Learn Adobe Illustrator: Fundamentals for Beginners

1. Introduction: Hi, I am Anne Bracker and I'm a graphic designer and illustrator. I work at a small agency in Kansas City, and I also freelance on the side. I have a Etsy shop, I have a YouTube tutorial channel. I also make stock images for stock websites. Today, I'm going to talk to you about illustrator. How to set up your workspace and then around the artboard. How to use the tools and then we'll jump right into creating shapes, and using paths and working with type. Once you learn those three, you'll really be able to create anything you want in Illustrator. In each lesson, will be creating a new graphic. If you're following along and creating these graphics, by the end of the class, you'll have a lot of different graphics in different styles that you can add to your own projects. In my years of working with illustrator, I've learned a lot about customizing my workflow, and using a lot of keyboard shortcuts to speed up the process and we'll go over those things too. You don't need any previous illustrator knowledge to take this class. But, if you're an intermediate or advanced user, there are lots of tips and tricks that we'll be covering along the way. I guarantee you, you'll learn something. I'm super excited to be teaching you about illustrator. Let's get started. 2. Setting Up Your Workspace: The first step to creating a new graphic in Illustrator is creating a new document. So, let's do that now. Okay. So, first, we'll go to File, New. You can also hit Command N on your keyboard. This will pull up the new document window. A great place to start with Illustrator is just your letter right here. I have it under Recent and then you can go to Print and choose Letter here. I'd like to start with letter size because I feel like I have a lot of room to work. It's not too small, so I can use all my zoom capabilities, but you don't need to go really huge with it, either because you can always scale your vector up without losing inequality. Illustrator automatically puts it in points, but since we're going to be using this graphic probably on the web somewhere, we're going to let use pixels. Six hundred pixels by about 800 pixels is a good size. It's not too small, it's not too big, and it's not going to slow your computer down or anything like that. When you first open your document, you will see tools over here on the left. Up here, you'll have your control panel, and if you don't see that, you should go ahead and open it, go to Window, and then Control. Then, over here on the right, you'll see a lot of windows. These can be really customized to fit your workflow. These are the three main sections, so let's go over each one individually. There are four essential tools that it'll help you create almost everything in Illustrator. They are the selection tools which are right up here. Actually, I'm going to move this out like this, so that I have two rows instead of one. It's just a little easier for me to work. These four tools help you select parts of your artwork to work on. The next is the Pen Tool. With this tool, you can click and drag to pull handles to create shapes. We'll definitely be going over this tool a lot more in-depth later. Next, we'll go to the Type Tool. You can hold down your mouse and see variations of the type tools. The main one you'll be using is that top one though. Anytime you see a little arrow on the bottom right corner of a tool, that means it has variations underneath and you can hold down your mouse and see what those variations are. The last essential tool group is the Shape Tools. These are your rectangle, a rounded rectangle, ellipse and it goes on. So, we will definitely cover those in more detail later also. There are a lot of secondary tools still that also as I go along the process of creating graphics. The control panel up here that we just opened will show you properties of what you have selected. So, if we highlight this with our Selection Tool, you can see that this has a one point stroke on it, a white fill, a black outline. It gives you a lot of different details about that graphic. If we decide to type something with the Type Tool, all of this information will change. Some of it stays the same like the fill and the stroke, but now we have the point size of the type paragraph settings and a lot of different details like that, this will change based on what tool you have selected. When you first open your document, these three windows are what come up. These are very customizable. I personally don't use some of these, so we'll go ahead and get rid of them. Properties seems redundant for the control panel. It's going to show you very similar information to what's up here. So, I'm going to go ahead and pull this out and just X out of it. Same with libraries, I know that this is something that people really use, and if this message or workflow by all means keep it in there. But for me libraries is not very helpful, so I'm going to go ahead and X out of that went to. The window section is one of the most customizable parts of Illustrator. Over the years, I really worked out what works best for me as far as what windows need to be out. They're the ones I use the most. So, if you find that you're using some window a lot, you need to have it up at all times. So, we're going to customize this workspace after my own workspace, but if you find that these windows aren't working very well for you, by all means, change it to match your workflow. The first thing I'm going to do is just open all of the windows that I used the most often. So, we'll go up here to Window. I'm going to pull up character and color. Character is under Type. So, we'll pull that window up. Next, we'll get the Color window. Then, I also really use Swatches all the time. We get that went up. That comes already with brushes and symbols, which I also use quite a bit. We'll also open the art boards and the links. We'll pull up the transform palette, which also has the Align and Pathfinder on it. Of course, we already have layers up. Another one I find myself using a lot is the stroke. Then graphic styles and appearance. There's Appearance and the Graphic Styles. Okay? Now, we have all the windows up. Now, it's just a matter of snapping them where they need to go. So, I'm going to move character all the way up to the top, on top of layers, and you can see how it makes a little blue line. If you get a blue rectangle around that box, that means you're going to drop it in the same window as layers and that's not what I want. I want it to get the little blue line on top and that will put it on top of the layers. Paragraph is fine to keep open, but I don't need open-type so I'll just drag that one out and X out of it. Next, we'll set up the swatches. I want those right underneath my character and paragraph palette. So, I'll wait till I get that little blue line again and snap that in. So, I've got character, swatches, and layers. Next, we'll do the transform palette. I'll just move it right over here. I want this at the very bottom so I'll wait till there's a blue one underline there, and put that there. Now, I've forgotten about my art boards. I want to put those in between the layers and the transform. So, I'm going to just hover until I get the blue underline. Then, I think I decided that I want my layers to be in the other row. So, I'll click on layers and pull that out. Now, I can just put it right up against that row until I get a blue vertical line and just release in those snap. Graphic styles and appearance really work together well, so I like to have them separated. So, I'm going to pull graphic styles out, and then we will just snap it to the bottom of this one. Then, I'll pull the entire thing down and snap it to the bottom of this row. That leaves us just with stroke. I'll just put that right in here. Okay. So, now our window is set up and we're ready to get to work. Some of the windows have extra options and I think it's a good idea to expand them so you can see them. All you need to do that is to double-click right on the word; for example, stroke. Every time you double click on that, it'll show you different options of the stroke palette. So, we want to have it expanded so we can see all of these options here. Okay? So, now we have everything set up, exactly where we need to be as efficient as possible. This is a really great thing to do. At the beginning, I know it seems like a lot of work but it can really help your workload to be sped up as much as possible. 3. Optimizing Your Workflow: So, the last thing about Illustrator is the actual Canvas, this white area where you're creating artwork. I kind of think of the white area as the painters Canvas. So, this is everything that you want to include in your artwork. The gray area outside, you can do anything you want with. If you decided you had a shape that you didn't want anymore, but you want to keep it out there for reference, this will not print, but this will. So, that's a good way to think of Artboards. Another way to orient yourselves inside the Artboard is to open your rulers, which is Command-R. The ruler will show you what size your Artboard is right now in whatever unit you chose. So, you can Control-click and see other units. If you wanted to change it to inches, you can do that right here. I'll change it back to pixels for now. Once you have your rulers R, you can easily drag guides from your ruler onto your Artboard, and that way, you can align objects along those guides, and that can be helpful. If you don't want to see the guides anymore, you can do Command-Semicolon, and you can also get them to come back the same way that just toggles them off and on. If you want to see your Artboard in a different view, you can just hit the letter F. If you hit it once, it'll hide the file name and give you a little more room to get around your Artboard. If you hit it again, it'll hide everything except your Artboard. If you have a small screen, that's a really good way to view it all at once. The best way to move around your Canvas is with a Hand tool, but instead of going over here and clicking, a really fast way to do it is just hold down your space bar and then click and drag, and you can move around your Canvas that way. In fact, I really recommend doing it that way, is way faster. Another way to move around your Artboard is with the Zoom tool. So, you can hit Z on your keyboard or go down here to the Zoom tool, and then just draw a box around anything you want to see close up. You can also use the Command-Minus and the Command-Plus keys to zoom in a little bit and zoom out a little bit. Illustrator is customizable. So, they make it really easy to change your preferences. Let's hit Command-K, and you can see exactly what preferences are available to you. So, we have all of these here, but the one I use constantly is this Keyword Increment. Right now, it's set at 0.4 pixels. I'll say Okay. I'll highlight this, and then I'll move it. You can barely tell it's moving because it's such a low increment. I'll hit Command-K, and we'll change it to three pixels. Now, when I move, it is quite a bit different. So, if you find stuff isn't moving quite fast enough for you, you can change this preference and you can go back and forth. I found over the years that certain preferences and settings have really worked well for me. So, I've changed Illustrator's based preferences to match my workflow, and you can change it to yours depending on what you're using the most. So, I want to go into keyboard shortcuts, which is Shift option Command-K. You can also get there from Edit and then all the way the bottom keyboard shortcuts. To change these, all you have to do, if you want something different for group selection, you can change that to a different letter and then just say Okay, and that will be your keyboard shortcut for that. There's two main reasons why professional illustrators and designers use Illustrator to create their graphics. The first reason is that Illustrator is vector-based, and that means that you can make a logo, this size, for a business card or scale it all the way up to a billboard and never lose quality. The second is that Illustrator is designed for vector graphics. Other programs have some vector capabilities, but Illustrator has all the capabilities readily available for you to create any graphic you want. As an example, I've included vector and raster graphic in your resources. So, I'm going to pull that up now. So, here are our raster and vector images up close. If you click on the raster one, you can see this is all just one image and if we get really close in here, you can see that this image is made up of tiny squares of information pixels. This is what causes it to lose quality as it is increased in size. If we look at our vector one and if we click on that, you can see that it's made up of points and paths. Actually, if we get really close here, you can see it's absolutely clean, and this will maintain itself. Even blown up to a billboard size, it'll still have these clean edges. So, vector images are made with mathematical equations. Don't worry, you won't have to do any math to create these, but that is why they are able to be increased to the size that they are. All right. So, now we have a lay of the land. Let's get started actually creating some shapes. 4. Creating and Editing Shapes: Shapes are the foundation of Illustrator. There're quick and easy ways to create simple shapes, and then there are more complex ways to create custom shapes, so we'll take a look at the simple ways first. The easiest way to create shapes is with the Shape tool. If you click and hold, you can see the other options underneath the Rectangle tool. The ones we're going to worry about today are the Rectangle, the Ellipse and the Polygon tool, and the Star tool a little bit later. So, let's get our Rectangle tool now. You can just click on your canvas and drag to get a rectangle, or you can hold Shift to get a perfect square, and then just release. Okay. So, let's go back over here and grab the Ellipse tool, and we'll do the same thing. You can click and drag to get an oval or hit Shift and hold Shift to get a perfect circle, and then release. Okay. Now, let's get the Polygon tool, and you might be thinking, "Well, why would I ever want to use a Polygon tool?" It's just not something you need very often, but this one is really great to create triangles. So, as you click and drag, while you're still dragging, use your arrow keys, and you can move the number of sides up and down. So, this is a really great way to get a triangle, and hold Shift and it will automatically stay perfectly square to the world. Okay. So, these are the easiest way to create new shapes, but there's another way to create a shape, and that's the duplicate of shape that you have already made. So, to do this, you can just click on one of the shapes and hold Option, and it will create a new one, and then you can release. Of course, you can highlight and copy and paste, and get a new shape that way. So, those are the easiest ways to create basic shapes like these. Pathfinder is one of the really essential Illustrator tools that allow you to create complex graphics from simple shapes, and you can see down here with the shape modes, what exactly is going to happen with the graphics that you have. I really only use three of these, this one which is Unite, Minus Front, and Divide. So, I'm going to highlight these and drag them over here to duplicate them, with Option held down, and we will unite them. So, they've just become one shape here. I'll just undo, Command Z. When you select something, you'll have these handles out here and you can actually just get on the edge of one of those and hold Shift and you will proportionately resize that object that way by dragging. So, release now. I want to show you what happens when you hit the Minus Front with Pathfinder. So, come down here to Pathfinder and click Minus Front. Now, we have a pie graph-looking thing, which is awesome. It's kind of like Pac-Man. Okay. I'll undo that so I can show you what happens with the Divide pathfinder. So, to show you how the Divide actually works, and we'll get into the Selection tools a little more later, I'm going to use the Group Selection tool to highlight this piece and pull it apart, so you can see what's happening here, same here. So, this is actually three separate pieces. Another tool that has a lot of the same functionality as the Pathfinder is the Shape Builder tool. I use it because it's a little faster than the Pathfinder. So, if we highlight all of these shapes, and then hit Shift M, that'll take us to the Shape Builder tool. Then, we can hold Shift and select all of those, and it will combine them into one shape. To show you another property of the Shape Builder tool, we're going to look at the Fill and the Stroke. The Fill is the color that is filling each of these shapes, and the Stroke is the outline. So, I'm going to highlight all of these shapes, and then hit Shift X, and what that does is going to flip these. We're going to have a black fill and a white outline. You can also do this with this little arrow right here, and Shift X. Now, get back on your Shape Builder tool by hitting Shift M, and then we will use the Option key. Hold the Option key and you can click these areas to subtract them. So, this tool allows you to be a little more selective with what you want to delete from your shapes, instead of using Minus Front, where you have to worry about how things are stacked on top of each other. So, between the Pathfinder and the Shape Builder tool, you can create almost any object from these simple shapes. 5. Building Objects with Shapes: All right. So let's get started on our first mini-project which is creating a telescope. To delete everything on my screen, I'm going to hit Command A, which is select all and I'll just hit Delete. So to create this telescope, I'm going to get the M tool, which is my rectangle tool. Then we will click and drag a little rectangle here. This has a black fill and a white stroke because that's the last thing I used. But let's switch that by hitting, Shift X. So, now I have a white fill and a black outline. Now I'm going to just, I'm going to zoom in a little bit by hitting the Z tool. Then I will select this with my V tool, which is the selection tool, and that is the selection tool right up here. Then, I'll get right on that edge and I'll hold Shift and Option to drag this over. I'll get right on the edge again on one of the squares in the middle, and when I hover over this top little white square, I get a little arrow button and I'm going to click and drag to make that just a little bit taller. All right. Then let's click and drag this to make it longer. You can see that it's changing the size of my stroke when I do that and this is a setting that you can change under the scale tool so hit S and hit Return, and that'll bring up this scale strokes and effects. You can click this if you want that to stay the same. Right now I'm going to leave it as is and say "OK". All right. Then I'll do the same again, I'll hit V and start dragging and then I'll hit Shift and Option to get another copy of this. We'll use the space bar to move over, and this one is going to be just a little bit taller and a little bit shorter. All right. I'll do that one more time. Hit V to get your selection tool. Start dragging and then hold Shift and Option to get a copy. This one I will make just a little bit taller. All right. Now I'm going to Command minus so we can see our entire telescope and I'll use the space bar to drag over so we can get the whole thing on the art board view. So, let's Command A to select all, and we'll come down here to the Align window. Now the Align Objects window has a lot of different options for alignment and the one we want is right here. The Vertical Align Center, so just click that. This is starting to look a lot like a telescope now, but I want all my strokes to be the same size. So, I'm going to hit my Eye tool which is the eyedropper and it's right over here. I want them all to be this thicker stroke width. So I will click right on the edge there and it makes everything have the same stroke and fill of that selected object. Okay. Now, this did not get right on the edge so I am going to zoom in here, I'm going to hit V to grab both of these objects. Now I'm going to switch into Preview mode which is Command Y, and this really helps you see a wire frame of what you're working with and I can get right on that edge and pull this over, hold Shift so you can stay right on that plane and then drop it. So now they're all exactly lined up so it doesn't look like one stroke is bigger than the other, and I just hit Command Y to get back to our regular view. Command minus to zoom out. Then the Hand tool to center it up in the frame area. Okay. Let's zoom out just a little more with Command minus. Okay. Now I'm going to select everything. Command A, and we're going to rotate with the Rotate tool. Now this tool you can hit R on your keyboard to get to it or you can just click this button over here. When you do that you'll have an anchor that's right in the middle of the telescope and it will always be in the center of whatever graphics you're working on. That's just fine. We can click and drag out here to rotate it. I'm going to undo. If you wanted to rotate from over here, you can click once to reset that anchor point. So just click once to reset the anchor, and then you can pull and it'll rotate on that anchor point. So that's really helpful sometimes if you want it to be exact from a point. Okay. Because I'm getting a little close to the edge and I don't know why but it bothers me, we'll just move everything down. Okay. So we need to draw a little stand for our telescope, and to do that I'm going to use the Line tool, and to get the Line tool you need to use the front slash on your keyboard or go right up here on the toolbar. Then, we'll just take a point here and draw a line down from it. Okay. Now we're going to want to reflect this line so it will be exactly the same but over in this area. So I'm going to copy paste in front and then I'm going to hit O which will give us the Reflect tool right up here and then I'll hit Return. Here we can decide which way we want it to reflect we want it to be vertical so I'll choose that and then we'll say OK. Now, it's going to put it over here if we have our anchor point here, and I'll show you how to change that in a minute but let's just go ahead with this. I'm going to hit V and click on this and then we'll just get right on the edge and move it over where it needs to go. Another way to do this and it actually makes a little more sense, we'll delete that, is to click Copy, which is Command C, paste in front, which is Command F, and then get right up here on that top point then we'll hit O to get the Reflect tool, and we'll click right up here on the top and hold Option while we do this Option click up there. We'll get that same reflect but we have the anchor point right up there in the middle where it needs to go and then you can see what happens when we hit OK. It goes right exactly in the right spot without having to move it over. So that's a plus but you have to just remember to Option click that anchor point to get that to work. All right. Let's get our Line tool again by hitting the forward slash, and we'll come right up here and draw a line from center, hold Shift to make sure it's absolutely straight up and down and then we're ready to go. Now, I think we ought to add some stars. So let's go back to the Shape tool, and we'll come down here to the Star tool. Just click and drag and you can see those stars. There are two types of stars with the star tool. There's this fatter star and there is also a thin star, if you hold Option you can see what happens there. So I'm going to have one big star or fat star and one skinny star and then we'll Option click this and we'll get right on edge this is another way to rotate without actually going into the rotate tool. You just have to get close to that corner and then it'll turn into a little rotate arrow and you can rotate it around like this. Now, with this graphic I don't really like all of the harsh corners on everything. So I am going to round the strokes of all of these. So let's hit Command A to select everything, and we'll come up here to the stroke palette, and we have some different options here. First is the weight of our stroke, we can increase that. I think I like three. We can also change the cap. The cap is any line that's not a complete path like these lines down here, they have caps on them. So, to round that cap, we'll select the middle one, and you can see if we zoom in with the Z tool and draw a box that this is now a round edge. I'll zoom back out, but these corners up here where they're full shapes are not rounded yet. That can be changed right here under the corner part of a stroke. You can just go round join and that will round everything else out. All right. So, I think our telescope is done. 6. Adding Colors and Swatches: So, now that we have a graphic created, the next step is to color it. One thing that's really cool about Illustrator is you can take jpegs that you find online of colors that you like and then sample those colors in your own images. So, I'm going to go to my resources folder and pull up the final files for this project, and that has the color palette that I want to show you today. So, I'm just going to click on this. This is a jpeg of some colors that I created, and I want to show you how we can use these colors which are a raster file not a vector file, but we can sample them in this artwork. So, I just copied and pasted this with command C, and then coming over here into this document and hitting command V. Since we don't actually want us to print, I'm going to put it right outside the canvas like this. Okay. Now, I want parts of this to be the light blue color. So, I'm going to use my selection tool to click this one and this one and I'm holding shift so that I can get both of those selected at the same time. So, now we can hit eye to get the eyedropper tool which is right over here and then make sure that your fill color is in the front and you can hold shift and click on this blue color and that way it will only change the fill and not the stroke. It will change whatever is in front over here. So, if you wanted it to change the stroke, you could just split those. Okay. Now, we'll do the same with this one. Hold shift and click this one, and I'll get the darker blue color for these and hold shift and click and now, all that's left to do well with the pills is recolor the stars. So, I'll highlight all of these with my V tool for the selection tool and I'll hit I, for eyedropper, shift-click the yellow. All right. We've got all of the phils that we want build done. Let's select everything, command A, and now you can see we have a question mark over here on the fill color and also a question mark on the stroke and that's because some of these have different bills and strokes. So, let's get the stroke to the front by hitting X. Now, that stroke even though it's a question mark is in the front. Now we can get our eyedropper, shift-click on this dark blue, and that changes all of the strokes to the dark blue color. So, let's zoom in and take a look. Hit Z on your keyboard, and you can tell now that the strokes are all the same blue color, and it is as easy as that. I wanted to bring up, if you're working with Web graphics, you're going to be working in RGB. Right now, this document is in CMYK, and those are the four colors that you use when you're working with print. But I think a lot of people also work with Web images, so it's a good idea to just change your document into RGB because that's what works best on the Web. So, let's go up here and I'll show you how to do that file, document color mode, and RGB color, and it does actually change the look of your colors a tiny bit. You might not have noticed it on the screen, but it did change it a little bit. It's a really good idea to have your screen mode match the output that you want and so, if we're working with Web graphics and these will end up on the Web, we would want to use RGB and since we just changed our document to be RGB, we will come up here to the color mode and click on the fly out to choose RGB over here just so they match and we can keep it all the same. If you want to change all the colors in your document pretty quickly and come up with a brand new color palette, it's really easy to do that with a retailer artwork tool. So, grab your V tool, your selection tool and draw a box around everything, and then we'll come up here to this little recolor artwork symbol of in your control panel, click that once and then go straight into edit, and this is where you can start dragging the colors around. I like to keep them at the same level they are already. So, that they are tonally similar to what they were. So, we'll pull this over here and maybe we can make this kind of an orange and if you don't like the colors here, you can just click this little eyedropper tool up in the corner and it will completely revert back to your original colors, but you cannot undo as you go. Sorry this line to bring that to your attention and we'll say okay, and that is a pretty quick little color change to our palate. If you want to get even more specific with your color values are, you have a lot of ways to do that. We'll select this color and then you can come over here to your fill and double-click that. The color picker is where I go to really make some fine tune changes to my colors. I have a lot of options here. I can actually choose a color right here, I can use the slider to move up and down and choose a completely different hue,or I can actually enter values here. So, I can get exactly the color I want RGB, CMYK, or HSB or even the hex value for Web. Now, if you wanted all the colors that are in this graphic into your swatches palette, all you have to do is just select all of them like this and then come down here and do a new color group which is a little folder at the bottom of the swatches palette. I usually keep the selected artwork, convert process that global box ticked because that way if you change that swatch, it will update all of those colors across your entire graphic. So, as you can see they're added right there and now, if I deselect and choose one of those colors, choose all stars and we'll make them green. They have all updated. So, this is a really good way to speed up your workflow if you're using a lot of the same colors across different projects. Now, that we've created sound simple shapes and gotten some color in there, let's look at creating more complex shapes and working with paths. 7. Creating Paths: Understanding paths is critical in Illustrator. Pretty much everything in Illustrator is based on paths and points. All the steps that we've made so far had been a combination of paths and points. So, once we learn how to create our own paths and points, we'll be on the road to creating a lot more complex graphics. For this next section, I'm going to move the telescope off of the artwork because we're not going to be using it right now. So, I'll use my V tool to draw a box around the whole thing, and then click and drag and hold it off the art board. I'll go ahead and put both of these on different layers. So, I'll create a new layer, and then we'll just lock this layer. That way, we don't ever have to accidentally click any of this stuff, even though we do command A, which is select all. The best way to create our own paths is with the pen tool. So, you can either hit P on your keyboard, or go up here to the pen tool. Now, when I go to actually draw with my pen tool, you'll see that we have a little no or stop forbidden icon on there, and that's because I'm on the wrong layer here, I'm on a locked layer. So, this will probably happen to you at some point. Just click on a layer that's not locked, and then you can go on and create your graphic. The way the pen tool works is you click once to get a point, and then you click again, and it will draw a path between those two points. To de-select here and just stop at the line, you can hit Shift Command A. You can also create an entire shape with the pen tool, and I'll show you how to do that. We can just click once, click again, and we'll make some polygon here. Then when you get pretty close, you'll see a little circle at the bottom right of your pin, and that means it's going to close the path. Most of the time, you want to have closed paths, that's best case scenario. But you will have times when you do need just a line, and that's fine too. One of the most powerful parts of the pen tool is the fact that you can create curves with it. This is one of the hardest things to really get the hang of it, but once you do, it just all make sense. So, to do that, first you click once, and then you click and drag to get these wavy handles. These will help you to manipulate that path later. Then you can click on your next point and also drag a little to get the angle that you want. I will come back up here, and drag again, and finally finish the path. If you decide you don't like the way the shape is right now, you can adjust these bezzier curves. The way to do that, you'll need to get on your A tool, which is your direct selection tool. It's right up here. Then you just click on one point like this. Now you have two handles that you can manipulate, including this handle down here, so three, if you want to get technical. We can drag this handle like this, we can move it in and bring it all the way to the point to create a corner point there, and same with this one. So, it actually hasn't been converted to a corner point, but it gives the same look as a corner point. If we wanted to change this line, we can go all the way around like this. So, I really think you should mess around with it, and get a feel for it, and how those handles can behave. Since we just mentioned the A tool, or the drag selection tool. Now is a probably a pretty good time to talk about what that tool can do. When you're on an anchor point like this, you can click and drag just that anchor point. You can also click right on a path, and you have to be right on the very edge of it for this to work, and then just drag and it will adjust the path between those two points. You can also select a few different points, we'll get this one, and I'll hold Shift, and get this other one, and it'll move just those two points. So, if I wanted to make this rectangle taller, I could just hold A and draw a box around those two points, and then move that around. I could skew it. So, the A tool is very powerful. One more thing to mention about the pen tool is as you are drawing your curved lines with the pen tool, Illustrator is going to try to help you create the smoothest line possible, and you can see how it's doing that. But sometimes you don't actually want a curved line, you want a straight line. So to do that, you go back and click on the anchor point, and then you can continue drawing with a straight line. Now you have a pizza slice. Since my pizza slice is not very symmetrical, I am going to use my A tool, and just draw a box around just that point, and then I'll use my arrow keys to move it up and over, so it looks more like a pizza slice. 8. Drawing with Paths - Part 1: Now, let's use the pen tool to create our own graphic. So I'll get these out of the way by hitting command A, and this is not going to select anything that's on this locked layer, but it'll select everything on layer two which is where we are. Now I can just hit delete and I have a blank canvas, still have my stuff up here that I want to keep, but I can start from scratch. For this next graphic, I'm going to bring in a hand drawing that I made and scanned in. So this will be a raster graphic that I want to create in a vector format. So open this one with the little alien man and I'll click on him, copy, and then I'll move to my other document and paste. Now this is something that I'm going to be drawing right on top of so I don't want to be able to select it when I don't want it selected. So to the t that I'm going to unlock my layer, and there's a little red square on layer two and I'm going to click and drag that to layer one. So now he is on layer one and I can lock layer one again, and now I cannot select any of that stuff. So let's zoom in on the little alien man. So, this is just a little doodle that I did at home and I just took a picture of it and uploaded it. So, feel free to use the alien in the resources folder that I drew or you can bring your own in to work from that. Now, first we need to click back on the layer that we're working on otherwise we'll get that little forbidden icon. We don't want that. Now, let's hit p for the pen tool. I'm going to start right up here. So I'm going to put an anchor point at the top. When I'm placing my anchor points and pulling for curves, I want to put them at the farthest points possible to the left bottom right or whatever. So I'm going to put one right about here, one down here, one here, and then I have got the one at the top. This is something you want to do with everything that you're tracing. It really helps with how smooth your points and curves are. For example, if I just started and tried to do a curve from here, I just have no control. I can't get it to match the side of his head very well. So undo that, and I'll put my curve right out here on the side. Now, I can get it to match the edge that I want. Right now, my fill is white and I don't really want that because I want you to be able to see what I'm doing. Usually if I have a fill I don't want, I'll just hit the letter D, and that will give me a white fill and a black outline. That will always happen if you hit the letter D. But right now I think I want a green fill. So we'll just do this, and I've changed my mind once again, how about just the green outline? Shift X will switch them. Then we can get rid of the black outline by hitting the backspace key. The backspace key will clear whatever is the selected attribute, whether is the filler stroke. So, whichever one's on top basically. Next we're going to get down here on his chin and just click and drag until we get something pretty close to our edge. When you're doing this, it doesn't actually have to be exact because what you're wanting to do is get a really clean smooth version of your drawing, you don't want it to have all those rough edges anyway. So anyway, right now I am going to click on the chin to get a straight line and I'm going to go right up here to the middle like this and close that path. Now I'll select this and I'm just going to mirror image of this so that it will match on both sides. So I'll copy, paste in front, that's command F, and then I am going to hit O for the reflect tool and then I'll option click right in the very middle and do a vertical width. So it didn't quite line up and I'm going to look at command Y to see the wireframe here. It looks pretty good up here somewhat, but down here at the bottom it's not lining it up. So, I'm going to zoom in to that area and I'll use my A tool to select both of those points and then I'll hit option command J, which is the average, and what this does it will take both points and put them in the exact same spot and you can choose the horizontal axis, the vertical axis, but for this one I want them to be exactly on the same one. So, let's say "Ok." We'll zoom out and then we'll go up to the top. We can work with this. We haven't selected, so let's use the shape builder tool to delete these points. I'm going to zoom in close up here, hit shift M to get to the shape builder right over here and then hold option to click in here and click in here. We can select the whole thing, command A and then do the shape unite down here in the Pathfinder. That has given us just his head, all right, so we're halfway there. 9. Drawing with Paths - Part 2: Next, we'll do one half of the eye, by clicking once. This one I might be able to do all at once, like this. It looks like it's going to be pretty good. We will clear out, or click off, select that green again, copy and paste in front, and then we will reflect by hitting O, and then return. It's already on the vertical, and hitting return again. Now we can rotate this around, like this. Since we're going to be working on reflecting almost everything with this image, I'm going to grab a guide off the ruler, like this, and put it right down the middle, and we'll hit Command semicolon, to have that guide show up. All right. So, we've got one eye done. Now let's get the mouth. I'm just going to do a line for his mouth. So hit P, click once, and then click again, holding SHIFT, to get a straight line. Since his body is pretty symmetrical, I'm really only going to draw half of him, then we'll reflect the other half, and draw in the missing pieces. Now we'll start with the color. I'm going to hit P, click once, and then click again. All these are straight lines, you don't need to click and drag, until we get to this one. Now we'll click and we'll drag a little bit like this. I want to complete this path, but I don't want to go over here, so I'll click on the anchor point, go up here, and just complete the path that way. We'll get rid of this a little later, okay. For some real crazy curves work. For these curves, we'll start up here, click once, and then drag like this, and I'm going to leave these as curves, even though they look like hard points down there. Right now might be a good point to switch to the pencil tool, because the pencil tool is pretty smooth, but it's a free form drawing tool. So let's hit N, and I'm going to start on this path around like this. You actually need to start on the existing path. Let's do that. I'm just going to randomly draw his fingers, and we'll go all the way up to here. Okay. We have some problems here. I'm going to hit command Y, to see how to fix these. These three fingers look pretty good, but this finger has a hard edge and has a corner. We'll re-draw this with the pencil tool. I'll hit N, and I'll start here, and I'll finish on that same line. You have to start and stop drawing, on the same line going the same way, or it won't work out. You just want to remember, if you're starting the path in one direction, you need to end it in the same direction, and on the same path. All right. Up here we have another little section that I want to fix, and I'm going to use the smooth tool to do this. The smooth tool is part of the pencil tool. It's underneath here, so you can hold, it's right down there, but you can just hold option when you're on the pencil tool. We'll do that now, to smooth out this section of the arm. I'm holding OPTION, and we'll just go over it a few times, okay. I still want this arm to be a little skinnier. I'm going to switch to my A tool. We'll grab that anchor point right there, and I'm going to- oh see how far it moves it? That's because I've set my units at a too high value. Let's go and change those. Hit command K, and we'll get it back down to point five pixels. Now when I move it, it works much better. I'm going to hit command Y to get back to normal view. Right now, I'm just going to use the pen tool, to complete the rest of the graphic. Now we have all the paths on one side. Let's come back in and reflect these, to create the character on the other side. To do this, I'm going to hit V, and I am going to select everything, except for the head, and I also don't want his belt buckled, because it is already completely drawn. I'll copy and paste in front, so command C and command F, and then I'll hit O, and then I'll hit Option, click right on that center point, and then hit OK, for vertical reflection. All right. He his well centered up- oh I forgot to do his eyes, we'll just do that real quick. Copy, paste in front, and then hit O, Option. Okay. There's this eye. Let's hide the layer to see what we've made. He's looking awesome. Belt buckle needs to be moved over a little bit. At this point, we can start combining shapes, to create his whole body. I'm going to highlight these parts, and come down to the pathfinder, and unite those. Since I don't want to see those anymore, I'm going to hide them with command three. This leaves us with this shape, and this length. I'll combine those with the pathfinder, and I'll hide that with command three. Belt buckle needs to be centered a little bit more, I want it to be right along this axis, and now the color is another one. This is something we need to zoom in on. Hit Z, and these two aren't touching. If they're not touching, they are not going to combine with the pathfinder. They have to be overlapping in some way. If we hit the unite tool now, nothing happens. To solve this problem, we can use the A tool, and then draw a box around just these two points, hold Shift, come down here and draw a box, around these two points. If you can tell the ones that are filled in, are the ones that are selected. These out here are white. They have a white fill, they are not selected. Now we'll hit Option Command J, and we'll choose vertical. This will average them and push them together. When we do the unite tool, it will unite them. All right. Let's zoom back out. I think we have everything we need, but now I want to unhide everything, and to do that, it's Option Command three. Now we are probably ready for some color work. 10. Coloring in Paths : So now, I went to get some colors going with him, and to do that, I'm going to go back to the resources folder and grab the color palette from the same file. So, I'm just going to hop over to the other tab, and to do that, you can do a command tilda. We'll grab these colors right up here with the V tool. Copy those, and paste them in. I think this time, we won't have any outlines at all. We'll just do all fills with him. So, I'm going to hit V, grab the head, and we'll have it be this light green color. So, I hit I for the eyedropper and then fill that. I'm going to hide this now, command three. I'm going to hit V to get these two eyes, and will eyedropper those, command three. The mouth, I want also to be the darker green. So, I'm going to bring that to the front by hitting X. Hit I for the eyedropper. Shift click this green, and the reason you have to shift click this part is because this is a green fill up here. So, it's going to want to automatically do a green fill on what you have. If you shift click, it'll do whatever is in front, and that is what we want, and we'll hide that. Now, I think we'll make his collar this darker red. I'm going hit I, shift click and hide, and then we'll make his body green, hide that. I'm going to get rid of one of those, highlight this. We'll make that a darker color. Now, I'm going to do the belt buckle. We'll hit I, I'm going to make it this darker green. Hide that. Then, we'll do the belt itself, and we'll make that the lighter green. But now, the belt buckle is behind the belt, so we need to bring it to the front, or send this one to the back. To send the belt to the back is Shift Command left bracket, and that will give us what we need. Now, I'm going to unhide everything, and that's option command three. Okay. So, there he is, all colored in. When you unhide something, it will select everything that was hidden, which is great because right now, I need to send all that stuff to the back. So, I'm going to hit Shift Command, left bracket. Now, we have exactly what we want. One thing I also noticed is the color is back behind his chest, so we need to bring that to the front. To do that, we'll do Shift Command right bracket. Now, he is good to go. 11. Working with Type: Type in Illustrator will allow you to create images and graphics that can express anything really. An Illustrator makes it really easy to manipulate type two. Fonts are vector-based and since Illustrator is also vector-based, it just makes working with fonts that much easier. For this next section, I've already moved the little alien guy off the artboard. So, we have a clean working space. We're going to talk about the two different types of Type which are point type and area type. To get point type, you just hit T on your keyboard and click once, and this will put just one line of type and we'll type point type here. The reason you would use point type is if you want to add some text to a graphic, or a logo, or something like that, and very minimal type to something. If you have more lines, if you have say, more than two lines of type, you'll want to go with area type. So to do area type, you also click T on your keyboard and then you just draw a box. When you draw a box, it will fill up with Lorem Ipsum if you're on the most recent version of Illustrator. This is really nice, it's something I've really gotten used to because if you need dummy text or a text to fill in the space, it is already right there for you and if you don't want it, you can just hit delete on your keyboard. Now, there are lots of ways to edit text. So, I'm going to click on the area type, we'll command A to select all, and then we'll come over here to the character palette. Now, this might not be expanded all the way and if it's not, just double-click on the word character a few times, and I'll expand it all the way out so you can see all of the options. We have a lot of different ways to adjust the type here. You can adjust the space in between the letters and to do that, you can hit option and right and left arrows to add space or delete it. When you do that, you can see it changing over here and this is the tracking. So, if you select an entire bunch of text and then change in the space between all the letters, that's called tracking and you can adjust it right here, or you can just type in a number. Okay. I'm going to zoom in here a little bit. If you want to change the space between two letters, you can click in between those two letters and then option right and left click to get that space to move. Now, I'm going to come here and minus to zoom out a little bit. The space between lines is called Leading, and you can use the option up and down arrows to adjust the leading. As you're doing this, you can look over and see that this number has been changed. So, if you want to adjust that manually, you can do that here. Alright. Now, I'm going to click on the point type and I want to show you touch-type and to do this, I'll get a little different font. This font, Montserrat-Bold, should be in your resources folder and this is a good font to show you how touch-type works,. But of course, it will work on any type. So, to get to the touch type tool, just hit shift + T on your keyboard and it's this one right over here, and then you can click on individual letters and adjust them. You can just click and drag, you can rotate them with this little. You have to be right on that little dot right there, and then just rotate it around. I don't know why I am rotating an O, we'll rotate this I. I am going to rotate it up and then move it up a little bit, and this is really helpful if you're designing greeting cards. Because a lot of times, if you're designing kids cards, if you open that card, you can see that the type has been bounced up and down and it gives it a sort of whimsical feeling. 12. Customizing Type: Let's clear our Canvas. I'm going to hit the V tool then select all command A and then delete. Now, we're going to start our little spaceman graphic. I want this graphic to say, "My Space Rocket is awesome." So, it's for a little alien man. So, first we'll start out with the point type. I'm going to hit T to get to that tool, and click once, and I'll type rocket. Now, this file will be Pacifico. So, I'm going to make it a little bit bigger by holding Shift and then dragging a corner and we'll change the font to Pacifico. All right. Now, I want to make that R into a swoosh that goes underneath the word. So, I'm going to make a copy of this by holding option, and then dragging it off of the art board. The reason I want to do this is because, I am going to need to outline this font to manipulate it. When I outline it, I lose that font or I won't know what font that is. So, I'll have it up here if I ever need to make changes to it later. So, I'm gonna click on this one and hit Shift, Command, O. You can also do that under Type and Create Outlines. So, Shift, Command, O, this will give us points that we can then manipulate easily. So, but first, I'm going to click on the R, and as you can see these are grouped, so I'm going to use my A tool, click off, and then just select the R itself, and then I'll hit V to resize it by dragging a corner. So, we'll make it quite a bit bigger, and then I'll move it back to a spot that makes sense. I want to take this part of the R and extend it this way. So, I'll grab my P tool, and I'll just click here and then I'm going to click and drag a little bit. Then, I'll click one more time over here. As you can see, I've got a fill and not stroke, so I'm going to hit Shift, X to switch those two, and then I have a stroke and not a fill, which is what I want. Now, that I have the stroke, I'm going to bring it to the front by hitting X, and then I'll come over here to the appearance and increase the stroke here. Now there are several ways to do this. I want to get the stroke just about the size of this part of the R, which I've done. Now, I think that this part looks a little stiff, so I'm going to hit N, which is my Pencil tool, and then hold Option and drag over this, and then changes my Pencil tool to a Smooth tool. Now, the Smooth tool's also located right under here. For some people, this won't work. So, you'll have to double-click your Pencil tool and make sure that option key toggle to Smooth tool is checked. So, if it's not, just check it, and you'll always have that ability. So, we'll smooth this out by just going over it a few times. I don't think I need this point here, so I'm going to hit P and then minus, now will get me to the Pen minus tool, and we'll just delete that anchor point. Okay, now this is pretty close to what I want. But I think I want this part out here to be a little bit wider. So, let's switch to the Width tool, and to do that I'll hit Shift, W. Now, I can just pull right out here and get it a little bit wider. All right, now looks pretty good. I think I'll smooth this down just a little more. Perfect. Okay, now right now, we have a stroke only, and we want this to be a fill. So, if you hit Command, Y on your keyboard, you can see that it's a different style of path than these, and I want it to match these. So, to do that, I need to expand it. So, let's go up to Object and Expand Appearance. Sometimes you'll need Expand Appearance and sometimes you'll need Expand, I just go back and forth between the two, whichever one is available really. Okay, and now this is what we want. If we hit Command, Y, we can see that this type of shape is similar to this type of shape. Hit Command, Y again to get back. Now, I want to round these corners a little bit, but I don't want them to be the same type of rounding, so I'll hit A to choose just that corner, and then I can come down here on this little dot, which allows me to round the corners however I like, so round this one a little bit. We'll click down here on this line, and I'm going to round this one a lot, so all the way in like this. I really like the way this looks, but I was planning on putting some text in here. I'm going to make this a little bit wider through here. To do this, I'll hit Q, which is the Lasso tool, and now we can draw a circle around the dots that I want to move, just make sure you're not getting any dots that you don't want. Now, you can see that those are blue and the other dots are white, and that means those are selected. We'll need to switch to our A tool and get right on the edge of that, and pull it down a little bit like this. All right, as you can see it messed up this part of the swoosh. So, will smooth that out with the Pencil tool and hold Option to get this smooth. Sometimes you have to go over it quite a few times to get it to work. Looks a little weird, so I'm gonna use my A tool to click on a few points, and then move those up, so they don't have that strange look. Now, I'm going to delete a few more points, so I get my P minus tool, and delete those. Now, we'll pull this handle down on the anchor to smooth out that line even more, and I'm pretty happy with this, but we have this extra stuff in here that I really need to get rid of. So, let's deselect all with Shift, Command, A, and I'm going to zoom in on that part by drawing a box right around it. Okay, so we have this piece, and we have that piece, but this part does not overlap, this part and we do need it to overlap to get this to work right. So, now I'll hit Command, Y and I'll click right on that dot and give it to overlap just a little bit, and then I'll Command Minus. The next thing I want to show you is the Shape Builder tool. With my A tool, I'll select all of these pieces. It didn't get the rest of the group because I chose the A tool and so the V tool, the V tool select the entire group. So, now we'll get to our Shape Builder tool, which is Shift, M. We can combine these parts by just clicking and dragging. Sometimes with shapes like this, with something cut out of them, this'll happen, but we'll fix that in a minute. So, we also have this piece out here that I don't want, so I'm going to Option click that, and that will get rid of it. Then I'm going to zoom in really close to that overlap part, and I see another spot here that I didn't want. I am going to Shift, M to select that tool again, and then Option to delete it. We'll smooth this out now, so N for the Pencil tool, and then hold the Option and drag to just smooth a little bit. I'm not really focused on getting it perfect right now since this is just a tutorial, but I do want to show you how to fix this piece. If we hit Command, Y, we can see that this other piece is back here is just not showing, so I'm going to hit Command, Y again, and use my A tool to select both of them, and then we can hit Shift, M, which is the Shape Builder and then Option and delete that middle piece, and that gets us to what we want. So, we have just the word rocket. The K bothers me a little bit because I think it looks too much like an h. So, I'm going to zoom in on that K, and now I'm going to do a few things that will help it looked more like a K. So, basically, I want to take this piece and make it connect right here. To do that, I'm going use the N tool. When you use the N tool, you need to start on a path and continue on that same path for it to work correctly, So, I'm going to change this piece first. I'll start right here, and then I'll come in like this and overlap and then continue along that path, and then I'll come out here and do the same thing. Of course, we'll smooth all that out with the Pencil tool. All right, the next thing you want to do is add My Space over the top of the K. So, to do this, I am going to use Type On A Path, and first of all draw a circle. I'm going to start out here, that's about right. I don't want a fill or a stroke on this. So, I'm going to hit the forward slash key to clear that out. Okay, I'm going to move this down a little bit, then we'll get our Type On A Path tool, and click right on the edge of that. As you can see it already filled it in with dummy text, and now I'll type, My Space. Since this is Pacifico, it's not looking very good. It's never a great idea to put a script font on a path like this on the circle. So, we'll change this to Montserrat, which is also in your resources folder. Okay, so it's there, but it's a little off center as you can see. So, let's get on our V tool, and I'm going to click and pull this bar around the circle, I'm going to move it all the way over here. Sometimes when you do this, your text will disappear, and if that's the case, try to get on the other of little bar and pull it around. Okay, usually I like to center my text here, so I'm gonna hit Shift, Command, C, and then these two should be equal. So, I'll move this one up a little bit, so that looks about good. I want the swoosh to align better with rocket. As you can see, there's a lot of space under here and only a little space here. To get that to work, I'm going to use Shift, P, which is something that is relatively new in Illustrator and that is called the Puppet Warp tool. I'm going to hit A on my keyboard, and then just select the R shape. Now, I'll get my Shift, P tool, which is the Puppet Warp, and I'm going to set some anchor points with the Puppet Warp tool, you need to click on the things that you want to move, and also click on the things that you don't want to move. So, I want this part to move, but I don't want these other points to move. So, now I'll click right in the middle of that point, and just drag it up. All right, I think that looks much better, maybe even a little more, yeah, okay. All we need to do at this point is just add "Is Awesome" in the little swoosh area of the R. So, to do that, I'm going to hit T and just type "Is Awesome". First, I'll move it into the swoosh and then I'm going to change it to white. To do that, I'm going to hit the letter D, which gives us a white fill and a black outline. I'm going to bring the back black outline to the front by hitting X, and then I'll delete that by hitting forward slash. Right now, I think the letters are a little big, so let's reduce them by hitting Shift, Command and left caret, it's the one above the comma. All right, that reduced it a little bit. Now, let's add some space in there. I'm going to hit Option, Right Arrow, and space that out. A lot of times in a swoosh like this, you'll actually need to rotate the text, and you can do that by hitting the letter R and setting an anchor point by clicking once and you can rotate it like this. But I think ours looks pretty good. All right, so now we have a Type Graphic for our Alien Spaceman. 13. Exporting: All right, so let's bring everything together to see what we've made. I'm going to come up here to my layers and view the layer one and unlock it. Then we'll select the things that we created and move them down. I'll move this background away, I'll grab the little space man and move him over. Okay, so we've got our little alien guy and he's got a telescope because he wants to look at us here on earth. He also wants us to know that his space rocket is awesome. Now, I'll show you how to save these down as a JPEG if you wanted to share it on social media or something and then we'll save them individually as PNG with a transparent background. So, to get these to look a little better in this space, we're going to make the artboard a little smaller. To do that, hit Shift-O and you'll have handles where you can drag the artboard in a little bit. We'll move down here and drag this part of the artboard up. Okay, I am going to hit Command-0 to center everything on the workspace and then we'll hit Shift-Option, Command-S, and this is File, Save for Web. A good size for this is probably going to be around 1,000 pixels, and we'll change this to JPEG up here, and that's all you really need to do. We'll save and we'll put it on the desktop and we'll save it as graphics. Okay, so let's go to our desktop and open up that graphic. There it is in raster format. Now, if you wanted to use each of these graphics separately on your own projects, I can show you how to put them on their own artboards and export them as PNG with transparent background, so let's do that. First, I'm going to clean up my artboard and select all these [inaudible] out here and delete them. Then we'll come down here to the artboards panel and I'll create two new artboards. To do that, I just hit this little new artboard button at the bottom of the palette. I'll draw a box with my V tool around each graphic. But I accidentally selected this so I'll hold Shift and click on it. Then we'll drag him over to his own and resize him to be a little bit bigger to fill the space. I'll grab this graphic with my V tool and move it to its own artboard. Okay, and then we'll resize this rocket graphic to fill the space, too. Okay. Next, go to File, Export, Export as, and here, we can choose a title, I'm just going to put space. Down here under Format, you'll see Use Artboards, and you definitely want to have this checked, and that way, it will know to export all of the artboards, and then say Export. Here, it depends on what you want to do but for web, Screen 72 PPI is what you'll want to go for and background color will be transparent, and then say Okay. Now, let's look at our desktop. Here, we have our three space graphics and it will name them dependent on the artboard name. So, you can also change your artboard names and have it update that way. Okay. So, let's go back into the file and I'll show you how to save this. So, hit Shift-Command-S, and honestly you should be saving throughout the project. It's a bad idea to just leave it untitled the whole time. So, let's save this as space graphics. Even after you've exported your JPEGS and PNGs, you're going to want to save that AI file so you always have access to edit it later. So now that you've got your graphics ready to go, you can share them out on the web, social media, or anywhere you like. 14. Final Thoughts: All right. We did it. We covered everything from working with tasks, working with shapes, and creating our own texts. By learning these essential skills, you really have the ability now to go out and create just about anything you want in Illustrator. Now that you have the lay of the land with these skills, all it takes is practice to really have it become second nature. If you've been creating your own graphics along the way, absolutely upload those to the project gallery because I'd like to see how far you come. I hope you've enjoyed the class, and I can't wait to see what you guys create. 15. Explore More Classes: