Intermediate Course in Adobe Illustrator With New AI and Other 2025 Features

1. Introduction to Intermediate Illustrator: Welcome to the intermediate part of Illustrator for desktop. If you haven't seen the first part, go back and have a look at the beginner level. If you already know some Illustrator and you want to jump straight into this one. Welcome. If I mentioned things that you're not sure, you can always go back and have a look at the other course. We've got so many cool things that we're going to be covering in this course here. So fast, anything else is jump straight in. 2. Arranging Artwork & Layers: So this section is all about arranging or artwork. And we're going to use so many different things to do that, apart from the obvious like rulers and guides, There's always of lining your artwork up, distributing the various items, putting it into layers that we can layer not just the objects, but groups of objects easily as well. The great thing about this particular lesson is going to be the project. We're going to make a map. It's going to be this really, really cool map. And of course, you might not actually be into making maps, but you can use these techniques for any sort of artwork. So go through the lesson and then come through in a step-by-step way, we'll create something awesome. 3. Arranging Artwork - Bring to Front: Let's have a look at arranging our work. What I want to do now is to have a look at how we can move objects in front of each other or behind each other. Now, I've got six different shapes on my art board here, starting with the one that's right at the back, which is this orange shape over here. You see if I move it around, it's behind everything else. Now, I can do two things. From the menu, I can either move it right to the front of all of those objects, or I can just move it in front of the object that it's behind. Show you what I mean. I've clicked on the orange objects, so it is selected. I used the selection tool for that. And I'm going to go to the Object menu. I'm going to go to arrange. And over here I've got bring to the front or bring forward. If I choose, bring to the front, you'll see it'll move it in front of all of the objects which are there. Let's undo that. So this is either Command Z or Control Z, depending on your Mac or PC. If I go to object, arrange and then use bring forward, what happens is it moves it one object forward at a time, so it'll move it in front of the purple object. Once again, if I go to Object, arrange, Bring Forward, do the same thing. It's moving at one food, at one object, food at a time. Now you can do exactly the same thing using Send Backwards of sent back, sent back home, send an object right way to the bottom of the pile of objects or send backwards, we'll go one object at a time. The other way that we can work is to use the layers panel. Now, if you can't see the layers panel minus up over there. But it's also available in the Window menu. You can go down and find layers in here. So here's my Layers panel. And if I click on the little arrow, that little arrow there next to where it says layer one. It shows me the objects which are in this stack. Now you'll see that the purple shape is the back most object. If I clicked on that and I used the Object menu Arrange, and I brought that to the front. You'll see how it'll change the stacking order in there. But of course, the other thing we can do is we can just go into the Layers panel here and just drag something around. I could take this blue object and just drag it right up to the top or the green object and bring that to almost the top of the second one from the top over there. So two ways of moving objects around. Sometimes you'll find it's easier to use the layers because it's much more visual. But if you've got a large job and thousands of shapes in there, then occasionally it will be better to go to the Object menu and use a range to bring an object to the front or the back or move it one object at a time. As always, have bit of fun with that. 4. Cut & Paste: Now as well as being able to move things up and down the stacking order by using the layers panel and dragging around us we've just looked at or by going to the Object menu and using our range option. We can also use cut and paste. If I click on this green rectangle, which is behind the other two, you can see there it is at the bottom. And I go on to the Edit menu. I can cut it. And then I can go to the Edit menu and I can choose Paste to paste it in the front of those other objects. The downside you can see is that it's actually moved. It, it was over to the left here, it's now put it right in the middle. Let's undo that. So if you go to the Edit menu, you'll find that you can use paste in place and that will paste it in exactly the same position that it was cut from. Now, we've got some other options in there as well. You can also use paste in front, which is pretty much like paste in place at the moment, or paste in back to paste it right at the back. Now of course, this also works with copying. So I can choose to copy an object, and then I can paste a copy of that object in front of the existing one, or behind, or in the same place, right in the front as well. We've got one final option in there, which when we get to art board will have looked at and that is paste on all art boards. 5. Group & Ungroup: I've got a whole bunch of objects on my art board. This is like a clock face with all the items going around the outside. Now, the thing is, when you're working with multiple shapes like this, very often you want to keep them as a group. Now, let's open up the Layers panel over here so you can see all of my objects in there. To group objects together. Just select them. So I'm using the selection tool that's the black arrow top-left on my case. I'm going to click and drag over them to select them all. And then I'm going to go along to the Object menu and choose Group. You can see there's a shortcut there which is either control or command G to select them. Now in my layers panel over here, I've got a group of objects and I can still see them individually in there. So this means that when I click on one of them, they will all select at the same time. Of course, what about if I wanted to? Well, first of all, just change one of them. Well, I could select everything, go to the Object menu and choose Ungroup, which ungroup them all. And then I can select them again, like so, but that seems a long way round. So a slightly faster way. Let me just group all these together again. Just go to the one shape over there and double-click. And this now takes me into isolation mode. So I've actually gone into the group itself. Now, at this stage, I can then click on those objects individually so I can select that object there, go along to my properties, change the color, do whatever I want to do with that. And now to get out of this isolation mode or from within the group, you just double-click elsewhere. And I'm now back again to the group. Everything is the same as it was in my initial group. Once again, it's really useful, especially when you work on a large job with lots of objects. Try it out. Okay. 6. Nested Groups & Isolation Mode: So I've got four little shapes over here, circles just getting smaller and smaller. And I want to make sure they stay in exactly that position. So I'm going to use my black arrow tool, select them all. And I'm going to go to object and group them together. And once again, if we have a look in the layers panel, you see they're all grouped together and there are my little shapes in there. But of course, I then want to take those and add more of them. And I'm going to get them to spin around the outside. Now this is something we looked at in the last chapter of getting repetition. I'm going to select all these objects. I'm going to go over to my rotation tool. I'm going to move to the point where I want to rotate them around. Hold down the Alt key, and just click once. And then I can rotate them on US 30 degrees in here and click copy. And then I'm going to use either Command or Control D to repeat that process all the way around the outside. Now once again, I want to make this into a group. Now remember, I've grouped those already. So I've got lots of groups in here. But of course I can still select all of these shapes and go to Object and go down to group once again. So I've now got groups within groups. You'll see in here if I go into that group that I can open it up and I can see the groups. I can then go into a group, open them up, and see the individual objects. So what about if I want to change the color on one of these? Well, first thing I do is double-click to go into my group isolation mode. And if I click on that, you'll see that is still now grouped. If I double-click a yen, I'm now inside this group, within a group, within a group. And I can then click on there. I can change the color. Just make that one a blue. And then I double-click to come out of isolation mode. Once again, this is still grouped together as one shape. Once again, to give it a go. 7. Layers Introduction: So let's have a look at some layers. Now. I've got this little example of this blue water. Well, I suppose it could be a poster for a shop or a label, but we've got a number of different items on here. So there is the goldfish color background over there. We've got the little logo, the fissure, the whale in there, and we've got some other text in here. Let's have a look at this in terms of layers. And if I go to my layers now and click on the little drop-down, That's the little arrow next to where it says Layer 1. You can see that we've got a group over here which is bit of text. Could another group which is a bit of text in there, and another group over here, which is this bit of text in here. Down further on, we've got some colors for the well itself. And finally at the bottom is our background. So how are we going to sort this out? Because the problem here is if I want to move something and I go to select it now when to click, let's say on the tail for example, and I just missed, I might end up moving the background by mistake. Likewise, when I want to move the text, if I don't get it exactly perfectly on, I'll end up moving the background. So we've got a few things we can do. First of all, I could go through here and say, well, I want to lock down the background for now, that's the background. I can lock it. And then maybe I want to lock the fishes. Well, so we'll lock all of those. You can see this might take a little while. The other way we can do this is we can split the items into different layers and then just lock the layers. So everything that we've got so far is in layer 1. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a new layer. So down the bottom here in the layers panel, we've got a little plus in a square box. When I click that, it makes a new layer for me. Now I'm going to rename my layers. You don't have to, but it's good working practice to do that. If I double-click on Layer 1, I'm going to call this background or VG, whatever works for you. And on this layer here, I'm going to have my logo. So I'm going to double-click on that and covers a logo. And then on the very top I'm going to make a new layer once again, and this will be for my text. So now how do I get things onto the different layers? Well, That's reasonably easy because you can just drag and drop things. See if I started off with maybe the text. And this is text, this is text and this is text. I'm going to select all of those layers. So by selecting one, holding down the Shift key on the keyboard and clicking on the top when I can select them all. And then I just click and drag, and I drag up until that text layer goes blue, I release it. And now those texts layers or text objects, original essay, or in the text layer, I'll do the same with the logo. So I'm going to select all the parts of the logo. Hold down the Shift key, dragging that, and dropping them into the logo layer. So now everything is sorted out and it's very quick to work on and quick to show and hide things as well. So on my background, for example, I can just lock it so I can't touch it by mistake. Or I can go along to the logo and I can show and hide the logo. I can show and hide the text in there as well, should I need. But I'm going to lock those two down. So then my text is now ready to be worked on. And it doesn't matter if I click and drag over things. I can touch the other bits and always move this around. And just experiment and see where the best positioning is for my text in that. And I do try that out. You don't have to use layers, but it's good working practice to do so. It will help make your life a lot easier when you have complex artwork. 8. Layers in Use to Select Objects: So what else can we do with layers? Well, we can use it for selecting items. So if I wanted to select, may be the body of the fish, I can go into my layers. I'm going to go to my logo layer, unlock it, and then click on the dropdown so I can see the fish. Now this is where a lot of people get confused with layers. Because if I go along to the body of the fish and click OK, You can see it hasn't selected. Now, if I clicked on the fish's body here, it has selected. But look over here, you see this little red square on that side. The color of that square depends on the layer that you are in. This one can have blue squares, those will have read, that's green in there. So another way to select things is not clicking on them in there, but clicking on the little circle. And that way I can select items in here very, very quickly. And it also means that if I've chosen, some of you have selected something in here like that. I can see at a glance very quickly which layer that item is in because of the different colors. See if I do that. I've selected different objects and I can see that I've got objects from both layers selected. 9. Save Selections in Your Layers (New Feature): Illustrator has got a real nice core feature, which is quite useful sometimes, and that's the ability to save selected items. To do that, I'm going to go to the layers. And I've just opened up this layer one, so I can see the objects in there. Now, maybe the beak and the face is something that I need to work on. Occasionally I'd like them to be selected. I'm going to select that one, hold down my shift key, select that one, select that one. And you can see, and here those are all selected. Now I'm going to pull the layers out just so that you can see right at the bottom here, the options that I've got down the bottom. There's a little option there. If I click that, this allows me to save that as a selection. I'm going to say save selection. Give it a name. Beak and face click. Okay, Maybe the feather area over here. This is the turquoise and the green. I'll select both of those. I want that to be a selection by itself. And maybe I'll even add in the eye over there. You can see those are selected because the little blue dots, once again, I'll click down there. Save that as a selection, and this will be feathers. And how does that work? Well, wheneever, I need one of those selections. Now I can just go down to the bottom and choose the Beacon Face selection or the Feathers selection. You can see that's what it's selected in there. You've also got ways of editing your selections. So you can go in and just change the name or delete them. If you don't want to have them anymore, try out. 10. Artboards: So once you've got your artwork, maybe you want to put it on two different sizes. Or you might want to make variations of the artwork, different colors, slightly different designs for your client or for yourself. Let's start off at looking at how we can make variations on our artwork. Now, the first thing is, I've got an A3 poster size here. How do I know it's a three? Well, the thing to do is to go along to the artboard tool that's on the left-hand side here. If I click the Artboard Tool, it puts this dotted line around the outside here. And if I go over to my presets in there, I can see that that's a three because it's a standard size. If it wasn't a standard size or with a custom size, I can have a look the size up here where it says width and height. Now, I'd like to make a variation on this particular artboard. And the reason that I'm doing that is either for myself that I can see different variations next to each other or to give the client various options. Now, I'm going to make sure that move artwork with artboard is switched on. And in my layers that nothing is locked. And then all I have to do is using the Artboard Tool. Hold down the Alt key. It's always the old key. If in doubt, try the ALT key. Hold down the Alt key and drag my art board. And what it'll do is it will drag a copy of the art board with all the artwork on it. Let's move along a bit more. So I'm going to drag that over, hold down the Alt key, and drag a copy of the artwork. Now once I've got that, what I have to do is to then carry on working on these. So maybe this one here, I'll click on the background and its try a variation where this is maybe slightly over a bit. And then see how that might work. Or I can try one where I have a white background so I can get rid of that. And maybe change the color of just try that once more. And then maybe change the color of the text to white. And the I could go to white as well. Let's zoom out a little bit. So that gives me the three different variations of the same artwork. Now, when it comes to saving, when I go to File and Save As over here, and I'm saving it, I will be saving all three of those art boards together. So let's call this 13. And you can see it says Use Artboards a, that's all grayed out at the moment when I click on Save in here. And then saving all of those art or art boards at the same time. If I wanted to save them as separate files, I would tick the save each artboard as a separate file option in there. Now, I'd like to actually just go back to the original artwork that I had. So I'm going to remove all of these bits of artworks are click and drag over them, delete them, and then to get rid of those artboards, if I go back to my Artboard tool, I can click on the artboard and press Backspace or Delete on the keyboard to get rid of it. So now that I've got my A3 poster, I would like to do a business card. So I'm going to make a business card size art board. So I'll go onto my art board tool. Let's just zoom in a bit over here. I'm going to click and drag to make a business card. Now the thing is, how big is a business card? Well, there's all sorts of sizes for business cards, so you need to consult your printer first. But a certain average size is about 3.5 by two inches. Now this problem, you see because the width and height over here or in millimeters, and I know that it's an inches. Now that's not such a problem because you don't have to get your calculator out and sorted out. All you do is you go in here into the width. And I'm going to type in 3.5 IN for inches. And when I press the Enter key, it will just converted into millimeters for me. Same with the height over here, two IN for inches. Press Enter, and it will converted wherever you see these values here, you can just put in anything you like. You can change from inches to points to Pike is two centimeters, two millimeters, as long as you put in the correct extension on them. So here is my business card and then all I have to do is to copy my artwork onto that. Now, I would like to name them because at the moment, they're just called ARPU one output two, output, whatever. I'm going to click on the Artboard tool. Click on this one. And in here I can name that Artboard tool. I'm going to call this poster. And we're going to click on this one here. I think I've just renamed the wrong one. So let's try that again. So I'm going to call this one poster there. So now I've got one called poster. And this one over here, which is also called poster, should be called business card. And same again, I can then go in here, I can select the bits that I want to take a cross over there, hold down the Alt key, make copies of them, resize them, place them in the right position, and bring in some text on my card. Like so. Once again, have a bit of a go with those. 11. Using the Artboards Panel: Now, as you can see, I've got a few different artboards. I've got to eight threes. So two variations of the poster. I've got an A4 with a white square so that the client can potentially write their own things in with a felt tip. Then I've got a glimpse comp step here, and finally a business card down there. Now, I've given these all names as I showed you a moment ago. But this time I'm going to go to the Window menu and go down to the art-board panel. Now the art-board panel shows me the art boards that I've got. It also shows me the name. In fact, you can change names in here very, very quickly. So if I wanted to call this poster A3, I can just double-click in there and change the name straight in here, poster A3, like so. Let's zoom out so we can see them all again. Now, these are also numbered and the numbering system here determines the order that they appear in your final PDF. So if your PDF and things and you want certain ones of these to be at the front and certain ones towards the end. Just change the numbers in here. And you can do that very quickly by just dragging and dropping. So at the moment, I think I'd like this gold stripe to appear after the A3. Then I want the comp slip over there and the business card last, but the A4 postal go between those. So it doesn't matter how it looks over here. It's this order here that dictates the order on your final PDF will be having a look at PDFs later on, so you can see then how this will come together. 12. Create Mockups on Artboards Using New Mesh Tool (New Feature): I've got a piece of artwork here and I want to show the artwork to my clients on some of the apparel. This piece of artwork I made. You can use anything you like, anything that you've created in the course so far, You can make something specific. For this little exercise, I'm going to take this bit of artwork and I'm going to make a copy of it. So I'm going to just select it all. Hold down the Alt to the option key, drag it over there. And I'm going to resize it as well. So I'm going to hold down my shift key to resize that down to roughly about the size that I wanted to go on the hat. I might make it a little bit smaller as well. I think that's probably about right now. I'm thinking while I'm here that maybe this red won't look so good on the black. I might go in and just change that. You're going to have to do this on a piece by piece basis and just decide what would look good on different backgrounds. I think that that should be in white over there. So it'll sharp better on the black hat. Now I'm going to select this, I'm going to go along to group it. I'll do object and group. It's all grouped together. That's really important. Otherwise it goes a bit funny. Well, it's actually behind the picture, Let's just move that in front, we'll bring it to the front. And you can see now that that's pretty much about the right size, but it doesn't look correct. This is the new feature for 2024. I'm going to select both of those, the hat and the logo. I'm going to go to Object, going down to my mock up better and click Make. What this will do is it'll just put that into the hat. It's just analyzing the hat at the moment. This takes a few moments. Well, it's popped in there, but it looks a bit strange. So the first thing is that I can start to move it around now. And you can see it sees the shape of the hat as I'm moving that around. Look at that, just the way that it goes down that edge there. But it's in the wrong position. So I can go over here, move to the outside and just rotate it around until it looks correct. There we go. And we can move that anywhere we like on the hat. If I move it to the front, you can see how it can actually go on the peak of that cap as well. Let's do that again. I'm going to zoom out a little bit here. And I'm going to select this, copy it. Hold down the old key. Make a copy there. Scale it down to the size that I want. It's easy to scale it first, group it together. It's going to go on the T shirt Arts behind the T shirt. Let's go to object, arrange, bring to the front so we can see it. Just try that again. To the front. There we are. I'm going to make it a little bit smaller as well, I think. Let's zoom in to have a look at that. That doesn't look bad, just like that. But I'm going to select both of those and do the same thing. Object. I'm going to go down to mark up make. Once I've done this, I'll be able to move that anywhere I like on the T shirt even to the shoulders. I hope right there it is. Still looks pretty much the same. But look what happens when I move it. You can see it's actually seeing the fabric And going over the folds in the fabric. If I moved it over there, look at the way the text goes round underneath his arm. Move to the edge. And it goes around his shoulder as well. Maybe if I wanted that on the shoulder, just move it around like so we can have something sitting on his shoulder in there. It really is just a most brilliant way of making a markup. Now there's a few things that you need to know over here and I'm going to do another art board for this. First, when you bring your picture in, if you go to file and down to place, when you find the picture, let's go and get a car there. The image itself needs to be brought in as a linked file. Now, I did that very, very quickly. I just double clicked. But when you're doing it, what I'm going to suggest when you go to file in place, find the image and make sure that link is off. Don't have it on like that. Make sure it's switched off. Then when you place it, it will be embedded file. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with linked files. Same again, I can just go in, select what I want. Copy that, and let's put it onto the car this time as well. And you can see how they'll find the different planes. I'm going to scale that down, make sure it's grouped together. We better select that. I'll just pop it onto the front, it's not ready yet. We'll select both of them. Object mark up, make, and we'll zoom into that in a moment. Now, it's not always perfect, but sometimes you might need to tweak things around a bit, that's not bad at all. If I move the pizza over to there, you can see how I can just move it along the car or onto the side of the car. Actually roll over the edge, the car down here. I think that's what I want to put it right on the side of the car in there. Pull that up a little bit, have fun with it. It really is an amazing tool. Lastly, if you want to get it out of that, you can go to object mark up and just release the object from the mark up. And you can also edit it while it's there as well. Try it out. 13. Libraries - Introdcution: Now one of the really useful features in Illustrator are the libraries. Libraries allow you to store various items, whether it's a vector shape, whether it's a photograph, whether it's a color or a style. And what we can then do is we can share those items around between the different Adobe packages. So you can make something in Illustrator and share it with both InDesign and Photoshop. Or likewise, you could make something in Photoshop and shared with Illustrator and InDesign. You can also share your libraries with other people, either allowing them to collaborate with you or just allowing them to use items from your library. Let's have a look at how the libraries work and how we can put things into the library. If you go along to the Window menu, you'll find the libraries is about two-thirds of the way down. Now, I've got my libraries up here already. If you're on the properties, just click on the library's tab. And we're going to make a new library by going along to this little drop-down menu. Now, as you can see, I've already got quite a few libraries in mind. I really enjoy using them. But I'm going to say Create New Library. And I'm going to call this Tim's logos. I'll click on Create. And here is my new library. Now to put something into the library, you can either drag and drop it onto this area here. Or if you select the item, Let's select just the little logo by itself. Over there. I can either drag and drop it or I can click at the bottom, the little plus down there. And then I can either add the graphic OR and the fill color. So if I wanted to bring that in, I'm going to add that graphic. I'll just click on the little graphic in, in there and it adds in my whale into the library. Now if I want to add the whale and the type, I can do the same thing where I can just drag and drop it straight across. Now the interesting thing is if I click on the Type and click on the Plus, I could then add in just the fill color or the text itself or any staff that we haven't got onto styles as yet. But we can add in character styles, paragraph styles, and then as a graphic as well. Let me just add in as the text fill color and you'll see the color will come up there. The other way we can add colors is if I click on item like this. And once again, I go down here and I can add the fill color to that area. If there was a stroke, I could've added the stroke color to it as well. So once we've got things in the library like that, how do we use them? Well, let's say I'm on a new documents. I'll go to File and New and just open up a very quick document over here. So I've created this, this brand new document, and you can see my libraries there. I'm going to click on this little graphic, right-click it, and I'm going to just say place a copy. There's also place a link to you can place something which is linked to the original. I'm just going to place a copy. And you'll see I can now click and drag to have my copy on the page. It's still in the library, in there. Anyway. Have a look at the libraries. Try them out. Create a few yourself. If you've made one, you think, oh, that was a mistake, I want to get rid of it. We'll all you have to do is to choose the library, go to the top, there's a little menu item there. And I can then just say delete Tim's logo library. And you see the great thing is if I delete this, it doesn't delete anything which was on my page. So try them out and remember they can be used between various software packages in the Adobe suite, as well as sharing with other people who've also got the Adobe Creative Cloud. 14. Map Project: Import Bitmap: I've got a JPEG file here of a map. It's a really badly drawn map. Be some roads, you can see the black areas, the black lines of the roads. And these areas here are water. And there's service three subsets of water in there. There's a few road names around. We're gonna take this map and we're going to make it really exciting using Illustrator. We're going to redraw it. And we'll do this bit by bit for this project. So let's start off by going to Illustrator and creating a new document. Now before we create a new document, we need to decide, I'll be doing this for web, or are we doing this for printing? I think we're going to be doing this for a website as website type map. So I'm going to go in, click on Create New, and I'm creating a new document. So I'll go along to my web options along the tops and the web tab. And I'm going to choose this Web Large here. And I've just chosen that because 1920 by 1080 pixels. Remember illustrators vector. So if it's too big, you can scale it down later on. It's not a problem. Now, over here, I'm going to be using RGB color, of course, because it's for the web. And I'll just click on the Create button down there. So the first thing that I want to do is to bring in my map, bringing the JPEG of the map because we're going to be tracing it and using our pen tools and all the other tools to trace it. So I'm going to go along to File down to place. And I'm going to go and find that map. Now, this will be in the folder with all the exercise at things in it. And it's called a bad maps. I'm going to find a bad map and just place it at a place it, we just click and drag. Simplest that. The main thing though that we want to do now is to make sure that when we start to copy this, this doesn't move around. And I'm good to do that by going to the layers. Now, if you can't see the layers, you might see the properties. They're just click on the little layers tab. If you don't see it there, go to the Window menu, and of course go down two layers. It's about two-thirds the way down to show your layers. Now, what I want to do is I want to click on the little down arrow to open up the linked file. And that linked file I'm going to lock. So I'm going to click next to the eye to make sure it's locked icon touched by mistake. But the other thing is that I find these lines are quite dark and I'd like to make sure the whole thing is lightened up quite a lot because it'll be easier to trace it. So if you double-click where it says layer one, but not on the word itself, it just next to that double-click, it will open up the options for that layer. And one of those options is to dim down any pixel or bitmap images. So anything that's made of pixels will be deemed on this layer to 50 percent. You can type in any percentage you like. In fact, I'm going to type in 30% in there. And I'm going to click Okay, and that lightens it up. Now will be able to throw this away later when we're finished. It's just the for us to trace. So firstly, the project get the map into the document that you're going to be creating. Lock it. So lock the object itself, not the whole Leo. You won't be able to do anything on that layer, not just the object. And then double-click on the layer and dim the image down. And I do this to anything that I want to trace are always locked and dim the image. 15. Map Project: Road Lines: So let's start to draw the roads. Now. You can use any tool that you like. You could use the pencil tool. And with the pencil tool, I will get a black stroke. And I'll go to my fill and choose none for the fill. Let's just check that in the properties over there, or move this panel out the way. Stroke or the fill. And we can change the width in there. And you can then use your pencil tool to just start to draw the roads in like this. Don't forget with the pencil tool. If you are drawing in shapes like this, you might find that they jump, they don't follow exactly where you want to go. So you can double-click your pencil and you can choose whether the road is going to be very smooth or more accurate. Remember, if it's more accurate when you're doing it, you're going to find that the picks up every little nuance of your movement. So be careful. I'm actually going to use the pen tool for this. So I'll get rid of those. And with the pen tool, easiest way to do this is just click. And then you can just click and drag a little corner like that and go with them. If you click and drag there, we don't have to be too accurate with this. We just getting roughly roughly right. You can change it later on if you need. Or you can just make up your own map if you want to draw your own map and use the same principle on there, that's absolutely fine. So once you've got the roads in, you can then use the selection tool to deselect it, go into next road and start to draw that in. I'm going to speed up this process a little bit here and have a second road in there. Deselect that, by the way, there is a shortcut when it comes to delete, to de-selecting items. And it is if you're on a Mac, it's Command Shift. And a, if you're on a PC, it's Control Shift and Command Shift. Control Shift, and I just de-select what you're doing. So I can very quickly go in here, click and drag, and then Command Shift or Control Shift a to deselect. I'll do these two very quickly here. I wanted to be really nice and smooth and round like that. Deselect them with my shortcut, some of their finish that one off. I've got another one here. So I'm not being super accurate with these. Let's just go really quickly over here. They're just going to be pretty rough. So it looks kind of like the road. I'm keeping it nice and smooth. A stylized the road. Now for the circle there, the traffic circle, I'm actually going to use an ellipse. So I'll just draw in my elliptical shape over here. And if you need, you can use that black arrow to move it into the right position. Once you've done that, select all of your roads and go into the stroke and just increase the stroke weight. We're going to take a stroke weight probably in the region of about 24, 25 points, somewhere around there. Once again, get to the stage, come back and we'll do the reverse. 16. Map Project: Road Stroke Work: So let's draw in the rivers. Same principle. You can use either of these two tools, the pen tool or the pencil, unused a pencil for this one. And because it doesn't have to be too accurate. So I'm going to double-click the Pencil and go to reasonably smooth in there. And I'll then just draw where I think this Marina will go. You can see I'm I'm not being that accurate because this map doesn't have to be if you were trying to do something a lot more accurate, will definitely be a bit more accurate and I'm being so I don't want to stroke, so I don't want none for my stroke. And I want a bit of color from my river as well. Now we can change these colors later, but I'll put in blue in there. Control or Command Shift a to deselect it. So same again for the next one. Draw it in. The river, running along there. Like that. Sometimes drawing with a mouse is colorblind drawing with virus, so it just doesn't get what you want. So now I've got a bit of a problem here. You can see it sort of rounded off that corner. Well, I can just redraw that line. If I click over here and go up and make a point and then go down to that. It will just redraw the line for me. Or you can use your direct selection tool. You can select the points themselves and you can pull the handles around and move things around as you want it to go. So I'm just going to pull it out a little bit like so. Same again. I'll just fill that with a color and choose to de-select it. Last one. Really quick, down, up to the end, over there and back again. Now, I'm not really worrying about these edges here. You can see that very, very rough ER, demand would clean them up nicely later, is a nasty one with that, give it some color. Over there. De-select. And we're ready to go. Have a go with that so far. 17. Map Project: Add River & Colour: So let's put in some color areas here. I want a park in the top section, then I want to park on the bottom right-hand side. And now I want this area here to be a different color to the rest of this. So I'm going to do it pretty roughly. I'll use the pencil again. And I'm going to start off with the park at the top. So I'm just going to draw it and kinda, kinda draw down the middle of the road. Now, if you were doing this, be careful because you find that if your pencil is setup to be too smooth, you might find those edges kind of go out of the road a little bit. We don't want that. As it stands. This one's gone out of the road. So I'm going to use my white arrow tool, the selection tool, direct selection tool, shall I say, just move it in. You want to just make sure that those are going at least halfway over your road. And I'm going to give that a bit of color. Now, once again, I'm just picking all sorts of colors. At the moment. De-select that and do the next one. So the next one is going to be this area here. All the way up, around and down the road. Doesn't have to match up to that orange bits, just going to cover this part of the white. Same again, let's give that a different color. And last bit is going to be this park down here. So it's going to be that section there, this bit here, and up again. And we'll give that another color. And as I said, it honestly doesn't matter at all what color you use. So these bits are going to be behind the road. So we're going to use the selection tool to select those areas. So this one here, that one and that one. Now I've done this by holding down the Shift key. Hold down the Shift key and you can multiple select different items. And then you can either do this by going to our layers and actually manually you can see which are the layers. They're the ones with the little blue dots in there we just selected manually moving them below all the other objects. So removing these objects below those ones. Or if they selected, you can go to the Object menu down to arrange and just say send them to the back. If you send them to the back, however, they go underneath this linked file here. So maybe if I just move that linked file below those items. Now, there we go. We can sort of see where those colors again to be in the roads are still there. Looking at mess, still. Don't worry about it. We'll improve it. Have a go. 18. Map Project: Background: Let's do a background color in here as well. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take a rectangle this time. Let's go and find a rectangular shape and draw in my shape over there. As I said, it doesn't matter how big it is. I'm going to change the color in the properties over here. So we've got something totally different. Once again, let's make that sort of greenish color. And I'm going to go to the layers and send that right to the back. So I'm going to move it all the way down. But just above the link file there, start to look a little bit more map-like, but still looks like it's been done by a five-year-old at the crown. Let's do some layer management balance so that we can start to work on this. Probably. What I'm going to do is I'm going to have different layers for the different parts of my map. So if we click on the little arrow there, it hides or folds up all the objects which are in layer one. I'm going to double-click on there one, and I'm going to call this my background graphics. So VGA graphic. You can call it anything you like to be honest, it doesn't make any difference. Click Okay, and then I'm going to lock that layer down. So that whole layer is locked. So if I start to move things around, I can't do anything actually which will affect this layer. Let me add a new layer. So I go down to the bottom. Over here, the little plus, which is next to the bin. If you click on that, that creates a new layer for you. I'm going to double-click on this layer here, and I'm going to call this text. Let's have another layer. So I'll do another layer here. And I'm going to double-click and call this one trees. Yes, we're gonna make some trees for this. And we'll go, we'll have one more over here. I'm going to click on that double-click. And I'm going to call this one. We've got trees, Let's have buildings. Now. I'll lock the ones that I'm not working on. And this is really important. Make sure you click on the layer you want to work on. Because even if that layer is unlocked and you've clicked on a locked one, it'll just say, Oh, you can't do anything. So make sure you click on the one you want to work on and it's unlocked. And then I can put in my text. Now I can't see the text because all these things on the way. So if I were to just drop the the layer down to open it up, and I'm just going to hide for the moment that green background so poked in the eye now you can see it won't let me hide it. Well, that's because next to the layer, the lock is switched on. If I switch off that padlock. Now you can see I can hide the green and I can see all of those items. In fact, I'm just going to hide lots of these. It's still going to be there, but it means that I can very easily see exactly what I've got. So it's just showing the linked file. So I'm going to go ahead and just put in the names. So I'll use my type tool. Remember, I'm still on the text layer. I'm going to go to the Type Tool. Click once and put the name in key side. And I'm going to highlight the text. So I've clicked 23 times until it highlights, go to my properties and just increase the size of that type. You can always at this stage as well, you can change your typeface. You can change all the usual character options in there. In fact, I'm going to go into my typeface over here and just pick something else. See what to look. Nearly bold. I like that. Brilliant. That's perfect. Now once you've got one of those, rather than having to go and type again and try and get the sizes all the same. Just hold down the Alt key and make a copy of that bit of text. You can then double-click that and put in the new name. Why didn't copy? Let's try that again. So make a copy of the text by holding down the Alt key. I should've said. So over here, let's have, this one is Neptune. And you can keep working all the way like that. Hold down the Alt key, drag another copy. This one can be rotated to move just off the edge and rotate it around like that. And we could just keep going with all of these. I'll finish these off, um, but I won't expect you to watch me all the way through. So have a go on yours right now. 19. Map Project: Add Road Names: So once you've got all the names in, we can go to the layers. And in fact, now this linked file is finished because I've got all my names and I've got the roads and I've got the rivers, him. So I'm actually going to take that and just drag and drop it onto the bin at the bottom. And I'll show all of this underlying or the underlying objects in there. Lock that bottom layer down and then I can go to my text and just move things around. If they're not quite in the right place, you can retake them as well. Don't forget, and just move it around and get them well, where we need them. In, their key side is fine. Over there. Maybe we'll move this river up a little bit and the chase in a bit as well. So we can close that bottom one down. Once again, get that all up and ready. And the next stage is something really important. Save it. You don't want to lose all of your stuff. Although there is some form of recovery if you do crash out, it's always best just in case to do a Save. So File Save As. And what I'm going to do here is give it a name and I'm going to combine map. Obviously rarely put it where ever works for you. And I'm going to click on Save. It's going to be an Illustrator file type. We'll click OK. And we're now ready to move on. 20. Map Project: Recoloring : So let's have a look at changing the colors in here. Now you can of course, go into the appearance panel and just make your own colors by clicking on the little plus over there and make it appear in color. Or you could actually go into the libraries of colors. Now you can save your own libraries of colors to use in different documents. And that's what I've done. I've made a color library for you. And we're going to import that color library. And of course, if you working on your own different map, at the moment, feel free to make up your own colors. So to bring in the library, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the Window menu. I'm going to go down and find the swatches panel. It's right near the bottom over here. And in the swatches panel at the moment, this is my usable swatch that I've got. I'm going to click on the little books in there. To be honest, you can do it from in there as well. You can click on there. We thought I'd show it to you just in case you can't see the appearance panel if you've got something else selected. So click on the little books in there and go down right at the bottom it says other library. And we're going to choose that. And then if you can navigate yourself to the folders with all of the examples in them. And in my case, I'm just going to go along very quickly and find those folders that I've got for the course folders and the exercise folders. And in here is a file called map colors, swatch dot AI. I mean to click Open. And now you'll see that I've actually got a library of the colors that I want to use. So now it's very quick. I can then just use my selection tool to start selecting these part, which C11 select. Because in the layers panel that's locked, Let's unlock that, lock the text. And now I can start applying the various colors. So color like that there we have some green there. This is also going to be a green area in the river. And the water is going to be the light blue. Once again, you do what ever you like for this. And this part here is going to be a slightly darker gray. Now what about my road? What I'd like to grow it to be white. So I'm going to select them and then go into my stroke. So I'll just make sure the stroke is selected. You can see I can do it from up there and choose a white stroke over here. And this should look quite pleasing actually when I've finished it. So stroke all the way through here and you can make a start on yours right now. And once we've done this, we'll just lock this background down again. Two more to go. One over there and to miss that one. Right? So do your colors in there. Once you've finished doing your colors. Then the next stage is to clean this little area up. And we're going to be doing that by using a mask. It's going to be a very simple little mask. Let me just move my colors out the way for the moment and close down my swatches. All I'm going to choose, make sure I'm on that Bg graphic layer. I'm going to take a shape and I'm going to draw the shape over the area that I want to mask to. So something like this. That's where I want my mask to be. Now. I don't need that thick stroke in there. I'm just going to make sure that it gets in everything that I want. We can of course edit this later on. Well, the Neptune Marina texts will be right by the age, but we can move that. I'm going to select everything in here. And you can see it's selected everything in that layer. And I'm going to go to the Object menu down to Clipping Mask and Make. And then everything gets masked into that area. If we open up the layers, you will see I've now got a clipping mask in there. We've got the Neptune Marina. Well, if I lock this layer, I can unlock that layer and then I can just move it around. If I need it. Still move some of these around to where we need them to be at the moment. But this background layer is now masked and locked. Have a go with that. 21. Map Project: Make the Trees: Let's make some trees. Now, I'm going to lock my text layer by clicking next to the little eye. And I'm going to unlock the trees layer and make sure I click on the tree layer itself so that it will allow me to work in there. Now the trees I'm going to make are going to be very simple. What I'm going to do is just use some ellipses and some rectangles. So I'll start off with an ellipse. This will be the base of the tree. And I've got my Mac colors over here. Let's make that a gray. Now point go to gray because I'm on the stroke, not the fill. A quick way to get around this is I can click on this little button here which swaps the fill and stroke around. And then I don't want anything on the stroke, so I will click None on the stroke. Let me bring the fill to the front so we keep using that one. So over here, I want to make the trunk of the tree, so that's going to be just a rectangle, like so. And I'll make that a dark brown. And then I think for the tree itself, keeping this very, very stylized, I will do an ellipse like so. Let's make that one a darker green. Heavy here. We'll just move it along a little bit. And then we need to make a copy of that. So hold down the Alt key and move a little copy over and we'll make that one a lighter green like that. Now, you can always move these over as much as we die as we like. And of course, all of these things can be adjusted if they're too big or too small, whatever. However you like, honesty, make up your own tree and see what you, what you think of it. Let's pull that down a little bit like that. So there's my first tree in there. It's obviously too big, so I'm going to scale it right down so you can just select everything. I'm holding down the Shift key and just scaling it down to something a little bit more sensible. Now I can use that tree to make some other ones. So I'm going to zoom in a bit. I'm using Command or Control Plus to zoom in the space bar to move around my document. And I'm going to select that entire tree, hold down the Alt key, and drag to make a copy. And then on the copy I can just maybe to make these a bit more pointed the top, use my selection tool to select those top two points and just pull them up a bit like that would have a tree that's, that's shaped. Or once again, I hold down the Alt key, move that down a little bit like so. And I think this time, I'm going to move these two slightly closer together. Make them a little bit smaller, but then have a few variations on that. So I'll have one there. Hold down the Alt key to have another one here. Hold down the Alt key again to have another one down there. And if I wanted to, I could bring one to the frontal, move one to the back. Depends on the order that you actually making these as to how they will end up looking. You can make bushes in exactly the same way. So I could say select those two there, hold down the Alt key. Well, there we go. I've got a little a little bush in there to go on the ground. Have a bit of a go with those. Now, once you've done some trees, you want to use them a number of times. So I would suggest that you selected them and then select a tree one at a time and then go to object and group. It will just group all those shapes together so you didn't have to keep trying to select everything. So same again, this tree here, Command or Control, G is your shortcut to group. So if you're on a PC, it's Control a max command obviously. And then start putting them around your document. Now we're going to be bringing some buildings as well. And so trying to fill up too much, but hold down the Alt key to make copies of those trees, to have a few bits and pieces around. There's no right or wrong here. Just do what you feel looks exciting or interesting for your document. Just hold down the Alt key all the time here to move these across. Let's get a few bushes down there, hold down the Alt key, and a few of those together. Like so. Create some, some foliage for your map. 22. Map Project: Create 3D Buildings: Let's make some buildings. We're going to make 3D buildings. Now, later in this course, we're going to actually look at a very accurate way of creating 3D. The one that we're going to use now is just a quick 3D effect. And it's a pre-made effect that we will apply. It still looks really good. I'm going to lock my tree layer and I'm going to get my buildings and unlock that layer to work on there. So to make the building, I'm going to start off by making some windows on the side here. Once again, I'm going to make them a bit bigger than I should have here. So let's have the first window over there. And I'm going to hold down the Alt key and copy that window and then use either Command or Control D to repeat it again. Now let's take those same again. Hold down the Alt key to copy them downwards. And then use Command or Control D to repeat that twice more. So this is going to be like an office block. I'm going to select all of those and give them some color. Now, I'm still using the palette that I've got in here. I'm going to get goes a light yellow for that. And then so it looks like an office building. I'm going to take my rectangle and put a large area around the outside. And of course, unfortunate that's in front of the building. So I'm going to have to go to my Layers, open up the objects in that layers, and just move that shape. Just drag it down below all of those little squares. So we have something that looks like that. You can make this as interesting or not as you like. I'm just going to pull this in. She asked a little bit like so. And if you find that it jumps like mine's jumping around, It's a good idea to look in your Properties panel and click on your art board. And what you might find is in the snap options, that is an option here. And this is called snap to pixels. And if it's switched on, you'll find that the individual vectors snap will jump to pixels, so can be a little bit jumpy. I'm going to switch that off for the moment. And then in here, I can just pull it around. It's a lot smoother now that I'm dragging that around. And you can use the arrows on your art board is on your keyboard as well if you wish to move them around. So there's my first building and I'm going to make it a bit smaller. And that's probably about right for them. So I want one like that. Hold down the Alt key, and then I want a shorter one. So I think all I'll do for this one here is to delete some of these windows. Now what I've just done, I've forgotten to hold down the Alt key as well. Sometimes when I talk, I'm not what you want, I'm doing. So not a problem. Control or Command Z to undo. And I can keep going backwards until I get that original one back again. Hold down the Alt key this time, and remember to copy it over. Once again, I'm going to go in here and just delete some of these windows in here. Now, I'm doing them in a very slow process. You can select them all and then de-select the building as well. Hold down the Shift key. But I think for this one could make it nice and simple and just do it manually. Okay, so there's my second type of building and we'll give that a different color. I think maybe a dark color for the background. Next thing we're going to do is I'm going to take this building and I'm going to group it together. So they're remember that's object. Group. Same with this one, just this building by itself. Click and drag to select it. I'm still using the selection tool and it's object and group. And now let's do the magic. I'm gonna move this over to cider. Think. I'm going to go to the Window menu. And it's right down at the very, very bottom. If you just keep scrolling, scrolling, scrolling through scrolling. Eventually you get to something called the graphic styles libraries. And I'm not just going off the screen there, but in the graphic style libraries. If I go up there to 3D effects, there are a number of different 3D effects in here. Now, feel free to try them out. But when you click on them, you'll notice that your object just goes 3D in various ways. And some, sometimes it was extruded out and sometimes it'll put it around. The one I'm looking for is this one that's purple and green over there. Now you can see that it's made the stroke purple around the outside. It hasn't done anything with these bits in here. I don't want that purple stroke on the building. I just wanted to be a different shade of brown. So of course, if I click on that shape, I can go to my stroke and just choose a different shade of brown in there. And I gave you the rest of the 3D looking building. Let's do the same with this one. Click on that, click this purple and green effect here. And once again, within the stroke area, we don't want to purple, so I'm going to choose maybe a lighter brown. Like so. That's it. Those are done. All I have to do now is to start moving them across into my document. And let's see, I will put this one up here. And this one is going to go down over there. And of course you can make copies. You can hold down the Alt key and you can just copy them over. So we have another one there, and I have another tau block over here as well. Once again, pile down to Save As or Save if you haven't saved it already, just do a Save As in there. Give it a bit of a go. Try and make some interesting buildings. Don't just go with squares, try different shapes and have a go with those effects. As I said later in the course, we'll be looking at how to actually make these ourselves and go through all of the settings for 3D effects. Have fun with it. 23. Map Project: Export Map: So let's export this out as a JPEG file. If you've got a File down to Export and choose Export as what we could do is we can export this as a JPEG file. There's all sorts of other file types that you can Export As. I'm just going to export as a JPEG. Click Export. And over here, keep my quality nice and high and click Okay, now let's check out the JPEG that it's made. So I've got the JPEG here on my desktop. And if I were to go along to a browser window and find a browser here, I can drag and drop this into the browser to see the file. And you can see there's a problem here because although it's gone right up to my mask, there is a great big white area over here. So what's happening with that? Well, if we go back into Illustrator again, what's happening is this probably something on the side here. So I've just made sure I've unlocked all of my layers. And if I click and drag down there to see if there's anything which is hidden a high, you can see this little point, straight point out there. What I'm going to do is delete that. Let's try this again. File down to Export, Export As do the same thing. One more time. Export it out. It's just replaced the last one. That was then. Click Okay. And let's have a look at this now. In a browse window and window. And let's browse window here. And there it is. Absolutely perfectly cut off or cut out. Have a bit of a go that last section and don't forget all of these things out. But you can make up your own maps and uses, not just for maps, but any, anything else where you need to. First of all, generate lines, being able to make things on separate layers. And lastly, create a little icons like trees and buildings and anything along that line. Enjoyed. 24. Masking Intro: In this section we're going to look at masking. Now, mosque is usually seen as a Photoshop type of activity. But there are two types of mouse can illustrate that we can use. One is a clipping mask, and the second one is called an opacity mask. Now, if you are a Photoshop user, you probably be used to the opacity masks because it's very similar to a layer mask in Photoshop. If you don't use Photoshop, doesn't matter. I'm going to take you through it from scratch project wise. For this one, we're going to make some pictures for social media. So we're going to use a combination photos and vector files to create these images that could be saved directly out for Instagram or other social media purposes. 25. Clipping Masks - Make & Release: Let's have a look at how you can mask out various shapes. And we're going to look first of all at masking vectors, and then we're going to look at masking photos. And we're going to be using something called a clipping mask. In the next section, we will then start to look at a different way of masking. Well, but this is called a clipping mask. So if I have a few shapes and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a little ellipse like that and make it slightly more interesting than just an ellipse. I think I'll pull the top-up a little bit like so. And I'm going to remove the fill from that shape. So I've got a shape like like so let's give it a slightly different color and make it look a little bit more interesting. And we'll make it a little bit thicker. So these are the sort of things that we've done earlier on. Now I'm going to move it to the middle of my page. I don't want to do now is just make a few copies. Take my scaling tool. So let's go along to the scaling tool here. And I'm going to go down to the bottom because I want to scale it to the bottom. I'm going to hold down the Alt key. And I'm then going to just scale this down to 80 percent. Let's click Copy. And then using either Control D or Command D will depend on the Mac or PC. We can make various copies of that. So I've got all these shapes together. Now, what I'd like to do is to just have them inside a rectangular with I want to crop off some of this section in here. So if I were to take a rectangle, put the rectangle over the area that I want to keep. So I think I'd like it to be like that. I'm going to select all of those shapes. So I'm using the selection tool, the black arrow tool to select everything. And then we go to the Object menu. And this is the magic bit, down to clipping mask and make. And what that will do is it will just hide the other areas. They still there. If we go to the View menu and we view our artwork in outline mode, you'll see that all of the artwork is still there. Let's go to view and back to preview mode. Once again. Now, if I then realize, oh, I've made a bit of a mistake, I want to undo it. Well, I can just select it all. Again. Go to the Object menu, down to clipping mask, and I can release that clipping mask. Try it out. 26. Clipping Masks - Adjust Contents: Now if you've released the clipping mask, what you'll find is that the shape around the outside is still there, but it just got no fill and stroke on it. So if you're wondering where it went, just click and drag over what you think it is and it will be, be there and appear again. You can always put a stroke back on if it's easier for you to see it. Now, let's make this into a clipping mask again. So I'll select all of those, go to object, down to clipping mask and across to make clipping mask once again. So how else could we adjust any of these items? Well, what we've got if we look at the layers panel, is an R click on that little arrow to drop down is a clipping group. It's pulls overdone but so we can see the whole of the word. If I click inside there, you can see those are all of my individual shapes. So remember earlier when we looked at layers, I said we can select layers by clicking on the little circle. So if I click on a circle, I can select any of those items. Let's try this one over here. That's the big one there. It's selected. I can now move it around. Should I need to. I can even go in and change it adjusted, do anything that I need with that. So once again, you go into your layers and you can then click to select parts of an item which is inside the clipping group or clipping mask. Now, are there any other ways? Absolutely. One way is you can double-click. So I've double-clicked and let's take me inside the group. And same again, I can then start to move my items around inside my clipping mask. Double-click to get out of that clipping mask or clipping group. Once again, tried out. 27. Clipping Masks - Photo & Edit: So how else can we use a clipping mask? Well, I'm going to bring in a picture. I'm going to go up to File and I'm going to choose place. And I'm going to place a picture. Now, this little picture in the folder full of pictures, it's called Cameron boat. And I'm going to click on that and place it into my document. So I'm just going to click and drag to place the image right over there. Now, all I really want is this little camera here, and I'd like it to be in a circle so I can take a shape. I'll use an ellipse and just click and drag a circle. Now I'm going to hold down the Shift key on the keyboard, and that gives me a perfect circle. I, so using my selection tool are moved into the right position, like so. And again, to make a slight mistake algorithm by mistake. Leave out a little to the camera. So if I were to select both of those, both the photograph which is all made of pixels and the vector shape. I didn't go to object, clipping mask and make it, it'll always use the top object to make the mask. Now you can see it's mustered out nicely, but my cameras in the wrong position. So of course, exactly as before, I can go down in my layers. And there's the picture to the linked file over there. I will click on the little circle which selects it. And I can then just move it around into the right position. Now, this is the problem. Sometimes you click and you move it around and the circle moves as well. You can see it's selecting everything in there. So if you haven't trouble moving the item around inside the mask, what you can do is double-click. And that takes you into the clipping group. And now I can click on the picture and move it around quite happily inside that circle. And let's move it down to the bottom over there. Don't forget double-click to come out of that clipping group. So double-click, go into the clipping group, move it around, you know, unit clipping group because it's a gray area along the top. And then double-click anywhere else to come out of it again. And now if I click it will move the picture and the mosque at the same time. 28. Opacity Mask - Basics: So let's look at another kind of mask. Now, this is called an opacity mask. And the way that it works is with shades from black to white. And depending on how light or how dark they are, you will see more or less of the item below. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring a picture in. I'm going to go to file and place. And I'm going to place the image. Now. I'll just use this camera that I showed you before. Click on Place, and I'll click and drag to place it right in there. Now, I'm going to do a very similar thing to before. I'm going to take an ellipse and I'm going to put an ellipse over the area that I want to mask. All looking very familiar right now. Using my selection tool, I'm going to select both the ellipse and the photograph. Now we can do this in two ways. We can either go to the capacity option, and that shows this little window in here. Or I can go to the Window menu and I can find the transparency. I go down over here, I've got transparency in there. Both these areas exactly the same. So whether you use the transparency or with use it from the opacity, It's going to be absolutely identical. Now what I'm gonna do is I will use the transparency option over here. And I'm going to go and I'm going to click on Make Mask. And you see by doing that, we get exactly the same result that we got when we were doing the object and clipping mask. So how is this different? Well, the thing is, with a clipping mask, you could only have one shape. Whereas in here, I can have multiple shapes and multiple transparencies. So I can either click on the picture here or I can click on the mask. That's really, really important to know exactly where you are. Because it's easy to come unstuck when you're on the mask. And you wondering why you can't get back to the rest of your document. So I'm going to click on the mask. So I'm on the mask. Firstly, I can move the mask around in here. I can reshape it. But I could also go and put some more shapes in Togo long and get little circular tool and I'll just click and drag a few more circles in there. We can even overlap them like that. And all of these are part of that one, mask, a pasty mosque in there. Now, if I want to move the whole thing around, I click back on the photo. On the picture there in that little area. Then I can use my black arrow tool, the selection tool, and I can move everything around in here. When I want to go and adjust the individual areas, I click on the mask. And same again. I can then go and move those around and place them wherever I want in there. Try that out. 29. Opacity Mask - Shades of Grey & Effects: Now for the next example, I'm going to put a dark area behind this. So I'm going to click on the picture making sure I'm not on the mass. That's so, so important. So I've clicked on the picture. I can now go and get a shape over here. And let's just draw shape in there. And I'm going to give it a color. So I'll change my fill in here just with a darkish color. And I'm going to say object, arrange and send it to the back. So it's sitting behind those pictures. Let's go back to this picture now. So I'm going to go onto the mask. I'll click on the mask. And remember when I made these shapes, I made the shapes and they were white. They had a white fill, whether you see it there or whether you see it up here, It's the same thing. So what would happen if I went for a black fill? What did we just disappear? You can see over here, the white is showing through and the black is hiding. If I changed to gray. So a mid gray of the eye would see some of the picture coming through. So it's a percentage of the capacity of that picture. So that's why it's called an opacity mask. You can't do this type of thing very easily with the clipping mask. What about if I used a color instead? Well, if I went for, let's say for example, this bright pink, you can see it shows up pink in there. But it just looks at the lightness of that area, doesn't bring in through the color in the slightest. So what else could we do in here? Well, let me go back to white once again. And I think I will just remove some of these little shapes here. So I'm just going to delete them. I'm pressing the backspace or delete key on the keyboard to delete them. Let's move that. And across all. Now there was a bit of a mistake there. I should have clicked on the picture first. Move it across, and then I'm going to go back into there again. So I'm back on the mask. Don't forget to click on that. It's so easy to do. So starting on the mask, I'm going to go to the effects. Now there's different effects in here. And the effect I'm going to choose is a blurring effect. So if I go down to the effects and choose Blur, Gaussian Blur here, that's just a really nice general soft blur. You can see I can blur the edge of that vector shape, which then affects the mask. Once again, I can move it around. I can reshape it. Be careful those you've seen if I go to the edge with the edge of the picture is it's going to go quite hard in there. Let's click back on the picture. I want to delete this. So I'll go back to the picture and then press delete and do another one. I'm going to go to file and place and bring a picture in. And I'm going to bring in this blue line for masking copy up here. And I'm going to put a shape over the top of that. So once again, I'll get an ellipse. I'm going to pop the ellipse in here. And I'm going to select both of them. I don't wanna select the red. So to deselect something that you've selected, hold down the Shift key and click the item. So now it's only those two that are selected. I will click Make Mask. I'll click into my mask, move it across a little bit over here, and let's increase that blurred quite a lot this time. So Effect Blur, Gaussian Blur. And we can really push that up to give it a nice soft edge on there. But once again, watch the edge over there goes too far. You will see that the very edge of the blur, I can have more in there as well. So I can get another little circle over here and another one down here. We can just get our picture to appear in the various areas throughout. Don't forget, always click back on the picture. I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record. But do try it out. And then we'll have a project together. 30. Instagram Project: Image Blend: Let's do a little project now using the masking. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make to Instagram images. So you could do yours for any social media you like really. But I'm going to choose Instagram. I like it, it's nice and square. And I'm going to go with some square shapes. So I'm going to click on Create New over here, which will bring up the New Document window. Now, I know that instagram at the moment is 1080 by 1080 pixels. So I've popped them into, into there. If you're doing it for some other social media, feel free to put in different sizes in there. And of course, always check with Google whether that is the correct pixel size for the given social media, because they do change every so often. I'm going to click on Create. And this will give me my square. Now, I'm going to start off by bringing a picture in here. So I'm going to go along to File. I'm going down to place and I'm going to place this picture of the girl with the Hadean. I'm going to click on the side here and just drag it all the way across to the opposite side. Now. Looks good so far. But we want to spice it up a bit. Now before I bring in another picture, which I'm going to do, I want to lock this down. That's really important because I don't want to touch it, move it by mistake. It's so easy to just kind of click and drag and end up dragging the wrong thing. It's just undo that Control or Command Z to undo. I'm going to go along to the Object menu, choose, Lock, and selection. Now the pictures lot, I'm going to bring in the second image. So I'm going to go to file place. And this time I'm going to place the sunset. So let's click and drag that one over the top as well. Now, the top one I'm going to mask out. Now when we looked at masking, before we looked at masking, so things were either there or they weren't while they were there a percentage. This time I'm going to use a gradient so I can get the image to fade out. Now we haven't looked at gradients property yet. We will be doing it later in the course. We'll go into them in a lot of detail. But this will be a really simple, just applying the basic black to white gradient. So I'm going to make a shape which is going to go on top of those. In there. I've just done it a over the sum of the left Two-thirds of the picture. And I'm going to fill that with a gradient. You'll see the little gradient down here. Now, if you can't see the gradient, you might find right down the bottom that you're not seeing all the swatches. So we can either show just the colors or the gradients or the patents. But just make sure you show all the swatches and that way you'll see the gradient. I'll click on that. And we're going to get rid of the stroke as well. So you can remove the stroke over here by clicking on that little red line button, or you can do it in the Appearance palette on this side. So now all I need to do is to select both of those have selected the and picture underneath which is the sunset and the gradient. And I'm going to go into capacity, and I'm going to click Make mask. And you can see now how beautifully it just blends out that top picture. So we've seen the bottom one coming through. Now of course, if I click inside the mask area over here, I can then click on my mask and I can maybe moved over a bit if I want more of a blend on this side or further over, if I want the blend to cover her face as well, I don't really want that. I just want a little bit going on in there. We can move it over this way as well, but you can then start to see we've got a bit of color coming through. So I kind of quite, quite like that. And I think a little bit of text appropriate would be, would be quite good. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring in some text. I'm going to go to the Type tool. I'm just going to click once in there, put in my type, select the text, and I'm going to make it quite a lot larger. Now, if that doesn't go high enough, just keep going with little arrows until you get to the right size that you want. Change it to any typeface you like. I'll use a nice sort of heavy duty bold in here. And I'm going to change the color of the type to white. So what's happened? Because I've put my type in the mask. It's actually showing the picture through at the bottom. Now, that might be exactly what you want. You can separate this beautiful sunset coming through. And it's done that because I'm still on the mask. Of course, if you didn't want it on the mask, what you'd have to do, and I'll just delete this. They'll just cut it actually is. Make sure you're not on the mask. So you click any past city, click on the picture, de-selected, then do your type, and then to come in at whatever color you've chosen. So I'm going to rotate this around like so. Pop that on the side and grab a corner and scale it up to fills the rest of that area. Now, I'm going to stop at this stage here. So have bit of a go with it, try it out. I've used two pictures, but you can then add more pictures right on top. But do make sure that, you know, I'm on the mask. Am I on the picture? I'm sure you'll get caught out because I do time and time again, but have some fun with it. And then we'll do a second one in a moment. 31. Instagram Project: Image Masking: To do my second version of this Instagram picture, I'm going to make a new artboard. So I'm going to click on the Artboard Tool over here. And I want to copy this artboard here rather than drawing a whole new one. So if I just check in my Properties, make sure that Move Artwork with Artboard is switched off. Then when I hold down the Alt key, I can just make a copy of that art board. I'll go back to the black arrow tool now that's all that I needed to create that art board. I'm holding down the space bar. That gives me the hand. And I'll move this along like so. So instead of using a gradient this time, what I'm going to be using is something from the library. So I'm going to go to the Window menu. It's not the library that I showed you before, the CC libraries, this is the symbols library. The symbols libraries got all sorts of weird and wonderful things in it. But I'm going to choose the dot pattern vector pack and then lead to drag out one of these shapes. Over here. You can see, if I click on them, I can just drag them out and get all these really interesting shapes from there. Well, let's use this one over here. So this is actually now going to be my mask. The thing is, when you use a shape like this, if that is black, black hides, and black on a black mask just means that everything will be hidden. I need to make this shape white. Now, I am going to put it over here because you won't see white on white backgrounds are placed on the side there. In order to change the color of these dots because they're all individual little dots to white. You can't just do it in the Appearance palette panel over here because, well, you can see that's white already. But you will need to go to the Object menu. And we will need to expand this. So we'll expand all of those little shapes into objects and fills. And now you'll see that that's turned black. I can go in and I can make this any color that I like to be honest, but I wanted to be white. Now, if I click off of that and then click and drag across, you can see it selects some of those items in there. I'm going to select them all and just group them together again. So I'm going to go to Object and down to Group. Right? I've got that all prepared over there might be an idea to just stop the video at this point and get your shape prepared. You don't have to use this one. Try any of those from that set. So that was in the Window menu. It was all the way down to your symbols libraries. And I used the dot pattern vector pack in there. And when you've got one of those, just drag it out and drop it onto the page. Now, let me go and do something over here. I'm going to bring in the the woman with glasses. So I'm going to go to File and Place. Let's play, Sir again over here. And this time I'm going to take this and put it on top of that. Now this is the wrong way round this funny shape. The dots are underneath the photo. So I'm going to go to the Object menu, Arrange and bring it to the front so it's sitting on top of that shape there. Let's do that. Now if I select both of them and go to the opacity, and then click on Make Mask. There we go. And she's just coming through in the dots. Remember, you can always go into your dots. You can move them around, you can change them. I'm going to keep it like that. And I just want some text in there. So I'm going to hold down the Alt key and copy that bit of text across and change the color. Now I need to make sure that that's the top objects. I'll go to object, arrange, bring to front, to bring the text to the front, so it's in front of everything else. Of course you can see it's white on white, so that's not going to really happen in there. Now the color that I've got is not ideal. I really want to use a blue from the picture to keep the whole thing looking cohesive. So with the text selected, I'm going to get the little eyedropper that's on the left-hand side here. If you click and hold, you'll see it's called the eyedropper tool. So the text is selected and I just go along and click on the color that I want to sample. And it will change the color of the text to that color. So I could do that with a skin, I could maybe samplers skin tone or sampler hair. And the bet. But as this brand is called blue line made up, I'm gonna go with blue line in there. Once again, have a go with those last little bit, put some text in, come back, and then we will save these out as jpegs ready for Instagram. 32. Instagram Project: Post Export: So let's save these out as jpegs ready for social media. I'm going to go to the File menu. I'm going to choose Export. And I'm just going to say Export As. Now, I'm going to pop these onto my desktop. And I'll just call this one lw line down in the format. We're going to choose JPEG or PNG if you wish. I'm just going to go with JPEG in there. Your window in here, if you're a Windows machine might look a little bit different, but it's basically the same sort of thing. And then over here somewhere, There's a Use Artboards button. I say somewhere because as I said, in Windows or might be further along a bit, Use Artboards. And I'm going to use all of them. I'm putting this onto my desktop so you can see it easily. Afterwards. I'll click Export. And in the JPEG options now we'll talk about these color modes and qualities and stuff later on. But for now I'm going to keep the quality quite high. And click OK. Now, I've now saved those two there are on my desktop. Let me show you where they are. So we'll just there we go. There's both of them, blue line 0, 1, and blue line O2. Now this a quick little trick to actually seeing these. If you want to see what the jpegs look like, you could of course, opened in Photoshop. But if you don't have Photoshop, as long as you've got a browser, you can just take them and drop them into your browser. And the browser, depending on which one it is, of course, most of them will, will just show it like that. So I'll just check the other one, drag and drop that one in. And there's my second one in there. I'm happy with that. So I'm going to go back into Illustrator and just do my final save. So I'll choose Save As make sure I'm saving it. Something I can remember over here. Blue line, Instagram. I'm saving it as an Illustrator file. So this is the file that I'll be reusing a number of times. And I click on Save. If when this little window appears, just click the Okay button at the bottom. Have a bit of a go with that. And just do a whole bunch of them is so many that you can try out variations on the theme. 33. Working with Color - Intro: So in this section we're going to be looking at color. Now we're going to start off by looking at RGB and CMYK and talking about that. So if you've got no idea what the differences, keep watching. And after that, we'll talk about spot colors. We'll talk about how to make your own colors. Whether they asked, working with spot colors or creating your own individual CMYK or RGB colors. Will then also look at other color options. For example, taking colors and adjusting them and making variations. And then on to a very special part of Illustrator. I just loved this part. It's where if you get a color, how can you choose other colors that goes so well with it? And illustrates that gives you some really, really good ways of doing that. And finally, we look at variations, so we can make some art work, and then we can do a color variation on that artwork. So you just have to put the work into one and you can then show your client three or four different color variations. It's very, very quick to do. 34. RGB & CMYK: So let's have a look at the differences in the color modes. There are two main color modes that we have in Illustrator. Rgb, which is on the right-hand side of the screen. And that stands for red, green and blue. And CMYK, which stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. So let's start off with RGB. Rgb, red, green, and blue is all about the screen. So most devices that you work on, whether it's a computer, monitor, a laptop, a television, a smart phone. All of those items display all of their colors, just using red, green, and blue light. So in here I've got red, green, and blue. If I have a 100 percent of red, green, and blue light, it gives me white. So when you're looking at a document and you see the word, a word document, for example, with a white page. You're seeing white because it's made up of a 100 percent of red, green, and blue light. If you see black. Well, that's because there is no light in there. So anything that's done for screen use, for the web or for your own personal display is done using red, green, and blue. On the other hand, if you're printing something out commercially, you would generally tend to start off on white paper. So we've got white paper in the background here. And then we print with cyan, blue, magenta, the pink and yellow CMY. Now, if you mix together cyan, magenta and yellow, at a 100 percent, you get, well, it's not quite black, it's a very, very dark gray. So we also use a black ink as well. So we have CMY and k, The black ink in there. K, you might ask, why is it k rather than B? Well, first of all, be, it would be confusing with RGB, but mainly because it's the key color. So cyan, magenta, yellow, and the key color black. So can you work in one and then convert to the other? Absolutely. If I go to the File menu, I can go into my document color mode and I can convert my document from RGB to CMYK. But if I go from RGB to CMYK, you will notice the colors in RGB tend to dull down a bit. You get much more vivid colors in RGB than you do in CMYK. And it's because they made a blight, you just cannot get the same vivid green. I think that you can get with light. Certainly not mixing cyan magenta and yellow together. So I'm going to release the mouse on CMYK color here and watch the colors on RGB and you'll see how they change and they go bit duller in there. Let me undo that. I'll just do it for you one more times that you can see it. So over here file, I'm converting from RGB to CMYK and the colors dull down. If I go from CMYK to RGB, will these brighten up? No, no, they weren't. They'll just stay exactly as they are. So when you're starting a new document and you get a file in your, you click the New button in the initial new screen. If you are on the web setting up here, you will document will default to being RGB color. If you don't see that little color mode in there, you can just click on the Advanced Options to go into it. If you aren't the print tab, your document defaults to CMYK color for print. Remember though, if you're creating in one of these, you can always change to the other if you need. But in an ideal world, try and stay in the correct color Source. Click correct color mode to start off with. I'm just going to click on Create. So what else changes in here? Well, because I'm in CMYK and you can see that that says CMYK at the top over there. When I go on to my colors and I'm going to go to the Window menu. I'm going to go down. I'm going to find my swatches. All of these colors that I've got in here are all CMYK colors. You can see over here, if I click on the list, I've got CMYK reds, greens, blues, and a whole lot of different CMYK colors with little CMYK icon over there. If I had made a new document and I've chosen the web presets, so I was actually in RGB color mode. Then when I go into swatches, my colors are lot brighter, but they are all RGB colors in here. So CMYK, della colors made up of four channels. Rgb made up of three channels of color. The colors are much brighter, but this is all to do with light. 35. Color Swatch 1 - Create Your Own Color Sets: Let's have a look at the color swatches and how to create your own colors in Illustrator. I'm going to go to the Window menu. And I'm going to go down and I'm going to find the swatches option in here. Now, when you look at the swatches, you'll recognize it because it's very similar to what you've been seeing when you've been choosing color in the properties. So I've got some swatches in here now, and I can view my swatches either as a list or as individual little swatches. I can also at the bottom, click on this little drop-down menu and show all the swatches, or just the color, just the gradients, or just the patterns, color groups. I'm going to just click off of that. So the first thing is, what about these color groups over here? Well, the color groups are just groups of colors and you can do that yourself very easily. So I could select some colors. So if I'm going to select, say for example, a set of browns, I can select them by holding down the Shift key. So I click on one, hold down the Shift key and select all of those. And down his little folder, I click on that and it will then allow me to put it into a group. I'll call that one brown and click OK. And I've now got a brown set. If you find is a color that you don't particularly like, you can click on it and you can drag it into the bin to remove the color, whether it's from there or in the sets. You can also move colors out of the set and drop them back into the swatches. Now, what about extra colors? Well, there's so many ways of getting extra colors into Illustrator. Let's start off with the library sets of colors. In the swatches panel. I'm going to go down to this little icon here. It kind of shows three books. And that's because these are books of colors. And we got different sets of colors in here. For example, just starting at the top, there's the art history sets. And we've got things like impressionism sets and prehistoric sets. What can go down to celebration sets? This color box, and we'll come to these later on, but these are your spot colors. And going down to earth tones and food, the list just keeps going, going on. Let's go to art history as it's right here. And I'm going to go in and I'm going to choose the impressionism set. And you can see then I've got a whole set of colors in here. Now I can look at the colors and go, well, I really like this set here. So I can drag the set by the folder and drop it straight into my working swatch. This is my working swatch over here where I could pick a single color and just drag the color from there and either drop it into the set, or I can drop it into the main area over here. So click at the bottom, go down, choose the set that you want. Next goes earth tones this time. This might have turns and drag them across into your swatches. Try it out. 36. Color Swatch 2 - Make Your Own Colors: Now the other way that I can make extra colors is to make them myself using RGB or CMYK values. Now I can do this in my swatches by clicking on the little plus down there. All by going to the top to the drop-down menu here and choosing new swatch. Either way, it opens up the new swatch window. And I can then put in my RGB values. So I can just drag these around or type them directly in there. If I'm working in CMYK, I can then go into CMYK and I can use the CMYK sliders. It is a specific corporate color that you want to create in there. Now, once I've created my color, I can either choose to leave it as named with the CMYK or RGB values, or I can just click in there and rename it myself. It's called this sea foam. And I can click Okay. Now the second thing when you're creating these is once you've created a color, you can either get it to appear in the swatches or you can add it to your library as well. So if I say add to my library, and I can then just add it into my library, libraries that we looked at earlier on. As well as going into the swatches. 37. Spot Colors: So what about the spot colors? Well, spot colors are extra inks that you use when you're printing. So I'm going to go over to CMYK document over here. So when I send an artwork or a piece of artwork out to the printers, they generate print with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink. But if there's a specific color that you want to be very, very accurate or to colored you need to print which cannot, can't be made up using cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. You can then get them to use a particular spot color. Now I'm good to go down and click in here on the color box. Here's the kind of books here. And these are all the different brands of spot colors that we can use. So I'm just going to go and pick one by a brand called Pantone. Yeah. Now you'll see that these are slightly different to those colors because not only do they have the global settings switched on, but they've also got a dot in the corner to show that they are spot colors. And I can search for a spot color by just typing in the number that I want straight in there. Or I can just scroll through to find the number that I'm looking for. Once a founded, I can just drag it straight in my swatches in there to be careful with spot colors because if you're using them and you're sending stuff to print, it's going to cost you a lot of extra money because the printer prints with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Plus they then have to make up the spot color for you as well. 38. Global Colors - How & Why You Need Them: I've got a piece of artwork here and I've got a few little petals around these flowers. And there's a different color in the background. And we've got some orange bits in the middle of the flower. Now what I'd like to do is to use this to show you why some of these colors have got little lines on the side. You see, if I click on the orange from the middle of the flower, there's the orange over there. It doesn't have the line through the middle. Whereas if I clicked on one of the petals, It's got the line across the core national essay rather than through the, through the middle. So what is the difference between them? Well, if I were to double-click on this color here, the sea foam, green. You can see it's got global settings set up. And what that global does is it means that if I make any changes in here, it will affect that color wherever it's been used in my artwork. So if I switch on preview, I can then go in here and I can just change the colors. And I don't have to even have them selected live. I can see exactly what's happening in my artwork over there and change them until I feel happy with the way they're looking. Now let's have a look at the orange. So the orange, remember it was up here. If I double-click that orange, because there was no global setup in there. If I go and change the colors, I can change this color here. I can click Okay. And it's changed up there, but it doesn't affect the ones that are in the document. So if you want to affect colors in your document by changing the swatch color, you use that global setting. So once again, when you're making a new color swatch in here, once you've made your color, decide whether you want that global switched on or switched off. 39. Saving Swatches: So what about if you've added some extra colors into the swatches and you want to use them in another document. Well, the problem is that if I go to File and New and I choose a new document in here, I'll do another web document. You'll see that the colors just disappear. Now go back to this document here. They're still in that document. So the colors you make our document specific. So how can you save these so that you can then reuse them again? Well, if I've made up a set of colors that I want to reuse time and time again. When I can do is I can save them specifically as a library of colors. I can go to the top right-hand corner of my swatches to that little drop-down menu. And I'm going to go down and save Swatch Library as. Now, if you're saving it for Illustrator, you save the Swatch Library as an AI file. If you want to save the swatch libraries, that you can use it in InDesign or Photoshop, then you can save it as an ASE file. Auc stands for Adobe Swatch Exchange, and it means that you can then open it up in either Photoshop, InDesign. So let's do it for Illustrator. I'll say Save Swatch Library as AI. And in here takes me to where it should be saved. So it's taken into the swatches. I'll call this Tim's new colors. And I'm going to click on Save. All right, so if I go into this document now, and of course my colors have disappeared. How do I get those colors into this document? Well, and I can do this at anytime even if I've closed down Illustrator and open up in six months time, if I go to the library of colors, I go all the way down to the bottom to where it says user-defined. And there it is, Tim's new colors. I can click on that and it opens it up as a library, exactly as those other libraries were that I showed you the impressionism, the Pentagon's Earth colors, all the, all the others. It just makes a new library so you can make your own very specific libraries. Of course, don't forget that you can also put colors into your library panel. As we looked at earlier, by just choosing the color and then adding them in either as a fill or the stroke color. In there. 40. Color Guide: Now, there is another way of finding color as well. And I loved this way because when I'm stuck for colors on a job, this really makes my life so much simpler. Let's say, for example, that you have one color that you are going to be using on their job. And for me, I'm going to choose this red, kinda like red. So I'm going to go with that grid over there. Now. That's great. If I'm using it in my document and now need to find some other colors that will go with that grid. So one of the ways that Illustrator gives you to help you to choose colors is something in here called the Color Guide. I'm going to go to the Window menu, and I'm going to go down to the color guide that's over here. And this is the Color Guide. Now when you first look at, think, well, I'm not really sure about that. Don't like purple, maybe I don't want to purple in there. But the idea is that you go along to this little drop-down menu. So you've chosen the color you want, I've chosen the red. There. You go to the drop-down menu. And this shows you all of the harmonies that work with that red, starting right at the top, but things like complimentary colors. So the complimentary color is the color of its opposite. Read in the color spectrum, which is this bright green. Right away through to variations on complimentary, right, complimentary, left complimentary. All the way down. We've got all of these colors which should work together with that red. Now, let's say that I've chosen this one here. Oh, actually I like that one. I'm going to choose that one there. You can see what it does. It pops it up there. And if I'm happy with that and I like those colors, will then down here I click this little button and it will just save it as a group into my swatches. But the great thing about this is it also gives me the ability to choose tints and shades of those colors. So for example, in this teal type of color, I can go in and pick some of these colors. I'm going to click on one. And then I'll just hold. Now you can hold on either Command or Control depending on whether your Mac or PC. And I can just choose those colors in there as well. I can pick multiple, so I'm going to pick those plus these ones in here too. And same again, I can then click that. It'll save color group button. All of those in my swatches as a color group. Now not only do you get shades and tints, but if you go in, you'll find that you can actually change from tints and shades, too warm and cool versions of those colors. We click back on that red again that I chose initially. So I'm going to pick this harmony over here. And there. I've got warm aversions and could aversions. If I went back to the top again, I could have vivid and more muted versions of those colors. Personally, I like the tints and shades, I think, gives a really nice set of tones from the colors you've chosen. Lastly, if you want to get a particular color, you can just click in there and drag and drop it straight into, place it into your swatches. Don't forget that one. It'll make your life so much easier when you are designing a piece of artwork. 41. Recolor Artwork: So let's look at another way that we can change existing color. What I'm going to do is I'm going to open a piece of artwork that we did earlier. If you didn't do the poster, there is an Illustrator copy of it in the exercise folder. I'm going to open it. And there it is over there, the folk poster that we created earlier. Now what I'd like to do is I'd like to do some variations on the color for this particular poster. Now, you can see we've got these large areas of color around the outside. I'm, I'm finding them a bit distracting. So I'm going to go to the View menu and I'm going to just choose Trim View. So it shows me what the poster will actually look like. And in my layers panel, which is right over here, if you can't see it, remember it's in the Window menu. I'm going to just unlock all the layers from that. Because what I want to do is I want to make some copies of this art board. So I'll move this along now I'm holding down the space bar to get the hand tool and pulling it along. I'm also using Command or Control minus to zoom out. So I'll go along to the Artboard tool. I'm going to make sure in my Properties panel that move artwork with artboard is switched on. If that's not switched on, remember it will only move the artboard, not the artwork. So now that I've got that, I'll hold down the Alt key and just drag another copy. Write out over there. Now it says that any hidden or locked object on the artboard will not be moved. And let's click OK over there. And that was why when we did this, I unlocked all of those items. But you can see there is a linked file that was the original photograph that we use to draw the guitar, which was hidden. So that wasn't moved, but that's absolutely fine. We really don't need that. So I've got my first version in there. Let me do another one. So I'll move this along. Same again. I'll go over to the Artboard Tool. Hold down the Alt key on the keyboard and move a copy of that one over. So I'm going to be doing three variations of the colors here. Let's go back to our properties once again. So I'd like to find some colors that I might want to use in here. So I'm going to go to the Window menu. I'm going to show my swatches as we've done before. And I think I'm going to make a few more little groups of color here as well. So I'll go down to the libraries. I'll use art history. I really like the Art History, color sets. And I'll go over to Renaissance. And it's pick one of these sets of colors in here, and I'll just drag that one, looks interesting. Drag that one across into there. And let's do a different one as well. So we'll get a third one going on in here. Let's try foods, ice creams, Neapolitan color, brilliant. Okay, so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to select all the items on this art board. Yes, I'm using the selection tool is the same normal black arrow tool. I'm going to click and drag so I can set everything in here. Now, I have to be very careful because when I select this, you'll notice I've just touched the edge of that item there, which is actually on the other art board. Um, so I don't want to select that. So let me make sure I'm just being very careful here to just select the items which are on this art board. That looks good. So now what we're going to do is we're going to use a little tool that will help us apply these colors to that art board. Now you'll find this appears all over the place and I'm going to go and get it from the menu. I'm going to go along to the Edit menu. I'm going to go down to Edit Colors. And I'm going to be using recolor artwork. Just while I'm here though, you'll see that we've got a lot of other ways of editing our colors. We can reset with presets, knows our colors from the swatches or the color library. We can adjust the color balance on images and graphics. We can blend them. We can convert to CMYK, we can even convert to grayscale. But I'm going to use the Recolor Artwork. Now, what we have here is a pretty complex looking little window, but it just break it down. In here. We've got color groups. So what would happen if I clicked on a color group will right-click on this shirt color group. You see it just recolor artwork using those colors. If I clicked on lessons when impressionism 10, or brights or grays, I can just very quickly recolor with these colors in here. Now, if I've recolored with one of these and I kind of like it. I'll just click. Okay, let me do the next one. So I'm going to select this other art board. And I'm going to go back to the edit menu, Edit Colors, and Recolor Artwork. Now, if I've chosen a set of colors in here, and let's have a look at Renaissance. Not really happy with that. Let's go with brights of Yeah, Okay. I like the brights, but it's not quite as I wanted to be. In this little area here. We've got the assigned color and we've got Edit Colors. I'm going to click the Edit Color button. And you can see that all of the colors in there are met onto this color wheel. Now, if I make sure that, that those are all locked, and I do that there's a little lock over here. We can just lock all the harmonies. If I drag one of them, you'll see it will affect all the colors. And I can just drag them around the color wheel to get different harmonies of that same color. Now, it might get to the point where I think a kind of like those background colors, really not sure about this blue. Well, in that case, I can unlock them and I can go to just the blue. And I can try different colors for the blue. Let's go and get something which is on the opposite side. Bad. Now, at some point when you're doing this, you'll end up making a total mess of things. Well, I do anyway. And when you get to this point, I think I just want to reset it to worry about clicking the cancel button. Just go up to the top and there's a little eyedropper. If you click the eyedropper, it will just reset all your colors back again. You don't have to use the color groups. You can go straight into edit and I can unlock, lock the harmonies together. And this time what I'm going to do is I'm going to pick the lighter of those blues and just change it up a little bit here. Brighten up a bit. Maybe this blue here make a little bit more purple. And I'll take the writing and it's pull it over so it's bit more yellow. Once again, when I'm happy with that, I click OK. Let's have a look at these with trim mode. So we're going to trim view over there. And we'll zoom out a little bit. And we've got three variations on the same theme, done fairly quickly. Give it a dash. 42. Recolor Artwork From Photo: I've got a graphic here, this Tiki graphic. And if this is going to go into a brochure, what I'd probably want to do is to adjust the colors so it's sympathetic to my brochure. Now, let's say, for example, that it was going to go into a brochure. And one of the main pictures, this one over here with the boat, the sand, and the sky. Now although I love the colors that I've got on the graphical ready, I'd like it to be sympathetic to that image. So I'm going to use the colors from this image in my graphic. Now this is a great way of, first of all, making sure that your graphics are sympathetic to a particular color scheme. Or it allows you to also create variations on a color theme for a client. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select my graphic. So I'm just going to click and drag using the black arrow tool. I'm going to go to the Edit menu down to Edit Colors and Recolor Artwork. We've looked at this earlier in the course. So now that I've got this little area here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on this color theme Picker. Now, if you don't see this, it could be that you haven't upgraded to the latest version of Illustrator. This is in Illustrator 2020 one, it was one of the new features that they brought into the later versions. So as I said, I'm on 2021 here. So if you don't see it, just upgrade your version of Illustrator. Anyway. It's really easy to use. Only do is you click the Colosseum, pick a button, and you click on the picture, and you'll see now how my image is just using colors directly from the photograph. You can see we've got blues of the sky. There is some of the sand is coming to the mosques knows, in there we've got shades of blue in there. But the great thing about this is you can sample as many pictures as you want. So I'm going to go to this image and sample this one. So we click over there and you can now see how we getting colors from that. So second photograph, and let's try the green forest one. So once again, I click on the picture, doesn't really matter where. And you'll see that all the colors now are coming from that image. Finally, I'll try this image down here. You can see I've still got this little area open with the Color Theme Picker switched on. And I'm going to click on that and it'll pick up all the reds in that. Now kind of quack that the defect from the forests. I'm going to go back to that one there. All I need to do now is to click off of the picture that will close and it's all ready to go. Do try it out. It's a new feature in the latest versions of illustrator and it really, really good. 43. Use AI Prompt to Edit Colors (New Feature): I'd like to make some variations on this little piece of artwork that I've got here. And this will work on any vector artwork. I'm going to select it and I'm going to hold down the alter the option key to copy it over there. I'd like a brighter version of this, but I want to do that using new feature. I'm going to go along to the edit menu. I'm going down to Edit Colors and using the generative recolor. Now there are some premade ones that you can use in here. There's yellow submarine colors and terracotted desert colors. You can just click on those and see what you get. I'll click there. It'll sample the artwork. And then come up with some variations. Not really what I had in mind. I need to tell it what to do in here. I'm going to say I want vivid warm oranges. Vivid warm orange. And I'll click on Generate. And now it's going to use my prompt to try and give me some variations on that. Not too bad, I quite like that one. That's an interesting variation. I'm going to choose that one, You can just flick through them to see how they actually look. I think that's really a rather nice variation. Now if I click on this little three dots over here, you could see I could actually choose to just delete that one if I didn't like that in there. Or in my case, I'm going to choose select and edit colors. When I choose that, it selects those colors, but it takes me in to this editing area. What I'm interested in down the bottom is the slider. So I can either darken down those colors or I can make them a whole lot more vibrant and brighter. You can, of course, go in here and edit the colors individually or as a group. So I can click in there and drag all the colors around like or I can unlink them and then go in and adjust the colors that I don't like this color here are these little shapes in there. I'll just try it some different colors. Let's go to some of the reds and see, there we go, the pepperoni. I want that to be more of an orange like so really, really useful. It means that color variations are very quick and easy to do. Try it out on any of your own bits of artwork. 44. Gradients, Blends & Meshes Intro: In this section we're going to be looking at three things. Gradients, blends, and meshes. Now, they all seem to do the same sort of thing. But you can do so many different things with each type. Each one of them can create just a standard gradient. But we're gonna make some amazing stuff with these. So once you've gone through and you understand how to use the tools, have looked project. Because we're going to do a really big one today. We're going to do an infographic and we're going to use some amazing gradients on there. Will also be looking at using a mesh to create an interesting banner, a very sort of cyber R3 space style banner. And as you can see here, so we've got to have better here as Conoco. And this is the big project for this one. And this is going to be now infographic, lots of arrows. Because once again, if you don't like these type of things, you can always change them and do your own thing with them as well. And I'll be going through step-by-step. As always. Let's get started. 45. Using Gradients: So let's take color onto the next level. What I'm going to do now is show you some gradients. First of all, how to work with them. And then we'll look at creating your own gradients. Now I'm going to select one of these shapes that I've got here. And I'm going to go along to the fill color in the appearance panel in the properties. And you'll find that there are a few premade gradients in there. There is, for example, a black to white one. Or if I select this shape over here, we've got this blue to white one in there. Or over here. If I go in, you'll see there's another one, which is the pink. It's actually not pink to white. It's pink, too transparent if I put it over the side or over those, you can see this transparency in there as well. So with gradients, we can blend colors together, but we can also use transparency. In. What I'm going to do now though, is to have a look at how we can control these gradients. Let's get rid of that shape there, that one there. And we'll just make this one a little bit bigger. So if I want to edit my gradient, we use the editing tool over here, going to the tuba, go down to Gradient Tool, click once. And you can see I've got this gradient yen is little dots along the gradient. Now we'll come to those little dots later on. But the line with those dots on it controls the angle of the gradient. So if I click over here and dragged, you can see how I can just change the angle of the gradient. We want to go bottom to top or top to bottom, depending on the gradient. Now, if you have a few shapes in here, Let's have another shape there and another shape is there. Each one of those has got an independent gradient on it. But if you use your selection tool and select all of them, then you can use your gradient tool and you just drag across them all at the same time. You can get one gradient that, well, it goes across all the same items. Have bit of a go with the basic ones they give you. But when you're doing that, don't just use the ones that are they. If you go to the Window menu and go all the way down to the very bottom. Now mine's going off the screen unfortunately. But within the swatch libraries, you find that there are some gradients in here as well. So good your swatch libraries, gradients. And then across, you've got a number of different gradients. Let's just have a quick look at this metals in here. These all different types of gradients are once again, I can click on them. I can choose the gradient. And then I can use this gradient to, to click and drag to change the angle of the gradient. Try it out. 46. Create Your Own Gradients: So what about if you want to make your own gradients with your own colors? Well, let's have a look. I'm going to go to the Window menu and I'm going to find the gradient panel. You can see it's remembered my last metal gradient in there. And I'm going to make a little shape over here. Now, if I go to my fill, I'm just going to pick the very basic shape to start off with. It's bad is black to white. Now you'll see in here in the gradient panel it shows white on one side, black on the other. Well, if I want to add my own colors him, all I have to do is to go along here, drag a color and drop it straight into that gradient. And so I've dropped it in there and it's now changed my gradient. Just click on that to update it. So same again. We're going to find a different color to go in there. So I'm going to pick an orange, drag and drop it in and I want to replace the white. So I click on top of the white to drop it on the white. Once again, you'll just update on your given gradient shape. If you want to remove a color. Well, all you have to do is click on the little circle and pull downwards, and that will get rid of the color from the gradient. There you go. You can see it's working live now. I can move the colors around so I can pull him about. And if you've got a selected object, it will show you live on the object. I can pull it over to change them around with the little circles. I can also go to this in-between area. Click on that, and then drag that left and right in there to change the amount of purple or orange. In my case. Now, these little circles here, and let's add another one to the, the gradient of drop it in every day and I'm going to move the orange across between the two of them. These little circles that we have here relate to the circles that you see in the gradient tool. If I click on the Gradient Tool and click and drag up here, you can see there's my blue circle, my orange circle, and my purple circle relating to those. And I can click on these circles and actually move them in here rather than doing it in this little gradient panel. I can also move the little diamond shapes between them rather than doing it. In here. 47. Radial Gradient Options: In the gradient panel. Over here, we've got a few more options. Let's go across to the top, to the linear, from the linear to the radial gradient. If I click on that, I get a circular gradient rather than the linear gradient. Now this works in the same way because if I'm on the gradient tool, I can just click and drag to change the size and where the middle of that linear gradient or radial gradients in this case starts. So I can just click and drag like so. But the radial gradients got another little trick up its sleeve. If you go down here, you find that you can change the aspect ratio. So if I wanted something long and thin, I could go to, let's say 20 percent. And you can see now I've got this more flattened gradient in there. There's all sorts of percentages to try out. If we went to 300 percent, you'll see it's going the opposite way, but it's going up like so. 48. Gradient Opacity: Now we've got another option in here as well. If I go along to my gradient at the moment discussed from Orange through to blue, if I want transparency in my gradient, what I can do is I can click on one of these stops and then I can change the opacity in the bottom. Now you can do this on either radial or linear gradient. I'm going to click on the past two inches, take it down to 0. So now the blue is transparent. You can see a little bit of it in here. If you really want to color, going from that color out to 0, what I'd suggest you do is take the same color. So in my case, I would have orange going through to orange. And that gives me a really nice gradient going from orange out to transparent. Now this actually looks like it's going out to white, but you'll see if I were to move my shape. I'll just get my selection tool and just drag it off the side of the page. You can see there is transparency in there. You can add as many transparent areas as you like. So every stop, you can change the color, you can change the opacity. And below that is the location. Now the location is just its position, position on this little line in here. So to make sure it's right at the end, rather than actually dragging it, I could just choose a 0 in there. And to make sure that this one was right at the end, I could choose a 100 percent in there. 49. The Freeform Gradient: Now our last type of gradient is this one here. And this is called the free form gradient and does exactly that. It allows you to vary freely, move your colors around on the shape. The way it works is I've got a shape up here with a color fill color. I'm going to click on that little Freeform Gradient button. And this puts in one little dot on my shape. Now the idea is that I can click on that and I can change it to anything I like. I'll pick an orange. But then for my gradient, all I do is I click somewhere else, have clicked again. So I've now got this little dot here, and I can change the color of that dot. Let's make that more of a purple. And I can add as many of these dots as I like. So over here I'm going to click over here. And this one, I'm going to make that blue. I don't like that blue. So let's pick again different color blue in there. And we can just go back to existing dots, click on them and change the color. Now, once you've added the Min, you can also move them around. So I can just pull it around like that. And it will show you live exactly what your gradient is going to look like. And just pull that in, move it across in there. You can also change where the gradient is affecting the colors. So for example here, if I pull this one out, I can get more of the purple or less of the purple from that dot. Add as many colors as you like. Go to the Fill. Choose a new color. If you don't like one of these little dots or points as they called, all you have to do is to it. And in the gradient panel here there's a little bin. You can just click the Bin to remove it. Now, once you've de-select your shape, It's just like a standard gradient in there. But if you want to edit it, you click it. Now you won't see those dots initially. You have to go to the gradient panel. Click the edit gradient. You'll see that we find the same things down here. By the way, in the properties above, click the edit gradient, there's the little dots and we can then move those points around to wherever we like. Have a go with that, that one's great fun. 50. Save Gradients: If you've created a gradient, and that could be a linear gradient or radial gradient. And you want to save it in the document you're working on so that you can use it in other parts of your artwork. What you can do is if you go to the appearance panel, click the fill and the swatches open up here. Now you see that because I've selected the object with a gradient integrate into showing up over here and I can just drag and drop it straight in. Maybe I also want a radial version of that. Well, same thing again. I can then just drag that one in, drop it into the swatches as well. And remember that will be here for this particular document. When you go into a new document, those gradients will disappear into default. Back to the original gradient type. Like with swatches, we can save out a swatch by going to the top. And just choosing to save as a swatch library. 51. Blend Tool Basics: Let's have a look at the blend tool. Now, the way the blend tool works is it blends shapes together, which initially gives you a gradient effect. Now this used to be the original tool in very early versions of Illustrator. I'm going to take a little shape here. I'm just going to use a rectangle and make a rectangle. I'm going to fill it with some color, so let's choose red in there. I'm going to get rid of the stroke. So stroke option here, I'll choose none. Now I want to second version exactly the same size. So I'm going to use my move tool, my selection tool, hold down the Alt key and just move a copy across. Let's make this one a different color. Now, to blend between these two, we can do one of two things. We can select them both. And we can go to the Object menu, down to Blend and Make. Or we can go to the blend tool over here. Click on one object on the corner. So I'll click on that little point there and the same point on the one on the other side. And you can see what it stands, hasn't made much of a gradient on mine. It's just done a number of in-between shape colors. So let's have a look at how we can change that. If I go to the Object menu, I'm going to go down and I'm going to go to blend. And then I'm going to go to the blend options. Now in here, if I were to choose specified steps, you can see that there are five steps are 123455 steps between those two colors. Let's increase that a bit. I'm going to try and increase it to 200. We'll click OK. And you can see now we've got 200 shapes between those two objects. Now, that's all very well. We can do exactly the same thing with the gradient. So why is this a bit better? Well, if I use my black arrow tool, the selection tool, and I click on this, it selects both those shapes at the same time. If I go over to the direct selection tool and into the group selection tool, now I can select one of those items. I'm sector one from the group, and I can move it. And you'll see it'll just automatically change that blend between those shapes. So one of the reasons to use this is that you can very quickly move shapes around to change your blend. And you can see you've got a really interesting gradient going on here. It's not just a straight one. A conformist goes around the corner of that shape. It doesn't have to be squares. You could do exactly the same thing with ellipses or any other shape for that matter. Let's go down here and use the Star tool. So I'm going to make a little star over here. And then I'm going to change the color. Think we'll start off with red. And let's do another star over here. And I'll get to make this one. Well, green. If I select both of these shapes, I'm using my Selection tool to select both. I'm going to go to Object, Blend and Make. And you can see how it's blending the two shapes and making lots of shapes between those two. At anytime go along, you get your group selection tool and you can select either of those shapes and move them around. But moving far enough you can see the individual shapes coming in of the, on that pretty rough edge. Try that out and I'll show you some really cool stuff that we can do with these. 52. Go Wild with Blends: So how else could we use this tool? Well, let's have a go with some different shapes. I'm going to take a star over here, and I'm going to fill it with interesting color. Let's go with some orange over there. And I'm going to get a different shape now, I will use an ellipse over there. And with the ellipse, I will once again change the color. Let's try a blue in there. Now you'll notice on this time I've left a stroke on those shapes. So I'm going to select them both. I'm going to go to object down to Blend and Make. And you can see it's kind of put the shapes between those two there. Now, if I want to reduce the number of shapes, I can go to object, blend and blend options. And then over here, let's change this to maybe 50. And if you switch on Preview, you can actually see directly what it's doing. We'll click Okay, so it's going from the star to the blue shape over there. Now, I can still change the colors in here so I can take my group selection tool. I can select the circle at, I could change the color in their books or might not like the blue. So let's change that into a green. And I can also click on the star. And maybe I could change the color of the stroke to a red. So it will also blend the stroke colors across as well. Now what's really interesting about the shapes is that when you select them with the selection tool, you'll see there's a line between them. Now this means that you can actually change that line and get the shapes to follow a different line. I'll just use a pencil. I'm going to go in here and find my pencil tool. And there it is over there. And without a stroke, I'm just sorry, without a fill, I'm just going to draw a little shape like that. And if I select both of those, the shapes that I've just drawn and the blend. It's moved that color out the way and go to Object. I'm going to go down to Blend. And this time I'm going to say replace the spine. So it'll actually now put my blend onto that spine. So it's going from the star, coming forwards to the circle. If you prefer it to be the other way round, you can go to object blend and you can say reverse the spine so it goes the opposite way in here. Once again, because this is a shape, I can always get my Direct Selection Tool. I can select those points on the shape and I can pull them out. And once again, this will just follow those shapes around. I can select the whole thing. I can go to the Object menu down to Blend, Blend Options, and I can change the number of steps between those two. Let's try 200 again. We'll switch on preview. And we've got a much smoother area now. So one last time with a slight difference this time, I'm going to start with a circle over there, and we'll give it a color. I'm going to do a number one, appear longer, circle like that and give that a different color. And I'm going to do a square on the end or rectangle over there. And give that a third color. So you can blend between multiple shapes as well. So over here, if I select all three of those shapes, I can go to Object, Blend and Make. And I've now got a blend going between those three. And any of those items can be moved around using the Group Selection Tool. Just de-select what you've got. Click on the shape and you can move it around as you need. And this allows to create some really interesting blends. Try those ones out. 53. Use Blends for Repetition: So what else can we do with the Blend tool? Well, I like to use it quite a lot for repetition. Let me show you a little example here. I'm going to make something which appears to be a piece of traditional photographic film. And I'm going to use the blends to make the sprocket holes. So you can see here if I were to maybe get a fill color, Let's fill this with black. And this is going to be my black background for the film artist. To a shape over my art board. Like so. I don't want to move it by mistakes. I'm going to go to Object. I'm going to choose a lock selection to lock it down. Now I want to make a number of little sprocket, sprocket holes in there. So I'm going to use a rounded rectangle to draw in my first little sprocket hole, like so. And in here I'm going to go and choose white. So to make the sprocket holes or to make copies of the sprocket holes. One way I could do it would be to hold down the Alt key, make a copy of that shape. And then keep using Control or Command D to repeat it all the way along. Now, it just so happens that this fitted absolutely perfectly. In the end. It was the same gap between that side and that side. Which is great. What about if I then thought, what if these needs to be further apart or closer together? I'd have to undo it, do the whole thing again. So this is where blends come in because if I were to take the shape, hold down the Alt key and make a copy on the other side. I could then select them both. Go to the Object menu, go down to blends and make. Now you can see there's a lot of shapes between those two. But if I go to Object, Blend, Blend Options, and I'm going to change the specified steps to well, something a lot less. Let's try 10 in there. We'll just switch on preview. That's pretty good at the moment. Now, just to be careful when you're doing these blends that you are not on smooth color because if you're on smooth color, you'll find that things don't work out always quite the way that you expect. I change it to specified steps so I can put in the number of steps that I like. So I'll click Okay, so the great thing about this is that if I then have to move this around because maybe I've suddenly realized that my piece of film should be shorter or longer. Let me make it a bit shorter. So I'm going to move this rockets in a bit. All I have to do then is to go to my group selection tool, select this little sprocket here, move it in, and the others will follow suit. So I can pull it in to leave a bit of a gap on that side there. If then I've realized also that they should be further apart. I use the selection tool to select them all. I can go to object, blend into my Blend Options and to make them further apart or have less of them. So I'll put in eight. It's switched on preview. That looks perfect. Click Okay. To make a copy, I just use the black arrow, the selection tool, hold down the Alt key and I can copy these to the bottom. We go and put in the middle section from our piece of film. Here we go. Don't forget, you can always change colors as well. If you want a bit of a gradient going on in there, you can select individual items and just change the color in here, and it'll give you a gradient between those. Let's click on that one down there. So once again, de-select, click it to select the one shape. And then let's have a different color in there. Give it a go. You might find it's really exciting for doing a weird one for shapes. But with the power of this really comes in, is repetition like this. 54. Gradient Mesh Tool: So let's look at another way of creating gradients. This time I'm going to use an ellipse and I would like to create a little balloon. And I'm going to draw my balloon shape just as a circle. But I'm going to use my direct selection to just pull this down to make more of a traditional balloon shape. Now, I think I don't really need the stroke around the outside, so I will choose none for the stroke. Now, the light in here is coming from the top-left side. So what I want to do is I want to lighten up this part of the balloon over here. Could do this with the other gradients as well. But let's try it with the mesh. So I select the balloon, let's give it the color that I'd like to start off with. So I think, well, let's make this blue. I'm going to go over to my mesh tool. This is the mesh tool over here. It's on the left-hand side of your neck. You're using the tools in a single line will be about halfway down. All I need to do is to go over my shape which is selected and click once where I want to put the mesh. So the mesh tool click once. And then while that point is selected, I go across to the appearance and I can choose the color that I want to graduate out to. So there it is, over there. Now, that's fairly straightforward and you could do that with a lot of the other tools as well. But let's make this a bit more interesting. I'm going to get a second balloon in here. So I'll use another shape over there. And I'm gonna make this balloon orange. Same again, I'll just pull it down to get more of a balloon shape will use the direct selection tool to pull this down. Like so. De-selected. And let's reselect it again. And I'll use my mesh. And then click on that point over there to get the same lighting effect on this one. Once again, I'll just go to white in there and maybe even a yellow of blended like that. Now in reality, what would happen if I were to put this shape next to that balloon will, because they're shiny. Let's move it across. What would happen is there be some sort of reflection, some sort of orange going on, on this balloon here. And this is where the mesh comes into its own. If I click on this shape here, what I can do now is use my mesh tool to put another point in there. And on that point, I'll go and choose orange. So you can see now very clearly that if I move this across, it has that sort of orange, not quite a full reflection, but the orange glow coming onto it. Now That's the thing about this tool, is you can add as many of these points as you want, but do be careful. The more points you add, the more difficult it is to get a really nice soft blend between them. But the interesting things you don't have to just add the points inside. If I select some points, I'll use my direct selection tool. And I'm going to click down here and drag up to select just these points in here. Once I've made this into a mesh, I can then go to my appearance and I'm going to choose a dark orange. So now my balloon is slowly fading out to a dark orange. Let's do the same thing on this one here. I'm going to select rule. Didn't mean to do that. Let's try that again with the direct selection, with the selection tool. So on this one here, once again, I'm going to use the direct selection tool to select those points, the bottom. And let's make those more of a purplish color. There we get a really nice blend between them. With that back together again. Do have put up a go with that. As I said, be careful if you put in to me points, you're going to find that your gradients are a bit difficult to work with. So less is more. In this particular case. Try them out. 55. Gradient Mesh from the Menu: Now we do have another way of applying our meshes as well. If I get an ellipse and I want to put a mesh on there, I could do it manually. Or if you go to the Object menu, you can go down to create gradient mesh. And in here you can choose how many rows and how many columns you want for your mesh. You can also choose to either habitus flat, which I've got there, or going into the center, going to white, or the opposite way to the edge. If you do choose one of these options, you can still make changes afterwards. So I can still use my direct selection tool to select the points on the end here. And then go in and change the colors. So I'm going to darken that down to a very dark blue in there. I like to use this little tool up here. It's called the last sue tool. And the last sue tool is great because it allows you to select points very quickly. So I can select, say, for example, those ones there. And then I could go and change the color on just those. So the last sue tool, click, select the ones that you want to get those all the way around the edge over there and go in and change the color on them. Or it's called the dark blue. Instead. Remember, when you click off of the item, those lines will disappear. 56. New 2025 Features in a Project Intro: In this new version of Illustrator, the 2025 version, we're going to look at using so many things in this project. We're going to use shapes on a path, so we're going to be putting multiple shapes on a path. We're going to be looking at the new gradient options where you can drag and drop things from the swatches. We're going to use the mockup feature, which was in the earlier versions, but they've just made it better. And we're going to get some really cool stuff with this. We're also going to generate shapes to fill areas, and this is such a lovely feature. Lastly, we're going to look at the contextual task bar update for live shape. What this will do is it allow us to take shapes and change them and round off the corners. You'll see how it works. It's really cool. We're going to do all of this in a project, as you can see over here, which is going to be a graphic that you could either put onto fabric or you could have it as a children's wall decal, whatever you want. If you don't like sheep and mountains, feel free to do any other shape you like. Anyway, let's get started. This is some really cool. 57. Live Shape Properties: Let's start a new document over here, so I'm going to go to New File, and this one is going to be done so that it can go onto a room or it can be printed on the large format machines. And I'm going to make this just a four because although it could be scaled up to wall size, it's all going to be vector, so it's fully scalable. If the printer wants a CMYK image, we can change it to a CMYK image later on. I'm going to click on Create and my documents ready to go. Unfortunately, though, I've done it the wrong way around, but that's not a problem because I can always go and just edit the artboard. I'll just click on Edit Artboard over there, and I can change it from landscape to portrait in there very, very quickly. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to make some mountains and some clouds and a sun in a very graphical style. I'm going to start off really simply with the sun. This is one of the new features in 2025 they brought in. If I go to the Sartol, I'm going to click and drag my little sine. But now what I want to do is I want to change the number of points in a star. Now, there is a little feature over here where you can click and you can drag and you can change the number of points that way. But you can also go down here to this little heads up display, and if you click on the little properties in there, in here, I've got a slider so I can change the number of points in the slider. But what I like to do is I'd like to round those points off, so there's another feature in here so I can go in and I can say, Well, let's try this as 5 millimeters to round them off. And you can see how it's rounded them off quite a lot. Now, of course, that's a bit too much. So let's just try something a little bit less, and I'm going to go with I think 2 millimeters in there. That's a lot better. That's what I'm after just slightly rounded off. In fact, I might even go as far as going to 1.5 over there, so they're a little bit less. And I can still then go and change the count in here. Now, I'm happy with that. The other thing I'd like to do then is to knock out the middle section. I'm going to use the Ellipse tool, drawing an elliptical shape. Go get that right, an elliptical shape. I'm holding down the alter the option key to draw from the middle out and the shift key to get a perfect circle. So I'm looking for something like that. That's going to be my cutter object. Let's just make sure it's in the right position. That's absolutely perfect. Now, I want to make sure that these two are lined up. So if they're not, you can select them both and then just go across to align. You align vertically and horizontally to make sure they're both in the same place with them both selected, use the path finder, second button in, and click on that to subtract the front from the back object. I'm going to make sure that those are all grouped together, which they are, and I'm going to do another little circle over here, a little bit smaller, and we'll get those to also line up. I'm going to use the align option to just align the centers that way as well. I'm going to give that some color. Into my fill, I'm just going to pick an orangy yellow type of color and I'm going to get rid of the stroke because I don't want to stroke around the outside. There it is my sun is now done. Have a go, get up to that stage and then we'll do some really simple mountains, but then we'll do some awesome stuff. 58. Triangles: Now, the mountains are going to be triangles. So I'm going to go and I'm going to use the polygon tool. And I'm going to draw in a little polygon over here. Now, as you're drawing in polygons, if you hold down the Shift que, you'll see that you can actually get them to sort of jump to an exact sort of size, sorry, an exact angle there, so the top and the bottom are flat. If you don't, they'll go anywhere where you put them. So if I've got a polygon shape like that, what I'm going to do now is to go down to the settings over here. I'm going to click on the polygon properties, and in here, I can change the number of sides in my polygon until get to a triangle. Triangles are as easy as that to do. If you wish, you can go in here and you can change the corners to rounded corners or flat corners. I think I'm probably pretty much going to keep them exactly as they are with the corners, all of them being angles. So let's make it a little bit bigger. I'm going to pull this down. Over here, we want some tall mountains. Let's move that sun out the way. I've grouped the inner and the outer parts of the sun together, so we'll move that one across to there. Let's have another copy of that. Over there. We'll make that one a little bit bigger. Wider should I say? We'll have one more over there. This one's actually going to go to the back, but I'm going to make it thicker, like so, and I will move this one. I'm just going to move around a little bit like that. I'm going to move this one behind the other ones. Now, of course, you can't see what's going on with the colors, so I will just change the colors of these mountains a little bit so that you can see what I've actually done with them. Let's make that one more of a red. Then we've got the yellow. Actually, the yellow will clash with the sun. I'm looking for bright colors here which would appeal to children. Let's see if we can find a different color. In there might have to go with something else like that. And this one I'm going to move to the back. Obviously, we go to object arrange and send to the back like so. And I want to have the effect of almost like a snow cap on here. We're not going to do snow. We're going to do some really funky patterns with it, but I want that sort of effect over here. So I can take one of my tools here and I'm going to use the knife tool. Make sure that I select this. So I'm just going to select that shape from the knife, I'm going to click and start to drag. But you can see if I do this, it's a bit of a wonky old line. So if you hold down Alt or the option key first, when you drag, it will drag a perfectly straight line in like that. I think that's too high, so I'm going to come down a little bit, do it again, Alter option key first to get that. Let's do another one on this one here. I'm going to select that one, Alter option key. Drag that one down to there. This one here, I want to be a bit more interesting, almost like melted snow. I'm going to start over here on the outside. I'm just going to do some blobby bits like that in there. Now, my bubby bit looked a bit strange in there, I might have to undo that and do it again. If you find that you can't see what you're doing or what's getting in the way of the other shapes, just move it along. You could always move them back later on. One more time over here, so rounded blobby bit there. Perfect. Looks like it's melting. And as you can see, these three are sepal objects. Once again, have a go and get to this stage where you've got three little mountains and you've got some snow caps for those as well. 59. Knife Tool: What I'd like to do is I'd like this snow cap, this melting snow cap to be actually bigger than the mountain, so it looks like it's out the side. So if I scale, it doesn't fit it in there properly. If I bring it to the front, I'll go to Object range and send to the front or bring to the front. Once again, it just won't fit in there being larger because these bits are scaling, but so are those in there. It's easy to fix this sort of problem, though, but you need to do it before you actually make your mountain. So let me do this once again for you ready quickly. And then all you need to do is to make a copy of it. Hold down the old key make a copy. Do your larger one on this one. What I'm going to do here is to take the knife tool once again and do my cut on this. It's a large bit down there, smaller bit over there, out the side. Now I've got this one as a separate piece, so we won't have any issues. I'm going to click on that, change the colors that you can see what I'm doing here. Let's make that a dark red. And now if I go and place that on top or even just move it upwards, you can see how I can get that larger look to the whole thing and I won't get any gaps in it. In fact, I'm going to have mine something like that over there, maybe a little bit smaller. You can do whatever you want with these. To be honest, just experiment, try them out, see how it works for you. Then I'll even take this one and do another cut on there. Let's have a different cut. I'm going to hold down the alter the option key again for this. Just do a cut on that under one and change the color on one of those as well. So let's take that to a lighter color in there. Anyway, do have a bit of a play with that, and don't forget. Sometimes it's sometimes it's just an obvious thing. Just make a copy and try it on a copy rather than trying to do a clever work around of extending this and pulling those bits in. Have a go. 60. Generate Patterns: So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a pattern really simply and then apply it to these items. And once again, we'll come across a few little problems to sort out. And we'll also see one of the new 2025 features as well. So to make some stripes, I'm going to just take a little rectangle over here, drawing a stripe and I want my stripe to go from, I think, let's because this is supposed to be snow and ice at the top, I'm going to try some sort of darks and lights in there or some blues. Let's go with some blues. So we try some blues. So click on that blue there and hold down the alter the option key to make a copy of that of this. I've got a second one, and I'm going to make a lighter version of that blue over there. So to make the lighter version, I'm going to just click on the little plus at the bottom to make a new swatch. Now, to make a lighter version of a color when you come in and it's RGB, it's like, how on earth do you make that lighter? It's as easy as going up to HSB. HSB stands for hue, saturation and brightness, and then you can go to the saturation and you can just lighten it up like that and click Okay. And I'm going to make sure that I've got no stroke on those as well. So that's done. And then all I've got to do is to drop that into my swatches. I'll go and find my swatches panel over here, swatch swatches. There we are. And drag and drop that in over there. Here's my pattern, and I'll click on there and add the pattern. But I want this to be at a really groovy angle. I don't really like the way that it is at the moment, and I've noticed something else as well. Can you see if we zoom in this little gap between them over there? And that is between these two here, I didn't notice that. So I'm going to undo this, so control Z or command Z to undo over there. Zoom right in here and just make sure that these two are actually touching. So I'll just move them up and they're touching like that. And then once again, I'll just drag and drop this in and do the same thing again on there, and that'll look a whole lot better in there. You can see it sort of I can see the other one behind it. I'll move that along. Just using the arrows on my keyboard, to be honest to move that across like so. Now I want it to be at an angle. So I'm going to go along to the rotate tool over here, and I'm going to double click on the rotate tool and I'm going to rotate just the pattern, not the object. So switch off the object there, go to rotate pattern or transform pattern, and I can then just angle it to whatever angle I want. I'll go with something which is different to the line I've got at the bottom. Click Okay. Once again, we want another one. So to make my pattern, I'm going to make a little circle. Like that. I'm going to fill it with a color that I want, and I want a sort of a light brown in there. And then, well, I can see so many colors in here. I'm just going to click at the top on the right hand side to show these are thumbnails. I'm going to drag that and drop it in and that's then going to be my pattern. But if I were to just make that directly into pattern, you'd actually see the sun behind it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold down the alter the option key to make a copy and apply that to the copy. And move that back into the right position like that. All we then have to do is to double click on the pattern, and you can go and change it in here. I'm going to change this from grid to brick by column. This is the sort of thing that we've done in the course, in the section on patterns. I'm happy with that. I'll click on Done like so. So where is the 2025 feature that you were talking about, Tim? Well, if you go over here, there's a third button. And if you click on that, you can actually generate a pattern over here by describing it. So let me try this again. So, light brown, dot on Darko. Background. Color. Right, let's generate and see what happens. And there we go. We've got some different dots in there. If I were to say, click on this one, we could try that one out. You got different colour dots in there, and you just click on them to see what you get. And if you don't like them, try it again and just regenerate another pattern in there. It's really easy to do. And we're going to be using this generate later on in this little project, as well, so you can either do them yourself or you can do them using the Generate Pattern option. Try that out. But 61. New Gradient Trick: Now, as it happens, I don't like that one as much. I've changed the color of my dots manually by just double clicking on the pattern and changing it in there and then just choosing done. I'd actually like to try a gradient and see how that will work in here. And I want to show you the new gradient features in 2025. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a gradient. I'm going to do that by going to the Window menu down to gradient. This is as we've always done the gradient. But instead of actually having to go in and putting in the colors in here, as one did before, what you can do is you can choose the colors that you want from here. So I want to experiment with blue. So I want to try, I think, a gradient that goes from dark blue, and I'm going to hold down the control or the command key a lighter blue, a very light blue, and an extremely light blue in there. And if I drag and drop those in straight onto the gradient, it will make a gradient out of those colors for me. It really is as easy as that to do. If you've got a gradient in there, you can just drag it and drop it into your swatches like that. Remember, all the rest of the options are exactly the same. I can go in here and I can rotate it. Let's try -90 degrees or I think maybe plus 90 degrees would probably be better as to the darker bits at the bottom. Anyway, it's entirely up to you as to what you want to do. Have a bit of a go with that. You can edit these as you've done before, dragging and then dropping the individual colors in like that, but just being able to drag them in as a whole group is really, really cool. Try that out. 62. Generate Shape Fill: I want to show you another new feature. I'm going to use the generate shape fill because I would like some graphical trees in there. And this is Generate shape fill Beta. It's obviously sclmba, and it's in this heads up display. It's actually not called the heads up display. That's just what I call it because it looks like a heads up display. It's actually, if you go to the window menu called the contextual task bar. Honestly, that's a bit of a mouthful. So if you hear me talk about the heads up display, it's the contextual task bar. What I'm going to do is I'm going to click on Generate shaped Filbta and I'm going to tell it what I want. So I want quite a lot of them, so I'm going to say ten trees with autumn colors. And I'm going to click on Generate in there. There we go. It's done actually quite a nice job. It hasn't done ten trees. I don't think it can count. We've got seven in there by the look of it, but it's looking pretty good. And there's some other variations in here that I can choose from, as well. There's some with green trees. And if you don't like what you see in here, just generate again. So click the Generate button. Once again, some more trees in here. Let's have a look at that one. Quite like that one, actually. But there's this whole white area behind it. Now, I want to get rid of that. So what I'm going to do is if I click on that, I can go to object and ungroup. Over there. And we can just click on that white and delete it. And I can just work my way through over here, getting rid of the little white or the lighter areas that are in there. I think that's pretty much done. There we go, and we've got some trees in there. Let's try this again over here. Now, instead of doing it on here because it's always a bit of a pain to try and work directly on the item. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hold down the alter the option key and just make a copy and do it over here. And I'd like some sheep on this mountain side, so I'm going to click on generate a shape. Once again, I'm going to do 20 sheep. As you can see, it didn't actually understand me. It didn't understand 20 sheep. It's just done one sheep at a time like that. So I'm going to undo it, and I'm going to try wording it a different way. So I'm going to say a flock of sheep. Oh, that's more what I had in mind. With a holot of sheep, let's try this one over here. That's kind of quite cool. And that's an interesting one as well. It's nice and big and bold like everything else that we've got in there. So I can then just take this, drag it across, and place it in the right position over there. So have a bit of a play with those and try one more at the bottom of this one here. You've got trees, you've got sheep, anything else that you like, whether it's a skier or a cow, whatever works for you. And then we'll take this on to another level. 63. Mockup: I've done some clouds, and they're really simple. All they are are three little ellipses, which I put together, and I used the pathfinder to unite them, and then I put a shape in front of them and once again, use the pathfinder to cut off the bottom. And I've given them all a color and moved some of them in front and some behind. So nothing too difficult. As you can see, I've gone back to solid colors for mine, but I've done a second one to show you where you could just go wild with patterns. So this one here, similar sort of idea, but lots of patterns in there. It's entirely up to you, but mine with patterns and the pictures was looking a little bit too over the top. In fact, I prefer the sun that I've done here with the bigger areas or the smaller middle, shall I say, so I might move that across to there instead. If it's up to you, you do whatever you want. Now, the next thing we want to do is we want to take this and we want to put it into a photograph. So we're going to use a feature which was in the earlier versions of Illustrator, not the very early versions, but the earlier versions of Illustrator, but they have improved it so very much. So I'm going to make a new Artboard over here. I'm going to bring my picture in to the artboard. So I'm going to go to file and place the picture that I want to use, and I'll have included this picture for you in the picture area where you can get all your images. I'm going to click on Place and click and drag. So what I'm intending to do here, oops made that a little bit on the small side. Let me just pull this out. Okay, there we go. So I got this picture from the assets, and I'm going to take these two pictures. I'm going to take this one here, and I want to put it onto the pillow. So I'm going to move a copy of it, so I'm going to do a copy. I'm not going to do the main one. I'm just going to scale it down a bit, so it's roughly the right size. I'm just holding down the shift key as I do it. So let's just get it to roughly the correct size over there. It needs to be in front of those. I will group it. It'll make my life so much easier if I do. So I'm going to group it. I'm going to go to the object menu, arrange and bring it to the front over there. Now, you can see it's flat against something which has got some shape to it. So what we're going to do is we're going to select both of these items over here and we're going to create a mockup now, there's a little button down here for creating mockup. You could also get to it by going to the Window menu, and there's some mock up options in here. If we go down to the Ms, there's mockup over there. But let's use this one for now. So select both of them, say create mockup and then sit and wait for a moment. Now it's done it, so you can see there's a circle around it. If I click on there, I can drag that around. You can see how it'll find its way around that shape then. And if I don't want it there, say, for example, I want it on the bear instead, I can drag it onto the bear and start pulling it around the bear shape, too. But in fact, I want it on this one here. It's still not quite right because it's really solid color, where that's got darker areas and lighter areas. So what I would do then is I'd go along to the appearance here down to opacity. And in the opacity, you've got normal change that to multiply. That'll multiply it with the shape below, but you can see some of those darker areas are now coming through. If I move it around, you can see where the darker and the lighter areas are on there. It looks a lot more realistic like that. If you go to one of these corners, you can hold on your shift key and just drag it out to make it larger as well. So I think I'd like that to be covering virtually the whole of that cushion. So I'm just holding down the shift key and dragging it out. Look how lovely that sun is sort of going around that corner there. If you deselect it and click back on it again, you won't see that circle. So to get back in, you just have to double click, and that will take you inside the object itself, and then we can click on it and start to move it around again. Anyway, do try that out. It's a lovely feature, and it's the mockup, and the easiest way to get to it is from this idle heads up display at the bottom. If you have double clicked and you're in this area, just click on the little arrow there to go back to normal mode. Try it out. 64. Another Mockup: Let's bring in another picture. I'm going to go down to my artboard tool, and I'm just going to draw in another artboard. And then I'm going to go along and place another picture. So file and place. Once again, I've put this in with your assets. But you can use anything you like. And I'll just bring in that picture over there. Now, what I want to do is I want to place one of these. I'll use this one again on the wall. So it looks like it's actually been added to the wall or painted on the wall or put in as a transfer on the wall. I'll just zoom out a bit, and I'm going to go and make a copy of that. So I'm going to hold down the alter the option key, make a copy. I'm going to group it together. There we go. It's a lot easier to work with when you group it, scale it down to some sort of size that kind of seems about right. Now, of course, it's behind that, so I will go up to object arrange and bring to the front in there. Let's zoom in a bit. And let's do the same thing again, select both of those, create a mockup and wait. There it is. It needs to be scaled down. So I'm holding down the shift key to scale it down to a better size, and I can move it into the right position over there. Now, look what happens if I move it onto the bedspread, it kind of goes onto the bedspread. I can move it onto the floor. I can move it up the walls. There we go up the walls, even onto this side over here. So that seems to be working quite well. I'm happy with that. I might have to scale it down a little bit because it still looks a bit big and I'm missing out on some bits. But that was so very fast to do. Try out. 65. Objects on a Path Tool: I'm going to make a new artboard over here, and I want to now go in and put in a little circle. So I'm going to use the elliptical tool. I'm going to draw a little circle in here. I'm holding down the Shift key. And I'm going to remove the fill on that shape. Now at the moment, it just says create mockup. So I'm going to go up to my selection tool over there, and I'm just going to select that shape over there until it says, generate shape fill beta. I'm going to fill this with a sheep. You can do anything that you want. So I'm going to say generate sheep, and I'm just going to say a sheep. And let's click on generate in here. Those aren't bad at all. You see, we've got some different buttons over here. I'm going to click on the one on the right hand side, and this shows me the whole thing. So I can say the shape strength. Do I want the shape to be high or low? The strength in there, the detail, maximum or minimum. Detail wise, I want minimum detail in there. The shape strength, let's have that fairly high so it will keep it in that circle in there. But this is what I'm interested in here is the style reference because what I want to do is I want to match a style of something else. And, of course, we're doing these sheep to go in with the same style as those mountains that we created. So let me just cancel this for a moment. And I'm going to go along here and I'm going to select that. And I would just make a copy of that, so hold down the alter the option key and copy it. I'm going to make sure it's grouped over there, so we've got all of that in the group there. And let's go back here. Again. So clicking on there, I'm going to go into the settings here, and I've got my shape strength is high, my details minimum. I'm going to go to my style reference over here, and you can see you can then choose an asset for your style. So I'm going to click on that and says, What asset do you want to use? I want to use that asset over there. And it's brought it in, understands it. And then we say generate. And once again, it won't adjust to ones that it's done, but it will generate more based on this style over here, and it'll probably bring in some of these oranges, I should imagine. Oh, look at that. You can see already how it's brought in some orange stripes in the background behind the sheep. Now, I can then do some more if I think, well, maybe that's not enough. I can just change it a little bit over here. A sheep in a hat. And once again, we can add some more of those in there. It will keep these ones here. You'll still be able to get to them, and we will use them very, very shortly as well. So I want a whole bunch of different sheep that we can work from. Yes, there's some rather odd sheep in hats there, but that'll do just perfectly. So I'm going to make some copies of these. I'm going to say that one there, I want to use that one. I'm holding down the lt or the option key every time and just adding some more sheep in there. Let's make another copy of that. We'll use that sheep over there, and I could generate some more if I wanted to. But the new feature that I want to show you over here is actually got tons of these on top of each other over there. I don't like that when it's too blue. I like all these orange ones. So what I want to do is I want to get these objects onto a path. So I'm going to go and make my path, so I will use the pen tool over here. Now, I'll redo it again in a moment. I'm just going to click and drag to make an interesting path like that. Let's give it some colors that you can see it. There it is. There's the path. Now, all I have to do is to select the objects that I want to put on that path, and then I can move across here to this new tool. This is the new 2025 tool, and you just click the tool and then choose the path that you want to put it to. You can see as I move onto it, the cursor changes, I click, and it places those along the path. Now, we've got some controls over here because I can go to this control here and I can just change the angle that they're in, dragging left and right. I can use this one to move them closer together or further apart, like so. Would happen if I changed the shape? Well, if I grab the end of the shape and move the shape around. Oops. Let's try that. This line here. Where is it? There we go. You can see how I can adjust where those sheep actually go. I'm going to just undo that over here. So let's say that I wanted to have these on a circle. What I'm going to do, there seems to be something down there is I'm going to put in my circle over here. I'm going to select all of my Same tool again. Now, I can't see that, but if I move over here, there we go, I understand that it's there. I can click pops on the circle, and I can move them around to any angle that I like. Of course, that circle is still there, but it's invisible, and at any time, I could then say, Well, let's take this. So let's have that one over here, select them both. And we'll create a mockup, and then I can drag those onto the carpet. This is where things start to slow down a little bit. And as you can see, it's really huge. But if I grab a corner, hold down the Shift key to make it smaller. I can have the sheep on the carpet there, and don't forget, go to the opacity here, and from normal, change it to something like darken or multiply, so it looks like it actually was really there. Darkens working quite well. On that. Do have a bit of a go with that. This new feature is really cool for taking different shapes and just getting them to go along a path, as opposed to the brushes, where with the brush, you use one shape which gets moved along a path. Here we're using different shapes. Try it out and enjoy this. 66. Cyberwave Blend Project - Intro: So let's make a web banner using the blend tool. And we're going to make something which has got a very cyber punk slash sci-fi type of feel. I'm going to create a new document. And I'm using the web settings over here with 1000 pixels wide by 300 pixels high. And down here, I've got RGB color, color mode. So I click on Create. And the first thing I'm going to do is to put some text in here. So I'll use my type tool. Click once with the type tool and type in or whatever I like. Let's have cyber wave or do something that does look like very cyber wave. If there's such a thing as a cyber wave. I'm going to go across to my Character panel. And I'm just going to change this to an interesting typeface. Then make it a bit bigger, and maybe make it gray just so it doesn't interfere with my color choice later on. So make it great because we can always change the color later. So now what I want to do is to draw my shapes in. So I'm going to use the pen tool to create my interesting shapes. I'll start off by making sure that I've just got a stroke on hana. You can do it in the toolbar or you can do it over here in the Stroke option. No fill for the moment. So I'll just make an interesting little wavy type of shape at the bottom. You can always change it later on. But I'm going to do something which looks a bit like that. Now I'm going to make a copy of that shapes. I'm going to have two of them. So I'm using the black arrow tool. I'm going to hold down the Alt key, click and drag to make a copy. And I'm just going to pull this one over itself. Certain mirrors, the other shape. Let's zoom out a bit because we're going to tweak this as well. We're going to make it maybe a bit bigger. I can pull it in over here. I can adjust the angle as well as we get more out of an angle going in there. No right or wrong with this. Just play with it until you get something that you like. Now once I've done that, I'm going to then select both of those shapes. I'm going to go to the Object menu, down to my Blend Options. And I'm going to say make. And you can see this lovely effect that we're getting from here. If I go to the Object menu down to blend and blend options, I can always change the number of steps between those two. Now sometimes what you might find when you do this is and I'll switch on Preview to demonstrate you might be on smooth color. So when you get your shape done, you just have the one line down the middle. Don't worry about it. Go into the blend options, change to specified steps, and choose the number of steps that you want in there. Let's have a look and see what that looks like with 60 steps in there. It's a bit, maybe a bit too much. I think I'm gonna go back to 30 steps and click. Okay. Now we can do a number of things with this. Let's start off by looking at blending these out into transparent. It's not actually transparent. It's just going to be blending them out to white. If I use my Group Selection Tool, I can select one of those shapes. I've just selected this top one for the moment, which kind of comes under there. I can go to my stroke and I could choose white. And you'll see how then just fades out to why do we get this very interesting. Look down here. Don't forget, of course, you can always use your white arrow tool to select the points and move the points around. And you can just adjust your shape to achieve something which looks at very, very interesting. Let's pull this up a bit. I might get more of a interesting shape. Now, do be careful if you go too far, your break it like I've done there and you get some really weird things happening. So what about if we wanted to put this on a black background, will let us do a variation for that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use my my artboard tool. And with the Artboard tool, I'm going to make sure that move artwork with artboard is switched on, hold down the Alt key and drag a copy. And then for this one will take a shape over here and just put the shape right at the very back. So make my shape in there, fill it with black and go to object, arrange and send to the back. You can see the white doesn't look so good on there at the moment. But of course, I can still just select the white shape. And let's change the stroke to black. And I can go to the blue and maybe give it a more electric blue type of feel that's looking really good. Now, all the stuff around the outside is very distracting rarely. So we can go to the View menu and just to view in Trim View mode. So that's how it will actually end up looking. And I think this one here, I'll make the text white against the black as well. Let's try another variation. I'm going to once again go down to my Artboard tool. I'm going to take this art board, hold down the Alt key, make a copy. And this one we're going to make interesting colors. So I'm going to select both those lines. So the whole of the shape in here. And then I'm going to go over to my fill. And I'm going to go over to my stroke. And with a stroke I'm going to apply a gradient on both those strokes. And you can see how it goes then from white or very light through to a darker blue. Let's try a different one. Once again. Make a copy of this, hold down the Alt key. And this time, I'm going to go to the Window menu. I'm going to find my swatches. The swatches are the same as the colors that you see in your properties that I'm going to click on this little button down the bottom, the swatch library menu. And down here we've got different menus of colors and gradients, or different swatches of color and gradient shall I say. I'm going to go down to my gradients. And you can try out all sorts of gradients. But I think I'd like to have a go with the spectrums. And these are color spectrums. So if I select shape here, I can then choose a color spectrum to go on it. Now what's happened? Well, I've put it onto filled by mistake. Undo that, make sure that I'm on stroke. And then applied to the stroke and you get this really beautiful look to your shape. I'm going to go up to the View menu and just show everything in trim mode. Now once again, when you finish these, you can then save them out. So I'm going to go to File down to Export. And I'm going to export for screens. And this will enable me to choose which ones I want to export. Now I don't like the blue ones. I don't want to export that or that one. I think I'd like to export these two. Over here. I can choose the size that I want to, the scaling I want it to be exactly as I've made them. So 1 times is the scaling over here. And then I'm just going to go and say export the artboard. Now I'm exporting mind to the desktop. Over there. You can change it to whatever you like. Let's click, click export. And this will now give me a little folder. Over here. And inside the folder are the two JPEG files is the one. And there's the second one. Ready to be uploaded to wherever you wish. Have bit of a go. There's so many variations that you can try. Adjusting the different colors on the sides, put gradients on them, put multiple gradients on them. One gradient on one side of the different gradients on the other side. And see the interesting results that you can get. 67. Infographic Project: Set Up Doc: So we're going to make an infographic now with some arrows. And the first thing we'll do is make a new document, and then we will bring in some premade colors. Now of course, you can make your own colors up for this if you like. But I've already done a swatch for you if you wish to use the same colors, Diane. So let's click Create New. And of course, this infographic we need to now decide where it's going to go. I'm going to do mine for screen use. So I'm going across to web in here. And I'm going to choose the Web Large, that's 1920 by 1080 pixels. And of course on the right-hand side over here, I just want to make sure that this says RGB color. And I'm going to change my raster effects to medium. And this will just make sure that when we put in things like blurs, there'll be a good quality blow without being too pixelated. And of course, you can change this later in the Effects menu if you wish. I'll click on Create. And I'm going to just clean up my desk because I've got some bits and pieces here from a previous project. So I'm going to go to Window workspace and reset my essentials workspace. And I also want all of my tools in there. So Window workspace, a toolbar, and the Advanced Toolbar. Now, let me bring in the colors that I've created for you. So I'm going to go to the Window menu, and we're going to go all the way down to find the swatches panel. So find swatches in there. And in swatches. If you click at the bottom left-hand corner, you can see the swatch libraries. Now, I've created this one for you, so I'm going to go down to the other library and you do exactly the same the other library. And then find the folder which you've downloaded. And that's going to have the swatch rough crazy in there for you. So I'm going to go and find my folder. My folder happens to be in the documents, but you might have saved it elsewhere. And then in here we've got who? I've got my exercises and training files. So I'm going to go in here and I'm going to now find the arrow infographic color gradients dot AI. So this is now containing the colors that I want to use. Click open. And you can see it now opens up a swatch with some gradients in these are the gradients that we're going to use. If you prefer to do this yourself, you can find your own colors in here, going choose some colors in there. You can go down to the gradients and there's lots of different gradient colors in here. And once again, when you choose them, Let's say for example, pastors, they will open up in their own little window in here. So go ahead, find some color setups and colors we really want for pretty bright gradients and maybe a gray gradient as well. And then we'll move on to the next section. 68. Infographic Project: Draw Arrow: Now before I move my colors out the whale, my swatches out the way. I'm just going to take these colors here. So I'm going to select one and then Shift click the last of them and just move them into my working swatch so I can just drag and drop them in. And that means it's one less thing for me to worry about, which is open on the document so I can close down my swatches. Now, let's start drawing the arrows. And I'm going to do that by using just a rectangular tool. I don't want to fill. So I can remove my fill here or I can go up to the fill in there and just choose none. And I'm going to draw my first shape. So using the rectangle tool, I'm going to click and drag to draw a little rectangle like this. Now, we're going to actually make three rectangles. So there's going to be this one here. I'm then going to hold down the Alt key and copy. To make a copy of that, I'll just shorten down so it's bit shorter over there. And once again, hold down the Alt key and make a third copy. And well, let's just a little bit shorter. Like so. Now how wide you make these really doesn't matter if you think you've made them too thin, just select them all and you can thicken them up like so as long as you've got these three items in here. Before we move on, I also want to go to the arrow at the front and make it into little arrow shape. Now, I'm going to do that by getting the pen tool, but the one, the plus on it. And this is the one that says Add Anchor Point tool. And we click right in the middle. Now you can see when I get to the middle, the smart guide comes up and just shows me that I'm on the middle. So I click to add my point in there. And then I can use my selection tool to select that point and move it out. You can also use the Shift and the arrow key on the keyboard to just move that out into a bit of an interesting shape. Once we've done that, we're going to make three more copies of this. So if I move this one up a little bit like that, hold down your Alt key and drag a copy, but hold the Shift key down at the same time to make sure that it goes absolutely vertically. And then you can use command or control D to do two more of those. This is what we're looking for, three shapes repeated down four times. And the one on the right-hand side has got little arrow in it. Once again, go ahead and get to that stage there. And then we'll start to make them look a little bit more exciting. 69. Infographic Project: Gradients: So let's make these look a little bit more interesting. And I'm going to do that by adding some color. So I'm going to select the top ones over there. Go to my fill. And I'm going to choose one of these gradients. I'm going to start with the green. And you can see it goes from dark green to light green, dark green, light green, dark green, light green. That's what I'm looking for. But of course I don't want a stroke on here so I can get rid of the stroke and we do the next ones as well. So this one here, this is going to be my purples over here. And I know I haven't forgotten the stroke. I will get rid of all of them at the same time. That's going to be the oranges. And this one here at the bottom. This is going to be the blues. So I'll just select all of these now and go into the stroke and just choose none for the stroke. Now for the magic bit, I want to make these look as if they're an arrow almost going down a step. So I'm going to use the white arrow tool to select some of these points. But just before I do that, let's move out to the side so I can show you what I'm actually going to be doing. If I have a little shape like this, doesn't matter whether it's got a gradient on it or not. If I use the black arrow tool and I select all of those points in there. And I go down to the scaling tool. When I click out here to scale out, you see out from that middle dot over day. If I moved the dot to there, I just click over there. Now it will scale out from that point. If we move the dot over here, now it will scale from that point. That's using all four of those points. So it's scaling all of those points and moving them all at the same time. What about if I use my direct selection tool and I just selected just those two points. Now once again, when I go to my scale tool, if I click over here, it just scales of those points around. If I clicked in there, it will scale those two points. It doesn't affect these ones over here. And this is the technique that we're going to be using to get our arrow to look correct. Let's close that down and move back to here. So I'm going to use the direct selection tool and I'm going to click and I'm going to drag across. So what I've done now when I release it is I've selected that point, that point, that point, and that point from this shape. But from this shape you have only selected those two, those two points are still unselected, so it'll only scale up those two. And of course, because I've done them all at the same time, it's selected all of these points, but just those ones in there. So let's get the scaling tool. I'm going to put my point of scaling down here. So I'll just click once down there. And if I move out to this area over here, so a little bit, little bit away from it, I can click. And then if I drag upwards, you see how it scales it out. If I drag this way, it will make it bigger. So I can choose any particular size that I like over here. And I could make that gap as small or as big as I wanted. I'm going to go with a fairly large, large gap in in there. Don't forget if you need to move any of these around. Will use your white arrow tool, the direct selection tool. I can move all those points. I could put them all back if I wanted to push them this way as well. So I'm just going to pull them back a bit so I get a really interesting step down. And what really makes this is having these gradients going from dark to light. It really gives it that appearance of having depth. And a third dimension to your shape. Go and give it a go. What I would suggest is select everything first. Before you do this, hold down the Alt key, make a copy and just play with your copy and try out and see what you can do and how this works and how by selecting various parts, you can then scale them up and down. As you need. You can get some really interesting results from that. Once you've tried, had a good play with that, do it on your final piece. So you end up with something which looks a bit like this. And then we'll go on to the next stage. In the next section. 70. Infographic Project: Perspective: So let's do something about the arrows at the front. What I'd like us to have, this particular Arab being longer than the others and the other one's getting a bit shorter. Because the way that we're working out, the way that we're creating this is that each of these areas is going to represent something. So we need to be able to change the distance of them. Now, if I use my selection tool and I selected this arrow here to shorten it, I can quite happily put it in, but you can see by putting it in, shortening the whole thing, which is also affecting the angle of the arrow at the end. So we can't use the selection tool to do that. What I am going to do those, I'm going to use the direct selection tool and just select that point, that point and that point, and just move those points in. So we won't be scaling this little area here would be just been moving across. Now this in itself leads to another problem because trying to select this point, I might be selecting the one on the purple as well as the green. You see if I do that over there and start moving this now, it's also picked up the purple one. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into an area called isolation mode. In isolation mode, I can just isolate one of these items. Now to do that, if I just go to my Selection tool for a moment, if I double-click on this shape, you can see it's taken me into isolation mode is of gray bar along the top, it says Layer one path. And you can see everything else is now faded out or grayed out except for this item. Now, I can go back to my selection tool or direct selection tool, select just those points and pull them in to where I want them to be. I'm going to go roughly to something like that. To get out of isolation mode, you can either click the little arrow at the top corner of the Intel, you get out of it. Or to be honest, you can just click on anything out here. So just double-click and that takes you back into the normal mode again. So I want to shorten this one down as well. So by double-clicking, if you are on your selection direct selection tool, it's not going to do anything. So go over to your selection tool, not the direct selection tool. Double-click isolation mode. I can then select just those points over there and then move them back as well. I think we're going to have those as maybe just maybe the same as the green. Double-click to come out of isolation mode. The last one over here, we don't actually need isolation mode because I can very easily use my direct selection tool to just select those three points are not picking up one of those by mistake. So I can move this straight in and we'll keep going. So I've also got this secondary arrow shape with all four arrows going on here. 71. Infographic Project: Adding Shadows: Let's put this onto her background as well. So I'm going to go along and get a rectangle and draw in my rectangular shapes. I'm going to have a shape over there. And you'll notice that my shape goes right up to where the arrows appear to come forward. So we'll have one over there. And I'm going to make this one gray. So it's going to be not just plain gray, but a slight shade of grades, very, very subtle, going from dark gray through to light gray. If you've made your own gradients, you can just make one of these yourself. It's just light gray going to slightly lighter gray. And hold on the Alt key and make a copy of this. And we'll just make it a bit smaller. Over here, you can now see the difference between those, those two grays. And that's going to go from there through to the top section and there. And one last one. So we'll hold down the Alt key, make another copy of that subtle gray. And we'll pull that one out over here. Now I am going to make sure that those three shapes, just those ones, they don't have any stroke on them. And then I'm going to send them to the back. So I'm going to go to object, arrange and send to the back. So to go behind those, I'm also going to go to object and I'm going to choose to lock them. So lock the selection object lock selection, and lock those three selects ones so I can't move them by mistake. And you see now it almost looks like it's a wall that those things are flowing down on our graphic. The next thing to do is to give the arrows themselves a little bit of depth. And we're going to do that by putting a very, very subtle shadow underneath the size of each of them. Now, one of the things that you could try, although it's not really recommended, is you can go to your effects, go down to Stylize and use a drop shadow in there. So we can put in a drop shadow there. You could play with these settings to make it a little bit less hard. But to be honest, it's still looks like a very harsh, typical drop shadow. We want something with a little bit more nuance to it. And to make my shadow, I'm going to take a shape, which is going to be an elliptical shape. And I'm going to draw my elliptical shape out. I'm going to fill that shape with black. Seems a bit extreme, but bear with me. And we're going to have a second shape like that as well. So I'm going to hold down the Alt key to make a copy. Make this one smaller. This one's also going to be black. And I'll move that on top of that one there. Now I know it's difficult to see, but they're on top of each other. Let's go to the one right at the back and change the opacity of that one to 0. So I've got a transparent black shape there and I've got a nontransparent small black shape in front. Now if you select both of those, you can then go up to the Object menu. We're going to go down to blend. And we're going to say make and that's going to make a blend between those two. Now when you first do this, it looks awful because you just get this three shapes. One which is solid, one semi-transparent, and one transparent. So we're going to go back to object down to blend again, and go into the blend options and change from smooth color into Specified Steps. And you can put in as many steps as you want in here, I'm gonna go with about 200. Should be plenty. Let's click Okay. And you can see there what we have now is a shape which goes from black through to transport. I know you can't see it yet, but if I put it over there, you can see how it is slowly getting transparent. Now the shape itself is a little bit too harsh. So I'm selecting the whole shape that's both of those circles or ellipses. And I'm going to change the opacity and take the opacity down to make it a lot more subtle. So that's what I'm doing to create my shadow. Now I'm going to place my shadow over here on top of the blue one. Would just adjust it a little bit. But I wanted to go over the blue one, but underneath the orange one. Now to get there, we're going to have to go into the Layers panel. Click the little dropdown item there. And here's the blend up here. I'm going to drag the blend down until it's on top of the blue, but underneath the orange. And this is going to be a problem because if I do that, you can see it's over the blue, but it's not under the orange. So I might have to take the orange and drag the orange above the blend. There we go. That's looking better. And this is kind of what I wanted in there. You can adjust it to make it as subtle as you like easy. That's a beautiful subtle little gradient in it. Just almost making these look like paper potentially that is just lifted up from the background. Now, let me do the same thing again. I hold down the Alt key with that shadow, make a copy of it. Let's have, we want to have those copies. I'm going to go to this copy here. This copy needs to be on top of the orange. So it's over there. So it's going to be on top of that orange one, which is fine and needs to be a little bit larger because obviously it's a bigger gap there, so I'll pull that out. So maybe move it up just a little bit. I'm using the arrows on the keyboard to push it around, move it around a little bit. So, but then I want the purple on top of that shadows. I find my purple. Drag it up above that blend. So just be careful don't drop it on the Blend, go above the blend like that. And there we go, we've got the subtle shadow in there. Last one, drag this one into place. You can see it's entirely wrong. This time is going the wrong way. So same thing again. I'm going to move shadow above the purple. So let's go and get this blend, move it above the purple arrow, and then take my green and drag my green above the blend. Of course, you can move these around as much as you like. You can make them as big or as small as you want. It really is about subtlety and getting something which people don't, shouldn't look at the gray shadows. They should just look at your entire design and just go. That's awesome. So have a bit of a go, put some subtle shadows in there. And then we'll move on to the next stage. 72. Infographic Project: Background Highlight: Let's use that same technique to create an interesting glow in the background. I'm just going to something very subtle. But using the same technique. I'm going to take an ellipse and drawing an ellipse. This time instead of going black, I'm going to make it white. So in my fill, I will choose white. I'm going to have a second copy inside that fast way to copy something to make a smaller version is to either go along and double-click on your scale tool. And in the uniform, we can choose maybe 40 percent BY so. And click copy which will do it. Or of course, you can also do it by going to the Object menu down to path, and then using an offset path to create a second copy. So I've got these two here. I'm going to select both of them. Just be careful you don't end up selecting your arrows as well. I will go to Object, are now forgotten something, the back one here, ready should have an opacity of 0. You don't have to do it now. You can do it later, but we'll do it now so that it's like the last one. Let's select both of those. Go to object, down to Blend and Make. And the same thing again, Object, Blend, Blend Options. And I'm going to put in 200 steps between those two. And that gives me this really nice glow in the background. Now with a glow, I want to move it behind the arrows, but in front of this. So if I go to my layers again, there's my blend. I can just drag it down. It's in front of the gray background, but underneath everything else. And that just gives me a really nice little lighter area which draws the eye to the front of the arrows. 73. Infographic Project: Create Icons: As you can see, I've gone ahead and put in a little bit of text here. And these are just normal text. The one on the left hand side here, I popped in and then rotate it around so that it went vertically. And just to make sure that it went perfectly vertically, I held down the Shift key while I was rotating, so it went in 45 degree increments. These bits of texture don't say anything. Interesting. It's just Lorem Ipsum text, which is, well, it's in the type menu over here and it is filled placeholder text. So when you go to make some texts where you click and drag with the little text box. It fills that textbox with Lorem Ipsum text. Or if you want to fill it with text yourself, you can just go to the Type menu down to fill the placeholder text, and it will fill it with temporary text of z. This is text that the client would then change or you then change when you get the details that you need to fill in. A few more bits of text in here and a bit more Lorem Ipsum text, placeholder text at the bottom. So as you can see, my infographic is really about electric vehicles. So what I'd like to do finally, is to just make some little graphics over here of different cars to go in. And I'm going to do that in the usual way that I tend to do these graphics. And that is using either in the Properties panel, the Pathfinder, or in the tools. I'd go in and use the Shape Builder tool. So let me go ahead and make little shape. Over here. This is going to be very futuristic vehicle. Once again, I'm keeping it so that it looks very simplified. So I think I'll go to shape the like. So I'm going to cut off the bottom using a rectangle at the data. So let's just make sure that cuts or we're thinking about like so. Select them both. And then I can use the Pathfinder, just subtract the front object from the back object. So this is the basic shape for the vehicle that I'm trying to create. I'd like a little window over here. So once again, I'm going to hold down the Alt key and make a copy of that shape. And then going to subtract part of the shape here. So I'm going to subtract that bit and that bit of there to get this sort of slight triangle. Select both of those, and then use my shape builder tool, hold down the Alt key and just subtract the bits that I don't want, which are all of those, It's in there. Now I do want to slightly round off the corners. So if I use my direct selection tool, I can go in and choose this corner here. Rounded off just a little bit like that. And I think I'll round off this corner as well with that shape. So this is then going to go up to the front of the car, which is going to be there, that's the front window. I think. I will then select them both and use the Pathfinder tool to knock out one from the other. I need some wheels and this is the simplest of the shapes that I'm going to do. So I'm going to take an ellipse, draw a little elliptical shape in their place it where I wanted to go, hold down the Alt key and make a copy of that shape for the front. Now, this is where it could be. An interesting problem because I've actually gone into the window in there, so I might select both of them and just move them down a fraction. I think that'll work really well. Select all three and subtract the front objects from the back object. And then finally, pop in my wheels, which will just be too little ellipses. So this is the first of the cars that I'm going to create. So this is going to be the JSX model. And the JSX model will be the most simplified of all of them. So I'm going to just make it white for now. Let's make that white. And then I want some other versions of this car. So hold down the Alt key and copy all of those are down. The next model is pretty much going to be the same. But it's going to have some windows over here which is just going to be like little portholes. So I'll make a little shape like that. Pop it where I want it to go. Hold down the Alt key, make a copy of that, and use Control or Command D to make a third copy. Select all of those items, and subtract the front from the back. You can make these things up as you go along. Let's have another one of these, or hold down the Alt key and make another copy. And this is going to be for my GI effects version, which is going to be the delivery vehicle. So I think to make it a delivery vehicle, I will just give it a sort of a an interesting back shape over here. So I'll just make it begins square, maybe like that in there. And same again, we'll select both of those and unite them together into one shape. Lastly, I've got the economical version here. Well, let's try different variation on this first one in here. And I'll just give it a, once again, an interesting back area, maybe with a bit of an ellipse going on out there. Let's just move this up a little bit like that in their active and rotate it round. So and I'll select both of those and unite them together. So that gives me four different vehicles from the one basic shape. Now I can select all of these vehicles. I'm going to scale them down to the rights and of size that I want to go in there. And I'm going to group them together very quickly. So Command or Control G for grouping. I select all of those group it select all of those groups that select all of those ungroup that. So this one is going to go up the top here. And you see how beautifully they, the white goes onto the gradients that one will go over them, will have the delivery vehicle in there. And finally, the whatever vehicle this is just going to go down there. Now, this is a bit of a problem because this is very, very tight next to my text. So I might select all of my text. And I'm just using the arrow keys on the keyboard to move it along. So there's a bit more space for the vehicles in there. Right? I think we're pretty much done with with this. Make sure that you save it. So go to File, Save As. And when you're saving it from an arrow infer, just save it as an illustrator AI file. And in the options, make sure that your version is the 2020 version. Unless of course you saving out for somebody who's on an older version. Click Okay. 74. Infographic Project: Exporting: So that's done. Let's now save it out for the web. I'm going to go to File down to Export. And I'm going to export it for screens because we're going to make sure that this is a bitmap, as in it's made up of pixels. So in the art boards area, I'm going to make sure I've chosen the correct artboard. I'm going to be exporting it. In my case, I'm exporting it to my desktop. And then in the formats here, my original file size that I chose was 1920 by 1080 pixels. So that's the size that I want my final to be. So I'm going to choose one times in here. But of course you can always click in here and you can choose different resolutions or double or half the resolutions in that scale area. The format. If it's for the web, I'd either choose PNG or JPEG file. Let's go and click the Export Artboard. That's done. So if I now go to my desktop and have a look, there is a folder on my desktop. In this case, in my case called 1 times. And inside the folder over here, I have got my artboard, which is JPEG, and let's have a look. There it is. In there. All finished. Having a bit of a go with that funny saving out. But then try this whole project again and try variations on the theme and see what you can do. Enjoy it, have loads of fun with it. 75. Appearance Panel - Intro: Let's have a look at the appearance panel now. I've got two shapes here. I'm going to click on the foreground shape. And if you look in the properties panel, you will see there is some options for the appearance and that shows the fill and the stroke. And we've got an opacity and potentially some effects. Now, there are three little buttons down the bottom here. And if I click on that, it actually opens up more detail about the appearance. It opens up this appearance panel. Now, if you can't see those three little buttons for any reason or you forget, you can get to the same thing by going to Window menu and finding the appearance in there. So what have we got in here? Well, first of all, I can work in exactly the same way with the fill and stroke that I do in this appearance. I can change the size and change the color. But, and this is quite interesting thing. I can also go in here and I can hide either the stroke or the fill, rather than actually going in and choosing none. Now the other thing is that I can do in here as well, is if in the appearance panel, I went in here and change the opacity, see what it's doing is it's changing the transparency, the owner of the capacity of the whole shape, both the fill and stroke. Let's take it up to a 100 percent again. But if I went into my appearance panel, I could click just on the stroke and change the opacity only on the stroke without affecting the fill. Or I can go to the fill and change the opacity just on the fill without affecting the stroke. Let's take that down a bit. You can see I'm just affecting the fill in there. So that's the second use for this little item. The next thing though, is it we can also go in and we can add second, third or fourth or have many want to, to be honest, fills and strokes to your object. So let's say, for example, that I like to read background, but I also wanted to put a patent on that shape. I could do that the long way round by making a copy of the shape, filling the copy with the pattern that I wanted, and then trying to put it back in exactly the right position on that last shape. You can do it that way if you want. But it's much easier if you're on a shape like this to go into the appearance and add a second fill or stroke. If I click this little Add New Fill button, you can see now I've got a second fill up here. Now my fill is actually in front of my stroke. If I just drag it below it. Now I've got two fills over there. Let me go to this top fill here and this fill, I'm going to apply a pattern to it. You can then see over here, I've got the red underneath if I hide that or show that you see it, that one is the fill, we can do the same thing with a stroke. So I can go to the Stroke option. I can add a second stroke on there. I'm going to make this stroke orange. And I'm going to make it center. So I can see both strokes at the same time. I can add as many of these, both fills and strokes as I like. And each of them can have their own either fills, patterns, gradients, whatever you wish. But we'll go with it. It's very useful. 76. Saving the Appearance as a Graphic Style: So let's take this on to the next level. I've got a little shape over here. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to add two more fields to it. So add another fill over there and I'm going to put a pattern in that fill there. I'm going to add a third fill over here, and I'll put a gradient on that fill. Let's go with a pink through too transparent gradient. Now, what about the stroke? Well, I'll add another stroke over here, so I've got two strokes. I'm going to go to the top stroke. Click in there. And I'm gonna make this one orange. And I'm going to change the size slightly so you can see the other one through it. And I can add another stroke on top of that. Said I can add as many of these are like, let's make that purple. And once again, a little bit sooner than those. Now the other thing that we can do with strokes is if you click on the word stroke over here, it takes you to all the stroke options. So we've got things in here like the line, is it aligned in the middle, on the inside, on the outside. Now it's so small you can barely see that one in there. So let's have a look with the blue. I got the blue click on Stroke. This is a 21 strokes that's quite thick. Is it on the line, on the inside or on the outside? We go back to the orange over here. And if I click on the stroke rather than the color, so I'm clicking on the word stroke. Down here, I've got a dashed line so I could put dotted lines on that as well. I think I'm going to change this top one to white just so that you can see the little white line around the middle of that. And then anytime I can just change the order of these architect that white, which is a bit thin for the moment. And instead of having it over the top, I could just move it below, dragging it underneath the orange. So let's go over here. We'll find some more room that I can drag it around and drag it underneath the orange stroke. So now it appears between those lines. Now, this is all well and good for making one shape. But what about if I wanted to apply it to a second one? You can see when I draw it, it just remembers the last thing that I've done. And I might have a number of different shapes in here. And I want to apply the same group of fills and strokes to all of those. Well, this is where something comes in called the gradient. Let's try that sentence again. This is where something comes in called the graphic styles. Now with a graphic style, that graphic style remembers all these appearances. So if I click back on this one here, I've got three strokes refills. I can go to my graphic style. I can just drag this shape in and drop it into my graphic style. Then when I want to apply it to another shape, I just select the shape and click on the graphic style, select the shape, click, Select and click at. Each one of those is independent. So if I did go back to the appearance on this one here, I can go in there and I could choose to maybe increase the size of the blue or a go along to the orange and remove the orange stroke from that as well. So the graphic styles are a way of saving fills and strokes and any appearance. And the appearance of course, could be the capacity as well. But it could also be any effects that you put onto that shape. They can also be saved as a graphic style. Like everything else in Illustrator, these are only available to you. The ones that you've created in the document that you're using. So if you want to save them out, you need to go along and save that graphic style. So over here, if I go to the top corner, I can just say Save Graphic Style Library. And I can then save this as a whole new library, which I can then reuse in other documents. Try it out. 77. Typography - Intro: In this section we're going to be looking at type. Now, there's a lot of Type in Illustrator. But the great thing is if you know type in Illustrator, you're going to be able to do a lot of it in InDesign as well as Photoshop, as well as all the other Adobe packages as well. So when you learn one, it's across the board. So we'll go through all the type options, look at the various kinds of type in there, from things like point type to Area Type 2, putting type on a path so you can get your type to run and followed a path along. And then we'll do a project at the end, a fairly simple one with a bit of a logo and some tight around the outside. 78. Area Type and Point Type: So let's have a look at the type tool. Now there are two main ways that we can work with type. I'm going to go across to the Type Tool here and I'm just going to use the standard type tool for now. Now, one way to work with the Type Tool is by just clicking. So all I've gotta do is click ones and I can then put my type in. Now, when you've got some type in, you can click and drag to selected. And then over here in the properties, we have the character options and the paragraph options. We'll go through those shortly. I'm going to do though, is to increase the size of the point size of my text. So I've got some text to do this text I clicked and then type straight in. Now what this means is this particular type of text is then fully scalable. So I can just scale the text around. Now you can see it's scaling. Well, it's misspelling and scanning all over the place if you want to keep the proportions, hold down the Shift key. And that way when you scale it up and down, like so, it won't miss scale. Let's do another type of text. So if I go along to the type tool, and this time using the and type 2, instead of just clicking, I'm going to click and drag a text box in and it's put in a text again. Now you can see automatically because I made a textbox when it got to the end and there wasn't enough room for the word type. It just popped it onto the next line. So let's see how this works. If I use the selection tool, remember on this kind of type here, if I use the selection tool and I clicked and dragged on the edge, it would change the size with this one. When I do the same thing now, see what it does. It just changes the Bucks. So the type will then go on to the next line. And I've just kept to flow onto the next lines, like so. So we've got two main kinds of text. Now we can change from one kind of text to the other kind of text fairly easily. And the one way to do it is to go to the Type menu up here. Now, the kind of texts that were on, it's either called point type of area type. This one here is point type. So if I say convert to area type, now you'll see when I drag the box, it does the same thing as the one below. It just allows it to flow onto the next line. Same here. If I click on this area type and go to the Type menu and I say convert to point type. Now it will do what the top one did. And if I scale it, the type will scale. So if you click, you're automatically putting in point type. If you are clicking and dragging a box, you're automatically putting in area type. So if you've got type like this, which is point type, you can go to the Type menu and you can just convert to area type very, very quickly. But there's another way to do this as well. When you click on the type box, once again, I'm still using that selection tool, the black arrow at the top. You see there's a little stick which sticks out with a dot on it. So think of those as lollipop sticks. If you double-click on that, it changed it from one type to the other. So you see now if I click and drag, it's scalable. If I double-click, now when I click and drag, it changed it, so it flows. Let's do the same over here. So at the moment, this is in the flow method, the area type method. If I double-click over there, changed to point type, and now when I click and drag, it will scale it. So you can either do it from the lollipop or you can do it from the Type menu and using the type conversion options in there to go from point a to Area Type O back again. Now, there's also another little option here, and that's this one down the bottom. So if I've got type, which is area type, I can double-click on that and it will just take my textbox so fits to the bottom of the text. You'll see what I've got point type. You don't get that little lollipop down the bottom. And we do try those two out. And it doesn't matter which one you use because you always change to the other one later. 79. Type in a Custom Shape: So let's have a look at some more of the type tools. If I go along this next one down says it's the area type tool. So how is this different from clicking and dragging? Well, the great thing about this tool is it allows you to put type into a shape. So if I had a shape like a little while, let's go with a rectangle. Over there. I can go along to my area type tool and I click in the box, but I'm making sure that I'm actually clicking on the path itself. You see if you just click in the middle, just says must click on a non compound path. So I click on the actual line itself and it puts in all this text into the box. Now, what you'll notice is that it gets rid of the fill and stroke which is on that box. But now I've got the text in there. And if I pull this out, you will see it is area type. And of course we can make it much more exciting than that. Let's make little shape. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a little apple shape here. So I'm going to have a circle like so. And I'm just going to use the direct selection tool, the white arrow tool to select the bottom and pull it down a little bit like that. And we need two of these to make a good apple shaped or hold down the Alt key. And we'll get to make a copy of it like that. Select them both. And we'll go to the Pathfinder, which is over here in Properties. Click on that button on the left-hand side and that just unites them together into one shape. Now the thing is most apples don't have this sort of sudden corner in here. So if I use my direct selection tool, can then go in, select that little point there and drag the circle out to round it off a bit. You can use other tools for the same thing as well. Do the same thing, click on that one and rounded off a little bit like so. And now I also want a little leaf at the top. So I'm going to take an ellipse like so and make a copy of that ellipse like that. And then once again in the Pathfinder. So I've selected both of them in the Pathfinder. I'm going to choose the third button, which is the intersect. So it just leaves the intersection in there, right? So there is my, my apple. But what I'd like to do now though, just make a copy of it. So I've got a copy over here, so here's my original. Let's make the apple red in there, and we'll make the leaf up here green. So I'm going to go to the second one. And on this one here, I'm going to use the area type tool. And I'm going to click on the line. And you can see it's put my text straight in there. Now, what I've done is I've just gone to Wiki and I've copied a bit of text about apples. So I'm going to paste that straight in there. Now you can see it all. Now some of my text is missing. You can see by this little red plus it is actually extra text in there. We're going to come to how we can deal with that later. But I'm going to select all my text. The easiest way to do that is to go to any of your type tools or just double-click on the type to select it all. And over here we'll just take the size down a little bit. So I get all of my text straight in there. Now I also want some gaps between the lines of text. So we're going to move over to something on the right-hand side of the size. And this is called the leading. And this changes the distances between the lines. So I can change it to anything I like in there. So if I need more room, I can increase the room in there or I could decrease it to make it closer together. You can make the type a little bit larger like so. If I want to push the type in from the edge, either the left side or the right side. Well then we go down to the paragraph. And in here I'm going to click on the three little dots. Now we can't see it in there very easily. And if you can't find all of these options, you can get to the same thing by going up to the Window menu. And you'll find this subtype options in here as well. So once again, it's right near the bottom over they've got type, and I've got characters, and I've got paragraph options in there too. This is exactly the same as that. Instantly if you do find that these things disappear off the edge, when you click on it, you can actually just drag down little slider over here to see a bit more. And I'm going to be using this option which allows me to indent from the left-hand side. Just indent that text just a little bit like so you can do the same thing from the right-hand side as well. So maybe we'll indent that just a little bit like that. Now, if you don't like having hyphens, because there's cultivars has been hyphenated and the word productions. When hyphenated, you can switch off hyphenation, the bottom of that as well. So now that's a dangerous day with the word Apple's been split into two. So maybe we might need to change this a little bit until we get everything all on the same lines. Or we could even go in there and just do a return. Now, let's see what we can do with this. To return there. And production. Now, production needs to be sorted out because it's a bit of a problem down there. So I'm going to select all of my text. You can see if you just keep clicking. Eventually you'll be able to select all of your paragraphs or you can click and drag as well. What we do is just take my type size down just a little bit like so we'll put it in. Good. Okay, I think that looks okay. What to do now is to move the text on top of the existing apple shape. And I've then got some type with the apple. Try and move it up a little bit and to the left a bit as well. And I think to make it look a bit more interesting, I'm going to go along to the appearance and change the color of the text. What I've gotta do is choose a new color with the text selected. There we go. We don't need that one, that one can go away. Do try that out, requires a little bit of fiddling. And having a look at some of your settings in here to try and get the text to where you want it to go. But all you have to do is will the text. And you need to do that by double-clicking or clicking and dragging. Go down here, you can use your size. You can use the distances between the individual lines. This is known as you're letting. You can also go down here to the paragraph and you can get the type to align to the left, to the center, or to the right. Or you can align all of the lines as well. And sometimes when you're doing a shape like this, it actually tends to look a little bit better when you've got both sides lined up. So once again, we'll just push that in a bit from the right. Do try them out, have bit of a go, make some simple shapes that make them too complicated and see how that works for you. 80. Type on a Path: So let's look at the next tool down in here. And the next one is type on a path. So we need to make a path. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use the pen tool. And I'm just going to click and then click and drag, and click and drag and click this little curve. Now this curve has got a fill and no stroke. We don't really want a fill on there and the stroke will disappear anyway. But what I'll do is I'm going to go up to the fill option here and just choose a none for the fill. And go to my stroke and just give it a color in there so I can see it. Now of course, if it's not the right shape, you can always use your direct selection tool to go and click on any of those points and pull them around. Like so. I'm going to pull this down a little bit in. Yes, I'd like a bit of text over here, coming down over there, says something along the lines of fruit of the gods. So I wanted to be on the path. Remember like the other text, if you put type on to shape the properties, the fill and the stroke will disappear anyway. So make a copy if you need to keep the shape as well. And we need to go into the type on a path tool. And over here I'm going to click on my path somewhere. Now, if I click right in the middle, you see it puts this bit of text. This is Lorem Ipsum text. It's just filler text straight in there. That doesn't matter. I'm going to just type straight over it. And let's try fruit. The gods. I'm going to select that text by clicking and dragging it and go over to my Character options here and just increase the size quite a lot and see when it gets to the end it just disappears. So to move the type along the path, we can go along and we can use this black arrow tool, the selection tool at the top. You'll see now that it says fruit of the gods has disappeared in there. To the left-hand side, what we have is a little line. There's a line on the right-hand side and there's a line right in the middle. This is your left margin. You're right margin and your center margin. So you'll see here if I go to the paragraph options and I choose to left align it, it aligned to that. If I central line it, it aligns to this one. And if I write a line it, it aligns to that one there. The word gods is still missing. Let's left align this for now. So I can actually go in here and I can move the margins around. You have to be very careful when you click on this. See there's a little line that goes up like that. That's a vertical line there. If you grab it near the top, you can then pull that left margin around. If you go to the middle one. When you drag the middle one, it drags both the left and the right margin. If I pull this one in a bit like that and like move the text anywhere along that line. If I wanted to detect be upside down, I just pull this underneath the line and it goes upside down once again, if I grab that point and put it like so. So the thing about this is you need to be very, very careful that you're clicking on exactly the right area here. If you find you click on these boxes instead, it does something slightly different that we'll get to later. So do be careful of that. Have been Virgo, put some text into your picture, try moving it around. And then we'll do something more interesting with it. 81. Type on a Circle: Now I've got my texts through to the gods in there. And I can always edited. Still. If I go along to the type tool, I can click in there and edited directly if it disappears, like that's done. Go back to the black arrow tool, the selection tool, and just grab that little line and pull it out until it comes back in, like so. So can we do this on closed shapes? Absolutely. I'm going to go along and get a circle over here or an ellipse. Let's make a little elliptical shape. Same again, I can use my type on a path tool. I just click on the path over there, put in to put my text in there. Once again, go back to my selection tool. And you can see it starts there, that's the left margin, goes around, That's the center. And that's the right margin on that side. So left, center, right aligned. It's a left align this, once again, you can pull this inside the shape if you wanted on the inside. You can move it around the outside of the shape as well. So many options we can do. I think I'll leave this one just at the top there. And I'm going to move it across like so I want to make it bigger. Now, if I grab the corner of the shape, I can then adjust the shape. So I'll just pull it out and the type automatically scales itself on here at the moment. Let's do another little bit of text over here as well. Because if I want some text at the bottom, we can't really put it into the same path. And I don't want to touch that. But if text. So I'll do another circle over here. And this time, same thing again. Use the type tool. Click the bottom. I want to move that around to the bottom, but I wanted to go onto the inside. So it's actually the right way round. So sometimes you might find it a bit or quit. Occasionally you have to pull it around, move it about until you get exactly what you want. If you now need to move this type to the outside of the circle because it's on the inside of the circle. Well, what you do is you select the text. And then in your options over here, if we go into the character options, I'm going to show some more options by clicking on those three little dots. Now this opens up a whole other set of options. You can see that one of the options we've got down here is called the baseline shift. We look into this in more detail later. But this allows me to actually move the text above or below the line where I can even move it onto the line. If I wanted. Don't forget though if you're moving it onto the line like so, the characters are going to be further apart than there were up there. So you might find you also need to change this setting. This setting here is called the tracking, and this allows you to move the text closer together or further apart. Once again, we're going to be looking at this in more detail later in the course. So I've done that. I'm happy with that. Same thing. I can scale it. Should. I want to scale it up a little bit like that. And we can move it to the bottom in there. Try those out a bit of a go. Don't forget, use your black arrow tool and move the individual little points around there can be very, very frustrating. So give it, give it some time. 82. Touch Type Tool: So far we've looked at the type tool, the area type tool, and the type on a path tool. And you'll notice now that the next three tools are exactly the same tools, but the type goes vertically rather than horizontally. So if you want Vertical Type, choose one of those and they do exactly the same thing with the first three does. But what about this one at the bottom? Will the touch-type tool is really cool? What do we need to do though, is I'm going to put in some type using the normal type tool. I'm going to click once and I'm going to put in the word red in there. What happens to my texts though it's kind of close together. So what's happening with that? Well, the thing is if I selected, if I go down to my Character panel, it's remembering all the settings that I used when I did this. Food to the gods or food of the Gods at the bottom. So we're going to reset that. I'm going to go to the Window menu. And I'm going to find in the type option, the Character panel now that's exactly the same as that one there. And at the top is a little drop-down menu. And you'll see the very bottom item says reset panel. So if I click on that, it just resets that panel back to the default settings in there. You can get to the same thing in here and click on those three little dots. And then there's the drop-down over there. When you think is it's just disappeared off the bottom of my screen, but it's exactly the same way of working. So all I need to do now is to increase the size of my type. Let's make it a lot larger. It's great. And then I'm going to go and use the touch-type tool. So let's select the text. If I go over here, type touch-type tool, I can then click on the individual characters in here and adjust them individually, ready easily. So let's click on this R. Now you see this little dots around the outside here. So first of all, we've got this one here, and this allows me to move that character individually up and down. What I'm actually changing is the baseline shift. I can go to the one at the top here, and I can actually scale that character up and down. I can rotate with this little one here. I can go to the top right and scale the whole thing. Down here. I can adjust the width. So with those and being able to move it around individually, I can just get this character to look, well, quite interesting. Let me go to this E over here and same thing again, I'm going to move it around, just move closer to the r. And in the d here I think I will just rotate that the other way and move it down like that. So we've got some interesting letters going on in there. Of course, you can always change those later on. Just go back to your standard type 2 and you can select them individually. So I'm going to select them all. I'm going to go to the fill and make them white. Let's get the move tool again, I'm going to scale this down. We'll take the whole thing around and just pop it on top of my leaf in there. Do try that out. That touch-type tool is such fun. 83. Text Flow: I've got some text in here and this takes is, is in as area text. So this means that when I change the box, the type just flows with it. But what happens if I've got rid of some of the text? Well, first of all, I can see that because this little red box suddenly appears the plus inside it. So the first way to get around that is if you go to this little, the lollipop stick at the bottom was square. It's not really around Lollipop. And I double-click on it. It will just make the box the same size as the text. You can see the little red box has disappeared. But the other thing that we can do is we can click on the little red box. So I click on there. And then you can see my cursor has changed. All I need to do now is to click and drag another textbox. So now my text flows from this box into that box over there. So if I were to, for example, lengthen this one a little bit, you can see the text will just flow back into this one. It's moved at around. Move that up to the top there. If I shorten this box, The text will then flow into that one. Well, until it gets to the point where this little red plus on there as well. So you can of course click on that and do another one. So one click in there, click and drag over here to get another box or the text flows from there into their, into there. And any of them can be changed and that can be moved around as well. What happens if I delete them? What if I get rid of that one and that one? All the text is now in this box over here. The other thing that we can do with text alike, this is to go along to the Type menu. And underneath where it says converted point type, we've then got the area type options. So the area type options, when I click on it, it opens up a window. And I can then divide this box is area type box into different rows. If I want, I'll switch on previews of that. You can see it live. So let's have three rows in there. It's kinda like columns really. And if I go to columns, I can then divide it into columns as well. So once again, I'll just click Okay, and this means now that if I change the box size, you can see those columns will adjust as well. We need to get rid of them. Click in there, go to type Area Type Options, and just change that back to one and click Okay. 84. Character Panel Options: Now let's have a look at some of the character options in here. Rather than doing them down the bottom here, we can also get them by going to the Window menu. Right near the bottom, we have got the type and the character options in there. So this is the same thing. Now, the thing is that there are still more options that you can't see. And that happens quite a lot in Illustrator. You don't see everything in these windows. So sometimes you just need to double-click on the name. And you can see it shows all the rest of those options up. Let's start off though with the simple options over here. So the first thing we've got in here is the typeface or the font family, which is the usual option. You can see the various type font, I'm sorry, font families that I've got in there. Go and pick a type face. In here. You've got the style. So this could be regular bold, semi bold. There's just so many options to choose from in here. I'm just going to go back to regular again. But depending on the typeface that you are on, you might get different styles. Moving down. We then have the size and the size comes in points. Now, although it goes from 672 points, you can make it bigger. By the way, the reason it goes to 72 points is because there are 72 points in an inch. So 72 type would be one inch high. The thing is though, you can actually do this yourself. So if I wanted the word apple over here to be a title, and I thought, You know what, I want that to be exactly six millimeters or 12 millimeters or 13 millimeters. I don't know what that is in points, but I can just go in here and type it straight in. So 13 MM, press Enter. And well, it turns out that 13 millimeters is 36, 0.8 points to the right of that. We've then got the distances between all of the lines, which is known as our lettering. Once again, I can increase that or I can decrease that. If not sure what to use, just go in there and choose auteur to the left of that and down. This is known as kerning. And kerning is the distances between individual characters. So between the peas of the, if I wanted to move them closer together, I click between them. And that I can go into my kerning in here. And I can just either make it closer together or if I wished further apart, it's an incredibly fine adjustment. But if I wanted to affect the entire word, well, I select the word. And this is known as our tracking. So I can then increase or decrease the tracking in there. Let's have a look at a few more. I'm going to double-click on the word character, open it up. We've got horizontal and vertical scaling here so I can scale things up and I can scale width as well. I can also change where they sit on the baseline. So I could take the two P's and make them go down or above the baseline. It's known as the baseline shift. To the right of that, we can change the whole angle or rotation of characters. If I just start to do this, we can rotate them around to any angle you like. That's not italic, it's not skewing it. It's actually changing the rotation angle of the entire character. Then below that, we have a whole little line of buttons. This one here makes everything a capital R. You can see how the baseline shift is. Push those two p's up. This one here makes them small caps. So the capitals, the uppercase letters, stay the same. But the lowercase letters become capitalised, but they keep the same height as the lowercase. We then got things like superscript and subscript. These are useful if you have something like a copyright symbol, we're registration mark, you want to make it small and go up. I'll just put in TM in there for trademark. It's selected. And I can do superscript to make it small and go up, or a subscript makes it small and go down. Lastly, we'll get rid of that TM there. I'm going to select all that whole word and I can underline it. Or I can do a strikethrough. The bottom, this is your spell checker language. So you can have different languages for different parts of your document based on the characters. 85. Spellchecker: So when it comes to spelling, there is a spell checker. And the spellchecker is in the Edit menu. It's under spelling. And we've got two options here. We've got an auto spellchecker, which at the moment is switched off. And we've got to check spelling option. So if I were to choose auto spellcheck, it will check my document. And it tells me that this root stocks is wrong and cultivars is wrong. Well, the first thing is though it would also depend on which language I'm actually looking at. I'm with, I'm English. I'm I'm in the UK at the moment, so I'm using English UK. But if we just select this document and we change the language into English USA. Now you'll see that cultivars is actually spelled correctly. So it does look at the language down here. Rootstock is still wrong. So the other way to check your spelling is to go to Edit Spelling. Check Spelling, and it's like the spell checker in most documents. Click on Start to run through your document and find any misspells. And then it gives you suggestions as to what you can use and then change that into two words in there. I can just choose Change and click Done. And there we go. It's all sorted out. 86. Paragraph Panel: The next thing we're going to look at is the paragraph options. Now, the paragraph options, once again, it's either down here. And if you go down there, you can click on those three little dots to see all the options. Or you can get to it by going to Window menu down to the bottom and finding the paragraph panel in the type menu exactly the same as you did with the character panel. So first of all, if I select my text over here, I'm going to switch hyphenation off his hyphenation option at the bottom and we'll just switch hyphenation off. And then I've got various options along here. Allow me to align my text to the left, to the center, to the right. All the lines on both sides are lined up, so left and right are aligned. But the bottom line of each paragraph, because that's a paragraph there, is aligned to the left. This one will align it to the middle, that will lie to the right. And finally, I really don't like this one, but it aligns up everything. And you end up with these very big nasty gap between your type that just go back to this one over here. After that, we've got the ability to indent all the text. You back again to there. We can also indent from the right. If we'd aligned to the right, we can indent the first line of every paragraph. Let's go back again over there. Or we can go the other way to get the paragraph to come out. Now if you're an InDesign user, this will be a bit of a revelation because InDesign doesn't allow you to actually move text out of the box. Let's get that back to 0. After that, we've got the option to change the distance between the paragraphs, either before the paragraph or after the paragraph. So I can increase the distance before or after. And most of the time like this, it'll look exactly the same. It's only when you've got a heading that you might need to change it either before or after. Try those out. Not very exciting stuff, but so, so useful for any type that you're going to do. And remember, almost all the stuff in here with its character and paragraph is exactly the same throughout the Adobe range. So when you're working in Photoshop or InDesign, most of this 95 percent will be identical. 87. Type as Outlines: Now let's say that you've got a piece of artwork and you are going to be sending this off to somebody else, possibly a colleague, maybe to another company, or maybe you send it off to the printers. Now, we've got some text in here and this text is fully editable, the name of the company. But when this goes to the other company or the colleague, unless they've got exactly that font in the system. This won't appear correct when print correctly, and there won't be able to edit it. So you could either get them to buy the font in. If they're part of the Adobe CC Cloud, you might find that you've used one of the fonts, which is on the Cloud and there'll be able to use it then. But to be sure and just in case what we do is we make the type into outlines and what that does it change the type from regular editable type into objects. So you go up to the Type menu. And down here we just say Create Outlines. And now my text is actually just objects which happened to look like that type. So the main reason for creating outlines is when you're sending workout, you don't want to have to send the typeface at the same time, so you make your type into outlines. Now the other thing that you could do with the type which has been outlined is you can then start to play with it because it is just shapes. I'm going to take these two shapes here and I'm going to rotate them around a bit. I'm holding down the Shift key. So it rotates in 45 degree increments. And let's make that a little bit bigger as well. So the first thing is because these are shapes, I can now use my direct selection tool on them. Let's zoom in a bit over here to the y. And you'll see that I can now select just those points on the y and I can actually manipulate it and pull it down. I could do the same with any of these points. A tool like a take from the P and just pull them down as well. So it does allow you to manipulate shapes by clicking and dragging around. The other thing that we can do at the same time is we can mix shapes together using the Pathfinder. Now, pretty much done with that one. So let's get rid of that. And what I'm going to do is I'm just Take a little rectangle like that. I'm going to go along and get some type. The word while in there. Let's make it a little bit larger as well. Now, if I put it over that shape there, and I selected both of them, you can see my Pathfinder options do come up. But if I click on one of them, what happens is, well, nothing really. If I took this type, which is editable type at the moment, I went to type and create outlines. Now it's just shapes. So if I put it over there, I can select both of those. And I can go into my Pathfinder and I can use the Pathfinder to mix them together. And I've just used this little button over here, which is the exclude option. Really quick way to get very, very effective looking text effects fast. 88. Outline Text - Convert Outline into Editable Type (New Feature): I've got a little graphic here and there is some text up the top which has obviously been misspelt. Unfortunately, this text is actually not editable text. It's been made into outlines. By going to type and create outlines over there, you can take your text and make it into shapes. You can see and hear in the layers. Each one of those is a separate piece, it's not editable text anymore. One of the new features that's come about in Illustrator is being able to take text which is out and converted back to editable text. Have a look here. I've selected this outline text and I'm going to go along to the type menu. I'm going down to retype in there. What it'll do is it analyzes the text and then it gives you various options for the typeface that it thinks is closest to that one. I think this Helvetica bold is probably pretty close. We can then apply that to there and it's converted it to live text. I'll just press escape to get out of that. Now you can see over in the layers panel, this bit of text here is live text. If I selected, I can then use my type tool in there and I can put in my missing Z over there. Really useful sometimes. It's not going to be something you're going to be using every day, but if you have a bit of text you can get it to convert it back to editable text for you. I would still try to save a document with your editable text or save it somewhere and maybe as another art board, but this is a last resort. Do try it out so you know where it is. Type and retype in there. 89. Project: Aperture Blade Logo, Create Repetition: Let's have a look at creating a logo. And I want to put text over the part of the top and under the bottom in a circle. And the logos I'm going to show you how to create is going to be based on photography. And I'd like it to look like the shutter or the aperture blades, not shatter blades, but the aperture blades of a camera. So I'm going to start off by going along and using my polygon tool to create a polygon. Now, if you click and drag, as long as you're holding down the Shift key, you'll see that it holds the polygon so that the top and bottom run parallel to the edge of the page. If you release it, you can spin it however you like. It also goes from the middle out. I need to move it into the middle a little bit like so. Now I don't want to fill on this. So I'm going to remove that and the stroke, I'm just going to leave like so. But I also want to round off the corners just a little bit. So it looks a bit more interesting. Now what we're going to do is we're going to make some copies of this. So I'm going to go into the effects. I'm going to go down to distort and transform. And I'm going to use a transformation called transform. Now transforming here allows me to transform the scale, the move, and the rotation of an object. I'm going to do the scaling first. I'm going to take this down to 90 percent vertical and 90 percent horizontal. And you can see it's made a copy inside that's kind of like using the normal scale tool ready. But I can choose how many copies I want it to just go with six for the moment. And you can see I've got six versions going smaller and smaller, each 190% of the last. But then I'm going to rotate them as well. So I want each one of them to rotate five degrees. And you can see we get a really interesting result from that. Now of course, I can change any of these settings. I could say, well, let's try and see what it would look like with 80% on those. Or I can go in here and try different degrees settings as well. But the great thing about this is that I can also change the number of copies. So I'm going to try 20 copies in there, but take the degrees back to, well, probably a lot less than it started off with about 8, 8% degrees in there. And I'm going to take this back over to 90 percent for the size. That's looking really cool. In there. Maybe 20s too many. There's no right or wrong here. Just try different settings to see what you can get. I love this pattern as it's going in. So I'm going to click Okay on that. The interesting thing about this is it's based on this outer shape. So if you were to change the outer shape, for example, if I scale the outer shape, everything else inside will scale as well. If I got my selection tool and select it, little rounded corner and rounded them off. Or the inner ones will round as well. If I choose to run them less, the inner ones will follow suit. And you can see I can go from corners, too rounded, factor go all the way to a circle if I go far enough like that. So I'm nearly finished with this. But I would like to change the stroke weight and make it a bit thicker. Just looks a little bit more interesting. And I'd also like to then put a gradient which covers all of these shapes. Now remember at the moment, it's just this outer line that I can adjust these effect based on that outer line. So to get around that, so I can work on the individual parts. I'm going to go to the Object menu. I'm going to go down to expand Appearance. And that then breaks these down into individual components. So the great thing now is that I can go and apply as a fill, a gradient. And you can see my gradients going across like that. But I think what I'd like to do is choose my Gradient tool and go from the middle outwards. Now, I want it to be circular. So we can go to the Window menu down to the gradient panel. And I'm going to change it to a radial gradient. Now, the radial gradient you can drag from absolutely anywhere. So I could say start out here and drag out, walk it, start from the middle, and drag my gradient out over there. Let's click off of that. And you can see there is my gradient starting quite delicately and going out to the blue that I want on the outside. So that's my initial part done. Once you've got one of these done or something along that line, done, try different effects in here as well. Using that effect will then put some type around the outside and talk how to get it, about how to get it looking good in a circle. 90. Project: Add Color: So let's put some type around a circle. What I'm going to do is to use my elliptical tool. And I'm going to just draw a circle around this shape. Now you can see when I go into the middle, it kind of shows me a lot of little dots in there. I'm looking for roughly the middle of the shape, holding down the Alt key to draw from the middle out and the Shift key to draw a perfect circle. So I'm looking for something probably about that size. Now this is filled with a gradient. That honestly doesn't matter. Because when I use the type tool and I'm going to be using not the normal type tool, but the type on a path tool. And I click over here, you can see what it does. It just gets rid of the fill and the stroke of the line and puts lots of text around the outside. Now I want my text to say, exposure matters. So top and bottom. So this is all about photography and about how important exposure is in the photography world. So I'm going to first of all, type and exposure. And I'm going to increase the size of this text. I want it to be pretty large. So I'll go over to my Character panel. First of all, find that the typeface that I want to work with, and I'm going to use this fairly hefty Arial Black. And I'm going to increase the size. I'll go to 72. Now if it's not big enough, you can just keep going. Like so. So I've got the word exposure in there. And then I want the second word along the bottom in here. Now, if I want to move with the word exposure round, I can use my selection tool. And I can then drag the circle around. Now when you drag it, you'll find that you've got the left margin there, the center point or the center margin there, and the right margin over there. So if you just go to the paragraph options, you can very quickly say I want to send to that. I want to align it to the left or the right margin. I'm going to center it and then grab this middle margin to move it. Now, if you just click as I've done over there and you've grabbed the wrong area, I grab the Type, it just moves the whole thing over. So what you have to make sure you do is grab exactly on this little line. It's very, very easy to miss it, but have a look as I move over it, you can just about see now how my little process changed from having that square rounded to having a little upward arrow. If I click on that, now I can pull this around and move it to wherever I wanted to go. So I'm going to place that right at the top there. Now that I've done that one, I want the second one to go underneath. So I'm going to hold down the Alt key and just make a copy of this text. Select all the text in here, and change it over using my type tool. So, whoops, Let's try that again. So keep missing the type. Let's select the type of segment. So let's make a copy of this type for the next bit of time, I'm going to hold down the Alt key, drag a copy out, and then I can change my type. Now, the fast way to select type is to double-click on the type to select a bit. Sometimes you find when type, like this is on a path, it's a lot more difficult to get hold of. So I prefer to actually go to the Type tool over there. And I can then click on a line itself and then just drag to select my type or use Command or Control a to select it all. Once I've got that selected, I'm going to change the text to exposure matters or exposure features. Let's defeat. And I'm going to select all my text now. Make sure that it's all selected. And in the character options, I'm going to go into my character options and I'm going to choose all caps. I could have typed it in that way, but this one works just as well. Now, I want the type to be on the opposite side, butt on the inside. So if I use my selection tool, I can then actually just drag one of these beams in to make it go onto the inside. The issue that I have here. When I move that back, you'll see it will be too tight in there because although matches up to that one there will most it's on the inside here, that's on the outside. So the next thing that I would have to do is to select the text and move it out. And we do that in the Character panel by showing more options. And going down over here to something called baseline shift. Baseline shift allows you to move your text on the baseline up or down. You can see I can move it up or what I'm about to do is to move it down. So I'm putting in a negative figure which pulls it all the way out and I'll get it to match that line. Now, this text is fairly spaced out. The characters are spaced out and I can move them back or closer together using this option, which is called tracking. So by tracking, I can pull those characters closer together. Of course, the other thing I could do instead is I could go to my top bit of text, select that top bit of text in here, and then change the tracking on that so it matched the bottom and was further apart. Once again, the issue here is trying to select text when you go to these text objects on top of each other. So I might end up moving that one. Going back to this bit of text here, selecting it all with Type Tool, make sure that I'm on the correct type tool over there, selecting that all, and then changing the tracking on that by putting a positive number in there and getting that to tracking to roughly match the tracking at the bottom. So I've got a 122 in there. And this one over here, I've got minus 43. And you can see they're pretty much getting the same type of tracking on the mail. And so that matches top and bottom. All I need to do now really, is to put a line that goes between the two bits of text to make it look a little bit more like the front of a lens or give the impression of the front of the lens. So I'm going to use my elliptical tool. I'm going to draw a circle out to where I want this to go. I'm going to make that a stroke. But no fill. Rid of the fill from that. And then I'm going to cut out these bits. So using some of the cutting tools and we've got a number of different cutting tools here. I can just cut those or that line. I'm going to use the scissors. And with the scissors I can put a cut there. And a cut there. Same on the other side of cuts on this side here. And finally a cut on that side there. You can see my smart guides or show me exactly where to go. So finally, this line here can be removed and deleted. And this part of the line can be removed and deleted. And these two, well, I think I should just increase the stroke weight. So it has the same type of feel or width as the text does. I'm happy with that. Lastly, don't forget File, Save As, and save out your AI file. We'll call this one exposure. And we're done. 91. Project: Path Text: So what I've done now is I've put a black background behind mine. I made a black shape and send it to the back. By going to object, arrange and send to the back. I've changed the color of the text from Black through to this light blue. And I've put two circles, one in the middle and one on the outside. It just makes the whole thing look a lot better rather than on the white background. And it shows up the colors, the gradients in here. A whole lot more. You can experiment with different gradients may be Kofman, red to blue or some other colors. They look really, really cool. Enjoy it. 92. Course Conclusion for Intermediate Illustrator: You've just finished the intermediate level and you're ready for the advanced section. Well done for getting so far. Now, in the advanced section we're gauge be creating stuff like this. It's really cool. And by the end of the advanced section, you will be an absolute Illustrator master. Let's go.