Getting Started with Adobe Illustrator for Surface Pattern Design

1. Introduction: Well, hello there, everyone. I am Amla Fall it and I am here to introduce you to getting started with Adobe Illustrator , which is my latest skill share class. I am an illustrator and a teacher and a coach and I focus on surface pattern design. And in this five part adobe illustrator class you will get introduced to all of the essential tools and techniques that you need to make progress more quickly. Either in your illustration work or in your surface pattern design work. I am super excited to have you join me. All you need is a subscription to Adobe Illustrator or you can try out a trial. There's a link below for a free trial. So hidden role and let's get started. I'll see you in class Bye for now. 2. Lesson One: Create a New Document & Take a Tour of the Tools: Hello, everyone, and welcome to getting started with Adobe Illustrator. I'm an low folate and I'm so excited that you decided to join me for this series of videos where I will walk you through the essential tools and techniques that you need for your illustration or pattern design work. Let's jump in tow. Lesson number one. This is going to be about how to create a new document inside Adobe Illustrator How to Change the Look of Your Work area? Or that what is called the canvas the auto say feature, which is really important so that you don't lose your work if the if illustrator crashes or you lose power for some reason, and then also just a general introduction to the tools and the menu bars that you see when you first get into the program. So I've already opened Adobe on my screen, which is what you are seeing in front of you. Toe open yours. Just double click the icon if it's down in your bottom toolbar on your PC or on your Mac, or just go to your applications menu and double click it there to open it. And this is the first screen that you'll see, and we're going to create a new document by just hitting. Create new over here on the left and this pop up menus. Actually movable, you can click and drag it along. If you just click and drag this top little bar, you'll see a bunch of presets here. And what's great about the presets is that as you become more familiar with the way in which you like to work and the dimension of the documents you like to create, you'll be able to keep the same those same dimensions and just click them very quickly to get started in a new document. I am going to start with 1000 by 1000 pixels because I post a lot on instagram, and so I always like to be working in a square format, but you don't need to choose that you could choose something else that is preset here, for example, in 8.5 by 11 piece of paper, which is in inches, but I'm going to start in pixels. If you want to input your own dimensions, you just need to come over here to where you have with and put in your 1000 and then go to your height and put in your 1000. And then this is a drop down menu where you can change your unit of measure if you'd like. And I'm going to keep it on pixels. I don't have to change my orientation because it's a square. I'm I only need one art board for now, and we'll get into art boards actually in the next tutorial. So I'm just gonna keep that at one. I don't need to change any of my bleeds. This is more for when we're doing printed work. And I don't need to change any other advanced settings so I can just hit, create, and we now have our first art board. So an art board is this White Square, and the art board is where we're going to import any work that we do or create any new work . And the canvas is this background color this dark gray. So I want to show you how do you can change the look of this background and also where toe auto save Teoh ensure you've selected the auto safe feature so that you don't lose any of your work and both of those. A swell as a few other features Air found under a illustrator cc up here, which is along your top menu bar and under preferences. And you want to click on general. So this is where all of the different preferences air housed and I'm going to show you a few of them. Let me show you units first, because this is a place where you can come to change your units. If you are, for example, in in inches you started an inch is for some reason, and you want to change two pixels or to another unit of measure. This is where you would change it. You'd come here to General, and you would just click on this down Ariel Arrow to see all the choices. And then you would change it from interest to pixels or from pixels two inches or toe one of thes other units of measure, the only units of measure that I work in or either inches or pixels. So I just wanted to share that with you. So this is where you would change your units then. If you want to change your unit, your user interface, you'd click on user interface and there are a couple of things you can do here. One is you can you can match your user interface brightness and what that means is, if you click here on dark, it will change everything in the background to this darker grey. Here is sort of the medium toned gray that I believe comes as your preset When you open illustrator for the first time and I just don't change it. If you want to have something that's a little bit later, you can click on this medium light or even something lighter. That's the super super bright of white, which I just find to be too bright. So I just leave it here on this medium. Grey, if you would like to actually match your art board, which is this square with your canvas collar, which is this background color, you would just hit white here, and that will actually change them to match. And this is totally personal preference. So I'm just gonna leave it the way I believe it is set when you get it from Adobe, because I just like to work this way and, um, but that just shows you how you can make a couple of changes, depending on how you might want to personally set your own set up. Then the next thing I want to do is go under file handling because file handling is where we're going to find the data recovery feature, which is very important to insure, has a check mark next to it. So when you come here, make sure there's a check mark next toe, automatically save recovery data every and minus set to one minute. You can change this to 30 seconds, which is the shortest amount of time available. What this is saying is that if you are working on a document and adobe crashes, which actually does not happen very much anymore, But should it happen, you'd only lose 30 seconds of work. So essentially not much, Not much work. It all would get lost. So it's really important to insurance. It's set and then you want to set it either to 30 seconds or toe one minute. I generally just keep it at one minute, and then that's those are the only change is that I'm gonna make in this preferences menu. So now I'm just going to click OK, so that covers the look of your work area or your canvas color that also covers how to set that auto save feature to make sure that you don't lose your worker only lose 30 seconds or a minute of your work. Now let's just talk a little bit about the layout of the menu, this tool bar area and then also the presets that air over here that are also extremely handy. So here, on the left hand side, is your toolbar, and what's great about this toolbar is as you hover over each tool, it will tell you what it's called. The other thing to note is that there are many of these tools. Have a little arrow. Looks like a little air oral triangle on the bottom right hand corner. And if you hover there and right click on your mouths, what's called a fly out menu pops up. And that just shows you that underneath the rectangle tool, which is the first tool that's shown in the toolbar, there are a whole bunch of additional tools, and we will definitely use some of these hidden tools. You just right click on that little arrow and then the fly out menu pops up and you'll see the additional tools that air underneath it. We'll be using some of these that are hiding, and I'll cover them as we go through each of those additional tutorials. So that is sort of great to no. It's also good to know that some very commonly used tools that will actually get into in the next lesson is how to move around your art board. And those are the hand tool and also the zoom tool. So it's good to know where those are and then also these items over. On the right hand side, your adobe illustrator may come with Essentials Classic set up here if you click on this down arrow. There's also a variety of other options that air here. Some of them are preset, and then I've actually created my own. I'm not going to get into having you set up your own, because it's really not necessary. And part of my goal in thes illustrator tutorials is to kind of get you to know what you need to know as quickly as possible so you can actually get into the fund artwork part if For example, you have a something different up here and you don't have color open. Here's where to find it. The window menu here is where all of these are hidden and to open them you just need to goto window so that this drop down menu appears and then color is right here and you can see mine's already open because it has a check mark. My art board is already open. My image traces already open, which is definitely one you want to make sure it's open on your computer as well. We're probably not going to use layers initially, but but if it is open, you can certainly leave it there, and you definitely want to make sure that swatches is open and on. And then I also have a little A few here of additional tools might transform my align in my Pathfinder. Those are already open with this essentials classic preset. You're going to be working with tools here on the left. You're also going to be then doing things to the items that are on your art board with tools that are over here on the right, and then you're going to be altering things. You'll also be making some alterations to some of your artwork with additional tools that are actually underneath this tool bar up here. And it will be a lot easier. And when we jump into actually working with something, But I just wanted this first introductory tutorial to be familiarizing yourself with the layout, What does it actually look like when you're inside your first document? What are some of these features called and also how to ensure that you've set your canvas color to your preference and also that you've set the auto feature. So that wraps up lesson number one. I can't wait for you to move on to Lesson Number two, where we will cover art boards, how to move around art boards and some of the most important selection tools. I will see you there. Bye for now. 3. Lesson Two: Moving Around Your Artboard: Welcome to Lesson number two. In getting started with Adobe Illustrator in Lesson number two, we are going to cover art boards and a variety of different things that you can do with art boards. We are also going to to cover moving around your work area and specifically using the zoom tool and the hand tool and a few other ways to quickly move out to see your entire work area and then finally will cover selection tools, including the lasso and the Eraser tool. So let's jump right in with art boards first, and I'm gonna show you how to do four different things with art boards. I'm going to show you how to resize them, how to create a new one and then also how to copy and delete them. So this is the art board that I created in our last lesson. It's 1000 by 1000 and let's say that I want to resize it. So what you would do is along the left hand toolbar very close to the bottom. Is this icon here? And if you hover over and it says it's the art board tool now what that does is it activates the art board, and you can tell that it's activated because it gives it a name. 01 our board one. And it now has these blue little lines around it, as well as anchor points on all the corners and at the midpoint of each of the square exterior. So if I want to resize it, I can just click and drag on one of these anchor points. I could also click and drag from the corner if I wanted Teoh. But if I want to actually enter a particular size, I can just go up here to my with and my height. So right now it's a kind of random numbers, and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to change it to 800 by 800 so that it's still a square, and now you can see that it's a perfect square again. And the reason I was able to enter a value under both with and height without them actually changing because this insignia and the center is actually what will either lock the constrain tool or keep it unlocked at the moment it's unlocked. If I hover over it, it's going to say, constrained with and height proportion, and it now turns into a lock or interlocking sort of like a chain link fence. If it's locked like that, if I change my whip to 1000 and then hit enter, it's going to change my height automatically to keep them in proportion. So that's a really good thing to know. If you want to again change them so that they're not constrained, just click on it again. And now I could change my height of 500 for example, and it will leave my width as 1000. So I'm just gonna go back to my 1000 by 1000 which is sort of my favorite size. So that covers re sizing. Now, if I want to create a new art board, I can I can click on the art board tool again and then just click and drag over in another area off my canvas. And again, this canvas is what I'm calling canvases, basically your background area, and I've created this. I can go up here and actually make sure that its numbers that kind of makes sense to me like maybe 2 50 by 500 so that it's got those. Those numbers are easier to remember, and then I can hit the like Victor on my keyboard, which is one of the selection tools I'm gonna cover in a second. And now I have to our boards. Some people like to work this way where they keep their main large art board for where they do the majority of their work. And some of their motifs might be on a small art board like this off to the side. You'll find different ways that you like to work, but it's great to just know how to create different art boards, and they don't all have to be the same size as you can see. So the other two things I wanted to show you how to do is how to copy art boards and also how to delete them. So my art board Panelists open over here on the right. If yours is not open, just goto window and thes air in alphabetical order, so art board is very close to the top and just click on it. Mine's already open because you can see it has a check mark next to it. So to copy and art board. All you do is click and drag it over this little insignia that looks like a piece of paper , and now all of a sudden I have two of them, and that can come in very handy if you want to replicate something that you're working on. If you have any artwork on the board, it will also copy it so that you'll have duplicates. If you want to delete this art board, you just click and drag it to this little trash insignia, and it will go away Now. What's important to note is it won't actually get rid of the artwork. So if I had duplicated both the art board an artwork that was on it, the artwork would still stay over here. It would just be on top of your canvas, and you would just click and drag over it if you and hit delete. If you wanted to delete it, and if you're on a PC, you would hit the back space key. So those are the four things I wanted to show you how to do with art boards. So let's move on now and talk about zooming in and zooming out which you've already seen me do quite a bit. So let me show you a variety of different ways to do that. The zoom tool is over here and your left hand toolbar. It's all the way close to the bottom, and it looks like a magnifying glass. And the keyboard shortcut that you definitely are going to want to remember is easy for Zoom. So if I am in the middle of my my work area and I hit Z like Zoom, you'll see that my cursor changes into a plus sign. If I click on the center of my art board and then I keep clicking on the center, it will continue to zoom further and further in. If I want to go backwards. All I need to do is hold down the altar or the option key, and now my magnifying class has a negative sign in it to remind a sign in it. So again, if I click while I'm still holding the option or the altar key, it will. I'll continue to zoom out further and further and further. Now, if I want to stop zooming, I need to hit the selection tool, which is again this super handy V like Victor tool that you'll end up using a lot. Now, that's one way to zoom in and out. Another way to zoom in is actually to click on the Zoom Tool or Z, and then click and drag on a new area of your art board. And you can continue to do that like zoom way, way, way in and again. If you want to zoom out because you've gone too far in, just hold down the option or the Ault Key and you'll get that minus sign, and then you can just click a couple of times and go backwards. Now this next action is very handy when you have been zooming in on your document, and now you want to go out and see your entire art board again. What you'll do is hit, command or control on a PC and zero to see your entire art board. Another handy tool is the hand tool, and the hand tool has a very handy keyboard shortcut age. If you click on it, you can basically move around your art board by just clicking and dragging on your with your mouse and that could be very convenient if there's a certain area that you want to zoom in on, and as I move into the selection tools were actually going to go to a document that I have , which is gonna make the zoom tools kind of come alive for you. So I clicked on this document, which is some floral sketches that I did for a project, and I want to walk you through a little bit more of the selection tool, which is this black arrow key that is automatically selected when you first start working. It's a very handy tool. I'm also going to show you how to use the direct selection tool, which is right below it. And the keyboard shortcut for the direct selection tool is a. And I'm also gonna walk you through the lasso tool, which is down here. And the keyboard shortcut is a Q, which kind of looks like a lasso, so that's not too hard to remember. And then the eraser tool is also a little bit further down on this left hand toolbar, and it luckily has a keyboard shortcut, which is shift plus E four eraser. So the first thing that I want to do is let's just play again with Zoom Tool. I'm gonna click on the Zoom tool, and I'm going to click and drag over this sort of little fern so that you can see we've gone way, way, way in to be able to look at it in more detail. Now, if I just want to pop out to see my entire art board again, I would just do, command or control zero. Now let's talk a little bit about the direct selection tool and what's different about the direct selection tool. What's great about this tool is that I'm going to zoom back out on my entire art board, this flower down here. It's grouped, and what I mean by that is if I click and drag on it while there are different elements inside it, they're all grouped together and the group feature. When you want to do that, it's command or control on a PC G for group, and we're gonna actually cover that in a in a later lesson. But it's nice for you to know about it right now. If I wanted toe ungroomed, I can right click on my mouse and go toe on group. And then if I click away from this flower and now I click and drag on it, you'll see that I've actually left some of these this color that I had added to it. And if I want to go backwards because I didn't want to actually detach those I'm going to do Command Z or Control Z if you're on a PC to go backwards one step and now I'm going to group these again by clicking and dragging over the entirety of the flower as well as all of these green pedals. And then I'm going to do command G on a Mac or control G on a PC and the reason I want to keep them grouped, as I want to show you now that if I click on the direct selection tool, let me zoom way in so you can see a little bit better what it is that I'm doing. If I collect, click on the direct selection tool and then I want to click on, for example, one particular element in this flower. It doesn't actually need to be selected for this to work, and so I'm going to click on the direct selection tool. And now I'm going to click on this portion of the my my flower and you can see it hasn't selected the whole flower, even though it's grouped, it's on. Lee selected these green elements, and so if I wanted to make some changes to these green elements, I could click, for example, on this anchor point, and I could click and drag the entire this entire element, and now I've sort of offset it a little bit more. And that could be fun for you to do as you get further into your design work. And if you want to go backwards, Command Z or Control Z on a PC is how you go back one step and frequently I may make a mistake and I want to correct it. And so, in order to go backwards and basically just erase that particular step, you just do Command Z, which is a super handy action to know how to do. So. That's how you use the direct selection tool. I'm just going to go back and click on my regular selection tool. I want to use the lasso tool next and the last so tool is very handy when you actually want to select an item that's very close to another item on your board. And so you click on it here in the in the toolbar. Or, if you remember the shortcut, it's que. And then you want to click and just start to draw around the element that you want to sort of have grouped. You can group it by doing command G and then de select the lasso tool by hitting V for this selection tool. And then you can click and drag it away so that it's you haven't actually activated or you haven't by mistake grabbed a portion of another element that's on your art board. Sometimes I will want to sort of quickly drag something by using the just what I did right there clicking and dragging. But then I might by mistake, if the's air elements are very close together, I might, by mistake, click this flower this particular motif, and I didn't want to do that. And so using the lasso tool will allow you to actually go and just do a very quick outline of the element that you want, and then you could move it away so that you could now start to color it or manipulate it askew for go further in your design work without actually impacting anything that was near it. And so that is a super handy tool to know about as well. So the last thing that I want to show you how to do is how to erase something and a couple of different ways to use the eraser tool. So the first way to use the eraser tool is if you've selected an item and you go to your left hand toolbar and you see that the eraser tool is right here and shift plus e is the keyboard shortcut. But I'm just gonna click on it now Let me actually use my zoom tool to zoom way in. Onda, let me click on the Eraser tool again. If I wanted to, for example, get rid off this portion of this leaf that is basically on the other side of the stem. I would just use my eraser tool and get rid of it by basically erasing it. And now you can see that that element that was on my flower is gone. If I want to bring it back. I can just do command Z a couple times to bring it back because I did two different actions , so I had to do that twice. And so that is one way to use the eraser tool. And if you wanted to get much more delicate, for example, if I just wanted to move, remove this area. I can use the bracket tools, the left hand and the right hand bracket tools will make your racer of bigger or smaller if you want to work in a very tight area of your document now, a different way to use the eraser tool is if you have a more complex element on your board . So, for example, let's look at this flower and let me zoom in on this flower if I want to erase just a portion of this green, but I don't want anything else on the flower to get impacted, I can double click on this particular area, and then I could go to my eraser tool and I can a race. And let's say that I'm making a mistake and I'm actually going over. A portion of I went actually went over a portion of the yellow. You can see that because I had double clicked and just selected Gone basically into a ah subgroup, and we'll definitely get into this more in future lessons. But for right now, I just wanted to show you that you can double click on on a grouped item and then Onley erase what you've selected without impacting another area. That's right near it. So let me just go backwards using Command Z or Control Z. If you're on a PC, I'm going to just go back to my selection tool. I'm going to double click to get rid of those layers and let's see what happens now. If I hadn't done that, I've clicked on my eraser and I'm going to now a race because I wanted to just erase the green and you'll see that I actually erased the yellow portion of the outline of my leaf as well. And since I didn't want to do that, I'm going to do command or control Z to go backwards so that I get that portion of my leaf back and let me show you again how I was able to just click on the, um, green portion So I clicked once on my entire flower and this flower is grouped. I'm now going to double click on just this green portion and you can see when I hover over it that it has a very faint ah blue outline around it. And if I click and drag on it, it is now moving away from the rest of the flower, and I'm going to move it backwards. But that's just to show you that. Now I'm inside the first layer of my flower in this subgroup. And now if I wanted to hit my eraser and I wanted to sort of just reshape this a little bit because I thought it was maybe a little bit too big, I can then do that. And if I made a mistake and remind my mouse he was just using my mouse. And so maybe I'm not that accurate. I can erase more of the green and not actually impact the leaf outline. I'm gonna go backwards just by clicking commands here, coming in command Z a couple times, and now I want to de select what I have just been working on, and I want to double click to get outside of that group and there you have it. That's actually a couple of different ways to use the eraser tool. I hope you enjoyed lesson to where we played with art boards. We also moved around your work area using several tools. And then finally, we walked through the very important selection tools, including the lasso and the Eraser tool. I look forward to seeing you in lesson number three bye for now. 4. Lesson Three: Essential Tools: Hello again. And welcome to lesson number three of getting started with Adobe Illustrator. In this lesson, we are going Teoh use shaped tools. We're also going to cover combining and dividing shapes and lines. And then we're also going to play with one of my favorite tools, drawing tools, which is called the Blob Brush tool. So let's jump in and get started with shaped tools and let me demonstrate. Here we are in the file that I created in the prior lessons is just a blank art board that's 1000 by 1000 and your shape tools are over here in your left hand toolbar, and they're all hiding underneath the rectangle tool. So if you hover over the rectangle tool, it'll pop up and the keyboard shortcut is M. And then there is also a fly out menu. If you click on this small triangle that's on the bottom right, you will get a fly out menu that shows you that there is a rounded rectangle tool. There's also an ellipse tool. There's a polygon, a star and a flare. So let's just get started with the rectangle tool, and we're gonna do a couple things with it, so if you click on it or again, you can click on em. You can create a rectangle in two ways. You can click and drag and then just release. And now you have a rectangle here, and you can go up here along the top of your menu area to see what its dimensions are. It's kind of a random dimension of eight of 1 18 by 1 43 but that's one way that you can do it, and it will automatically actually set a stroke for the um, for this particular item, you can see it has a black stroke and it has a white Phil. Now, if we wanted to reverse that, we could fill it by clicking on this little arrow. That means sort of back and forth shift. X will swap it. So I am going to leave it right now with actually a fill of black and no stroke, no stroke. What I'd like to do now is show you a different way to create a rectangle you could be. You're using the same tools. All you need to do is click on your art board and release and a little pop up menu will come up and now you can actually put in the dimensions that you want. So let's say we want a actual square, so I'm gonna put in 200 by 200 pixels and click OK, and now we have a perfect square. Now, since there are always a variety of ways to do things in Illustrator, you can actually make a ah square by by using the rectangle tool. And all you need to do is that as you're dragging out, you want to hold down the shift key, and the shift key will automatically turn this rectangle into a square. And if you release your finger on your mouth first and then your finger on the shift key, you can see that we now have a perfect square. So what I want to do now is I want to go to the next tool. I'm going to skip the rounded rectangle tool. For now, it essentially just creates thes same shapes with rounded edges. I'm going to go to the Ellipse tool because I want to show you how to make a on oval, and then the same rule applies if you want to create, actually a perfect circle. Just click and drag and hold down the shift key and then release your finger on your mouth first. And then the shift key second. And now you have a circle, and all of these shapes can be You can change their dimensions up here. And like we showed you in the last video, they're unconstrained. So if you wanted to change the circle that selected into a actual oval, you would just change one of these dimensions. Or if you wanted to ensure that it did stay as a square, you'd click on this little insignia, which now constrains the height and the width, and then you would just have to change one side to 200. And when you enter, it's gonna change the other dimension to keep it as a circle. So let's move on, actually to the next tool, which is the polygon tool, and you can click and drag the polygon if you'd like to create it, or you can actually click on your dartboard, and this is where you'd be able to change the number of both the radius. So let's make this 100 just for just for an experiment, and then you can change the number of sides, and so you can turn the polygon into a triangle by just changing again. All I did was I. Instead of clicking and dragging to create my shape, I just clicked on my art board and released to get this polygon pop up menu. And then you can change the radius, and you can also change the number of sides in order. Teoh change the shape and create the shape that you want. Let's do that also with the star tool because same the same rule applies. You can either click and drag to create your star shape. Or, if you want to, just click and release on your art board, and then you can change the number of points down to four down to three Rather. And then that's another way to get a triangle so you can play around with these various shapes. It's actually quite fun to experiment with them and what I wanted to show you next with how toe actually combine shapes. So I'm going to move this rectangle up to the top of my square, and I'm going to click and drag over both of these shapes, and I'm going to show you a couple of different ways that you can combine them. Let me get rid of a few of these shapes. I'm going to click on a shape and then just hit, delete or backspace if you're ana, if you're on a PC and I want to, uh, select both of these items again, and then if I go over to my toolbar along the left hand side, I want to find something that's called the shape builder tool. And it may be showing on your toolbar because it's actually the tool that's at the top of this set of tools. I must have been using my life paint book, a tool in a for some work that I was doing before I started recording this, and so the shape Villa tool was hiding underneath it. But you want to click on the shape builder tool and then to combine these into one shape you see, as I hover over them that you get a little grid and so all you need to do is click and drag through them, and then I'm going to use my selection tool, which is the like Victor. And now this is one shape, which is there could be very handy. If you wanted to try to create something that looks like this. You can create all kinds of interesting combination. So let's put this star on top of this circle. Let me click and drag over both of them to select them. And then I'm going to actually make a copy of this by holding down the option key. And my selection tool turns into two little selection tools once black and one's white. And then if I click and drag, I can make a copy. And while you need to do is release your finger on your mouse first. So let me just do that again. Let me get rid of a couple of these so we have a little bit more room, so I'm going to click and drag over my star and my circle. I'm going to hold down the option or the Ault key. Then you see my cursor changed from just one tool to one arrow to two arrows. Then I'm going to click with my mouse and drag, and then I'm going to release the finger on my mouse first and then the finger on the option or the all turkey and I now have another duplicate. We're gonna do a couple different things with these shapes that are going to be really fun for you to play around with. I'm going to select the 1st 1 that we had here, and I want to create one shape out of it, just like we did up here. So I'm going to go back to my shape builder tool, and the keyboard shortcut is shift em. And then I'm just gonna drag through the whole thing. And then I'm going to click away by holding my clicking on the V for the selection tool. Or you could go up here to hit it on, and now you can see that this is one shape. So if I move it, it's moving the star and the circle together. Now let's decide to do something different with this version. Let's decide that what we actually want to do is we want to divide it, so we're going to go back to the shape builder tool. But now, actually, you can see that when I first click on the shape builder tool it. The the cursor is a an arrow with a plus sign. If you hold down the option or the altar key that turns into a minus sign. And what that means is you can actually eliminate a portion When you're hovering over these items, you can actually eliminate or, uh, essentially delete one of these shapes. So let's just delete the shape that's here in the middle. And then I'm going to release my keyboard and go back to my selection tool in this time, I'm just gonna click it up here so that I'm de selecting it, and now we have a really interesting shape that has a little bit of a cut out on it. Now these air, not thes air not attached to each other. So if you click and drag them away, you can now use this, for example. And if you want to rotate it, just goto up one of the corners and then hold on your shift key so that you can rotate it and 45 degree angles, and then just release and then this shape you might find that you don't want to use it so you could delete it or you might decide that you want to use it for something else, but that's actually a great way to create really unusual shapes from other shapes. Now, another thing that we could do with this one is we could go back to our shape builder tool and instead, this time what I want to do is I want to get rid of this might not be particularly interesting, but I'm going to get rid of the circle part and I'm gonna hold down the option or the Ault Key. And now that it's highlighted and my cursor has still the arrow, but it's got the minus sign next to it, I'm going to click on the part that I want to get rid of. Now I'm gonna go back to I don't want to continue to use this tool. So the reason that you're so often using that selection tool, which is V like Victor on your keyboard, is because you want to switch between tools once you've selected one. So it's basically your de selection tool, so it doesn't look like they're two shapes in here. But if I click on it and it actually has created a separate shape Where the inside that inside portion Waas Um, it's a little bit hard to tell, but this is essentially the part of the circle that we kept when we got rid of the rest of it. So that's another interesting way to both combine and divide shapes. OK, so I want to show you how to do a couple of other things with lines. And so we're going to use the line segment tool, which is along your left hand toolbar, and it's right here. There are some other tools underneath it, though, so if you right click on the arrow, you're going to get an ARC tool and a couple of other things. But we're just gonna focus in this lesson on the line segment tool. So I'm gonna click on it, and then I'm going to click and drag and to keep this line straight, I am going to hold down the shift key, and then it will just move in 45 degree angles. If I wanted to make it, make it. If I wanted to shift it around. Now I'm going to go over to my swatches panel. And if your swatches panel is not open just goto window, and all of these are in alphabetical order. So swatches is near the bottom and you just want to click on it. And I want to switch from the fill, which is this first box. If you hover over it, you'll see that it's the fill box. I actually want to go to the stroke box, which is the rectangle that has her the square that has an empty square in the center. And I want to change this to a red color so we can see it a little bit better. And then the next thing that I frequently do when I'm using the line segment tool is I go up to my stroke here along the top of my toolbar, and I changed the weight to something fatter. So I'm gonna change it to ah, fatness or thickness of six. Now let's do another one of thes and on have it touch, And I'm now going to zoom way in, and I just want to show you how we can these air not currently joined. So if I click on one of my elements and drag it away, you can see that they're not attached, and I want to go backwards and do command Z to go backwards. You can also undo your last action by going up to edit, undo, and you can just undo the last action. But here's the keyboard shortcut cut, which I'm using all the time, which is command or control on a PC and the letter Z. This online is highlighted because you can see that there's a blue line in the center of it . So that's the one of selected right now. So I'm going to click on this anchor point at the bottom, and I'm gonna move backwards until I can try to get it to totally overlap with the one that is on the line on the left. I'm going to release. Then I'm going to select the two of them. I'm gonna write, collect and hit, join and see what happens. And so the reason that it's not perfect is because the angle of these two lines is not the same. But what you can also do, once they are joined, is you can go up to your stroke up to stroke along the top here, click on stroke and you get some options and you can change the cap, the corner and the align stroke. And so I'm going to see what happens if I click on round cap. And also, if I click on round join. And so did you see what happened? It changed to around corner, and so that looks a lot cleaner. What? It looked like this initially because it was actually a miter corner. And then, if I make it around, corner it, Ah, it actually looks much better. So that's how you can join two lines and also make it rounded at the bottom. Let's basically zoom way out so we can see our entire art board again. Let's play with the blob brush tool. So I am going to actually erase all of these items t to get to a really nice clean art board. OK, so we're going Teoh, click on the Blob Brush Tool and we have a red fill. I clicked it actually over here and let's see what happens when we start to just use it and draw it. It's actually I'm just using my mouse, and so I'm not going to get any variation in the weight of the line. You would get variation if you were using an iPad Pro or a Wacom tablet. But I keep things really simple. And so I primarily just if I'm going to do any drawing on my art board, I do. I basically just do it with the Blob brush tool. And what's great is that the Adobe illustrator has some settings that are basically keeping this changing my very sort of ragged line and making it smoothing it out for us so you can actually do some pretty nifty things with the blob brush tool. So I am going to try to make a little bit of a daisy, and you'll notice that although my actual strokes are kind of ragged, Adobe Illustrator is actually smoothing them out for me. And actually creating a kind of cute little design experiment with it have a lot of fun. There's all kinds of fun shapes that you can make you could make. You can try to make your own like little store so that it's more organic and it will have. It will maintain some of of the movement from your hand using your mouths, but it will also smooth out these lines really quite nicely just to recap we covered using the shape tools, combining and dividing shapes using the shape builder tool. And we also did a little bit of drawing with the blob brush tool. All right, that was it for lesson number three. Thank you so much for hanging with me in these adobe illustrator lessons. I will see you in the next video and bye for now. 5. Lesson Four: Common Actions: I am super excited to be here with you For lesson number four, you are doing great. You know, a lot of people sign up for courses and then they never actually watched any of the videos . And so if you are here with me, congratulations. I am super excited that you're here. And as we go deeper, we're doing more and more fun things. I'm going to jump in right now to these common actions that are going to be very, very handy in your pattern design work or in your illustration work. And so what you're seeing on my screen is on the left hand side. Here is this pattern that I created that has the little Deer Head, and it also has sort of a little wispy kind of garland on the bottom. And then there's also a background texture. So I'm going to start with the duplicating and copying and also sort of re sizing to show you how to do those. So let me click first on this with this first deer head, and the fastest way to actually make a duplicate of something is to hold down the option or the altar key. If you're on a PC and all of a sudden your cursor, can you see what just happened? So let me take my finger off the option or the Ault key. And I have the selection tool, which is the black Arrow tool. If I hold down the option or the altar key, it turns into two little arrows, a little black one and a little white one. And then if I click and drag with my mouse and then I release my mouse first and then I released the key that's on my keyboard. I've made a duplicate, and so that could be super handy when you are working with the pattern and you want to create some duplicates, and then you also potentially want toe oriented them slightly differently. So one really quick way to rotate your element is actually just to go up to one of the corners until you see the selection tool, turn into left and right arrows and then just click and drag and you can click. You couldn't hold down the shift key, and it will just go in 45 degree angles, which I think I showed you in a prior video or you can just freeform rotate to your heart's content to make this motif look a little bit different. So that is actually the super easy way to rotate something to scale this item there a couple of different ways. You can do it, you can select it, and then you can go to one of the corners and then just click and drag, and that will change the size of it. But it won't necessarily keep the proportions the same. So if you see, I'm moving off to the right and I've made it really fat. And then I moved off to the left. I have made a really skinny, so if I actually want Teoh, I'm going to go backwards by clicking my Command Z or Control Z. If you're on a PC just to get it back to be the same proportion that I had originally. If I want to make sure that I am increasing in or decreasing in size proportionally, still go to one of the corners and then you want to hold down the option key on the shift key, and then you can scale it up or down proportionally. Now that will actually keep it in exactly the same location, which may be convenient for you at some point if you want to scale something up or down, but leave it exactly in the same place where its center is located, you hold down the option and the shift together and then either go in or go out. And when you're making patterns, that can be super convenient, because you may be filling in a hole in a pattern and you want to keep the object that's actually in that location in exactly the same place. Now, if you're not, if you're less concerned about that and want to still scale it proportionally, go to one of the corners, hold down the shift key and then you see that it's actually increasing and do curson in size from this upper left hand corner. If I was toe, do it from the lower left hand corner and hold down the shift key, it's a Z you can see it's basically keeping this antler pretty much in place, and it's just wrote, it's just increasing the size from the left. Okay, so what I want to show you next is how to reflect this particular little sprig over to the on the right hand side so that you can get this type of a little garland here and these are both identical. They're exactly the same. And so what I want to do is I'm going to click on one, this one hold down the O on my keyboard, which is my reflect tool. When I hit it, you're going to see that my cursor changes. And what that will do is if I actually right now, the reflect insignia is actually right here. It's a very, very small little blue anchor points. I'm going to go to the zoom tool and I'm going to zoom in so you can see better what it is that I'm doing clicking on the object that I want to reflect. Then I'm holding down the okey, and I'm gonna hold it until I figure out where I actually want to place this reflected object. I'm then going to click, and now I'm going to remove my finger from the okey and come down to the option or the altar key on the PC, and all of a sudden that has changed with four little lines below it. So I'm going to click again, and that is going to reflect my item. You can see it's now popped over to basically a 90 degree angle and I want to copy it. I don't want to hit okay, because that will just move it. I want to copy it. So I'm gonna hit copy, and then all of a sudden, you see that I have my two little sprigs and they're kind of attached at the bottom. So where I placed my cursor was not exactly where I had it in this particular version. So what I can do now is just click on this guy and I can kind of move him over, and I could do it by hand. And if I hold the shift key down, it will keep them sort of aligned with each other so I can do my final adjustment That way . Now, these are not grouped. So if I click and drag on one of them, I'm gonna move it. And so I'm going to go command Z to go backwards. And if I want to make sure that these now stay the way they are, I want a group of something to do command G for grouping. All right, so I'm gonna have another duplicate of my little sprig. And this time I want to rotate it So I zoomed away in So you can see this per sprig up close I'm not gonna hit are on my keyboard And if I hold the are down you can see that my cursor changed You can see this blue dot And if I click on the blue dot I can move it to a different location The first place it will always go is actually the sort of centerpoint of this particular motif. And if I don't do anything else, if I just click and drag I can rotate my item around that center point Let's do one more thing with the rotate tool I've selected my sprig I'm holding down the r key and I'm now going to hold down the option keys that I get the three dots. If I click again, I'll get the pop up menu that shows me 90 degrees. I'm gonna hit copy and then to repeat that motion. All I need to do is hold down the command or control Chiana P C and D and do that several times command D or control de on a PC to create what you see on your screen right now. So the next thing that I want to show you how to do is I want to actually show you how you can split on item down the center and then create additional copies of it that actually look exactly the same left to right. So the reason that this might be helpful is that I hand drew this little deer head and you can see that it's kind of a little bit funky. It's actually I think it looks great. But when I put it into my pattern, you can see that it isn't exactly straight. It has a little bit of, ah, sort of funky rotation because the right and the left side are not identical. And so what? I might still like it because it's more organic. But if I wanted to duplicate the left hand side or the right hand side, which is what I've done here, essentially, I cut this in half, which I'm gonna show you how to Dio. And then I made a copy of it and reflected it so that I could have it to be identical on both sides with this left hand left hand half, and then I did it again, using the right hand half the first thing I want to show you how to dio. It's how to cut this in half. So I'm going to zoom in by using Z on my keyboard, and then I'm going to click and drag with my marquee to bring this closer so that we can see what we're doing. And then the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the Sisters Tool and the scissors tool is actually hiding underneath your eraser tool. And so you come over to your left hand toolbar. You want to right? Click on the eraser so that you get the fly out menu and then click the city's tool. The keyboard shortcut is see, my cursor has changed into the sea, and I'm going to click on this top portion of my dear head for one of my clicks. Then I'm going to click down here on the bottom portion of my dear, and then I'm gonna go to my Pathfinder tool. And if you're Pathfinder isn't open just goto window and these air all in alphabetical order. So go down the Pathfinder and click on it to open it. And I'm going to click here on divide and you can see now my cursor is still using the scissor tool. So I want to de select it by hitting V like Victor on my keyboard. But you can see now I've got a line through this deer head I have to ungroomed at first cause it's going to keep it grouped initially. So I right click hit on group now click away and now I can move Ah, half of the deer head away. And now you can see that this is the half I'm going to duplicate to create this dear. And this is the half I'm going to duplicate to create that dear select the half that we want to duplicate right click, go to transform, reflect we want to reflect it basically vertically. So we're going to click on vertical orientation here and we're gonna make sure that it's saying that it's 90 degrees because we want to keep it basically in the same orientation and then instead of just clicking OK, which we just rotate the 1/2 we had. We actually want to copy it, so we're gonna hit copy. And now we have two halves. Now they're in the opposite order that we would like. So I'm gonna click away from them, grab one of them, hold my shift key and slide it over. And the reason I'm holding my shift key is I want to make sure that I'm keeping it in line so that I can now unite it. But I need to fill in the center. You can tell that it's it. Looks like I did a pretty good job of uniting them down here. So let me hit the Pathfinder again. Go to Pathfinder. This time you're gonna hit you night. And so it combined them down here. This shape now has this big V in It is I would go to the Blob brush tool and I would just paint it in. I would be careful to make sure that go on staying sort of within the lines. And then because I'm sort of doing this a little bit organically, it doesn't have to be perfect, but I don't want there to be any sort of little open spaces up there, so it carefully kind of fill that in. And then I would you would basically de select the Blob brush tool. And now I have one shape, and it's basically identical, left and right. If I want to smooth this area up here, I would go up to my smooth tool. And the smooth tool is hiding under the shape or tool along this left hand toolbar. So if you if you see this insignia, which is basically looks like a pen, and it also has, like almost tiding with the circle behind it, then right click on that and you're smooth tools underneath there, and the keyboard shortcut is you. You need to make sure that your item is selected first, then click on smooth. And then we can just click and drag over this area just to smooth it out a little bit, that I'm going to de select the smooth tool by hitting V on my keyboard, and now we have a really pretty and totally symmetrical deer head. Let me zoom back out so you can see my whole art board by holding command or control on a PC zero and Now you can see that we basically duplicated this guy. So let's do it again. One more time with the other side. I'm going toe zoom in. So might the fastest way for me to zoom in is to Z on my keyboard and then use my marquee to click and drag over the item that I want to zoom in on And then I consume any even closer by just clicking on it. I want to de select Zoom now by hitting V on my keyboard that we're going to rotate it so that we can just do it in a different way than we did the prior time. So I'm gonna hit it selected I'm gonna hit that reflect tool that we talked about before. I'm going to make sure that my marquee, which currently is in the center of the deer head it's basically in the center of essentially this entire shape. I want to make sure that it's kind of down here somewhere, So I'm gonna click down here. Then I'm gonna hold down my option or my all to key so that I get those little dots. I'm gonna click again and I want to make sure that I'm in a 90 degree angle, so it's exactly reflecting. And then again, I want to make sure I get a copy because I don't want to just hit. Okay, that would just move it. I want to get a copy. And so now this time, the deer head has looks like it's connecting here up at the top instead of at the bottom. So I'm gonna de select my reflect tool. Now, what I want to do is I want to highlight both sides so that I can connect the head up here . I'm gonna go back up to Pathfinder and hit Unite, which is the 1st 1 of these. It's basically bringing two shapes and uniting them together. So now we can see that this is one entire shape. I'm now going to use my blob brush tool just over here along the left hand side, and I'm going to just paint in this center line to fill it in. Then let me just do a teeny bit more of an adjustment there. Now I'm going to de select the blood brush tool by getting V, I'm going to select the item so that I can actually maybe do a little smoothing down here. Gonna go to my smooth tool and I'm just going to slowly smooth over that area. And it actually created kind of a center point, which is nice doing a de select the smooth tool by hitting V on my keyboard. And now we have a different looking deer head, which is also totally symmetrical. That looks different from the other one because the antlers air different and let me pop back out so you can see the whole our board command. 00 But essentially, that is showing you a bunch of different ways that you can use the reflect tool and the rotate tool and how you can also use the scissors tool, how you could make duplicates and you can do re sizing. Congratulations on making it through lesson number four. I cannot wait to see you in the next lesson. So bye for now. I'll see you there 6. Lesson Five: Additional Techniques: Welcome back to lesson number five. I am so thrilled that you're here. Let's jump in tow less Number five, where we're going to cover a line tools also simplifying paths and using the outline mode. What you're seeing on my screen are some florals that have created, and I want to show you a variety of different ways that we can actually align them on our art board or actually within a project you might be working on. So the first thing I'm going to do is I am going to select of the flowers by holding down my shift key so I can select all four of them here that are on my white art board. Then I'm gonna go to my align tools. I'm going to click on the line. If you're a line. Tools are not open already. Just goto window and click on a line, which is here in this alphabetical ordered list. Then there are actually some additional options that are not showing at the moment. So if you go up to this little hamburger or these three parallel lines, click on it and then say show options, it's going to be important to periodically look at what you're aligning to. So if I click on a line to right now, it's saying that it's going to align to a selection, meaning that anything any action that I take right now is going toe aligned these two themselves, essentially. And if I wanted to actually align them to my art board, I would click on a Leinart board. But let's a stick with a line to selection first. So with these four selected and with my align panel open, I am going Teoh horizontally, a line center, all four of those motifs you can see that they're now horizontally aligned to week basically to each other, and now what I'd like to do is distribute them evenly. So I'm going to click on Vertical Distribute Center, and that aligns them all perfectly here on the art board, which is really great. So then, if I select them again and this time I go to aligned to the art board, if I click on a line, objects to the center, it's gonna click and move them all to the center of my art board. I'm gonna undo that since it's going over my other artwork that I want to demonstrate use in the next demonstration. So now let's say that I have a situation like this where I'm either working maybe on an imitation or an illustration, and I want to align these objects to also to each other. So I'm going to click on them. I'm going to make sure that I have a line to selection. And then again, I'm going to this time vertically aligned them on this white line in exactly the same location you can play around with all of the other options that are in here. Another one that I'll just quickly show you is if I want to click on all four of these flowers, and I want to make sure that I'm on a line. Teoh actually key object this time, but I want to distribute them differently in terms of how much space there is between them . And that's where you would do this. Distribute spacing. Right now it's at 50 pixels, so let me click on vertical distribute space and see what happens. It moved them slightly farther away. If I want to decrease this, for example, I can either use those up and down arrow keys. Or I could just change this to a number if you could enter. Actually, nothing happens. You need to make sure that you enter the value and then you click on vertical distribute space, and now they have all moved close closer together. There's now spaced by 25 pixels, and you can do that with either orientation. So I did it with the vertical orientation. But let's do it here now with ease, motifs. Let's make sure that I'm aligned to a key object. Then we've got the 25 pixels, and now I'm going to do horizontal distribute and they're moving slightly farther apart. And if I don't like the fact that they're farther apart, I can select them again. I can make sure that I got a line to key objects, and then I can change this number down to maybe 15 pixels, and you can cleave toggle ing with that number to make them be their closer or farther apart or whatever looks best to you. So that is how the align tools work. Now I'm going to click over to my second art board, and one way to quickly I've clicked on it. So you may have noticed up here that with my art boards open if I click on this art board, this art boarded our board. One is highlighted. If I click on this art board to was highlighted, but it didn't actually move me over there. A quick way to move over. There is just a click on it again, and then all of a sudden it will not come into the center of your screen. Now what I want to do is this is a motif that I hand drew very roughly, as you can see. And then I brought it into illustrator and I image traced it. And now what I want to do is I want to simplify the paths inside here. And I also want to go into outline mode to show you how to use that So outline mode can be convenient and, ah, helpful tool. It's basically command. Plus why, or on a PC, It's control and why That will now basically change this into an outline. And the reason that this is helpful is if I zoom in even closer. You can see that when I image traced this particular item, it picked up a couple of little random bits over here. And so I can an outline mode, go and ungroomed this item, and then I can select these little bits and I can't actually erase them. This one is inside another path, so I can't do that with that one. But I can do it for this one that's on the outside. So I was able to delete the items that are on the outside those little extra bits that are on the outside of this motif. But I also want to get rid of the ones in the middle. But if I click on the ones that are sort of inside this outline, I it selects the entire outline. And so if I were to, for example, hit delete, it's gonna get rid of the entire outline, which is not what I want to do. In order to be able to go deeper into this motif, I can double click on one of these elements and have now gone inside one layer, and I can now click on an element that's essentially sort of hiding in here, and now I can delete it to clean this up, which is what I wanted to dio and to go back out from being inside this layer. You can either hit this arrow key to go back one level and then back again to get out of it . Or you could just double click on the outside of your motif. Now, what I would like to do is I'd like to select this and I want to go to object path simplify , and what this is going to do is give us a pop up menu, and this little pop up menu has. I haven't clicked on preview yet because leaving it here in the curve precision at 50% it's going totally distort the shape. So watch what happens to the shape. When I hit the preview and were at this 50% it really distorts the outline. And that actually is not the effect that I'm looking for. I am going to move this curve precision line up towards 100%. Now you can see that it's essentially gone back to the shape that I had before. One of the reasons that you use simplify paths or the goal of using simplify paths is actually to try to maintain as much of the integrity in your shape it's possible while reducing the total number of points, because that will actually save you space on your computer. And it will smooth out your edges slightly while still keeping sort of a hand drawn feel for your item. You're a motif. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go down slightly to maybe 97% and I'm going to check the number of pat points. So I've gone now from 187 to 1 53 So a little bit of a reduction. And if you continue to watch the courage er off the lines, if I go down maybe to 95 again, it just very slightly re orients where all of these anchor points are and continues to save me additional points. I'm now down to 111 so I could continue to play with this to see, sort of How far do I want to push it while still maintaining the integrity of the sort of wonky shaped that I wanted? So I might stay at 91% and now I'm actually reduced this number by more than half and now I can hit. Okay, Now, what I might want to do is I might want to select each one of thes interior bits, which I can do by just clicking and holding down my shift key as I go around to select all of them. If I select all of them, I can then improve them as well from being quite as kind of wonky as they look right now. By going back up to object path, simplify. And I get the simplification again now, at 91%. Maybe I didn't like a few off the shapes and how they changed so I could go back up to 100% to remember kind of. Well, what did they look like when I drew them? So now if I go down to maybe 97% I'm haven't really changed the points that much have gone from 1 24 to 1. A one. So now I'm going to get out of outline mode by going command. Why? Or control? Why? On a PC? And we can see now what this shape looks like. If I would still like to do some additional sort of hands moving I can select the item again and we can go back and use our smooth tool. And I might, for example, just want to smooth this particular portion by clicking and dragging over it slightly. Or I might want to actually de select the smooth tool and click on this particular item and move it slightly so that it's maybe more centered inside this portion of this little sort of fake flower. And so there you have it. In this lesson, we covered how to align objects both to themselves to the art board and two other selections. We also played with simplifying paths and using outline mode. Don't forget to watch the bonus lesson where I'm going to go over image trace and color palettes. I'll see you there. Bye for now. 7. Bonus Lesson: Welcome back. This is the very special bonus lesson that I have recorded for you in it. We are going to go through image tracing and also color palettes. Let's jump in. What you see on my screen right now is actually an image of a photograph that I took off my some artwork that I did. You can scan in your artwork if you like, and I actually teach you how to do that in my from sketch to wrapping paper class. But you also can just take a photograph of it and then import your photograph straight into Adobe Illustrator. That's what I've done in this particular case. What I want to do next is I want to go to my image trace tools. And if your image trace toolbox is not open on your screen, just goto window and then scroll down to image trace to open it. With my artwork selected, I'm going to go to this preset drop down menu, and I'm going to pick black and white logo, and that is going toe automatically start to turn my artwork into vector shapes. And what's great about vector shapes is that once you have converted your artwork into a vector shape. You can scale it up and down indefinitely without losing any integrity at all. You can play around with the threshold here if you want to. I actually think these came out great. They're already certainly black enough. They might infect these slightly to black if I'm create less than it will re generate the image. And maybe you notice that here these became a little bit more separated. So what I always pay attention to is I want to make sure that I am still keeping the integrity of these lines that you see. The next thing that I do is I click on Advanced and this drop down is usually closed. All you need to do is click on the arrow and then this will open and I want to click on Ignore White because that is going to get rid off the basically the color in the background . That was originally the piece of paper that I was using. You can't really tell that it's there, but it is actually there. And so I'm gonna click, Ignore white, and that will then generate the image one last time. And now it's really important that you click expand. And if you're not on Adobe Illustrator CC, you're expand. Feature may not be up here along your menu bar. You may need to go find it under object expand, but I'm going to click. Just hit the button because it's right here on my own, and you and you can see that it's now expanded these items because it there now all tinged with blue. Now the last thing I need to do before I can actually start playing with them is right. Click on my mouse and go toe on Group, and then I'm gonna click away from them. And then now I'm going to see whether or not I can actually click on them individually, and I can now. The last thing that's very important to do when you have image traced items is you want to group them. If I click on click and drag on my pansy, I'm going to lose these interior marks. And so I'm going to do Command Z to go backwards. And in this particular case, since it's a little tight in terms of where these different flowers are, there kind of close together, I may not be able to click and drag in order to get it entirely, because then I'm going to actually touch this other element. It's a little sprig of lavender, so I'm gonna click away, and I'm actually going to use the lasso tool. And so the lasso tool will allow me to actually just go around this image, not touching anything else. Close my loop, and then I could do Command G, which will group this elements together. Then I need to de select my lasso tool by hitting the young my keyboard, and now I can click and drag and move my little pansy away. I always do this to make sure that I am keeping myself really organized before I actually add color to any of my motifs. Or before I start actually, the creation that pattern design, creation, process or illustration work that I might be doing now there's a whole cleanup process that's really important. Once you've actually digitized your artwork and I go through that in a variety of my classes, so I'm not gonna cover that here. Now I'm going to come over to this second art board that I have where we're going to talk about color palettes. I've imported a photograph that I took. This is a pretty bouquet, and what I want to do is I want to pull some colors out of it in order to create a pretty color palette. And this is a great way to take your own photographs and create your own color palettes so that you are truly creating your own unique work That's not referencing really anyone else's work. So what I like to do is I actually like to go get the Ellipse tool and I just hold down the shift key to make little circles. And then I like to copy a few of them. So let's say maybe we're gonna get pick seven colors out of this bouquet with my circle selected. I'm just gonna hold down the option or the altar key on the PC, and I'm gonna click and drag to make a duplicate. I'm gonna release the finger on my mouse, and now I'm just going to do command or control on a P C and D like duplicates in order to make a bunch more duplicates across the top of my page. Now what I want to do is click this 1st 1 and then hit I on my keyboard, which is the keyboard shortcut for your eyedropper tool. And I am just going to click on one of these little beautiful lavenders. I can toggle back and forth between selecting by next dot if you will in the next circle and then keeping the eyedropper tool if I just hold down the command or the control key on the PC. And now I can click on my next circle, and when I released having after having clicked on it, I still have the eyedropper tool. So that's just a great little shortcut to go back and forth between two tools that you're using. So all I'm doing is I'm using the selection tool, and then I'm using the eyedropper tool. And the way to toggle back and forth between those two is to hold down the command or the control key on the PC. But I'm gonna pick one of these pretty sort of very, very light greens again. I'm gonna hold down the command or the control key, click my next circle, and then when I release it, I now have my eyedropper tool again, Basically keep going until I feel like I have ah, couple of different purples that I really like. That might be a little bit too dark. Color palettes are, ah whole thing in and of themselves, the way in which I address color in general, as I always want to make sure that I have some neutral tones. And then I also want to make sure that I have colors that are in the same family that that I have selected in both lights and darks. Let me show you know how to save this palette. The first step in the process for saving your colors as a color palette is to click and drag over all of the ones you want to put into one color palette kind of set. Then you go to your swatches panel and all you need to do is click on this little folder. And if you hover over the folder here all the way over on the right, it will tell you that it's a new color group, and if you click on it, I can now give us a name so I can say that this is going to be my baby. It's lavender and green colors, and then you just click, OK, and then now you can see that it's sitting over here in my swatches panel. The last thing that I wanted to show you about color palettes is you want to save this if it's something that you really like, and you decide that you're gonna use it several times and you want to be able to find it again and use it in a different piece of art that you're creating. You want to make sure that you go to your swatches panel and you click on the hamburger. Click on that and then go save Swatch Library as a I. I'm going to give it the same name, which was lavender and green colors. It's are automatically going to be saved in the Adobe Illustrator Swatches panel, and then you just have to click save if I just toggle over to a different piece of work that I have so a different document. Now, if I want to actually access those colors again, I am going to go to my swatches panel and go to the little hamburger menu or those three parallel lines click on it. And this time, goto open Swatch library, then scroll all the way down to user defined. And then you will see a list of all of the color palettes that you may have saved in the past. And so I have lots of color palettes that I've saved over the years. So I'm going to go and they're all in alphabetical order. So I'm going to go find the one that is called lavender, green, lavender and green colors. I'm gonna click on it and on a pop up menu will show up this whole puppet box, and here it is. You can see it right there. And to bring it into my swatches panel. All I need to do is click on the folder and it'll pop right over into your swatches panel. That is actually how you can create a color palette from a photograph, how you can save your color palette into your swatches panel and then also permanently save it so that you can use it on other pieces of work. Thank you again So much for taking this class with me. I hope that you've enjoyed getting started with Adobe Illustrator. And if you'd like to go deeper. My most popular pattern design course on skill share is called from sketch to wrapping paper. And this is the perfect time to take that class because you'll learn how to make a beautiful repeating pattern with your own designs, and you can turn it into wrapping paper in time for Christmas. So please check that out. I hope to see you there and again. Thanks so much and bye for now.