Learn Flat Design in Adobe Illustrator CC

1. Class Intro: Hey guys, it's Spencer. You might know me from pixel and bracket over on YouTube. I'm a graphic designer from Indianapolis, Indiana. In this class you're gonna be learning so many different tools and techniques in Adobe Illustrator, I've compiled a ton of different flat design tutorials and lessons for you guys to complete everything from making a castle to a birthday cake to flat design potted plants. Any one of these can be completed as your class project or maybe you're feeling ambitious and you're gonna do them all. I cannot wait to see what you guys post and I'll see you in lesson one. 2. Flat Design Tree: I'm gonna walk you through step-by-step how to create a little flat design tree. And you're going to know much more about illustrator and hopefully be a lot more comfortable. By the end of this tutorial, we're truly going to go step-by-step. This is the new files starting document window, screen thingy, and then the upper left-hand corner and see new file. So we can click on that and it's going to pull up the dialogue box from here. You could name this as a new preset. You can select from a ton of different recently used ones or anything up here. If we go to a web really quick, I think we could probably just grabbed this 1920 by 1080. So you check the width, check the 1920s by 1080. Pixels are the dimension we're gonna be using. I like RGB color mode for things that I'm creating for digital work, CMYK for print works. So we'll stay on RGB under here in the advanced settings, everything else will just leave the same. Hit Create. We're going to have a new blank, 1920 by 1080 art board children in front of us right here. Now one thing you can do to get your window the same as me is go up to window, down to a range actually workspace. And you can click on Essentials and then we could reset essentials. That's going to remove a couple of things from my window, will open them up if we actually need them as we move along. So you shouldn't see the Properties panel here on the right Illustrator. Move them from the top down. If you're on an older version of Illustrator, you'll see a lot of the things I mentioned in the top toolbar. And you can find any of the windows that you need underneath the window drop-down, like the alignment panel and then the Pathfinder panel and all these different things in here. Anything to do with type we won't use type in this video though. Let me go ahead and get started. This is a tree. We're going to be creating it out of triangles. I'm gonna click and hold on the Rectangle tool and find the polygon tool. Another quick shortcut on this essentials toolbar. We actually lost a lot of tools. One thing I like to do is click on this Edit toolbar, go to the three little hamburger menu thing, and click on advanced. So now our toolset here on the left-hand side is the advanced version. We have all the tools in front of us and you can minimize this to be a single column or a double column. I kind of like the double column when I'm doing these tutorials. So that's what I'm on over here on the left-hand side, we may make some adjustments as we go along. There's some tooltips. I'll definitely do a tutorial on how to get rid of those. Can't wait. All right, so we've got the polygon tool out here. Click on your canvas or art board and it's going to let us adjust the number of sides. We're going to drop that down to three radius, doesn't matter and hit Okay, we've got a triangle. Check that out. We go back to our selection tool. The shortcut key for that is V. And we've got this little triangle out here and we can scale him up. We can keep him in proportion if we hold shift just like that. Let's scale him up a little bit. It doesn't matter the size, it all. Now this has a white fill and a black stroke. The stroke is the outline and the fill is the color of the actual shape. If we click on the stroke here, it might open up your color guide here. And you could always pull that over here to the side and till it highlights in blue and drop it in over there. So now we have the colors right here. If we'd like. One way I like to adjust color is by double-clicking on the fill or the stroke. And you can actually use this color picker. It's my favorite. We'll probably come back to that. But with this stroke, I actually don't want to stroke and I'm gonna hit None. And you guys, I do not like these tooltips, so let's go ahead and turn those off really quick. We'll go up to the Illustrator preferences into general, and I'm kind of assuming that they're gonna be in here somewhere. Look at that right there, show Rich Tooltips. I do not want that. I do like tooltips, but the rich ones get out of here. All right, so now when we hover over things, it just shows that little one. That's what I'm more used to. If we click on the fill, it's going to pull it up to the front. We can double-click on it and until of course this is a tree. So let's pick a darker color. And if you stay in this center area, it's a nice muted tone in here, up here. It gets a little more saturated over here, desaturated and then lighter at the top and darker at the bottom. If you find your way to the middle, you're going to have a gray or green or I like to call it like a muted tone with any of these colors that were picking. You can see the little color hex code down here. So you can just grab that and paste it in or type it in as you're, as you're working with me and we're gonna hit okay. All right, so we got a little, little triangle tree now, we're going to maybe zoom in a little with Command or Control plus and minus. We can do that. I say command for Mac users, control for Windows. We're going to duplicate this piece of the tree down. Hold Option or Alt until you see the double ended arrow. And you can duplicate this piece over anywhere. You let go and it's there. We can bring it back over. Have you noticed all these little little lines that allow me to intersect and line things up, but those are smart guides. Smart guides are really useful for exactly this. If I wanted to bring this piece back over to the center of this piece and also start to line it up in different spots. Smart guides are the way to go. So we're gonna go up to View, down to Smart Guides and make sure that is checked on. Seemed to have Snap to Pixel on if you want to get this all the same as me as well. But anyway. We got this guy here. And what we can do is find this double ended arrow at the bottom of him and we can click and drag to make him larger. And if we hold shift, once again, it's going to increase the scale of this triangle. We could do that and then maybe bump him up a little bit. You can use the up and down arrow keys. And then if you hold Shift while you're using those, it bumps them up and down a little bit more. If we find the right little spot I like that I think will keep something like that. That's all we need to do. To build up this tree. We can keep clicking on the next piece holding Option or Alt, getting a double-ended arrow, we can click and drag it down. Smart Guides helps us keep it lined up. We can also hold Shift while we do it and it's really going to stay lined up. And then once we get it somewhere in here, we can just find the bottom of it, scale it down, hold Shift. It's going to bump it out a little and make it a little bit bigger like that. So as we build out this tree the way that we want, we can just keep doing that kind of thing. Maybe we'll do one more hold Option or Alt and Shift and just duplicate that down. Grab the bottom holding Shift, kind of scaling it out just like that. So you can see how this tree is getting built pretty quickly. I can click and drag to select everything here because we have four different triangles. And then I could find the bottom again and we can actually scale this down. You can, if you feel like yours is too skinny or you want it to be wider, you can do that. But I'm going to hold shift just to make a little smaller so it fits on our art board here. Once I've done that, another way to zoom in and out, That's pretty easy as to press Z shortcut key and you get the little magnifying glass click and drag to zoom in and out. See that? Kinda drag them to the right, zooming in, dragging left, zooming out? Probably the same with up and down. No, not really. So right and left. Okay. So one thing I wanted to do here is maybe just increase the size of this triangle at the top. So that actually what I could do is just bump these down, maybe the three bottom triangles. I'm going to bump them down just a little bit. I just felt like the top needed to be a little bit bigger, like this line here in relation to the other ones could be just a touch larger, maybe one more bump up. All right. I'm just being picky there. What we're gonna do now is create the trunk at the bottom, the trunk of our tree. So let's select this fill and grab something brown, and we'll probably do a little bit darker brown, Something like this. Hit. Okay, remember that hex code if you need it, hit okay, so we've got a brown, we're going to click and get the rectangle tool. The shortcut key for that is M. Once you have that, we're just going to create a little rectangle out here for our trunk. So something like this. Then we can actually center all this together really easily. Even without the smart guy, you could use the smart guides, but what it will do is select everything. Select everything. And we can then click on the trunk. You see how that highlights it in more of a blue than the rest. That means this is now the key object and we're gonna be aligning to that key object. In the properties panel on the right-hand side, you'll see the alignment panel. But also if you drop the Window drop-down down, That's a lot of drop-down downs. You can click a line here and actually open up the alignment panel. You can dock it over here if you want or anywhere. You can use any of these. They're all the same. I'm just showing you different spots. Anyway, we're aligning to a key object so we could select that just to make sure, but once you click on this again, after you select everything, then click on this. Now we're aligning to that, which means everything else will align to this. So if we press this guy right here, which is horizontally aligning the centers are tree scoots over, so it's in the center of this trunk. Now, let's bring this guy up and look, he's on top of our tree. We don't want that. So what we're gonna do is click on him, right-click on him, and then go down to arrange, Send to Back. Now it's behind this tree. And I think that works out pretty well right there. So we'll keep, we'll keep that you can make this however you want really. Alright, so there's a couple more things here that we can do. One thing that we'll do that I think is super helpful to keep in mind as you're working on anything here in Illustrator as Erin dropping likes to say vectors are free, which means I can take this state of this tree, a working file, almost duplicate the whole thing out. I selected at all. I can duplicate the whole thing out. And I can just drag it over here and keep it over here. I could always go back to this separated version of the tree if I want to. I always do that when I'm gonna do something that I feel like is more of a destructive technique. Nondestructive is keeping all these shapes separate so you can edit them. Destructive would be selecting them all and merging them together. So that's what we're gonna do really quick. So don't select the trunk or you can select everything and then. Shift, click on the trunk to de-select that. You can also click and hold Shift to select things individually, but sometimes it's easier to just grab it all and de-select, uh, one thing you don't want by holding Shift and clicking, I've got all these selected. I'm gonna look at my Pathfinder options. Remember Window drop-down Pathfinder if you need to find it. And I'm going to click Unite right there. This is just gonna emerge to these shapes together. Now this is one piece. You can also group it together, but I like merging this together so we can just makes it easier. We're not going to bump things around on accident. Alright, so the other couple of things that we can do here is add a shadow to both this top tree and this bottom trunk. The shadow super-easy press M for that shape tool and then click on or double-click on the fill. Let's go and drag it down here to the Black. Want to make this a black all zeros hex code. Hit. Okay, and we're gonna create a rectangle and this is where smart guides are really important, really useful. We're going to create a rectangle that's got to start taller than the tree. It's going to finish further down than the bottom. So we're gonna make sure we start it up here. It covers the entire right side of the tree and we're going to line it up to intersect in the center, doesn't matter. All these shapes, this one and the trunk are all the same. So just make sure we can make sure by hitting Z and zooming in and then clicking on this rectangle and we can bring it in and out with this double-ended hours. Just make sure it snaps right there, right there to the center of the tree. Once you have that, then we can select the top of the tree here. And this black rectangle, we can use something called the shape builder tool. The shape builder tool super quickly sees each of the different overlapping pieces of whatever you have selected. It does not see the trunk because we didn't select the trunk. We just have the top of the tree and this black shape selected if we hold Option or Alt, notice how the cursor changes to a minus. We can just click on this to subtract out this outside shape. Now if it was a plus, you can merge things together. You could do that, but that doesn't do anything. In this case, that's not what we're doing. We're subtracting out. So you hold Option or Alt and subtract that out. So now we have this really dark side of the tree. What we could do is if we look in our Properties panel in the appearance tab, that's another one under window. If you want to find it, we can go to opacity and click on Opacity to open up this little dialogue box where we can change not only the opacity, but also the blending mode. You can hit multiply on this if you wanted to and then change the opacity or normal or any other blending mode to get the effect that you're going for. For me, I think what we'll do is maybe drop it down to 10% opacity. You could go even like 20 if you wanted a little bit darker shadow that's a little bit more visible. So maybe that's what we'll do. Then what we'll do is just press M for the rectangle tool again and then just do the same thing down here on the trunk. I didn't really like how this if this all came down in the straight line, I'm going to adjust it here on the trunk just a little bit. So it's gonna be a little bit off-center. If you can tell. We'll zoom in real quick. I'm gonna select both the trunk and this rectangle. Shift M is the shortcut key for that shape builder tool. And you can tell that I didn't completely cover the entire right-hand side of this. Now one thing to note here is the rectangle of the trunk is a little bit larger than this black rectangle that just made here. I can switch back with the shortcut key V to the selection tool and make sure I cover up every piece of that trunk. So I make this rectangle is tall enough to cover up what's behind here. Then I can select both Shift M for the shape builder tool. And what we'll do here is the exact same thing will hold Option or Alt and just get rid of the outside rectangle. Once we do that. Now we've got this piece and the trunk here. This piece is in front. So we'll go ahead and send all of these guys to the back by selecting them and then right-clicking send to back. So it go underneath this. And we'll do the same thing here. We'll grab this rectangle, will go to the opacity and maybe drop it to 20% just like that. Now there's a couple of things that you can do here as far as the shadow, like the long shadow or having a shadow underneath the tree, we could do an oval. We can click on this shape tool, find the ellipse tool. And we could do like a really small oval, like a very skinny one down here. And we could click and make sure we center this up and then send it to the back, Send to Back. Then once we have that, we can drop it down a little bit. So if we see this guy is right below this, we probably need him to be like who is wide, as wide as the tree at least. So we'll zoom in a little bit till we can get those double-headed arrows. We can grab these corner ones if we wanted to, but if we zoom in a little bit more, we might be able to get the directly like side-to-side ones. And if we hold Option or Alt, It's going to scale it from the center. So we already have this lined up. We can scale it from the center and out just like that. And then what we could do is drop the opacity of this, maybe like 50% And actually I think that's a little wide. Maybe we can scale this back in, maybe maybe having more like that was okay. Maybe twenty-five percent, something like that. So you've got this little tree. I mean, really you could make this a little bit wider if you wanted to. Maybe we went a little too skinny. You can do something like that. So you can actually see the shadow below it, just like that. You could do that, or vectors are free. Let's grab this guy, just drag them over here. We're going to duplicate the entire thing out. Another thing you can do is using the blend tool. I don't really like to blend tool as much anymore. So maybe we will look at a different method here. Yeah, I think what we'll do is create a rectangle and then start at this anchor point. So the top of the tree click and drag. It's kind of like making that shadow again and make sure it locks into the bottom of the trunk. I'm actually going to go beyond that. Then I can press Z and zoom in here. And with this guy, just make sure that I lock it and snap it into the bottom there, just like that. Now we'll use a gradient tool on this. If we find G actually is the shortcut key for the gradient tool. So if we do that, we need to add a gradient to this. I'm going to go find my gradient panel and we can just click on the linear gradient. I actually want this to be flipped. So I'm gonna open up the options of this gradient panel and it looks a little bit more like this. And I can bring the white and black swap sides. And actually I didn't need to do that. It's really wondered, want to do is change this white to black. We have two blacks. But I want the opacity of the right-hand side to be 0. The difference there is it goes from black to black with the opacity being 0. So this is totally see-through here on the right-hand side, that's more what I want. So once we have this linear gradient setup, what we can do is grab the direct selection tool, which allows you to play with these anchor points. There's two anchor points here, 12 on the right-hand side. If we click and drag, we can grab them both. We can also hold Shift to individually select or deselect anchor points. As long as you have them both selected, you can then click and drag on the path in-between those two. And we can drag that path around. The gradient, follows the angle as well as we've been this around. What I would do is maybe grab it and put it right in here like this. So this is gonna be a long shadow and then this is obviously in front of everything. So we need to go back to our selection tool. Shortcut key is V, right-click and send this sucker to the back. Send to Back, just like that. And then we want it to be a lot less dark. We want it to be like some kind of twenty-five percent type of opacity. Again, in regard to where the shadow lines up. Now I made a mistake here and we can fix it really quickly and easily. We don't want the shadow to start in the middle of this trunk and needs to start from the right-hand side. What we'll do is press a again for that direct selection tool, grab this anchor point here. So as long as you have this shape selected, snag this anchor point, and we can bring that anchor point. Just click and drag over to here. Now, the shadow actually starts at the right-hand side of this tree and then the top of the tree up there. And maybe that's not right. I don't know. That doesn't look right to me. So you could drag it to the left-hand side, but you could put it anywhere. That's the whole point of this. You can put that guy anywhere. So maybe the shadow starts there. And then you can always edit this by grabbing these two anchor points over here. You can stretch it out, you can bring it in. I think this is a much better way to do a long shadow than the old blending mode method I used to use. Plus it uses a lot of computer resources and it also tends to look really choppy. Anyway, I like this method and we could just keep adjusting this opacity if we want. One thing I do want to show you on the gradient itself, you can adjust the opacity as well. If the properties panel gradient menu is kind of tough to find, the gradient menu can be found right there. What you can do here is adjust where basically we're going from black to black, from a 100 to 0 with this little gradient slider in the middle. That means it's going to be perfectly 100 counting down to 0. Once you get to here. If you adjust this a little bit, you can see how it favors one side or the other. Now this goes a little bit slower, and then it's going to be a lot quicker to 0 once you pass this midpoint. Same thing here. You could go really quickly from dark and then it's going to hit the midpoint and then go a little slower to 0. So you can adjust that there. You can also just the end point here of the shape. Do you want this gradient to finish before the end of the actual shape? You see the end of our shape is here. But if I drag this finishing slider back or the opacity turns to 0, it actually, the gradient finishes here and the rest of the shape is just blank 0 opacity. So you can make some minor adjustments to the gradient here if you'd like. And also, then we can just adjust the entire shape itself. But grep crabbing this opacity here. And drop in that as well. So those are a couple of ways you can really adjust this. But overall, I think I liked the effect better. Or you could do a more realistic shadow here at the bottom of your tree as well. Now, let me show you one last thing. I'm going to click and drag and just pull this tree over here. We'll stick with this one because that's what would the old tutorial was and I just wanted to make this update for you guys. Let's make a quick background. So what we're gonna do first off is click and drag to select this whole thing. We're going to group them together. So that's Command or Control G. Or you can right-click and go to group. Just like that. With this group, I might just move, I might just move them out of the way. I'm a move them over here and we're going to create a quick background. We know that our art board is 1920 by 1080. We can press M for the rectangle tool. Click on our art board and go ahead and type in 1920 pixels by 1080 pixels high. Hit Okay, and then to center this on our art board pretty easily we can go to the alignment panel, align to art board, and then center horizontal and center vertical. Just like that. But we need a better color. So we're going to double-click on this and we're going to grab something like a really light tan, maybe a little less yellow, something like that. It okay. I want something like this. And then what we can do is go to the Layers panel and then create a new layer. We could have done this first, but we didn't. So we're creating a new letter, we're calling it background. We're gonna drop it to the back or the bottom of this layers panel. And then you can find, first-off, you can find all the shapes we've made. But we can find this rectangle would just made and drag it to the background layer. You could also have done this in reverse, created this layer and then select it and then added the rectangle to that layer. But anyway, that's all we have down here. So what we'll do is click right here to toggle the lock. Now we cannot accidentally grab it and move it around or anything. That's perfect. Then we can grab this little tree which is on top layer. We can bring him out here and we can send her or him. But we're going to need to do a little something here because it all centers, centers this box, you see this bounding box here. It centers this box on this art board, which means our tree, if we wanted to a tree in the center, it's a little bit offset. You could send to the tree and then align the shadow to it if you want. Or you can just sort of eyeball it if you want and we'll scale it up a little bit. I'm holding Shift and Option or Alt to scale proportionally from the center out just to make it a little bit bigger. And then you can line it up wherever you want. And then you could also always ungroup this really quick. And then maybe just take the shadow over here. You know how it lines up, don't resize anything, but then grab this tree, group it together, and then center it on your art board. Now this tree is actually in the center of this art board. And then we can grab this shadow you guy and bring him over. And it's easier maybe to zoom in. And we know that when we created this point right here at the top of this tree, so we can bring that over and intersect with that right up there. Once we have that, we should be good to go. Now, a couple of things I noticed that I did, that you guys should be aware of this Z and I'm zooming in. I missed it. I missed my 0.1 off for both of these and I'm having trouble lining this up. It's just bumping around. And I believe that's because we're snapped to pixel and that might have been a mistake at the beginning of this, I can always improve you guys. Instead of snapping to pixel, we're going to turn that off. What we want is Snap to Point. We want these points to snap together. We don't want individual pixels to be snapping. Once we have that, we're able to click and drag this around to bring that point right there. That's probably why this shadow is off as well. I take back what I said. Snap to Point is nice or don't even snap at all. Snap to pixel is going to actually snap to each individual pixel. But you can create shapes in-between pixels. So that doesn't really help you as much unless you're trying to create pixel-based art. That may have messed us up a little bit, but that's one piece that I noticed now. I'm just clicking and dragging and looking down this. Yeah, see where a little bit off down here to what we could do to make it even easier. Press a for that direct selection tool. Click on this point and then click and drag this point to snap it right there. I would say that that is exactly how I would get this lined up, up here as well. Click a, I'm going to click on this shape, so I make sure I get this anchor point. And I can click and drag this around and snap it into there. I can do the same thing with the shadows as well. I can click on this shape, that's the shadow shape. Click on this anchor point and bring it up to snap into there. And depending on where this ended up lining up down here, we're holding shift just coming down here. What we can do is the same thing here. I know that the trunk and the tree leaves or whatever are centered. So I'm gonna press a for that anchor tool or sorry, Direct Selection tool. Grab the anchor, you can click on the shape. It's going to select the shape. Then you can click on the anchor point. And now I have just that anchor points selected. And I can drag that either way. I know when I see this intersect right there, that's gonna be the center of this tree. We've officially fixed that now. But I'm just showing you that. That's why snap into points, snapping the pixel, these settings actually snapping to pixel can actually hinder you a little bit. So forget what I said before. That's not how we wanted to have this. We wanted to snap to points, so these points can snap together easily. And now we've, we've fixed our tree. So at least I covered that in this tutorial as well. I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial, this new flat design tree tutorial. It's an update on the old one. And I used a lot better tools and this one things that I didn't even know. So don't be afraid that you don't know everything about this program yet. You guys will get the hang of it and just keep trying. There's a lot of different flat design tutorials on this channel. And if there's anything I can do to help you hit me up in the comments down below. I'll catch you next time. 3. Flat Design Traffic Cone: Let's start a new document, command or Control N, or just go find new. I'm going to create 1920 by 1080 pixels. And CMYK RGB doesn't matter. Let's go RGB. I like creating digital artwork. Here is our new Canvas and we're going to start by creating a triangle. Let's go over to the rectangle tool, click and hold and go to the polygon tool. Click on your Canvas one time, make sure the sides are three on that polygon. Radius doesn't matter. I'm going to leave it at 50. Hit, Okay, and we have ourselves a triangle. Now let's take a look at our Layers panel. Go up to window, down to layers if you don't see it on the right-hand side. But if you do, you should see layer one right here has a triangle on it. Double-click layer one and rename this to outline. This is going to be the outline of our shape. And I'm going to create three new layers just by clicking that new layer button down at the very bottom, we've got a bunch of different layers here. Drag the outline layer to the very top. Next up, we're going to name this shadows and highlights after that color. And last but not least, I'm going to call this last one background Kevin, optional layer. But background down here at the bottom, lock these three layers, background, color and shadows and highlights. And let's make sure we have outline selected. We're going to be creating the outline of our traffic cone completely on this layer. I'm gonna zoom in by pressing the Z key and then clicking and dragging just to zoom in a little bit. With this shape selected, we're just going to pull down the bottom to elongate it to that traffic cone. Look. Now press a for the direct selection tool, the shortcut key for that, as I just said that, but the direct selection tool is up here. It's the white arrow, click and drag to select that top point, you might have to press Z and zoom in a little bit and then press a to go back to that tool. And we're going to round off this top corner a little bit just until it looks like what you think a traffic cone should look like. Then I'm going to select this entire shape, go to the Properties panel. Any of these windows are always in the Window drop-down. So go find properties if you don't have it. From here, the stroke size, I'm gonna make the stroke eight and we're gonna keep that the same for everything in our document. That kind of changed what this looked like. And I think I might just round this off a little bit more. Then we can click these bottom two points with that direct selection tool. And we can pull down to change the different size of our cone here. I'm holding shift as well. You don't have to, but you might get a little wonky like that. So hold Shift to keep it in line and pull it straight down. We're just going to size that traffic cone to about what we think it should look like from there, I like that and I'm going to go select the rectangle tool shortcut key for that is going to come down here, see all these pink guides, those are smart guides. You might want to turn those on in the View drop-down down to Smart Guides, command or control U. To do that, what I'm gonna do is make sure I see that smart guide lined up right here on the middle of that path. Click and drag with the rectangle tool. And we're going to create a very skinny rectangle down here at the bottom. Maybe a little bit less than a little bit skinnier, just like that. Now with this rectangle selected, I'm gonna go over to my appearance. Click on Stroke, and we're going to round the corners here. And I think that should create a round enough corner for your traffic cone. We might zoom in a little bit here. I might even pull these guys in just a touch as well. Remember I'm just selecting with my selection tool and finding those Corner Widget bubbles that we can pull in, go up to View, down to should be right here. Hide Corner Widget. You can show the corner widget if you don't see those little circles. Now as I zoom out, I feel like the top portion is a little bit small compared to the bottom. So I'm just gonna click and drag and hold Shift to scale that up a little bit and get it looking like it fits the bottom section. Select both. Go over to your alignment panel and make sure those are horizontally aligned to the center of each other. Otherwise they might be a little bit off like see this is left aligned and right align. We're going to Horizontal Align. Make them in the center just like that. We are looking good with our outlines so far. Next up I'm gonna grab that rectangle tool shortcut key is M. We're going to draw the two lines that go through the center of our traffic cone, holding Alt or option to click and drag and duplicate that rectangle and then sort of position these wherever you want. I'm just going to manipulate them a little bit, maybe something like this right here. Next I'm gonna click and drag on all of these elements, make sure everything is selected. You might notice if you started at a new document that your fill is white, so I'm going to just select None for the fill. And you can click on the fill or the stroke to highlight that. And if you select none, it's going to change that Command or Control Z to undo. Whichever one is in front is where that none is going to apply. This color guy popped up, we're just going to exit out of that. Now after you do that, I noticed one thing we had Scale Strokes selected. So that means when this guy scaled up earlier, our stroke weight actually scaled up as well. In the transform panel, in the properties panel, there's a little ellipses here and you can see scale corners and scale strokes and effects are selected. So as we scale our objects, the corners, the strokes and effects, those are going to scale as well. So we have to be careful with that. I'm gonna make sure this is back to 8. Next, what we're gonna do is delete out some of these paths so we can use the shape builder tool, select the direct selection tool. Shortcut key is a just click in-between these paths. So in-between these two anchor points and hit the Delete key on your keyboard. Same thing over here is even easier, is to click and drag through them and hit delete so I can make sure I just get that path selected. I'm just deleting out these paths. If you don't get it right, sometimes it might even select the whole shape and delete the entire thing. Clicking and dragging through might help you. Now I'm going to switch to the selection tool shortcut key for that is V. Select everything up top here, go to my shape builder tool Shift M is the shortcut. And then while I have it out here, I'm gonna hold Option or Alt on PC and I'm gonna click and drag through the outside lines. And that's going to get rid of them. Click and drag through the outside lines and that gets rid of them. Now when we take a look at the outline view Command or Control Y, you'll see that all these lines match up perfectly. That's what we want. So everything I'm seeing here is looking really good. You're going to want to make sure all that lines up so none of the stroke weights look off. We're going to switch back out of that preview mode. We're looking good with the outline. I like it. I'm going to select this big triangle shape, hold Shift and select the bottom part. And then Command or Control C, That's copy. We're gonna go over to our layers panel, lock that outline mode, an unlock the color, and then make sure you select on that color layer as well. Go up to Edit, down to paste in place, that's Shift Command or Control V. And now we've pasted that outline into the color mode or color layer, I should say. I'm going to select both this bigger shape and this rectangle. And we're going to swap the fill and the stroke by clicking this double-ended arrow right here. Now what we have is the same cone but filled in with color right on top of where it should be. So I'm going to give this an orange look. I like to double-click on this swatch over here, and then I can select something in that orange color space. Maybe a little bit more orange, something like that would work hit. Okay, now we have an orange cone. Let's fill in those white stripes on this cone. I'm going to press P for the Pen tool that's up here, this little pin tool icon. Make sure that you're of course on your color layer and your other layers are locked. Click in-between these outlines and create a shape that goes in-between. Where do you want the strike to go? Just like that. Now I'm going to go over here and change the color of this shape by double-clicking to something maybe a little bit more white or I'm going with just a slightly gray tone hit. Okay. And it's filled that in. We're gonna do the same thing down here. We're just going to create a little shape that goes in-between this space. You can press I for the eyedropper and select the color you want. Same with the orange. You could select the orange, you can select white or whatever color you see using the eyedropper tool while that shape is selected, will change the color of that shape. Cool. Now we're getting somewhere. I like where the colors are at. We're going to lock that color layer and move on to our shadows and highlights up here. I'm going to zoom in just a little bit more Command or Control. Plus, let's create a shape with our pen tool again. P for the Pen tool, I'm going to start right about here. This is gonna be a highlight. I'm going to click to make a point there. Come down. And this is gonna be, it's gonna go all the way down to this lower portion here. So I'm gonna click outside of the color area underneath the outline. Back over here, but not all the way to the side. Same thing. And then we can just finish this up here. Now I want this to be a little bit more parallel to this line so we can press a for direct selection tool, click on this anchor point. And I'm gonna use my arrow keys to bump it over just a little bit until I think this is a very parallel line to the side of my traffic cone. I think something like that works pretty well. Now I don't like how sharp this point is up at the top. So I'm gonna press Z, zoom in a little bit just by clicking and dragging. I can drag left and right to zoom in. That's called a scrubby zoom. Use the direct selection tool to grab this top anchor point, only the top anchor point and pull it down a little bit. We're going to round off that sharpness just like that. Now it might've dropped it down a little bit. So what I could do is click and drag to select these top points. And then I might need to zoom in a little bit here to make sure I can drag it up without changing the roundness. Some kind of click on one of these anchor points and drag it up to here, just a little bit higher, something like that. There we go. We've got this little highlight thing. Now what we can do with this piece is changed the color of it. First off, double-click, I'm gonna make it a yellow, a bright yellow. Something like that. Hit Okay. Now we've got this bright yellow shape over here in Properties, I'm gonna change the opacity by clicking on the Opacity. First two maybe like a screen blending mode. And then we can actually adjust how transparent that is. So we can bring that down a little bit if we'd like just to find where we'd like that highlight color to be something like 50% might work. And then of course you can play with the color. I feel like the yellows popping a little too much. Maybe the screen blending mode isn't even what we want. Maybe we just want normal and we just want it to be 50%. Could be any of those. I kind of liked the screen potential blending mode because it doesn't show the color as much on here is as much as it shows the highlight. But anything like that, you can play with that option. Now I'm going to show the highlight down here as well. I could create just a square shape with the rectangle tool right down here. Simply like that, press the eye eyedropper key and you can click on this highlight and it's gonna change it to that color. Just like that. I like that for the highlight. And now we're gonna do the shadow on this right-hand side. Press P for the Pen tool. I think I'm going to start this shadow right down here. I'm going to try to remain parallel. So we might even undo that. I might start at a little bit closer to the edge. So somewhere right here, stay parallel with the side of the traffic cone. I'm going to click right in there. And then up here I'm gonna click and drag a little bit. So it's going to round off that corner. Then we're just going to click down through the outline down here to the bottom to close that path off. If you look at what I did up here, if we zoom in a little bit, I'm going to use my direct selection tool to click on these different anchor points. I've rounded this off now I don't like how that finished. I might take this anchor point and move it over just a little bit. And then I might click on this anchor point and convert it to a smooth point. So I'm gonna click on this right there. That helps convert this to a more smooth point. Otherwise it's got a sharp edge to it. Now this isn't much, this is just a tiny bit of curvature. If I click on this anchor point can bring it over just a little bit more. I think it just helps the top of the shape here curve a little bit. Since the top of this cone is, is round, it's not just straight squared off. Now we're going to click on this and we're gonna change the color. Let's change it to something like a darker orange color. Like this. I'm going to go to opacity, hit Multiply on that, and then we're going to bring the actual transparency of it way down to find the opacity you like here and you've got your shadow. We're gonna do the same thing down here at the bottom. Press M for the rectangle tool and create a little rectangle down here. And then I for the eyedropper key and make sure you select this shadow over here, which will help create the same color there at the bottom. If we zoom out, we are looking pretty good with our traffic cone. Now the last thing we could do is add a background so we can go back over to layers, lock the shadows and highlights, unlock the background. And in this case, press M for the rectangle tool. And then just create a shape out here. Double-click on the color. And I think I chose something like blue, something like that for the for that orange blue contrast. And there we go. You've got a background and your little traffic cone. 4. Flat Design Cheese: A flat design cheese slice. That's what we're making in this tutorial. First thing I'm going to create a square using the rectangle tool shortcut key is M. You can create a square or a rectangle. It can be perfect square or just kind of eyeball it just like that. Now we're going to add a stroke to this. I'm gonna go ahead and use my eyedropper tool just to eyedropper this color over here. It added it as a fill to flip the fill to a stroke, you can just click this double ended arrow on the left-hand side. Once we have that, I want to change the stroke size to something like 15 points. And then I can hop into the stroke properties and actually adjust the roundness of the corners of this stroke. And along with that, I'm gonna select this, zoom in a little bit so I can see my corner widget right here. If you don't see it go up to View right here. It's gonna be Show Corner Widget or Hide Corner Widget if you already have it shown like we do, I'm gonna just pull in these corners a little bit to help the inside corner not be so sharp as well. Now before we get too far along, we're going to go ahead and start by drawing every outline of this cheese slice. And I want to do that only on a single layer. In that layer we're going to name outlines. If you don't have your layers panel open, go up to window, down to layers to open that up. And we're gonna have two other layers. Those are ones color swatches. So that's a third other layer, but the two other, if we add another one here, are going to be color, and then we'll add a last layer. We've got shadows and highlights, color and outlines. I'm going to readjust these and pull the outlines to the top underneath that shadows and highlights underneath that will be the color. So make sure you have outlines selected and we'll continue on. I'm gonna go back over here and select the ellipse tool. The shortcut key for that is l. And let's take a few bites out of this cheese. I'm just going to draw a circle. There's nothing perfect about this. And then press the V shortcut key for that selection tool, select everything. And then Shift M is the shape builder tool. Notice the icon over here. What we can do with this is hold Option or Alt until you get a little minus sign, click and drag through these two shapes here. And it's going to just take a bite out of our cheese slides just like that. We're gonna be putting holes in this piece of cheese. And we might as well have a few along the outer edge as well. So we can press L for that circle tool. And let's just create a couple more circles out here. Maybe one there, maybe one here like that. Press V, we can select everything by clicking and dragging Shift M for the shape builder tool hold Option or Alt. And just drag through these to where they highlight where they overlap. And it's gonna take a little bite out of the side of the cheese right there. We've got a couple of bites out of our cheese. Next I'm going to press L again and create a couple of circles on our cheese to represent the little holes that are in it. Just click and drag and hold shift like that. And we can create a couple of circles around here, kind of spread them out a little bit different sizes. Like I said, there's nothing perfect here. Just create whatever you would like to represent your piece of cheese. This middle one, I'm gonna make it a little bigger. I'm going back to the selection tool. We're going to find this double-ended arrow, pull it out a little bit while holding Shift and Option or Alt. And then I'm just going to spread this around a little more evenly. So I feel like they are all across the cheese without being too far apart or too close to each other kind of thing. There we go. So we have our cheese drawn at this point. We have the outlines. What I want now is the color. So I'm gonna click and drag to select all of these outlines, press Command or Control C to copy. You can go down to Edit or up to Edit and do copy paste, paste in front. All right here, but I'm just going to grab that with the shortcut key Control or Command C. Then I'm gonna go ahead and lock the outlines layer for now. I don't want to accidentally mess with it. Go down to the color layer, make sure you have it selected. And then we're going to go up to Edit, Paste in Place that shift Command V or shift control V. Now we've just pasted the same exact outlines onto our color layer. So what we can do with that is if we select the outer outline, if you will, this outer shape, we can actually flip it like we did before to make it a fill of the inside of where the outline is. And then what we can do is grab that eyedropper tool and go over and snag this yellow color. That's gonna be the first color of our cheese and it's underneath the outlines because the outline layer is above the color layer. Now we also have all these little circles in here. I could click and drag just to select all the circles. Now I also selected this color. I can hold Shift to unselect that and are de-select the hat. And then we have just these circles. I could flip their color to fill their stroke to a fill again. So now we have the insides selected. And then I can select the orange color that I've picked out just by using that I key for the eyedropper tool and then selecting this orange right here. So as you can see, we're well on our way already. So now we have these orange inner parts and this yellow cheesy part. From there. We're gonna be adding shadows and not really highlights on this because I don't want it to look like a plastic piece of cheese. So we're just going to add some shadows in here. I'm gonna select all of the color and I'm not selecting the outlines because we locked the outline layer. So you've got to make sure that's locked so you're not accidentally selecting everything. I just want every piece of the color here. Hit Command or Control C to copy that. Then I'm going to lock that color layer, go up to shadows and highlights and do the same thing, paste in place, that's going to place it right where it was before. So now I have a duplicate of all the color and we're going to create shadows and highlights out of this. So the first one that we're gonna do is basically all of these little circles are gonna have a little interior shadow to add a little bit of depth. So to do that, pressing Z and clicking and dragging, I'm going to zoom in a little bit, press V for that shortcut key for that direct selection tool. Now if I move this circle around, it kind of looks like there's only that one circle, but it's because we also have this larger color block. So underneath that is the rest of the color. This, the yellow here is kind of hiding the rest of this color layer. That's okay. We're just dealing with these shadows and highlights. We just want to create a few shadows out of these colors and then it'll all come together. So don't worry about not seeing that underneath color layer. But anyway, what we're gonna do with this circle is actually hold Option or Alt. And you're gonna get this double arrow or double cursor. And you're gonna be able to duplicate this circle. If we bring it down, we can't see it very well. So what I might do is actually just adjust that color a little bit like that. So now I can actually see it That's just by double-clicking this fill and then changing the color. Now I can see where it's at and I can move this down to where we create this moon shape right here. Now, I want that shape and I don't have it yet. So what I need to do is select this purple layer, hold Shift, select this background, and then Shift M for the shape builder tool. And now what we can do with the overlap between these two is I can actually just click on this moon-shaped and that creates that shape. If we go back to my selection tool, you'll notice now I can just delete this one. And I've got two pieces here now where I could delete this piece and then have this selection right there. So that works out perfectly and we can change that to our darker color just by pressing the I for the eyedropper tool, snagging this darker orange or whatever color you'd like to make it. And then you'll see this come together here soon after we remove this full color layer right here. And if I just show you that really quick, see how we're gonna get those shadows. That's just me deleting out the yellow color out of our shadows and highlights. So then we can see down to this color. But anyway, what we need to do is create these little moon-shaped for each one of these. If we zoom in, we'll do the same thing this time. I'm not going to change the color. I did that for you guys. What I'm gonna do is just click and drag a little bit, kinda see where it hits. That looks pretty good. I can hold Shift, select both of these. Shift M for the shape builder tool, just click on this shape and then delete out the rest of the stuff. So we just click on this top circle, the bottom circle, and now we have that piece there. I didn't might be going a little fast for you guys. So I'm gonna go ahead and just walk through it again. Click on this circle, we're on our shadows and highlights, hold Option or Alt. Duplicate it down a little bit. We're going to move it a little bit too hard to see, but when you let go, you'll see the outline Shift click to select both of these pieces. We selected one, I helped shift selected the other, Shift M for the shape builder tool. And then just click on the piece right here. And it's going to create that. It's going to split that underneath shape. So we go back to that selection tool and we can start to delete out everything on top and to the side. And we have this shape here. Pretty easy stuff, hold Option or Alt. Click that down. We can use our arrow keys even to shift or nudge this into place just like that. Select both Shift M, Click on that shape and then we can delete these out pretty easy. In fact, there might even be, I'm clicking on it, but there might even be an easier way. Let's go ahead and duplicate this down. We've got this held here. We're going to shift click there, Shift M, and I'm going to hold option to actually subtract everything but this layer. And now we just saved a couple of steps. So you see you guys, even as you're working, as I work, there's more efficient ways that I find as I work. And sometimes that's just the way it is while we're doing it tutorial, we find a more efficient way. Select both of those hold Option or Alt just dragged through these to everything that's not the moon. And it's gonna go ahead and delete them for us. So that actually helps us a lot, makes it real quick hold Option or Alt, click and drag, bump it, nudge it to the spot where you want it to have that little sliver of a moon shape hold Shift select both Shift M, hold Option or Alt drag through and we deleted those pieces. Right on. Now what we can do is click on each of these and I'm holding shift so that everything gets selected. And I'm going to just make sure it's that same shadow color. There we go. So we've got little shadows for each one of these. Let's create a shadow across the piece of cheese itself, across that back, yellow, I guess you would call it across the L of the chiefs. I don't know why I'm saying. Alright, so I'm gonna go to the pen tool. P is the shortcut key. And tools right here, we can click, make a point. It's going to be inside of this edge a little bit, maybe right in here. And then down here and click again. But we're going to click and drag, click, hold and drag, drag in the direction that that line was going. We're gonna need to drag pretty far. In fact, to get the angle that we want, we might need to zoom out a little bit for this. So what we want is for it to come down and across our piece of cheese. I can hold Option or Alt to edit this handle right here and move this back in. So now we've got this swoop across our cheese. I'm gonna go click down and around to just reconnect this point right there. Just like that. Now you can kinda see how we've created this shadowy right side of the yellow. Let's go ahead and actually get that shape out of this. I'm gonna click on the background cheese color, hold Shift, click on this new shadowy layer we created. And then of course Shift plus M is that shape builder tool. Here we go. We can do everything we've done before. We can just hold Option, subtract this shape, subtract this shape just like that. Now we have everything that was overlapping right here as a shadow. Let's go ahead and select the color we had as the shadow for the top layer of cheese. Now here's an interesting little dilemma, and this is fine. What we need to do is have this shadow actually underneath these colors of the holes, but over top of the cheese color itself. Well, this color, the main color of the hole is actually on the color layer. So there's no way I can have this layer which is completely on top of the color layer to be underneath anything on the color layer. So what I need to do is grab this shape and we're going to cut it out of here. We're cutting it, we're removing it and copying it now for whatever reason we had a duplicate shape underneath here, we can delete that as well. So these are just extra things that were on the shadows and highlights. So make sure all you have are the whole shadows. And then with that shadowy layer over here copied, I'm gonna go over to my color layer. We can lock our shadows and highlights, unlocked the color. We actually want this on top of the cheese color, but below all the holes. So somewhere in here we're going to paste it in place, Edit, Paste in Place, and just make sure to see it, put it on top of everything. So we're going to drag it underneath all the holes. And you'll see now that brings back the color of the holes on top of this shadow. Then we can adjust the properties of the shadow from an opacity standpoint, maybe down to like 60, just to have it be not quite as saturated, just pull it back a little bit so that shadow is not too harsh, if you will. I think that the outlines of these holes is a little thick. I don't mind this 15 outline out here, but we might reduce the outline of the holes. If we go back to our layers, we can lock what we don't want to edit. So we'd locked the color, locked the shadows, unlock the outlines. And I'm going to go ahead and click and drag because we should only be selecting the outline since everything else is locked. Hold Shift to deselect this outer outline. Then with these inside pieces, I'm not sure what point we should go to, maybe something like ten. So we've got 10 instead of 15 points. So I think that these, since they're smaller, since their interior pieces, they should be a little bit smaller than the outer outline. Last couple of things we'll do. We're going to add another layer I didn't talk about before. Let's lock the outlines. It hit the plus button for the layer. This one's going to be the background, right? So when you're finishing something, if you want a background, It's nice to have just a background layer. I'm going to create a rectangle the size of our art board just by clicking and dragging from top to bottom, we still have that outlines. What we actually want to do is press the eyedropper key and just snag this color right here. You could switch the outline to a fill and then change the field or whatever color you want. We've got that and then I think we'll add a little shadow of the entire piece just outside the edge of this piece of cheese. So to do that, I think I might go to the color layer, so it's locked the background go into the color layer. And I'm going to grab this background color shape. And I'm going to press Command or Control C. On that. We could create another layer underneath here, a lot more layers than I thought we would. If we just call this the cheese shadow lock, the color layer. We're going to paste this in place right on top of everything and just shift it a little bit down and to the right. We can use our arrow keys to kind of bump that into place. Then from there we'll go to Properties, change that fill to just a black and we can drop the opacity, maybe a twenty-five percent or something like that. And even, even less than that if you wanted to, something like 15% might even be better. Now we have a little shadow of our cheese itself. Now if you want to select all of this and move it around and rotate it, you'll want to unlock these layers. I'm going to keep the background lock so we don't mess with that. My unlock all of these and just rotate this, everything just ever so slightly. Kind of give it a little bit of character, lock these layers back up. And we created a cheese slice. 5. Flat Design Potted Plants: Here we are. I have a new document open. This document is 1920 by 1080. You can go to File New and just create a new document if you want to follow along 1920 by 1080, that's in pixels or points or whatever you so desire. I have a little bit of a background on this. It's just like a sort of a tan, very light tan color, but that doesn't matter too much. Let's get started. First things first, let's make a square. We're going to make the pot first, and that's gonna be with the rectangle tool. The shortcut key for that is m. So I'm just gonna make a little square out here. It doesn't have to be a perfect square, just this is gonna be the bottom of the pot. And we're gonna make it right about there, right about that size. Just guesstimating. And we want a color for this. I like to use the color, the actual color panel. You can go up to Window down the color, that's F6. It's going to pop out here. I'm going to dock it over here in my toolbar. And then it's this guy, we're not that guy, that guy, that guy right there, the color window. And so I like to double-click on this and then I can choose any sort of color. And I think that's sort of terracotta color will work well for these. I actually have colors already prepared. What I would do is once you pick your color, go ahead and open the swatches panel that's in Window down to swatches. And once you have that open, click this New Swatch button. And when you do that checkmark global swatch, that's going to create a swatch that you can change later and it'll change all the colors in your design that use that swatch, which is very nice for working backwards later when you want to change colors. So I have these already picked out. I have five of them created. I'll go ahead and show you the color numbers every time I go into this and that doesn't show you what it shows you, the RGB 237121107. But if you're looking for a hex code, we can go back over to this little color palette. Double-click on that guy. And we have EDI 976 B. That is the hex code for this little terracotta color. We're going to use this. We got this square created. I'm actually going to duplicate it by holding Option or Alt, clicking and dragging and holding Shift, dragging up. Notice all those pink lines, I'm gonna let go. There's a duplication of it. Those pink lines are smart guides are gonna be very handy. Go up to View, down to Smart Guides, command U or control. Use the shortcut for that. That's a lot of stuff. Alright, we got some of that out of the way. Now let's really create this thing. I'm gonna zoom in a little bit, That's Command Plus or Control plus. And we're going to scale this rectangle down because remember this is gonna be the top of our little pot. Will scale him down to somewhere right in there. And then I'm going to hold Option or Alt. And just on the double-ended horizontal arrows here, I'm gonna click and drag that out a little bit because there's a little bit of a lip to the top of these type of pots. Okay, cool. We're creating one of those Mario pipes so far. I'm gonna grab this bottom corner here with the direct selection tool. The shortcut key for that is a, once I have that grabbed, I'm going to hold Shift and hit my left arrow key just maybe one time over to get some of that little tapering off of the pot at the bottom. I'm gonna do the same thing with this right one. Just grab that point, shift right arrow key to bring those into each other. This is cool. I think this part is a little tall, so I'm going to remain on my Direct Selection tool. Grab both the bottom points just by clicking and dragging over both the bottom points. And how about we shift, click up with the arrow key. One-click. That looks a lot better to me. Let's round some corners. I'm going to click on my entire shape with the direct selection tool. You could also click with the regular selection tool if you wanted to. I'm going to find my Transform window up and window down to transform, that's going to pop out. And what that gives me is some corner options down here. As long as you have this still is a perfect square or rectangle with all 90 degree angles. You're gonna get this little corner panel. So for this corner radius, I'm going to do five points. And because this is linked, they're all going to change at the same time, which works for me. So we just round it all of those corners. You can also click and drag on these little dots, which we'll do that at the bottom of this pot. At the base of this pot down here, I'm gonna click and drag, grab those two points again and kind of pull those little dots in just a touch just to round off those bottom two corners. Now if you're in CS6, go checkout my rounding corners in CS6 tutorial, and you'll be able to round those bottom two corners in the same way as those who are updated. We have our little little pot thing, but I need a separation between the top and the bottom. We're gonna do that by creating a little bit of a shadow under the lip of this top of this pot. To do that, we're gonna go back to the rectangle tool. Remember that's M for the shortcut key. I'm going to create a rectangle. And it's just gonna be sort of haphazardly across this guy, but then I'm gonna pull him up so he locks into the bottom of the lip of the pot here. And once I do that, I'm gonna zoom in a little bit more. Switch to my selection tool. Grab the bottom of this with a double-ended vertical arrows and drag that up a little bit. Maybe into here. I don't want this shadow to be. I'm too tall. Just a little bit underneath the lip of this. That looks good. Now I'm gonna click and drag, grab both this rectangle and the bottom rectangle. See how they're both selected. Switch over to my Shape Builder tool, that's Shift M is the shortcut key. And then I'm gonna hold Alt on a PC or Option on a Mac. And that switches that arrow to a minus instead of a plus. And if I just click and drag through these extra bits, they're gonna get rid of them for me. There we go. Now we have a shape right over the top of this pot. And what we need to do with that guy is just change his color. So I'm gonna switch back to the selection tool. Make sure I have just this piece selected. Go back to my swatches, which I'm not sure which one that is. There we go. I'm gonna select my darker color here. I'm going to sort of darker tan. And that color is 1 ninth 311073 on the RGB scale and on the hex code scaled C16, E4, nine. You can input that and you'll get the same color if you want the same color. All right, so we've had a little shadow, Let's zoom out. There's our pot. I mean, it's looking pretty good so far. Last thing I'm gonna do is add an entire shadow on the right side of this as if there's a light source from the left coming down to the right, That's super easy these days. They used to not know this trick, but grab the Rectangle Tool, create a rectangle and make sure that it cuts or stops or locks in at the halfway point of your shape. Smart guides help you out here. Am I let go? There's a rectangle. Cool doesn't matter what color it is. Switch back to my selection tool, grab everything, go back to the shape builder tool that's Shift M. And now it sees everything which is really nice. I just want to get rid of this piece here. I'm going to hold Option or Alt for the minus and slice right through that and it's gone. There we go. We have a shadow on the right side. I'm gonna click on it, change its fill to a black color, then bring its opacity down to something like 10%. We just have a little bit of a hint of a shadow on that side. Sweet, I'm gonna grab all of this. Right-click, group it together, and now we have a pot. While we're at it, I'm gonna show you quickly how to create another style of pot. We're going to grab this, go to the Ellipse tool that's L for the shortcut key. From here I'm going to hold Shift and Option or Shift and Alt on a PC to kind of create it from the center out. I wanted to create it about the same height as this guy and actually we could lock it in. Well, I don't want to lock it. I'm going to create it a little bit further, a little bit taller than part on the left. Let go. Is a shape there. Switch to the selection tool, make sure it's selected the I key for the eyedropper tool, and I can just eyedropper this color. There we go. Now, I'm going to cut off the top and the bottom by creating rectangles again. And I'm going to create a rectangle that lines up with the top of that Terracotta pot on the left. Just like that. And I'm going to create a rectangle that lines up with the bottom of it. Just like that. Now I'm going to switch to the Selection Tool that is v for the shortcut key, grab everything. Shift M. That's my Shape Builder Tool. I'm gonna get rid of this slice here. So I can just slice through the top of those shapes and the bottom of these shapes. Here's another style of pot. Now I think that I cut a little bit too much off the bottom of this guy. I think the top should be a lot more open. So I'm going to undo with Command or Control Z. I'm just going to move this rectangle down a little bit and we're gonna see how much it cuts off there. I think that's better. I think it should taper a little bit. So we're gonna do the same thing. Just select everything, go to the Shape Builder tool and then hold Option or Alt and drag through this. And that looks a little bit better now we can scale this guy down some he didn't have to be so tall and then we can drag him down to match the bottom of this pot. And then what I think you could do is add a little bit of decoration to this guy. So I'm gonna grab my rectangle tool, just create a rectangle through here. On the top third of this, could bring him down just a touch. Then what we'll do with this guys, we can change his color. I like this sort of whitish tan color. The hex code for that guy is F9, easier, D7. Okay, so we can grab both of these, Shift M for the shape builder tool and then slice off these two side pieces by holding Option or Alt and dragging through them. So here's a different style of pot. We can once again M for the Shape tool, drag through this and create the shadow. If we just select everything, Shift M for the shape builder tool hold Option or Alt slice through that right side. We've got a shape for the right side of this. Once again, just change him to black. And 10%, there is our sort of rounded version of this pot. So we can grab this. Group them together. That's also Command or Control G. There we go. We have two styles of pots. Little bonus here. Now, we're going to create the leaves. Let's zoom out just a touch that's Command or Control minus come over here and we're going to create two circles with the rectangle, not the rectangle tool, with the ellipse tool, that's L for the shortcut key, I'm going to create a circle. I like creating them from the center out. So I hold Shift and Alt or Shift and Option created from the center out. It doesn't matter how big. We're just going to create two of these guys. So switch back to the shape or the selection tool. Grab this guy, hold Option or Alt, and we're gonna duplicate him out. And look at this carefully. The middle where these two cross, it's like a Venn diagram where they cross creates a leaf shape. So create the shape that you want, maybe something in here. Let go and now grab both of these with the selection tool and see how we have that shape in the middle. Well, you guessed it. We're going to use the shape builder tool that's Shift M hold Option or Alt, slice off these two sides and we have a leaf, so easy. Now this leaf, we want him to be a certain color. I have a swatch up here, just a light green. We have two leaves. I'm gonna delete this one. Sometimes it'll duplicate that for whatever reason we'll create two anyway, that doesn't matter. I created this little green color. If you want the same green color, that's going to be 87 B27, too. Cool. Okay, we need to create a shadow on the right side of this with maybe a darker green. Once again, the shape tool up here, rectangle tool M is the shortcut key. Grab that, make it so it's just over the halfway point, boom. And then V for the shortcut key, grab everything. Hey, do you think we should use the shape builder tool Shift, M, hold Option or Alt? I loved the shape builder tool. Just slice through that right side. Now you have a shape that is the size of half of this. So we're gonna change his color. I've got a swatch for that and look at that. There we go. By the way, this color, 50 to 6045. There you go, You guys, that's all the colors we're using. Now I have this leaf, I'm going to group them together so he's easy to move around group. And we can just bring him over here. And more than likely he's on top of our pot. Well, since we grouped this pot together, we just click on it, right-click go to Arrange, Bring to Front. That's also shift command right bracket or Shift Control right bracket. And we're starting to build this little leaf. We can, with the double ended arrows, we can always grab the top and bottom of this. I'd like to hold Shift to keep it in proportion. But you can also, I'll show you in a second where you could skew it if you wanted. But we have this guy so we can duplicate him to the left. Maybe duplicate it, or maybe just rotate him a little bit. You could bring him down some we could scale him down, some hold shift when you're scaling. And then we could do the same thing over to the right and just kind of make this pot, this plant, however you want him to look just like that. There you go. You can or you can group these guys with command or control G, they're grouped together. This guy's grouped together. You could group the whole plant together, Command or Control G with everything selected. Now it's one big group. You can center it up with your eyes. That's fine. We could, we could take this group here. Well, we'll just so if you double-click into a group, you're in the isolated portion of that group so you can work on the elements inside of it. I could grab this group, because now we have these two pieces inside of the whole plant group. I can grab this guy Command or Control C to copy. Double-click outside of it and you'll go back to your normal level. You're not in isolation mode anymore. You can command or control V to paste. And now we have this little plant again and we could always just bring him down instead of this guy here. He's on top. So we'll just grab the pot, right-click, arrange, bring to front. And now we have two different styles of plants and I can just bump him over with the arrow keys to position him Two different styles of plants in well, two different styles of potted plants. Same plant. Cool, wow, we did it. Lots of talking. Oh, I gotta go, but that's okay. I'm gonna do one more thing for you guys and that is, I'm gonna grab this guy, bring him over here. That's a duplication with the Option or Alt key. I'm going to ungroup him, That's Shift Command G or Shift Control G. And then we're going to, we're going to bring this group over here. I just want one of these leaves, so I'm gonna double-click, find this leaf probably Command C for copy or control C. Then I can just delete this group. I don't care about him anymore. I'm going to command or control V to paste. Now I have this leaf. Watch what happens when I don't hold Shift, it actually squashes the leaf down, makes them a little bit rounder. If I had something like this, I could make a little baby plant over here. Let's create another shape for the stem of this little baby plant. And he's just going to poke out of here. That might be a little too thick, That's okay. Something like that. That's what the rectangle tool again, that's shortcut key m. I want him to actually be the lighter color. So I'm going to use the I for the eyedropper tool and grab the lighter color green. I'm going to bring this pot to the front. Right-click arrange, bring to front. Now that's behind there. And I'm just going to drag this leaf on top, which he's not on top. So we need to bring him to the front as well, a range bring to front. Now I can rotate him to the side. If I hold Shift, it'll be 45 degrees and I can just kind of position him on there. I think the stems a little too thick, so we're gonna zoom in here. We can grab this rectangle, hold Option or Alt, and you can scale out from the center. Remember that? And I'm just going to make his stem a little bit skinnier. Maybe that's too skinny. Maybe we'll just make that a little bit thicker, something like that. Then we can bring these leaves and just duplicate them with Option or Alt. And we could rotate them, we could flip them actually, then rotate them. So the shadows are still on the bottoms of the leaves and we can create two little leaves on here. These leaves might be a little too big for that, but in their little too lemon looking, so we can always skew them back a little bit so they're a little bit more leaf shape that's holding option and skewing from the horizontal section of that. And then we can bump that over just to make sure he's over the top of this stem. If you want to, you can zoom in and just make sure that lines up with the side there and covers up anything we can zoom way in on this guy and make sure that sort of lines up there with the stem. Then we can zoom out. There we go. We have a little baby plant over there. That's a little bonus. Thank you guys for joining me for this lovely tutorial on potted plants. 6. Flat Design Flowers: I'm going to show you a new technique that Illustrator has implemented in which you can create flower shapes really quick and easy. This is a 1920 by 1080 pixel background or document. I have a layer open, that's the background layer and all it has on it is a rectangle shape as my background color, we're gonna be working on the layer above that as I've locked my background so I don't accidentally mess with it. So to start, we're going to create an ellipse out here or a circle. I'm going to change the fill color to a red. Something down in here works. And then we're just going to create a circle. I'm holding Shift to make it a perfect circle. Now once I have that made, what I'm gonna do is press it for the direct selection tool, that's the white arrow key up here in your toolbar. Click and drag to grab that bottom point and I'm going to pull it down a little bit. So this is my pedal shape. Now once I have that petal shape, I'm going to switch back to the regular selection tool shortcut key is v0. I'm going to scale it down by grabbing the corner here, holding Shift and Option or Alt. And we'll scale that down a little bit to maybe this size right here. Once I have that set, I'm gonna go up to object down to repeat. This is a new feature in Illustrator radial repeat. And that's going to allow me to repeat this object around and keep it editable. I can do a couple of things here. I can expand the distance from the center just by clicking this point on the circle. I can also expand or decrease the number of instances of that object. So like of that pedal leaf, It's not a leaf, It's a petal. So I'm gonna pull this down, so that closes in right there. And I think this will be our flower shape. What I'm gonna do now is actually click on this again, go up to Edit, down to Copy, and then Edit paste in front. Now I have a duplicate right on top of this guy. See, I've got two of them. So I'm gonna select the one on top only and I'm going to edit its shape. So if I double-click in here, I get to this petal and I can go over here, change the color of it. And when I change the color of this, actually changes the color of every one in the pattern here, the radial repeat, I can also adjust the size. So as I pull in from the corners and I'm going to hold Option or Alt to pull in from the center of that corner and maybe even drag it down. I can adjust the shape of this and create the interior of my flower really easily. Once I have that, I can actually double-click outside of this and this more of a gray area. It's going to kind of bring that back. If I click on this again now I can adjust how close or far from the center of these things are. I'm going to bring them in a little bit closer and then double-click on it again to adjust the size of this. As I'm working on this, I can actually make all sorts of adjustments and changes. I can rotate this around just to make sure it's still lines up these other petals. And we're going to do just that right in there. There we go. We have the inside of our flower and then I could create another circle out here holding shift, of course. And this will be the very center of the flower and we can make it like a dark steel blue color just like that. And if we grab this and we grab everything here all at once like that, I can go to my Properties panel and just center align everything to put that circle right in the center of this. You can then even add the stem of this flower just by creating a quick little rectangle, we can change the color to something like a natural green color. Could even press a key for the direct selection tool, pull in the corners a little bit to kind of round them and then center this up. And a real easy way to create leaf shapes is to grab that ellipse tool again, credit couple of circles holding Shift. And then I can just select this with V for the Selection Tool hold Option or Alt to duplicate it. And if you look when you select both of these, center shape is kind of like a leaf shape, maybe something like there. I've got them both selected. Shift M for the shortcut key for the shape builder tool hold Option or Alt, and just remove the edge pieces there. Now it removed it for both of them. So there's gonna be two leaves, which is perfect. And I can just rotate this one, put it here, maybe rotate this one a little bit and put them right there. And then we'll send these two guys to the back just by selecting all right-clicking, arrange. Send to back that quickly we have a little flat design flower if you want to add a shadow to it, we could create a rectangle that is black. Just build this rectangle so it covers maybe half of the stem and the rest of the flower. Select everything, hold shift in that shape builder tool and we can remove the outside of this. Now one thing to note here, because these are still editable, they have bounding boxes like that. So the shape builder tool actually doesn't work with them. So what we need to do is actually move this to the side, take these pieces, take these two radial pieces and I'm gonna duplicate them over by holding Option or Alt that keeps editable versions over here. But then over here what I could do is just select all this, go up to object, down to expand, and that expands the fill the object. Now I have all these actual objects, not just the editable radial. Repeat. Now we can bring this guy back over. Select everything, grab that shape builder tool on the outside of this hold Option or Alt to subtract that out. Now we have this black shape that's kind of the right half of our flower. And we could drop the opacity, but a lot times something like 10% over in the properties panel. And now you have a little shadow here on the right side of your flower. That's a really quick and easy way to create a flower here in Adobe Illustrator. 7. Flat Design Castle: Lo and behold, this is our castle right here. I'm going to keep this on the screen because I don't really feel like memorizing every little piece that I made. And we're gonna start the castle right over here. Let's build out the basic shape of everything. First, I'm going to use that rectangle tool. It's over here. Pretty easy. Shortcut key is M. And I'm going to use the basic swatches. I'm going to open up my swatch panel up here, Window drop-down, down to swatches that'll open up wherever it is for whoever you are, whatever system you're on, however updated you are. Okay. And I'm gonna pick three different grays I'm going to use. The lightest is gonna be the front and the darkest will be the back. So we'll start here for maybe this main piece right there. I do have the smart guides setup, but you don't necessarily need them. Just make your own size rectangle for the front. Eventually, this smart guides will help you line things up. You can go to View down to Smart Guides to turn those on. And those are gonna be able to pink lines. You see lining everything up just like that. We've got the base wall belt. Let's go ahead and build like a secondary tower. It'd be about this height right here, kind of arbitrary width like that. Then the one thing I want to make sure of here is that these two are aligned right to the bottom together. So I'm going to select them both open up my Alignment panel just like that. And we're going to use this guy here that's Vertical Align Bottom. That just makes sure that that bottom is exactly in place. We don't want any spaces here. You can zoom in and out with Command or Control plus or minus, just to make sure there's no gaps in-between these two shapes. And once you've done that, I'm gonna leave this guy here because we'll just duplicate him over later. Let's build out this, maybe this side here in this middle one. So I'm just going to duplicate this by holding Option or Alt on a PC and I'm going to drag it over to the middle, should be able to intersect. It's not working, so we're just going to drop it in there. I'm gonna hold shift and select both of these two pieces and then click on my main wall again, go back to that alignment panel and horizontal align center. That's going to center up this piece in the back. We're gonna make him bigger just by grabbing those double arrows on the top and dragging him upwards. And then I'm going to grab the double arrows on the side while simultaneously holding Alt or Option to drag that out like this. Maybe something right in here, looks good. Now you see this next pillar kind of goes over the side. This little, I don't know, tall point here, wherever you call that, that little block. So I'm going to duplicate this guy over holding Alt or Option and Shift to keep it in line. Remember, we want all this to line up on the bottom. Let's make him just a little bit shorter, something like this and here and then I'm going to pull him back a little bit until he's somewhere overlapping this guy here. Now it's hard to see everything, so we need some color separator. So let's make this a little bit darker. We're gonna go back up to that, fill that little swatch will actually make this one the darkest. So maybe over there, just a couple of spaces away. And then same thing with this guy maybe right in here. So we got light, medium, dark, just like that. Now these two guys there in front of our wall in the back don't want that, so I'm gonna grab them both. Right-click, arrange, send to back. Now we've got them all in the back. Let's go ahead and make our little blocks that go on the top of these towers. So I'm just going to, I mean, I like duplicating rectangles if I already have made. So I'm just going to duplicate this rectangle like that holding Alt or Option. And then I'm going to make it into a smaller little block just like this, like that. Then we need it to line up right there and line up right there. So basically the smart guides are going to help you, but in order to make sure these two are lined up perfectly, I'm going to make sure I select them both. Click on my big wall and then of course aligned to the left, just like that. Now it's not a big deal if it overlaps a little bit. In fact, that'll guarantee that you don't have any gaps. You might consider doing that if you want to. The next thing we're gonna do is just duplicate this over. I'm hold Alt or Option and Shift and kind of give myself whatever spacing I sort of want, just like that. Now what we're gonna do is duplicate again, going up to object, down to Transform. Actually it's called transform again, that's Command or Control D as a shortcut key. And when I click that, it just does that last transformation again, which was a duplication that we had done. I can hit Command or Control D and just duplicate that all the way across. I just keep pressing D. I think I'll probably stop it with that piece. And what I'll do now is bring this piece over until it intersects with the side there. I'm gonna make sure that it's completely on the right side there. Remember, just select them both and use that alignment tool. And then I'm going to select all of these pieces right here, just like that. Open up that alignment panel again Window Align if you don't already have it. I need to show more options. So you might need to click this hamburger menu, but once you do there, should see distribute objects. You may already see it anyway. Got to make sure it's aligned to selection M. I distribute horizontally and that's going to distribute all these guys evenly between the first and the last shape. Perfect. I like it. All right, Let's grab one and bring him up here. Same thing I'm going to intersect. And I want him to kind of bump down a little bit, shift click and then click again. We're aligning to that key object and aligned to the left. Same thing here. I'm going to duplicate him over, grab them, click aligned to the right, and then we need one in the middle. I can just drag him over. That little smart guide helped me intersect it. But if you don't, you can do the same strategy here again, select them all, go to your alignment options. You might need to show the advanced ones align mixtures to selection that selection and horizontal distribute just like that. Now that we have this guy is set up, I'm gonna go ahead and grab this entire piece, the blocks on top and the tower. I'm gonna hold Option or Alt and bring it over here to this side, just like that, it intersected perfectly. So now we've got that guy up here at the top. I'm going to grab these blocks, duplicate them on their own, and bring them up here on this tower. And I'm just going to let him go. There's a little gap here. That's the thing we need to fix. So click on it, right-click on this guy, then select him again. So we've got both these selected key object, left align. All right, I might make these a little bit smaller. Let's pretend like they're in the distance a little bit. The other thing we need to do is make sure they overlap some maybe two arrow keys down on that. And we're going to just select them all and bring them in this way. I want four up here with a little gap. So I'm gonna bring this guy over, duplicating alter option, make sure they're lined up. Remember just selecting both. We've done this a million times, align them to the right. I just want to make sure those line up perfectly. Those might be a little bit tall, so I'm gonna drag them down a little bit more or just click them down by selecting them using the arrow keys. And then last but not least, just grab them again. Use the eyedropper key that's I as a shortcut. And just select that color. Now you've got that tower in the background. Easy-peasy. All right, grabbing this and we're duplicating this whole piece over to the other side. Just so actually before we do that, I'm going to undo that Command or Control Z. I actually want it to come over to about the center of this block. So I'm gonna grab this whole piece again. And I'm going to just pull everything over and scale it to the center of that. Those smart guides helped me line that up. Now that I have that, I'm going to duplicate it over just like this. Alright? And of course it's on top, so make sure you grab that again. Right-click, arrange, send to back. We're getting the basic shape down. We're just about there. It looks like I totally screwed that up. Wow, we got ahead of ourselves so you don't need these pieces. Just go unless you want them. You actually totally could. Let's build it with them and see how it looks. See it. We did it up here. So let's go ahead and maybe grab these big blocks again, because even though this isn't the distance, we're gonna pretend like it's like the biggest block and actually reverse these colors. So what we can do is select this, use the eyedropper key. Sorry guys, I'm confusing you now. I know, but these towers are gonna be the darkest. This one is going to be that middle color and I lost it. So we'll go grab it just like that. Alright, and then these blocks up here are going to be the same color. There you go. All right, we're back on track. We got some extra pieces here. We're gonna see how it looks in the end. We may just get rid of them at the end, but that'll be okay. Same thing as always. Click both of these aligned to that key object and push that to the, to the left. I'm gonna do the same thing here. Just push him to the right, line him up, and then we're gonna duplicate this. I duplicated at once and I can do Command or Control D to duplicate it a couple more times, maybe once more. Then we're gonna grab all these guys, open up my More Options, Align to Selection good, and just distribute those so they're perfectly lined up on top there. Okay, so next up, let's do what do you want to do? Let's do, let's do the the rooftops there, the little pointy rooftops. I'm gonna grab the polygon tool. Click on my Canvas, make sure it's three sides, the radius we'll figure out later. Hit Okay, there we go. We've got a triangle. I'm going to use a color and let's find out what this color is. Let's just grab it. Actually know this is gonna be different. So just an orangey, orangeish color. I like to double-click this color swatch, sorry, no, my mouse was all over the place, but I like to double-click that color swatch. And we're going to pick something a little bit saturated in there, maybe something like that. There you go. This guy is just going to sit right on top here. So first thing I'm gonna do is make sure he's aligned to the center of my tower. So I'm gonna grab them both. You know, the drill horizontal lines center. There we go. It's perfect. All right. Is also going to be sent to the back. So we're going to right-click him, arrange send to back, just like that, and then he needs to be a little bit bigger in my opinion. So we're just going to click on him and maybe hold Shift and Option to make him bigger. I don't want him to go outside of my tower, but I can just sort of lift him up a little bit like that. That's okay. He's a little point is. So I'm going to actually bring this top point down and make that a little bit flatter of a little rooftop here, here. I'm not really sure how I'm liking this. So here's what we're gonna do. We're already going to get rid of these. Got rid of them. I'm actually going to make him the width of our tower. Just like that. Those smart guides helped me out there. And then we're going to place him on the very tippy top here. Just zoom in, make sure he locks in there just like that. There we go. He's right on top. Now we can just duplicate this guy over to here. Make sure it's aligned in the center of this one same thing. Select both, click one Key Object, Align, Center, and then get rid of these again. I know I made you do them before, but it was good. It was a good test. Right? Okay. Next, let's put this guy on top. I do know it looks okay up here, so we'll go ahead and do that. We're going to bring them up. We're going to align them to the center of this piece. You know how to do that now. And I'm just gonna make him larger by holding shift just like that. And I liked where I got this one to hit, looks like it hits just above this corner. So that's what we'll try to do. I'm gonna show you a little trick here. We're gonna make him actually bigger than everything. He goes just above the corner there. Alright, well I got these two little, too little side pieces that are, well, how about I just select everything that I see right here. Just select an OOP, just deselected, select everything I see right there. Go to that shape builder tool that we haven't even used yet, Shift plus m. And then on these little edges, I'm going to zoom in here so I can see right here, I just need to make sure it's highlighted. I'm gonna hold Option or Alt. The little minus pops up and I click on that and it goes away. Same thing with this side click and it goes away. So now we've cheated a little bit, but I like the way that looks better. Where are we at? Maybe we need maybe we need a door on this guy gonna make the door. Here we go. Next up is the door. Alright, so we're gonna do, we're gonna do a rectangle tool. And let's just put it right here to start with. And let's make it a darker brown color somewhere down in here. Okay. We're just going to eyeball the size of the door right here, maybe like that. Next thing we want to do is switch back to the selection tool shortcut key is V. Drag this down here. We're gonna build the door down here. We don't need to build him on top of everything zooming in so we can see, I actually need to select the top two points. The direct selection tool, this white arrow shortcut key is a right-click and select the top two points. Once I do that, I got this little corner widget things. I'm going to pull them in. This is in CC 2015, maybe 10,017 and later update if you can't do that, I highly recommend it. Otherwise, I have other corner widget videos for CS6 or anybody that doesn't have it. But the corner widgets, awesome, Look, I just pulled those in. Now we have a door shape just like that. Let's go ahead and add maybe the stroke around it. I'm gonna duplicate this out. You should know how to do that. We're going to flip this. We're going to flip the stroke and the fill just like that. And by clicking the little sloppy arrow over here, also shift X. Then I want to maybe up the stroke a little bit. Not sure how much we're just going to up it to 55. Looks pretty good for the size that we made this. We might actually do ten. I think we're going to do ten. I'll show you why here in a second. Next, I want to make this an even darker brown. So I'm gonna double-click that swatch or that little stroke swatch, drag this down. Be a darker brown hit. Okay. There we go. And then I believe we may get this wrong, but I believe I'm going to use the Scissors tool that's a C as a shortcut key. And I'm going to click on this anchor and click on this anchor. Now I believe once again that I have two separate pieces. I can grab this one at the bottom and hit delete, and it's gone. Now I have this little arch around the door. It's like that door frame and I can bring it back over the top of this door. And then I can click on the main part of the door, right-click arrange and just bring that to the front. Once I bring that to the front now that reduces that stroke to more of a five-point strokes. So I liked the five points stroke. Now half of a hidden up half of the ten. So that makes, leaves five. That makes sense, Makes sense to me. All right, next thing we're going to add a little shadow. Let's do all of our shadows. Let's just look at the castle before I get carried away, let's do all of our shadows on the right. We're going to add a rectangle out here. And not like that, I'm gonna make this rectangle just pure black. And then I'm gonna make it bigger than the door and I need it to intersect in the middle of the door. Now I'm running into a little problem up here. So here's what I do to fix that. I simply zoom in. Luckily, Smart Guides pretty much just look at what you can see. So now if I do this, it locks in right there on the middle of the door. We've just covered it up. Let's grab everything. Shape Builder tool is perfect tool for this. Over here, Shift M, you know, the drill option, click on the outside of this guy. And there we go. We've got a little shadow here. The door frame doesn't need a shadow, it's already dark. This is too dark, so we're gonna make it lighter by dropping the opacity to, I don't know if 10% works. We'll try 10%. Alright, let's make little door knobs now, these are gonna be the lightest part of the door. We're gonna use that ellipse tool. Shortcut key is l. Make a little circle. Just like that. I did it from the center out by holding Shift and Alt or option. And let's say we want our little door knobs be like this big. Now I'm going to grab the color of the store, a key eyedropper key. Grab the color, and I'm gonna double-click this and just make it a little bit lighter like that. Pretty easy. We can probably bring it on top of our door. It's sometimes hard to grab that, So just have to zoom in so I can get a better grasp on that piece. Just like that. What I'm gonna do is just pick a height, line it up to the center. And I'm going to use Shift and the left arrow key to bring it over a little bit. Gonna do the same thing after duplicating it over, lining up right there, shift right arrow key, bring it over a little bit. I have a feeling that's too far. So let's go back 1234, maybe like that. 1234. Just put these where you want them. Pretty much. There's two door knobs. There's our door. Let's group it together. So select it. All right-click group. And then we want it to line up to the bottom. Remember, so first things first I'm gonna grab both the main wall and the door. Click on the main wall, and then we're going to align it to the bottom and align it to the center, just like that. So we should be good at doors in there. Perfect. What's next? All right. I'm seeing something here. You guys. First off, I think there's four different colors here instead of three. The outside two towers are a different color. So what we can do is just grab that like that and let's go ahead and just work our way back here. So this tower I want to be, Let's see what we did before. This tower was the second darkest, this was the second lightest. I was totally off as we did this tutorial, but that's okay. All right, So second darkest, Let's make it this right there. Then we'll grab this one. And I for the eyedropper key, make it that right there. And now these two guys, these guys are going to need to be a little bit darker even so we go to those swatches and maybe grab this swatch here. There we go, Just like that. Alright, let's add some flags. Let's add some flags on the top. What I did do these flags, I went ahead and probably did a line segment tool and just found the center here you can start at the very top at that anchor point, made a little line segment. And just like that, now this line segment needs a stroke size on it. So I think two points might work. We're just going to put in to there. Yeah, that'll do that. We'll do. Next thing I want to do is this is like a dark brown and I think that's fine. You can make it just any dark color you want. But that stroke, I want to round the caps on that, which basically, whoops, whoops, whoops. Basically that turns the ends of them from a square to a nice round look that just adds a little finishing touch. Now the problem is that we are kinda on top of this guy. So I'm gonna select both here. And then actually the first thing I'm gonna do is grab this guy and send him to the back. He needs to be behind this to look like he's kind of popping out on top of it. So arrange, send to back. Next, I'm going to grab both select the triangle and center it up just like that. And then we just need to drop him down maybe with the arrow keys until he can't see the end of him anymore. So just, just like that right there, he just gonna come out at the top of this tower. We need, of course, a little flags. So let's just duplicate this triangle. Easy-peasy. I'm gonna rotate him holding Shift to rotate by 90 degrees. And this isn't quite a flag shapes, so we're gonna bring in the two edges just like that. Hold Option or Alt to bring in both at the same time. And that's about a flag shape right there. What color did I choose? Maybe the same color as the roof. That's fine. Let's go ahead and resize him so I can just grab the edge here and hold Shift while I do that, it's going to scale him down. And just kind of pick a size for your flag. Doesn't have to be anything perfect. And then I would just put him I would allow a little bit to pop out up top, but I would probably send him to the back as well. Make him go behind that. And there we go. We've got the little flag. That looks good. I can just grab him and duplicate him up here. Just like that, but of course he's a little bit off, so let's go ahead and bring him over till he lines up right in the center. He's not doing it, he's not cooperating. So we're gonna grab this flag posts, shift, click this guy again and just align handed the center. Now this flag, you could bump it over one if you want, just like that. And then we'll grab him. I'm just going to command copy and then Command or Control C, and then Command or Control V to paste, just to bring them over here. And we need the line him up against that. We'll have to zoom in, maybe grab both of these here, line them up. Did I forget to send that other one to the back? Will see. You guys send this guy maybe to the back. Then I would send this flag to the back as well. Like that. There we go. Is he on top? No, That works. Okay. Let's zoom back out. Now we've got little flags on top. Okay, what's next? We've got windows. Look at these windows. They look a lot like the door, don't they? Let's make more doors that turn into Windows rectangle tool, maybe this size, we're just guessing, just like that. I need to pull in the top two corners. So a for the direct selection tool, this tutorial is a lot longer than I expected. That's okay. Okay. Pull these in here just like that, and then let's make these that darker door frame color. Maybe that's not the right color. I can select. It didn't seem like I can get it very easily because it's underneath there. So what we're gonna do is not have this be 10% opacity. We're just going to select a color here. I don't want, I don't really want it to be all the way black. So let's maybe do some super dark brown just like that. Okay, now these windows too big, so let's make it a little bit smaller. Not selecting that correctly. There we go. I have no idea what's going on. Do we have the Direct Selection Tool selected here? Whoa, buddy. We have actually what's going on here if you're running into this issue, go out to the Transform panel. I believe we have an issue with these not being checked, so we need to scale corners, scale strokes and effects. I would have those checked. Now, what can happen? There we go. Okay, so the corners weren't scaling, that's what was happening. We can put these windows in here. You can choose your size. Looks like I went a little bit bigger than this, maybe something like that hold Shift to keep it in proportion. And then I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate this out. It doesn't really matter where it lands over here. If I select both right-click and group those together, this is a little group. I'm going to Shift click the main wall, click the manual and we're going to align to the main wall just like that. So bump them now I know there are exactly in the center of each other. I can go ahead and get rid of that group by ungrouping. And now I can grab these guys and just place them on your towers around here, make sure they're aligned to the center. You can just place them wherever you want. I'm not sure if that's aligned to the center, so I'm gonna grab that and make sure it's centered up. Good. I'm putting one on each of these big towers. I don't know if that's centered. So same thing just there. It wasn't so just select both and center it up with your alignment panel. And I'm just gonna go ahead and do that over here. And I'm gonna worry about trying to eyeball it. It looks like I did three on this big one. So let's try it. Let's try doing that. We'll do 123. I'm gonna grab them both or grab them all. Go. And first I'm gonna align to selection to make sure they're exactly three in a row, spaced out perfectly. Then I'm going to group them. If I select them all again, I'm going to group them. And we're gonna select this back object and center on that. There we go. So we've got the windows all centered. We're looking pretty good. Let's, let's add, let's add some shadows. And the last thing we'll do is add the little bricks, little texture and then the grass shadows next. We probably could have already done this, but that's okay. We've got, we've got these triangles. Okay? What I'm gonna do with these triangles, these two are gonna be easier. We're going to grab the rectangle tool again, just make sure it's completely black here. No, not like that. I don't want that selected. I need the rectangle tool and then I need my swatch to be a darker color. Police. Then we're just going to build this out. So it's exactly in the center of this triangle. Select a triangle, select the rectangle shape builder tool, and then just hold Option or Alt to get rid of the outside of that. Now we have this triangle right here, and what we can do is drop that to about 10%. You got a little bit of a shadow there. That works. All right, same thing on this side. In fact, what we could do is just grab this shadow, duplicate it over and let it line up with the center of this guy. We know those two are the same. That'll work out. This is an up here we'll do a little bit different. We're going to bring him to the front first, arrange bring to front. And then I'm going to use that rectangle tool. This part will be the same, but I just wanted to bring them to the front and then we'll push him back, line them up right there in the center, grab both, and then click. I don't need to click on anything. We just do that shape builder tool. Get rid of the outside. There we go. Go ahead and do my opacity while we're here. 10% could do 15 or self you wanted. I'm gonna grab both of these right-click and group it. And I'm gonna right-click. And actually I'm going to grab the flag and this whole shape here, right-click, arrange, send to back. It goes beneath everything again. There's the shadows for us. There. We'll go ahead and build out a shadow for down here. I believe they're the same note there are different. So we're gonna build a rectangle that is once again black and it goes just a little bit up up our main wall like that. We're going to bring this door. This is two pieces. This is one piece. So we're going to bring the door to the front. Bring to front. We actually don't need to use the shape builder tool here. I can just grab this piece and lock him in like that. And then run that opacity again down there. Can just duplicate this piece over like that, make sure intersects. And then we can grab this corner and resize it. I'm going to bring this shadow up a little bit since this guy is taller. And then we can do the same thing on this side over here. Just duplicate him over to this tower, just like that. And then I think I added a little shadow behind here. So we can just grab this piece again. I like just using these rectangles that we already have. What I'm gonna do is just kind of placed him up here, right-click this main building and we're going to align them to the left. And then let's zoom in a little bit and bring him over to the right side. Like that. Then what we can do here is select everything except for this tower. So hold Shift, Shift-click, Shift-click, Shift-click. That should be this wall. I'm going to bring this wall to the front, arrange bring to front. There we go. That just sits that shadow back there. I think I want to drop this down a little bit. Maybe something like that and I think that's a little dark. So let's just make this 1, 5% back there. I just want the slightest hint of a shadow back there. All right. What does that leave us with? Are we onto the texture guys? Are we almost there? It's texture time and the little Greenpeace, let's add in the world Greenpeace here at the bottom. That piece is pretty easy. Rectangle, build him so just sticks out a little bit on either side. Now we can select that main wall will center it on that. So we center on this whole thing. All we really need here is a color. The other thing I'll do here is to click on him. And up here in my Transform panel, if I go to more options, I actually have the corners right here they can select. So I could do like a corner radius of five and see what that looks like. Yeah, I could just round these corners a little bit and maybe I'll do three just so it's not as sharp of an angle. And then all I have to do is click on this guy, double-click, go into the greens and select a green that I like. I like something maybe in the middle here, maybe a little darker like that. That's a little hot about something like that right there. That'll be good. There you go. Something like that. Okay. Little aqua, whatever, kind of like this color better. Well, actually it's gonna change here. I'll show you how to recolor everything here at the end. Okay, guys, last but not least, it's pretty obvious what these are. These are just little, little rectangles, but what I want to do is start a new layer. And it looks like I have a color overlay layer that I've already screwed up. So what I wanna do is just add a new layer here. I think I've put this entire castle on my color overlay layer. That's okay. This will be pretend like you just started and you probably only have one layer. And this one layer is going to be the castle layer. Then this layer is going to be the texture layer. So I'm gonna go ahead and lock everything else. I cannot move anything anymore. This texture layer where I'm going to build these little, little texture blocks. Once again, these guys are just rectangles, pretty simple. Build out a little block, whatever size you want, zoom in on him. I think I'm gonna start with just a gray and see what happens here like this gray. I think what I can do, I'm not sure if there's a blending opacity that I can do. We'll see if it works. I'm gonna pull in these corners just to touch just like that. So they're a little bit softer blocks. Going to bring this over here on top of this guy. Now, what I did was I made these always be a little bit lighter than the shape that they're on. I'm gonna start with something, a color that's lighter than this wall. To begin, let's go back to my Properties panel. I'm going to fill it with something like this. I'm gonna go ahead and test this out. We're gonna duplicate this guy onto each wall. Just random spots. I'm going to select them all and see what happens when we go to that opacity and we change it to something like a soft light. I think that works out to where even though it's the same white color at the soft light helps change that. The brightness of it, depending on the darkness of the tower that it's on. I can drop the opacity as well to maybe like 50% or something. Maybe we'll do like 70%. So we can still see it like that. It's all one color, which makes it a lot easier than the first way I did this. And you use the soft light by clicking on Opacity, just use the soft light blending mode and then you can drop the overall pasty a little bit. And now all you're doing is just making this texture so we can duplicate these pieces out. I may even speed up this section, but I'm just using Alt or Option to duplicate these different pieces and build them on top of each other. I like keeping the same same relative spacing and sort of centering them up. So if you ever offset them, remember the offset like this where you have two and then you put one in the center and you would do two more. Kinda keep that in mind as you're building all these, all these little shapes out. Remember, it's easier to zoom in. It's easier to zoom in on this and grab these blocks than it is to grab them by looking at it like this. We'll just speed up the rest of this here. While I create the rest of these blocks on this layer, and I'll see you on the other end. Okay, So we've placed these blocks around. I stopped short of doing the rooftops because they're a little bit different, but place these blocks on, I think they're a little bit too visible, so I'm gonna drop that back to 50. Want them to just be kind of like a little bit there so you get the sense of the texture. Now, the only difference here with the roof, the rooftops, the little piers up here, is that these guys should be probably a little bit smaller. So I'm gonna grab duplicate some blocks and just make them a little smaller up here. But nevertheless, we're going to just do the same, same type of type of thing up here with these. We're just going to bring these around like that. Maybe I'll, oops, actually, I should probably duplicate this one because it should be smaller. Maybe like this right here. Doesn't really matter. I was doing the same thing. I'm sitting there talking to myself saying, this should go over here. Maybe just kinda piece it, pieces together like that. Maybe we'll put one extra one up here. Just like that. Then we can just duplicate these little segments. I was doing a lot of that where I've just duplicated segments. I'm gonna keep them away from the middle of the shadow. I don't want them to get sort of confused or anything Just like that right there. Now these actually, I wouldn't mind going ahead and shift, selecting them all and dropping those back even more and opacity, maybe they like thirty-five percent. There we go You guys, we built the castle, Holy macaroni, That took a way longer than I expected, but we did it. Last thing I told you to wait for this. This is how I might color like re-color something. You notice how this is a little bit different color. Well, guess what? It's not really, there's just a layer on top of it. I'm gonna go up to my layers panel and we're going to unlock the castle layer. So I've got this castle layer and this texture layer on top of that, we're gonna make a new layer. I'm gonna call this Color Overlay. Color Overlay. This is just gonna be the last little piece to the puzzle. I'm gonna make a big old rectangle just like this, over the top of everything. Now this rectangle, I actually want to select everything underneath it and the rectangle itself. So we've got everything selected right there with that big rectangle, the color overlay rectangle using the shape builder tool, I'm going to hold Option and just minus out, subtract everything. That's not the castle. Now, we're going to hide the castle layer or not hide it, but we're going to lock it, lock castle, locked texture. Now we just have this little color overlay. These flags. I'm gonna make sure we grab them all just like that. With this all selected. I want to change this code. Let's say I want this to be a warmer tone. Let's go down here into the oranges. We're going to select an orange just l 8. Flat Design Balloons: Here's our cute little balloons. They each have their own little Smiley faces and their own little colors. We're going to just start a completely fresh document File, New. We're going to make it 1920 by 1080 because that helps them make thumbnails out of this. Alright, let's start by creating a background. So going over to my rectangle tool, the shortcut key for that is M. I'm just going to click in the corner of my art board and make this thing 1920 by 1080 the same size as my art board. I want to get rid of this stroke so you could just click this little slash there to make none. And then that's I click on my fill to make it the foreground of what I'm working on. I can double-click on it. And we're gonna go down to something in the tan region. So a little bit more saturation, something right in there, hit Okay. And there we go. That's a little yellow for my liking. So let's pull it back away from the yellow a little bit and hit Okay, we got a little bit warmer tone. Now we're going to go up to layers. I'm going to double-click the name of this layer, call it BG, create them a new layer and lock the background and makes sure the new layer is selected. We're going to build everything on top of the background. That way we don't accidentally move the background around. Woof, That's a lot of rounds. L is your shortcut key for the ellipse tool, Let's make a perfect circle holding shift, something like 350 by 350 around, around that size. And then we're going to create the color of our little balloon. Double-click on our fill. Go to our color picker. I think something I want like an orange, red. Something right in here might be good, maybe something like that. And then I also want a stroke around this guy. So I'm gonna double-click the stroke. I'm gonna make it like a really, really deep purple, something around here. If you look at this little b right here in the HSB, I don't even know what these stand for, but I'm pretty sure this one's black. I'm looking at the percentage and I think I want him around 25 or so, somewhere around there. And then just in this region hit Okay, and we have a stroke around our shape. Switch over to my Properties panel and check out that stroke. I don't remember how wide it should be, maybe ten points. That looks pretty good. And then I'm going to click the stroke properties and we're going to align it to the outside. Now here's where I would've stopped in the past. But instead of a perfect circle, we're going to warp him just a little bit. It adds a little bit of cuteness to this. All right, I'm going to grab not that ellipse tool again, I'm gonna grab the direct selection tool. The shortcut key for that is a. I'm gonna click and drag over that bottom point. And I'm gonna use my arrow keys to just bump him up a little bit, just to kind of flatten out the bottom of my balloon. Then I could grab some of these handles and pull them out just to kind of warp the shape. If I click on an anchor point, I'll see all the handles around it. I can grab them and kind of just warp this little guy around. So he's not just a perfect circle. That's where it starts to get a little bit more of that illustrated effect. Alright, so we've got this sort of shape here are a little blob. Let's go ahead and create the, I guess I don't even know what the opening to the balloon here at the bottom. We're going to do that by creating a square with the rectangle tool hold Shift. And then once we have that square, I believe what we're gonna do is use the pen tool, which is P. And then just click on one of the anchor points to cut that off. And then I'm gonna go over to the stroke options again and click on the corner around join so that the corners aren't so sharp. And then I'm gonna rotate him, hold Shift 45 degrees. And that's gonna be that's gonna be the other way. So we want the point facing up. He's a little large. So what I want to do is just shrink him down. Of course. Then the other part you can use the scale tool here to pull in without holding anything. It goes ahead and sort of keeps in line could hold Shift if you want to squeeze in those corners. So it's not maybe the widest of shapes. Something zooming in and out might help there. Alright, maybe like that also if your stroke is messing up when you're scaling things, so you scale that down and the stroke is real tiny now too, all you have to do is go up to your Transform window, Window drop-down down to transform and make sure that scale, strokes and effects is not selected for this because I want that stroke to stay at ten points no matter what I do. Back to this, all we have to do with this guys, just pull that right up into there. We can zoom in a little, that's Command or Control plus and minus and kind of pull them down. I think he's got to be just a little bit smaller in there, maybe, something like that just so he's right at the bottom, but make sure he doesn't overlap too much, so just bump him down so we can't see the top portion of that triangle. There you go. You've got the bottom of the balloon that works out pretty well. Alright, so what else do we have here? Let's go ahead and do the little Smiley face. I'm gonna go ahead and draw an ellipse L key again and make just a tiny little circle, something in this size. Then we got to adjust this. I'm going to click this little flip, flip stroke and fill. Then I'm going to make sure the stroke is selected and hit None. So now we just have one little black dot. We can go ahead and make the Smiley face out here. If I hold Option or Alt, It's gonna click and drag and it's going to duplicate that. I'm going to zoom in just a touch. Now, I'm going to create an ellipse, but I'm going to go ahead and swap the fill and stroke. So I just have this stroke. I'm going to create a little ellipse here, hold Shift to keep that in line. And this is gonna be his little smile. So we basically made, made a circle. I want to make sure it's ten points on that stroke. And then what we can do is simply delete out the top point. Grab that direct selection tool, hit the Delete key on the top point, and there we go. Now, one thing to finish this off though, you see how it's just a jagged edge there at the top, we can go over to the stroke options again. And on the cap, we're gonna do a rounded cap that's going to round off the ends of our stroke. I think the smile is a little bit too big, so I'm going to scale him down just a little. I'm holding Shift and Option or Alt with my selection tool. Always going back to that selection tool. And we're going to bring that smile right up in-between those eyes. Somewhere around here. Maybe we'll make those eyes just a little wider. This part it doesn't, things don't have to be perfectly centered all the time, especially for an illustration that adds a little bit of character to this dude. Also, if you're not centered on the eyes, it just looks like he's looking one way or the other. All right, so let's go ahead and group this guy together. So Command or Control G to do that. So now it moves as one layer and we can just drag him on top of our balloon. There he is. He's got a giant head. We can always scale this stuff up and down if we would like. So we've got a little Smiley face. We got some eyes and beady eyes on there. Let's go ahead and work on the highlight and the shadow here. I'm gonna create another circle. This one I'm going to fill with white, like a pure white. Not fill, but I'm going to add the stroke as a pure white groups that ellipse tool create a circle and go ahead and create it on top of your guy. Hold Shift there. And we'll take a look at this. I'm gonna make sure he's also ten points stroke. If it didn't automatically do that, I'm going to align him up to the top here. I'm concerned with putting this highlight up here. And I'm just going to use my pen tool to add anchor points to this path where I want my highlight to go, something like that. And then we're gonna have a shorter one. Somewhere between here. Like real short like that. Now what I can do is zoom out on this guy and start to delete out the other anchor points on this circle. And so I can just use my direct selection tool, shortcut kids a click on other anchor points and start deleting them. Just like this. Just click and delete what we don't want here. I don't want this one. Let's see. I've got one. I want I want there to be a break in-between these two. So I'm gonna pull out a different tool. It's the scissors tool. Shortcut key is C, and I'm going to cut it on this anchor point and cut it on this anchor point. And then I can use my selection tool, click in-between and delete out that sometimes it leaves a little extra point. You see how it's got an extra points selected here. All you have to do is delete that as well and you're good to go. So now we've got our little highlight. This guy makes sure that those caps are rounded. Mine automatically did it, but if yours didn't, make sure they're around it. And then what you can do is just grab both of these and you can start to rotate them around to make them fit in here. And I'm pretty sure in my other one, I upped the stroke to maybe 15 just to give it a little bit more. And these guys are a little close together. It's a feel thing here. Just pull him apart a little bit, maybe rotate these around just a touch more. And then I would take the opacity of both back. I don't remember, maybe 50% or so, just like that. So he's got a little, little, little highlight up there. Let's create a shadow. And to do that, I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate this entire piece. I'm selecting everything, holding Option or Alt and dragging it out here just like that. So this guy, I'm going to use him to create the shadow and I'm going to delete out what I don't need. I don't need the bottom, I don't need the face and I don't need the highlights. I just need the blobby circle, balloon shape, body thing. Alright, so create another ellipse this time, lag that. And honestly you don't have to hold Shift here. Oh, you know what, We're not gonna do that. Sorry. We're going to use his body to create a shadow. On his body. Does that makes sense? All right. So go up to the selection tool. We've got him right, hold Option or Alt and create another duplicate and just bring him out here. I'm going to swap the fill and stroke just so I can see it. And then if stroke is selected, get rid of that stroke just like that. Now I can see where my shape is. I'm going to make him a little bit bigger so it's kind of scale him up. I'm holding shift on that, maybe a little bit more. What I'm looking at is the negative space here. So I'm looking at the space that's leftover of my balloon guy shape here. I'm just kind of scaling him up to try to find the right sliver to make a shadow. Once I find that, select both, and then use the shape builder tool that's Shift M as a shortcut key. And we're going to hold Option or Alt until that little plus becomes a minus and we're just going to swipe through here. You can also just click on them. Now I have this piece over here. What I can do with this piece is do the same thing, swap the fill and stroke and then click on the Stroke, get rid of it. We'll click too many times. Just want to get rid of that stroke. I just want this type of sliver right there. Bring him over on top of my balloon over here. We're just going to line him up, zoom in, just kinda line him up in here so that he completely covers out to the stroke edge, something like that works. I'm going to click on him and take him down to maybe twenty-five percent is where I'm I'd taken. Now we've got a little highlight and we've got a little shadow on the side of our friend here. I think I'm going to take us take his face, facial features down just a little bit. He's got a nice, nice, big round heads. So cute. We need the little, little strings string here that he's connected to. So let's open up our pen tool shortcut key is P. Make sure that we have just the stroke selected, and this is always the same Blau we've been using the same black the whole time. That stroke weight is gonna be five points, ten points, It's gonna be ten points. Make sure the stroke options, we got rounded cap selected and then we're golden. Now I'm just going to create out from the center of this little triangle, his, his little string. I'm gonna click and drag in the direction that I want to go. I'm also going to hold shift a little bit with that. That's going to influence my curve out here. And I just want like a little, little rounding maybe to the curves. So something like this. And then maybe something like that, just like that. And then if it doesn't look like look at this, it doesn't look the best. Okay, so I'm gonna hit a my direct selection tool and select this anchor point. I can start to mess with these handles just to make this a bit more fluid of a curve, I can also move this anchor point if I want to just adjust how much these handles influenced the line. Either way, that looks, that looks a little bit better. So you just want to make those curves nice and smooth. And it'll, it'll look pretty good. It's not a scientific process here. All right. I want to send this guy to the back obviously. So right-click him, arrange, send to back. You guys. We've got a balloon. We did it. You made a little balloon. Let's change these colors. All right, so we've got this balloon. I'm gonna grab him. I'm actually going to probably Command or Control G is going to group them together. You can also right-click and go to group. It'll be right there. That's ungroup. Group will be there. Alright. We're gonna duplicate him hold Option or Alt, bring them out here. There we go. Got to look at. Now let's just double-click into them until you get to the inside this layer group now, and now we can select each individual piece. We can select his head and we can change the color of his balloon of this little bloom guy. What? Let's make this guy green. Just drag this around, find a green that you like. If you keep it in the same spot, it's going to have some similar tones to the, all the colors are going to have a similar feel to them. So I'm just gonna keep that in the same spot. Just adjust this hit. Okay, and there's a little green color. If we double-click in there, well, not double-click in there. Let's click out. Alright, I got the group, double-click into him and then click the head. We can double-click on that fill. And before you exit this, you can always grab this little hex code at the bottom. Copy that, and then go out to this little piece double-click and you can paste that hex code just to make sure you have the same color. And then you can always go into Window down to swatches. You can always add a new swatch. So we're adding that color as a new swatch. And if we check mark global and we hit Okay, now it's a global swatch. Now what I could do is click on that button and click the global swatch. So these are both a global color. I can double-click on that global swatch at anytime just like that. And I could change his color if I wanted to. I can hit Preview to see how it's going to preview. If you want those similar muted tones, just keep this RGB kind of in the middle. So like if it goes from here to here, keep them, keep them in here, and find your colors and you'll still have the muted tones that won't be too saturated, too bright, anything like that. I still want them to be green though. There we go. We've got a green balloon. We're going to drag this guy out and we're going to make him blue. We're going to find a nice blue that we like. I'm going to copy his little hex code. Then I'm going to click on this little triangle. Is there a name to that part of the balloon? I don't know what that is, but it's little triangle DoubleClick is out. Now the thing I did is you can go back into either of these by double-clicking into them. Since they're grouped together, you can pull their little face to the side so it looks like he's looking left. And we're going to click into him and he's looking right. Just like that. Then we can just sort of put them behind each other. I'm going to right-click this group, arrange send to back. There he is. We can rotate them a little bit, make them so he's like that same thing with this guy. Make sure he's in the back, arrange send to back. Just like that. And then we can rotate him just a little bit. So he's kinda he's kind of going out that way. And then I did tie these strands together so I could go back into, if I double-click into this group and use my direct selection tool, that's a, I can grab this point here and bring it way over. Grab the handle on accident there. It's usually easier if you zoom in a little bit so you can grab these small little points. And so he's going to come over, he's going to come over just like that. We just click on these points, grab the handles. I want him to come out a little bit and then come over there. And then I can double-click and use the selection tool to go inside of this guy. And we kind of intertwine his little little strings so you can just come across there like that. Maybe, maybe something like that. Then the blue the blue feller, he's gonna come, oh, you don't have to double-click in there. If you use the direct selection tool, you can actually just click on his little strands so you don't have to double-click in, just click on the strand with the direct selection tool. I'm going to pull him way over here. I think like this. And he's just gonna, he's gonna sort of loop around these guys here. Maybe something like that. We'll just shrink that handled down. So I'm just clicking and dragging the anchor points, shrinking the handles down, just make it look all nice and flowy. Just like that. There we go. 9. Flat Design Bunny: On the right-hand side you'll see the Properties panel. We're going to keep that over there because we're going to use it quite often in this tutorial. But what else I want to pull up is under Window down to swatches. We'll pull open our swatches panel, and this one's already opened here. So I'm actually going to pop this out with the double arrows. And you can see we have swatches open here. We're also going to open up underneath Window, the color panel. And we can drag this color panel underneath the swatches, as long as it highlights in blue, it's going to put it under there. And then if we hover between the two panels, will get a double ended arrow that we can use to adjust the height of our panels will also pull in the alignment panel because we'll be using that as well and we will want that to be available to use anytime. You can also pull out the transform panel and align that here in our document. And then what I would do is actually probably bring the color panel all the way up below swatches. That way these two color options are closest to each other. I might keep colored guide with that which can nestle in here if we just drop it in on top of this color dialogue box. So as you can see, we can quickly create our own workspace. And we can actually go up to window down to workspace and save as new workspace, your own version of this. So I might call this the pixel and brackets workspace and I can hit Okay, and I can always come back to that workspace that always has the setup that I need for working on my document. There's the hex codes on the right for each of these colors, what I would do is create global swatches out of each one of these with a color selected. I can go to in my swatch panel, this new swatch icon, it's going to pull up a dialog box. This dialog box, first off, since I'm creating a digital artwork, I'm going to select RGB, but I'm also going to check mark global. Once I do that, I would normally hit okay. But I already have them made over here. I have these global swatches. The word global basically means like, I can re-edit these and change them to any color that I want it anytime and anywhere. I've used that swatch, It's going to actually update that color. So let me show you really quick. If I double-click on that, I can change that color here. I can click Preview and notice how it changes the entire color of my bunny. Just with that one swatch. That's a pretty powerful way with global swatches to be able to go back and re-edit colors after you've applied them. So we're going to jump in here and just create a new bunny. And we're gonna start with the head, and we'll grab the pen tool. The shortcut key for the pen tool is of course P, which is pretty easy. Now with the Pen tool, if you're new to Illustrator, what I want you to think about is you can click and add points. And that's going to create a line. And then you can either add a stroke to that line or fill or both that shape. If you click and drag, it's going to create little anchor points with handles. Now these handles are essentially telling Illustrator, Hey, I want to send this line out that way. And I want the strength of the influence of this curve to be stronger or less strong depending on how far you drag out the handles. When we do that. And then we go click on our next point. You'll notice that this line is already curved. And I can click and drag and do handles again. I always think about this. I always think about when I'm using the pen tool, just point in the direction that you want to go next. That's how I remember how to use it with where my line is going. We're going to redo this a little bit here. Just Command or Control Z to undo. I'm gonna click and drag and pull those points out. If I hold Shift, it's going to lock it into 45 degree increments, going to pull that out. And we're just going to create the head of the bunny. Just like this. We're going to create about four different points. Doesn't matter how it looks. You can close that shape by clicking on the last anchor point and read, dragging out those handles. And then if you've created sort of a messed up shape here, the way that you can go in and re-edit those is by clicking a or pressing a on your keyboard, which is the shortcut key for the direct selection tool up here in the left, the Direct Selection Tool, when you click on an anchor point, allows you to move that anchor point around and also re-edit the handles of that anchor point. With that, you can create a shape here that actually looks like the head of the bunny rabbit. And we can create a more organic shape. It doesn't have to be a perfect circle or oval shape. We can sort of pull out these anchor points. I'm using that direct selection tool until we get something that looks sort of like a circular head shape. Once we've got that, we're going to create the eyes. I'm gonna go over here and grab the Ellipse tool by clicking and holding on the Rectangle tool shortcut key for the ellipse tool is actually L. I'll make sure I have my darkest color selected. We're going to create a little circle here. I'm gonna hold shift and it's gonna be really small. So we're just going to create it, maybe that size, I'll zoom in with Command or Control plus, just so that I can grab that circle a little bit easier. We're going to bring that in over the top of our bunny rabbit. And In his right eye. Now to duplicate this, we're going to hold Option or Alt on PC, and then we're going to drag that out. We can also hold Shift at the same time to keep it lined up. You see that pink line that is a smart guide. Our smart guides are turned on up here in the View drop-down, down to Smart Guides, really useful to sort of align things and line them up. And I think keep, keep your designs pretty even. Alright, so once we have both those eyes, one of the things that I did to sort of make it a little bit cuter was cut out a little circle shape and the bottom of the eyes. We're going to create another circle here. Like so, this one you don't have to hold Shift on. I'm going to use that white color. Use the selection tool shortcut key is V, and bring that over the top of the bottom of the eye. Just like this, we're just going to cut out a little bit of that hold shift and select both this circle and the eye. Then we're going to use my favorite tool, the shape builder tool. Over here in your tool panel is two circles with a cursor Shift M is the shortcut key. Once I have that selected, these two objects selected. Notice how it can see, I'll zoom in here. You can see every little overlap here. If we hold Option or Alt, my cursor now has a minus next to it, normally a plus holding that button, it has a minus click and drag through everything we want to get rid of, which would be the bottom two pieces. Let go. And now we have a little I cut out. We can do the exact same thing over here. Press L for the circle tool or ellipse tool. Create another ellipse like so. Shift over to that selection tool shortcut key is V, and do the same thing on this side. We have to select both of them, which will click out of here, click and drag with that selection tool to select everything. Notice how we get the head as well. So I'll just hold shift and click on the head that'll deselect it. Shift M for that shape builder tool hold Option and drag it through here. Now, I'm gonna go a little slower here in the beginning for some of these new tools, especially if you're new in Illustrator. And then I'll sort of just create this as we go along, letting you know what tools I'm using, I won't be quite as detailed. So you can go back to the beginning if you need some help going through the tools. Because I don't want this to be 45 minutes long. We're going to try to keep it a little bit concise. So we have our two eyes now, one of the other things I did was add a little blush underneath the eyes. I use this pink color over here. Once we grabbed that, we can grab the Ellipse tool again and just add a little oval shape underneath the eye. Press V for the Selection tool hold Alt or Option, click and drag that over and bring it underneath the other eye. So we have two little, little brushy type of things underneath the eyes. Now we can always move these around at anytime. I can click, hold Shift to click on both of these and select them both and move them around by clicking and dragging. As we go along, we'll sort of move, morph and readjust are shaped to be the right bunny shape. It's a little hard to design it correctly just on the fly. So we'll take a step back from our design and a little bit, look at it and maybe make some adjustments. Let's go ahead and make the nose and mouth. So we'll grab that pen tool again. Shortcut key for that is P. And I'm gonna make it outside of the head shape. So grab that darkest selection again. By the way, if you want to add all these up into a folder like I have, we can go back over to these swatches. If you've created them like I did, you can select them all and then create this folder. Select this new color group folder icon. You'll see you can name the color group and also say, Hey, create this from the selected artwork. And if I hit OK, it's going to create a folder of all of those swatches. So we've got this, we're going to create the nose and the mouth here. A suppose it's called a mouth right? Grabbing that pin tool again, we're going to create, maybe just click and drag out with our pin tool. Do the same thing here. If I hold shift sometimes that throws me off. So I'm not even going to hold shift on this. I'm just gonna click and drag and try to get the shape that I want out of this. You'll see the shapes sort of develop as you click and drag and pull this around. I don't need it to be perfect. Remember, I don't need this to be perfect. We're gonna do the same now if I were to just click on this, it's going to create a sharp corner here. You can see that by if I can show you here, that line just kinda comes in and then sort of like a harsh edge there. So what you really need to do is as you're clicking around, you really need to click and drag on that last anchor point to re-create and reroute around the shape to finish it off. Now, same thing here, so I've got a messed-up corner here. I can redo those anchor points with the pen tool by holding Alt or Option, clicking and dragging out from that point. By doing that, I've recreated and re rounded those anchor points. And then what we can do is that direct selection tool. Remember that white arrow. We can press a and we can go in and sort of tweak what this nose looks like. Just click on each anchor point individually. You can click, drag it around. You can adjust the handles, kind of rotate them differently and create the nose shape that you think works best. I think we should pull this bottom part down a little bit more. I think that looks actually that looks pretty good. Pretty flat on the top and kind of pointy on the bottom, but very, very round overall. Then what we're gonna do is go back to that pin tool shortcut key P. And this time you see how we have a fill and a stroke here on the left, I'm gonna click this little double ended arrow to swap the fill and stroke. That's also shift X as a shortcut key. Now instead of a shape, we're going to be creating a stroke. I'm going to find that middle section here. My smart guides helped me identify the center. I'm gonna click there, come down to somewhere right here where I think the corner of the mouth should be like where the smile should end. If I click there and pull back, I can see that I'm creating this rounded shape. When I let go, it's going to create a line with a stroke. And if I press V to switch over to my selection tool, I've got this stroke selected. We're gonna take our first look at the Properties panel over here and you'll see some stroke options. We can adjust the point weight of it to something like tin. Tin is way too much. So we could maybe do five or find something that works on your document. The other thing I want to do, you'll notice that the end of the stroke is cut off. But what we can do with that to round it is actually click on this little stroke linked to pull up the stroke options. And inside of there, there's gonna be a cap and we can use Round Cap to just round the end of that stroke. Now the other thing I'm gonna do is duplicate this. So holding Option or Alt, we can click and drag that out. I'm going to hold Shift to keep it in line as well with it selected. Same thing, backup in our properties panel. There's a little flip along horizontal axis and that's just going to flip that shape over. Then we can bring it back and line it up right on top of our original stroke. Now we can completely edit this if we want. I like to use that direct selection tool shortcut key is a, can select both these bottom points and we can move this around to scale it up or readjust the smile shape as much as we want. And once you have that to a spot that you like it, we can bring this up over the top of our bunny and onto the face. That nose is way too big. So let's scale this sucker down a little bit. I'm holding Shift and Option and just grab the side of it with both selected until we get closer to the size that we want. Now one thing that happened here is the strokes also scaled. If we select these two, you'll notice that the stroke is now 3.189. It's scaled with the nose. We can click this to make it go back to five. This is where in the transform panel down here, you'll see we have checkmarks, scale, strokes, and effects. I would recommend when you're resizing smaller elements, leave it unchecked so that your stroke doesn't scale. If you want it to be a point weight of five. You wanted to stay five when you're moving things around, you want that to stay five. But if you have your entire design or illustration selected and you just want to resize the whole thing. I would recommend checkmark and Scale Strokes and Effects so that you can scale the entire shape without it getting super funky looking. Okay, so now we have our little nose and smile. What I want to do next is actually add a little bit of shadow to this guy. We're going to grab that pen tool again and I'm going to select maybe one of my darker gray swatches over here. I'm gonna click way, way up here and create a curve all the way around to the bottom of the chin. And we're going to click outside of the shape on both of those anchor points. And then we're gonna click and drag to create a curve that goes around the edge of my bunny. Now this might not be perfect and that's quite alright. Because what we're gonna do is just use that direct selection tool shortcut key is a click on this anchor point and bring him down until we get something that matches the edge of the head shape. So it's gonna take a little bit of playing around with, to tweak this and get it just right. You want it to kind of taper on both edges here. So you wanted to taper on the bottom here and on the top there. It might even require more anchor points to keep continuing on with this path, we switch back over to the pen tool shortcut key is P. Look for that little slash icon. That means we can click on that anchor and continue on. I'm just going to click completely outside of my shape. Just like this. You want it to be completely outside and cover up the edge of the head. So I pressed V, my selection tool. I select both the head and this new shape. I go over to my Shape Builder tool Shift M. And we're going to just hold Option or Alt and click on this outside piece to get rid of it. Now we have a stroke. This piece as well. We wanted to get rid of that and we can look in our stroke options over here, we have it, I'm just going to press 0 on that and it's gonna get rid of it so we only have a fill. Now this film has a question mark. If for some reason maybe it thinks that there's multiple objects here, we're going to make sure that we select the correct one. I might just select this even lighter gray and it looked like I had the head selected as well. That's why that Phil was kinda messed up. So we can just click on the head again and select this other swatch. There we go. We've got a little shadow going around the edge of this bunny. Now if you want to add other points to this, you can just click on that shape, the PIE tool look, there's a plus icon there you can click. It's going to add a point with a perfect curve there. We can press a for the direct selection tool and we can pull this point back so it goes up against this edge a little better. Now we can pull this handle over to create a better taper along this side kind of gets thicker in the middle. And then we want this taper to be better down here. So let's go ahead and tweak this handle just like that. So that's how you can sort of add and fix the tapering along the edge of this shadow. Now with this entire head, I'm going to press V for the selection tool, select everything. And it's gonna be Command or Control G. Or you can right-click, go to group or ungroup right here. Now this piece is grouped together so we can move it around individually. Let's create an ear. Next, we're gonna go up here with the Pin Tool. I'm gonna check my selection here. I think that's the darker ones. So we're going to switch to the, I guess, the color of the rabbit's fur. And we're just going to click here. We're not going to click on the edge of the path. We're gonna click inside. Remember this ear is gonna kinda go fall behind the head. Click once, come up here as high as you want the ER to go click and drag to create a little shape. Then we'll just bring it right back it down, just like that. And we'll close off that path. That's perfect. Now I'm going to click or press V and click off of this ear shape and we can move this around freely. I want to create the inside of the ears and the pink part. We're going to press P for the pen tool again, kind of find an inside edge here, click, same exact sort of shape here. Doesn't really matter where you're putting this. I'm actually going to click and drag here just to create a little bit different edge on one side of this, I don't want it to be perfect. And then we'll click again right there, press a for the direct selection tool and grab one of these handles and just bring it back. But you've got to make sure that this handle, it doesn't take that outside of the ear. We made it white. So what we can do with it selected, just press that little pink swatch. And now we've got a pink section of the ear. It's in front of the head. So we want to grab both of these and I might just group that Command or Control G. Right-click, arrange, send to back, that's Shift Command left bracket or Shift Control Left Bracket, bring to front is the opposite of that. So there we go. We've got a little ear and I can actually click on this group hold Option or Alt, drag it out, let go. So now we've got to, I can come back up to my Properties panel, Flip Horizontal really quick like that. If you don't have the properties panel, this might be a difficult tutorial for you, but up an object transform is also reflect. You could do the same thing there. And we can bring this ear over to this side. And maybe with one of these ears and we can just readjust and select and move these around and grab the edge, rotate it just to make it a little bit different. I think these years might be a little bit just looking at it. There might be a little bit small. So I'm gonna click both of them and just grab the edge here, hold Option or Alt as well as shift and scale both of these up. What we might even do here is squat Both of them down if that's a term by pressing a for the direct selection tool, grabbing the top two points. And we can just drag this back down to bring in that ear. We can create whatever kind of shape we want here. With this, we can select our anchor points. Remember, I talked about kind of stepping back from your design and readjusting it if you want, you can select with the selection tool, rotate these around, do whatever you want to create, the shape that you want. I think what's actually happening is the inside of the ear here. This pink shape is too wide down here. What we can do to fix that is just take these two anchor points and bring them in closer to each other. Like so. And even, you could even bring them in on top of each other at this point. And then you might need to just readjust your different handles here. If you click on the right thing, readjust your different handles to make sure that ear sort of looks the way you want it to look. Same thing I think with this other outside edge with the fur, we got to use that direct selection tool. I'm just using the direct selection tool to grab these different anchor points. Bringing them in and creating the shapes that I want for my bunny design. All of this that we're doing is gonna be totally different for you. Whatever you're creating, just use these same techniques to click, Adjust, move around, adjust some anchor points, create new anchor points, do whatever you want to do to create your design. Now one other thing we can do, and this is kind of important with the regular selection tool. You know, this is a group so it all moves around together. Well, if I want to get in there and adjust maybe where this pink shape is just by moving it. I have to double-click into that group. And now I'm in a little bit of an isolation mode and I can see my layers up here in the upper-left it says layer one, which is gonna be the full just art board of everything. And then I'm inside of this group and now I can't even select anything else except for what's in the group and it's separated these pieces. Now, I can just move this around. If I double-click back out in this sort of gray area, it's gonna take me back. So that's kind of a nice way to work. Instead of a group, I like this shape better than this shapes. So let's just delete it. Grabbed this again, hold Option or Alt, bring it over. We'll flip it horizontal and we have some ears. Now, by the time we look at the old design, I might completely readjust that, but hey, look, there's some ears, That's how you make it. And let's move on to the body. The body is going to be kind of like a squat. Squat is sort of circle. So I'm gonna start with 1 here at the top. I'm gonna click and drag. I'm creating the body outside of the shape of the bunny just so that we can look at it and then move it underneath. I'm gonna create another anchor point a little bit lower down here and drag it out and create this little squatting shape with four anchor points. We're going to have to readjust that bottom one. Click and drag on the last one here, just to create this shape. And I'm going to press a for the direct selection tool and grab this handle and pull it out. One more shoulder shape there. Then down here we might just pull this down a little bit. We're going to want that to be a little bit more round, a little bit more flat. If this is locking into things, sometimes Smart Guides get in the way. What we want to do is just zoom in and it's going to be able to let us move this and tweak this and the way that we want a lot easier, you can just tweak all these anchors. Once you have this all created. It's not a big deal. It's pretty easy to do. And you're just gonna get the shape that you want. I don't like how that's sort of pinching in. We might reduce the influence of this anchor point over here is sort of a little egg shape. It's kinda tilting to the left. Not a big deal if you want, you can just grab this anchor point at the top. Remember this is what the direct selection tool, the shortcut key is a. And we've got that all completed. Now, this is pink. We want this to be white. We're just going to click on our white swatch. We also do want a similar shape in the middle here for his belly Pin Tool again, same sort of thing. Just click on the top here and we're just going to create this rounded shape on the inside. We're gonna go around, I think I'm gonna do three anchor points for this one. And we'll just have to readjust our handles here in a second. Click around. I would do this a lot quicker, but I'm trying to show you exactly what I'm clicking on direct selection tool shortcut key is a pull this handle out. We want it to kind of mimic the shape of the outside of our bunny here. I know this one's way too strong, so we got to pull him back a little bit. Same thing with this one. It's sort of flattened. Maybe we need it to be a little bit rounder so we can bring it in a little and then round it off. A lot of this is just clicking. You got to be direct with your clicks. It's the direct selection tool. And click once to select it and then click it's got to be very sort of, I guess, direct and certain with your clicks. So make sure you click everything. Because if you click and accidentally drag my sort of take your whole shape with you. So once we've done that, we're going to switch the color of this to pink. And we have our belly shape. Now we can take this and group it together, Command or Control G, drag it underneath our bunny and sort of see where things are at. It's on top of our bunny. So we're gonna right-click, arrange send to back underneath our bunny. Now, I'm going to press V for the regular selection tool, grab this whole group and sort of scale him up, but also holding option if I don't hold Shift, I can do this with him so we can make him exactly what we want. Well, that's a fat bunny. We'll grab this point here and continue holding option to squeeze them in just a little bit. He didn't eat that much candy quite yet. What I'm gonna do is actually double-click into this group. That's gonna make it easier just to adjust this group only. We're going to press the P key for the Pen tool. Always grab that light gray swatch. I'm gonna start at probably somewhere, maybe in here. And we're going to swoop down all the way to write in here, similar to what we did for the chin. And then we're gonna click and drag, click. Remember all the way outside, create a big old shape outside here. We're going to add with the P shortcut key, the pen tool. Another point right here. With this one, we're going to adjust our influenced between these two a little bit. And I might even bump this anchor point up just a touch, just to get this curve a little bit higher. We can always make these adjustments later with the bottom, let's select everything. Shift M for the shape builder tool Option or Alt. Click. And we've removed it. And now we can kind of look at how that shadow looks on the side of our bunny. I might move this anchor point a little bit closer to the edge here. And I think that actually looks pretty good. We've got to create some arms. Coincidentally, the arms are kind of similar to the ears. Let's make sure we have our white fur selected. I'm going to create something maybe starting up here, like if his shoulder was coming out right there and click, click down here and we're gonna create a little rounded shape. Then we're going to come right back to here and just close off that path. Now after creating it, I noticed this arm is way too small, so we're going to use the selection tool and scale him out a little bit. He's gonna be way too fat now, it looks like a flipper. So let's grab the direct selection tool, grab this point, and maybe reduce how much handles affect this curve like so, we're going to use the selection tool, right-click and transfer, no arrange, send to back. It's gonna be the arm on the side of our bunny. I think we can rotate it a little bit. So let's just kind of stick out and we can move it in to find where you'd like it, something like that. And then we can just grab this arm option, drag, that's Alt on PC. We could simply rotate it around. Remember, we had him waving before. And we can give them a little wave. Just like that. We're just going to rotate this round, right-click arrange, send to back to make sure it's behind. So now we've got a little bunny and he's waving. We need some feet using that pin tool. We're just going to create some little squat feet down here. I'm gonna be kind of round with the top part of them. And then just bring this over flatter, which will change the handle here in a second. Very similar to his nose. Actually. Use the direct selection tool to click on this point and adjust that handled sort of flatten the bottom of his feet. We're going to send this shape to the back. So it's underneath everything. And then we just going to move that in a little bit. Find the spot where you want his feet to be. Press the selection tool, that's V, hold Option or Alt click and drag to move this over. This one, I don't think I'm gonna flip. I think I'm gonna keep it sort of poking out there. His little foot is just going to poke out on this side. And it's going to be the same shape on this side, but it looks different because you can see more of it over here. Did we create the bunny? I think we did. It's probably going to look completely different than the one that we started with. This guy looks a lot cuter over here. There's a couple of reasons why, and there's a couple of things we can do. We're going to add a little hair up top. We're gonna make his eyes bigger and we might adjust the shape of his belly a little bit. His ears, I think even look better. So there's a lot of things that you can click and adjust with this guy. I think his arms could be fatter. His body shape is descent, the feet are okay. But he couldn't be way cuter with those eyes. So let's zoom in here. We're going to use the selection tool. Double-click on the head since we grouped it all together and click on the eyes. And what I would do is just do one I holding Alt or Option and Shift and pull that up and make it a lot bigger, bigger iss equals Qt or bunny. Just delete this other eye because we're just going to hold Option or Alt, click and drag with this guy to duplicate that one. Wide set eyes. A lot cuter. I think we can probably pull this nose up. I'm going to group these guys together so I don't have to select them individually anymore. Pull that nose up a little bit higher. Then we might even just grab everything on the face here and pull it all down just a little bit more. So he's got a bigger head, bigger eyes, just like that. Maybe those eyes are a little too big. You guys can adjust it to look like this. I'm going to press M for the Shape tool here. You see that it's a rectangle tool. Create a rectangle. I'm going to create a perfect square by holding Shift. I'm going to click on my green that I've got selected. We're going to go back to the selection tool V is a shortcut key, Arrange, Send to Back on that sucker, select everything so we get our whole bunny shift click on the square. So now it's just the bunny. I'm going to group them together. And what we could do is select everything. So we have this group and the shape selected. I want to center my beanie on the shape, so click on the Shape. Darker blue line around it means we're aligning to a key object. You can actually see that down there in the alignment panel align to key object. Now we can press Center and Vertical Align Center and our bunnies sort of centered on that. Let's create the little shadow at the bottom. Pretty easy to do. One thing I might do with my background is locked it. We can go to Object down to lock selection, that's Command or Control to now we can't move the background. That's a good thing in this case. I'm going to press the P for the Pen tool. I'm going to click here to start. We're going to go over here, use our handles that we learned and just create this little circle shape down here. Like so. Finish it off with this last little anchor point. It's going to be some kind of dark gray. I'm not sure. Maybe we'll just do the darkest one and then we'll go to the opacity over here. And we're going to drop that to maybe like 15%. And then we need to send this behind the bunny. So what we can actually do is just bring the bunny, the front. We want him on top of everything. So arrange bring to front on that group. There we go. We have a little shadow underneath him. You can readjust all the anchor points of that and move it up and down if you want. The only difference between these two is actually the hair. Let's do the hair. Let me show you how to do the hair really quick. We're not done. So since this is grouped, we don't have to ungroup it. We can just double-click into it. Remember we go into that isolation mode and we have a group within a group here. We've double-click into that, see how we can go layer group, group. We can keep diving into these different groups. So I'm gonna double-click all the way into only the white shape of his head. I'm all the way in layer one group, group path. So here we're going to select the Pen tool and we're going to add some points. I need for every little tuft of hair, I need three points. I'm going to add a point here and add a point here. That'll be one tuft of hair. Over here. We're going to add a point, another point, press a for the direct selection tool. And let's zoom into this guy. We see all these points. We got a group of three here. I'm gonna grab the middle and just pull it up just like that. Now we need to adjust these anchor points here. I'm gonna adjust the handle here, adjust this handle to push it out. And we're just going to keep adjusting these until we have sort of like a little tuft of a hair up here. Want to pull and adjust the influence of these handles. Press the P shortcut key for the anchor point tool which you hold Option or Alt for. I think we're just going to keep adjusting these until we get the shape that we want. It doesn't even have to be perfect. It doesn't look all that great, but just a little bit shows that there's some for up there and you guys can adjust this however you want. This is almost like two little waves of hair. There we have it. That is how to create a flat design bunny in Adobe Illustrator. 10. Flat Design Cloud: Alright, so this is the graphic that we're gonna be creating. It's this sort of flat designed Cloud icon with a nice long shadow on a blue background. To get started, let's go ahead and go up to File New. And we're going to create a new document. It's going to be 1920 by 1080. That's in pixels, of course. And the rest of this you can leave alone, I do like starting it in RGB color mode, however, just click Create and we're going to have ourselves a new document from here. Let's start. As always, with the background, we're going to create a rectangle That's just a shape with the rectangle tool and that's shortcut key M for anybody wondering, just going to click and drag and cover my entire canvas here. This shape, if I check my transform option up here, it should be 1920 by 1080. And if you want to make sure it's dead center on your background, you can make sure that the align tools here is aligned to art board and you can click the middle of each. So this is Horizontal and Vertical Align there. Once that's set, Let's change the color of it here in the upper left. And let's just select this sort of sky blue color. And from there I'm also going to get rid of any stroke that we have just by clicking this none color with a little slash through it. Alright, so I've got this background color set. That's great. Let's lock it in to do that, go up to object, down to lock, and then you can lock selection. So whatever you have selected, what you can lock, the shortcut key for that is command to that is something I use quite a bit. And then the shortcut key to unlock things is Shift Command E. On a PC that's control anytime I say command, it's Control on a PC. Anytime I say option, That's Alt on a PC. So keep that in mind in case I forget to tell you later. All right, So what we're gonna do is build this thing out of shapes. I'm a big fan of building things out of shapes, using the shape builder tool to make them work. So I'm going to grab the ellipse tool over here. The shortcut key for that is L. Then I'm going to, I mean, you don't have to create them out of perfect circles, but in this case I'm going to create this little cloud icon out of perfect circles. Let's go ahead and change the selection or the fill up here to white and the stroke we can change to black for now. And then the stroke width. Let's do, I think on this type of a canvas, we're gonna do something like 20 points from here, we're going to draw our first circle. I'm gonna hold shift to keep that completely as a perfect circle and then let go and just create a circle any size you want on your canvas. Now I'm gonna grab my selection tool. The shortcut key for that is V. And with this circle I'm gonna hold option that's Alt on PC. And I'm gonna click and drag out while holding shift. You see these little pink lines, those are smart guides. You can turn them on in the view window up here. Command U is the shortcut key. I pretty much always have them on so that it helps me keep things in line with each other. I do, however, want to drag that circle completely straight across. Don't move it vertically yet, because these two circles are important that they're aligned together, it's going to help you give that even perfect horizontal line at the bottom of the cloud shape. All right, so we've got the two circles, these are our two outside shapes. Now let's go ahead and duplicate again by holding Option, holding Shift and dragging this circle over maybe until it intersects with the side of itself. And I let go. I've got it. Three circles here are all the same size. Well, this center middle circle. Let's go ahead and drag him up. I'm gonna just hover over that middle top point and click and drag them up. Now makes sure you hold Shift or else you're gonna get this like elongated oval shapes. So if I hold Shift, it's going to create a nice big circle. And let's just make him, so this'll be our medium-size circles. So there's two on the sides are gonna be small. This will be medium, maybe just a little bit taller than those two guys right in there. This is not an exact science, just so you know. All right, so let's switch back to that selection tool and we're going to, well, we were already on it. You don't have to switch back to it, but we're going to duplicate this one more time. Let's create one more circle. I'm holding Shift to keep it aligned and sure will intersect right there. From here, I do want to make this the biggest circle. So I'm gonna hold shift again to scale it up from that top point till I don't know, Let's give this a little bit more right in there. Cool. What I want to do with all of these now is select them all. And then we're gonna grab our shape builder tool that's over here. It's got two circles in it and a little cursor icon. The shortcut key for that is Shift M. I got a little plus icon on my cursor here. And as I scroll over all these circles that recognizes all the little shapes in here, that's fine. All we're gonna do is click and drag all the way through everything. And I missed a few. So make sure you click through everything. And make sure everything gets highlighted and then let go. And that's going to merge all of those shapes together. This is pretty cool. You can already see that we're getting this little cloud shape, but the bottom of it, I mean, if you want the bottom of it to have those clouds, you can. But we're gonna make this a little bit flatter and we're going to use, you can see all these little anchor points here. We're gonna use the bottom two anchor points of our outside circles. What I want to do is just get rid of all these middle anchor points between those two. I can grab the pen tool to do that pretty easily. And if I just hover over those anchor points and click, it's going to get rid of each of them. So if I just click through and get rid of each of those little anchor points. Now we've got this nice cloud shape that rolls right into a straight horizontal line, allows to create that nice long shadow underneath and replicate that first shape that you saw that we are trying to create. Alright, so I like this. I think this is pretty good. What I do want to do is get rid of the stroke. Let's just create a white fluffy cloud. That stroke did help us see where all of our lines were, but we're just going to get rid of it for now. I'm going to click on this guy again and let's get him in the center of this art board. To do that once again, go to those alignment options, which are usually hanging out up here at the top. If you don't see them up there, you can go to window down to align and they'll probably pop out here to the side. But we're going to ignore that guy. Let's just use this one up here. I think it's handy-dandy. All right, align to art board. Perfect. Now I'm gonna do the horizontal align and vertical aligned to put them right in the center of the art board. Now one thing was centering objects the way this is sort of offset. So like if this was a perfect square, it would be exactly in the center visually. And mathematically. While this is in the center, mathematically because this bounding box, There's a little bit more like visual negative space up here, a little bit of whitespace. And I think to center this visually, you might have to bump it up a little bit. If you hold Shift and hit your up arrow key, you can sort of bump that guy up. And I think that's a little bit more visually in the center because there's about equal negative space up here as there is down here. That's just a little design tip for you guys. Now let's create the long shadow underneath our Cloud. To do that, we're going to copy paste this guy a couple of times. First I'm gonna show you the actual options. You go up to the Edit it down to copy, and then go back up to Edit down to paste in front. So copy is command C or control C. Paste in front is Command F or Control F. To paste in front doesn't look like it did anything. But if I click and drag, yeah, we created a duplicate of the cloud. But we actually want to duplicates of the Cloud. And because I already have that copied, I'll have to do is hit Command F again. And now we've got, we've got three Clouds here, so you see 123. And then this one, I'm going to undo that with command Z and get them all centered up. Now what we want to do is take that top Cloud and we're just going to drag him off the canvas down here about the angle that you would want that shadow to go. Now between these two clouds. So this next cloud, the middle one, and this guy, we're going to create a blend to create the shadow. Obviously, a shadow is gonna be like a dark shape. Let's select both of these by holding Shift and clicking on each and change there. They're filled to a black color. That's great. Let's just create a blend now. I still have these two guys selected. Just these two guys go up to object, down to Blend and we're gonna do Blend Options and under blend options for spacing, Let's specify distance and do one pixel that's going to create a cloud. Every one pixel between these two clouds, we're going to blend these two shapes together. And orientation wise, you can keep it on this first one. Doesn't matter as much. I'm gonna hit OK and nothing happens because we just set up the blend now we've got to make it. So go back up to option, down to blend, hit Make. Now we get our shadow. But our shadow is not much of a shadow. Yeah, it's very just one solid black color. It's got all these clouds in-between every one pixel and it's created a group. So these two clouds, if I click off and don't have anything selected, and then I click back onto it. You see it's got both of those clouds selected with this blue line in-between. And if I move one of them, it's going to move both of them. So Command Z to undo that, I want to keep this cloud centered on that other original cloud. And what we want to do is double-click into this group. And now we're inside of the blend. You can see we have layer one, which is where everything is at, and then we're inside the blend, that's our current isolated group. So now I can click on each of these individually. What I want to do with this bottom cloud is actually go to like a complete transparency. So I'm gonna grab my Transparency panel over here on the right if you don't see it, window Transparency way down here. And once I get that open, I'm gonna change the opacity to 0. Hit Enter to commit that change. Perfect. So at this point you actually have the shadow. We're just probably going to want to take the transparency down or the opacity down on the entire blend a little bit. So I'm going to double-click out here in the gray area to get out of my isolated group back to the center now. So I'm going to zoom out just a touch. What I want to do is send this to the back. And to do that, I'm going to do Shift Command left bracket. That's also shift Control Left Bracket on PC. And then you could just right-click and go arrange send to back if you don't have those shortcut keys committed to memory yet. But that's how you do that. I'm also going to send this background layer to the back, but we need to unlock it first. So don't forget that that is well, I don't know what it is. I think it's Command Shift to know it's command option two to unlock everything. So on a PC that's gonna be Control Alt to that unlocks everything. And then we're going to send that to the back with Shift Command left bracket. I do like that's some important ones I use all the time. The Shift Command, left bracket, Shift Command right bracket, send to back, center front. I would recommend memorizing those. All right, I think this shadow is a little too harsh, so let's take it down to something like since I prepared this before, I know 10%, I think I just want a little bit of a shadow underneath that cloud. That's cool. There's our shadow, but I don't see a whole lot of difference in the shadow going down here. So let's bring this cloud up and I can do that by clicking. Now I've got that blend selected. I can double-click on it and I'm inside of that isolated blend, Grouped layer. And I can click on this cloud down here and I can move him around. I can completely changed my shadow around. So if you want to change the angle of your shadow later, you can do that. I'm going to bring this cloud up a little bit closer and then double-click out of that space. So now you can see the shadow sort of blends into the background now because right in here we go to 0% transparency. That's it. We've created a Cloud icon. You can clip this into a circle shape if you wanted to, whichever way you want to use this guy. I hope this was easy enough to follow. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time. 11. Flat Design Christmas Lights: Alright, so we're in Illustrator, this is what we're gonna be designing, this sort of like the finished product, we're going to have a little strand of lights. It might do a loop de loop. I've got some glow on these and there are different colors. They all have that flat design look. We have a little sort of highlight on the left, some shadow on the right, and then it kind of flips on these bottom ones here. But basically we're gonna make one of these guys and then I'll show you how to string them up like this. So I'm just going to grab one of these guys down here as a starter. I'm going to copy paste him and wall head on over to a new document so you guys can start from the very beginning. I'm gonna go to File New. The shortcut key for that is Command or Control in I just do 1920 by 1080 because I'm in the world of YouTube tutorials. But nothing that really matters. For starters, I'm going to bring this guy over just so I know the shape that we're making. Let's look at this piece by piece. I'm gonna start with the base of this guy. That's just gonna be with the rectangle tool, the shortcut key for that is M. And we're gonna make a little rectangle out here, approximately this shape. So the key with this is you can make any light you want, so it really doesn't matter. Now, I want the fill of this guy to be the lighter green, the two greens we're gonna be using. So I'm going to go up to my color panel, which is in the Window drop-down color. I think it's F6. That's a guess. Am I right? F6. Alright, I got that down. Now. I like to double-click on this little swatch there and it pulls up this color picker. I'm a huge fan of this color picker because I know what I'm getting out of it. I want a lighter green, but something more like a muted tone which tends to be in this circle of colors somewhere in the grayish saturation, not fully saturated, and then pulled down from the top and bottom. So we're gonna be right in here, I think for my lighter green, maybe something like that. Once we have that, we can switch back to the selection tool. The shortcut key for that is VI. And we've got it, okay if we click on this guy, there's these little dots in the corners. If you pull in these dots, it's going to round those corners. I don't want to quite round them that much, but I'll pull them back a little bit. I just want a little bit of a rounding Command or Control plus or minus. We'll zoom you in and out. I can zoom in and have this shape select and sort of pull these corners back a little bit. I just don't want them quite as sharp. Now there's a couple of subtle things here that you might notice that I created. You see this rounded arc at the top and rounded arc at the bottom. It's pretty easy to create that we can select it, switch over to the Pin Tool, which is this little pin icon, the shortcut key for that as P. Then if we hold Alt on a PC or option, we get this little icon and it's struggling showing it, but you can kinda see it. It looks like a telephone, almost like a dot with an arc, two dots with an arc between them. If we just hover over the line while we hold Alt or option, we can click on that and pull it down to create this sort of arc. I just want a slight arc to this, something like that. Just a little bend in the bottom. I'm going to do the same thing when a hold Alt or Option and create a little bend up here at the top. Just like that. Now we've got this shape that it's got a little more character to it. It's just has a little more fullness to it. Let's create this top portion here. I'm gonna do that by going back to that rectangle tool shortcut key is M and just creating a rectangle the size of my shape here. So from left to right it's the same size. We need to adjust the color of this guy. If I pop open this color panel again, remember F6, I'm going to double-click on him and I'm just going to pull down to create a darker green. Something in here would work. Alright. There we go. Next, see how I've got this sort of angled out like it. The light bulbs going to sit in there. All I need to do is switch to my direct selection tool. It's up here, it's the white arrow, the shortcut key for that is a. I'm going to select this top left point just by clicking and dragging over the top of it. And then you using my left arrow keys, I can bump that out. If I hold Shift and press the left arrow key, it's going to bump it out a little bit more. That might've been too much. So I'm gonna go 123 back. So I did Shift Left Arrow key to bump it out once and then 123 back without the shift. Once again shift right arrow key. Then let go of shift one to three on the left arrow key, and that matches up either side. Now I know that we've rounded the top of this bottom shape before, but I've actually changed my mind on how I want this to be layered. I do want this shape on top of this one. So what I'm gonna do is just click on this guy here. I'm going to go back to that pin tool. The shortcut key is P, hold Alt or option right there on the bottom. And sort of bring that up to create the little ark. Maybe something like that there. So now if I click off of this with the selection tool, I've got a little bit of that arc built into it. This top part is too tall, so I'm gonna grab the two points here and here by pressing a for the direct selection tool, clicking and dragging. So I select those two points only. Once I have that, I can click on the path hold shift and drag it down a little bit to make sure it's the height that I want it to be somewhere maybe in there. The last thing I can do is with these two points still selected with that direct selection tool, I can adjust the sharpness of the corners. I just want a little tiny bit of a rounded corner up there. Now we've got this shape setup. I want to create the indents here. I want to make sure they're the same color as this darker green. So what are we gonna go ahead and do is while we have these, I'm going to switch to my selection tool, shortcut keys V. Click on this object, go up into my swatches panel. If you don't see it Window down to swatches, that'll pop this guy out. And if we create a new swatch while we have this guy selected, it's going to create a new swatch based on this color green. And I want that to be a global swatch, so make sure that's checkmarked. Hit Okay, and we've got a new swatch in here. I'm going to click on this. Oops, I accidentally rotated that. I'm gonna click on this darker color green, new swatch, global swatch hit. Okay, now we have the light and the dark green. What I can do actually is as long as I don't have anything selected. So click off of everything. Shift, click or click one shift, click the other one that's going to select them both. I can create a folder called a new color group. And I'm going to call this light colors. This will be the greens, but we'll also add in our other light colors as well. So we've got this folder of these light colors and now I can go back and change those anytime I want. Pretty, pretty cool way to do that. We need to create these sort of indents in this here. That's sort of what we see on these, the bottom of these lights. So M is the shortcut key for the rectangle tool. We're gonna grab that rectangle tool. I'm going to create just a skinny rectangle that goes all the way across this element. And I want it to be the darker green. So I'm just going to select the darker green on that, so that changes the fill to that. Then I can hit my selection shortcut key, that's v, To go back to that tool. And there we go, we've got that. Now I want an odd number of these I think so. I'm going to hold Option. Let's zoom in a little Command or Control plus hold Option or Alt. Duplicate this piece. Click and drag it left. And we're going to just keep duplicating those. And in fact, you can use Command or Control D Once you've done that once and it'll duplicate those across, we want to make sure we have an odd number. So 12345678910. I think I'm going to go ahead and delete the last one. And I'm going to select all of these with that selection tool. And I'm going to just find the edge here, click and pull it across. What that did was it sort of made these a little bit wider. You can adjust these however you want. This might be too many. Maybe you'll want to do less and make them a little bit wider like I did in the example. But regardless, I want these to be spread out evenly there almost but not quite. So we need to open up our alignment panel. I've got them all selected. I'm gonna go up to window down to a line, pop that open, and I don't actually see what I need. I do see what I need, but if you don't, make sure you click this hamburger Show Options. What I want is aligned to selection, and I want to click this guy right here that's Horizontal Distribute Center. And you'll notice a little bit of adjustment or not. These were already pretty much centered up, but just in case they weren't, it adjusted those two, they're perfectly centered. Now what I want is to center this on everything else. So I'm gonna select it all. Right-click it. We can group it together, That's Command or Control G. Now this is one big group. I can click this group and Shift click the background object. Now they're both selected. Just click the background object again. Now it's sort of double selected. That means we're aligning to it as a key object. Open up that alignment panel again and make sure this says Align to Key Object. And then we want to go ahead and align that to the center, which had already was, but let's say we were off like that. You can hit horizontal line center, it's going to center it up. Alright, so we're centered up. We just need to chop these pieces off where they go past. We've got this group. We can select everything. All of this. That's weird. I don't know why that's selected were out there. But all we need to do now is use the shape builder tool right here, Shift M, and it sees all these different shapes. What we want is to chop off this bottom portion. So I'm gonna hold Alt or option and a little minuses is going to pop up. It's having trouble showing those, but you can see the cursor now it's got the minus. If I click and draw through that, it's going to chop those pieces off. Now I want to do the same thing up here, but before I do that, I actually want to go back to that selection tool and select all of this and duplicate this piece. So I'm gonna hold Alt or option and just duplicate this piece out. I want to have a piece that I'm working on. And I also want to have a piece that is gonna be my final. So over here I'm working on this guy, so I'm gonna select all this, go back to the shape builder tool. And this makes it easier to where I don't have to worry about getting rid of anything on accident. I can just hold Option or Alt, click and drag through that. Now I have these pieces with the angles that I want here, that they run along that arc, they're gonna follow that line. We're going to ungroup this first. And then I'm gonna click and drag through that to select it all. Delete. We're just going to delete that out. I'm also going to delete this background piece. Delete. Now over here, I don't want this group anymore, so I'm gonna delete that. Now. I've got this guy. He's going to fit right in here. But what I want to do is make him not fit edge to edge, but just kinda come close to the edge. So I'm gonna take my direct selection tool, that's the white arrow shortcut key a click and drag through these top points. Once I have these top points, select on this arc, I'm going to hold Shift and use my down arrow key. And that was way too much. So we're not going to hold shift. You guys just press the down arrow key a couple of times. That'll that'll sort of bring those down a little bit. So that was two. I'm going to select the bottom one is only now go up to 12. Now, if we select this as this group together, no, So we're gonna select all these command or control G to group together. You can also right-click group. Once we've got that group together, I'm gonna bring this over here. All these smart guides are helping me Center the center it up. As long as it's centered, we can we can have that on there, but it's behind everything, so we need to right-click and bring it to the front. So good arrange, bring to front. There we go. That's how you do that. That was a lot I know probably a lot more explanation than I wanted. There you go. Now what I'm seeing here is that our darker green maybe isn't quite as dark as we want it. So let's change that simply by going to the Swatches panel, Double-clicking on this green. Now we can look at this with the RGB or any of these other types of settings. If I go to lab, I can actually sort of pull this one down a little checkmark preview and maybe pull this down to like 20. And there you go, that darkens it up a lot more. I'm going to hit Okay. Now that swatch, the dark green swatches a little bit darker and everything changed at once. All right, cool. We've got this piece. Let's go ahead and add the little shadow to it. To do that, just go back to that rectangle tool. Maybe select a fill that's straight black. Then we're gonna create a rectangle. And I'm going to use smart guides here. So if you guys aren't smart guides turned on and just go to View drop-down, down to Smart Guides and make sure that's checked marked. But anyway, we're gonna create a rectangle. Click and drag this out so it lines up in the center there. Let go. Now we're gonna go back to the selection tool shortcut keys is V, select all of this right there. Then the shape builder tool, that's Shift plus M, hold Option or Alt and just click on this outside shape and that gets rid of it. So now we have a shape that's cut out on here. And what we can do is take the opacity down to maybe 15%. That's going to create that shadow on that side. What I'm seeing here is that we might want a little more saturation in this lighter green. So if we go back to our swatches, we can double-click this swatch. We can select Preview. And potentially we could just pump a little more green into. That. Might be a little too light. So we can pull that back just a touch. We can just play with these till we get it more, more in there where we want it and hit Okay. That might be okay, right. Okay, so that's how you can sort of change those global swatches though. All right, so we've got this guy, we need to create the light bulb part. So to do that, we're just going to create a circle, pretty much create novel rectangle tool, click and hold it. We can go to the Ellipse tool, the shortcut key for that is l. Then I'm going to create an oval shape, something like that right there. Alright, let's go ahead and make this a color that we want. So not green. Click on actually when we're gonna go into that color tab again, a double-click my swatch, I'm going to pick a color. We're gonna make it a read. Something in here, maybe right there. Hit Okay, there's our red. Now of course, I'm going to want to add this to my swatch group down here. I'm going to click New Swatch on there. And we're just going to do a global swatch hit. Okay, there it is. I'm going to drag it down into this group. And there's our first actual light color right there. We can always adjust that later. So no worries there. The global swatch really helps. We want this thing to be a little bit more egg shaped, I suppose is the term. I'm gonna click on it, select my pen tool. Remember the shortcut key is P. And up here I'm going to hold Option or Alt. And that's gonna bring up the anchor tool. If I click and drag on this while I have those held, I can create new anchors. And if I hold Shift, it's going to lock those into 45 degree increments. I want it to be straight across like this. And I'm just going to create a little bit more of a point at the top. So I'm gonna bring that in like that and let go. So there's, there's that what I can do with these is sort of go back to that direct selection tool. Click and drag through the middle section where it includes those two anchor points. And once I have them, I can use my down arrow key to bump this down so it's sort of dropping. I don't know the center of gravity on this guy a little bit. Maybe down into there. Then if I select this bottom point, bring him up with my up arrow key. Somewhere in there. So we're looking for that light shape. I think that's, that's pretty close. You guys. It might come to a point more than this one does but to each his own, right? Alright, so I'm gonna click this, drag it over to here, right-click, arrange, send to back. So we want it behind this guy, right? Then we just want to sit him in there. Find where you find where you want them to sit. You can use your smart guides to help you find the center there. And UV light. It's in there. Okay, so let's hold Option or Alt and make a duplicate of this right out here. Now with this duplicate, I'm going to make another duplicate and bring him over. I got two on top of each other. See that? I'm looking at the shape that these kind of cut out on the right side to make this shadow. What I actually need to do is make the left shape bigger. So I'm going to go ahead and scale this up by clicking the top holding Shift and making it bigger like that. I'm going to drag it left a little. I'm still looking at this right-sided discuss. So if I select both of them, you see how it's creating this shadow over here. I'm gonna click and drag it left a little bit more. But I don't want it to hit the top here. So maybe right in there is pretty good. See the overlap between these two. That's gonna be the shadow on the right side of my bulb. If I select both Shift M to get that shape builder tool. And now we see all these shapes I can hold Option or Alt and just draw through these left two sides. Now I have this piece here, which is the important piece to creating this little shadow. Once I have this piece selected, I can bring him back over the top of this guy. And he kind of lines up there with my smart guides. Then I can change his color to this, a complete black. And maybe this one will find out, but it's like 15% or something like that. Again. Now I've got that shadow on the right side of this bulb. To create this little highlight, all we have to do is go back into the ellipse tool. Shortcut key is L. Create like a really skinny ellipse like this. Instead of black will change that fill to a white. Go back to that selection tool. We can zoom in a little bit here, Command or Control plus bring him over here and maybe angle him a little bit so he lines up with the left side of that. Might be a little bit too skinny and long there. So there we go, something like that. And then I would drop the opacity back a little bit, let's say 75%. Something along those lines. That's it. That's how we create that bulb. Now if I go ahead and click and drag through this piece and group it together, Command or Control G and group it together. It may bring it to the top. If it does, all we have to do is right-click, arrange and send it to the back again. Notice how there's a little glow around this guy. We can do that by clicking on that group. The grouping was important part. Click on that group, go to Effect, down to Stylize and then down to Outer Glow. Once we're there, It's going to bring this up. We need to hit Preview. We obviously want to preview it. And then we want to click on this little swatch. And instead of selecting a color, go to color swatches. And if you scroll to the bottom, these aren't in folders or anything anymore. But remember we put that folder at the bottom. These are our global swatches down here, and this is our global swatch for this red light, the red color for our lights. Click on that. Click. Okay, and there we go. We've got the glow. You can adjust the opacity, you can adjust the blur to be whatever fits your style. So we might drop the blur back to 30 on this guy or something like that. Just whatever you want, hit. Okay, now let's zoom out a little bit. We have our first light. Congratulations, you did it. If you want to change the color of this light. I don't know what's over here. Oh, there we go. We've got a point. Okay, we're gonna delete that. All right. We've got this light. We can hold Option or Alt and duplicate him out. Here. We've got two red lines. Well, if I use that direct selection tool and just click on this red color here, notice how the fill is this color. What I would do is go up to my color panel, double-click my little color swatch and say, okay, I want I want this to be a blue one. I'm going to find the blue area, find the color I want hit. Okay. Now it's blue. But what I need to do with him is create that global swatch again, because he's not in here yet. We just changed the color to a random color. I'm going to hit this new swatch button, create a global swatch. Hit, Okay, drag it down into my color folder down here. And now we have those colors, but look, it's, he's still got that red outline. So I'm gonna go back to the selection tool and click on this whole selection again. And if you notice in the appearance panel whether you go to Window drop-down appearance or over here on the right. And the properties we have the effects outer glow. If you click on it, you can edit that effect. We click on the swatch, click on color swatches, and we can find that blue swatch we just made. Hit. Okay. Hit Okay. And there we go. We've got a blue light now. That's how you can go through and make all sorts of different lights. Now, to create the strand, all I did was grabbed the pen tool and start to create a line here. And I'm going to switch my fill and my stroke here so I actually don't want to fill. So I'm just clicked this little slash icon. I do want to stroke of maybe let's just do like five pixels. That color. I think I want it to be this lighter color, green, for instance. So I'm gonna do a green stroke of five points. I did all that before I did anything with the pen tool. Now with the Pen tool selected, we click and drag. We click and drag in the direction we want our strand to go. I want him to go out to the right in this direction. Let go. Now we actually see where this line is gonna go. I'm going to maybe make click another point up here and drag in the direction I want to go out this way. We can do that to create this strand. If you want, you could create a little loop, de, loop part of your strand. All right, through here. However you want this to sort of behave. We can click and drag, just keep clicking and dragging in the direction you want to go. When you're done with that, just go back to that selection tool and now you have this whole strand here. And one little thing I like is I click the Stroke option and click on the caps, round cap that just rounds the end of either sides so it doesn't cut off quite as harsh. Now all you have to do is take your little light which we can click and drag, select them all right-click and group. You can take this guy and just bring him down here along the strand. You can resize them if you want. So resize this group hold Shift while you do it to keep them in line. Maybe something like that. Then we need to bring him on top of the strands to right-click arrange, bring to front. And what you might do is click on the strand, right-click, arrange, send to back. That way everything's on top of it. But now we can just click on this guy and I'll zoom in a little bit. We can rotate them around if we need to. Insert just place him in here. All right. Just like that as if he was on the strand. Now, we can bring this guy, he needs to be grouped together, group them together. We can do the same thing. I'm holding Option or Alt to duplicate them. I'm going to bring him around and do the same. I'm gonna kind of scale him down to, it might be I would advise you to scale these down at the same time, so they're the same size. But once you have one, you could go in and just adjust the colors of them if you wanted to. But if we flip him over like this, what I would do is click on this little flip along horizontal axis. Because imagine the light all coming from the left, like whatever's hitting this. I want all the shadows on the same side. So now the shadow is on the right side instead of just rotating him. But there you go and you can kinda mess with the angle of him, bring him in here just like that. String these along. Just like in the thumbnail image. That's exactly what I did here. I hope you guys enjoyed that tutorial. We created a strand of Christmas lights. If you have any questions or comments, hit me up down below and I'll see you guys in the next one. 12. Flat Design Birthday Cake: We're gonna be creating the birthday cake that you see here. I just made this guy and I played around with some different options. And I think there's a lot of really cool techniques that I'm gonna show you in this tutorial. The first thing I'm gonna do. The first thing that you should do is open up a new document. You can go to file new for that and it's gonna pop up the little dialog box. Now I haven't 1920 by 1080 document opened in RGB color mode. And that's all you really need to have set for this. And go ahead and hit Create on that. I'll hit close because I already have one open for me. The first thing I want to do is get all my colors in order. I'm going to select all of this artwork I like what I came up with. I'm gonna go up to where normally the fill would be up here in the color, color picker selector thingy. And I'm going to add a new color group by clicking this folder icon here. And that's going to ask me, what do you want to add this from wherever these colors coming from. And I'm gonna say Selected Artwork. I'm also going to make sure to uncheck Include Swatches for tense. I think that might include the swatches for the different multiply effects and stuff like that, which I don't necessarily want. I'm gonna hit OK and that's going to set up all of my swatches for every color that I've used in this art piece here. Now, that's a quick way for me, but you don't have the artwork already. So if you want to, you can grab all the hex codes from the description down below. I'll put them in there and for each hex codes. So if I click on a, whoops, I didn't mean to do that. Let's undo that guy. Okay, so if I click on a specific color, Let's double-click in here on this blue and go to the colors panel. Whenever you adjust some of these colors, if you double-click on this guy and you pull up the color picker down here, there's a little hashtag that's where you paste the hex codes. So whenever you want to grab one of the colors that I used, just paste it into here, and that will equal the exact same color that I'm using. Then once you do that, you could always add those swatches, just like I did here. Now that you've got your colors figured out. And if you need to pause the video and go add all of those, you can. We're gonna get started. And this is, I mean, this is a birthday cake, but a birthday cake has made out of quite a few simple shapes. There's a lot of rectangles in this. There's some other little things that we're gonna do. Some tricks and tips that I've figured out while making this guy. As a matter of fact, Let's go over here and let's start fresh. I'm gonna start on the just this gray space because it's a little hard to see on the white some of the stuff that we're doing. Let's begin by creating a rectangle. And we're gonna do that by selecting the rectangle tool over here, the shortcut key for that as m. And we're going to create the base layer of our cake. No, we're not. We're gonna create the plate that sits on. Let's create the plate that sits on. So it's gonna be like a skinny long platter, I guess if you will. And we'll just create that rectangle. And I'm going to switch back to my selection tool. And that shortcut key is v0, the shortcut key for rectangles M, shortcut key for selection tool is V. I'll be switching back and forth between those a lot. Let's make this more of that reddish color. How about maybe this color here? And that'll be our little planters. So let's go back to the rectangle tool shortcut key is M Once again. And let's create that first cake layer on this guy. And we're just going to make him a little bit taller. How about right in here? You can kind of eyeball it. This is your cake. Make your cake what you want it to be. Let's change this color to more of this tarnish color. That's gonna be like No, we'll go with the yeah, we'll go with the tanh the tan color. That's gonna be like the color of our cake, I guess the actual cake part and not the icing. I'm gonna shift, I'm going to click on this guy with the selection tool and then shift click on the platter and then click on the platter again, it's going to outline it in blue, and that means we are now aligning it to a key object. You can see that up here we're aligning to a key object. And I'm going to hit the Horizontal Align Center. And that's going to bring my cake just shifted over ever so slightly to make it lined up in the center with my platter. Now, I'm going to duplicate, duplicate, duplicate this cake layer by holding Option or Alt on a PC. And I'm gonna hold shift to keep it in line. And we're going to bring Up until it intersects there. And all of these pink lines that you see, that those lines are called smart guides. They're very, very helpful. I would turn them on there in the View tab down to Smart Guides, That's Command U, Control U on a PC. And from this point let's make him a little bit shorter. Remember this is our top layer and we're going to squeeze him in from the outside in. I'm going to hold Option while I click and drag those outside edges, make sure you have the two arrows pointing in opposite directions. And we're going to just make this top layer a little bit shorter than the, the base layer. From here. I like what's going on. What I want to do now though, and you will need Adobe CC to access this feature. And I think CC 2015. But I'm going to switch over to my direct selection tool with the shortcut key. I'm going to grab the top right and shift, click on the top left points. So I've selected both the top points here. You notice that I've selected them because they're filled in with blue, whereas the points that aren't selected are filled in with white. From here I have these little icons that pop up there are these little corner widget icons. And when I roll over them, my cursor actually changes to an arrow with a, a rounded corner in the bottom of it. And that's because if I click and drag these, I can actually round those corners. And I'm gonna do that just a little bit to each of these corners to make this cake a little more friendly and rounded on the edges. If you're not seeing those pop-up, you can always go up to View once again and then there should be, yes, there's a little Hide Corner Widget button here. It'll either say show or hide corner widgets. So you can select that to show or hide those little icons that you get when you have an object selected with the direct selection tool. Let's go up here and select both the top points of the second layer, the top layer. And I can do that by clicking and dragging with that direct selection tool. And it goes ahead and select those and we'll bring these corners in as well. In fact, let's go back down here, and I'm gonna select these two points here. To select this corner, I'm going to find out what my corner radius is. It's actually written up here. Let's make that, let's go ahead and make that 25. That's easy to remember. And I'm gonna select these two top points and we'll make those 25 as well. Alright, we're getting somewhere. We're getting somewhere, I promise. Next thing I want to do is maybe around the edges of my platter a little bit. But let's only do about five pixels on that. That may even be too much. That'll be okay. Maybe we'll go back to about three pixels. And I just want that to soften up a little bit. I'm gonna zoom in here just so that we can work with this cake a little bit closer. Alright, so what I want to do next is add the icing. What I'm going to use is something that I've almost never, ever used in Illustrator, but that is the brush tool. And the reason I'm using it is because this combined with the shape builder tool, allows us to create really unique icing effect. Let's select maybe one of our white layers here, white colors for the icing. And I'm just going to draw right here. And we're gonna draw through this cake. I'm just going to kind of swoop down like we've got some icing on there. And I'm gonna circle back around outside of the cake just enough to come back over to this edge and you can meet that if you want. We've created and you'll notice once I let go, Illustrator actually smooth, smoothens out all of those paths so that any irregularities that I have when I'm drawing, I'm just drawing with my mouse. It actually smooths those out very nicely. And if I double-click on my brush, my paintbrush tool over here, it'll actually bring up the paintbrush tool options. And I can adjust the fidelity of this to be accurate to what I draw or smooth. And I want that to be as smooth as possible because when I'm drawing with my mouse, it's, it's gonna be kind of choppy. I want Illustrator to help smooth out those strokes. And I'm just gonna hit Okay after that. And I can select this with the selection tool. And instead of a stroke, I can actually go to my color panel over here on the right. If you don't see it, you can go to Window Color panel. Once I pop that out, I can swap the fill and the stroke so that instead of a stroke, I can actually have a filled shape. And once I do that, I'm gonna go down to Pathfinder. Once again, you can go to Window and find Pathfinder if you don't have that option, let me go down to Pathfinder and just for safekeeping, hit the Unite button just to make sure this is all one nice shape. And then I'll just minimize that. Okay, Cool. Boy, that looks great, doesn't it? How about we do this? I'm gonna show you the shape builder tool. To use the shape builder tool with two shapes. I'm going to need to select both those shapes. So let's select the bottom layer and I'm gonna hold shift and select the icing. From there. I'm going to go over and find my shape builder tool. It's usually hanging out over here somewhere Here it is two circles and a pointer, shape builder tool, shortcut, key Shift M. I'm gonna click that. And once I have that, if I roll over with the shape builder tool, you'll notice that it does this little grid pattern on each of the shapes that it's recognizing. It sees that I have these two shapes selected and it's recognizing here's where they overlap. What I can do with that, you'll notice that right now my cursor has a plus icon on it. If I hold the option key that turns into a minus icon. And then if I want to get rid of this outside layer, I'll have to do is click on it and it completely gets rid of it. It clipped, well, it doesn't clip, it actually deletes that shape and it leaves this other ships on now for switch back to my selection tool. I actually have the icing masked into the bottom layer. From here, I'm going to select that icing. I'm going to scale it up a little bit and I'm holding Shift and Option while dragging from this corner. I'm just, I just want that ice into go outside the edge of the cake a little bit. I think I need to zoom in here. So Command plus and minus. Let's see, zoom in and out really easily. So I don't want it to go too far outside the edge. So I'm just going to grab this and move it up about that much. For me here, what I don't like is this sharp little pointy edge down there. I can go back to my direct selection tool shortcut key, and click on that anchor point. And I can use my little corner widget to pull that in to create a much more rounded corners. It's like that icing is in 3D going around the edge of the cake. And I can go back to this side, click that same anchor point on this side and do the same thing, just round that off. Now what's cool is that icing isn't perfect and so you're drawing with the paintbrush tool doesn't have to be perfect and this looks pretty decent for icing on that bottom layer. Let's go up to the top layer and do the same thing. We'll do it a little bit quicker this time. Shortcut key is B for the brush tool, we're going to, I'm going to click on this icing just so that my swatch changes to that same color. Shortcut keys B for the brush tool. Alright, now I'm just going to draw through here. We'll just make some waves here. Looks good. Kind of go like this. All righty. We're gonna go select that shortcut key V for the selection tool, select that icing, go to color swap it. Then we're gonna go to Pathfinder and just kinda unite that emerge that together. It closes in any paths that aren't. They're still open. And from here we're going to select the top two pieces here, the top layer and the icing. I'm gonna hit Shift M for the shape builder tool hold Option and click on that outside icing layer. And now we've got that clipped in there or deleted so that it's a shape in there. I'm going to hold shift and option scale it up a touch. And we're going to grab that corner, pulled in a little bit as much as we can, and grab that corner and pull it in as much as we can. Now we've got icing on the top and the bottom layers. While we're at it, I'm going to add this little double layer. It's kinda like mimicking like that cake has layers of icing inside of it. We're just gonna do that by hitting the line segment tool over here. The shortcut key for that is the slash. I said a forward slash or backslash. I don't know. It's not that angle slash Actually, that's confusing. It's that angle slash. So the one that goes from the top left down to the down, lower-right. And I don't know, wasting time here. Next thing we need to do is just use that line segment tool and draw a line all the way across. And then there's nothing. Well, we need to give that line a stroke. So let's do maybe ten points on that. Perfect. I liked the white south, the same frosting color. That's what I want. I'm going to switch back to my selection tool. I'm going to hold option. I get the double cursor there now. And if I click on this and I drag it down, it's actually going to create a duplicate of that. And that's what I wanted. I wanted too little. I don't know. It's not a swirl of like an icing layer in there. That's perfect. Now what I'm gonna do is actually select these two guys and go up to Object expand. And that's gonna take those from being strokes to be an actual shapes. I'm expanding that stroke into a shape. So now I actually have edges to all of that. And let's go ahead and select everything. So the whole bottom layer here. So I've got the bottom layer cake and these two icing things. And now that I have those three selected, I'm gonna hit Shift in. I've got that shape builder tool selected, hold Option. And I'm just going to draw through the outsides of those to kind of cut them off there. Because I want that icing to just be on top of the cake and inside of the cake there. Perfect, so I've got a little, too little icing layers there and I'm gonna bring them up and touch. So zoom in Command Plus and click on both of these. I'm gonna hold shift to get both of them. I'm just going to use my arrow key to kind of shift that up a little bit just to bring it away from the bottom. Some cool, We're looking good. Actually, we've got pretty much the cake done here we're gonna make, let's make a candle up top candle, right? Yeah, vertex, birthday cake, candle. All we are going to do for that is the rectangle tool, that's M shortcut key. And let's just create a candle shape up here. Just like that. Now it's still the icing color, so let's switch that to maybe something more red. We've got a red candle up there. I'm going to hit that selection tool again. And I always go back to that selection tool a lot of times by pressing the shortcut key V. Now I'm going to send this to the back and I can do that by the shortcut key for that is Shift Command, left bracket and then right bracket to bring to front. But you can also right-click, hit a range and say Send to Back. I just want that candle to be behind this cake layer. I think I'm going to add some stripes in the candle. So M for the rectangle tool. And then let's just draw some little rectangles straight across here. I'm gonna change the color of that to white color, maybe that icing color. I'm going to create a couple more of these by holding Option and Shift and just dragging them down. How about we create? I don't know, six of these are, so I did that once I did that transformation wants what I can do now, since I did that transformation wants it to go up to Object Transform. Transform again, I'm just gonna do the exact same transformation down. Then if I hit command D, which is the shortcut, I can just hit that a couple of times. It's going to transform that all the way down. Now I wanted 66 stripes, so that's good. I'm going to actually bring this guy down a little bit. And I'm going to select all of these and go up to my transformation options. And instead of aligned to art board, I'm going to align to selection. And I'm going to distribute these vertically so that it's going to evenly space them out from there. How about we select them all again? Rotate a little bit. We want, obviously for the stripes, we want those to be a little bit rotated. And from there Let's select all the stripes and the candle. And then Shift M for that, that famous shape builder tool hold Option. And just draw through everything that you don't want. I don't want anything outside of the candle because I want those stripes right there on that Candle. Want them to be a part of it, perfect. V to go back to selection tool, I'm going to click off of it. And there's my striped candle. Now one thing I don't like about this guy is the pointy edges. So let's go back in there. I'm going to click on him and then switch to my direct selection tool. That's gonna pull up all my corner, corner widget stuff. And let's just bump this up by using the arrow keys to see, I think just once I think one pixels all I really want on that candle, just a little bit of a rounded edge that looks perfect. Be careful that you don't round that edge too much that it brings it up. You can actually, and you can see if you round this edge too much, it's going to bring it above your cake. You don't want that, you want that, you want that Canada goes straight down into the cake. I'm going to undo that and make sure that there's no curve there and that's perfect. All right, One thing we want to make here is the flame. How about a flame at the top of the, top of the candle here? This tutorial for teaching a bunch of stuff. I'm going to hit the L key. That is the ellipse tool. You can also click and hold on that Rectangle tool and drop down and select the ellipse tool. But the L key is the shortcut key for the ellipse tool. We're gonna make a circle by holding Shift and Option that's going to create a circle from the center out there right there. That's good. Let's change the color of this. So I'm going to change this to maybe this orange color. Let's create a flame. Alright, so if you notice, when I have this circle selected, there's four points and there's one here, here, here and here. Let's select the top point O there you can see the points better now. So four points, four anchor points. I'm going to select just the top one with the direct selection tool shortcut key. And once I have that, I'm going to click and drag it up a little bit. I'm holding Shift to drag it up. Right now we've gotten like an egg shape, so we need, we need this to be more flame. Let's zoom in a little bit and zooming in. And what I want to do now is actually switch over to my pen tool, which the shortcut key for that is P. And I'm going to hold Option or Alt on a PC. And that's going to switch to the anchor. What's it called the anchor point tool? I think that's the anchor point tool. Maybe. Yep. Anchor point tool. It's going to switch to the anchor point tool momentarily, as long as I'm holding Option, it switches to that and I can grab that handle and then drag it down and start to create kind of like a teardrop or a flame shape. Once I do that, it actually gets rid of the other handle, but it doesn't really say switch back to your direct selection tool. Click on that anchor and that handle show up again. Switch over to the pen tool shortcut key P. And I can hold Option or Alt to affect this handle as well and bring him down. We've got this flame. I think I'm going to not bring him down as much. This flame is kinda like swooping down on this side, but a little more rounded on this side. I'm gonna hit V. And there we go. We just created a little flame. I'm going to create that white center of it. The white hot center of a flame, just by clicking on this shape. And we're gonna copy with Command C, That's Control C on a PC. And then we're gonna hit Command F to paste in front. Those options are also up in edit. You can hit Copy command C or control C, and then paste in front, which is Command F or Control F. And that creates a layer right on top of my other layer. I want to do that because I'm going to use the same shape for that inner flame, the inner like hot center point of it. And I can just click and drag this down from the top while holding shift. If I don't hold Shift, it's going to make it all wonky and skewed. So I'm gonna hold shift and just create down maybe to where that tip is about halfway down the flame and let go. I need to change the color of this. I'm going to select something a lot lighter, like a lighter tan or something. From here. There we go. We've got the white hot center of our flame. I'm going to zoom out a little bit. The only thing we're missing here is the wick. So let's create a little wick. I'm going to create a line, just a simple stroke. So we're going to use that line segment tool again. And we're just going to create a small line coming up from our candle here. Let's give that a stroke of maybe 33 points. Oh, that's way too much. We'll drop that down to actually 1 for the scale that I have everything set up at. With that stroke, I'm going to make it more of a charcoal color. And then I'm going to actually go to that stroke panel. And I'm gonna do a rounded cap on that. You'll notice that that rounds each of the ends. It's a little hard to see here. We'll zoom in on him. But each of the ends is now rounded on that stroke. I like that shape a lot. So what I'm going to do is go to object, expand and just fill in that stroke. So now it's an actual shape. But I do want him to be behind this candle. So I'm going to select him right-click arrange and send to back. But I also want him to be in front of the flame. I'm going to right-click the flame. I've selected now I've selected both of these. Let's go ahead and group those two together. So we're going to select both the flames right-click and group them together. And we're going to send him to the back as well by going right-clicking on it, arrange and then send to back. There we go. And we're just going to maybe bump this down a touch. And that looks pretty good. We've got a wick and a flame. I think they had flames like little too big. So we'll select them again. And I'm just going to hold shift from the top here and kind of bring him down in size a little bit. Bump him up with the arrows. Human not and that's a little too much, so I'll just kind of drag him down. There we go. We'll see if that flame looks a little bit. Yeah, it does. I think there we have it. We made a birthday cake. The only thing left we have to do is the background and the shadows. So let's create a background. I'm going to go back to my ellipse tool shortcut key for that as L. And then somewhere in the center here, I'm going to intersect in the center of everything. I'm gonna hold shift and option and create a circle from about there in the center. Once I've got it about the size I want it to be, I'm just going to let go. And that made it whatever color we had selected last. So let's change that to some sort of a steely blue color. From there, we're going to send him, he's got to go all the way to the back. So we're going to send him to the back. But right-clicking go to arrange and then send to back. All right. We're getting close. You guys. I think he's maybe a little off center. Let's just bring that circle down, some center, that cake up. And I think we're also going to go ahead and group all of this cake together. So right now it's a bunch of separate elements. I'm going to select everything, deselect this circle by holding Shift and clicking on it. Now I'd have just the kick selected. I can hit Command or Control G to group it or I can right-click and hit Group. Now that I have it grouped, no matter what I select, that group is going to move together as a unit. Now that it's centered up, I'm going to select both of these and right-click. I'm going to select everything and then click on the circle. We're going to hit this horizontal lines center button just as you saw. Nudge it over just a little bit, just want to make sure that's in the center. Then I'm going to eyeball the vertical center. I kinda like where that is, right there. Alright, let's create a shadow. I think the first shadow I'm going to make is the shadow on the entire cake layer. And I'm gonna do that by copying this remember object or I'm sorry, Edit, Copy, Control Command or Control C. And then we're going to paste in front with Command F. It doesn't look like I did anything but I did, I made a second layer of that cake right in front of it. Now what I'm gonna do is actually double-click on that. I'm inside of the cake, the top cake group layer. Now I can select all of these objects because I haven't isolated. You can see I'm on layer one inside of this group. I've got all of these elements isolated. What I'm gonna do is interesting here, I'm going to actually use the rectangle tool and that's shortcut key M. I'm gonna draw a rectangle, make sure it's big enough to cover your entire cake. But then I'm only going to bring it across half of the cake. To about there. I don't really care what color that is. I'm going to select all. That's underneath. Select all or Command a or Control a to select all. I've got everything, all these cake elements and this big old rectangle selected Shift M for that lovely shape builder tool. And notice that I've got all of these shapes. Let's get rid of everything on the left side. I'm going to hold Option and just draw through everything that I don't want while holding option. So I've got all these major shapes taken care of. Let's zoom in a little bit now. This candle, and we'll do the same thing, shift M and then hold Option and draw through all the shapes that we don't want. There's a couple more in here, so let's zoom in here again. That's a shortcut keys x0 for the Zoom tool, you may have a scrubby zoom or you may have the zoom to selection like I'm showing you right now where you just draw on it zooms to that. I've got this wick in here, and I really need to get rid of the left side of that as well. So hold Shift and M, just draw through that while holding Option or Alt. And there we go. So I've gotten rid of who will zoom out here, gotten rid of the entire left side of everything. I've got this layer of just the right half. The reason I did that is because now that I've got this right half layer, all I need to do is go to transparency and switch that the blending mode to multiply to create a shadow on the right side of the cake. From here, I think that's a little harsh. So let's maybe drop that back opacity. And actually you can grab opacity and the transparency panel as well. That may be mixed a little more sense hit seventy-five percent just to pull that shadow back a little bit. I don't want it to be too strong. There you go. There's your shadow of your cake. All right, We're almost done. If you want to stick with me, I'm gonna show you how to create a long shadow. And another tutorial showed people how to do it with a blend method. This one, I think I'm gonna just gonna do a quick shape building method with the pen tool. So I've got everything selected here. Let's, let's get rid of some of this. So I'm going to lock this in with Command to you can also go up to I think, Object. Yeah. And then lock selection. I'm actually going to just grab everything and lock it with command or control. To. Now I cannot grab anything. Everything is locked in and I can't accidentally click on something, I don't want to. But because I have my smart guides enabled, notice how it recognizes all these anchor points and the paths are, I can go in there and create a point right at the very tippy top of this flame. Create a point there. Then I can create a point in the bottom left corner. We'll create it somewhere. You don't want that will create it somewhere down. Just along this edge here, maybe right in there. I've got those two points created. I'm going to switch back to my selection tool. Shortcut key is V. With this, I want to duplicate this out. So I want to have that selected. I'm going to hold Option and duplicate it out outside of our circle background. Once I have that, I basically have two objects. Now I've got these two parallel objects. It's the most important part right now is that these two are parallel. Now that I have that, let's go back. Let's hit P for the Pen tool. And I'm going to select this anchor. You'll notice the slash underneath the Pen tool. It means I'm gonna continue on this path, select that anchor, and then let's combine it with this side over here. Once I do that, it may fill that in automatically for you. As long as I have three points that it will. Let's change the color of this so we can see it maybe something more like a really light gray color or maybe something in the middle there. And it's just a gray just so you can see it. This path isn't closed. So I'm going to go ahead and go to pathfinder, that Unite button or merge one of the other. We'll close this as one shape. Let's see from here actually let's go ahead and create a gradient. How's that? Will create a gradient shadow, not just a shadow but a gradient long shadow. I'll have to do is go to gradient and click on this gradient area. This is already set, this is already set up. I'm going to switch this back to what you'll find. You're gonna find this being like a white to a black gradient. And there's the gradient tool over here in the tool panel. I believe the shortcut key for that is g. You see the gradient here, that's the gradient tool. You see this bar here. You can actually redraw the gradient. So I could click in the top here and then draw down at this angle to redraw the angle of the gradient and where the gradient starts and stops. Now I want this to be from black to white. So how about I just switch these two colors? I also don't want it to be as stark black. So let's double-click on that black. And we'll go to maybe something more like 40% black. And then this white is fine. The other thing I want is for this shape and I'm going to go to my selection tool and just select that shape. I want him to be multiplied. You can see now where the shadow is going to becoming from. It looks kinda wonky, but that's okay. What I want to do now is unlock everything. So I'm gonna go up to Object Unlock All. That's also option command to or control command to. Once they do that, everything's back in play. All of these elements can be moved and whatnot. Now I don't want to move them all at this point. What I do want though, you can see how this is actually not going to be the shadow that we want. I need this shadow to start here. And what is this? This, there's no shadows and nothing casting a shadow over there. So I'm going to add a couple more points to our shadow. As long as my shadow selected, there's a little plus icon that pops up. I'm gonna hit Plus there. I'm going to hit plus here and I'm gonna hit plus down here. And then I'm going to switch to the Direct Selection tool with the white arrow here. And I'm gonna click on that point and only that point, notice the other ones are not selected, they're still white. This one is filled in. Then I can click and drag and just drag that point directly below the candle. And I can do the same thing here. I can drag that in to make sure that shadow doesn't crossover anything behind the cake. And same thing down here. We'll just make sure that that doesn't go behind the cake on the left side, we want it behind on the right but not on the left. There's another thing happening down here and I think I'm going to change how this platter is set up. So because I've got rounded corners at the bottom, there's not a good spot to really start that shadow. And I'm gonna select this guy. And we are going to actually, we're actually going to select him with the regular selection tool. Just have him selected. And we're going to double-click on him. And then I've got him isolated or I've got the whole cake isolated, but at least I won't select anything on accident here. So I'm going to use the direct selection tool to select all of the bottom points. And we're just going to get rid of the corners on that. So I'm gonna go back to 0. So that's gonna be rounded here, but then flat at the bottom there. And I think that that's gonna be more like the platter and where it stops right there. Now I'm going to double-click out of this and I think one thing we need to do, Let's go ahead and let's go ahead and finish this shadow out. Let's go ahead and finish the shadow. So I'm gonna hit Z and I'm going to zoom in here a little bit. And this shadow actually needs to be parallel. So anytime I move one of these two points, this point or this point up here, what I actually want to do is move this entire line segment because I want it to be parallel with this one. I don't want to affect the angle of this guy. I need to select this point, and I need to select this point by holding Shift and clicking on it. So now I've got the two selected. I am safe to zoom back in and sort of move this path till that anchor point intersects with the bottom left of our plate here. Once it does that, I've actually moved this entire line segment, so we're still parallel with this guy. So that's all good and that's all fine and dandy. We're looking pretty good here. There's one mistake that we're gonna correct and then I'm gonna show you how to get this shadow behind the cake. What are we going to do is take this shadow layer and I know it looks weird right now. We're going to fix that. I'm going to send him to the back, arrange send to back. Then I'm gonna take this background layer and we're going to send him to the back because I want him to actually be the furthest back. That's looking pretty good. So before we clip this shadow in here, Let's zoom in and fix one little problem. It's hard to see. But when we unrounded our corner of our platter, we didn't and round the corner of the shadow. We need to double-click in on that shadow layer. And then a for the direct selection tool, select this and get rid of the corner. We can pull that all the way down or we can select 0 up here on corners. And then I'm gonna hit that selection tool and double-click outside of that to go back to our main canvas here. And that's fixed that. So I kind of liked that better and I like how the shadows go from there. What you can do is define the angle of your shadow. And to do that, you just the direct selection tool, select both of these points here. And because, and that's because you want to keep this, every time you move any of these points, you want to keep this parallel with this or this segment parallel with this segment. But as long as I keep that parallel, I keep that shadow inside of the cake. I mean, I could bring it down if I wanted to. It's up to you whatever the angle is that you want. But I think that you want to keep that shadow above the cake. So then above the platter. So anything from here all the way down to maybe in here is where I would probably move it just based on other flat artwork that I've seen. But you can find your angle of the shadow that you want. 13. Flat Design Heart: The first thing I want you to know is that we're going to use the technique not available in CS6. So this will be CC or later as long as you have the rounding corners tool, we'll start with a rectangle and I'm just going to create sort of any sort of size rectangle. You'll understand and be able to create your own here and adjusted if you want. Now, I'm gonna take, after I created this rectangle, I'm gonna take the direct selection tool, click and drag to select the top two points. After I've done that, I should see the corner widget on those two points and I can just click and drag to pull those in. I'm gonna pull them in until it shows red, which means I can't pull those in anymore. It's going to create a little half circle along the top if you don't see the corner which it go up to View and then down to hide or show Corner Widget. And if you're in CS6, like I said, you're probably not gonna see it at all. Okay, So we've done that much now what I can do is maybe swap the fill and stroke on this, Get rid of the stroke. Probably I'm just going to type in 0 there. And for the fill, Let's go with a red color. And actually this is a little bit too hot. I want to more flat design and flat color. So I'm gonna pull it down into here. I just double-click this swatch over here and it brings up my color picker, make it a little bit more grayish. And that's going to be a much more muted tone. I'm gonna rotate this guy to the left 45 degrees by holding Shift and clicking and dragging with that double ended arrow. And then I'm going to duplicate by holding Alt or Option also hold Shift to keep it in line, straight horizontal. Duplicate that piece right there. Now, I can actually just rotate this guy back around 45 the other way. And you see where we're going here. Click and drag hold shift until it locks almost into place. It actually might not lock very well into place. So we're going to want to zoom in on this guy That's Command or Control plus and minus to zoom in and out, I'm gonna click this top layer and just drag him over until I feel like he is flush with that edge. And that's going to make this edge over here the same. Now we have a heart, and depending on the size of your rectangle, this heart is going to look a little bit different each time. I'm just going to stick with this one. We're going to select everything because right now it's made out of two shapes. I'm going to grab my shape builder tool over here. Shift M is the shortcut key. I'm just going to click and draw through this real quick to combine all of those shapes together. Now we've got a heart that's a single, single element here. What we could do is if we wanted to add back in some kind of a stroke, we could add in a line around the heart. If we want, we can add in some shading on one side so we could add another rectangle. I'm gonna make this rectangle a darker color. Hit. Okay, and then I'm gonna draw this so that it locks into the center. And my little pink guides, our Smart Guides go up to View, down to Smart Guides to turn those on and off. Once I have this drawn, I can do the same thing with that Shape Builder Tool. Remember Shift M, I can subtract out this outside part by holding Alt or option. And now I have a slice the size of half of my heart. What I can do is just turn the opacity down on that guy. Maybe like 10%. That's gonna give you a nice little ten or 15%, a nice little shadow on one side of the heart. I suppose the last thing that you could do is maybe grab a pen tool, for instance. And we could click here and then click and drag down here to create sort of a curved line. And if we try to match the curve or the arc of the outside of our heart. And then go back to the selection tool. We want to swap the fill and stroke here. We don't want this to be filled. We were actually want it to be a stroke. So I'm gonna click this swap fill and stroke button that's Shift X. I want to bring that stroke up to maybe something like five points. Change the stroke color to white, and then change the stroke settings to round cap. It's going to round the two ends. And we could actually make this maybe more like ten points. And that's gonna give me like a little shine, a little highlight on that upper side of the heart. And if we don't want it to be full white, we can always bring that opacity down. Something like 75% maybe would be a little bit softer of a highlight. 14. Flat Design iPhone: This is the flat design phone mockup we're gonna do today. It's simple, it's pretty basic. We got a little bit of a hint of a shine on it and some shadow there. So let's go ahead and get started. It's pretty easy, really when you break it down. It's just some simple shapes. I'm going to start a new document so we can start this thing from scratch. It's gonna be 1920 by 1080 only because it's just a pretty standard size. Alright, so we need to make a rectangle. That's pretty easy, right guys? If we go over to the rectangle tool, the shortcut key for that is m. We can just create a rectangle. This is gonna be the shape of our phone. Phones are a lot more vertical than I thought they were. So maybe something like this is going to work. We're just guessing. And then in the appearance panel over here, anywhere you find, Fill and Stroke, we've got to adjust these. I'm gonna do no stroke. So I'm actually just going to maybe put a 0 in to this box here. Hit Enter and it's going to put a slash there. Strokes, we have no more stroke on the fill. I want it to be black, but I actually don't want it to be the starkest of blacks. So I'm going to go up to the color tab, which you can go up to the Window drop-down, down to Color F6 to pop that out. If I click on my fill and select it as the primary color that we're editing and then double-click on it. This is my, this is just my favorite little color picker. If I drag this circle over to the left, I'm not gonna have any color in it, it's just gonna be black and white. Now another thing I like to look at when I'm over here Is this a little b right here? It's kind of a trick for me. This means 85% black, so it's sort of the reverse of what we're looking at. It's as if it's 15% white is applied to this. So what we're gonna do here is maybe set the phone color to something like 10% right here. And that's gonna be like in 90% black has a lot of explaining for that little piece, but that's the way I like to think about it when I select blacks and stuff. So now we have this rectangle in our phone shape. If you have Adobe Illustrator CC 2015 or later, you're going to have the corner widget, which is in the View drop-down, down to hide or show corner widget we haven't shown currently. So we see these little dots in the corners of our rectangle. Just click that dot and pull it in. It's going to round our corners. I'm going to round them to be maybe about 2525, 27 pixels, something like that. Something just to have slightly rounded corners, maybe a little bit more. Maybe we'll do something like 30 ish. And we can actually set that in our Properties panel in the transform dialogue box, which once again, you can also find in the Window drop-down. If you find transform, it's going to pop that out and its own dialogue box. We have all the advanced properties shown. It might require you to click on the hamburger menu. But once you're down here, check this out, There's corners and we can actually set the corner radius to a specific number. I could do 30, as long as this is linked, they will all change. As soon as I click out of that, I'm going to minimize this and we have rounded, a rounded rectangle. So this is starting to look more and more like a phone. Let's add the screen with another rectangle. So we're just going to create something in the center of this guy. Given us a little space for the bezels, doesn't really matter, just create a rectangle right there. We're going to adjust the fill of it, make it something like just, let's just go with white for now. And then backup to the selection tool shortcut key is v. Let's center this first. So I'm gonna select both of these. And then I'm going to click on my black phone rectangle. From here I'm going to find my Alignment panel, which is down to the right, but first up in the Window, drop-down, down to a line, you can pop that out if you can't find your panel. Now since we clicked on this and it's highlighted in a double blue stroke, we can actually align to it. So we're going to align horizontal and vertical just to get that rectangle right in the center. Once we do that, we're pretty good to go. I'm going to decrease the bezel on the left and right just by increasing the width of our rectangle. And I can hold Alt or Option to increase it from the center out, which allows us to keep it in the center and increase the width on both sides at the same time. Now at this time I'm going to maybe give us a little bit more bezel on top and bottom, just by clicking on the top and decreasing the height of this holding Alt and Option as well, just to give us a little bit more up here and down below. And at this point, if it's starting to look like an iPad, Mini, not a phone, what we can do is just go to the law actually, since we don't have any shapes that matter, as far as the skewing of it, we can just select both. We can do the same thing. We can pull in an edge just to decrease the width of our entire phone and create more of a phone shape. Phones are way more vertical than I thought they were. Now we're gonna do the button on the bottom with the rectangle tool. Once again, we can click and hold that and find the Ellipse Tool. The shortcut key for that is L. If I hold Shift and Alt or Option, I can create a circle from the center out, just like so. We want to create a circle that's not too large that it can fit down here below in that bottom decile, this circle, we want him to be filled with black. I'm going to go up to my color panel. Remember F6, to pop that out, I finally remembered that color picker. Let's go down here. Remember how we picked a color that was, Let's see, I don't know what we picked. We picked ten for that. So for this one maybe we're gonna do five. We want it to be darker than the phone itself. So now that we have that, we're going to select this and maybe drag it over the top of this phone. You see this little pink line that's a smart guide. Smart guides are pretty helpful to align your objects together. Underneath the View drop-down, we can turn on Smart Guides if they're not already on by clicking smart guides right there. We've got the button down there. I think the background color of our phone is a little too dark, so I'm going to click on it again, double-click that. And then instead of like eight or 9%, we're gonna do something like maybe 13%. See what that ends up. Once we do that, we can actually see this other circle a little bit better. Now, I need to, I need to center him between these two points here, just on this bottom bevel, but this whole shape isn't going to help me. So I'm gonna create a new shape that's going to be sort of like a guide just with the rectangle tool. I do this all the time. I'm going to align it up here so that it's linked into the world that the path, you see, the path right there, it's going to intersect that. And then I'm going to create just a rectangle that hits the bottom of our phone. Got it there. I'm going to just slide this over to green so we can see it. And now I know that's not a piece of my, that's not a piece of my artwork here. I'm going to click on this circle hold Shift, click on this green rectangle, let go of Shift and click on the green rectangle again. Now we're aligning to that key object. We find our alignment panel window drop-down if you need it. And vertical lines center, it's gonna bring that circle down. And then we already lined it up to the center of everything with our smart guide earlier. So it's right here in the center. I'm actually going to bring this guy up to the top because I know this top part is the same size and I need to get it locked in there. If I'm a little worried about that, I can just go ahead and decrease the size of it and increase the size until it locks into the top of our phone. Same thing here to it locks into the top of our screen portion. And I can keep this rectangle right in here for now because we've got to create the, actually, I don't really know what this is. What is it? A speaker and a camera and all the gizmos and gadgets up here. We're gonna do that with the line segment tool. Click on the line segment tool. It's a little slushie button. We're going to create a line. I'm gonna hold shift to make sure it is perfectly horizontal. We're gonna let go right there. Alright, so it's given me no stroke, no stroke and no fill. I need to add a stroke to this. And this stroke should be the same color as this guy down here, which as we recall, if we just click on a color, as we recall, it was about 5% black. I think if we go back up to our color panel, click on the stroke and then double-click on it. We can bring this over here and set B here are black to 5%. Hit. Okay? And now we have a tiny little stroke there. I'm going to just guesstimate here. Maybe five pixels are five points. You guys can choose whatever size you want, whatever it looks the best for your phone. I'm going to go back to the stroke settings here by clicking on stroke. And I'm going to round the caps. It just creates a nicer finish, a little cleaner look. We're gonna go back to the Selection tool. I've got my little speaker here. We're going to center it on the phone by clicking both are shift clicking both the speaker and the film. And then we're gonna click on the phone. And that's going to highlight it again. And we're going to use the horizontal align center to center that. And it looked like it was already in there. So that's good. Now we want to center it on this little guide here. So I'm going to Shift, click on both of these and then let go of Shift and click on our guide. A lot of aligning to key objects. So this time we're going to align the vertical to put it right in the center of this top decile. Now that we have that in there, we're pretty good. So we can delete this guide piece just by clicking and hitting the delete key. And let's go ahead and zoom in a little bit. That was Command or Control plus and minus to zoom in and out. And then hold shift, I'm sorry, hold space bar to get the little hand tool so you can move around. So this might be a little bit wide. I'm going to click on it and then hover over this point. Click on that anchor point, hold Option or Alt, and Shift to drag it in and out. You see how we can just skew it in and out like that. So I'm gonna make it a little bit smaller, maybe like that. We need the little camera and then maybe a little dot up here for whatever that is on your phone. Alright, so let's create a little circle. I'm going to create it with the ellipse tool, shortcut key L, hold Shift and Alt or option to create a circle from the center out, maybe something like that. Now because we have this selected last, it went ahead and did the stroke for me. I can actually flip these with this little swap fill and stroke icon that's Shift X as a shortcut key. And so it's gonna take that stroke color and just make the fill color and no stroke, It's going to just swap them exactly what it says. Okay, so now we need this little circle to maybe be a little bit left of our speaker, like there. And then I'm gonna hold shift and click on the speaker. So I've got them both selected. And then let go shift click on the speaker aligned to key object, you know the drill. Alright, Vertical Align, Center, boom, right there, right there like that, That's pretty good. Then I can actually duplicate this guy by clicking on them holding Alt or Option. And I'm not zoomed in enough like barely to select that. So this is where like a command plus Control plus zooming in is gonna be helpful because now it's not getting messed up with the edges of my shape. I can hold Alt or Option and duplicate this guy out. Let my smart guides tell me where the center is. It's somewhere right there. Then once I do that and let go, I'm gonna grab this top corner. Start skewing it, hold Shift to keep it in proportion and then hold Alt or option to keep it from the center out. This guy is pretty small, so we're gonna make them kind of tiny like that, but maybe not smaller than my line down here. Something like that works. Let's zoom out and see where we're at. Let's zoom out and see where we're at. That's a pretty decent really. What we can do now is maybe change the color of this shape. So this is our screen and it looks right now like it sees through to the back of our page. Let's change the First off, let's change the opacity. If we go to the Appearance tab, which is of course in the Window drop-down if you need it, we changed the opacity is something like 50%. That's gonna pull a little bit of the darkness of the rectangle underneath through it. So now we have sort of like a gray screen. I like adding just a little bit of color into it, I think so if we go back to our color panel, remember F6 is the shortcut key. Double-click on that fill. Maybe we want just like, I don't know, just a little bit, just a little bit of color. And this is sort of like a little bit of red, orangeish. I'm adding to it Not much. Do you see the difference here? This is before. This is after I'm gonna hit OK. And it's just, it's just a little some added in there. Alright, so that's pretty good. We got this screen color in there and we can always adjust that however you want. I'm just showing you how to do this. You guys can adjust and make your own phone in whatever way you want. So let's go ahead and do the reflection up here. That's the right word for it not shine, it's the reflection. Alright, so I think the easiest way maybe here is to go grab the pen tool shortcut key is P. I'm going to create a point out here. I'm going to create a point somewhere randomly over here. And then we're gonna create a point down here. And this is going to dictate where it crosses over. I wanted to maybe be like just this upper left-hand corner there. Then the last thing I'm gonna do is close up this path. Not not anything too complex with the pen tool didn't hold Shift. I just clicked three points and made a triangle. Now I'm going to go back to the selection tool. This time we're going to select everything by clicking and dragging over everything. And now you see where that reflection is going to be. We use that shape builder tool Shift plus MB hold Option. And my little cursor is going to switch from a plus to a minus. We can just click on this outer shape. That got rid of that. You can go back to the selection tool. We can change the color of this to maybe just a full white if we want, just like that. And then the opacity, we can take that down. I don't really know what it should be. Maybe 5%. We don't want much, just like 5% or so. We're pretty much there. What we need is maybe a background and a shadow. What I'm gonna do is just create a rectangle. The shortcut key for that is M. It's right here. By the way, we've used it all throughout this tutorial. I'm going to kind of create something like a background. This rectangle is going to scale the entirety of my background art board. And then I'm going to change the color of it. I think I like blue, like we did in the thumbnail. So we're going to double-click on this fill. And then I like it maybe something like a blue or green. I don't remember now, let's make it green. Something like this. It's gonna be like a little minty green hit. Okay. Something like that. Yeah. Okay. Now this shape is on top of everything, so we're gonna click on it, right-click. Arrange, send to back, and you can use that shortcut key like I do, or you can just right-click once we have it in the back, an easy way to lock in backgrounds is to click on them and use Command or Control to, to lock it in. You can also go up to object, down to lock, to lock whatever object is selected. Now we need to add the shadow. I used to do this with the Blend tool, but I'm not doing that anymore. I don't like it. Let's just do something pretty easy with the pen tool. So grab the pen tool, I'm going to hit on wherever the corner of this phone is, somewhere, somewhere in here. And then I'm gonna hold shift. And you see that we're doing like a 45-degree angled down here. I'm gonna go off the art board and click Space-bar to sort of move my screen down a little bit. I'm gonna go 45 from this guy as well down here. So it's past where I think 45 would hit, coming down from the other corner. Maybe like down here. Now we have that piece. And what I need to do now is get off the pen tool by hitting V. That's the shortcut key for the selection tool. Click off of it and I'm gonna do another shape or another line here. So P for the Pen tool once again, go to this corner. Click. That's my first anchor point hold Shift, and I'm going to go past my shadow right here. Just like that. So now I have that line. That's all I really needed. Back to the selection tool shortcut key V, select both of these objects and utilize the shape builder tool. Got it. Okay, So I want to slice off this portion. So hold Option or Alt, switch that to a minus click. Okay, so it's gone right there. Now that I have an anchor point right here, what I can do is actually just get rid of this little line. It was almost like just a guide. You can delete him. And now this shape has the anchor point I need right here. So I'm gonna switch to the direct selection tool to just grab this one anchor point. We're going to move him. And if I don't hold Shift, I can move them anywhere. So I got to hold Shift to keep them at 45 and he should line up right with the corner of this phone right there. That's one way to do it. There's about a million other ways to do it, but hey, that's one way to do it. This guy, we need a shadow color obviously, but I want to do like a gradient here. I'm going to find my gradient tool, maybe just by going up to window down to gradient, that's the gradient panel. If I just click on this gradient slider, it's going to apply a gradient. I need this to be from black to black, not from white to black. So I'm going to double-click on this color, select that black. I'm also going to double-click on this color and select the same black just to make sure we have the same black. Now, this end point here is gonna be an opacity of 0. So we're going from black to black, but from a 100% to 0% opacity and click out of that box to apply that. Now the other thing we need to do is adjust the angle of our gradient. I can do that by grabbing the gradient tool which is right over here. The shortcut key for that is G. Now I can actually see where this gradient is applied from left to right. Everything is left to right. I could click up here, hold and drag my gradient down, which the latest update has this awesome preview feature. It's pretty cool. All right. I hold shift. It actually doesn't lock it into 45 degrees. That's a missed opportunity by Adobe. So you can just kind of eyeball your 45 degree angle here. I think I'm gonna have this go off the art board, just barely, just something like that. Let me just show you here where you can adjust where this falls off by using this little slider right here to adjust where the, how steep or how quickly it goes from 100% opacity to 0% opacity. Then the other thing we of course can do, if we go back and maybe zoom out a little, we can click on this entire shape and we can adjust the opacity of it, which will need to maybe down to twenty-five percent. We don't want that full full-blown shadow. Last thing we need to do here is send it to the back. So we're going to right-click on it. Go down to arrange, Send to Back. Now it's behind my background so we need to bring it forward one spot. So right-click, click on it. Right-click. Arrange should be bringing forward, not bring to front, bring forward. And now we're on top of the background. Now I actually would rather this have an effect the background a little bit differently than just the opacity of the black. So what we can do is click on our little opacity tab. Now, this is gonna be under Window appearance if you can't find it or you don't have it over there in the Properties panel. And on this we need to look at the fill opacity. When you click on that opacity. Once we do that, we can actually select a blending mode here. The blending mode, I think I'm gonna pick as soft light. And then it looks like it got rid of it, but just hang on a second so we can go out of this backup of the spec out of this. It's there just a little bit. We might need to pump that up a little bit more. And it looks like we messed up the opacity here, which is fine. What we can do is open that window appearance panel back up and we can adjust it here. So the capacity is actually here. We sort of screwed it up, but that's fine. This appearance panel is going to show you everything. So I'm gonna click on this opacity. And we can bring this up to something like 50%. And that's going to help pull this shadow out a little bit more on our, wherever our background is, it's gonna kinda see how it's sort of tweaks the color a little bit more than just the darkness of the black gradient does. I think we did it right? And then we can grab all this. We can right-click it and we can group it together. Now that it's grouped together, no matter what I click on here, it's all gonna move together. So you can do this with or without the shadow. You could describe the whole phone and then you'll have the phone as a single group that you can move around on your on your document. I hope you guys enjoyed that. If you have any questions about it, let me know this flat design stuff, really it's just looking at whatever, wherever your thing is and then breaking it down into the most simple elements that you can. And you can add, you can add more strokes to this. You can add a gradient to the button to make it look a little bit more realistic. But it depends on what level of realism you're going for. To me. Flat design, it's all about communication. If I can do that in a single color shift or color change with two shapes laying on top of each other. And now that circle is a button instead of having to do an outline and a gradient and all that. Then, then that's what I like to do. That's a personal preference for me. I hope you guys learned a lot in this tutorial. Thanks for watching and I'll see you guys next time. 15. Flat Design Pilgrim Hat: And we're gonna be making something like this right here. It's like a little Pilgrim hat thing. Let's get started. I'm gonna come over to the side, not that side, and maybe this side. Let's keep it on screen a little bit and just model everything off of this first one that I made. It's gonna be out of shapes and everything. So let's start with the shape tool, the ellipse tool, specifically the shortcut key for that is L. You can get to it by clicking and holding and going to the Ellipse tool in the shape tool over here on the left. I'm going to click and drag and I'm gonna make an oval. And this is the bottom of the hat or the brim, if you will. Now, whatever color it shows up as it will likely be black for you, we're gonna make it sort of like a slate color. So I'm gonna go to my color panel up in the Window, drop-down, down to color that's going to pop this out. It's also F6 as a shortcut, I should remember that one. I like to double-click on this fill right here. And then I can select with this color picker whatever I want. Let's do a slight color, maybe 20% black right there. I'm just looking at this B right here and till it said 20% hit. Okay, there we go. It's a little light, but that's okay. All right, Now the next thing that I want to do is create from the center out another oval. So I'm going to select that ellipse tool once again, click and drag from the center. And apparently that moves that guy. So I'm gonna go a little off center right in here. Click and drag to make another oval. This time I'm going to hold Option or Alt, and that is going to create it from the center out. I'm going to try to get somewhere into that sort of cone shape on top of this, this hat. And let go. There it is. Let's center this guy up on the brim of the hat. Go back to the selection tool shortcut key is V, select both, then click on the brim or bottom of the, heck, I think it's called a brim, right? That highlights it. That means we're aligning to a key object. Now I'm gonna go up to window, down to my Align panel, get that to pop out and have all these little options we're aligning to a key object. I'm going to just center it up like that. And then also make sure that it's centered this way, like that. There we go. So now we're in the center. I'm going to select both. Again. Go to the Shape Builder tool that is Shift M. It's my favorite tool. I'm going to hold Option or all until that little cursor turns to a minus instead of a plus. Click and drag through this bottom shape and it goes away. Okay, so if I go back to the selection tool shortcut key, now I've got this sort of shape. It's looking good. Let's create the little belt. We're doing this out of shapes and I want it to have the same arc as the bottom of this hat. I clicked on the bottom of the hat. I'm going to hold Option or Alt to that double arrow pops up. I'm going to click and drag upward and hold Shift at the same time to keep it locked in. And we're gonna drag to where we want the bottom of, the, top of the hat to end up some maybe right in here would be good. I'm just eyeballing this. We're looking at the bottom here because that's going to make the bottom of this. And then we're going to do the same thing to this shape. Click and drag up while holding Option or Alt to duplicate it. And we need to make the size of the belt. So I'm just going to let it lock into the center right there. Okay, this looks super complicated, but basically what we have if we click and select all of this, the shapes are in there, they're in there somewhere. So we need to hit Shift M to get back to that shape builder tool and when you start cutting out our shapes, so all these things on the side, notice how I have everything selected. If I just hold Option or Alt, remember I can click and drag to minus out these shapes. I'm gonna do that to that side. And I'll do it to this side, all these extra pieces we don't need. Now, you can kind of see where that belt around the hat is gonna be. It's gonna be right there. So let's go ahead and get all these merged together up top here. I'm gonna click and drag through these top shapes, stopping when I reach the top of the belt and I'll let go. Now I have a top shape. I'm going to click and drag along the outside of where the belt should be so that we now have that bottom shape. Now, this might require a little bit of zooming in. So Command or Control Plus to zoom in. We're going to look into this really close. I'm going to select both again. And notice we have these little corner pieces that I need to be a part of the belt as well. So I'm gonna hit Shift M. We're back on that shape builder tool. And I'm going to carefully click and draw through the corner piece, the bigger belt piece and then the other corner piece. Once I've done that, I let go. And now we have three pieces, the top, the belt, and the bottom. Let's zoom back out. And I'm gonna switch over to switch over to the selection tool shortcut key V. And now I can select these pieces independently of each other. I'm going to select the belt and we're going to pick a color. Let's go up to that little color panel. Remember it's in the Window drop-down if you need it. I'm going to double-click on this guy here. And as long as we're sort of in the orange hue around here, I'm gonna select something. Select something maybe a little more red tint to it. Something like this, maybe right in there. Hit Okay. And there's our belt. We need the buckle, little buckle. Alright, so let's do that, But actually let's get it a little more red like this one. So let's do, let's go back to that color picker. I'm gonna go a little bit more red and a little bit more muted right in here. Something like that little peachy color. We need to create this little belt buckle. We're gonna do that with the rectangle tool. The shortcut key for that is M. I'm gonna create a rectangle about the size that I want it. There it is. It's just pulled in the same fill is what my belt is. Let's switch the fill and the stroke over here, so we're gonna flip that. And then up in our color panel, that stroke, we're going to click it, double-click it to open up the color picker for the stroke. Let's get something a little bit more golden and a little bit more saturated up in here. Maybe it will, maybe we'll do a little orange ear, something in there. It okay. All right. Now we need to increase the stroke size. It could be up here at the top, it could be over here at the right depending on which version you're in. But this is my properties panel and this stroke size over here, we're gonna guestimate here 45 maybe. That seems like a little much for this size of a hat. So let's do, let's do 35, something like that. Now I need to click on this stroke icon and I can select a few things, the corners I want to be rounded and I don't mind the align stroke. I'm going to keep it in the center. So from here what I can actually do if I zoom in on this guy again to show you guys Command plus or minus, remember, or Control plus or minus. If I click on this guy, there's these little dots here. Those are available in CC. So if you're in CS6, you're going to need to find my head around corners CS6 tutorial, but in CC, which most of you are the View drop-down, down to corner widget is either hide or show corner widget. You can do that here. If you're not seeing these little dots, but with these dots selected, you can pull them in and sort of round off these corners like that belt buckle look that we wanted to go for. All right, so I'll zoom back out here. Let's drag this guy over the top of this hat. I want him to be centered. So I'm gonna have him selected Shift-click on the top of the hat and then click on the top of the hat that's that align to key object. And now with this alignment panel, I'm just gonna make sure I hit the Horizontal Align Center just to center that up. And we can center it on this belt buckle sort of visually if we want to, we can use the up and down arrow keys to bump that into place. Now the last thing we want to add here, It's a little like the actual latch part right here. I'm gonna do that with a little tool called, It's actually right here. It's called the Line Segment tool with the slash icon. And I'm just going to find the center of that click and drag out while holding Shift. Not quite halfway, maybe a little short of halfway and let go. That creates a little line with that stroke. If it doesn't, you can go ahead and edit that stroke if you need to. And to create a rounded end on this, we need to go into those stroke options on the cap and just click on round cap. That creates like a nice rounded little, nice rounded little. Oh my gosh, I keep hitting that button. I'm trying to get back to the selection tool. Nice rounded little buccal. Now as this buckled too big, I don't know. Maybe we can bring in this side as well. I think it should be a little bit more square. Now, I'm going to shift click to select both of these pieces and maybe drag them back over to line them back up in the center. Something like that. This bug goal looks huge compared to this one. I did a much better job on this side. Let's zoom back in. And maybe we need to click on both of these again. And with them both selected in the upper right-hand corner, I can click and drag, hold shift and option to scale in and out from the center. Maybe I can scale it down just a little bit like that. Then maybe we can add a little bit more from the stroke standpoint to be like 50 points. Oh wow, That's too much. It to be like 40 points, maybe just to have a little more stroke on that buccal. Okay, So there's our little hat. We need to add the final little shadow on this guy. You know, these flat design tutorials always come with a nice shadow. Back to my rectangle tool this time, let's go ahead and set up our fill and stroke. In the appearance, I'm gonna go with just a straight black is as dark as I can get. And then the stroke, I'm going to say none, 0 please. No stroke on that. We just want a black rectangle. I'm gonna make that rectangle big enough that it covers our entire hat and then let it lock into the center. By the way, these are smart guides, all these pink lines, you can turn them on up and view down to Smart Guides checkmark. Alright, now that we've drawn that rectangle, Let's go back to the selection tool. Let's select the hat and the rectangle. Switch to the shape builder tool now that everything is selected, and let's get rid of this outer piece by holding Option or Alt and just clicking on it. Boom, it's gone. Now back to the selection tool, shortcut TV. And I've got this shadow. It's obviously too dark so I can click on it and just do the opacity at something like 15% to give us a little shadow on our hat. And of course, we can always just create a rectangle background to sort of accentuate our design. 16. Flat Design Puppy: Here's our little dog that we're gonna be creating. And he's got about five different colors in Him. We're gonna make him actually use the pen tool a lot more in this than I'm used to using to make the different shapes. So I'm gonna go ahead and start out with the pen tool shortcut is P, and we're gonna start by making the head. Then we'll make the body and we'll put them together and do the shadows. The heads kind of a different shape. I'll go ahead and start at the very bottom. And this is like the center point. I'm holding Shift. So this, these handles will go straight out. They're not going to be crooked or anything. And I'm going to point it in the direction that I want my lines to go. Same thing for everything you do with the pen tool. We're going to click and point, click and point and just create this sort of oblong half circle, half oval shape with these two corners being slightly different, something like that. And then I'm gonna connect it down here. Then what I can do is with the Pin Tool selected hold Option or Alt, and just bring this extra handle back and it'll snap in to that point. And so now I have this half circle shape. Now with the new Properties panel. After I duplicate this by holding Option or Alt and dragging it out, I can flip it. We can flip that along the horizontal axis. Really easy. If don't have the properties panel over here to the side, you can probably go up to object transform and do reflect to do the same thing. I'm just going to make sure that this kind of snaps in place like that. And then we're going to add these two together by selecting them both Shift M for the Shape Builder Tool, it says to circle right here Shape Builder tool and we can just swipe right through them, add them both together. Now, I don't like the shape of this, obviously it's too wide, so we're just going to squish it down. We can squish it down to make the shape of our dog's head. Just like that. We need colors. So I'm going to go over here. You can just create squares with colors on your Illustrator document. I like to do that a lot so I can just eyedropper them. And if you make them global swatches, you can change them later as needed. This is gonna be sort of that middle brown color. We've got a lighter brown middle and a darker, and then we've got a really, really dark, almost black. This is his head. And now we're going to create his little, I don't know, his a little snout. And it's pretty much the same thing. I could just almost duplicate this guy, bring him down and then make him smaller. And I'm just going to grab the color from here. Same thing. And we want him to be a little bit more oblong. I think. Something like that. I feel like the tops of these could be a little bit more squared off. I'm just going to switch over to the direct selection tool. Click on the anchor point here and I can pull this handle up a little bit. And I can do the same thing over here. Just pull this handle up a little bit. Maybe even to where it intersects up top here. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that. Make sure it intersects all these pink lines are smart guides. You can go up to View, down to Smart Guides to turn those on, Let's create the cut-out where the tongue is going to go. To do that, I'm actually just going to create a rectangle. If M is the shortcut key for the rectangle tool, I'm gonna switch that to pink so that we can kind of see where we want his tongue to be. I'm going to round these bottom two corners by pressing a that's direct selection tool. By the way, the selection tool is V, the direct selection tool is a. These two arrows up here, if I click and drag to grab the bottom two points, I can pull in the corners. And if you don't see the corner widget, it's going to be up in view, down to show or hide corner widget. You might be on CS6. I've got tutorials on the channel, Just search for CS6 rounding corners. And there's some different ways that you could do that or you could put two shapes together, like adding a circle and a rectangle. But I'm going to assume that everyone's sort of upgraded by now. It's been out since at least 2017. So it's been a couple of years to guys. This is actually the tongue, but I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this over and create the sort of mouth opening here as well. Just by bringing this up into on top of this shape, holding Shift, clicking both Shift M, shape builder and this time hold Alt or Option to subtract out the two pieces in the center there. We've created this sort of opening. Now we need to finesse this a little bit. First, we need to get rid of a couple of points here. So I'm gonna switch to the pen tool with p, subtract that anchor point, and subtract that anchor point. There's an extra one here. I don't like that either. So subtract him. Now we just have 123, hold Option or Alt. Click on this one and figure out which way my handles need to go hold Shift. And we're just going to open that up. Just like that. Go back to a which is the Direct Selection Tool. Select both these bottom points. And I'm going to round these off a little bit, kind of like that. Don't want them to be so sharp. Now, we need the tongue to go right inside of here. So he needs to be on bottom of this shape. What we can do is actually bring this guy to the front by right-clicking. Arrange. Bring to front. There we got a little tongue sticking out. Now, this is probably a little too much so we can bring this up a little bit more. Just like that. I think that maybe we can bring this down a little bit. So I'm zooming in and out with Command or Control plus and minus. I'm going to hit a for the direct selection tool and grab this anchor point and we're going to bring him down some, I don't want his mouth to be quite that open. Maybe something more like that. That looks pretty good. So I'm going to create his little nose shape there. I'm gonna use the pen tool again, similar to how we did with his head. Just going to click and drag to start out this shape. And I want them to come out here like that and then come down here like this. Click and drag and just use these handles to sort of round out. That knows, you can hold Option or Alt and grab this single handle, bring him back. And then we're going to finish that shape going up there and just clicking. And then what we need to do is duplicate this guy. So we hold Option or Alt click and drag him out, flip him again or reflect him. And we want to merge these two guys together, grab them, shift M, swipe through, and we got that. Now he's obviously it's way too wide. So we're just going to click on this. And if I hold Option or Alt, I can kind of pull it in from both sides at the same time. So that's how we create that no shape. I need him to be that darker color. So we're going to go over here to my swatches, kind of grab that darker brown. You guys can make whatever colors you want. These are just the ones that I chose. This nose is way too big, actually, looks goofy sort it looks like maybe more cartoon version of a dog. But I'm just going to grab the corner here, hold Shift and Alt or Option and scale his nose back a little bit, maybe something like that. All right, Let's add some little beady eyes. We can just use L, that is the ellipse tool. It's in the rectangle tool. Click and hold, go down to the ellipse tool and just create some vertical little ovals here and these are gonna be his eyes. So I need to grab that darker color again. And then just plop some eyes right here on his face. It can be anywhere. It doesn't really matter. Duplicated out by holding Shift and Alt or Option if you're on a Mac and just bring it over here. Just like that, we can do anything with these eyes and to center them on the head, I would shift click both of them, then right-click, group them together. And now that they are a group and they move together, I can actually Shift-click his head as well. Then click on his head again and go through the alignment panel on the lining to key object which would be his head. Horizontal line center brings them right to the center like that. All right, now he needs some ears. We're going to create some up here with the pen tool again. Got the pen tool out. I'm gonna find a spot on his head. And I actually think his head prime needs to be a little, it needs to probably be a little bit taller and a little bit more squared off. I'm actually going to switch to the Direct Selection tool and find out what kind of anchor points I have to work with. First, I'm gonna take this one up like that. And then second I'm going to switch to the pen tool shortcut key is P, hold Option or Alt and fix these anchor points again, I'm also holding Shift and I'm just going to square this off a little bit more up here. It's still rounded, but it's still a little bit more squared. Now from here, we're going to take the pen tool. We need to deselect his head. So just click off of his head. Go back to the pen tool. Click somewhere around here is where we're gonna start his ears. I'm going to select a darker color real quick. So just I, for the eyedropper. And we're gonna select that knows color just so that we can see our shape as we're building it. I'm kinda pick a spot here, click with my pen tool. And we're gonna go out here and just create his ears. So we can use the Pen tool, click and drag with those handles and just create some years that kind of dropdown here, the droop down a little bit. Maybe they come up this way. What we could do is click and drag and sort of bend them out like that. We can kind of mess with these handles some on this guy so I can pull this handle out a little bit more. He's got an ear a little bit more like that. And then we just place this on here wherever we want. Essentially, the one thing you want to do is make sure this top part kind of lines up better. So what we'll do here is sort of rotate it a little bit and then place it back. And then we can zoom way, way, way in and just make sure that we get that lined up just right. And if anything is not lining up for you, you can go to the View drop-down and make sure depending on what you want, you can do snap to points, Snap to Pixel, snap to grid, or you can turn them all off. It's not going to snap to anything. That's super-helpful when you're trying to align something out. The other thing that's helpful. Is Command or Control Y will shift you to outline mode. That's also in the View drop-down. Believe actually, I don't know where it's at. It's right here. It's a preview now they call it preview. Apparently. It's outlined in preview mode. So outline in preview mode, you can switch back and forth with command or control Y. You can really zoom in here and see exactly where your paths are lining up. And you can kind of move that so that it lines up exactly in the right spot. Once you do that, You're pretty good to go. He's got these little ears. And you can adjust the handles on these as much as you really want to get the type of ears you want out of your dog. So we can move that around a bunch until we find something that we'd like pretty much. So I'm going to duplicate this year by holding command or control or I'm sorry, by holding Option or Alt and bringing it over, also holding Shift to keep it in line. And I'm going to flip it just like we did before and then find the spot where it lines up again. I'm going to make sure to sort of zoom in here. We'll switch to the outline mode command or control Y and zoom way in and see all these lines. It's kind of technical looking. But if we just click and drag that over to where they line up, that's gonna be good right there. So Command or Control Y. To get back out of that mode. There we go. We have the head. Now we've got to do the body. And the body is pretty easy, actually, a lot easier than the head. You can move all these elements around just by clicking them, selecting the different portions. I could select just this. Now, I can group that together, Command or Control G to group things together. Now that whole piece moves around and I can move that up. I can widen his eyes, I can do whatever I want with him. But let's make his body. So I'm going to make his body sort of separate over here. I'm just eyedropper his I guess skin tone. If you want to call it that, then we're going to grab the rectangle tool and just create sort of a taller rectangle, something like this. And at the top of it we're going to use the direct selection tool to grab these two top points and just bring these in completely just like that. Then I'm going to duplicate this by clicking it with the selection tool shortcut key is V holding Option or Alt bringing that out. And then I'm going to make it smaller. First off, something like that. And I'm going to switch the color eyedropper, just one of these darker colors. Then I'm going to center it up. So I selected both, clicked on the larger body shape and just align it right to the middle. And we needed to make it skinny two. So if I click on the edge and I just hold Option or Alt, I can bring it in just like that. Now he's got a couple of little legs right there. I can just scale this down if I click on the right part using those double-ended arrows, scale it down like that. Now we need to create his little feet. So we kind of zoom in here. These are going to just look like little biscuits down here honestly. But if I start with my pen tool, once again, I'm actually going to start up top here just like that. I'm going to bring it down to here. And kind of just rounded off just like that. Going to hold Option or Alt to bring this handle back. Kind of go outside of his leg just a tiny bit. Something in here just going to click once. I'm going to round this off right up here, what I can do is actually redo this here. If I, after I've closed it up, I can redo any anchor points just by holding Option or Alt, having the Pen tool selected. And that's what we're gonna do on this one. Because I don't like that they're unequal. So I can just grab that again and make them equal. And I can actually just remove this handle as well. And so now they're totally equal on either side. This anchor point is not in the middle, so I'm gonna skip, scoot him over a little bit and then bring him down some just like that. So there's this fee that was a horrible way of making that, but that's one way of doing it. You guys can find a better way. It's kinda like a half circle, but I want it a little bit oblong. Like I don't mind things being sort of organically not perfectly symmetrical, if that makes sense. All right. His paws are gonna be the same color as his nose or his snout, I guess, someone who just eyedropper that. And then the other piece that I want to do on these is use the direct selection tool and just pull in these corners a little bit. I don't want them to be perfectly squared off. I want them to be a little bit round. Now we can just duplicate this guy and bring them over here, kinda cover up where these two colors match. And there he's got, he's got some pods down there. Then we just want a little bit of a body sort of poking out on the left side here. So I'm gonna eyedropper this color. Use that pen tool again. I'm just going to go all the way down to the floor. Kind of been a little bit. Get rid of this handle just by pulling it back, Option or Alt. We've done this a lot. Click over here and we just want to click. Underneath because this is going to be underneath. So I don't mind that that's sort of pointy like that because I'm just going to right-click that piece, arrange and send to back. And it sent it to the back of what is actually a background color that I forgot I had, but it's behind everything now. Then I can just bring this over a little bit. And I can play with these anchor points. I'm switching to the direct selection tool while it's selected. And I can kind of grab that, sort of play with these anchor points some, round this off a little bit because he's not perfectly squared like that. He's going to be rounded or have a little bit of a rounded body, something, something like that. If you want. We can bring this a little bit closer as well and then pull on these handles some, this is just how you sort of morph this shape and he's got a little bit of his body poking out. Now, we'll finalize this once we see him up here. But he's also got a tail. I like to do that with the Ellipse Tool and pull out the Ellipse tool shortcut key is L. Can I just make one circle? Then I'm going to duplicate that circle and then make this one a little bit bigger holding Shift to scale that up. I'm looking at the negative space that I'm creating here, selecting both Shift M and I'm looking at this little piece right there. I actually just want to hold Alt or Option to slice everything off except for that piece. Select it with the regular selection tool. Shortcut key is V on that. Use the eyedropper tool, grab a paw. We've got that nice color and then we're going to place this in the back here and also send it to the back. Arrange, send to back. Just like that, we can make this smaller, of course, holding shift the kind of scale that down. We can rotate it however we want. Just got a little tail back there. Now, we want to grab his body and everything. I'm going to group that altogether just to make it easier to bring it over here. And we've got to send it to the back. We've got to make it behind the head. We're going to go to a range, send to back, just like that. And then we can just move it around. And actually what we can do is we can center it on his head. So I've got the whole body groups like his head selected. I'll click his head again, aligned to that key object and press center. Now I just realized that because we have the tail that's going to offset it a little bit. So what you could do is look and see if we can't find a better center point. We can actually center it without the tail if you wanted. I don't mind too much. If this is sort of offset a little bit. It's not a big deal to me. What we're gonna do here is maybe you don't want these touching, so you want his snouts to be maybe a little bit bigger. So I'm gonna grab everything up here and then Shift-click to not have the body selected. I have this whole head section selected. I can right-click group that together. Then we're going to make that just a little bit bigger. Just like that. So that his snout comes a little bit closer to where these two colors touch. I want them covered up some, if that makes sense. Okay. So there he is. Now if he's too tall or not wide enough, we can grab the whole composition and just kind of scale him out a little bit or squish him down. However you want your little dog to be. I think his head is pretty wide at this point, so I would like that to be maybe pulled up just a little bit, something like that. You kind of looks like a puppy. He's got a big head, cute little dog there. We want to add the shadows now, pretty easy to do that. I'm going to go ahead and group the entire dog shaped together. Now this is one piece. I'm going to use my M key that's going to create a rectangle. Just going to create a rectangle that hits on the center of my dog. Just like that. I'm going to make this rectangle my darkest color over here. Now I'm going to select everything I have right there. Shift M for the shape builder tool. And we're just going to subtract this piece out holding Option or Alt and clicking. Now I just have this really dark shape on the right side of my dog. And I can turn the opacity down to something like 15%. You could do 10%, whatever you want to do here for that sort of shadow on that side of dog, then we can create a little shadow on the bottom like he's sitting on the floor just by creating a really thin ellipse. L is the shortcut key to get that tool, we place it down here. Let the center line up with the center of our shadow we just created. Send it to the back. Of course. Like so. So he's sitting there on that shadow. I actually wouldn't mind just offsetting it a little bit to the left since he has a tail over there. And we can create by double-clicking on this swatch, we can create a different color. I like to pick colors for shadows. I want it to be matching the background but kind of gray a little bit. Hit Okay, Just like that. That is a dog in Illustrator. 17. Flat Design Umbrella: In this one we're not going to be using the pen tool. We're gonna be using shapes to create an umbrella. We're going to start by using the ellipse tool, and that's like the circle tool over here in the toolbar. Just grab that, the shortcut key for that as L. If you don't see it over here, you can click and hold and then select Ellipse tool. And let's draw the first large shape of our umbrella. So you can just click and drag to draw out an oval. You don't have to hold shift. We actually want an oval shape for this one. And that looks about right. So what I'm gonna do now is show my rulers by holding Command R. That's kind of a shortcut key. You can also go up to View, down to Show Rulers right here. Rulers. And then you can hide rulers, show rulers with Command R or Control R on a PC. Also, it might be helpful to turn on Smart Guides with Command U or just come in here to the View drop-down and turn those on and make sure those are checkmarked. Those are gonna be helpful to align things up later. What I want to do with these rulers is actually just pull out a guide. So if I click and drag from inside the ruler, I can pull out a guide here and I'm going to line it up to the center, the horizontal center of this oval. The reason I did that is because we need to create the underside of the umbrella. The underside is going to look something like this. That umbrella E shape. What we're gonna do is create a couple more ellipses. Ellipses, I don't know, plural of ellipse, circles, ovals. And we're going to move them down here and duplicate them across. So let's go ahead and create another shape. It doesn't matter where you start because I can, while I'm creating the shape, clicking and dragging and holding, I can hold space-bar as well and move that shape around and then let go and then reread, define it. So if I just create this oval here, hold space bar and I'm going to have it sort of cross paths with where that guide and the oval does right there. I'm going to let go. We have this oval shape here that crosses right across here. I'm gonna duplicate this by holding Option, clicking on the shape holding Shift to keep it aligned and just moving it over. I'm gonna let go there. And then if I go up to Object Transform, I can actually do transform again or Command D, Control D on a PC. And what happens then is that it actually just repeat that last transformation. If I do Command D, it's going to skip another copy out there and skip another copy across. Now these are not centered, so I'm gonna grab everything and then shift click on the big oval to unselect it. Now that I have these, I can right-click and group also Command G. Then once those are grouped, if I shift click on the big circle, I've got this group selected and the big circle, oval selected. Click again on that oval without holding Shift and we're going to align to key object. This is our alignment panel up here, and actually it's already set up. You can see the key. It's set up to Align to Key Object. And what we wanna do is just bring these over so that they're all centered with this oval. I can do that with horizontal align center. Boom, they're all centered up. Now I'm going to grab all of these shapes again. And we're going to use the shape builder tool, which is somewhere over here, right here. It's got these two circles, the hotkey for that shift M. And what I can do with this, you'll notice that it recognizes each of the different shapes in here. I can actually just hold Option and draw through all of these shapes and let go. And it deletes them all out. We just drew this umbrella shape with shapes. We didn't have to use the pen tool at all. Let me show you that again. Hold Option and you notice the cursor now has a minus on it. It has a plus normally now it has a minus. Just click and drag through all that and it deletes them all out. So we've already got this top umbrella shape. Now for the handle of it, it's gonna kinda loop down here, sort of like an upside down candy cane or something. Let's go ahead and grab the rounded rectangle tool. And we're going to just create a rectangle in here. And that looks about right. And this rectangle has no fill on it. It just has a stroke. And you can see, if you look at this, I'm going to align this so that the It's the right side of this is aligned to the center. You can see that inside of here, I'm going to make it a little bit bigger. There is this sort of J shape to it. If we just up the stroke of this, Let's do five. Now. We're gonna do something like 20. Yeah, that's better. If I had a way to just cut this out, I could actually make the handle just out of this stroke of this rectangle. What I want to do now is actually convert this stroke to a shape itself. I'm going to go up to Object Expand. To do that we get a little window that pops up. I always just check fill, check stroke just to make sure everything expands correctly. Hit Okay, and now we have a shape instead of a stroke. What we can do with this shape, There's this cool thing that he showed me that we can do with the eraser tool. I never knew you could do this before. So over here in the tool panel, grab the eraser tool Shift plus e to select that. Once I have the eraser tool and this shape selected, yes, I can go through and erase paths on it and things like that. And I can make the with my bracket keys, I can make my cursor bigger and I can just erase through this. But what I can do is if as long as I have the shape that I wanted to erase selected and only that shape I hold Option. Click and drag. It creates this, this rectangular box and you can see it's already covering up parts of that shape. And that's because if I let go of it, it's gonna delete out that part of that shape. Really only have to make a selection there. And then make a selection for this part will go down to maybe here. Let go. And I have deleted out that shape and I'll have this perfect shape of the handle. Switch back to my selection tool with the shortcut key v, we need to give this umbrella some kind of a fill. Let's select a sort of teal color. And I'm gonna get rid of the stroke. Then I'm going to grab this handle shape here, right-click and Arrange Send to Back. Then let's drop this umbrella down a little bit. I selected it, I'm going to Shift click down just a little bit and I'm gonna delete out this guide and we pretty much have the guy that must be locked. So if your guides are locked, go to Guides and then unlock guides so I can delete him out. There we go. Now one thing I'm gonna do is I feel like this could use a little bit more thickness to it. So I'm going to add a little bit more black to that. Maybe bumped that stroke up some. So there is your umbrella shape. We made this completely out of shapes. We didn't have to touch the pen tool whatsoever. So I hope you guys learned some interesting cool techniques by following this tutorial and you can apply all of these to your own designs. What I would do is look at what you want to draw, what you want to make and really find all the basic shapes in it. Like can I make that face out of circles or that, that car out of basic shapes, rounded rectangles, circles. Can I use the shape builder tool to add and subtract shapes together to create the shape that I want. And what you'll find is that those shapes when you create them, that way actually become a lot more defined, a lot more. Even with the pen tool, it's hard to get things perfect. It's hard to get that perfect. If you know that perfect angle on those circles every time. It's a way to keep it a little bit more defined. I think. 18. Flat Design Lamp: I'm gonna show you how to make a flattened design lamp, but let me take it one step further and show you how to create an on off switch. That's gonna be pretty fun. Let's hop right into it. First thing we're gonna do is go to File New. We're going to create a new document that's also Command or Control N for short. 1920 by 1080 is perfectly fine with me. One of the advanced options I like to do is RGB color. Most of my work is digital, but if it is going to be printed, you might want to consider CMYK art boards fine orientation, fine. I do like pixels as the the unit. Then let's name this, Let's name this flat design lamp. Then we're going to hit create, and that's going to make us a new 1920 by 1080 document. Now, I like to start over in the gray space over here, because I generally just start with the white and then I'll create colors later. Let's first create a rectangle. Everything starts with that rectangle tool. The shortcut key is M. I'm going to just create a rectangle, doesn't matter the size, something like this right there. We're just going to start with that. If you want to know the size, I'm gonna switch over to the selection tool shortcut key is V. I'm gonna click the properties panel, which by the way, I'm in the new CC. All my properties are here on the right. If you're an older versions, you might see all the properties stuff at the very top, but you'll be able to find the same elements regardless. So over here we have a width of 250 ish. So let's go ahead and make that 250 and we have a height of 450 and I think that's about right, so we'll just make that 250 by 450 if you're looking for exact measurements, switch to the direct selection tool. The shortcut key for that is a, I'm just going to click and drag to grab one of these bottom points. And once I have that, I'm gonna hold shift and press the right arrow key to kind of bump that out a little bit. And I'm gonna do 123 times. So we're going to bump that out three times and then I'm gonna grab the left side of that. We're gonna bump it left three times. Remember I'm holding shift, just pressing the left arrow key. Now we have this sort of trapezoid shape. I'm gonna go back to that rectangle tool shortcut key is M. I'm gonna create a rectangle that is over the top of everything else. What I'm doing here is the, the very top of this. I wish I could point at it, but above this rectangle is my lamp shade. I'm going to just size that to something in here, right there like that. Now with the selection tool, select everything, and we're going to use the shape builder tool, one of my favorite tools, it's over here, It's got two circles and a little shape builder tool. The shortcut key is Shift M. I will remind you of that a million times in this tutorial. Now the shape builder tool sees all the shapes that are overlapping. You see this outside rectangle shape. I'm gonna hold Option or Alt and just click on that and it's going to get rid of that. So now I have these two shapes from here. This is my lamp shade, the top of my lamp that I want. So I'm just going to click on that and it's going to make that shape. I still have these two. Let's go back to the selection tool and see what happened. I'm pretty sure through that process we may have duplicated the bottom piece. We can go ahead and delete one of those. But now we have a bottom and a top and Control or Command Z to undo if you've made those movements. I want to leave these right here and I want to change their fill and stroke really quick. Because like I said, it didn't matter what we started with from a color standpoint, but I don't want a stroke. I selected both of them. I'm gonna go to the stroke and hit 0 points on that. No stroke, we just have a fill. For the time being. I'm gonna get rid of this bottom part, but I want to keep it because this bottom part we're going to use later as the light that comes out of the lamp like our on-off switch. So I'm gonna hit Command or Control X. That's also up here in edit. And it is cut. It's currently grayed out because we have nothing selected but it's that command or Control X shortcut. Then we're also going to use this one here in a second paste in front, and that is Command or Control F. But first we need to add a new layer. So let's go look at our Layers panel and look at what we got going on. This first layer is the only layer currently. I'm gonna name that off because that's going to be where we build the lamp in the off state. But I need to create a new on Layer. Way down here is a Create New Layer button. I'm gonna click it and we have a new layer on top of the off layer. This new layer we're going to label on, and I just double-click that to label it. And now we have this on layer and this off layer, and this layer just has this path, this little lamp shade. We could even double-click the path and rename that to lamp shade. We won't get into much of this, but just for so that, you know, you can do that kind of stuff and organized in that way. So what we're gonna do with this on layer is paste the light into it. I got to make sure it's selected. It may be highlighted, but maybe not selected. Honest, I click on this circle because that's my target layer. Now I can use that old shortcut we talked about Command or Control F to paste in front that light piece that we had cut out earlier. And now it's on this on layer. What I want to do now is just lock this layer. We're going to toggle the lock button right here, click on that, and then we're going to hide it. So toggle the visibility right there. We'll come back to that. But for now we're going to build the lamp. So I'm gonna go back to this off layer, make sure it's targeted. And then I can click over on properties again and we can just build the rest of the lamp. We have the lamp shade, we need the base, the maybe at the top or the lightbulb goes some different pieces. I'm going to use that rectangle tool that's just M is the shortcut key. And let's build the, I don't know the lamp base and the, I don't know what you call this the poll thing. But we're going to build that just a skinny rectangle. Now I'm going to switch to the Selection tool That's shortcut V. Select both, click on the lamp shade because we're going to center this on the lamp shade. Find your alignment panel. If you don't see it go up to window, down to a line, it's going to bump out. I'm gonna go ahead and dock it right here. Pop that out. It's aligning to the key object because we clicked on this after we selected both, just hit this Align Center and it's going to pop that lamp shade pole thing over to the center of the lamp shade. But I'm not really satisfied. We could just leave it like that, but I'm going to create some better pieces to this where the light bulb goes and stuff. So what I'm gonna do is let's zoom in a little with Command or Control plus. And we're going to just bring this down to the bottom of the lamp shade right there. And I might have made that off-center a little bit. So I'm gonna grab these both again, click on the lamp shade and just click the Horizontal Center. You can see that it's shifted a little bit. But this is what we're going to have right now. I'm going to create where the light bulb goes. And that's just with another rectangle maybe right in here somewhere. We're once again, I'm going to switch over to the selection tool shortcut key V. I'm gonna select carefully that rectangle and the lamp shade. Click on the lamp shade, center it. Now what I want to do is actually click on this rectangle, press the a key, that's the direct selection tool. Click on this top anchor, anchor point and shift arrow key that to the right. I'm gonna shift arrow key this one to the left. Now we have a little place where that light bulb would go and it kind of tapers outward. That's a little bit better. Look, I think last thing I'm gonna make it a little spot where this sticks out at the top. It's gonna be a little bit wider than this base. But what we could do is go to the selection tool, which is V. Click on this bottom part, hold Option or Alt, and that's going to duplicate it. And then if we hold Shift at the same time, it's going to keep it in line. And I'm just going to bump this out up top right there like that. And I'm actually going to hold Option or Alt. And when I get the double arrows, I can scale this out left and right and my widen that just a little bit to there. And then we're going to pull this all the way up to there. It's hidden underneath the lamp shade, but it kind of sticks out up on the top part. So all we really need now is like the base of the lamp down here. Just another rectangle, shortcut key M. We're gonna create something, maybe a little skinny base down here. Maybe about the width of this guy, maybe a little bit less. V for the Selection Tool, select both the, the pole here and the cache. I wish I had a better name for that. The lamp piece here, the poll thing. And then just click on that because we're going to center it on this. We're going to center this base on this guy. Hit that horizontal line center. And there we go. We pretty much have the lamp. We've got to color things in now. I want everything to be silver except for the lamp shade. Lamp shade will make like, I don't know. We'll make it like a blue color, like we did, like I showed you in the beginning. We'll make it a blue. Let's grab everything that's not the lamp shade. So I'm clicking and dragging with the selection tool. And I grabbed these pieces down here. I'm gonna hold shift, grab this piece up here. And we're going to change the color of this. Now I like to use the window down here to Color panel. The shortcut key is F6. I like to pop out that color panel because one of my favorite things is double-clicking on the little swatch color here. And that opens up the color picker. It's more than my favorite ways to pick colors because I know that basically this way is saturation and this way is sort of the, what do you call it, the shade. And then if I'm pulling it down into here, it's like a muted tones. So I like those muted tones a little bit not too saturated and not too dark to light. Let's make it blue. So I'm gonna click this guy to change this whole thing is sort of a blue tint or hue. And then maybe something down in here, which is what we're just not I don't know. This is silver. Sorry, guys. Okay. Silver something down in here. We're just going to pull it all the way left and make it silvery. Hit. Okay, and there's our silver in this. What I want to do with this is create a new swatch so that I can change this later if I want to. We're going to make a global swatch in fact. So go to Window down to swatches somewhere down here. And that's going to pop out the swatches panel somewhere. And what we can do here is click this New Swatch button once we've got our color picked. And it's going to open up this little new swatch guy. We're going to look at color type process spot, you just keep it on process. But it definitely check mark the global swatch. Because when we hit OK, it's going to add that to our swatches list right here. It's got a little white rectangle here. Now, even though these are separate pieces, I can just double-click this swatch. And it's going to open up the Swatch Options. And I could adjust that and even preview it. As I adjust that color, adjust any element that uses that swatch color, it's going to adjust. I want to cancel out because we'll keep it at silver for now. This lamp shade is obviously behind all of our other elements. It needs to be in front. So let's bring it to the front. Shift Command, right bracket or Shift Control Right Bracket. For those of you that don't use shortcuts like that, it might be a little much just right-click on your lamp shade, go down to arrange, bring to front. I'm gonna start clicking this up because I'm taking forever. Click on that lamp shade. We're gonna make it a blue color. I'm just going to start with something crazy like this, really dark blue. And I'm going to create a new swatch. And from here, I'm actually going to adjust it. So let's make this blue, a lot lighter of a blue. I don't have my preview button because I haven't made this swatch it. So let's go ahead and click. Okay, remember it's a global swatch. Now I've got this swatch, I'm going to bring it down here next to that gray. I'm gonna double-click it. And now I'm gonna check mark my preview button. And we're going to select this blue color. I'm going to make it something bluish, maybe something like that. More of a muted tones. I'm going to bring these back a little bit, maybe up a little bit. Somewhere in There would be good. There's all the numbers if you wanted the exact color. We have a blue lamp shade, we've got the lamp. Last thing I might do is for this whole flat design thing, we'd like to make shadows on this guy, right? So a little bit of shading. I'm gonna create another rectangle shortcut key M. Just create it so it's big enough to cover your whole lamp here. And I'm gonna go right to the center. It's gonna kinda lock in there with those smart guides. If you don't have those turned on, just go to View, down to Smart Guides, That's Command or Control U. Alright, so it looks like I just completely covered everything up. What I did was I covered half of everything up. I'm gonna click and drag with that selection tool to see everything. I'm going to use Shift M. Remember that's our shape builder tool. And now it sees all these shapes. And what I wanna do is get rid of this outside shape right here. So I'm gonna hold Option, get rid of that outside shape. Now what we have, It's a little confusing to look at Selection Tool. Remember shortcut key V. But I have this piece right here. This piece is half of the lamp. If I change the color of this piece, too black, for instance. Now we have a really, really, really, really dark shadow on half of this lamp. What I can do with that guy is maybe take the opacity down to 10%. Whatever opacity you want, maybe we'll do 20% so everyone can see it. There you go. So we have the shadow, we've got the lamp bill that we did a pretty good job here. Now, as long as you didn't move anything around, if you go back to your layers panel, we have the off position. If I hide that, it's just the lamp. Just have the lamp. He's off right now. But if we click the on button, check that out. We have this light pouring out of the bottom. Now we need to create, fix that rectangle and add some color to it. But what we're gonna do now is do that. All right, Here we go. I'm going to unlock this guy. I'm gonna show him. And now we can click on him. All right, let's send him to the back. So let's pull this on button to the back for now. I'm just going to drop that layer underneath the off layer so I can see the lamp on top of the light. Alright, now we're going to create a rectangle. And this rectangle is gonna be down here. It's going to make sure we cover up all the light pouring out of that down to the base of the lamp because the light shouldn't go past where the lamp is sitting, should just stop there. So now we have this rectangle. I'm gonna select the light here and the rectangle would just made Shift M for the shape builder tool. And I'm going to hold Option or Alt and just draw through the bottom portion of this. So I get both of those pieces and it's going to get rid of both of those pieces. Now the light is just down to the base of the lamp. Let's add some color to this. And we're going to add a gradient color to this. So you could go over here to the gradient tool. The shortcut key is G. We can click on our light here and it's going to add a gradient left to right, white to black. Now let's go to window down to gradient, command or control F9 to pop that out. I don't know that by heart, but I just saw it on there. We've got this gradient. Really. We want the white to be up here and the black to be down here. So I'm going to mess with these angles. I think negative 90 will adjust that. Yep, negative 90. Now this left color is the top and the right color is the bottom. We're going to make those two colors of the same color. I'm going to double-click on the gradient slider and we're going to pick one. Let's pick this. I got this. Let's just pick one of these yellow colors. Yellow for light. Alright, so it goes to yellow to black. We want this black go over here to be also yellow. If I click on this right slider and I changed the opacity to 0. Now it's kinda announce getting there. It's got this light that comes very saturated out of the top and then dissipates as it, as it goes down to the bottom. You can then adjust where that bottom is by dragging this swatch in and out. You can also adjust where the midpoint of this is. If you want it to be a lot quicker transition, you can adjust that midpoint or if you want it to really cut hard at the end, you can do that. I kind of liked it over here a little bit somewhere in the middle. Now we have this light here. What we can do if we zoom out a little command or control minus is click on this lamp light here. And I want to bring this layer to the top because I think that light should affect some of the, some of the lamp. But that might be a little bit too much. That light completely hides the structure of our lamp there, all that silver that we got going. So if I click on this gradient and go back to properties, I can actually change the opacity, maybe down to like 50% or even less. This depends on what you want that opacity to be. That lights streams out of there. That's pretty much it. So you can you can put this onto some sort of a background. I'm sure I'll try out some background colors for the thumbnail. But if you go onto that Layers panel, now you can toggle on and off your lamp just like that. Now if you want to get real technical here, you may have a pixel or two that overlaps. It's possible, it just depends on how your computers rendering things. You could bring that lamp shade on a different layer on top of the light. But as long as you use that shape builder tool, this light should match up right with the bottom of that lamp shade, shouldn't overlap too much. I think my monitor just kinda shows that a little bit because of how I have my display settings set. Also this gradient, it might look a little choppy. If you go up to View and preview on different modes like preview on CPU, we can change that, that actually smooth that out a little bit. So Illustrator's got some preview mode, some of my other tutorials and the blend modes like it looks a little choppy. If you save this out as an image like a PNG or JPEG or something. It should smooth out that gradient a lot. But here in Illustrator a lot of times depending on your settings, can be all over the place, how steps or choppy that gradient looks. But for the most part, if you change your preview modes, which is available in the latest CC version of Illustrator, I think the GPU Preview maybe shows a little more choppiness than the CPU preview. You can kind of go back and forth between those. If you're trying to show this to anybody, you can play with the blending modes on this, on this light as well. So if we go to this opacity and we actually click on Opacity, there's blending modes here, like screen or overlay, and that affects how the light affects what's underneath it, how those layers affect the colors underneath it so that depending on what you want, they're like a screen might be a little bit better showing the base of that lamp than some of the regular, normal mode with just opacity. Anyway, that's it. You guys, we made it, we did it. We created a lamp with an on-off switch. 19. Flat Design Stop Sign: So flat design stop sign. I'm gonna start with a new document. That new document is 1920 by 1080, but I'm going to ignore that art board and just go over here into our big gray space. Why? Because stop signs have a white outline around them and that won't show up on the white background, will make a new background later. Okay, Let's get started. A stop sign is how many sides in America, by the way, you guessed it, it's eight sides. So we got to get that polygon tool out. And if we just click on our art board or our space here, it's going to pull up an option for the polygon tool and we can make a radius. Let's just do 150. I don't even know where that's going to end up. But we want it to be eight sides because a stop sign is an octagon, so hit Okay, and we have a little octagon out here. Now the other way to create that is to click on your canvas and drag with that polygon tool. Notice it's already on an octagon. That's because we just chose eight sides. But if I hit the up and down arrow keys, it increases and decreases the number of sides in my polygon. So we can get to an octagon just like that. And then we can hold Shift to get it aligned just right up and down it. Or you can let go of Shift and just kinda spin it around if you wanted to. And then when you let go, it's going to create that shape. Those are two ways, but the easier way is just to click and select your amount of shapes. I've got this octagon out here. I'm gonna click on it with the direct selection tool. And I'm going to scale it up the corner here. Now notice that gets all skewed. That's because we need to hold Shift while we scale. I really like to also hold Option and Alt, or Alt, I should say, to scale from the center out. So Shift and Option or Shift and Alt if you're on Windows, scale that sucker up and there is our stops and let's go ahead and finish this guy out. All we really need is a fill color and stroke color. If the old CC, you're going to see it up here. If you're in the new Illustrator CC, you're going to see it over here to the right. We've got the fill, let's select a new color. We're just going to select a red, but that's a super, super hot red. So I'm gonna change that in my favorite way, which is to go up to window, down to color. It's going to pop out the color panel somewhere In this color panel, I like to double-click on this swatch and that opens up the color picker. My favorite color slightly or not so saturated, they're like the muted colors that flat design look. You see everywhere that tends to be in up and down here it's white to black. So somewhere here in the gray space, and then you saturate it a little bit more. Is some of those muted tones not so, not so saturated. You can even see the difference between the color that we're currently have selected and then the color that we had selected prior, which is like really hot RGB red. I want that more muted tone. I'm gonna hit OK, and that changes that swatch or that color of that fill. Perfect. The other thing we want to do with this guy is actually edit the stroke to be white because a stop sign has a white stroke around the outside of it. So I'm gonna click on that stroke and we're going to change it to maybe something like five points. We'll see, we'll see what that ends up. We might actually do more based on the size of this stop sign, just depending on what size your sign is or what size your shape is. Alright, so instead of black, we're going to click on that and I'm gonna go white. I'm just gonna go straight white with this one. I think I wanted to do something more like ten points for that stop sign, outer edge, maybe 15. Let's do 15. That looks about right. Now. The other thing I wanted to do with this, which will come up later, but we'll go ahead and do it now is I want to change how that stroke appears on my shape. And what I mean by that is if I click back on that stroke icon, I bring up those stroke options. You can align the stroke to what is currently the center of the edge of our shape. You can align it to the inside or align it to the outside because we're going to add a tiny shadow later. I'm going to align it to the inside. That makes it easier to sort of contain that stroke within the shadow. Alright, so there we go. We're just about there. Why don't we just go ahead and add the stop to the stop sign and then we'll do the post. Alright, so we're gonna go over here to the type tool. The shortcut key for that is T just click anywhere on your canvas and you can start to type. Obviously I wanted to type stop. I'm gonna type all capital letters STO P. And it's real tiny down there. If I just go click on my selection tool, I can then grab the edge of this. Instead of dealing with the size of the font, I can just scale this up on my own. Once again, you're going to skew it if you just scale it like that. So hold Shift while you're scaling it up, you can see how big that is scaling. So we're gonna hold shift again, scaled up a little bit more. I'm going to switch my font to something like, how about babies new? I know that it's kind of like a, a, a taller font and it'll, it'll go with that minimal design a little bit better. Let's do the regular, kind of a little bit bolder. We're going to switch the fill over here to white, just like the edge of our stop sign. And then we're going to, I'm actually going to show you go up to Window and down to character or I'm sorry, down to Type. And then character. That's gonna pull up the character panel. I'm showing you this because this is really important for people when they're dealing with type and they may not really know what I'm looking at over here. But on this character panel, you can change the font, you can change the weight of the font and then the size, the Letting, which is the spacing between the lines you can kern between letters. You can also set the tracking for the entire piece. Let's set the tracking to 50, and that's going to space out my letters. I can enter that with by hitting tab after I type in 50. Then when I'm looking at this, I'm kind of thinking that the, OH, and the p need a little bit of kerning. That's where this guy comes in. I can just click. I double-clicked into that and I selected between the O and the p. Now I'm going to go over here and I'm just going to hit the up arrow a couple times and now she's gonna hold shift while I do that and that's going to change it by increments of ten. It kind of bump that out a little bit. We'll bump it out a little bit more. So 20 on that guy. Then I might do ten between the T and O. What I'm doing there is I'm currently between the letters because the font isn't perfect. I think the spacing needs to be tweaked a little bit and I like where it's at now. S TOP, all those letters look very evenly spaced. So let's bring this guy on top of our stop sign. About in the middle, doesn't matter. I'm going to scale him up again by grabbing this corner with the double arrow holding Shift and Option or Alt if you're on Windows and just scale him up to size him in here. That's about right, I think. Now this is kind of an interesting part. By the way, I'm hitting spacebar to use the hand tool to move around my document here. But most of you probably know that I'm going to hold Option or Alt and duplicate this piece out here. I'm gonna keep my type out there. That's what I do a lot when I'm working in Illustrator, keep the editable type out there. This guy I'm going to outline. And we can do that by going up to Type and then down to Create Outlines. The shortcut key for that is Shift Command O or Shift Control O. That's one I definitely know about heart. So now we've got outlines instead of actual letters that we can type. But the good thing about this is there's no weird spacing now it's just shapes. So I can take this selection which is now grouped together, all these letters. I can shift, click, and select also the stop sign. So I have both of them selected. I can also just click and drag through here with the selection tool. And it's going to, It's going to grab everything within what I just selected there. Next, I'm just going to not hold anything. I'm just going to click on the stop sign. Notice there's a darker blue line around it now or a thicker BlueLine. That means I'm aligning to a key object. So I'm gonna go up to window down to a line. It's going to pop out our alignment panel. Notice down here aligned to currently key object. The key object is the stop sign. We are aligning the letters stop to the stop sign. I want it to be in the exact center. So I'm gonna grab Horizontal Align Center and click it. I'm going to do vertical lines center and click it. And now the stop is exactly in the center of the stop sign. Was a lot. Okay. Now let's do the post. The post is just gonna be a rectangle of a certain length. And we're going to do, let's click on this polygon tool again and go over to the rectangle tool. By the way, you can click and hold on that probably in the beginning. You may have figured that out and not sure I already had the polygon tool selected. But if I click and hold the select all these different tools, I'm going to grab the rectangle tool shortcut key is M going to just create a long skinny rectangle like this by clicking and dragging. And I'm just going to eyeball the width to something like that right there. With this guy. We're going to change him to be a darker gray. So maybe we'll just pick this dark gray right there. It's kind of picking one. And then what I want, you know, how those posts they have like all these little holes in them. I'm going to create those little holes with the ellipse tool. So L is the shortcut key for the Ellipse Tool. I've got it. I'm going to just draw a tiny little circle. And this is hard to see, but I'm also holding shift. There's a little circle created and I'm just going to let go. Let's go ahead and zoom in. The shortcut key for that is Command Plus or Control Plus, if you're on a Windows, there's our little circle. And what I wanna do with him, his grab the selection tool. And I'm going to bring this little circle over to the center of this post. Notice that all these pink lines, they are smart guides. You can turn them on. They really help you line things up, go up to View, down To Smart Guides and checkmark that to turn them on. All right, I can't really see this guy. Let's change his fill to white. There he is. And now let's create a bunch of them going down this post. So I'm going to hold Option or Alt to duplicate him down. You can also hold Shift while you do this to make sure you keep an inline with the other circle. I'm just going to give it some spacing right there and let go. Now what we're gonna do is basically duplicate this a bunch of times. And I can hold Command or Control and press D. And it's going to continue to duplicate that last transformation. So just keep pressing Command and D, Command and D all the way down. I'm pressing that precedent, person, that person or Control and D if you're on Windows, of course. And this has taken forever. Is there ever an end? Yes, there is. Okay. So I'm just going to let it go. Let it go. Let it go, Let it go, Let it go there. It's close. Now what I'm gonna do is take this bottom one, click it, select it, hold Shift, select the post itself. So I have the circle and the post selected. Click on the post. Now we're aligning to a key object. If you remember gonna grab that alignment panel again, and I'm gonna do this one here, which is like vertical line to bottom. So it's going to take that circle and line it up to the bottom of this post. Now I'm just going to click on this circle and press the up arrow key 12345678910 times. We'll do a little something different on that. On the next part, but that's, that's spaced out ten from the bottom. Now let's go back up to the top. And we're gonna grab this guy. Same thing, hold Shift, click on the post, then click on the post again to align to that key object. And we're going to align it to the top this time not the bottom. We're going to do the same thing. We're going to click it ten times, but this time we're going to hold Shift and just click it once, the down arrow, boom. So that's an increment of tin. Now that I did that and you might be wondering, what are you doing? Basically what I'm doing here, We got to zoom out a little more, is I'm going to line up all these circles. I'm going to select everything here, including the post, that's fine. Just hold shift and click on the post. Now it's de-selected. Now we have all these circles selected and only the circles selected. I'm gonna go back to the align tool, make sure we're aligning to the selection. I'm gonna distribute all the objects, Vertical Distribute Center, which basically means it's going to take that selection and space out all the objects evenly. So now we have perfect spacing with all these. I do think those circles are a little big. Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna grab them all again, zoom in a little bit. Shift-click the post. Now we have just the circle selected. Here's kind of a nifty feature. We're going to go up to object, down to transform, and then we're gonna go to Transform Each. What we can do with this guy already did it, of course, is, let's, let's reset this to a 100. So this is what it's gonna look like. Nothing's going to happen. If you check mark the Preview button, you're going to see happen what you want to have in and basically Transform Each means. If you have a number of objects selected, it's going to apply this transformation to each of them individually, which is super nice if you want to transform all these circles at the same time, I've got them all selected. I'm going to use the horizontal and we're gonna do 18, I think. I think maybe horizontal, vertical scale AT, so that's gonna make them a little bit smaller. Let's do something like that. And I'm gonna hit Okay. Now I've transformed all those and made them a little bit smaller. Super quick way to do that. Last thing I'm gonna do because all these circles are on top of this post. What I can do is just select everything again. But this time I'm going to essentially subtract all those circles from the post. And I can do that with the Pathfinder options. If I go to Window down to Pathfinder, this is one case where I would actually rather use Pathfinder than Shape Builder tool. I always use Shape Builder tool, but this one, I would rather use Pathfinder. I'm gonna hit this minus front, which basically means it's going to subtract whatever shape is in front from the shape behind. And that's all those little circles from the posts. So now we have something that actually looks like a post with all those holes in it. And all we need to do is make sure that this is on the very bottom. So I'm gonna click it, right-click, arrange, send to back. It's also shift Command left bracket or Shift Control Left Bracket. Now that it's in the back, I can just drag it over here behind my stop sign. My smart guides are helping me line it up right in the center. If you want to make sure it's in the center, just grab them both. Click the stop sign, go to the alignment panel, hit that horizontal align center. It's going to line everything up to the stop signs centered. Alright, so there it is. We have we have a post. All right, Let's shorten this post up a little bit. And then we will also make the stop sign a little bit smaller by holding Shift and Option or Alt on that stop sign and just make it a little bit smaller there. Maybe something like that. I don't know. What do you think? Whenever B flat design store or comes some kind of little shadow element, it kind of adds a slight bit of realism, although half the time the shadows don't make any sense, kinda like this one here. So to do that, I'm going to do a rectangle with the rectangle tool shortcut key M. I'm going to just create a rectangle that I know is gonna cover up enough of my sign. That rectangle is white. Let's make it black, just straight black. Now I'm gonna rotate this guy, so make sure you get those double-ended arrows, that kind of half circle there. Click, rotate, hold Shift, and I'm to rotate it 45 degrees just like that. Then I'm just going to eyeball this thing somewhere in the middle. So it runs through the middle of my sign ish somewhere right in there. That's good enough. Now I'm going to hold shift and select the sign. So I've got both the sine and this rectangle selected. Now we're bringing the shape builder tool double circle with the pointer over here. Shift M is the shortcut. It sees all these little shapes. I want to get rid of this one. So I'm gonna hold Option or Alt. Notice the minus under the cursor. Now just click. And now it's gone. Back to the selection tool shortcut key for that as v by the way, because I got this super opaque shadowy thing. All I want to do with that is take its opacity down to 10%. I've got a slight, slight shadow on this. It just adds, it adds a little something to it. I'm going to add one more something to it. So imagine. Imagine that you have this stop sign and below it maybe there's a shadow down here at the bottom. We're gonna do that with an ellipse tool, but a really skinny or with the ellipse tool but a really skinny ellipse. The shortcut key for that as L, we can click and hold and grab it here just like that. And I'm going to maybe do. I'm just eyeballing this like somewhere in here, not the whole width of the stop sign, somewhere in-between. And I'm just going to click and drag across and make a super-duper skinny ellipse. Let go. It's all black right now, that's fine. We do need to center this up. So grab that selection tool. You've got this ellipse, Shift-click on this post, and then click on the post, aligning to that key object like usual. Grab your alignment panel. Remember Window Align if you need to. Key object, okay, I'm gonna horizontal lines center, going to move that shadow of the center. Perfect. I think I want the shadow to the very back. So let's zoom in a little Command or Control Plus. You can right-click on this or use the shortcut key. But go down to arrange, Send to Back. And now let's make this something like 15% opacity. So it's a real light gray. Then I don't think it should hit right at the bottom of that posts. So maybe we just click it and bump it down with the arrow keys so that the middle of the post is hitting the middle of the ellipse. We've got like a little shadow down there of the stop sign up top. How about the last thing we do here is add a background. You know, a lot of those minimal things, they have a cool colored background. So let's just go back to that. Rectangle tool creates some kind of rectangle around this guy. Just like that. It's whites. Okay, let's change it. Let's go to the color panel. If we go to Window down to color, it's going to pop out that color panel. Remember my favorite little panel? We're going to drag this hue thing up into the blue area. And then let's click something a little bit saturated, but a little bit toned down, some kind of over in here, maybe a blue somewhere around there. Hit Okay. We got the blue, but we've got to send him to the back. So we're gonna click on him, right-click arrange, send to back. There it is. That's a little hot on the blue. Let's take the blue back and notch there. So I'm gonna click on it, double-click the fill, let's bring them back. Let's make them lighter and grayer. Maybe something like, maybe something like that. Maybe something like that. Alright. Now what you can do is click on this blue shape Command or Control to that's going to lock that in there. Then we can select this entire stop sign. We can right-click go to Group. Now this stop sign is grouped, but we can't click on this background again. So I want to click on it again. So that is command option two or Command Alt to, to unlock that background. You can also find what's locked and unlocked in your layers panel, all your objects and shapes over here. Notice we have the group here, you can see it. We have stop over there. You can see that we have the rectangle here. You can see it. If it's locked right here, you'll see a little lock icon. You can just click on that to unlock it. If you don't have those shortcut keys remembered. The reason I did that though, was to group this, this here. And then someone select both this group and the background. Click on that. I'm just going to center it up. You guys, That's all I'm doing right now. So bring out the alignment panel we're aligning to the background center, center done. 20. Flat Design Christmas Tree: So I'm gonna create a new Illustrator document. You can go up to File New or on the sort of splash screening. Hit the Create New button over here on the left. I'm going to create it to be 1920 by 1080. That's pixels. And it's going to be an RGB, which is in the advanced options if you wanted to change that and no bleed or anything, one artboard, all that stuff is fine. Hit Create and we got a new art board. I'm going to zoom out a little bit. Now, things look a little different for you. For instance, here on the right I have the properties panel. That's because I'm in the 2018 essentials panel. So if you want to, you can switch over to that and we'll kind of base things on that panel, will open up other panels and windows here that I need to utilize from time to time. However, that's what the property section is over here on the right. Now I'm going to try to design this on the fly. You guys are in the future so you know how it turns out, we'll see how this goes. However, if you're watching this video, it must have turned out okay, we're gonna start by creating a couple of triangles. I'm gonna do that by clicking and holding on the Rectangle tool and selecting the polygon tool. Then I'm just going to click on my Canvas anywhere. And little polygon dialog box opens up, gives me a radius and gives me a number of sides. I'm going to change the number of sides to three because there's three sides and a triangle and hit, Okay, and we have a triangle created. Now I'm going to switch back to that selection tool. Make sure I have it selected. And I'm going to check the fill and appearance or fill and stroke in the appearance panel. I don't want a stroke on it, so I'm just going to get rid of that. I'm gonna hit 0 on the stroke. It's just going to put a slash through it on the fill. We're gonna click on that and go with a green color. I want to select a green color of my own, and I don't really care for these two panels. So I'm going to open up in the Window drop-down the color panel, that's F6 as the shortcut key. Now what I like about the color panels, when I double-click on the fill color, it opens up the color picker. I prefer the color picker over this other sort of rainbow color picker down here. But what you can do with this is I'm gonna take the, I don't know if this is just just the generic color picker over here, like making it green all over. And then I can select from all my different saturations and Hugh levels. I'm going to select something in the sort of grayish green area. We're going to try for that muted look. Most of my colors are gonna get picked from here, whether it's a blue or red or any other color like yellow or yellow might be a little bit more golden like up here. But anyway, anywhere in that mid-range is taking that green from a more saturated highlighted look down into sort of more of a muted tone. That's where I'm gonna pick from for the most part. So hit, Okay. And we have a green triangle that's gonna be the start of our tree. Now what I'm gonna do with this triangle is I'm going to hold Option or Alt. And I'm going to click and drag this triangle out to the right. Notice all these pink lines while those, after I let go and duplicate this triangle, that's what we just did. This little pink lines are smart guides. You can go up to View, down to Smart Guides and turn those on Command or Control U. That helps us position things and align them together. Now this color panel I'm going to drag over here and we're just going to dock it to the right side toolbar. I'm gonna click this little double arrow to collapse it into icons. Now it's right here, that little palette, and I can open it up and close it as I need it. I'm going to click on this second triangle that were created. And I'm going to scale it up a little bit, but I'm going to hold Shift while I do that so that it keeps it in proportion. Let's just make this an arbitrary scaling. Looks good, okay. We want a third part or third section of this tree. So let's hold Option or Alt again and click and drag this over to create a third section. And then this last section, we'll make it the biggest section and we'll scale it up. Remember to hold Shift while you do that. Okay, so we've got the three sections of our tree now we need to align them on top of each other. Let's just go ahead and move this guy a little bit so that he is above the top of this guy. And also let's move this guy up a little bit so he's above the top of the middle one. You see how they're staggered. Each of their top points are above each other. Now let's select them all. And with them all selected in the Properties panel. And if you don't see alignment over here anywhere, just go to Window Align any of the panels I'm using. You can always go up to Window and then find that panel in here to click it and make sure it's showing. However, with all these guys selected, I'm gonna use the Horizontal Align Center on those and it's going to basically align them. Align their vertical axis ran on top of each other. So now we have what looks like a tree and I can mess with this a little bit like the top part of this. Maybe it looks a little like the top section. It looks a little small, so I can click that and grab the bottom part and hold Shift and drag it down to make it a little bit sized, a little bit better, I think in my opinion, and I can do the same thing with maybe this mid-section click and drag him down just a touch to sort of space that out a little bit better, but I like what that looks like, that looks like a tree. So I'm going to select everything. And I'm just going to bring it down here to the center somewhere. Just so we're a little closer now let's zoom in so you guys can see what we're doing a little bit better. We're going to create those three. So we created those three will create the trunk next and then we'll work on the shadowing and maybe actually will work on some Christmas ornaments and then the shadowing and we'll be done. So this will go by pretty quick. Let's go back to the rectangle tool. We're gonna select that. And we're gonna create a little trunk down here at the bottom of the base of our tree. Branches. We'll call them our branches and our trunk. I suppose. I'm just going to create a rectangle. And that rectangle, I need to select it again and maybe go to my colors panel. And we're gonna change this, but double-clicking the fill and opening up that color picker to something more brown. So we'll find something in this sort of between the yellow and the red. Then we'll probably go something pretty dark here, but still kind of in that grayish area and then hit Okay. So now we have the the trunk, the base of our tree, and also the little leaves. And this guy is probably not centered up. I'm gonna click him hold shift, click the bottom set of branches, the bottom triangle. Then we're gonna click that triangle again and it's completely highlights it. That means I'm aligning to that object. And what am I aligning everything that isn't that that object is one of the lining. So I'm gonna hit this horizontal line center. It's going to bring that trunk to the center. Notice that just bumped it over a hair. Now I know that it's completely aligned center with everything else here. Sweet. All right. Let's add a little bit of shadowing under the branches. Then we'll add some ornaments, and then we'll add the overall shadow at the end. Alright, so what I wanna do is actually add, I want these sets of triangles to lift off the page a little bit. What I'm gonna do is make sure that each one is aligned where I want it. I want this I want them to be in order from the bottom to be on the bottom, the middle to be in the middle, and the top to be in the top. I'm gonna take this bottom section, right-click it. I'm going to go to Arrange, Send to Back, and that's Shift Command left bracket or Shift Control Left Bracket. I use that all the time. I highly recommend learning those. You send that all the way to the back of this layer. This guy is in the middle and then this guy needs to be on top. So we'll right-click him, arrange, and then bring to bring to front, which is Shift Command right bracket or Shift Control right bracket if you're on Windows. Now this one's on top, this one's in the middle and this one's on the bottom. I actually want the trunk to be the bottom most layer. I'm gonna use my shortcut key Shift Command left bracket or Shift Control F bracket. Remember that's arrange send to back. Okay, that's enough on the arrangement. I highly recommend learning those though. Alright, so what I want to do is create a little bit of a shadow. And that shadow is gonna be kinda like a little bit of an angle here. We're gonna basically bust out the shape builder tool. I'm going to create a rectangle first rectangle tool, shortcut key E M. We're going to make this rectangle black. So let's double-click that and just drag this down into the black. So we have a black color as the fill. I'm simply going to draw a rectangle over the top of our shape. It doesn't matter how it's aligned or anything. I'm just going to draw that right over the top there. Now I'm going to grab my selection tool shortcut key is V, hover over corners target the double ended arrow. And I'm going to rotate this a little bit. Let's see what kind of angles do we have? So let's rotate it. It's at 0. We're gonna rotate it and maybe just a few degrees, just like that. Not too much, but just a little bit. I'm going to duplicate this guy by selecting it, holding Option or Alt and clicking and dragging it down here. What we're going to do, and you can see the blue highlight right now, is we're gonna create a shadow underneath the branches, just a hint of a shadow. I think the angle on that might need to be a little bit more, so we'll adjust that in a second. But it's basically going to fall, right? Or that blue line is underneath those branches. So if I let go, I've duplicated that now I have two of them. I'm going to select them both again, and we're just going to adjust that angle a little bit more. This is completely up to your discretion and how this angle goes. Okay, now I need to sort of slice and dice this rectangle to leave only the shadowy part underneath each set of branches. Let's zoom in a little bit here. Now you see how this middle triangle is poking out, just a hair underneath here. I'm going to that's okay with me. I don't want to cover it, but I do want to move it down just a touch so that it's only poking out just the tiniest little bit down there. And I'm going to zoom out now and select both the rectangle and the middle triangle that's holding shift to select both of them. And I'm going to switch over to the shape builder tool that's two circles and a pointer over here. Shift M is the shortcut. Now, this shape builder tool sees each shape separately where these two shapes overlap. I want to keep this piece over here. What I can do to separate that is just click on that. Now it's created this as its own separate shape. And I'll show you if we go back to our selection tool and click off of everything, click onto the rectangle. Notice how the rectangle doesn't select the whole thing now it selects everything else that's left over. I can just hit the delete key on that. Now I have this shadowy layer underneath this middle triangle because we basically added, segmented this shape off. Okay? Well, now I want it to only overlap where this triangle is. I'm going to select both of those. Shift-click. Use my shape builder tool Shift M. And now it sees where all of these intersect, these bottom triangle and the rectangle, if I hold Option or Alt, notice my cursor changes to a minus key, I can click on this outside shape and it gets rid of it. I still have this little shape over here. We're going to have to zoom in on him to see, but see how I have a little triangle poking out. Well, if I hold Option or Alt, I can subtract out that shape as well. What am I left with? Just the shadowy layer underneath that set of branches. And on top of this triangle down here, Let's do the top one, but we'll do it a little quicker. I need to move him up a little bit so that the bottom of this triangle is poking out. That's going to give us the segment we need over here on the right. See how he's just poking out just a little bit down here. Okay, that's perfect. Now I need to select both the top triangle and the rectangle. Go to the Shape Builder tool Shift M for that. And notice how we have all these sections. Just click on this right section and it's going to create that shape for whatever reason that it filled it in with our green color. That may be a feature of the shift shape builder tool, but we don't necessarily want that. We want that to go to black. So I'm gonna switch back to the selection tool. Click on that guy. We're gonna fill him with black instead, get that thing back to normal. But now I can click on this left section and just delete that out. So we deleted out that rectangle because we created this shape over here. So now we select the middle triangle and this guy, and we're going to do Shift M for the shape builder tool. And now it sees everywhere that these two intersect. So we're going to hold Option or Alt, subtract out the right side, zoom in and find your way to this triangle and subtract him out. Then we'll zoom back out. And now we have that shadow as well. That was a real long segment there on the shape builder tool. I'm going to select these two rectangles. Now, we're going to pull them back a little bit. Let's just change the opacity. Maybe there's something like 50% on those. So it's just a bit of a shadow. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Minimal tree. I actually like that better than my other minimal tree tutorial. But what are we gonna do now? Well, let's add some ornaments. We're gonna do that by selecting the Ellipse tool, that's the shortcut key L. And we're going to create some circles. And these circles are going to have colors. And we're going to make them a certain size. Just click and drag to make a circle. You can hold Shift to make sure that circle is a perfect circle shape. And let's create some colors. We're going to go back into that color picker and remember back in the red. So we're gonna take like a muted red tones, something in here. It's almost even pink. We're going to drop him on top of this tree right there. And then we can hold Option or Alt. And we can just click and drag and place these ornaments around our tree sort of haphazardly however you would like. Maybe there's one on the top and three in the middle and then maybe four on the bottom, something like that. But let's make them all different colors right now they look like berries. So let's take this one and make it more of a blue color. Now that this is selected, you can just change where this falls to change the color of it. That's a little too close to the green. We want that to pop a little bit more off of there. So maybe we'll make it a little bit more highlighted. There you go. We want this to be maybe a yellow color, so we'll just switch this. You can just make these whatever colors you want them to be. We could do like a purple here, purple, pink, whatever. Just make this however you want. And now we can leave one of these red. We can click on this and maybe I like that yellow so I can hit the I key for the eyedropper tool and just click on that yellow on. It, changes it to that color. That's perfect. I still don't like the way this blue pops, so maybe I want to adjust these a little bit. There we go. That pops a little bit more. So let's grab, let's grab this one here and we'll add drop her that blue. And then this guy in the bottom right, we'll just click and hit I to eyedropper, that purple. There we go. It feels like we're a little blue on this side. So I'm going to swap these two. We're gonna make this one yellow. And we're going to make this one, maybe this one red. And so there's not quite as many. And I'm going to switch this one. This is what you get. I'm gonna switch these colors around, but you just make this thing however you want. There we go. That looks better. We have a Christmas tree. Let's create some more shadows with this guy. Okay, so in the old version of this tree tutorial, I didn't use the shape builder tool much and now that I know it, I wish I didn't know that before. I'm gonna select this entire shape and we're going to group it together. Right-click, go to Group. Perfect, everything's grouped together now I can move them around. I can also scale him up and down. So let's zoom out a little bit, see how big he is on our Art board here. I'm going to select him and go to the alignment panel. We're going to open that up because I don't see it to the right. I'm going to just drag him in here. There we go. We get the alignment panel open and I'm going to align him. I'm going to show options on this guy because we need to align him to the art board. Once we have that guy selected, we can center him vertically, horizontally there he is in the center of the artboard. I'm going to grab the entire tree and just hold Shift and Alt or Option. Scale him up from the center. We're going to make him bigger so that you guys can see him better. There he is. All right. Now, we are going to create a shadow on top of this entire tree. And oh my gosh, this is such an easier method than I've ever done before. Select the rectangle tool, checkout the fill and stroke. Whereas it, I'm gonna make my fill completely black and then make sure there's no stroke. I'm just going to create a random rectangle. Doesn't even have to be a perfect square, but I will align it to the exact center of my tree. And I'm gonna make sure that it's in the center by making sure that the smart guide is telling me, Hey, we're in the center. So right there, it's in the center. Perfect. Now I'm going to select everything. And then we're gonna grab the shape builder tool. Just Shift M to grab the shape builder tool. It recognizes where the tree and this rectangle overlap. I want to get rid of this outside shape. So I'm just going to hold Option or Alt and click on it. Boom, we only have the shadowy rectangle on the right half of the tree there. So I can take this guy and bring his opacity down. Maybe they're like 25%. And that creates that shadow on the right side of the tree. Now, maybe I don't want it to be on top of the ornaments. Can you tell that it's covering up these ornaments? So these are a little dimmer on the right and these are, see how it's kind of cutting it into this guy here. Well, I can always just click and drag this guy off here, grab all of my ornaments. If we ungroup this tree by right-clicking Ungroup, now it's all ungrouped. We can grab these little ornaments and we can just select them. Make sure we've got them all. We can group them together on their own group. And we can bring them to the front by right-clicking, arrange, Bring to Front. They are on top of everything else. If I drag this shadow back on top of the tree, which it did not drag exactly in the right spot. So I'm gonna zoom in and sort of make sure I see these two points are really zoomed in and if I drag over it, we'll make sure to intersect right on top of those two. That's perfect. And now the ornaments are on top of that shadow, which kind of helps make it look a little better. We've got the shadow, we've got the ornaments, we've got everything. How about a long shadow will create a long shadow and maybe it will create a background layer color. And you note one other thing to note, I don't actually like how this overlaps that shadow, so I'm just going to bring this ornament, I'm gonna double-click to go inside that group, kind of isolate that group. I'm going to bring this ornament over just so he's on the left side of that shadow. Just so we're not sort of over the top of that shadow. So it's a cleaner design. But we're going to create a long shadow with this guy. We need a background. Let's do like a background of maybe a red. I don't know. We'll try this. I'm going to hit the rectangle tool that's M. I'm just going to create a shape that's the entire size of our art board. Those smart guides help us lock it into that. I'm going to click the selection tool, right-click on this shape and Send to Back. Now it's on bottom of everything else. I think that these clash a little bit, so I'm gonna click on this red color. Go to my color picker and we're going to find a color that works a little bit better. It might need to be a lot lighter, in that case, which we can make it lighter and maybe a little grayer and hit Okay, and see where that is. That's good enough. We have a Christmas tree on sort of a grayish background. It's a little bit warmer gray. I'm gonna click on that background and lock it into place by hitting Command or Control to on your keyboard. Now I can't move that background around. So let's create a quick little long shadow. I'm gonna do this different than the other tutorial. There's tons of tutorials out there on this. I'm just going to create a rectangle. And that rectangle is going to start at this top point. And it's going to end at the bottom of our tree and just extend outward. There it is, there's our rectangle right now, use the same color as our background. So let's change that to a black so we can see it. We get this black rectangle. Well now what I want to do is just take these two points on the right and move them. I want these two points to stay in their spots, but I want to move these two points to adjust the angle of the shadow. So I'm going to hit the direct selection tool not to selection the direct selection, that's shortcut key a click and drag to select just those two points. And now I can, now I can drag this shadow around and change the angle. And also I can stretch and skew it. I can take it beyond our art board down here and maybe, maybe just at whatever angle you want it to go sort of like 45 degrees is what I got it there. Okay, so now we have a shadow going down and then back up to this point. We can send this guy to the back by right-clicking, making sure he's selected right-clicking. And hitting arrange send to back. He is behind the behind the background layer. So maybe the background should have been the last thing we did, but we can hit Command Option two or Command Alt to, to unlock all of our elements. And we can send this background to the back again and lock him back in with Command or Control to now the backgrounds and the back. And we should be good here. We have a shadow, but the shadow is super, super, super, super, super, super dark. So I want that to be not so dark. So we're going to change that to be maybe, maybe like 50%. And we should also potentially have a gradient to this. Let's add a gradient. We're gonna select this guy. We're going to select the gradient tool, the shortcut key for that is G. And I don't see, well, if you're on 2018 tool options pops up here or you can go to window down to gradient. And then that gradient panel is going to pop up. And if you select this, it's going to immediately apply a gradient to this shape. I'm just going to apply it from left to right. So we want the left side to be the darker side. First thing I want to do is make sure both of these are the black color. I'm gonna double-click on this color swatch here and change it to black. Now we have black and we have black here. And the other thing we want to do is we want to go from a 100% opacity to 0% opacity. This right side, we're going to change him to 0. The opacity. Now he basically goes from completely opaque to completely transparent. But it goes not at the angle of our shadow. So once you get that shadow angle figured out, just select the gradient tool we have it selected. And notice I've got a certain cursor out here. I can click and drag to change the angle and distance of my gradient. It's going to end wherever I let go. And it's going to be at this angle as well. Fed drag it down here. Now the gradient goes at the same angle as our shadow, which works out pretty well. I'm gonna hit the selection tool guy here and we're gonna take a look at this. One thing I don't like is I don't like where this shadow starts. So maybe we can click on this guy, use our direct selection tool. Click this very bottom point and bring that over to the right side of the trunk. I think the shadow would start from there. It kind of makes sense for it too. And now we can zoom out. Now we have this long shadow that extends beyond our art board and it also goes from opaque to a more transparent. And we can adjust that as well. We can take that down even more with the opacity level, maybe the twenty-five percent or even 10%. Just so we have the tiniest hint of a shadow behind that tree. You can always click that in whether it's a circle shape or maybe you want to clip it into this rectangle by selecting both and right-clicking and making clipping mask out of those two shapes. But for now we just have the shadow itself. And that's it, you guys, this is the minimal Christmas tree that we designed. You can adjust all these colors to be what you want them to be, changed things however you want. But that is a version of sort of developing some flat minimal art. I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial and I forgot one thing, don't forget, we need to put the star on top of the tree. Holy cow, how did I forget that? The star, we have the star we want the fill to be. Yellow ish. How about we just use our eyedropper tool and we'll just click on one of these yellow circles. That is not the eyedropper tool. There we go. And remember I for the eyedropper, it's over here in the toolbar. We're just going to eyedropper that yellow click on the Star Tool. And we're going to create a star at the top of our tree here. If you hold Shift, it'll be like perfectly aligned. However, whatever size you want it to be, boom, there's our star. We're going to zoom in and sort of put it right on top of our tree. Let's zoom in a little bit more. We're just going to align him up right there on top of the tree. And what you can do now to change this shadow is you can click on it, use that direct selection tool again, click on this 1 at the top of the shadow and we can bring him up hold Shift to keep him aligned. We'll bring him up to here. And one thing that's going to happen is it's going to change where it sort of hits down here. So we could move that star down a little bit, sort of cover that up and really place it on top of the tree. And then also use that direct selection tool to click and drag that shadow to the top of the star. So the shadow comes from the top of the star. There we go. That star doesn't pop out from the background very well. So we could always change the background color to be something else, to be something darker. I'm going to go ahead and do that. We're going to hit Option Command and two, or option control and two. And we're gonna change that color to be maybe a little bit darker. Still. Warm. Hit. Okay, now we can see all of the star and everything doesn't blend into the background very, very much. Okay, So there you go. That is your minimal Christmas tree with the star on top. Almost forgot that one. That's what I get for doing this thing on the fly. I hope you guys learned a ton in this tutorial. If you have any questions, make sure to post those questions below, and I will see you in the next one.