Fundamentals of Illustrator II: Paths, Shapes & Lines

1. 1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Brad Woodard. I'm one half of Brave The Woods, a design and illustration studio that my wife and I started down here in Austin, Texas. This course is called the Fundamentals Of Illustrator Two, and the project you're going to be completing is creating a simple logo. Now, you may not be a designer, and you may be stressing out just by hearing that, but don't worry. It's going to be just a simple exercise to go over the things that we've learned in this course. It's going to be comprised of two parts, which is, one, the symbol and, second, the type, and this is a way to incorporate everything that we're going to be learning. So, this course is broken up into four parts, and the first part is working with paths. Open and close paths is how you work within Illustrator, and the second will be working with manipulating and building shapes, which is my personal favorite, creating lines and working with the Pen tool, and then finally, you'll be working with and customizing type. So, all really fun things and all things that will help you create this simple logo. It means really the bread and butter of Adobe Illustrator, and I use this every single day, and I'm really, really excited to go through and show you these things because, a lot of times, people think they draw in Adobe Illustrator, and you can. I use it more for building, and I like to build and subtract and add shapes. So, this is going to be a really, really fun course for you. So, stay tuned, and looking forward to going through this course with you. 2. 2. Paths: Let's start off by talking about paths with an illustrator. There's two types of paths, there's open ones and there's closed paths. These two types of paths are really important to understand, because there's a big difference between the two, and later on down the road, it's going to make a big difference as you're building and in creating your work. So, on the left-hand side here, let's go open up our pen tool, and I'll go into this in way more detail in a little bit. Let's click on just some, just two points here, point A and point B, and make a line. Now, the open paths are like lines, and if I want to make this into a closed path, which basically means I'm going to continue and build, and close the circuit here, then I'm going to be making a closed path. Pretty simple. So this is now a shape as opposed to what it was before which is a line. But, what's important to know here is sometimes, you'll look at things and they look like they're paths, or they are closed paths when they're not. So, right now it's outlined very clear, it's an open path. But if I was to have this be a fill, you'll notice that it looks like it's a closed path, but it's not, because there's no segment right here. So this is probably a good point to talk about some terminology. The anatomy of a path is, you'll have these little elbow joints, these corners here, and those are called anchor points. In between two, any two anchor points, is a segment. Now these line segments right here, you'll notice that there's two, but there's not one down here like we saw. So, that will cause a problem, because this isn't a closed shape, that will cause a problem for pattern fills, that'll cause a problem for subtracting this out of other shapes, this shape out of another shape, that which you can do which is awesome, working with masks, all different types of problems that you run into if you think this is a shape. So, let's look at this and let's figure out how to close these shapes and to make it complete. So, you could, there's a few ways to do it, let me bring it back here to an outline. I can click on my pen tool again with, I can say P and that's your pen tool. I'll hover over one of those points that's open, and you'll notice that there's a line right there next to my pen tool. That means I'm going to start off from where I left off, meaning I click on it now, I can go ahead and start clicking around and then It'll continue that line that I was making, or that open path that I was making. But let's say I want to close this path, now you'll see that now my next point, I can click anywhere I want, but if I hovered over this open-end, they'll show a little circle right there, a hollow circle, that means it's going to close the path. So, I click on it and now I have a closed path. There's another way you can do it, this is just really quick, which is you just highlight the whole thing and then if there's only two points open, you just hit "Command" "J", and it joins them for you, so it makes it into a closed path. It is pretty simple. That command J actually tool is really cool. If I, for example, if I had two of these, let's highlight, if I have both of these, it's going to take, if I hit "Command" "J" again, it's going to do those points, now there's two other open points of that Command J again, it will close those as well. It's just kind of neat. But, let's say I just want these two, then I haven't highlighted command J, I just want them. But what if I want these to connect to each other, not with an extra added segment, I just want these two points to merge into one point. That'll come in handy especially later when we're working with type. I can highlight these two by using my direct selection tool which is A, which we've gone over before, as your white arrow, click the little mark key, and it'll just highlight these two points. Now hit, this is along one, Command, Shift, Option J, and it makes them one point. That's really really really handy, it took me a long time to figure out that that even existed. Before then, I always thought the only way to do it was Command J, and it just added a line there and then I'd have to bring it over here, and delete a line. It's kind of frustrating. So, really need a Command, Shift, Option, J and they're connected, one point. Pretty sweet. Now let's talk about manipulating these different shapes. I'm going to go ahead and delete these, and let's say I have a shape right here. Now anchor points are really cool because you can move them again with your direct selection tool, I can highlight two of them if I want or any of the ones that I want to manipulate and I'll manipulate, If I just want one, I can do that, if I want a marquee tool, I can just use. So, it'll grab just those two, and I can move those around however I please and reshape this, or I can just click on them, or if I hit the V button, which is over here, that's my black selection tool, then I can just move my shape around freely however I want. So, but we're going to be working with anchor points. So, let's talk about adding and subtracting anchor points. If you hit the plus button or the subtract button, it'll add or subtract an anchor point. Now, you can only add anchor points onto segments. So, it needs to be on one of these lines between two anchor points. So, I can go ahead and hit the plus sign, or if I go over to my Pen tool, click and hold, it's right here. I can go ahead and hover over and it shows a little plus sign, that means I can click on it, and it added, it's adding more and more anchor points, which means these are working independent from everything else if I hit my direct selection tool, and I can manipulate that shape how I want. Really cool. Maybe I want to, I don't like what I did here and I want to just have this straightened out again, I can hit Command Z, of course, or I can teach you how to just remove anchor points. You might just want to move one, hit the minus button or click over here, go down here, and you can just click on any anchor point, and it makes it disappear, and it automatically just make those segments continue with what was there. So, I keep clicking and I'll just go back to what I had. So, really important that you can add your own anchor points if you want to manipulate some more. Now let's actually, let's talk about, these are straight, these are all straight edges right here, maybe you want to start curving stuff. Let's go ahead and go down, click again on the Pen tool down at the bottom, click and hold. There's the anchor point tool, or Shift C, because you'll want to use this a lot. So, I click on any one point, click and drag, you'll notice that it's moving both, this two little handles appear, first of all, and starting to make these curves. These handles are called Bezier handles, and if I click on them, and I click and drag, it'll make them go evenly so you have perfectly smooth arches, but maybe I want this to be independent from this one. So, I want this arch to stay there but I want to move this shape, this whole segment. So, I can click on it now after I've already clicked on it once, and now I'm only using working with one Bezier handle. Again, if I clicked on it and dragged, it is going to work with both, if I let go, then I can click on one, and I can drag, and I can reshape that. So, that one becomes a really important tool so that you can just continue to reshape. Now, if you have CC, Adobe Illustrator CC which I do have, then you can, you'll notice here that you can do some other things along with the shapes here. If you hit Shift C again, and that's your anchor point tool, you can hover over any segment and automatically, you can just click and drag. So, it makes it a lot easier than having to click on these and moving the Bezier handles. So, if you have CC, good on you, because this is pretty sweet. Anyway, that's just kind of a cool thing. So, again we have anchor points, there's ways to manipulate those anchor points within, if you go into the Pen tool, you'll notice all those ways to do that, and you have your arrow tools to highlight those different ones and move them, and you have ways to join your shapes together, join your points together and make open and closed paths. So, I hope this helped you understand the very very basics, because moving forward, this will be kind of your bread and butter. So, go ahead and play with this now and get used to it, and I'll see you in the next video. Thanks. 3. 3. Shapes: Illustrator makes working with shapes very, very easy. For someone like myself, who likes to use basic geometric shapes and a lot of my designs in illustrations, this comes in very, very handy. So, let's talk about how we can build things like this astronaut here, added some simple shapes that Adobe Illustrator already has preset for you, which is super helpful. So, let me go over here under this other board, and on here on the left-hand side of the toolbar, you can go ahead and grab one of the- it'll show one of the shapes up there in the corner and let's just say it was the Rectangle tool. If you just click and hold, you'll see all of them there. I'm going to start off with this rectangle and show you how to use it. So, just click anywhere you want, you click and drag, and you can go ahead and make any size, any shape rectangle that you wish. You went soon as you let go, it'll set that shape, and if I went and use my hit V and hit my selection arrow, I can go ahead and move that around, so I built that shape. Now let's say if I go back to my rectangle tool, I want to make a perfect square. I want actually, all I'd have to do is hit shift, and we'll set it to a perfect square for me, so wherever I drag, however large it is, it will always be a perfect square. That's a super helpful tool that'll come in handy with these other shapes as well. Now maybe I have a specific size square or size of the rectangle in my head that I want to set it to. Now, I can always take this and I can go up here and I can alter the size, up here at the top bar here and I can change the width to maybe one inch, and then over here I can change it to about six inches, and it'll adjusts that shape for me. Or I can just create a whole new and at the very beginning, I'm on the Rectangle tool, I click anywhere on the canvas, and now I can go ahead and just set that before I do anything. And there you go. I hit Shift Option, it'll start that square originating from the very center. Before it was starting the whole shape when you click it, you have the drag from the top- left to the bottom-right. Now, if you just hit the option key while you're doing it, and if you want this to remain a square obviously hit option and shift, and you can go ahead and have that start from the center, which is a helpful tool to know. Especially when it comes to working with your ellipses. Lets go to the ellipse tool now. So again, if I click and drag, it'll make any size ellipse or shape that I want. But if I hold Shift, it'll make a perfect circle, and if I wanted to put let's say, it's kind of hard to say but I want to put that circle in this square, if I click and drag, you can do it, but the center is a little bit trickier to do than if I just wanted to click the image saying okay guess right where the center is, I click Option Shift, and there I go, and I can make that circle wherever I want. Sometimes it's just easier to work with if it originates from the center exactly where you click. Again, if you just hold option, you can change that to whatever ellipses you want. So, okay, so now we have a square, we have a circle. Let's talk about one that's a little bit more complex, not much, but it gives you another option is the rounded rectangle tool. Now you can click and drag and make that, or you can click on there and set the width and the height, but also now you'll notice that there's a corner radius that you can change as well, and that is right there those edges that are around it. You can change the radius of that. Or before, so you can set that if you already know what you want to do. If you don't want, you can click and before you let go, hit the up arrow key and it'll go ahead and make that more extreme, and if you hit the down arrow key, it'll go ahead and make those a little bit more pointy on the edges, all the way until it's just a normal rectangle. So, you can set that however you want, Up and Down Arrow keys will do that for you. There's also the polygon tool which you can click and you can go ahead and set how many sides you want, that actually might be easier for you to do and set the radius, or if I click and drag, but you'll notice that this line, it doesn't start from the left hand corner, this one just starts so you don't have to hit your option button that originate from the center. These will always originate from the center. But if you hit the up and down, it removes the amount of sides, and if you can just like drag in or out , it will make it bigger. But yeah, so you can just go ahead and click down on a little reducing on the sides or add sides to your polygon, fairly, fairly simple. Then your final one would be or star tool, the star tool, it can be a little bit tricky and I'm not sure how I managed to make it harder than it really is, but, hopefully I can just show you real quick and make it easy. So, if I click and drag, you'll notice you have a five pointed star. So, perfect. You can change that star, so it'll originate from the middle, but I can change the chubbiness I'd say of that star. Or if I can make it thinner, it's just basically how far those points are from the center, and you can do that by holding command, and then dragging, and you can make a big burst if you want, or you can make it just a chunky little star right here. Another thing you can do with that, is if you click and drag, now you can change the how far those points go out, and you can also change how many, I said and or I guess you can change how many points it has just by hitting the up and down arrow key again, that's always adding or subtracting. So, if you need a bunch, you want to make a burst, you can go ahead and make that. If you hit option, if you hit Command Shift, you can go ahead and alter that as well, it'll keep the shape the center circle the same size, and then it will just move those points out if you're hitting Command Shift. Again, if you do those, you can go ahead and create however many sides you'd like, or how few you'd like. So, okay so, I hope that simple demonstration was clear. Now go ahead and play around with these tools, these different shape tools, and see if you can get a hang of it and then from there, we're going to go on and figure out how to manipulate these shapes further to make an illustration, or an icon, or whatever you need to do. So, I'll see you in the next video. 4. 4. Pathfinder: Now that we know how to make the basic shapes within Adobe Illustrator, let's take those basic shapes and alter them a bit to fit whatever artwork that we need, or be able to warp these into whatever shape you want to make. Now, illustrators made it very easy to do that by providing you with one toolbox called the Pathfinder. So Pathfinder is pretty awesome, it's over here on my right hand side. It looks like this, the two overlapping squares. You can find it, if you don't already have it out, under window, you go down the Pathfinder. Click on it, and it'll pop open. So, it says there, shape modes. There's four within shape modes and there's six options under Pathfinders. So, the difference between the two are: these top ones right here in shape mode, you have the option to make them into a compound path, which is the dynamic shape, which is awesome, which I'll explain here in a second. Then down here, it isn't dynamic, but they have a whole set of new tools there that for a whole new reason. So, let's go ahead and go through each of these and help us understand how we can use these powerful tools, because they will they will help you greatly as you're going throughout your illustrations, or your designs. Okay. So Unite tool, you always want to highlight on any of these, you want to highlight both shapes. There are all the shapes that you're going to include. It doesn't have to just be two. And, let's go ahead and click on this unite tool. So what that does makes them into one shape? Fairly simple. You click on it and if we were to convert this view hit shift X, that will convert it to the outline. And then, you can see that there's no longer that line there and it's one whole shape. Now, the cool thing about this is, that you have an option. Now if I go back to that, on these top ones, remember I said they can be dynamic; that you can make them into compound shapes. And I can do that by either clicking up here and say make a compound shape. So now, it still does the same thing. If I were to hit command X or shift X, you can see that it's outlined, and there's no longer, it's not showing, which is great. But, if you highlighted it, you'll notice that they're all still there. So if I ever wanted to go back, and I wanted to take these shapes apart from each other, I definitely could. I go back there and I say release that compound shape. Shortcut to all of this is, if you want to make a compound shape would be, highlight them hold option, and then click on the unite button there, and it'll do it for you. So, pretty neat tool, and that works with all these top four. Now, this minus front is exactly what it sounds like. This green circle right here, we want to subtract it from the background. So, I'll highlight there, and I'll go ahead and click that, and it's no longer there. Now, for example, if I were to drag this and hover it over here, you can see that it's see-through. So now, I've just made a little doughnut. And I could have done the exact same thing by making that into a compound shape the way I did over here. Same with the next two. Okay. So intersect, is also a cool one. Remember, highlight both of them, and let's click on intersect and see what that does. So what it does is, wherever those over the overlapping basically, whatever is overlapping between these two, so if this is like a Venn diagram, the whole center section, you just wanted that, that section right here. You just go ahead and hit that, and it'll subtract the ones around it. Now again, let's just say, I want to make that into a compound shape. It'll take those away because maybe I want those circles later. And I can do that, and I can release that compound shape later. And, I can work with those independently from each other. So, right now, let's just go ahead and show you have an intersect. Now, exclude, is also a fun one. Let's go ahead and click on it. It'll do the opposite of what the intersect is. It'll leave whatever is overlapping. It'll take that out and will leave the rest that are not. Divides a really cool one, because there's actually a couple of ways we can do this. I'll show you this way first. So let's highlight this, and when you hit divide, basically what it does is, it's going to take wherever, wherever there's lines overlapping each other. So for example, let's do this. I'm going to make these the same color just so you can see what I'm talking about. So this is what it does. When I hit divide, it changes this, so everywhere there's overlapping lines, it's going to make these, it's going to, it's basically in a section is off. Meaning, I've told you this before, but I'll teach you again, if you hit command shift G, that's going to ungroup whatever's grouped, because it automatically groups things when we hit divide. So this means, I can take just this section, and I can delete it. I can take just, it has separated everything by lines. So if I was to see this, hit command shift G again, make sure it's separated. I can actually just change the color of any of these sections. These are all separate. Wherever there is an overlapping line, it starts a new shape, which is a kind of a cool tool that I use quite often. And, you can do the same thing actually, by if I took these off, you could actually take the pencil tool. Let's just do that. The pencil tool, and you can draw all around in here, as long as it starts from the outside, it closes off. So, make sure you start from outside the shape and go, and end on the outside. And so, I will highlight both of those things, and I'll hit divide, and hit command shift G, and now, these are all separate shapes. Pretty cool. You can do the same thing with any type of line and be able to divide that shape. So again, I can take a line drawn through there, highlight that, divide, and now I have separate shapes. And, I can color those however I'd like. Okay. So, let's talk about the trim. The trim's kind of cool, because, what it'll do is it'll leave this top shape unscathed. But it'll make it, so that all of these are two bursts right here. Maybe I don't want all of this stuff back here. I just want the little parts that are going to be showing so that I can change the color. Let's just see what it does. So we trim, and so what that does is now if I hit command shift G again, ungroup it, that just takes these shapes fine, it just separates those back one. So then everything that was behind here that was hidden, is now deleted. And then, let's go ahead and merge. Merge is another one. It's similar to the unite tool, but what it does is it still leaves the top shape there, and it actually separates these. If I want to keep these together grouped still when I want them all to this, I can just click double-click into it and then click once more, and I can move these shapes. Otherwise, I can just hit command shift G and ungroup it, and I can mess with those shapes independently. So, kind of cool. And then you have your crop, which is exactly what it says. I'll hit crop, and it will just crop in whatever is at the top layer there, It will make sure that, let's say I want this burst, I just want a portion of that burst, but I want to keep it for later, it will just crop. I can crop it in this. I can just crop it this circle, or whatever shape I want to do. I can make sure I can crop that out of it. So, I'll crop that into the square or crop the square into the burst, whichever you like. Outline mode, that was just an outline mode, I should say, it's just the outline tool. It just makes it into an outline. And when you're messing with strokes, you can change the strokes. And then the minus back, is a lot like the minus front that we have over here. And so, it subtracts it from the front. But with the back, it just really depends on where you have your shapes. So if I have the shape on top, it's going to subtract what's behind it. So I highlighted both, I click it. It's going to subtract that shape that's sitting behind it and just make that one shape. Now if I was to take this and put it on top, or the green circle on top, and I highlighted them both, it would do the opposite. So, if you're finding you're having trouble with it, just flop the order of them, which one's on top or which one's on bottom, and that'll solve your problem. So, all right. So, I hope those helps. There's a million and one ways to do everything, but Pathfinder makes it kind of my go-to tool box to work with my shapes, because it's usually most everything I want to do is there, and it just does it reall click in one simple click. So, enjoy, play around with these, and I'll teach you a super cool tool that might even be quicker than this. And, it's actually just one tools. You don't have to go search around, and I'll teach that on the next video. Thanks. 5. 5. Shape Builder & Tools: Now, that we know what the Pathfinder tools do, I'm going to introduce you to one other tool that can be a lifesaver, when you're at those moments where you don't know exactly which of those Pathfinder tools to use, and then you start going through and doing a trial and error type scenario, and you lose a lot of time, and it can be kind of frustrating. So, there's one tool called the shape builder tool, and it's over here on the left. Well now, we'll notice that we have these two circles right here. So, if we want to highlight something when you're in the middle of any tool, let me just say this, let's go over to the simple circles. But, whenever we're highlighting, you want to highlight something, let's say we're off to the side here, and I don't want to switch tools and go all the way up here and click on my selection tool to highlight these things, just hold command. Then if you click and it'll let you click and drag and when you let go it'll go back to whatever tool you were using. So, that's a super simple way to go ahead and highlight things. So now, that you always have to be highlighted, but you'll notice now that every time I now I'm hovering over it, you'll see like it'll put a little mesh shadow over whatever area you're hovering over. Now, on this arrow you'll also see it has a plus sign which is always in the merge function. Meaning, if I was to click and drag, you'll notice that it's incorporating all of these. So, if I click and drag all the way across these shapes and let go, it merges those shapes automatically for me. I don't have to go over on Pathfinder and then go to unite, it just does it for me, which is nice and handy. Or if I just want this one circle to be united, and be on top, I can just highlight it, and it would. Then I hit Command Shift G, and then what I can do is I can separate those shapes. So, it did that all for me, that's all using one tool, I don't have to go over there and look for it in Pathfinder. It's the same thing in here, if I'm going to go on this little I just want this place subtract. Now, what I'll do, is I'll hit the option key, and so you'll notice off to the side and you see the option key, it makes the little minus sign, so now it's subtracting. So, I can click, and it'll subtract that section for me, or if I click and drag it'll just subtract what I'm going over. So, really, really handy tool for that, so that's a real basic use for that tool. Now, let's say I wanted very specific things taken off, maybe I didn't want all this to be divided, or all this be taken off. What I can do is, I'm going to bring this over here. I can use that same shape builder tool, and I can highlight member command and then cover whatever you need, and then I can choose. You can see now I have a lot more flexibility, I can go through and choose whatever I want to. So, if I click add, it's going to add it, so if I click it without holding option, it's going to combine that top one with the bottom layer. So, it's going to make it into one shape. So, when I let go here, you'll notice that we're not making that one shape, at least it's making it the same color as those ones. So, well what I can do here is, I'm using the shape builder, I can go over, and if I hit that option I can knock out that whole center section. So, even for really complex things, if I just want to go out and knock out a few things real quick and easy, you can do that real nicely with the shape builder tool. When I work with shapes in Illustrator, there's four tools that I use almost religiously, and I want to show those to you right now. Let's start off with a smooth tool. Now, the smooth tool is a pretty neat one because, I don't know many people that actually use it, and the reason is because it's not very accurate, it just adds anchor points. But, in some cases when I'm working on Illustrator is I don't need things to be perfect angles, or I don't need to be perfect curves, and a perfectly smooth. So for example, if I'm looking at this is it's obviously jacked up right here, so what I'll do is I'll go over here on the left and it's under the pencil tool, if you click and hold, you can go to the smooth tool there. All you do is you just hold command, click on your shape, and then go ahead and you can just draw the curve that you want it to be. So, I'll just see this is where it's getting problematic, so I'll click and draw a more perfect curve. You'll notice that it's aligning those things in a curve for you, a whole lot better than what it's looking like right now. So, I can keep doing that and you'll notice this curve getting cleaner and cleaner. So, the problem is that it adds a lot of points, but the upside is, if you're not worried about points in making it perfect, you just want to make it smoother than what it looks like now. You can do that really easily with that smooth tool. So, the knife tool, awesome tool as well. Let's go over to where these scissors are, and let's go down and go to the knife tool. So, all this is and now that we already have this box highlighted, I'm just going to click and drag just like I would take a knife right through it and just start slicing wherever I want. Now, what it's basically done is it's made these into their individual shapes. Pretty neat, so just like a knife, you just kinda slice across it, and you can get all those different shapes. Scissors are really neat in the fact that they work with anchor points. I like these because they're very accurate, and I use it a lot, so if I click and hold I go to scissors, I'll click on one anchor point over here, and I'll click on another anchor point right here, and you'll notice I can just cut between those two points, and now I have a little separate shape. So, this is again, like I said I use this one quite a bit, just because it's a little bit more accurate. Whoops! So, but you have to make sure that these are closed. Once you've already done that it leaves it as an open path now. So, close it so that when you want to go later on and cut this shape further, you can. So, I couldn't cut this shape anymore until I have this as a closed path, which we've learned before. So, going down closing that path now I can crop it how I want. Now, let's go I left a little bit more room here for the eraser tool, because this one is a whole lot of fun, and you can be as accurate or inaccurate as you want with this thing. So, you can change the size of the eraser by hitting the right brackets, here button the brackets, or the left brackets on your keyboard, right above your, it's right next to the on the right of your letter P. So, you can increase that size and you'll notice if you have this, whatever portion you have highlighted, that's what this shape is, I click and drag. It'll go ahead and make these into, it'll subtract everything that I dragged over and then it'll just make those into separate shapes that you can work with. Now, it's great if I'm just trying to, if I'm just drawing with it and I wanted to make this into a different kind of shape I could go ahead and work with it like that. If I wanted to make a straight line, cut through just hold shift and drag, and you can divide that into all the pieces that you need. So, eraser tool comes in really handy especially if you're working with all types of things, just make sure you're clicking on the right shape. But if it ends up being super helpful just in the middle of creating anything that you want just a little edge taken off, you can do that. If I just wanted this to be stunted real quick, I could do the knife I could do that, but they all do the same thing just in a different way. So, I can just erase all of that if I wanted to make that a portion of it. So, hope that helps, just four tools that do similar things, but you'll find reasons why to use them on their own as you're moving forward and find which ones are a little bit more successful for yourself, or relevant to what you do. But I hope those helped, and thank you very much. In this final shapes video, we're going to cover a lot of ground. 6. 6. Shape Builder & Tools II: In this final shape's video, we're going to cover a lot of ground. I want to go through a few shortcuts, a few tools, but all very useful things are moving forward. So, let's start off by a very basic, just command copy, command C. and that will copy, and then command V, and there you go, you have a copied shape. Maybe I want to have that shape though. What if I wanted to build inside, I didn't have to replace it. I just wanted to keep this shape here. I can go command C and then if I hit command F, it'll just paste it in place. It doesn't look like anything happened but if you click and drag, you have that shape exactly on top of the other. That's handy because let's say if I wanted this to be, since it's on top right, I want to go ahead and drag that, make it smaller. So now I can keep that completely centered within that box. If I went and did this again, I could go ahead and make another color and do whatever I want to do. So, that's one very helpful thing. So maybe let's do another one. Let's paste it in place, and I'll change the color to red here. Now what if I want to put so, you notice I put the shape in the front or in the back. That's really easy. All you have to do is hit the command, bracket arrow now to go back that's right next to the letter P, on your keyboard on the right. If you hit the one on the left, that will knock it back. If you hit the one on the right, it'll knock it forward. So you hold your command button and click on those brackets, and it'll start layering those shapes for you, to bring it to the front, or bring it into the back. You can also do that by right clicking on it, and you can go to the arrange function, and you can say bring forward, bring back. It'll just bring it. If it bring front and bring to the front, brings up all the way to the front and bringing to send to the back down here is all the way to the back. Why that's different is because there is- If I go to oops If go to arrange send forward if you had multiple layers it would just do one layer at a time and move it forward one layer until it finally got to the front. Now that we know how to do that, let's go ahead and rotate these things. So you can actually just hit R and you can rotate it. Which is nice. It'll just rotate around that axis and you can actually pick up that, you can pick up that axis you click and drag on it and you can have that axis to be any where you are maybe I want it to rotate around this dot, it's the one I'll drag in. You'll notice that it starts to go around this point that's where it will rotate. And you can get that also by right clicking like I said, Right click and here's the transform palette which is real handy which allow you to move it, you can go ahead and you can change the angle, the distance, horizontal vertical you can move this position if you have a very precise spot you need to move this square or shape you can do that and you can even hit copy and It'll leave the one there and just do the other one it will add another one to it. For example if I added one, four inches horizontal and hit copy four inches to the right it will add a new square. So you have to make sure you hit a copy not just okay and it'll make a new one. If you just said okay I'll move this shape all the way over there. So let's see what else we can do here. Let's click on this also click on the right click on it, go to transform like again you can go rotate and you can say this all allows you to say how much you want to rotate it and you can copy it and it'll allow you to just set that and provide a whole new one if you wanted to. So we go again there's other options here, transform you can go ahead and reflect. I like this one a lot. Let's go ahead and I'll give you a shape that where you can tell. So I have this shape right here. Maybe I want to reflect this shape and make a whole new one or I don't really have to make a new one I can just flip it so let's do it right so let's transform reflect and see how it changes it shows you a little preview here and it shows that it's now flipped vertically and shows you a little example of what that means or horizontally. And you can do that and if you wanted to copy it just hit copy and now you have both of those. Or if you didn't you would just flick that one shape. So you can also, going back to the transform. You can scale, it you can change the size and you can and if you hit copy again it will make a new one or if you just hit okay it'll just make a single one but you can make it you can increase the scale. You can also do a shear. Now you can set this all here. This one I find easier to do over here, so let me show you what I mean. So a shear if you go over here on the left hand side. This button here. You can scale using this one. Just by clicking and dragging. Tha's the scale to from a transform. That some of these tools there are all over the place, they are the same tool but they're just in different places so that's why sorry if it's confusing anyone. But then there's the shear tool. And what this does is it allows you to change that orientation of that rectangle which is kind of neat especially if you're making like a banner or something like that or working with perspective you can change that. And if you hold shift it will do that evenly. You go up, straight down it'll make those edges fine and won't make it so that trapezoid that you make will be even. Okay. So we've had we've learned a lot of new things there with the transform pallet. Now there's another thing that we can do with these shapes that's kind of neat is we can go ahead and duplicate things in place. And so let me give you an example, maybe I want to have let's just make a flower real quick because this is an easy way to understand this so I have this circle right? Now if I want to make flower petals let me go over here. I make a petal let's make this yellow and make the petals blue I'm going to go here and click on this point with my direct selection tool drag straight down holding shift when I go back to my- i'm going to hit shift C and get my anchor point tool. And I click once and evens that out. So I build a teardrop shape. So now I'm going to put it over here, I'm going to line it up here and I'm going to put this on top. We know how to do that now, we can arrange that if I click on this. Click transfer, arrange, sorry, bring to front. And then so what we want to do is maybe I want to put a series of flower petals all around here. So what I want to do if I want to copy them I'm going to hit what I'll do is I'll get my R hit R for rotate,and first of all let's make this a little bit easier, let's go up here real quick and go to view and just go to smart guides. That chart is showing you where center points are, where the pads are and makes you life a little bit easier. So I'm going to hit R again and now that I know where the center is I'm going to click on it while holding option. You'll notice it's bringing up the rotate tool. So the rotate tool is cool because I can let's say I want to rotate I want to add a new one but I want to add it 12 degrees over or something like that. Let's say 12 degrees. Okay. So I hit copy, maybe not enough. Let's do 24 degrees. So I'll go back and behold option and click on the point you want it to rotate around. And let's do 24 or something like that. Hit copy, and you'll notice it's growing now. It made a new panel right next to it. Now hit command D, and what that does that duplicates whatever you just did whatever shape that just was duplicated it again. So now you made that little flower. Same thing for example, if I was, the duplicate thing just to make a little bit clearer. If I was to- another way to copy this actually would be if I clicked option if you option click on any shape. Option and then click and drag and you can make a million of these from that same shape but it will keep that original shape. So let's say I did it like this and I like how that that goes in a path. All I have to do is hit command D and keep hitting that repeatedly and I can make a series of those and pasting them in whatever order I was doing it. So if I had it like that again or just go on forever. Now one thing I find everybody has trouble with at first is I showed you how to make a square, i showed you how to make a triangle but I never showed how to make a diamond. Now of course you can make a diamond by just hitting the rotate tool or just dumb hitting R and then rotating right? And if you hold shift it will do in 45 degree increments. So you can have it be perfectly perpendicular. But you can't, when you notice if you're going to try to resize this, you can't it will start resizing it back into a rectangle and you can't even if you hold options shift you know it'll make it smaller or bigger but you can't make this point these points further away than these points. If that makes sense it will always be even there. So if you right click on that shape okay right click on that shape, you can go down to the transform section again and go to reset the bounding box and so what that does is it resets it for this shape. So now when I click and drag you can go ahead and stretch that square out and then make it into a diamond. I know it's a little thing but believe me when you want to make a diamond it's going to be the most frustrating thing in the world if you don't know to do you that. You click on it, right click on it, go to transform and then go reset the bounding box and then you can reshape it how you want by just clicking and dragging. It's one of those it took me forever to figure out. So there we go. So we know how to duplicate, we know how to paste in place, we know how to arrange our shapes, we know how to rotate. But the last thing I want to show you is how to align shapes. Now aligning shapes is always a fun one because a lot of times you know you think it's going to be something super difficult, but it doesn't have to be. Maybe I want these all to be perfectly aligned, but they're obviously not. If you highlight them all. If you go up here you'll be able to see all your different alignment tools, this is where I go. You can even do it over here on the right hand side the align and you can look at them there but they're always available right here So then you have to have tool box out. But you can go ahead these are very clearly marked what they do. If I wanted them all would be squished in the center, I can do that and if I want them to be, I want the spaces in between them to be perfectly even as in all the space between all four of these are perfectly even I can go over here, and this is horizontal distribute center. So if I click on that now this space is the same on all of them maybe not their height. Maybe I want to align the tops of them. And this is vertical distribute top. But I want them all to be on one plane so I can go over here and you can see this one this is vertical align, and I'll arrange them all straight. So that that comes in super handy as you're working when you want things just to align visually or the same thing applies for when making a circle, and you want any shape really and you want to put let's put another shape inside of this. Let's go ahead I'm going to put a pink shape right there in the middle there. And let's say is it's not aligned I want these to be aligned right. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and click and make sure it's centered and this line is all even now but they're not evenly distributed sideways so I'll go like that on this and horizontal align center. So you'll have to play around with these a little bit to kind of get and understand which one does what, but when you do it's a very handy tool. So you can keep these things all aligned. So alignments awesome. And if I- and before I let you go in this tutorial here I'm going to show you one last little thing you can play with on your own, I don't use it a whole lot, but if you want to have a little bit of fun you can go over here and go over here there's the wrinkle tool. There's all of these tools if you click it use a width tool but you can see all these different options under here. You can play around with them. You click over the shapes and you can you can alter those quite a bit just click and drag. And I mean like it does all sorts of things click and hold and twirls you can blot certain. Click and drag and it'll blot those out which are kind of fun and they can be can be helpful but you can kind of find out what you want to use. It's not as if you want to make some jagged wrinkly edges you can do that, so you scoot back. Yep you can go ahead and see all that. So I hope this helped. Just a few things. I know that this may seem like a smattering of all types of functions but a lot of those correspond together and you'll find yourself needing to know those things as you're working on your project. So that's it for all of our shapes and looking forward to moving into lines. Alright, see you. 7. 7. Basic Lines: All right, so this whole next section is dedicated solely to learning how to use lines. Now, we're going to learn how to manipulate those lines, we'll curve them, scallop them, zigzag, ruff in, however we want to deal with these lines. But there's a lot we can do, we have a few different tools that we can do with. Now, the first and foremost and the one that you will most likely be using the most will be the pen tool. So, let's go ahead and start with the pen tool. You can go over here and click on your pen tool or you can hit P on your keyboard, and it was so funny P in your keyboard. Anyway, go ahead and click any point, click on another point, you have a line, you have a perfect line. Now, it's actually not quite perfect because it's a little bit angled because you're just free handing it. But if you wanted to make a straight perfect line, you click, hit Shift, click on another one. That's a perfect line. You can do it vertical, horizontal, or you can do a 45-degree angle. So, those are your straight perfect lines for all of you who want perfect stuff. Now, if you want to go ahead, you can go and click and zigzag, however you want you can actually complete shapes right there if you like, and you have those kind of lines. But you also can do curved lines which is pretty awesome and you can freehand those by clicking and dragging, and you can make a perfectly curved line, every time you doing click drag, click drag, click drag, you can make crazy wave-like shapes, I want to say shapes, I mean lines. But these are all things that you can do just free hand. Now, there may be a little bit sloppy and you'll get better and better as time goes on, but here's a few little tricks and tips that I think you should learn as you're free handing lines. So, again shift you can click a straight line, but now let's say I want to do a curve, so on my next slide I click and drag and I want to make a little curve right there and I can click and drag or I can click anywhere. But it's automatically after I've already clicked and dragged, the next click I do, is going to try to compensate for that curve wherever you click and try to make it into something that looks natural. But I don't want that, let's say I just want to make another straight line. So, what I do is if I'm already on it and it was already going to continue, I just hit command that we'll go back, then I'll switch over temporarily to my as long as I'm holding it, my selection arrow, my black one, and then if I click over here, I'm no longer on this. Now, I can use and then if I let go, it'll turn back into my pen tool, click back there and then I continue this line and then hold shift again, and it won't do that funky thing by finishing off that curve. So, just little tiny things but they will greatly help you as you move forward. So, like I said before, so we have our options here we can go ahead and switch the- Oops I mean the the widths of these things. So, if I want to change the width, I can go over here, make them thinners, thicker, however we want. But there's also options for seeing these things changing the widths of these lines to not be so uniform. So right now, it's uniform, but I can go through and taper that off if I'd like. For example down here, you want to see that tapered. It'll take those two terminals and the end points and I will just make those tapered off, or I can change it and make it kind of funky shapes of switches around that's kind of cool for things like these, let's show you ops! There you go. So, it only has that one taper in it but if I little trick, if I want to make this varied even further, I can go to my scissors tool, and click on maybe this path is a little bit thicker and I want to break that up. Click on it and you'll see that it maybe a couple of other spots and they'll start varying that up a little bit more. I have this illustration, and and you can see there's some line work mixing with some shapes, and just kind of have them overlapping here. Again, you can go over here and if I want to change those up a little bit, I can kind of vary up that line width and change that how I please. But there's one thing you'll have to know right off the bat, is here let's do this. If you click on here, you'll see that it says 3.433 so that's the size of the width of this stroke. Now, you'll notice that when I shrink this, so it's going to be smaller but so it's going to actually is not going to be 3.433, it's going to be 1.4 whatever it is, but it is now proportional to the illustration so it still fits everything else, it didn't really change. But, if I hit Command K, going to my preferences and their scale strokes and effects, that's what I'm clicking onto make it do that. But if i was off of that, which it actually defaults to not being clicked on; if I shrink this, it'll keep those lines the same way they won't change no matter how big or small that you change. You shrink the whole illustration or the line itself, you have to go in manually set those widths again. Again, the way to change that is hit command K. You're in your preferences in general, Scale Strokes & Effects, click on it. Now, when I shrink it, it'll be proportional. That makes sense, cool. Okay, so one thing that will be very, very helpful later. So, what you'll also do, when you're in here is you're going to be, you have options to round corners or to keep them straight, so let's go over here and let's go into the Stroke panel right here, is super helpful. So, you have a few different things, you have caps, you have corners, you have line strokes, you have dashed lines, we're going to go over these. So on this, since it's a shape here, it's a closed path, we're going to have to, we can't we don't have to worry about the caps for right now, just work on the corners. So, the corners right now, it says are rounded join. We can make that a miter join which is the pointy edges or we can just saw off those edges if we like but those are some options that you have with your shapes. Now, on the on the edges, let's do right here actually. So, on the edges of these, you can notice that these are flat just have a default right here on the cap. It's called a butt cap, or you can round off that cap, or again you can do a projecting cap which is kind of goes as a little bit extra off the edge. So, you have a few different options there with those. Now, what this is if you go over to your stroke sorry, if you go to your line section, they're grayed out, and you only have one option here. To get more options, you have to have something that has a stroke on a fill, if that make sense. So, this thing is just the stroke let's give it a fill as well, and then you'll notice that when I click on this, hit stroke now you have these two available for you to click on. So, what that means is the edge of this shape, this green shape is really goes all the way to the blue the center of this stroke right here, and that's what that says Align Stroke to Center. Then there's also, on the inside, so now the edge of that shape it's putting the whole width of that stroke on the inside of that shape, or you can put on the outside. The house full of like a stamp effect that was on some lettering and other things that you want and you can find ways to use those. But yeah, so that's what those Align Stroke sections mean. Now, we have a dashed line. Dashed lines are super simple to make. So, I will go into this very much dashed line, you can make a line and- ops over here. So, let's just say I want the dash to be 12 and so that just sets here the width of that gap and you can change the height of that, one the thickness. So, that's cool to know. But what if you want to make a dotted line? Dotted lines was the most frustrating thing for me because they didn't have any little option for me to do dotted is just always dashed. Because you don't want if it's a dash, if it's not a dashed and dotted you put zero on the very first one, that very first dash, and then you set your gap. Maybe it's 10 and you can go check it out. Okay, whoops! Actually, this this is good. So, what we need to have, if you want to make dotted lines, you have to have the cap to be rounded and then you want the corner to be rounded. Make sure those are both checked and then you have the first one is zero and the next one is you can set the distance between your circles, your dots. So, if I wanted to make those bigger for example, you'll notice that they're going to overlap, so I have to go and change that gap to just something bigger, maybe 20 because it changes the size of those. Okay, so one more thing on these is, if I'm going to be clicking and making a shape out of dotted lines, this is just something people run into, actually let me just do it, I'll just do a big square. You'll notice that the edges here, because I set the spacing, the gap between here, they're not going to even out to be perfect on these corners of the shape. So, what you have to do is, there's just one little quick button and it says aligns dashes to corners and path ends adjusting lengths to fit. You click on it, and it'll do it for you. It'll adjust that gap so that these end up on the corners. So, simple fixed, I see people do all the time or leave it where it's just not completely even on there, and it bugs the heck on me. So use that tool. It's very handy and it's very easy. Okay, so that's it for this first video, I just wanted to go over, that's a few basic things that we can do with lines. Now, the next one we're going to be talking about different line effects, and how to achieve those and then how to outline some things and to create some really cool effects later on and then we'll go into other tools. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video. 8. 8. Line Effects: This short video is about line effects. Now, your lines you can make them manually, you can make any shapes that you want, you can make bursts, you can make zigzags, you can do a scalloped edge, you can make waves. You can do all that manually in free-hand, but I would rather not personally, especially if I'm trying to make something quick or I'm trying to make it perfect. There's some easy things that you can do to save you a lot of time. So some things you can do, let's go into the effects panels, so we have something highlighted. You go into effect up at the top here, and then I would go down to distort and transform. You can do this, this will work obviously with your shapes and you can change and tweak and roughen. But let me just show you a few things that you might specifically want to do with your line shape. Maybe you're trying to make something just a little bit unique, you can go ahead and angle some of these things and just start to twist some of these lines, but whenever you use an effect, what it's going do is it's just still going to be this box, so you can't adjust points on here because an effect on that square that we already had is not an actual path. So, we can do in there in that case just go to object, you go to expand appearance, you click on that and now you can go ahead and manipulate any of those points or those angles that you wish. So, that comes in handy for a lot of different things. Now, there's another one that you just saw under there under the effect and distort and transform again. Go down to zigzag, this is the one I use quite often. I move it over here, it's going to preview. Go ahead and make a zigzag pattern which is nice, because that takes forever and is really hard to get accurate freehand. You can go ahead and change the ridges per segment or you can change the size of the height of this zigzag. About another cool thing so you can make your fun grass or something. But you can also make, if you hit smooth on your points here instead of corner, you can make what looks like wavelengths. Think a little bit taller, a little bit more dispersed or look further out, so you can make maybe some sweet noodles or maybe even some waves whatever you want. But you can do that here in the zigzag panel. Again, if you want to go ahead and go object, expand appearance, now you can go ahead and manipulate individual points. So, that can save you a ton of time. There's also under here, let's go ahead and actually, let's go on this one right here. So, we can show you this and so if we go to stylize. Now, in stylize you can do things like round your corners, which is really helpful if you've already made a shape or something like that and you wanted to round the edges but you haven't. If you haven't already done it you can do it right here, since it's already set you can't do it. If you're using CC you can, but if you're using Illustrator CS6 and below, you won't be able to adjust that after you've already built that shape. So, you can go in a little way around that is go into your effects and then go into your stylize, round corners, and then you can adjust that however you'd like. The cool thing with CC just for any of you with CC, you can go ahead and click on that A button to go to your direct selection arrow. Whenever you go here you can actually, but you'll see these little white dots pop up, that means you can adjust any shape just whenever, which is really cool. You can make it pointy or you can click and drag down and it'll change those. So, that's pretty neat. But yeah, you can round those edges there. Now, sometimes you create something. Now, people ask me this all the time, how do I create those different textures on the lines or I want to make it feel a little bit more hand-drawn or something like that. There's definitely a way to do that with your brush tools, and I'll go through and I'll even show you how to make your own brushes so you can customize those how you please. But right now, one easy way to do it would be this way. So let me go down to this illustration once again, and you'll see that I have these lines here. So if I go to, let's see, they're all done. So I'm going to just do this whole illustration because maybe they've used it. So, it'll do the effect on the lines and the shapes, but this is good because it's good to know that you have either option. It works for both. So if you go to effect, distort and transform and then go to roughen, let's go to preview. Now, it's going to look really bad first. As you can see, it's going real bad, but I like to hit smooth. I like the smooth edges more than the 0.8 versions and I like to have it be an absolute so I can control it more. Then I will say the detail, maybe I want a little bit less detail. A little bit more on the size, be a little bit more dramatic. Now, this you'll have to play around with quite a bit before you even figure this out, but it's a little trick that I've used. I still use quite a bit if I want to add a little bit of a rugged edge to something or a line to make it a little more interesting. So, what I do is now I have it like this, this is looks terrible, click "OK." Now, let's zoom out, make sure that you've turned off your hit command K, make sure you turned off scale strokes and effects, we don't want that on right now. So let's make it really big, and you can see those things are getting less and less visible, those little squiggles. I call them squiggles, I don't know what you call them. You can see it's getting less and less noticeable. So let's say I like it, will bring down a little bit, I like that. Now what I want to do, now that it's at the size that I want it, it has the right amount of jaggenness that I'd like. Let's go to object, expand appearance. Now everything is locked into place and let's go straight down, let's bring it back down to size. Now, we'll zoom back in. So, now they don't have skill strokes and effects on there. It's going to be kind of it. So now I have that, I lift up to the right size. Now look at that now. Soon as it's a little bit too much and you can take it off the type if you want, but if you see these little lines here, they're looking a lot more jagged. So, that's kind of an effect that I like to work with sometimes, and you can even vary that up by using your tools over here which is real fun, so it looks a little bit more hand-drawn. You can do that again obviously, it's on your shapes as well. You can go back and adjust and play with that, but the key is once you get it made before, you go ahead and enlarge it real big and then you set it, you go object expand. You want that thing to expand or expand appearance, and then so it locks it in and then you shrink it down, and then this is what you get, cool little textures. So, if you have somebody looking at about this far, it gives it a nice little soft edge on there. Anyways, thought that might be cool to learn, but we'll go back to here. So, I can go ahead and apply things like I had this whole edge and maybe it wants to be more like a like a stamp or a seal. You can go ahead, and of course, you can make that using the star tool. But you can also do it, but if already have an existing one, you can go into your effect, you can go into your store and transform, zigzag, preview. If you want to make it into more of like a flowery or scalped look, you can do that. Anyways, you can keep playing with that for days. But you can manipulate your lines and do things like that using the effects panel. Let me just show you for the very, very last thing, we can go and use a few more tools to draw with. You have the pencil tool, and so I can draw right there. The cool thing about the pencil tool is that it can make shapes, it can make pads. It's like the pen tool, but you don't have to click the points, you can just drag and draw naturally. I'm using a mouse right now, so it's getting all those jagged edges, but if you're to use a Wacom tablet or something like that you can get a lot more fluid lines. But like I said, you can make this and make it however you want and then you'll see, it'll lock up and you can make a shape out of it. Then afterwards, you can go ahead and change over here. You can change the, what kind of, let's just say it was like the brush effect that you want your brush tool. It won't connect or make shapes or anything like that, it's just making long paths and yeah. So, you can go ahead and do that. So, that's the difference between the paintbrush and pencil tool, but you can go ahead and adjust that brush and you can make all sorts of different ones and there's lots of different presets up here. You can go to brush libraries and open up and you have all different let's say, bristle brushes over here. Let's delete this. Use my brush or in B, N is your pencil on your keyboard and B is your brush, just so you know. So here's a brush tool that are some of the libraries that come with Illustrator, some of the presets. There's also what's called the blob brush, which I never used until recently and it's been really awesome. So, what's cool about the blob brush is that it's not a line, you're not drawing on a line. So if I was drawing, let's say with the pencil tool, you'll notice that it's still, whoops, let's do this. It's just making a line, it's making a series of points and everything like that along that same line. I can do fills or keep it as a stroke. But with the blob brush tool, what it's doing is just making shapes. So, it's everything you see on the outside exterior of this blob, you'll see that that's just making into a solid shape, which is really nice and handy if you're trying to draw our fill-in shapes. You don't want to have to go through the process of expanding and whatnot, or you just need to add something to it, an existing shape. So if I have a perfect shape and then I want to draw the blob brush next to it, maybe I want on one side just to be melting or something like that, whatever. You can go ahead and do that and this becomes one thing, becomes one shape, and it adds all those edges there. So, blob brush is actually pretty cool. Like I said, I hadn't used it until recently and it's been a really nice tool to have in my arsenal as I'm designing and illustrating in Illustrator. So already, hope those help, hope those are nice tips and I will see you again in the next video. We will talk about making our own custom brushes and we'll go more into the paintbrush and to see what the possibilities are. So already, we'll see you in the next video. 9. 9. Paintbrush Tool & Creating Lines: The brush tool in Adobe Illustrator is extremely versatile. You can go ahead and make your own brushes or it has a great set of brushes that are already preset into the software that you can use. So, let's go ahead and take a look at those first and then we'll go ahead and show you how to customize and make your own brushes that out of artwork, or out of patterns, or out of other things that you create textures, what have you. So, let's go over here to the left and let's go click on our Paintbrush tool or the letter B on your keyboard. Now, unlike the Pencil tool it's not going to create a path, it's not going to finish a path for your or make a close path. So, you're just going to draw around with it, but the perks to it are, you're going to be able to make a lot more expressive lines by changing that line quality or changing the brush head. So, we can go on there's more of a like a tapered version, kind of like a ribbon and if we make that a little bigger you can see it. So, it gives you some options. Then if you want to draw, let's go ahead and just draw one here. Now, that you have this line, you can go ahead, of course, and change the width and the size of those strokes. Makes sure it is on stroke when it's for painting. Then, of course, you can change colors and what have you. Okay. So, it's a very basic things. Similar basic options you have if you open it up on the right hand side on your tools. You can open up the brushes panel, and if you don't have the brushes panel you go up to Window and then you go on to Brushes and it'll appear for you. There, you can go over here and it'll give you some other presets. Now, these I've loaded previously, but if you go near to the top right hand corner click, go all the way down to the bottom it says, "Open brush library." Now, if you look over here you have lots of different folders that contain pre-made brushes with the Illustrator. There's arrows, they have some that are more flourishes or are water colored pens or different styles of. You actually have quite a few, and you can alter these to make them however you'd like. So, sometime is easier than customizing and starting or should I say customizing, but starting from scratch and building up a brush library. I would look at what you have and then go through and alter those how you'd like. If you don't have, it we can definitely show you how to make your own. But, for example, it's going to, the art one, some people don't know about these. You have let's say, let's have an artistic paintbrush. Now, look at all these different options you already have. So, what I can draw with those you can experiment with those and you can see that it's giving you a unique texture for each of those if I already had. You can even apply your brush strokes to pre-made shapes that you create, which is kind of me. Let's create our own brushes. Now, I have some things over here that we're going to use to build different types of brushes. Let's go ahead and start by looking at how we add a new brush. The easiest way is just by dragging whatever you want. If you want to make it out of an image or you want to make it out of a shape or vector illustration or a pattern you can actually drag those straight into, let's show you, just straight into your brushes panel over there and then I'll ask you what type of brush you want to make out of it. But, we're going to just go straight down the line and start making our own. So, you can go down here at the bottom and this little thing that says, "New Brush" so we can click and I'm going to click off of this so you can see it because it will only give you a few options unless you have the these highlighted. Unless you have something like an image or something that would be something you need to have for your scatter brush, our brush. So, calligraphic brushes, we already played around with one but now we can make our own. Let's call it the Brad's angle brush, okay. So, now we have Brad's angle brush over here, click on it, now let's draw with Brad's angle brush. Awesome. Maybe we want to change that up a little bit. If you want to see it with a preview, you have to highlight what you just drew using that pen or that brush, double-click on that brush and now you have the option to have a preview. So, now we can go ahead and make changes and see exactly how that's going to affect our image, so there you go. There you have. There's your calligraphic brush. You can create however you want, but it also will give you now that you've changed it and you're looking at it in a preview, so do you want to leave it how it was originally or do you want to apply to the new stroke that you have? Let's just apply what we have and so there it is. So, let's start with another one. Let's actually go down to the bristle brush because this is quite a bit similar. So, on these brushes, we can customize again. We could actually pick the type of brush that we want. So, if you want a round fan, a flat curve, let's try the round fan. Now, you can change the size of that brush, you can change the bristle length. This one you can play around with all day long and come up with some really cool brush effects. Now, we can look and we get C. We already done the calligraphic brush, we done the bristle brush, let's do a pattern brush. So, add on brush, you can actually click on it and it will choose the pattern but the easiest way to do it is just, first, we need to make some patterns. So, let's take this shape and maybe I want to make this into a pattern. So, in order to do that, we have to go to object, pattern, make. Now, the news watchers panel? Okay, don't even worry about that. Okay, so it's showing us what this pattern looks like. It's tiled, it's in a grid, sure that's fine. If we're good, then let's just get out of this. Okay, so we have the pattern tile and you can see it right there. So, now, what we have we want to do is we want to make this as well. Because what we're going to be doing is there's going to be caps and there's going to be main parts of the pattern. So, let me go ahead and make this into a pattern as well. So, all will make sense in a second. Oops object, pattern, make. Yes, that's fine. When I hadn't made it, I can drag those into here. But if I want to drag that pattern, I can go and bring it in there and let's go to Pattern brush. Perfect. So, now it's giving me the option, so it's showing that where this will be placed on this path. So, for here, the side tile will be this pattern right here and you can see how it's laid out there. Now, this corner pieces, now in Adobe Illustrator CC which I'm using now, it'll automatically generate some options for you when it comes to corners which is kind of neat. You can choose just between the ones, so you don't have to place or create a pattern. But, I already have a pattern I want this one right here as my cap or my corner. So, let me go down I already have it. So, I can click and you can see it there in place. You can go forward and maybe this, so you have the insight as well, and if you want that to be the same you can go over there click on that makes sure it's the same. Then if you have an open path, you can cap it off with the same thing if you'd like. It give you different options. But, then you have options to go through and you stretch to fit, you can add some space because it's not going to fit completely. However you draw this thing maybe your angles or whatever, it's not going to be able to keep this perfect pattern in there because of the height. So, it needs either stretch it or whatever. You need to be okay with that whatever the style of thing that you do, so you can add space to fit. So, you can see the little gaps in there, or you can have it stretch or you can have an approximate the distance there that'll have to be to make that. This all makes sense as we draw it, but let's just be Brad's pattern brush. Let's give it a name. Let's just click Okay so we can see it. So, now you can see it down here. It'll show you that this is the body of it, these are the corners, these are the edges there. So, let's go ahead and get my brush tool out. Clicking on my new brush, oops, don't have anything highlighted or else it'll make that into that, but there you go. So, you can see that I have now this brush that I can draw around with. Now, if I have corners, but we're going to, let's do this first. Let's make sure that we have this, was added to a square so you can see the corners. There they are. There's those corners, but we're going to have the probably drop this down significantly to make it, there you go, to make it look a little bit. So, you can have borders you can make all these differently but that's a brush that we created out of just vector shapes. We had to make them into a pattern first, but then you can go ahead and manipulate those in the brushes, the pattern brush pallet, so pretty neat. Now, we have the option to also make different types of brushes that are called scatter brushes in our brushes. So, let's make a puppy brush, everybody wants a puppy brush. Let's see, let's make a scatter puppy brush. Before we do anything, usually what I like to do is, let's do Puppy scatter brush. Then, before I do anything, I usually like to, okay, so I have, I can modify the- I can change it however I want. But let's go ahead and draw the line so we can see a preview version of it. Wait, let's do this one. Okay, great. So, little puppy brush, now it's highlighted let's double-click. Now, we have the option to see the preview right here. So, we can go on and fix. We can do random, and you can see, you can adjust the size of the puppies can be at random. See? How they're staggered too. Basically, you're setting the maximums and the minimums of the sizes, then you can go ahead and do that with your spacing too. Maybe, you want random spacing between your puppies. You can set that however we want. Now, let's go ahead and use a puppy brush and draw a ton of puppies, sweet. Anyways, okay, I'll stop playing out of that. So, go ahead make any kind of brush you want. If you're into cats you can do that, but let's see what else we can do with these images. So, you have to make sure it won't let you make certain size for art brushes which will be the next one. So, we have a star, there we go. Now, we want to go ahead and make this star into, let's get our brushes open, drag it over here, make it into an art brush, okay, made our art brush. Oops, let's draw with our star, it's going to be all wavy open it, okay, now we're back in here. So, on this one, we can go ahead and we can do things, like I said you can change the width of these things and you can change that with the pressure of your pen, if you're using awaken tablet you can change the color. But let's go ahead and add I want to flip it across. Maybe I wanted just to scale proportionally. So, it's just really large, but maybe I want to do it [inaudible]. So, instead of having the pattern or the scatter brush which would give me multiple images. This'll be whatever you do just be stretching it. So, that's why it comes in handy when you have things like your- Let's open up another, up here we go like grunge brushes, something like that, you have your- This is another, this is the one I've downloaded before. But basically, you have that shape and then you can have it stretch and you mess with the width then it can make that, it'll follow that along for you. So, that's kind of the perk to having the art brush. I hope this helped. I mean, I kind of felt like I ramble on a little bit about each of these brushes but there's a lot that you can do, a lot of different options I couldn't possibly go over all the different scenarios that you can use, but at least I know I gave you exactly what brushes are available, how to access those, what and how to customize the ones that you want. But, you really have to play around with these to get the exact desired effects that you're looking for. So, play around with that and I hope this video helped. 10. 10. Customizing Type: Let's talk about type. Now, when we think type, we generally don't think of using Adobe Illustrator right off the bat. First and foremost, we would think about using InDesign, which is built for that. But if you're doing things that aren't necessarily as complex or the project isn't based on using a bunch of pages that you're going to need to format, all that stuff I would put any of that pagination and layout would be something that would be great for InDesign. But in illustrator, a lot of times you'll have things like posters, where you'll have some text in there, but and you may even put a little bit of body copy in there, but you also need to have the flexibility of working with images and moving the shapes around, and all of that. So, we're going to get just go over the fundamentals here, and just show you what's possible, so you can apply that to your art. You have your text box which is created simply by going over to your Type Tool, and you can click and drag, and that'll set the size of your box. Then, the more you type on there, obviously it'll just fit within your box, and then you can go ahead, and with these you can go and click and resize however you want, and then the Text Tool, the lines will automatically format to whatever the new size of that box is. That's great. This one, however, is just a line of text and if you see, if I do the same thing there, it'll actually manipulate the letters. We don't want to hurt type because we love type, and so doing this, and stretching it, and excluding all that stuff is something we don't want to do. But it's great if you just want to be able to move a single line of text or a header. I will just quickly click anywhere. To achieve that, you just got to click anywhere on there, and then you can go ahead and start typing. It'll keep typing forever because it's not in the text box. It doesn't have any boundaries. So, but that's just good for a quick, you want to draw something like this little figure two here and have it task just something on a infographic will be perfect example of when you would use Adobe Illustrator for dropping in text, but yeah. So, you have those two. Those are the main ways to interact your text. Now, let's talk about what we can do with these different paragraphs. Now, you have all your paragraph styles here. So, if we click on it, we can have it all centered, we can have aligned it to the right, we can align it to the left. So, you can change the alignments there, and if you go on, you can change your font size over here, you can go in and let's highlight this. You can change the style of your, whatever font you choose. You can choose your different fonts, click on those and change that up. Very basic. If you want to use, there's also, I have the character palette and I have the paragraph palette over here on my toolbar, which is easier for me because it's all of it right there. You can go ahead and access that by going to Window and finding it in here. Click on and it'll pop up. Now, if you wanted to do your character panel, just messing with this, you can go down and this is where you can change your type as well. You can change the size here or you can change the, let's go over here, and you can change the spacing between the different lines. You can go back to auto if you ever want to go back to what it's set to originally with the type. You have your kerning that you can choose. Now, I'll do it on this one right here. So, hit T, that's your Type Tool. If you're highlighted on a different piece of text. Now, click in between two letters. Now, I want to add some space. Let's say I want to add some space between the W and the O right there. I feel like, maybe they're too tight. You can change the kerning, which is just the space between two letters, and I can knock that up, and the more I hit that, you can see that it's just moving the space between those two letters. So, if I click over here, you'll notice it's still zero. But if I click back in the space between those two, it'll show 43. So, if I want to put that back, I can just hit zero and we'll go back to the standard kerning. You can also do that by hitting option or Alt, click immediately and then you hit the right or left arrow keys. For- the right arrow key to add more space, and left to decrease that space. So, it's a quick way to kern between letters because then you can just click and move that space without having to go through and mess up that down here. So, that's your alter option with the right and left arrow keys. Then you have your overall tracking, which is dealing with the space between all of the letters equally. So, kerning is between two letters, tracking is between all the letters. So, you can add a little bit of space there and usually with uppercase lettering, capital letters, you'll want to go ahead and add a little bit of space between those. Yeah. So, maybe things like this, you can go back and kern. So, you have those options. That's what you can do with the character tool, the character palette, I should say. You can always, like I said, always go up and you can change colors, and you can add strokes to text. Now, we can go ahead and let's talk about what's available here. So, if you click on the Type Tool, click and hold, you'll see there's a whole bunch of other options here. So, we have Area Type Tool. So, let's say, this right here, move it over here. We want to type within this area, right there. So, I have the Area Type Tool, I'm going to click on the border of it. So, now I can go ahead and type, type, type, type, type, type, type and I'm just going to type within that shape that I have. Now, what I can do over here, is if I double-click the selection I have now, I can deal with all the little presets within the area type option. The biggest one that you'll want to know is having your inset spacing. So, you can add some cushion around if you're actually having another. If you have this within a shape, you can add some cushion around it, so it's not butting up against the edges. So, that's a cool option to do. You can also use that Type Tool for here ,and then go double-click. Let's go and preview. We can add numbers of columns, and so you can customize your body copy there. You have a lot of different options to do that. So, that is a neat tool. So, the Area Type Tool. You can also access that up here. There's always a million ways to access the same tool in Illustrator. So, you have it up here, Type and you could do your area type options. But let's go ahead and let's do type on a path. So, maybe I have, let me draw a little path here with my Pencil Tool. It's kind of wavy and I'll give it a little colors so we can see it. So, let's click on that. Let's go down here, click and hold, and then I can go down to the Type on a Path Tool, click on it. As soon as I click on it, now I can go ahead and type whatever I want. It's going to follow that path. Now, there's even options within this. So, again, if you want to go and find the options within each of those tools double-click on it, and this will pop up, and it'll say, "Rainbow right now is how it is." You can flip it. Let's preview it first. Let's flip it. Maybe I wanted the text on the other side, which is fine. A handy little tool sometimes. Then, you can change it from being aligned to the baseline, it can even be the descenders, which are the bottoms of those letter forms, or the ascenders, which is just at the top there. You can do lots of different things with these. So, that will be your Type on a Path Tool, which comes in very, very handy. Let's see, let me just do a few different things. You can even adjust your spacing, that you can even center it, left align, right align, that still is an option even when you're typing on a path. So, let's go ahead. If you have Adobe Illustrator CC, which I'm using, you have some options here. So, if I wanted to play around with just, let's say, I want to play around with just these letter forms and create my own custom text. I could individually go in there and I can even change the type and still not, I don't have a shape, I still have editable text, but each letter can hold their own character styling, their own attributes. But it's hard because you can't really manipulate it a whole lot, and if I wanted to offset these letters, it'd be tricky because there'll be no way to do it still having it editable. So, but the cool thing about having CC, is that you have this Touch Type Tool, which is brand new, and I can click on specific characters and just manipulate those characters, which is pretty neat. So, I can just have those letter forms up there, and then you can see, I can type and I can still edit these just as I would normally. Otherwise, the way to do this type of stuff, if you wanted to deal with it, you would have to, which is another way to do this would be, go to your Type and you can go ahead and create outlines and now it made these into shapes. You can hit Command, Shift, G. It'll ungroup these and you can stagger those however you want. But now, you're just working with shapes and now we're not talking type anymore. So, I'll go back. We can also do expand and that will do the exact same thing. You also have the option to do show things, so there's glyphs. Let's go ahead and find those real quick, right here. Now, if you want to insert any sort of different glyph for anything with an accent mark or anything, maybe a copyright symbol. If it has it in here, in that typeface, you can go ahead and you just have to click where you want it to be placed, double-click on it in here and it'll show up there. You can even use different type, you can even use a different one from a different typeface, and add it in there if you wanted to. But yeah. So, I think that's all that I can for the fundamentals of type. I think we got everything covered. So, I hope that helped. Thanks. 11. Explore Design on Skillshare: way.