Introduction to Adobe Illustrator: Creating Custom Silhouette Art

1. Introduction To Adobe Illustrator: Hi, my name is Vicki Brown and I'm a self-taught graphic designer, illustrator and artist. I've been running my own creative design studio for over 20 years. Hundreds of my designs and license for thousands of products sold worldwide. Specifically my greeting cards that are sold in retail outlets like Target and Walmart and sold millions. And I want to teach you how to use one of the tools I use the most Adobe Illustrator 25 years ago and I sat down to teach myself graph design. Adobe Illustrator was the very first program that I felt comfortable working in. And it still continues to be an important part of my creative workflow for all my commercial work today, this class is going to be geared towards beginners. We're going to start by getting familiar with the workspace, a separate file for print. Throughout the class, we're going to learn some of the key elements and working with vector program and some of the most powerful tools within Adobe Illustrator. At the end of the class, you'll have created a final piece of artwork. There'll be a custom silhouette of the subject of your choice formatted for final print and scalable to use for decorating your home, giving us a gift, or even selling as a commercial products. So I really hope you're interested and excited to learn the skill of me. So very powerful tool and I want to give you the confidence to continue to learn about creating digital artwork. 2. The Class Project: Let's talk about the project you're gonna be creating during this class. You're gonna be creating a print ready Illustrator file of a subject of your choice from a reference photo. So you're going to trace e.g. a. Photo of your dog or your pet. Or maybe you'll choose a person. We're going to create a custom silhouette piece of artwork. I use this technique in my commercial practice all the time. Silhouettes have been featured on a variety of different greeting cards that have sold worldwide. The skill is absolutely translatable to variety of different projects. Plus the artwork you're creating is a vector artwork so you can scale it indefinitely without losing resolution. This is a great project for beginners to start to build foundations, to really dive into creating digital artwork, illustrator. And I think it's gonna be a really fun projects. So in order to get started, you'll need to install the latest version of Adobe Illustrator on your computer. Second, please read the project description in the class description and make sure you're aware of the class reference materials that are available and how I'll be referencing them throughout the class. Lastly, I can't wait to create this project with you. Have patients with yourself. Pause and replay the video if something isn't clear and be open to all the possibilities this new skill set has to offer. See you in the next lesson. 3. Class Reference - Shortcut Keys: One of the things I've included in the class reference materials is a sheet of keyboard shortcuts that are built into Adobe Illustrator. As I learn a new digital program, I find it really helpful to incorporate these shortcuts because it makes me a little more efficient and moving to the interface. And what it does over time for me is that it removes the obstacle of learning the interface from allowing my creativity to flow. So I really encourage you to take a look at the shortcuts and I referenced them as I'm walking through the individual lessons. So give it a try. It may feel a little weird, but eventually it'll become easier. I think it'll allow you to learn the interface a little easier as well. 4. What Are Vector Graphics?: Vector artwork is art that's made up of vector graphics. Since the vectors are defined by mathematical formulas, they retain their appearance regardless of their size. So they can be scaled and definitely without losing image quality. In comparison, raster artwork is created using colorized pixels when you enlarge or raster file to match the edges look jagged and the quality is lost. To illustrate this concept, I've opened up a piece of vector artwork that I created in Adobe Illustrator. So each one of these design elements is defined by vectors mathematically. So I can zoom all the way in this piece of artwork. And each element never loses any resolution or clarity. No matter how big or how small this image is, it will print exactly the same. It will always appear clear. In comparison, opened up the exact same piece of art work in Adobe Photoshop, which is a raster based program. And my zoom all the way in on this piece of artwork, you'll notice that photoshop created a rasterized version that is comprised of a finite number of pixels. The more I zoom in on here, the fuzzier it gets. So if I printed this larger than I created it, then the image will appear fuzzy. So when do you use vector artwork versus raster artwork? Generally speaking, when you're creating anything that needs to be scaled, like logos for businesses, things like flat or gradient-based illustrations, or really any artwork that doesn't include photos or continuous color images. You want to use a vector. And when you're using raster, you're usually working with artwork that contains continuous color images like photos. 5. The Workspace: Welcome to Lesson one, introduction to the workspace. During this lesson, we're gonna be setting up at the Essentials Classic workspace. We're going to create a new document and then we're going to configure the document settings while we're creating the document, we're going to explore the toolbar and we're going to learn about layers. Let's get started. When you first open Adobe Illustrator, you're going to see this kind of welcome screen. It's telling me, Hey, welcome Victoria. If you've opened it before, you're going to see some of the work that you've already had opened here on the bottom. But I would imagine this would be just empty if this is the first time you're opening up Illustrator, the way it's laid out is very similar to all the other Adobe tool. So if you've worked in Photoshop, it's going to feel really familiar to you. One thing I'd like to point out is over here on the right it says fine tools, tutorials and more. After you take this class, I highly recommend you dig into some of Adobe is tutorials specific to Illustrator because they've really created a lot of educational materials. You can kinda dig deep and really learn how to use this program efficiently. The first thing we're gonna do, You can either select New File Open, I'm going to say File New. I could have also clicked on New File. It opens up a new file dialogue with presets for file sizes that are typical for different uses. I already have eight-and-a-half by 11 here, print selected, but I want to show you over in this panel how to configure these settings. I'm going to use inches because I'm in the US. I'm going to select 8.5 " by 11 " and portrait mode, that's the straight up and down, not landscape. One art board. It's important to note that eventually you can learn about having multiple art boards. But for the sake of this project, we're only going to have one. We're going to leave the bleed settings all zero. We're going to select RGB as our color mode. You can also select CMYK and you can also go back and change this later. Cmyk is generally reserved for commercial printing projects that are going to go to be offset lithography or a commercial printer. Some digital printers use RGB, but if we're gonna be printing it at home, I usually select RGB raster effects. We want it to be at high resolution because we want it to be print quality. So we're going to select 300 PPI here. Preview mode as default, and then just say create. What is this going to do is it's going to create an art board. And if you used to work in traditional media and you're just getting into the digital world. You can think of your art board as canvas or a piece of paper. So that's what we have opened now. The other thing I want to do is I want to standardize our workspaces. So when I'm talking you through different steps throughout the project, we're looking at the same panels. So in order to do that, I want you to select Window and go to Workspace and select essentials. And what that does is it configures like a default set of property panels over here on the right. These panels are walkable like as you start to learn what's going on in here, you can move them around, you can talk them different ways. You can create your own setup. But for now, because I want to make sure that we are all looking at the same thing we can do is select the essentials workspace. Over here on the left you're going to see all the tools in the tool panel. If you hover your mouse over each tool, it explains what that tool is. I'm hovering over the selection tool and if you watch the animation that appears, it kind of shows how to use that tool, which is really helpful, especially when you're starting to learn this program. Then there's the direct selection tool and select anchor points and can adjust them. The magic wand tool and the Lasso tool or both selection tools. But this next tool, the pen tool, we're going to get really familiar with. And we're also going to touch on the curvature tool. So just know that as you continue to explore and get confidence to kinda play around in Illustrator, if you hover over these tools, you can learn what they do and how they work. There's also tutorial specific to each of the tools. Last thing that I want to talk to you about in the tools panel is this stroke and fill. This is where you select the color of the fill, which is like the inside part of the shape that you're creating and the stroke, which is the outline. You can configure either one with different colors and you can also set one off. You turn the fill off, which we're gonna be doing a lot of when we start to trace our portraits later. Or you can turn the outline off and just use the fill, or you can turn them both off. Um, so that's, that's the stroke and the fill. And then last thing I want to point out in the workspace is the layers panel, because we're gonna be using this as well. The layers panels here on the right, at the bottom here, you can create a new layer, you can create a sub layer. You can rearrange the layers and then what we'll get into some of the layer properties later in the lesson. The last thing that we need to do is save our work, which is something that we definitely don't want to forget to do because many designer have had sleepless nights losing work. So we're going to say File Save As. And I'm going to save mine to my desktop and save it. My silhouette. I have to think about how to spell it every time and save it somewhere, like I said, where you remember it and what you remember the name of the file is gonna be. Accept the defaults here, click Okay. And I will see you in the next lesson. 6. The Pen Tool - Straight Lines: Welcome to lesson two, drawing straight lines with the pen tool. First, we're going to open the reference file that included with the class assets are in configure the layers. To start our tracing, we're going to use anchor points to create straight lines. We're going to trace all the shapes in the file. And lastly, we're going to learn to edit existing anchor points. Okay, In this lesson we're going to start to dig a little deeper into the Pen tool and start to get really familiar with how it works. So the first thing you need to do is open in the class reference files. You should have downloaded and Illustrator file called Pen Tool straight line practice. This is gonna be a reference file of shapes that we're going to learn how to trace using the pen tool. So when you first open the file, if you select View, Fit and window, then we'll be all looking at the same size document. The next thing I need you to do is come over here to the Layers panel. You'll see that there's one layer in this file, and I've named it a reference layer. And all the elements that you see in the file exist on this reference layer. You'll notice that I have it toggled to be locked. You can unlock and lock a layer. What that does is it keeps the elements that are on that layer from being edited. So I've locked the reference layer. So just like if we were tracing something in real life, we need to add a tracing layer. So to add a new layer to your workspace, you click this icon down here that says create new layer, select it, and it creates new layer, layer two on top of the reference layer. Let's rename the layer by double-clicking it and call it practice the layer that we're drawing on and so on. Then we have active. So we selected the practice layer and that will be the layer that we start to draw on. Next, come over here to the tool panel and select the Pen tool. So once you select the Pen tools, the third one down here on the toolbar, and you can see that says pen tool. It shows me my animation of what it's gonna do. It's gonna be really important to come here to the stroke and the fill because I want to set the fill which is the inside of the shape that we're going to be creating. I'm going to set that fill to be empty. Otherwise it'll be hard to see our outline as we trace it. Then if you select the black outline, it'll be easier if we double-click on that black outline to select a brighter color. So as we're tracing, we can see what we're doing. This is the color picker. You can slide this to any color you want. You can see that there's a lot of different colors to choose from, but I'm going to select just a bright red so you can see what I'm doing. Again, feel free to select any color that you want here. Just click and select and click. Okay. The next thing I need to make sure you guys just saw a little flash of pink here. I want you to turn on your smart guides. If you select View. Smart Guides, this target toggles on and off, so mine's on right now if I collect, it's all. So select window view, Smart Guides, so they're on and you'll know that they're on. If when you start to mouse over are the elements that are on the workspace, even if they're locked, like the reference layer objects, you'll notice that this pink guide appears. So when I'm over like this quarter point, e.g. it says anchor. So it's telling you that directly over the anchor point that is on the layer blew me. This is what we're going to use to trace these pretty simple objects. So again, pencil, pen tool selected, we've got a red stroke selected. And we're going to click on that anchor point. That is the start of the line segment that we're going to draw. Right now, you'll see that I'm gonna draw a straight line because the next point I click on, it'll be the next anchor point. As we move through these objects, I just want you to find the anchor points and click. And then if you close the shape, you'll notice that the cursor next to my pen tool turns to like an open circle. And now I've completed my shape. I want you to do that for each one of these shapes as we go through. And I might also want to point out that if you hold down Shift on Windows, I think the command button on Mac, it constrains this new line that you are drawing to 45-degree intervals. So if I want to make sure that this is going to be a right angle, I want to hold down my shift key, click on this anchor point, and that will constrain that line to be absolutely 90 degrees. So I'm gonna hold shift and click. And then I'm going to, this is not a 45-degree angle. If I hold Shift, you'll notice that it doesn't line up. So I don't want to hold Shift. I'm just going to find that anchor point. And let's say excellently, click over here and I'm like, Oh no, what am I going to do? This is when the shortcut keys get really important. If you hit control Z or Option Z on the Mac, then that will undo my last action. So if I mess up, it's super easy to do Control Z. And I can undo that anchor point that I put in the wrong place. I can also go back and edit the anchor point. Let's say I accidentally miss it. And I do that. The beauty of using the pen tool is that now that this path is created, I can edit the path. I can. If I want to just edit this one anchor point, I don't want to select it with the anchor tool. So if I click it with the anchor tool, what's going to happen is it's gonna, it's gonna go away. I don't want that to happen. So he just control Z. If I want to select just that anchor point and move it, I have to in the tool panel select the direct selection tool, the white arrow. And I can now select just that point. And I can find, I can hit I can still hold down Shift and it'll still constrain the placement of that point. Or I can just find the anchor point and place it on top. So again, if I, if I mess up, it's not a big deal because this path is completely editable after you draw it. I can also go back and add points. If I get the pen tool selected. If I hover over a path segment or a line segment here, you'll see that there's a little plus icon next to my pen tool. I can just add another anchor point there. So if I miss some detail and a shape, it's really easy to go back and just add another anchor. Now, if I select, if I mouse over that anchor, you'll notice that the little icon next to my pen tool turns into a negative. I can click on it and I can delete it. It's really easy. You can also do this manually by selecting if you click and hold on top of this pen tool, you select the Pen tool over here on the toolbox. You'll notice that you can actually manually select these things as well. Then it just last option if you hold Shift plus c, you can select this anchor point tool. You'll notice that my cursor looks like a little carrot. What that allows me to do is change the type of points. This is from a square, a square point to a curve point. So if I want to turn it into a curve, I can do that. But let's undo that for now because I want to talk to you about that in the next lesson. For now, let's just continue to trace these shapes. Again, hold down the Shift to constrain to 90 degrees, find the anchors and then finish the object or finished the shape. Close the shape. I guess. We'll move on to this arrowhead shape. I don't want to constrain this because it's obviously not 45 degrees. So find the anchor points. It's pretty easy to trace these objects because it can find the anchor points and the reference later below. But this is just getting you're really familiar with drawing straight line and objects. Then down here I want to show you that concept of a moving. Once we have our line selected, you'll notice it's still active. I haven't closed my shapes so I can still continue to. But if I, if I come up here and select the direct selection tool, then that path ends. And I can click on this anchor point and I can move it a little bit second, go back again. I can go back and change anything related to this line that I want to now that it exists. So that's the beauty of using the pen tool and that's why it's going to be a really great tool to use in drawing a silhouette. So let's move on to the next lesson where we can talk about creating curves. I'll see you there. 7. The Pen Tool - Curved Lines: Welcome to lesson three, drawing curved lines. In this lesson, we're first going to open a new reference file, and then we're going to configure that reference file for tracing. During this exercise, we're going to learn about Bezier curves and how they work. We're going to trace the example shapes in the file. And lastly, we're going to draw a free form shape and edit the anchor points. Okay, welcome to the next lesson. In this lesson, we're going to practice again with the pen tool and we're going to try and trace and learn how to trace curved lines using the pen tool. We're going to need you to file open and easy to find. The pen tool curved line practice document that's in the class reference files. Open that document. And this should look pretty familiar. But let's make sure we'll do View Fit in Window. So we're in the same general place looking at the file. Just as the other practice sheet, we're gonna be using this background as the reference files. So if we look over here in the Layers panel, you'll see the reference layer that's already locked. I'm going to create a new layer. We're going to call it any layer practice just as we did in the last lesson. So practice again, we're going to be tracing these curved shapes on top of the reference layer. And once again, we're going to come over to the tool panel. We're going to select the Pen tool. And we're going to come back down to the stroke and the fill. And we're going to make the fill, we're going to empty the fill. Click on the Stroke, double-click and select another bright color. Again, we can make it whatever color we want. You can select anywhere in here, the scrolls up and down. So to get to 36 colors, Let's go up here and select bright red again so we can see what we're doing and click. Okay. So make sure Smart Guides are on, View. Smart Guides minor toggled, toggled on already, but we can do View Smart Guides and toggle them on and off. So they're on again. You can see that my smart guides are showing my cheat sheet here where things are aligned, my intersection points, my anchor points. So now we're going to learn about Bezier curves. And Bezier curves are mathematical way of drawing this vector curve. That's really, again just math and background. Don't get too scared. We don't have to have anything to do with math because Illustrator's doing it all in the background. But watch, I'm going to show you how to create a curved line. If we collect, select this anchor click. And now again, this is my straight line that's getting ready to be drawn from my first anchor point. But if I select this next point, and if I click and drag these anchors appear, and as I turn these anchors, you can see that the curve changes. So if I if I hit, if I hold down, Shift, it constrains those handles and that 90 degree plane, if I let go shift, I can move it around again. I'm going to hold Shift because I want to draw this street 90, 90 degrees from its like a tangent line along that curve. Line, these anchor points up with my anchor points, and then let go. And then you'll see that that point is now curved and you'll see the next line comes off of that curve and it's defined by this, this handle. So we'll come back here, we'll come down here and we'll meet up with that anchor point. And we'll close the shape. So that's how curves work. So I knew that we just drew that on top of this other curve and we're going to draw another curve down here, but then we're going to practice more curves down below. And this whitespace. Again, if I select the direct selection tool, the white arrow up here, I can edit these points and you can see that that curve changes when I move that point around. I can move it up and down, side to side, back. And also if I let go the point, you can also adjust the handles so I can make this handle smaller. So the curve looks ever to make this handle bigger, we can change the angle of the handle. So once you create the handle on this point, we can adjust it. Now let's say, I didn't want to draw this as a curve. I want this to be a triangle. That's when we can go back to the pen tool from the tool panel and select the option anchor point tool. And so what this does is it toggles an anchor point between a curve and a straight line. So if I click on the anchor point, it turns into a straight line. If I click on it, click and hold and slide it, turns it back into a curved line and adds the handle. So that's what that part of the Pen tool does. So again, it's really powerful because once these lines are drawn, you can edit them in all kinds of ways. So I'm just going to undo all that control Z to show you what I did. And now we're going to trace this curve down here. So let's go back and select our Pen tool. If we click this point and again, hold Shift down and drag the anchors and the handles to the anchors. You'll see how this works. So click before you hold the Shift, right-click. And then if you hold the Shift, you can strain in that 90 degrees or you can just make it however you want to make it. But if we're tracing, I was using the Shift key to make this line. And now we have successfully traced this curve line. You'll see it's so my path is still active and I can just reset and select the direct tool. I can just end that path. These are the paths. And then if you select the selection tool, the difference between the Selection Tool and the Direct Selection Tool is that if I slept, if I use the selection tool, then if I select this path, it's going to move the whole path on me. I'm not directly selecting this anchor points. If I want to move a whole object or whole shape that I use that selection tool. But if I want to move an anchor point, I use the direct selection tool so I can select directly just that plant. Use this space down below, select the pen tool again and just draw it like a free form shape. Mix it up and use some sharp angles. Use some curved lines. If I want to close this shape, but this anchor, I want to be a curved line. I can click and hold and that changes it to curved line. Or if I want to go back and I can come up here and select the anchor tool, or you can use the shortcut and do Shift plus c, which will automatically select that tool. And I can make it straight, or I can go back and make it a curve. Remember in the last lesson, you can also hover over a point using the pen tool and you can delete it. Or you can see that it adds that little subtraction sign. You can click on it and goes away. And that works a lot when you're trying to simplify your path. Like if you have too many points in the air, you added too much detail. Or if you want to add lungs, you miss some detail. You hover over that point. And notice how my cursor turns into a plus and you can add a point. Now that added a curved point, you can see the handles that, that automatically appeared. So now that a curve point because it was on a curved path segment. But again, I can toggle between curved and straight by just doing that. So that ladies and gentlemen is the pen tool kind of in a nutshell. The more you play around with it, the more familiar you'll get with Ed. I highly recommend practicing with it on your own. And that because these are the techniques we're going to use as we trace our subject in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 8. Choosing A Reference Image: Welcome to lesson four. It's using your reference photo. In this lesson, I'm going to be walking you through the reference images that I've included in the class materials. I'm going to talk about the pros and cons of each. And I'm gonna walk you through things to consider when choosing your image and what kinds of images work best. So let's get started. Okay, the time has now come to choose your reference image. So I'm going to walk you through some of the examples that I've included and some pros and cons and things that need to think about when you're actually choosing your subjects. Here are in the class reference materials. I've included a variety of example images that would work really well for silhouette. Doesn't always have to have the subject facing the side. But what that does is it actually defines the space and the shape really well. So as you're looking for a subject or a reference image to use, I'm trying to select an image that has a pretty well-defined outline and kinda captures like the shape of the subject. It's obviously pretty subjective. If it's your child, your dog, you're going to know best what shape defines that dog like a pet object or a PET image can work. I've tried doing my dog head-on but the ears don't quite work and it doesn't really look like my dog unless I select the profile, but you can also select an image of your entire dog shape that would work as well. But again, another person, sometimes when the subject has long hair, it can get a little more tricky to find. Here's another dog image. I think that would work really well. The seminal works, great because I really well-defined shape around his face. Here's an image that may be a little difficult only because of the hair. So as you, if you chose an image like this or somebody that has long hair, he'd have to creatively find a way to include the hair, not necessarily all of it, but generally how the hair looks and the general shape as you're creating your silhouette. Obviously, like a baby. I did this with my kids when they were younger and when they're babies didn't really have much of a chin. So I kind of had to define like a fake function here where you could do like the little fat full, like you know what, however, the silhouette, again, you can create a shape, fill it in as we're working and decide if you like it or you don't, you can go back and alter it. Again. A girl with long hair or anybody with long hair, you'd have a hard time. But you could always kind of cascade this off your shoulders and kinda be a little artistic with it to capture the shape. There's a dog that has a pretty funny ear that would be a pretty defining part of the silhouette. So again, as you're choosing your subject, try and find a photo that captures that subject shape. Because that's the part that's going to be highlighted in your piece. You're welcome to use these reference images. But if you use the reference images, you obviously can't use your silhouette. So for sale, these are images that were just use, that are included just for reference and choosing your own image. I will be using one of these while we're tracing through. So if you want to follow along with me, feel free to do that. But again, that would just be for practice. And I guess I will see you guys in the next lesson. 9. Setting Up The Final Project: Welcome to lesson five, setting up your final file. The first thing we're gonna do is we're going to import your reference photo that you chose during the last lesson. We're going to place it on your workspace and resize it so it fits in the workspace and the reconfigure the layers to begin tracing our subjects. Let's get started. Hey, now we're going to set up our final file for our final project. Go to File Open and navigate to where you saved your my silhouette, the first file that we created together in the first lesson. Once that files open, we know this already configured. It's the correct resolution. You can configure the layer panel by double-clicking on the word on layer one and renaming that to reference. That will be our reference layer. And that's where we're going to place our reference image just like we traced the Pen Tool practice lines. So now we go to File and we're going to place, and we're going to navigate on our computer to the photo that we chose. I'm going use a sample image. And let me choose this one because it has a really well-defined silhouette. And see it's ready to be placed. I'm just going to click anywhere in my workspace and click Place. Now, obviously, this file is much bigger than my workspace. So to size it down, I'm going to hit Control and the negative sign and I'm gonna zoom way out so I can see how much bigger it is in my workspace. I have the direct select tool, the selection tool, not the direct selection, but the Selection Tool selected. So I can grab it, but I'm going to resize it. Now when I resize that, I can't just grab the corner and resize it because it'll squish the image. I'm going to undo that when I resize it. If I hold shift, it constrains the image size. So I'm going to size it all the way down to something that looks like an appropriate size for my workspace. I presumed back into my workspace by doing control plus L. Notice that kinda re-center itself. Now it looks like it's a pretty good size. Again, after I create the actual vector tracing, I can resize it as big as I want and as small as I want without changing the resolution of the actual image. So now I'm going to lock that reference layer over here in the layers panel. So while I'm tracing, I'm not altering that image or moving it around. I'm going to create a new layer just like we did in our practice lessons before and rename this. So that will be are working layer. And now our file is all set to start tracing or subject. In the next lesson, I'll see you there. 10. Tracing The Subject: Welcome to lesson six, tracing your photo. We're finally going to be tracing our subject with the pen tool. During this lesson, we're gonna be adding anchor points as we've practiced. We're gonna be working to zoom in and to focus on some of the details. To use the hand tool and mouse wheel while resuming. And finally to refine your silhouette. The time has now come to trace our subject. So the first one we're gonna do is we're gonna select the Pen tool. I don't want to turn off the fill because as you're tracing wouldn't be able to see all of our lines because this image is black and white. I'm not going to use black as my stroke. I'm going to use red again. And the reason why I'm going to go so I can see it again, I can change this color later and that would work just fine. I do prefer to zoom in a little bit more when I'm actually tracing things, I can capture some of the details. So I'm going to do Control plus to get a little bit closer, I'm going to use this little pen tool to move it to the center of my screen. With the pen tool selected. I'm going to start to trace this silhouette. I'm going to decide later if I want to use the color sniff start here, the nape of his neck. As I go on the line, I kinda want to curve here again to get a curve, click and drag. Now your subjects may be different than mine, so you can look closely at how I'm doing this, but, but feel free to spend time just working in your file. And I'm going to add a little bit of detail here around his hair. Again, control Z. If you want to zoom in, you can hit Control Plus kind of center it in the pan hands tool to kind of move it around really helps because then get a little more accurate. So if I want to continue this, I just click back on the end of my path. I kinda click and drag. I want him to something like rounded like this. It kinda find the top of the round part and that's where I place my anchor points. Just have to be exact. Again, we're trying to capture the essence and the shape of our subject so you don't have to worry too much about every little detail. Zoom back in and move it over a little bit. Now as you work, zoom in, zoom out. Feel free to move between these tools again, if I want to pick it back up, just click on the end and continue my path. Okay? I'm going to continue to select. You can also use your mouse wheel to move up and down and use my mouse wheel right now to meet back-and-forth. That helps move around without having to release the pen tool. Again, I may not like some of the lines are some of the curves that I'm actually making right now when he's my mouse tool again. But as I make them remember, keep in mind while you're working on yours too. We're gonna be able to go back and edit the silhouette because we're creating these lines and these anchor points that are all gonna be editable. Okay, so now I'm going to zoom back out and see where I am. I'm going to re-center this with my mouse wheel. Looks pretty good. It doesn't look great, but it looks pretty good. I do want to include a little bit of this turtleneck to kinda give silhouette a little interest. And then sometimes so what's held like this curve here that happens? You can include that or not include that. You can get back into, find that however you want to define it and then close my shape. So that's my first pass at the silhouette. It's not bad. Let's look closely at it though. I may want to go back and change somebody's anchor points. It doesn't have to be perfect. Again, it has to be just close. Let me use my mouse wheel again to kind of move around. And as we do this, you may want to add anchor points. You may want to remember to add anchor points. Just click on the path and add to create a little more detail or maybe you miss part of it. Whatever. You can subtract anchor points to, kinda gave up his hair a little bit. Here. Again, the hair doesn't have to be perfect. You're really just trying to capture the essence of the shape of the person. Talk about eyelashes here in a minute. Sometimes adding some eyelashes that jet out past. Even if it's unrealistic and make it look a little bit more like a silhouette. I'm just going to capture a little shape that looks like an eyelash. And then we'll decide later if I really want to include that. I don't actually know. I'm probably not gonna include that, so I'm gonna delete that shape. But that's a good example of if you wanted to add another shape to the silhouette liters. Well, let me, let me zoom back out and see how this looks. If I really want to test to see how the shape is coming along. I'm going to select it and now I'm gonna give it a fill so I can see what the cell, what's actually going to look like. So I can either select this fill and select the color. Or if you notice right here, it gives you the option of filling the same color as the stroke. I'm just going to do that and see how it looks. I'm actually pretty, pretty happy with that. It's not perfect. You can see that there's some of the photos sticking out behind it. But if I really want to see what it's gonna look like standing on its own. I can come over here to the reference layer and I can make it invisible and then de-select this. That's actually not really that bad. I don't know if I love the way this is happening down here. I may change this a little. So now. So now there's a little bit of creative freedom here. But you can take the fact that this guy had a beard, made his lip over here look a little strange. So I'm not sure I love that loan lumped in there. Zoom back in here. Now I think rod may not be the best choice because I'm not seeing my line very well. So I'm going to change the color. Now that my reference images gone, I'm going to double-click on this and open this panel up. And I'm going to select black. Black is you need to do this. It's close. You can hit zeros. Zeros is hex black. So if you do six zeros and this little pound sign, and then select, Okay, then we've got black. Then now that the stroke is red, I'm going to, I'm not going to include a stroke on my final because I want that to be a shape without a stroke when it's finally done. So now I can really see what's happening with these points and don't love that one. It's kinda hard to see. Let me zoom back out. Okay, So I've got a little better. So that is my finished silhouette. You can go back and you can refine this as much as you want. If you add too much detail that it kinda takes away from it. And you want to include enough detail that you can kinda get the general feel for the shape of a person's head or your animal's head or whatever you chose to trace during this exercise. The other thing that you can do is you can select it if you don't like the way they're facing. You can hit objects and you can transform. And you can reflect. When reflected along the vertical and hit Okay. For some reason I like my silhouettes kinda aiming to the left, but everyone's got their own personal preference. You can do is if it doesn't look like it straight up and down, if you come over here and you hover around, if you're using the direct selection tool and you've got the shape selected, you hover. And here you can see that the cursor turns into this little circle, circular looking thing. You can straighten it out a little bit if you want to. And that is my silhouettes. In the next lesson, we're going to work on some finishing details. I'll see you then. 11. Adding Text: Welcome to lesson seven, finalizing your composition. We're going to add text to your composition during this lesson. We're going to format the text that we add. We're going to learn how to align objects horizontally with each other. We're going to learn how to group them together as objects. And then finally center those groups to the art board. Okay, and now it's time for some finishing touches and to start to finalize our file for print. First thing I wanna do is if I'm really happy with my silhouette, I am now going to delete the reference file layer. And the reason why I'm going to do that is that including that high resolution image is going to increase the file size. So if I am going to send this somewhere to get printed, the file size is much more manageable if that high resolution image isn't placed on a layer. So if I grab the reference layer and drag it into this trash can, then that layer is now gone. Now I want to add some text. I'm going to add this man's name. I don't know if this man's name is, but I'm going to make up a name. I'm going to click on the Text tool here, the type tool, click somewhere below and it's going to start a Lorem Ipsum standard font here. So it's selected if I start typing when I named this guy, Robert, David, I don't know if that's a weird name or not, but that's what his name is. So that's what I typed. It, just defaulted into my default font. But right now you can see that I can't, There's no font or tape options around. We're gonna go back up here and select window, and we're gonna change our workspace. Now we're gonna go to Essentials Classic, which is actually the workspace I worked in mostly has a lot more panels that are visible. So I wanted to only show you Essentials before because otherwise the workspace can get really complicated looking, but we're gonna go to Essentials Classic. And the reason why we're gonna do that is that pops up this up here. You can see these character attributes up here. There's another way to view them, but this is a more streamlined way. Here we are. This is my Brandon grotesque font, if I kinda want that to be a script, so it looks a little fancier. So I'm going to use thirsty rough. These are Adobe fonts that I'm using. You may have some other default Adobe fonts to use. Whatever font you have in your system. Just find some sort of script or obviously chooses something that you like when I'm doing these silhouettes, I like to pair a script with a kind of a more stately looking font because it kinda juxtapose against each other and look really nice. So I'm going to add another line of font and I'm going to give him a birth date. How old the spam say tuber? I don't know. 21st 2010. I don't like that, That's script, so I'm going to use my selection tool and select it. And I'm going to use Brandon grotesque, which is a funny name for a font. That's my muse. Make it a little smaller. I think it's going to make even smell or when to change the font size appear in the top. Kind of zooming through this and I don't mean to, I've got the font selected up here. There's a bunch of font attributes relative to the font that you have selected. So the font I'm using is Brandon grotesque, and right here, that's the family. This is the font style medium. You can also have light and bold for the specific font-family. And this is the point size, and this is what I was just saying before. I'm gonna make it a little smaller because I want it to be a good size relative to his name. I want his name to be a little bigger because it looks a little more important. When I select thirsty rough. I also see the attributes of that font up here. A light. There's a whole bunch of attributes for that one, the size. But again, any font here works. I'm not gonna go into how to install Adobe Fonts. Adobe has a variety of fonts that are available if you have their membership to the fonts. But if not, whatever default fonts come with, your Adobe Illustrator will work as well. So if I want to center these together, if I select them up here in the top right, there's an online tool that shows up because I'm in this Essentials, this different workspace, the workspace essentials classic. If I want those to be centered with each other, I select this horizontal align center button. And now those are centered together. Now they're not grouped together. If I grab one and hit Undo, if I want to group them together and keep them centered in this configuration, if I select them both by dragging a box and selecting them both, I can group these together so I can move them together without messing up my alignment. So my shortcut here is Control G. But you can also do objects group. So now they're grouped together and I select them, they move together. So I could put this over here, I can center it further down on the bottom. I put it over here that kinda makes this whole composition centered within this space. Sometimes I like to have this up a little further in this kind of down. So there they give each other a little air in the space to do that. And I want to center these guys so I select all three of them. And I slept that horizontal align center button again and see how I like that. It's okay. Let me want to move it. I'm actually kinda like that. Okay, so the next thing I want to do is ensure that my silhouette is centered on the art board. To do that, we're going to open the aligned panels. We're going to select Window Align. And that's going to open this panel that has all of these align options. Once you have that open, I want you to select this align to artboard button. If you click on that, do you want to make sure that you're aligning it to the art board. Select your silhouette, and then select this horizontal align center button. And what that's gonna do is it's going to align it horizontally on your work, on your art board. I'm gonna do the same thing for my label, the name and date. So select the name and date that group of objects that we made before. Again, select, make sure they align to art board button is clicked and we're going to Horizontal Align Center. Now both of my, you can nudge it up and down using the arrow keys when you select it to see and to keep it up and down, like on your space. You can grab both of these and you can group them control G, and then you can align them to the art board that way. But I just want to make sure that we have a centered composition. Now I think that this piece stands alone as a black and white. So a wet, always timeless to have a black and white silhouette. But if you want to add some color to your composition, meet me in the next lesson. 12. Adding Color: Welcome to lesson eight, adding color to our composition's. First, we're going to create a background layer. Then we're going to draw a rectangle on that background layer so we can add some color. We're going to add color using the color picker. Next, we're going to pay some swatches into our file and we're going to use the eyedropper to add color is another option. Okay, so now if we want to add some color to this composition, we probably want to add a background. The first thing we wanna do is add a new layer, find your layers palette, and select this little positive button down here on the lower right part of the panel to add a new layer. This time we want our layer to be underneath our silhouette. So if you grab this new layer and drag it below the silhouette layer, then we have a new layer that's underneath the silhouette. I'm gonna need my name, my layer, backgrounds, I remember what it is. It's always good rule of thumb to name your layers because otherwise you get, this can get really complicated and you can forget where you are. So keeping your workspace really organized is a good rule of thumb. So now I'm gonna come over here to my toolbar and I'm going to select a color. But I want the background layer to be, I'm going to draw a rectangle, but I'm going to draw a rectangle. It's not black so I can see where it is in the background. So if I double-click on the fill color, it pops up this color picker. And I can pretty much pick any color that I want. You can select within the slides to create color ranges. And then within each color range you can select within this square to get what tone you're looking for. So why don't we choose a bright turquoise just so you guys can see what I'm doing somewhere in here. Select, Okay, now we're going to select this rectangle tool on our toolbar because we want to draw a rectangle shape on the art board behind my silhouette. Now, I still have my smart guides on. So if you don't have your smart guides on, you can turn them back on. You can go to View Smart Guides and turn them on because what that's gonna do is gonna help you find the corner of your art board. Once you find that intersection point, you click and you drag to create a rectangle in the background. See over here now how this background rectangle. Now we can just have some fun. We can recolor our artwork. So I generally try and find something that's more contrasty. You can do this black and blue situation. I'm going to ungroup these objects so I can select each one individually. So I'm going to do Object Ungroup. Now I can select my silhouette separately and if I want to make my silhouette white, I can select the Default stroke and fill and then turn the stroke off. So now it's white. I can also make my text white by using this eyedropper tool. If you select the Eyedropper Tool and then click on the silhouette, that can make my text white. I'm not sure that's going to print really well. I feel like that you need a little more contrast between the elements on the top and the backgrounds. Now I want to make my background a little darker. I'm going to make it much darker. So that's a whole another option. Obviously there's so many options here, but the one other thing I want to point out is that I included some swatches as some trendy colors that you can choose from. If you open the class asset file called swatches, you can open that file. And here are some trendy swatches and colors that I've included. So you can see up here in the left-hand corner, I've got multiple files. Open. Your swatches file, and I want to click and drag and select all of these swatches. Now I'm going to edit, copy them, go back to my silhouettes file. And now I'm going to do Edit Paste and we're going to paste them right into my the pasted on my background layer. Don't de-select them yet because they could get lost and then to actually paste them on my soul while layer, but it doesn't really matter. So I'm going to drag them off to the side. You can delete them easily. I drag them and then they snapped back. So here they are. And now you can use these to color your artwork. You can just use the eyedropper tool and select these colors. Obviously can adjust these colors. This is just a palette to work from. Again, if some trendy colors. You can also adjust these trendy colors by selecting when she had selected, you can find where it is and you can nudge them around. But I explore this, have some fun, and create some cool color combinations that speak to you. And I cannot wait to see what you guys create. Remember to save your final file. You can always go back if you want to undo all this. If you control Z all the way back through, you can undo all of your work if you forgot to save your black and white file first, you can say this is my silhouette, underscore black and white and then create a color version as well. But it's all up to you. 13. Saving Our File For Print and Web: Welcome to Lesson Nine, saving our file for print. First, we're going to save our file as a different file name. Then we're going to outline the fonts so you don't have to worry about sending our fonts to the printer. And we're going to save our file and the desired file format. So it's time to save our file. So there's one thing that I really want to show you how to do before we save our file. When you export or when you send a file to a printer, generally you have to either send the fonts that you use along with the file, or you have to outline your fonts, which means you create shapes from the fonts, but that keeps it from being editable. So once you've outlined your fonts, you can't go back and make any changes to them. I usually save a different version of my file first, so I always have a version I can roll back to you if I want to make changes that I haven't locked into place. So I'm going to save this file is file save as my silhouette underscore for print. And then I'm going to save it. I'm going to accept the defaults, say okay, so once I've saved my file for print, I'm going to select my fonts just by grabbing and dragging over them as a selection box. Once I have my font selected, I'm going to select type. And then I'm gonna go to Create Outlines. So what that does is I can no longer select these as fonts. Illustrator now sees these as shapes instead of fonts. You can see if you zoom in real close. And if I select it, there's no longer a line underneath it for me to edit it. Now that those are shapes, it really simplifies being able to send this file wafer print, but again, only do that in a file that you've saved separately because I can no longer edit that font if everyone to use this file as a template for creating new silhouettes with the same fonts. I can always open my original file that I haven't saved for print and edit the copy there. And the very last thing I want to talk to you about is the different file formats. You can save this file as if you select File, Save As you get a dialogue. And the default saves as an Illustrator file. But you can also select a PDF and EPS AIT, SVG or SVG Z. A lot of printers will accept a PDF or an EPS, but generally you can open any of these files. These are all vector file formats, so you can save it to any vector file format that your printer requests from here. I'm just going to keep mine as an AI. I'm going to save it now it's asked me to replace it, say Sure I'll replace it again, select defaults. And now my file is saved and ready to be sent to a printer. And lastly, I'm going to show you how to save a web ready file. So we have a file that you can share with your classmates here in Skillshare. When you're done with this class, I'd love to see what you guys create and I'm sure you're there. The other people taking this class would love to see it too. So in order to do that, I want you to go to file and I want you to do export as it's going to bring up a file dialogue. And you can see that you can save your file now for these web ready or web ready formats like JPEG or PNG, I'm going to save mine as JPEG because I don't want a transparent background and I'm going to select Use Artboards. So my JPEG will be the same size as the art board within the file. And then it's going to save to the same place that I was saving weather files. I'm saving my desktop, my silhouette dot JPEG, and I'm going to say export. Then here are the defaults. I have it set to a larger file. You can set this to maximum. This is my maximum file quality for a web file and screens 72 PPI, which is screen resolution. So you match these settings and click Okay, and that's it. So now you'll have a JPEG that you can upload here. Under the class. You can create a project and share your work. And I can't wait to see what you guys have created. 14. Wrapping Up: You did it, you finished the class. Congratulations. Hope you feel accomplished because we've covered a lot of material. I'm so grateful that you spent your valuable time with me. And I really hope this class has given you the confidence to start your journey to learn how to create digital artwork in Adobe Illustrator. Just because you finished the class doesn't mean we have to stop hanging out. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest, or send me a message and let me hear how it's going. I may even post projects for this class, my social media channels, so be sure to share them with me. And I can't wait to see what you create. Also, don't forget to share your final project here on the class page your fellow classmates can see, and I'll be checking in here too. The Follow button. Sign up for my newsletter so you can stay in the loop. And here when I launched more classes are exciting news about me in my work. And reach out via email if you have specific questions or feedback. Thank you so much for your time and effort. I hope you liked this class and I really appreciate you.