Creating Cute Characters in Adobe Illustrator

1. Intro Skillshare Cute Characters: Hi, My name is I am a middle school art teacher in Southern California. On after school, I like to do design, work and just create things for myself and for others. And I wanted Teoh share some ways to make Adobe illustrator a little bit more manageable. So I created this class for those of you who are starting out with Adobe Illustrator and are really just overwhelmed by the amount of tools and the different things that you could do with it. So I want to make sure that you know that this is very bite size even end up with these cute little characters and the basic tools to get you started with Adobe Illustrator. So thank you so much for joining me. 2. Your Project: In this course, you will use basic tools and jovial shooter to create que little characters. It could even be a self portrait or look like a family member. You will need a created, quite license or some other access to Adobe Illustrator for this course. Adobe Illustrator can't feel scary it first. With so many tools, I want to use this project to get you learning about the basic tools getting you started in digital illustration. I'll show you how to set up your workspace and use illustrator in a way that is easy to understand. I will also show you how you can create a character kit to make cute characters and unique weights. This is super fun. If you want to make characters for all of your friends, the character you create can be used to your profile picture or added to accustom card to a friend. Follow along with the videos and remember to pause and rewind as much as you need to feel free to ask questions in the discussion board, take your time and be gentle with yourself. If something isn't working as Adobe illustrator can feel complex in the beginning. If you take it slow you will be sure to get. I can't wait to see what you come up with. Remember to post your project so I can see it. 3. Setting Up Your Workspace: in this video, I'm gonna be talking to you about setting up your adobe illustrator workspace. Now, I opened up Adobe Illustrator already and I'm using Creative Cloud 2020. You may be on a different version, and that's totally okay. A lot of the capabilities are very similar. I'm gonna go ahead and click create new over in the left hand side here, and this will pop up. I don't often use the presets, but you can go through and sometimes they have things that are specific to the size that you're looking for. So I'm just going to go under, say, print and I'm going to go over. And I like to change the points two pixels and I'm gonna work at in a square, so I'm gonna go 600 by 600 pixels. I like working in squares because they can often give me the capability of posting to instagram and and other social media. Depending on if you are printing or not, you're gonna want seem like a for print and rgb for, um not print. And then you'll click create. Now a 600 pixel by 600 pixel comes out to roughly about a two inch square if you were to save it as is. However, working in Adobe Illustrator, you're working with vectors and when a vector is is a shape that you can create at a small size, and you can actually scale it up without it ever losing its clean lines. So when I save, sometimes I'll save at a higher size so that I can put it onto a website such as Society Six or Red Bubble. But often times I work it just the 600 by 600 it works perfectly for just posting to Instagram. Now that our pages open, we're gonna work on our workspace. Many of you won't look like mine right away. So I'd like to go up in this top bar up here. It says it will probably say essentials or essentials Classic. So I like to click on there, and I like to start with Essentials Classic because it's gonna give us a lot of what we need. Now I like to go into that same little, um, drop down menu and go and click new workspace, and I'm gonna title this one still share class. You can title it whatever you want. I might. The one that I work often with is called Sarah Space. So, um, go create it and it will show up there. So now whatever changes you make will be saved in that section. So if you ever need to go back to something else, you can. The first thing that I always do is a personal preference. So if this doesn't work for you, you don't have to do it. But I like to move my toolbar to the other side. And the reason for that is they like having Onley tools in one space rather than constantly ping pong ing across the campus. Now I'm going to pull out some of the things that I use most often. The first thing I do want to do is I'm gonna move properties down here below color. It kind of opens up my work space a little bit more, but now I'm gonna go up into our Tobar appear and click window and find a line. We're gonna use a line a lot. And it made show up with others in here a line pathfinder transform mind did not cause I symptoms often used them separately. So I'm gonna go ahead and bring my align find. You see, that blue line is popping up in between their stick That there, I'm gonna go back to windows. Now, if your window popped up with Pathfinder, then it will be a little You'll have to pull them apart from each other. Um, here's my Pathfinder, and I'm gonna stick that underneath. You see the blue line and that shows up. So now I have all the things that I use as often as ideo. So I have my main tools that I pulled from the other side. I have my allying tools, my Pathfinder tools, my color picker, my swatches and my properties. You are welcome to use the same workspace with me or keep it at your own personal preference. But this is how I will be working from for the class 4. Adding Color Schemes in Adobe Illustrator: Adobe offers different race to get color into the program. An illustrator. Every time you open a new document, your swatches do not transfer. So I'm gonna show you three different ways to get color into each new document that you create from here on out. If you'd like to follow along with me, I've included two color scheme files in the class project section of the class so you can go ahead and download those. Also, something I want to add here before we really get started is please save along the way. Adobe doesn't have an auto save feature, and I really would hate for you to lose your project. All right, let's get started in this video. I'm going to go ahead and show you one way of using Adobe Swatch Library so you'll notice this. This watch panel comes with some preloaded colors for you, but sometimes you want a little bit more so in this watch panel library, which is this book looking icon, you're going to go ahead and click it and choose something that might look interesting. So I'm gonna go with foods and beverages and you'll notice that it will show up here. Um, you could easily plop it in and it becomes another tab. I prefer not to work in tabs. It just gets a little confusing. So what I do like to do is I like to pick one of these colors. Let's say, in green tea, So, um, you're gonna go ahead and just click that file folder, and now it shows up nicely in your swatches panel. Now, sometimes they don't show up nicely in these little folders. So I'm gonna show you one of those. So, for example, here, color book. And I'm going to just pick this 1st 1 and you'll notice it shows up in a whole bunch of colors so you could actually go through and just click individual ones and they'll show up in your swatches panel or you couldn't click and then hold down shift, and then you can click, select many of them. And then what? This one, you're gonna need to go up to this hamburger menu, click add dis watches, and then they show up right there. One thing I did want to mention about swatches. Um, I had a definite moment of frustration one time when I couldn't understand why things weren't adding to my swatches panel. And it's this little icon here. You're gonna click on there and you want to make sure that this show all swatches. If it doesn't say, show all swatches, you're gonna have a really frustrating time when things don't show up. So I just wanted to give you that tip. The second method I'm gonna tell you about is bringing an image and sampling from that image. So the first thing you're gonna want to do is place an image from your computer. So I'm going to go up to file, and then I'm going to click place. The hot keys are shift alter, er three a shift, Commander Control and then Pete Click place. Now you're gonna locate, uh, your file. I'm using a Mac, so it might look a little different. But navigate, however, works for you, and I'm gonna go ahead and click this jade peg image. And this is for you in the project section of our class. Go ahead and click place. Now you can click down and it'll come at full resolution. So that's a little harder. So I like to just click and drag to the size that I need Now that I have my image, um, placed, I'm gonna grab the eyedropper tool. So you're gonna come down to this long toolbar here and you're gonna click the eyedropper tool. Now, you can also use the hot key of just pressing I and it will show up. So what you can do is click on a color that you're interested in, And it will show up down here in the toolbar where your, um, colors are now you congrats. Click the color, grab it and pull it into your swatches panel, and it will show up. And you can keep doing that for all the colors you want. But I like to keep things nice and tidy, so I'm going to go ahead and have a new color group. Let's start with skin tone and go ahead and click OK, and now I can go in and sample different skin tones. Now you'll notice it showed up with last color I selected, and you can go ahead and delete. That's watch. So let me go and grab some skin tone. So again I'm gonna click my color that's down here and just drag it into my color scheme and we'll dip for a little darker and maybe one more. Okay, so it's a simple is that you condone Have as many folders as you would like. This last method that I'm going to show you is if you have an adobe exchange file or a dot A S C. I have one for you to download in the project section that you can use and follow along. But other places have them online, and Pantone actually lets you download their dot sc files of their colors. So those air a great resource, want to show you how to include those in tiered adobe Swatch library. So go over to your swatches panel and you'll find this little hamburger menu so you'll go ahead and click there, and then you're going to come all the way to him to the very bottom where it's his open swatch library. Then you'll just have to have her over that this one shows up and you need to go all the way down to other libraries who go ahead and click other library. So now library is gonna show up, and it's probably not going to be where your file is. So navigate over to where your file is located and you're just going to click on your dot a s E file and click open and you'll notice it will pop up in its own little panel. Now, just like before, your Congar oh through and you can click colors that you like, or you can go ahead and just click a whole folder and it'll add it added in Now that you have your swatches loaded in a way that you like, Maybe you did the eyedropper tool from a photo of a flower that you really liked. Um you want and you want to use that at other times and not just on this one Documents. I'm gonna show you how to save your swatches panel. So to save your swatches panel you're gonna come to this watch is you're going to click on the hamburger menu and you're going to go down to save Swatch Library as an AI. Now that'll show up in where it actually needs to be. So it should be If you look at my thing, here should be Adobe Adobe Illustrator. I'm in the U. S. So it's in us and under swatches, and then you'll give it a name and click safe. Now that it saved there, you'll be able to open up yours, this particular swatch whenever you open a new document. So to do that, you go to that same hamburger menu and opens, watch, library and user defined, and it should shut that. I'm going to go over this little icon a little easier to see user defined, and you can see here I have several user defined ones. But here's that skill shared class to it will pop up, and it will be the exact same way where you can click the file folder to add it to your current Swatch panel. Now that we have all of our colors loaded and ready to go, let's get creating 5. Creating the Head Shape: all right, We are all ready to get started on our character. So the first thing we're gonna do is our head. Now, if you look in the toolbar, you won't find this shapes tool here. Mine's already on a lips tool, but yours might be on the rectangle tool. So you just need to click and hold, and then this menu will pop up. So you want that ellipse tool? You can also use the hot key of just pressing L. Now you're gonna go ahead and bring that ellipse troll to your art board and have you hold shift. You'll note and dragged. You'll notice it's a perfect circle, so if you don't have the shift held, you'll see that it makes more of a free form ellipse tool. So we're gonna have an ellipse little bit skin here and a little bit wide. Go about here. Now you can adjust that, however you want Teoh your liking. Now we're going to go up and make sure it's selected. If it's not selected, you're gonna use this up here. The selection tool. It's the black white outline tool. That's your your selection tool. So if it was, if you haven't un selected, you want to click it so that has either the transform box or you might see the anchor points show up. So we're gonna go up here in the toolbar to effect, and then you'll go down to work and then after warp, you're going to go to in Flint. Okay, so you're warp option tool popped up and you'll notice it's starting to create some warped effect. So what we're gonna do is we're going to adjust our slider, but I'm gonna go ahead and tell you we're gonna work at a negative 20 percent up in the bend section, and then our horizontal is going to be zero, and we're gonna add our inflate are vertical to be about a 12. And if it's not showing up on a life, you'll notice Over here it's checked for preview. You can check and uncheck that or uncheck and check it to see once you like. At this point, I like my settings, but my head is still a little thin, so I'm gonna go ahead and click OK, there. But what I can do is I can adjust my ellipse to find the shape of the head that I like, and I'm liking this shape here, so I'm gonna go ahead and commit to this one. So when you commit to something, you're gonna expand it. So right now, the anchor points are on the actual lips. And if you want to make copies of this, sometimes it gets weird if you accidentally move it around. So I like to go ahead and expand it. So you're going to go up to object and expand appearance, and then sometimes it'll show up with a box that will ask for Phil and stroke, but this went ahead and did it for me. 6. Ears pathfinder and reflect tool: now we're gonna go ahead and put some years on our little character. Now, you don't need to adheres if you don't want to. But I'm gonna show you how to use the Ellipse tool to make some years. All right, So I'm gonna grab my lips still again now this time and said clicking and dragging because I know it exactly the size that I want. I'm just gonna click down once and you'll see this ellipse tool. Papa, over here, you can either constrain the width and height. Oh, are, um or link it. So I'm gonna go ahead and link Uncommon. Take it apart first, because right now it's not a perfect circle. So what I want to do is 25 by 25. You was already linked in my work, but I wanted perfect circles. So it's unlinked there, and then I click. Ok, so now I have my ears, and I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in. You can either use your zoom tool. That's in your toolbar. Um you may have originally set is the scrubby zoom where it'll kind of zoom with your magnifying glass. I have mindset where I can not have a scrub. Easy. Um, so I'm going to go ahead and zoom in. You can also use command or control minus or plus to help you with that. Another great hot key that I love to use is the space bar. So you'll notice my cursor well with the magnifying glass. But my cursor turns into a hand with that hand holding down my space bar, I can click and drag my art board around. So something I was zoomed in somewhere else you can click and drag around. I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in a little bit more cause I want to make sure I can see what I'm doing. All right. Now I need to grab my selection tool, so I don't want the directs for selection Tool. We're gonna talk about that in the later time, but right now we want just the selection tool. So what? You ended this, elect your circle, and you're going to make a copy of this. So I'm gonna press command, see? And then another Ah, hockey that I love is command or control F. So what that is going to do is gonna paste it in place in the front. If you did, commander Control be it would paste in place in the back. Now, if I were to just do control the or command be it would just kind of go where it wants to go. I think there's a a reason behind where it ends up, but I wanted it to be right on top of the circle Airy hat. So I'm gonna do command Mac or control on a PC and command stuff. So now there are two circles you can't tell because it's behind it. But there are two circles and I'm gonna change the color to a little bit darker. That's a lot darker. So I can go with this one. So a little bit dark. Now, what I want to do is I want to change the size of this down, so I'm gonna go ahead and drag it down Now you could also, so you could shift drag to the size you want. Um, kind of eyeball it. And if you already know like I dio I'm gonna go up to the shape bar. It's up. Mine shows up here. If yours isn't show up. You can go over to your properties panel here, and you can type it in there. So I'm gonna actually go down to 15 and it should be linked, so it goes down to 15. The nice thing about doing it this way is it doesn't go straight to the center of your original circle. Okay, now would be working with this little darker circle here, and I'm actually going to move it over here just so I can work with it. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use a duplicating tool. And that is the hot key by pressing the Ault button or option key on a Mac. So I'm going to click it and notice how my cursor again changes to tool arrows. Now you're gonna click and drag down. We'll see. Now I have to independent little circles here. So what you're gonna do is kind of find a nice little crescent where they overlap with each other and think about your year. So this is kind of going to give your ear some depth, so I'm gonna go about right there now, I'm gonna go ahead and select both of them to do that. I have my selection tool. I'm going to draw a box around the two things I wanted. The other way you could do is shift click on the two items. Then we're gonna goto our Pathfinder tool bar a menu here, and we're going to minus the front. So that's what that's going to do is gonna take away anything that's in front, including the back shape. So we'll show you what happens there and I click this and now I have this cute little crescent that shows up and I'm just gonna click and bring that into my ear and you can adjust by rotating on one of those transformed boxes. Now, my question, I think, is a little off. So you I could go back and do some adjusting. But there's the ear. Now. Our characters needs two years, so I'm gonna ho ahead and select both of those again, and this time I want to reflect it and bring it to the other side. But I wanted to reflect as if it's going to the opposite side. So on your tool bar here, you're gonna notice there is this circle, which is the rotate tool. When I click on it, there's the reflect will years may seat show the reflect will may show the rotate tool. So here's the reflect all. So what I'm going to Dio is I'm gonna notice this center and I'm going to click and drag it , and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, And I grab that center and bring it to the center of my face. It's not gonna be perfect unless you have the exact measurements. But now I'm gonna hold down the altar option key and you'll notice it creates that different to a road cursor. And I'm gonna grab it and you'll notice it's making a copy. And it's reflecting along that line as if it were a circle. So I'm gonna go ahead and come over here and now I have a second ear. Now, there might be a little off in order to get them perfectly lined up. You can grumpy. So I would put my selection around the two. I was a commander control G groups. Same thing on this, that you could do this before you reflect as well, Commander controlled G. And now I'm gonna click, shift, click both of those. So both of those air highlighted because they can see the bounding box around that. So what you gonna do is go over to your align workspace. All right, So, up in the align workspace, I want my things to line up along the vertical center. So I'm just going to click on there now. You'll notice it went away. So I'm control Z here, Command Z toe undo and notice this align to go ahead and click that I am Don't want a line to art board cause that's what it just did And it made it go to the center of the our board . I don't need to align it to a key object cause it doesn't really matter where the ears are placed. Although I do like where one of them is. I'm gonna go ahead and do a line to selection. So now when I press a line center, you'll notice that they line up really nicely. So at this point, I'm gonna bring the ear in so it blends in with my head on both sides and by doing doing that, I just used my arrow keys to bring it on in. Hi. And now when I like that, I'm going to go ahead and group all of it together. So that makes my life easier. And later, commander Control G K. Now, if I were to grab him like her, I can move her around the page. 7. Nose and Neck: Okay, let's make arm knows now. So in order to do that, we're gonna grab one of these crescent that we already made and you'll remember that we grouped it. So I'm gonna need to go into this ear to grab it. So I'm gonna double click, and it will take me into the first group, which now I could move the ear if I wanted Teoh. But I group this before, so I need to group unearth, go into that group again. So now if I moved my crescent out, it's moveable. So what I want is grab my crescent and command or control. See, now, up in the top here, top bar here, you'll see it says Layer group and group, because we went into two groups. What we want to do is keep pressing that arrow until it doesn't say anything. Now we're gonna press Commander Control V, and that knows that Crescent is gonna pop up and we're gonna bring it to where we want her nose to be. And we're just going to rotate so that we get it to where we like And there's our nose. At this point, I'd like to remind everyone to go ahead and save your document. Now we're gonna finish off the head, and in order to do that, we're gonna want a neck. So what I'm gonna do is I want to select the color now minds kind of already there. But I'm gonna find the eyedropper tool so you can come to the toolbar and click the eyedropper tool or you compress the letter I and that'll get the eyedropper tool. So I click it, I can sample my color. And now I have my color ready to go. Now, we're gonna go ahead and make our neck so you're gonna need a rectangle tool if it's hidden . It's probably behind the ellipse toe. So grab your rectangle tool. You can click and drag. My rectangle is going to be about 30 with and 25 height. And I'm gonna grab him. Put him that lined up. So you'll notice I have these smart guides on and they helped me to intersect with center, so I know it's exactly in the center. If it wasn't lining up in the center, you could grab both of those items. You could use your align tool a line to selection I wouldn't do that because your nose is on top. So I would say aligned key object and click your head and then go ahead and do a horizontal align. And there it is, perfectly in the center. Now, this point, we're going to give our rectangle a little curve at the bottom. So what you want to do is click on that rectangle go up to affect click warp groups, Effect warp and go to arc lower. Your menu is gonna pop up and this, ah, warp option. We actually want it to be at an 80% in a 0% for vertical, and then he kind of flares out a little and creates this fun little neck here and take and see. There it is. If you want to adjust it, you can adjust the size of the rectangle, or you can go into that work tool again and adjust it. Now, when you like it, make sure you upto object and expand appearance. The last thing I'm gonna go ahead and dio is grab all of my pieces and group it so Commander Control G and now we're ready to move on 8. Eyes and Eyebrows: now we're gonna go in and get some eyes and eyebrows, so the first thing you want to do is get your lips tool. So over here in the shapes panel here, it's hiding behind that rectangle hand. Find your lips tool. So this process is gonna be really similar to those years that we created. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to click down and do the same size as my ears 25 by 25. And it's showing up skin color. So go ahead and pick the color of eyes you'd like. I'm going to go with these green eyes and I'm going Teoh, Commander Control. See? And then Commander Control F so that it places it up front. And now I'm gonna go ahead and select a black, okay? And this one, you can either drag to the size you want. So by dragging from the bounding box, or I can go up into my tool bar where it has the size or onto the side, where's his properties? And then go ahead and change that. Two of 15 by 15 pixel circle. Now I'm going to zoom in here. I'm gonna go ahead, come end or control. Plus sign to zoom right in. Now you can move your pupil wherever you would like it to go. Um, maybe you want it down at the bottom, creating some interest. I'm gonna go ahead and keep it center. So what I'm gonna do select both of these circles and in my align panel here, I'm going toe lying to selection because right now we're just working. We don't need it in a key place. And I'm going to horizontal line as well as vertical line. Now, we need to bring our character to life in his or her I So we're gonna add a little bit of a sparkle in order that we didn't do our ellipse tool again. If you know the size you want, you can just click down Otherwise you can click and drug I'm gonna click down and go with a five pixel by five pixel me Think those five pixel by five pixels ellipse Now it shows up as black and I'm going to change it to a white. Now you'll notice in illustrator when whites on white it goes away. But you can easily find, um that white. We're gonna grab that now. And I'm going to just click it over here and my little sparkle right here. I want to create a little more interest. So I'm going to actually create one more sparkle and same thing grabbing my lips, stool clicking down. This time I think I'm going to go three pixels. Uh, I had it linked, so it already creates a perfect circle for me. Shows up over there, I'm going to click it and drank it over here. So there is my eye. So what I'm gonna do is going to select all of it. I'm going to group it by pressing command or control G. And now it's grouped. So at this point, I'm gonna bring my eye where I want it to go, and then I'm going to click it the group. I'm gonna pull down the altar option key and this, um as I'm dragging it. So you wanna click the the option or or all turkey and you drag it. But if you want to stay in a perfectly straight line, you're gonna also now hold the shift key and you can see no matter which way I go. It's going to be perfectly straight. Stick my eye right there. Now that the eyes were done, I show you how to create some eyebrows Now, depending on your aesthetic, whether you want your characters to have eyebrows or not, um, you can add them or not. But I'm going to go ahead and show you how to do. I brought so or didn't grab that ellipse tool again. Um, I'm gonna just grab let's a dark brown here and I'm going to draw small circle. So this time I'm gonna click down and I want my 25 pixel circle Click. OK, now we want the shape to be less of a perfect circle. Kind of like the ear waas and the nose. We wanted to just be a slight arch. So this time I'm gonna grab a ellipse again, I'm gonna pick just a random color because you don't really need it. Um, but to be able to see the difference. So I wanna grab a bigger circle, and then I'm gonna just kind of adjust it onto that brown circles. I see. Do I like the way that looks? Do I want it more of an ellipse shape where it looks like that, um, you can make adjustments and I'm gonna go with this eyebrow here. So when I like the way it looks, I'm gonna select both the circles and in my Pathfinder tool. I'm going to minus front, and now it's gone, so I can click and drag it over to where I like it. You can use the bounding box to change your expression. Now to get it over here. We want to reflect it because we don't want it all going the same direction unless you But , um I'm gonna click that reflect tool, And this time I'm just going to click down one or double click on it, and I want it to go vertically. And if I click preview, it will show you that it flops. Um, you can notice where the center is. It's that little anchor point in the center. But I'm just gonna go ahead and press copy, and at this point, I'm going to click it, and I'm going to hold down the shift key and drag it to the other side. Now, if you're happy with the way your eyes are, you can adjust to whatever way you want your eyebrows to give the expression that you want from your character, um, at this. But I like to group them by selecting shift and clicking. Just so when I moved things around, everything stays where I want it to stay. And those are our for set of ice. If you want to create a character kit later, I'm gonna show you how to do that. I will be really easy. But just know that if you want to change the color of your eyes and you've already grouped things, all you need to do is double click. So now I'm into the first group with the eyes in the Angara's, and you just need to double click again. And now you're in, um, your eye color and you could change it to whatever color you would like it to be. And there your eyes 9. Mouth options: All right, we're moving on to the mouth. So the first thing we want to do is to turn what kind of mouth. So I'm gonna go through a couple different ones with you. The 1st 1 we're gonna do is maybe it like a toothy smiles Ah ah, white smile that's gonna show up. So I'm gonna go ahead and choose a white Phil and I'm gonna pick my lips tool. You'll notice the lips tool in the rectangle tool. Use those often for this one. It's mostly the Ellipse tool. I'm gonna click. Click down now, This time I don't want a perfect circle. So I'm gonna check that constrain properties, and I'm gonna make it about 30 by 20. And you could also click and drag. That's totally up teeth. Oh, uh, this was just what worked for me. Now we're gonna be using an anchor point tool, and this is going to be with the pen tool. So if you go into your toolbar, you're gonna find the pen tool. And if you hold down the pen tool or whatever's in this spot, um, you're going to find add Anchor Point Billy Anger Port an anchor point tool. So that phone were using on the hockey is shipped. See to use that and you're gonna click it now you need to make sure that your lips was originally clicked. If it was not, you compress Commander control and then click. So you'll notice right now it's not Click. So I would press command control, which gives me my selection tool as I hold it. And now it's there. So now I have these anchors when that are showing up. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click the left and the right, and what that's going to do is get going to create this sharp edge here in another sharp edge. There. Now you're gonna grab your direct selection tool. So we have been so far, only working with the selection tool. Now we're going to go into the filled White Arrow that is the direct selection tool. So this one lets you manipulate the anchor points. So you're going to grab this and now you're gonna grab your top anchor point and you're going to just drag it down and you can drag it to wherever your smile wants to be. So if you want it to be a more open smile. Go for it. You want to be a thin smile? Um, I'm gonna go about right there. All right? And then make sure you go back to your selection tool. You don't really want to be in direct selection, tool. It does some weird things. Now, if you also wanted to increase, I forgot about this part. But if you want to add a little bit, you can actually, um, bring that down, give it a bigger smile so you can play with the anchor. You can also curve it a little bit. Men do that. Okay, so there's our toothy smile. Now we're gonna go in with a little smart, so I'm gonna What I did was I took a copy as our original smile, and I used the eyedropper tool to get the same color as the nose and the ears been created . This little smile over here. So what I want to do is select it. So it has its bounding box go over to the direct selection tool. And now I'm just gonna play with the, um, anchors. So I'm gonna bring So would you under his double click something and I'm going to bring it up. And then I'm gonna bring this one a little bit down. Um, probably play with some of the others and bring it a little bit sinner. Maybe a little thicker on that. They noticed how I'm just pulling those anchor points in different directions. Um, could bring it a little bit more rounded. That turned out a little funny. It's just bring it back up a little bit, okay? So play around with it takes some time to get used to. Then he give you switched with your smile. There, There you have it. Now I like to keep my toothy smile and a copy of my spark at the same time so that if I wanted to change between the two already have them ready to go. The last smile, Our last mouth I'm going to show you is a super easy one. It's just the ellipse. Still, it's just a simple around the lips in the in the color of your eyes or nose. Um, and it's just a surprised look. So there it is, so you can play around with the different tools you could even create a mouth the same way we did, where you made two circles together, where u minus the front. You can try to play with that pen tool to create a mouth where you're having to anchor points and you just click and drag to where you want. Now, if you use the pen tool, you'll notice that it automatically goes to fill, and it's got this weird extra thing. So what I like to Dio is press command or can troll and then I click. And so now I can go back to my Drexel it or my selection tool, click it and turn it into a stroke. So what I'm doing is over here in the colors panel, you'll see that Phil is colored and stroke is not so. I'm gonna just switch those over, and now I have a strip so my mouth looks like that you can change it to any coat you want and just at U. C. If one quick note before in this section is, um, I've created an extra little colored box. That way I could drag things that were white, and I'm just saving my mouths as um for later. So when I want to create more characters now. I already have a copy of each of the different mouths, and I don't have to recreate it later and I'll be doing I'll show you how to do that with the eyes as well, for changing the colors just to have them ready. Changing the skin color of your head. Um, And when you start creating clothing later, you're gonna want a place to put all the things that you create. 10. Hair Styles : this video. We're moving on to hair styles now. There's so many different ways that you can go about creating your hair styles. As you can see here, I have several different options on. I'll go through several of them, and basically everything is made through basic shapes using the Pathfinder tool to minus the front. Um, there's we're gonna talk about the warp tool in this one as well, and combining things and going to go and make some here first. Warren Do is more about clean cut little hairstyle here. First thing you're gonna want to do is get that ellipse tool. That's our favorite, and we are going to create an ellipse this behind our persons. Grab a color for my hair. Let's go with a brown here and I'm going Teoh manipulated here. Now it's in front. So what I want to do is I wanted to send it to the back, so there's a couple ways to do that. To send it to the back, you can press command or control shift and the left bracket, and that'll send it back. The other way to do that is just to right. Click, click, arrange and sent into the back. So now it's in the back and I'm going to adjust my ellipse to fit the style I'm looking for . I don't want anything down below his do, uh, boy hairs, Laura Short hair style here. So it's going to go just a little bit about this year's there and be a little bit more. Okay, so there's the back side of the hair. Now that we have the Ellipse in the background, we're gonna go ahead and draw some more ellipses. So I'm gonna grab one, and that's what I'm just gonna do one in front. You'll notice my colors changed on me, and I'm gonna go in right there. It's OK that my colors off right now, so I'm gonna show you how to fix that. So make sure your soul your lips in selected head down to your color area here and you'll notice the black is, uh, in there, and it's my stroke. So what I want to do is make sure there's no stroke, and then I'm gonna change my color to be the same hair color is the back. So I'm gonna use my eyedropper tool and pick that up So now you could simply leave it as is , If you like the way that looks, you can also use the work tool. So the warp tool, you can find it a couple different places so you can find it up here under effect and then warp. And you can try any of these to get something different. I'm gonna actually use this tool over here. So if you find your toolbar right now says with tool, I'm gonna hold that down and my menu will show up, and I'm gonna use this shift plus our work tool. Now it's gigantic. So if I bring something out, it might create something interesting. Um, And if you were to want this to be a smaller brush, So if you hold down the cult or option key, you can adjust the size and the shape if you wanted to stay, is perfect. Circle will hold down the shift key. So I'm gonna make it a little bit of a oh, well, here. Okay. So you can go in and you can adjust by just pulling out. Um, maybe you wanna pull up? I'm give it some different looks. I'm gonna adjust it again. Maybe a little bit bigger, just to give it some more interest, Given some messy hair, play around with whatever fits your style. All right, so I've got one hairstyle here and what I recommend you doing if you want to play around with different hairstyles here is grab the two pieces that make up your first hairstyle press alter option and click it and dragon elsewhere. And that didn't work for me because I forgot to press, shift and click. So now I have both of those pieces. Another 1,000,000. Go ahead and press Alz and drag it off to the side. Now, I can, um, change that for later. Use it in different ways. I want to show you real quick what I have over here. So here are all my hair styles that I have already, and you'll notice for some of them. I have two different colors in places, and the reason for that is they keep them separate. And so when I want to put it onto a character later, I know what's what. The pieces are All right. So, back to this guy. So I'm going to adjust what I have already and give it a long hair style. Someone actually bring that oval down behind a little differently. And of course, you can adjust as you see fit. Um, you can use some of the tools like the direct selection tool to change where things are are settling in your oval back there. You can bring these out to the side, so it just gives a different look each time. So with this one, I'm gonna make that a lips up here, but I think I'm gonna go a little bit differently this time. I'm gonna add one ellipse here, and I'm gonna rotate it as you can see, really, Just play around with the different shapes, and then you can create different looks. And, of course, everything can be adjusted after the fact. If you don't like something. So I'm gonna create these bang type looking ellipses here, Um, and then I'm gonna go and I'm gonna play with the bottom of her hair using that warp tool again. So you can either press shift and our or click it in the toolbar here, So I'm gonna just kind of move, give it's, um, flares, little messy. And that's okay. Um if something's weird right here, there's this special tool called the Smooth Tool, and it is hiding. Let's see, where you hiding? Here it is behind the shaper tool, so you can see this circle with the pen looking thing. You'll find this unicorn style smooth tool here. And if you make sure your area selected and you just go in and you can, um, smooth things up and so sometimes I'll just click on the anchor point and it just smooths it out for you. So I'm liking the way that looks, So I'm gonna go ahead and stop right there. There are so many possibilities for your hair style. Ah, lot of it is used, which is theologian in the warp tool. But sometimes you need a little bit extra. So you notice this little bun up here. I had to add in extra layers with the darker color, and this one was similar to the ears and the nose. How we minus the front and just created this little crescent just to give it some depth and texture. You'll see. Here it is the same shape. I just copied it and pasted it in the back. So that would be, um, commander Control be. And then I changed the color and just adjusted it slightly to create that. Um, and I'm just using the keys up and down arrows to move it around. Um, for let's see, the braids, you can see it's just a couple different things down here. I did use several triangles together, and I used in the Pathfinder that, um, unite tool. So I created several different pieces, and I just united it to make it one piece and then added a little extra rectangle, this one. The headband was simply the circle in the background, um, of the the size of her head a little bit bigger, and then just again minus the front to create that crescent shape. And then her bangs here, of course, are gonna change the colors. You can see them there just to ellipses put together. Okay, um, again, A lips tool with the warp tool. The lives tool with the warp tool. Very simple. This one, the pony tail. I actually used the paint brush tool, so I just kind of created this shape. And with the paint brush tool, you have to make sure they connect, and it starts out as a fill. So if you go down to your colors on in your toolbar here, you can actually just change that lips. If you're not to click it, you can actually just flop it. And now it is over, Um, as this little pony tail shape. So that was the paintbrush tool. And make sure it's connected. Otherwise it won't created an actual shape. These curly hair samples here, I'm gonna make this a little different color. You can see I just used with a whole bunch of ellipse tools. You can also use the paint brush tool and choose a paintbrush that is going to just plop down. So, Aiken, grab that to a higher size. Um, if you're gonna dio just dotting totally fine. But remember, with these, you're gonna want to group things together, otherwise you can't move it together. You can see this one looks like it's all one piece, because what I did was I took my little circles and I clicked that in Pathfinder I clicked unite, and then you got to make sure that it it likes it overlapping pat. So it didn't like that one. So I remember now. Okay, so we're gonna go to object, expand appearance, and now you can unite them. There it is. All right. So those are just different ways to create different hairstyle, so I can't wait to see what you can come up with. 11. Upper Body: in this video, we're going to move on to the body now. I have different shapes and noticed that their all three rows are the same, just different skin tones. And that helps me later, when I'm mixing and matching my new characters to make sure I have the skin tone ready to go for when I need it. Now you can see that a lot of them just start off with this basic torso shape. So that's the easiest way to get started. Is just working with that basic torso that's going to repeat all the time. So what I'm going to take you through is how to create this basic torso shape. Get your arms, get your legs and some bottoms as well. All right, let's get started. So the first thing we're gonna want to do is get a rounded rectangle, so that's under your lips tool area where your shapes are and it's a rounded rectangle. And with this one, you can certainly pick and drag, click and drag. Uhm, I'm going to go ahead and go with a size I'm already ready for, so I'm gonna click down once, and I'm gonna make sure it's unchecked here, and I'm going to do 1 10 by 1 26 And my corner radius is going to be, uh, speaking attendance. You what? That looks like. Okay, so that looks good. And now we're gonna go up to warp arc. So I click on my rounded rectangle, go up two effects, click warp and park. So this screen pops up and you can see I have my preview check. So it did some weird things, and that's okay, cause we're gonna make adjustments, so I'm gonna make sure horizontal is clicked. I'm going to have my Bend B zero. I'm gonna have the horizontal line B zero. And now I have my vertical line B 30%. And if it doesn't show up already, I'm gonna click and un click preview. And there we go. Now you can make adjustments. Of course, if you don't like how, um, sharp it is or you wanted to go differently. You can do that. Um, go back to 30. You can also make adjustments with your rectangle shape as well. So I'm gonna bring her a little in right here. And I like that shape. So when you like that shape its ah highly recommend you go up to object and expand appearance. So now it's just that shape and nothing else. Now we're going to get some arms and here, so I'm going to go up again rounded rectangle. And this time I'm going to sample my skin color. So I just use my eyedropper tool sample. My skin color grabbed my rectangle tool. You're going to either click and drag to the length that you like. I'm going to go ahead and make fine specifics. I'm gonna click down once I'm going to do 94 by 1 29 and a 10 point radius still and I'll click OK, and that's a lot thicker. Then I wanted, So I'm going to do squeeze it in just a little bit. And if you don't like your round angles, you can use your direct selection tool, grab these corners and bring him out. So now I have my arms here and I'm going Teoh, adjust them to wherever I want them to go. You can have him in front. You can have him behind. Uhm, I'm going to go a little bit more out this time, and I think I wanted to go behind my shirt, So I'm gonna click on my shirt and I'm going to either right. Click, click, arrange, bring to the front. Or you could do shift commander control and the bracket keys. So now we need to get the Unless you wanted to be a tank top, you can leave it as is, but I'm gonna give her some sleeves. So what I want to do is I want to grab that arm. I'm going to command or control. See? Then I'm gonna press command or control f, and that's gonna place it in front. I'm gonna grab the eyedropper tool, pick up the color of my shirt head. I'm gonna show you another fund tool over in the pen tool area. So I need to click on my shirt, color or arm. And then I'm gonna click over here where the pen tools and then click and hold and you'll notice where it says add anchor point tool. That's the one you're gonna want to select. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna decide. How long do you want your sleeve to be? Is is it a long sleeve is a short sleeve. Where do you want this leave to cut off. So I want my sleeve to cut off about right here. So I'm gonna click once on the path and you notice it added an anchor. Then I'm going to try my best to get it to the other side and click down again. So now I have to anger points. So what you're gonna do now is find the scissors tool. It was probably behind the eraser tool. So if you long hold, click and hold on the eraser tool, you'll find this is a stool, or you can proceed. So grab that. Now you're gonna just simply find those two angers that you just created Click down, click down. Then, after using the scissors tool, I'm going to go back to my collection tool and you'll notice that you can see the sleeve there. But I want to click on the rest of the arm and simply press delete. And now I have a short sleeved shirt. Now, this point, you need to decide. What do you want your hands toe look like? Um, I'm gonna I've seen it. Cute characters, different ways, where it's just simply that they just leave it as it and that is totally acceptable. I'm gonna go ahead and add some hands, so I'm gonna show you how to do that. Hands can be tricky, cause it might never look the way you want it to be. But I'm going to start with on the lips. And now you notice it was the last color I chose. So I'm gonna go ahead and click it and use that. I drop her tool to pick up the skin coat, and you can adjust however you want. You could simply create a little ellipse a circle and attach it, and it could be done. You could even add in an extra little tiny ellipse to create a thumb, which is what I'm gonna do right here. Now it depends on how your girl standing to where your thumb is gonna go. Um, if her hands were down, they might be a different location. If her hands were, we're gonna have her hands out to her side here. Um, but you could move it to the other side. I'm having trouble getting my, um, bounding box to rotate. So what I need to do is click that rotate button, and then you can just rotate it that way. Okay, That direction for her thumbs. So now we have our arms. So we need to put it together so that it doesn't get all wonky if we want to move it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to draw a box around these three pieces because I don't want it to pick up the sleeve right now because what I'm gonna dio is use the Pathfinder tool and click that unite. And, like we saw in the last section when we were doing the hair. If you don't click expand if you're using some other tool, maybe you went and tried the pen tool for this. You want to expand before you can unite things. So you'll notice here also that when you united these three things, the sleeve went to the back, and the reason for that is it goes with the last thing that you did, which is your thumb, which is gonna be the the furthest in front. So everything kind of unites to the front, and it's a real quick, easy fix to send it to the back, so just pretty it's arranged. The right click arrange sent to back or press shift command or control and then the left bracket. Now, isn't it a little too far? So this time I'm going to press a command or control and I'm gonna press the right bracket and should bring it one up. Now I want to click and group thes two pieces. Yeah, and I'm doing that by clicking those two but crushing shift click. And then I'm pressing Commander Control G. Depending on your character, you may or may not want one arm. So we're gonna actually do to arms for our girl here. So I'm gonna go ahead and click the armed group and I'm gonna use the reflect tool. So again, that was near that rotate tool up on this toolbar and I'm in a place reflect tool. Now I could click the center and try to find the center of my girl. And and sometimes that's easy. Sometimes that's not You can notice when I press ault or option, I make a copy and it rotates around the body. Hey, so that's one way to do it. The other way to do is just to double click on the reflect tool. Make sure you have a non vertical and click copy. So then you're gonna use your selection tool, click it press shift and drag it directly across. So they're the two ways to get your arms reflected and you notice it, um is now in place. 12. Bottom Body : Now let's move on to her legs. So I'm going to use that eyedropper tool to pick up my skin color. And I'm gonna grab a rectangle tool, and you can click and drag to the height you want your girl to be. You can click down and pick a number to be specific. And then, um, you'll notice it's in front, and that's okay. We're just gonna work with it right now, and then I'll send it to the back. Now, I'm gonna want to make maybe a separation of her legs there. So I'm gonna do a line segment tool, and I'm going to use the eyedropper on her nose to pick up that color back to the line segment tool. And I'm going to find the center of this rectangle and should show up with your smart guides and you're just gonna draw that damn now. If you click and hold the shift key, it will pull it and make sure that it's straight. Currently, my thing is now set to zero Phil zero stroke. The reason for that is my stroke is non existent, so I need to go up to my stroke section. You can do that in the properties panel or up here in the toolbar and give it a stroke of save one point. If you want it bigger, go for it. And again, it showed up to black. So what I want to do is I drop her on this on the nose and there it iss And when I clicked off now it's really small. So I think I'm going to go for a larger stroke. So maybe a two point up It still went black. I hope I see why. So you can see it went to fill as my color. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click that swap Phil and stroke that I'm gonna change my fill to nothing on there. It ISS so I've got these legs now. I could adjust any way you want. I'm gonna go ahead and group these two together, and I'm gonna send it to the back. So in order to do that option are sorry, um, command or control shift and the left bracket making her legs turn into pants is super easy . You just need to click on your group that they that you created click on your rectangle. Give it the color pants that you want. Click on your lying and change the color of that stroke to something a little bit darker. And there you go. So now she has pants, right? I'm going to go in and give her a skirt now, So I'm going to grab Let's go with this pink color, gonna grab a rectangle and you want about click where you think you want your skirt to be. I'm going to go about there and let's say her skirt goes to there. It didn't go with my think because it went to the stroke. So whatever item is on top, if you look over in the color section here, um is going to get color. So what I want to do is I want to swap those, and then I want to take off that stroke. I click my fill tool that will be up front. All right, so now I have this shape. So here we're gonna be playing with the direct selection tool. So that's that White Phil. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to grab, double click this anchor point, gonna grab it, and I'm going to bring it out so that it kind of matches with her shirt a little bit. No flare down into the same thing on the other side, clear it out a little bit. And now I want to make them a little rounded cause everything in my little character here is pretty rounded. So what I'm gonna do there is I'm going to find these little circles in the corners. If you want around both of them at the exact same time, you will shift, click both of those little circles and then you're going to click and drag in so you can notice I made a little bubble. It's a circle. It can be a sharp fourth or as, um, rounded as you would let in. There we go. So now you if you wanted to have it more of, ah, shirt tucked in. Look, I'm gonna zoom in to show you here, so I noticed that it was a little weird. He got a little weird over here, So if you wanted Teoh, adjust again direct selection tool by bringing it out now, my corners a little different. That's double click, and I can bring that out just a tad and see if I need to do that on the other side. I notice it's a little too far there. So I used my direct selection tool DoubleClick, and bring it in a little bit more. So now you can see it's more of a shirt tucked in. Look, if you want her shirt untucked, then you would arrange and bring to the front that one or send it to the back. So I'm going to keep her skirt tucked in. There it is now. If you wanted to pair of shorts, it would be the same process we did with the sleeve where you would paste a second layer on top, change the color, use the penn and at an anchor and the scissors to cut those away. 13. Shoes and adding interest: Now we're gonna give our character some shoes. So let's get that ellipse tool again. Give her some pink shows here, all right? And I'm going Teoh, um, find where I want my shoes to be. So gonna do little rounded little shoes here a little bit larger than her legs there. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to grab a rectangle tool, probably put it in a different color and find worried like her bottom of her shoe to be. And I want to give it a little bit more interest. So bring it down to about right there, and then I grab on his human so you can see this. I'm going to grab the rectangle and the ellipse and go back to that pathfinder and minus front. So now there's one shoot, and I'm going to click it now. I want to hold down alter option. So it gives me that double arrow, click it and drag it over. So now I have to shoes, and then you can do You're just staying to make sure they are in the place that you want them to be. If you want to add a little bit more interest here. You can create a 2nd 1 I'm in a command C command. Yes. Yeah, let's give it a light blue color. And I'm just gonna squeeze that down. And so now it kind of gives you the bottom of a shoe. If you want to have a little pink late line at the bottom, I just do a little up arrow, do the same thing here Alz drag and does not want to go to the front. So let's send this one to the back. So I'm gonna do option and in the back, the right, the left bracket until it goes behind. It is just not working. That's okay. Sometimes. Doesn't want to do what you wanted to. There we go. And there's this. Okay, so now she has shoes. I'm gonna show you how to add some texture or some interest to your shirts or your clothes . One option is just using that that, um, shape, builder and grab maybe a stars to star on. There, you can use your paint brush tool creates, um, polka dots, but I'm gonna show you how to use some patterns. So what? I want you to do is that my torso is grouped. So what I'm gonna do is ungroomed pit right now. I'm hope. Hopefully, I'm not gonna have to move them right now because that gets a little tricky if you're moving on grouped items. So object. Um, let's see. I think it's this one object and it's not gripped. Okay, so I'm going to zoom in here so you can see. So here's that torso, and what I want to do is I want to command or control. See commander Control f so it places it in front, so you'll notice the Phil is a solid color. Now there is a cool library full of patterns, so we're other things, but I'm gonna go with patterns first. So we're gonna go into basic graphics, and I'm gonna go with dots for this one, and you'll see they show up here. You can Adam to your swatches panel, just like before, where you click on it and it will show up in your swatches panel. But you can notice it shows up on my girl a swell. So I'm gonna go ahead and try some different polka dots. Think I like this one here So, um, that's the one I'm going to go with. So in order to get it over to the arm, we're gonna have to do the same thing. Command C command F. You'll notice I'm in the object itself. You can see everything else is great out and up here. It's his later won an object. So I'm just working in that little sleeve there and go out and I grab this one same thing. Oops. I forgot to do the important step of command or control. See Commander Control F and then change it. If you don't do that, the color in the back goes away. So there it is. Some interest to your outfit. And you can do that with so many different patterns. The libraries are great. Um, there's some fun, interesting things in there as well to just play around with All right. Hope you have fun adding some interest to your clothes 14. Saving and exporting: Now that your character is done, I'm gonna talk to you about exporting it so that you can have a J peg or a PNG version of your character. The first thing I want you to be aware of is this white boxes called the Art Board and anything that is outside of this art board will not print or or be saved as a J pick or PNG . So whatever you want. If you want your character whatever size you want her on the art board. The nice thing about working in vectors is you can resize them without losing quality. But if you really want to print something that's off, you're saving. As the J pick heads off your art board, there's a a button to click that you can have that, but I prefer just to keep everything neat and clean on my arc word. The other thing that's cool about illustrators. You can have multiple art boards, and you can actually print them all us or save them is J pigs as sin at separate files toe add new art boards, or or more are boards you'll find on the toolbar. Here there's this little square box, and that's the art portal. So now I'm working in the art board and I can just click and drag to any size I'd like you can actually be specific up top in your property section. You can move it around. Um, another neat tool is you can actually click in our board, press the altar option key and copy in our board. So let's say you already like this girl and you want her to do something else you can copy . The whole are bored with the art in it as well. Now two x export this as the J peg or a PNG you're gonna go up to file and you're going to export. And they illustrator created this real easy export four screen. So go ahead and click that and you'll see all your art boards show up if you want to save all of them. I highly recommend changing the names regardless if you're gonna use all of them or not. But change the names, uh, what you are, um, creating I'm going to go on uncheck these guys cause I don't need them right now. And then over here is going to be some important information. So if you created your art at a size that you like, the one time is gonna be it's just gonna come out what it is, um, 300 pp. I's gonna be 300 uh, times that size. It's more of that resolution size. Um, there's different choices. You might want to play around or, um, be specific with your with or your height of your art board so that you get the quality you were looking for. Appears that. But if you want to have your full document, that includes everything into one big file, So I don't like to do that. I like to cook all he unchecked those guys and then here your want, Teoh, determine where you're gonna save your your file juice. And then if you want to create other folders or if you want to leave them as is, that's all here. And then you simply press export art, Bert. And then, um, I work on a Mac so it pops up automatically for me and you can see it shows up right there . Actually, it's in probably there. 300. There it is. So And if I were toe, bring that open. There she is. And I saved hers. A J pegs to the white box behind her, sticks around. If you had saved it as a PNG, if you had changed this to PNG, um, then it would not save the background, and it would be a transparent background that you could put into any little thing you want to. 15. Bonus Character Kit: in this bonus video, I'm gonna show you how to take all of your pieces and create a character kit so that you can go from individual pieces that you have ready to go and create your own set of Q characters. So to create your character, Kate, you're gonna need all the different elements just ready to go at all times. So, for example, if you go into your eye group here, I'm gonna command or control, see, and then exit out of that group, come to say, another art board I created and paste them. And then what you can do is use that Alz key or option key to click and make a copy. Then you can go into your eye here and you can select a new eye color, for example, this light blue here, and then you're gonna go into this one same thing. But this time I'm just going to use the eyedropper on the other side and head out. So now I have green eyes, blue eyes. I'm gonna do that option or halt drag again. Of course, you can change your eyebrow color to if you would like, and I'm going to go in and make some brown eyes. Same thing on the other side. And it's just a simple as that. And look there right away. I have three sets of eyes, all ready to go in different colors. We had already kind of done this with our mouths, so they're already ready to go. If you wanted to create the mouth that matches your skin tones, then that's a great tool to have as well. So you don't have to be clicking around on that. I like to go in and grab the head and, um, command or control, See, leave out of there, come to my other art board on and come Man V. And now we have our head. And all we have to do is go in to each of the pieces, um, and change those skin tones. So let's go with, say, a darker one. And then, um because sometimes I forget where I go. I like the eyedropper tool. And over here I drop her tool lips. I did not click it, So get out of all my groups here we go here and acting weird. Okay, there we go. And then I use my eyedropper tool to grab my color and same thing for the neck. I want to go in eyedropper, and we have our now, of course, are, um, knows color does not match this skin tone. So we're gonna wanna click into their and grab a skin tone. This is why I like to do it only once. And then I always have them ready to go a little bit darker than what our skin tone is. That should be okay. Um, and this time I think I'm going. Teoh, can I do both of these now? All right, I drop her tool. Grab out. Sometimes it is easier if you just ungroomed everything and then regroup it later. Um, And click this fun. And there we go. So now we have a second skin tone ready to go. I can go back to my original one. Grab it. Command C. Bring it out here. Command V. And now I have a pale skin tone in a darker skin tone, and you can see it's super easy than to just grab some eyes descended to the back. Um, look, see her rains and the back. And there it is. It's a little. So that is just how you can create. Ah, that kid. Listen, this one to the back around, so you got to skin tones. You can even add as many as you want toe work with. I typically work with three skin tones, one with a more yellowish tone, a PCI tone and a more brown town. So those are the three I have started right now, but you can certainly do all sorts of different values as humans come and all sorts of different colors. So we want to honor that when we are making our little characters and to Matt, whoever you are working with or working drawing blood. See hair styles here says, you kind of have to click as you go. I saved mine as I go, so that's for the hair styles. All the bodies were the same as well. I just you can see they are identical. The only thing I did was go in and change the skin tone. Um, and I made sure to match with the head that I was working with, and there you have it. Then you can have a character kit that's easy to create different characters with 16. Thank you: Thank you so much for joining me on this journey of learning the basic tools of Adobe illustrator while creating some cute characters. I cannot wait to see what you have created. Please go ahead and post those images in your class project section. And I would love to see them. If you want toe, find me on social media. I am linked in scale share. But it is at its my own sunshine. And I would love to see what you create. Thanks for joining me.