a brand new icon that kinda looks like a pointer with some words in there. And now I'm going to click and drag. And what that is going to do is continue the text from this box into this box where I can now move this box wherever I want. And this line to here that's keeping those together. So that's showing you that these are linked boxes. So if I were to say delete some text up here, you can see it flow through pretty sweet love Adobe's illustrators way that it does this. Now, let's look at the paragraph tools. I know we did pretty in depth on the character already. So let's look at the paragraph tools. The paragraph tools let us mess with the alignment of paragraphs. So in this case, if we hit the left alignment that will align all the characters to the left. Center will align them Center. And right now, justified means that it will attempt to make the lines full as much as it can. And this is justify with the last line being left, aligned, center, right and Full Justify. Now we can indent as we like and we have 0. We can also indent from the right side in this box. So we could invent from the left and from the right and put some, essentially some padding in there. So let's check those back to 0. We can also indent just to the first lines. Paragraphs, set that back to 0 now that you've seen that. And we can also put space before each paragraph so we can adjust the spacing before and after the paragraphs. Now, another thing that we wanna take into account is the idea of hyphenation when this checkbox is done. So lets the backspace on this and let's put some text. And we're going to put corner. Okay, and now what I'm going to do is shrink this. And what you're going to see. If I shrink this enough, it's like I didn't write very much text in there, is eventually, you will see that we have hyphenation here. And that is because it is attempting to continue the Word from one line to the next. If you are seeing that auto hyphenate and you do not want hyphenation uncheck. Typically, I don't use hyphenation in my work just reads weird on patterns. So that is the two different type tools, the alignments and pretty much all that we're going to need in response to making text. Now, what happens if we want to treat texts like an object? So there are going to be times we need to either embed a font or we want to make that text to where we can play with it. And in that case, we are going to do something called create outlines. So in the tight menu, we have to have our text selected. We are going to go up here and create outlines. Now, look just what happened. All of these are now individual, single objects that we can isolate and press a and now play with and move around. And so these now act as single objects. Now, the problem when you do this is you can no longer treat this as typing text. You can't no longer double-click and change your texts. So you really wanna do this only on things that you know for certain you are done with and you do need to play with this. Or if you are making a copy to send out to the printer. Oftentimes printers will ask for text to be in outlines, and that is so that they don't actually have to have the font embedded into their system, especially if you're using, we're in fonts. I typically do this in things like my logo, so that I never have to worry about the font being at each computer where I might be working.
14. Align & Pathfinder Tools: In this lesson, we are going to be learning how to work with objects using the align and Pathfinder windows. So go ahead and open the working with objects practice file, that's going to have a bunch of objects already in it and they are just black rectangles. So let's go ahead and talk about alignment of these objects. So let's select the first row here. Now, over here, we can choose a few things we can align left, and that's going to align all the objects to the left. And I'm just going to hit Control Z. We can align them Center. That will bind all the objects to the center, which doesn't make a lot of sense in this case, what I'm going to show you, well, it doesn't just a second. Same thing with right now. If we are working in rows, the runs here are pretty much what we want. We can align top, we can align centers, or we can align bottom. And let's make a little bit funky so you can kinda see that happen. And then I'm going to show you how we can do this even more. So let's go ahead and say vertically aligned top now. Oh no, it put them all to the highest object. So what are we going to do about that? Let's look a little closer at this window. So here it's saying align to selection. And what this election is is basically this group of objects. We can also say align to the art board. And in that case, if we have that selected, that would align it to the very tippy top of the art board, to the center, to the bottom, to the left, to the top and so forth. So that's very useful though line so the art board, but now let's go ahead and select these. And we're going to hold the ALT key. And we're going to select one of the objects. I'm going to select this one. And you can see this dark blue line is going to go over this particular object. And you'll see over here it says Align two key object. So we have selected this particular rectangle as the key object. So now if I hit vertical align center, they are all going to vertically align center to that object. These are some of the most important tools that we will work with in order to work in our digital pattern drafting. And these are often tools that a lot of people don't know they exist. Now let's look at the distributing. So we have this selected, right? You're gonna have the group selected and we can say we went to Distribute Vertically distribute the tops. And that's just going to find the middle differences in each one is going to be distributed evenly, vertically Distribute Center. Now, because we've already align those, it's unaligned those. So you can see that actually happen. There we go. And click this. Now they're gonna go to that same exact spot because the distribution isn't any different. But let's put one guy way down here, one of these way up there. Let's go ahead and select that and let's say the bottom four. So those are very, very useful. So let's go ahead and kinda, kinda lets drag him somewhat even and select them, just align the tops. Ok. Now, let's say that we want to put these objects with a certain distance in between them, or we don't want any distance in between the object. And so you can see this better. What we're going to do is make every other object a different color, because I really want you to see this. This is a really neat trick. Highlight them all. Now, if I select this, this overhears the distribute spacing. So I could select to horizontally distribute the spacing. And what that's going to do is evenly distribute the spacing between these same thing happens with the vertical. Now, let's go ahead and hold Alt and left-click to select a key object. Now you can see that this, this, this box has come into play. So right now it's set to 0 inches. Now watch this. If we say 0, it will make sure these are exactly touching so you don't have to do the work of a manually trying to attempt to make these align perfectly. Oh, no, I didn't want them 0 inches apart. I want them one inch apart. Enter your one-inch and distribute. This is going to be really, really important to the pattern grading process whenever we talk about that. So just keep this in your back. Alright, so that is the align men window. Now let's go ahead and talk about the Pathfinder with some shape modes here. So there's several different shape modes in pathfinder. So if we have two objects selected and let's go ahead and make them different colors, seeming like black and orange here. We can do a couple of things with these objects. And I made these like pretty close to here so that we can see how this works. So if we say unite, it is going to create a new shape. And if you'll look at the shape, it goes here, here, down, and this has united the outlines of the two objects. Let's go ahead and hit Control Z. See how this works. The next one is minus front. So the front most box basically cut out and carved out the back box. Control Z. Now we are going to intersect and that is going to leave us only the intersection. And in this case, we will have essentially the kinda out section. This is the outer area around the tube where there was no intersecting points. Now, I rarely use the path finder's it from this menu down here. So we're not going to go over these four pattern drafting.
15. Appearance & Grouping Tools: Take a look at the Appearance window and talk about grouping. So let's do a little thing here. Let's select this object here with in our work, in our working with objects practice file. And we're gonna go over here to the Appearance window. Now, what we're going to see is any appearance things and the stroke, the fill. Any effects that we have on this are going to be visible in the appearance menu. And we can also make changes to an object. So I can open this. I can set the stroke here. I can change the stroke color and make it a little wider so we can actually see it. I can change the fill from within this window. And I can also change the opacity if I so chose to make it more see-through, less see-through. And I can also do things like add additional elements, like additional stroke and fill and do effects, which we won't really use much by way of effects in this class, but those are something to see later on. Now, we did have an effect here. Let's just say, Oh goodness, pick something random. Here we go. A cutout filter. Ok, let's just say OK. Now we want to remove that so we can do a few things. We can turn the visibility of that filter on and off that effect. And we can also delete it by clicking there. So when you need to deal with your effects, sometimes you the appearance of the objects, sometimes the effects are really only accessible to change through this appearance menu. Now, let's talk a little bit about grouping. So if I select a group of objects here, I'm going to press Control G. And now those are actually grouped. Now we can move them and use them as one single object. If I want to go ahead and now mess around with these objects within this group, I'm just going to double-click somewhere on this. And then I can move these objects and work with them. And you'll see up here, we have gone into a breadcrumb menu. So layer one and then the actual group itself. So we are isolating the group and the rest of these workspace or the art board will actually gray out. Now, let's say I went to work and isolate this specific object. I can double-click again. And you'll see now we are isolated to that rectangle. I can also use this to go back up and down. So if I select the group here, I have gone out into this group. If I select the layer, I am now back into the layer. And I click the arrow, and I am now back onto the main airport. Now let's double-click and go into this grouping again. If I were to double-click outside of the group, that will take me all the way back to my art board. But now I don't want this group. So I'm going to press Control Shift G. And now these objects are separated then other weights, a group is to right-click. And then we can say group. And we can right-click and we can say Ungroup. And that is the appearance and the grouping.
16. Transform Controls: We are going to talk about the transform window over here. This is super, super, super important and super, super handy. So I'm just going to select an object that I made here and I want you to watch what happens as I move this in the transform. So now you can see the width changing here. You can see the height changing here. Now you can see the x and y. So this is going to be the position on the x and y-axis. And then now if I turn this and rotate it, you'll see the rotation happening here. If I want to share, this, shearing is moving things like on the top of the plane, left or right. So we could do that there. So let's go ahead and put that back. And then what I want to talk to you about the reference point here. So this is the reference point to which the object is being measured or worked with in regards to the actual art board here. So this, for instance, is referencing from the top right corner, which means if we put this at 00, darn it, we didn't set up our look at our rulers here. And now you see it put the top right of the object at 00. Now, let's see this. Now watch this 00. Now it put the center of the object at 00. So this is very important to know where we are working from whenever we are using manual changes in this transform menu. So I wanna show you something really interesting about the transfer menu that will really critically help us. We can actually do math in this window, let's say minus one. It now has transformed this minus one inch. And because we have the constraint for portions selected, it will constrain those proportions. So let's say we want to divide the height it half. We can actually say divide by two. And now it has divided the height in half. We can say multiply by four, and now it has multiplied the height by four. We can also use this math here on the x and y. So let's go ahead and put this at the top left. Since our 00 here on this particular board is on the top-left. And let's say that I want to move this plus one inch on the x, and that means I want to move it one inch down, right? Or in the y. I'm sorry. And let's say we wouldn't move this plus one inch over on the X, so we move that to the right. This is also very, very critical to know how this works. Whenever we are working in our pattern drafting. I want to just give you a little note here. We talked about it in the preferences. But if you're affects, our scaling, meaning the stroke of the object is scaling as you move it. You wanna make sure that is unchecked here. You can also do a little few extra things with the transform window over here, we can say we can flip. We can show that transform the object only, the pattern only or both. So that is the transform window. Now, there is also some transform in our right-click. There's a transform right-click menu. And that is gonna give us some cool stuff. So move, move allows us to move the object a certain distance at a certain angle. So let's say we want to move this to four or five minus five. Here we can see the preview for that's going say we want to move it at an angle and we want to move it. Nine. You'll see how it moves, okay, and then the other option is the copy. So we can actually say copy it to that new location. Let's go ahead. I don't use that move menu very often. I prefer to use the transform on the right side. Let's go ahead and do rotate. So let's say we want to rotate this 90 degrees. This is showing us the preview, okay? So it's just going to show us that the transform box, it's not gonna show us the actual object. And so we can choose, if we hit OK, it will do the object itself. And if we say transform, rotate 90 degrees and copy, now it has made a copy of the object. So very, very handy, very useful tool. Let's go ahead and move one of those over. And right-click transform, reflect. And that is, let's look at an object that actually has some interests to it so that we can see this reflect here. So transform reflex. And now you can see this much better. So if I take the preview off that is vertical, this is horizontal. And we can also select the angle to which we are reflecting on. So let's say that we are trying to put the second half of a bodice because we want to see the full BOD is so we can print it flat. We could use the Reflect tool, in this case with the Papi. And now, now we want to have the distance to be, let's remember how we did that. Let's put here. And let's say 0, distribute with check that out. Now had we selected there, the distribute width would have moved to the other side. But now these are exactly 0 from that point. And we have mirrored objects that we can now play with. Let's look again at the transform window or transform toolbar. We can also scale, which we can say 50%. That will scale or object 50%. We can do it uniform or non-uniform and check mark to scale the stroke and effects. Again, we can select copy. Now we have copied that at 50%. And we can also shear. Shear is basically, you're going to pull from the top, shearing it this way or shearing it that way. I don't use sheer very often. It's more of a visual tool and transform. And we can do a transform each, which will give us the full transform box here, which give us a little bit of stuff like scale. We can move, we can rotate, we can select the options here, reflect. So it's just kind of the full dialog box all in one shot. And then we can also reset our bounding box and we can do something called transform again. So let's say we wanted to repeat the transformation on another object exactly the same as it was. Transform again, right here. Transform again. It will transform the last known transform action on whenever object you have selected.
17. Path & Scissors Tool: In this lesson, we are going to learn about pathing. So let's go ahead and let's clean up our art board here. Let's just delete some objects. And I'm going to go ahead and reverse these two have outlines so that we can see these paths a little better. I'm just going to move one of these up here and get these out of the way. And you're gonna see this, why we're doing this in a second. All right, so I'm going to go up to the Object menu and path, and we are going to do what's called an offset path. Now at offset path allows us to make another path a certain distance, offset, the current one. So let's say I want to make an outline one inch away from the current selected object. Well, I select one in there and now that's out. Now let's say that I wanted to do it inside. Let's say I wouldn't do minus 0.5 inches. And what's nice is you don't have type the I n. Now we have built a path inside. So let's go ahead and click OK. And now you can see that these are two independent paths, one exactly within another. So let's go ahead and see what it looks like with a more complex object. This is our curvature tool and make this kind of a little bit interesting. Aereo. And now let's go ahead to object path, offset path. And you can see it will form and shape. Very, very well. Let's see the outside. Yep, it'll form and shape pretty good. Now, these actually overlapped here. So when it did to the inch, it's going to be a little, it could be a little weird. And those very unusual shapes might actually cause the offset path a little bit of a struggle, but we can handle that. And so now what we are going to do is look at the number of points, anchor points, this offset path made it made quite a few extra anchor points that are probably unnecessary. Let's see, we can zoom in really good here and see there's a lot of anchor points here, which will be a little bit, give us a little trouble if we wanted to work with this shape later on in the process. So let's go select that path and scope object path. And we are going to go to simplify. And it is going to go ahead and bring us up a nice little handy dandy tool here. We can decide how many points. So super simplify. We can take this down to eight points and now make eight points around the whole object. The more we move to the right on this slider, the more points there are, we can keep it in the middle. You can also do what's called an auto simplify, which we'll try to keep the shape as much as possible while reducing the number of points. We can also click those three buttons and bring out the bigger menu here. For the simplify, we can select how it handles points. So do we want it to make a full sharp point? Do we want it to smooth out the single points on the corner points. So we can also say We went to convert district lines. That would simplify this shape making no curves. We can also show the original path, and that's in the red here. And that will show us where the original points were. And we can also check mark this routine settings. Indirectly open this dialog if we would like it to do this every time that we do simplify. Now down here, there's that checkmark for preview. If I turn the preview off, no matter what I do, it's not going to show me if I turn preview back on it, we'll go ahead and show me what's going on as I move my sliders. So let's go ahead and auto simplify and click OK. And so now we have used the simplified tool. The next thing that we're gonna talk about here is joining paths. So let's, let's go here. And let's select express the a. Let's delete one of these paths. I wanna make it open and delete this path here. So I want to make these open. So now let's say we wanted to connect these together. We're going to select the two objects. And we're gonna go to object path. And then we're going to go to join. And now what you can see is those paths got joined at their nearest points. Well then I would like to talk about here while we are working with paths is the scissors tool. So you can select the scissors tool by either clicking on the very cute little scissors icon over here. And you'll get the crosshairs show up or we can press C, and that will bring us the scissors. And I always remember C for cut. So we can go ahead and click anywhere a path. And what that's going to do is cut the path into pieces. And if we look, we can see here we can move these around. And we do have individual pieces of a path. This is going to be suddenly pretty critical as we're working in our pattern drafting. Now, what we can then go back here and do is control Z. I can show you what happens if we don't use this tool correctly. So let's go ahead and click here and let's, let see this. So if you have selected to cut with your scissors where there is not a path, it is going to give you an error message you can select not to show it. I show it because it reminds me that I didn't click exactly in the right place so that if that comes up, you just try again. You can click on anchor points. You can select anywhere in a line and these can be on curved or on straight lines now, oh no, I didn't want to do all that. So I'm going to join that together back with controlled j. Now, if we want to fully close this shape, we can control j again. And that joins those pasts together. So I want you to play with this. This is a pretty important tool. I want you to practice your offset path. I want you to practice your cutting, your grouping, isolating objects by just simply playing around here, making random shapes and continuing to work.
18. Layers: In this lesson, we are going to be looking at the Layers menu and learning about the concepts of arrangement in layers were layers are going, moving up and down and how things overlap and under lap in Adobe Illustrator. So go ahead, close your current space that you have. Open your current file and reopen, close it without saving and reopen your working with objects practice or redownload it and we want to start fresh. So what I'm gonna do, select some objects and I'm going to change their color and you're going to see why in a minute here. So what I'm going to do is put these objects just on top of each other, just like this. Now, we can see all of the orange because the black is behind. And I'm gonna show you how we can see that. So let's pull up our Layers menu here, or Layers window so we can really see what's happening. And here we have, if we expand this, all of the different layers that are happening in our art board here. And I'm going to show you how we can make these layers bigger so we can see what they are. You can select large, went up into this menu here and I'm going to select large on the thumbnails. And that's going to just make those thumbnails a little bigger so they're easier for us to see. So as I select an object somewhere over here, you'll see it will be a blue or a different colored. It can be a different color depending on what color your layer as a selected, it's an indicator to say that this is the selected objects. You can see this. You can see this, you can see this. Now, if I want to make an object go in front of another object, I move it upwards in the stack. So this layer is now this, this object, now the topmost within this layer. Same thing here. If I select this one, I can put this one and you'll see it now moves. I didn't put that all the way. There you go. This one now moves on top. So now we have bottom, top. And then we had changed the top and bottom. And I move their arm or Tegel area. The right rectangle theory go top and bottom. See, everybody does that stuff. Have to select when they all look the same. Now, another problem when things all look the same is that they don't have names. So we can double-click and I can tell this R1 and I can call this one R two. And so now I wouldn't make that mistake of not knowing which rectangle was retract tengo. Now knots in a single layer, we can also raise and lower these in their arrangement by right-clicking, arrange, bring to front. We'll bring it all the way up to the top ring. Send, bring forward, we'll bring it one, forwards, sense, uh, backs and backwards. We'll bring it one backwards and sent it back. We'll bring it all the way in the back so they're sent to back. There's arrange bring to front. And if we go arrange, send backward, it will only move one backward. You can see that happening there. So that right-click menu is very useful for that. Now let's go ahead and come down here to the bottom and create a new layer. So layers can be turned on or off, and we can turn these objects on or off, clicking the little eyeball deal there. We can also lock objects and layers. So if I lock this layer, now, I cannot move any thing here. This is incredibly useful when we are patterned drafting because we may want to have pieces of our pattern that are locked from a previous step of drafting and we don't want to mess with them anymore. And as lines go on top of other lines, it can become very easy to move the wrong line. So let's, unlike those, we can also lock these individually. And let's move something from one layer to the next. So to do so we can basically come in here and openness, I can drag this up into the other layer. Now, this layer has the one rectangle and this one has another. And you can see that the layers themselves have a color. So this has a blue outline, this has a red outline, and that's to visually let you know which color you're on and which layer you're on. So everything in this layer is going to be on top of the other one no matter what I do. So even if I bring this rectangle to the front, okay, this rectangle will still be on top because it is in a layer that is on top itself. If I want to bring this layer behind the other, now I can't. So all of the objects within that layer will move when we move them. We can also turn all of them on or off, like we saw before. We can also delete layers so we can select and delete just an object from there. Or we can select and delete the whole layer altogether. It's going to ask you if you want to delete the layer, since it's a pretty major thing to do. Now, we can also release and make clipping mass. We're not gonna use clipping mass term here, but that is pretty much what we want to go ahead and do with our layers. You can also see that there is the ability to duplicate your layers. And another good way to duplicate a layer is to drag into the plus if you select your layer and drag it to the plus, now we have a copy, we can rename the layers and we could call this front and the other one back. And that is how we play with players.
19. Measuring Curves with Document Info: In this lesson, we are going to be learning about the document info window, which is going to be extremely useful in doing something like measuring curves. So let's go ahead and take one of those square objects and use our curvature tool and make it a funky weird shape. Ok, so we have a funky weird shape. Now, if we select this object and we look in our document info window, we can see some nice information about our document. What we're gonna do is go up here in those multiline selection area and we're gonna click objects. And now in this space, we can see in this path up here, there are eight points and their length is 10.4968 inches. That means that if we were to go around the perimeter of this object, it is 10.49 inches. Now, if we just looked at, let's compare that to the transform over here. Let's move that window down. This width only shows us the width and the height. It's not going to show us the perimeter of the tool, so r of the object. So that's really critical that we be able to measure curves. Now, let's copy this Control-C, Control-V. And let's say we want to measure just a portion of this curve on the top there. So there isn't a particularly easy way to do this, which have to do is copy that curve and then move it somewhere else because we're gonna do something that will essentially destroy the object a little bit. I'm going to highlight and delete all of the anchor points we don't need in the area we want to measure. And now, if I go here, I can see that this outer curve measures 3.391 inches. And that is going to be really critical in our pattern drafting. So anytime we need to know a point of length of the perimeter of something, of a curve, of even a rectangle. This will show us perimeter length. That is going to be how we do it is using the document info window.
20. Final Homework: So now that we have learned all about the different tools, the objects, working with an illustrator, you shouldn't be getting comfortable with the user interface. And if you have already used illustrator, I hope that you have learned some new tools. So please, please, in this lesson, you're biggest homework is to play, make, and play and experiment inside of Adobe Illustrator, feel free to play with tools that I did not talk about or list and just get comfy with the user interface.
Ariana Bauer, Sewing teacher, pattern maker, and mom.
