Learn the Ins and Outs of Illustrator

1. 1. Introduction: Welcome to class. This is called Learn the Ins and Outs of Illustrator. I guess, more importantly, welcome to Adobe Illustrator. Some of you, I guess I'm welcoming who've never, ever even opened the program before and others welcome back to Adobe Illustrator. Hopefully this time we can go and dive a little bit deeper into the tools and clear some things up for you and show you the most effective way of using an illustrator for all your graphic design and illustration needs. It's by far my favorite program and one that I use daily and it's because it's so flexible is the reason why I use it. If you're unfamiliar with why you would use Illustrator over Photoshop, you'll discover that as we go throughout the class. But the biggest difference is in Photoshop, you're working with rasterized images, and so you're working with pixels but when you're in Illustrator, you'll be working with vectors. That means that it's infinitely scalable so you can save a project and come back to it. Let's say you're printing something for 11 by 17 and I come back to it later and say I want to take that same piece of art but I need it much, much bigger, you can scale that, and you won't lose any image quality at all. Really great program, lots of neat things that you can do with it. It's extremely helpful like I said, for illustration and design. I'm glad you guys are all here and it's along building up process to get these things made and to get this class promoted. I thank you for spreading the word and joining. Just so you know, Skillshare is making a lot of changes and you've probably even noticed just from the time that you've signed up till now, they're making some interface changes. From what I hear, they're going to be planning on doing more and more of those and they're subtle, but sometimes you can get lost in the interface. If that's the case, go ahead and reach out to your peers, reach out to me and you can do that on your classroom dashboard. Really easy to go ahead and navigate through that. Just go and there's a question and answer section, there's a Class Feed. Either one of those that you can go into. The question-answer obviously, I will look at more thoroughly, but it will also be for your peers and then the Class Feed is just like one-off notes that you want to put up some similar, but either one of those works and we can answer your questions. Yeah, you'll see some changes in there. Basically, the biggest thing that's going on is all Skillshare classes are becoming more open-ended so you don't have to worry much about actual timelines and deadlines for these projects. Basically, once it's open, which this class is open today, which is May 13th, and it'll be open indefinitely to you. Now that you've already been in here, you'll have access to all of these files and all of these resources and links indefinitely. That's good news so take your time. Don't feel rushed. I know I tell my last class they're communicating with colors, patterns, and textures and it went over great. The only feedback that I received that people wished would have changed was the deadlines making it a little bit further apart. Maybe making a three-week course instead of two only because they have lives and I understand you have lives as well. You're probably fitting this in between your work hours or school or whatnot so don't feel pressured to get all this done within these two weeks. If you can't do it, you'll obviously have access to everything. Everything here is prerecorded but I will be keeping an eye on the questions and answers in the Class Feeds there in our dashboard. I'll try to give as much feedback as possible. Luckily, this course isn't aimed to talk about design principles or anything like that. The work that we're creating is obviously picking an ad and hopefully many of you you've already done so. If not, just go ahead and post it when you can. The whole purpose of posting these ads and recreating these ads is just to simply practice. I'm going to be teaching all the tools and show you how to use them and so as you learn those tools, I want you to be able to apply it to something and have measurable results. You can do that in the form of choosing one of these ads. Many of you I noticed picked some pretty elaborate ads and that's fine. You don't have to worry about finishing it or whatnot. Obviously do your best and maybe it'll take a little bit more time and practice to complete it and to make it look more accurate maybe but that's okay too. This is basically just a means to help you learn the tools and by no means is it something that you would claim as your own and put it in your portfolio as something that you designed. Just as a note, I don't want to encourage stealing any artwork but yeah, so that's the gist of the course. Again, I'm glad you all came and are part of this class, and please help each other out. It's a big part of this. We are a big class so take time and answer the discussion board, questions that your peers may have, and any feedback that they're looking for and just have fun with it. The program is extremely fun, you're going to be doing a lot with building shapes. If I can say one thing about Illustrator and what it does, I guess that is different from the other programs, especially Photoshop, that I know some of you are familiar with. Photoshop is more painterly, you stroke everything in, and in Illustrator, you'll be dealing more with paths. You'll be closing in, you're making shapes and building your illustrations from shapes and subtracting from those shapes in that. So yeah, it's more of a building process in Illustrator, which is really neat and fun. All right, if you have any questions again, post them on the discussion board for I guess your peers and myself, and good luck in all the classes. I hope everything is clear and you have a good time. Thanks, bye. 2. 2. Getting Started: Let's venture into Adobe Illustrator. I'll go right down here and open it up for us. You'll notice right away that it says Adobe Illustrator CS6. You may be working with an older version of the program maybe CS4 or CS5. Don't worry about a thing, designers and Illustrators have been using this program before CS6, and it's been working out all right for them obviously. Some of these new tools that you may see that you don't have, don't worry about them. There may be time savers, there's a few other cool functions, but really it's not the backbone of the program, and you can accomplish anything you need in those older versions as well. You'll be able to complete your print ad with no problem. 98 percent of the tools that I have here in see you'll have in yours too. The icons may look a little different, but go by the same name and same functionality. Don't feel left out, if anything, it'll just make you want to upgrade. The main purpose of this tutorial is just to introduce you to the interface. Some key terms and some basic tools and most important right now, we want to set up our documents so we have something to work on. Let's prepare our desk space by going to file, new, and here we go. We have our interface to set up everything we need before we go into building our artwork. Let's give it a name. Let's just call this Test Print Ad. If I can spell. I get stage fright when I'm typing in front of people. Let's go to a number of artboards. You can choose multiple artboards. What artboards are, what they sound like, they're basically your canvas. All your art needs to be created within those artboards. You can choose multiples if you'd like, so you can work on a few at the same time. Sometimes people like that, you can export them all individually at once, which I'll show you in later videos when we're saving for a web or for print. But let's go right now and just skip that and go just one and we have our sizes that we can choose. Since we're doing a print ad, typically is a portrait orientation and we'll also go tabloid. You can choose from other standards, a letter, legal, tablet here. But let's just put tabloid, and you can also set up your bleed if you're going to be printing. I'm not sure how familiar you're with bleeds. Most of you probably already know this, so just ignore me if you do. The bleeds are just if you're going to have a print, and you needed the artwork to run all the way to the flush to the edges of your paper in order for that to be printed, you're going to need to add some bleeds. Artworks have to bleed over a little bit. This will be your guide to show you how far you need to. This is a quarter-inch, I think that's fine. If you need to change the units that you want to work in, you can do that here. It says pixels and you'll notice down here you have some other options. You can create websites, you can create anything for mobile designs for mobile here in Illustrator. It's neat because you can go to this preview mode and go to pixel. That'll give you a pixel overview, which shows you what it would look like rasterized or in a pixel image mode. You can design to that and if you hit this align new objects to pixel grid, does just that. You can only align your things up to pixels and nothing. You can't split pixels. We're going to leave that alone because we're going to be doing print ad. The beauty of that is if you're working in Illustrator is that you have vector images. It is infinitely scale, you lead have to worry about pixel limitations or anything like that. I think I've beat this to the ground. We have everything set up. Let's go ahead and click "Okay" here we go. Here's your desktop, your workspace. Right off the bat, you're looking at your artboard and everything over here just imagine it as your desk. You're not going to create your painting or your artwork on your desk, you may have create and assemble a few things and then bring them back onto your artboard. But they ultimately have to be here if they want to be printed or saved in that area. We'll show you these bleed marks which are handy. You'll have all guides that you can set up here in the Illustrator to help you align things, to measure, to be able to see where you're going to have maybe some cuts or whatnot when you're printing. But your bleed line is here, so you can bleed the artwork all the way up to these points. You can get rid of those by hidden commands, semicolon, and then you can add. If you don't want to see those while you're working, and it's a nice way just to get those out of the way. Those aren't the only guides, we have those setup. If you hit "CommandR" let me move this over a bit. You'll see that these are the rulers. You can obviously measure with them. But also, if you click and drag in that ruler area, it'll bring down this horizontal line, and that's a guide. You can click over here and you can create vertical lines. These guides here are just that. Basically it's as if you were just drawing a line on your paper, and you want to just create a grid or you want to align some things, make sure they're all in the same height or on the same baseline, whatever. You use these guides. You can do the same thing if you hit "Command semicolon", all the guides and one will go away so you can focus just on your art. Then when you you them again, command semicolon and they're back. Really handy. Most of who've worked in Illustrator probably know this, but you'll also know how handy they are. For example, if I was going to put a circle here, let's see, and I want to make sure that it's in this spot. I can go ahead and drag that. Don't worry about how I'm building these shapes. That'll be the next video. I'll go into in detail about how to build your forms. But for example, if I have that, and I want to make sure that if I have another circle over here, I want to make sure it's aligned, you can align it up there. If I want to make sure the top is straight, I want to put another one over here. You get the point. Then if I just want to see what I made, I can hit command semicolon and that will all go away. What I'm working on just on here, I guess, so you know what the guides are now. Guides can be extremely helpful. But you also have just this very standard black arrow. That's your selection arrow, that's what you use for everything, that's your default, you want to go back to that if you're just going to be moving anything or on the screen or just to select it. I'll go through the rest of these tools later. But to get to this arrow, you hit "V" and that'll go back. If it's the white arrow, which I'll go over in the next video, you hit "V" it goes back, and now you can go ahead and manipulate what you need. For example, if I'm going to be using the eraser tool, I want to move this circle now. But if I try to move it, I'm going to start erasing things. In that case, if you already have a tool active other than your arrow tool, and you want to go ahead and move this, you hit "Command" and then click off whatever is selected, still holding command, and then you'll be back on that eraser tool. But then just go back to the V and you're back in your selection. I'm trying to give you as many hotkeys as I can to save you as much time as possible. Again, this took me a while to figure out, but if you're on something, and you're using a different tool, but you want to move it, you won't be able to move it unless you go ahead and hit "Command," click off of it, so you're holding command click off, and then go to your V and now you can go ahead and proceed to move that shape. Very important. Let me put a new shape on here and let's add a little bit of color because it's a little boring. A green circle. Just like in Photoshop, many of you have probably worked in Photoshop, you have layers just the same way. If you want to create a new layer, you can go ahead. Let's create a square that is red in this layer and overlap. But maybe I only want to work on this green square or this green circle for a little while, so I can go ahead and hide that layer number 2, with hitting in that eyeball button. I can bring it back, I can look at that. If I want to go down and work on that circle, I just have to click on that layer. Layers are really handy, they can help you and save you a lot of time when you're working, and you have different colors, or different characters, and maybe a foreground and a background. Keeping those things separate will save you hours of editing time. Here it is, the layers panel right there. I'm pretty sure that's all that I can go over in this first one. This is just the very basic overview. Make sure that you know how to navigate, and you don't feel too overwhelmed by the whole presence of this interface. We'll continue to dive a little bit deeper into the next one. We'll actually import our artwork and start building, which is the exciting part. I hope this helped you out and I'll see you in the next video. 3. 3. Preferences: Okay, guys. This is a continuation of the last video. I felt like there's a few more things I wanted you to know. This would be nice because it split up the video. You'll notice that when you're moving shapes, you're moving them at specific increments. If you're highlighting one of these shapes, that orange shape, and if I hit the right or left arrow keys, you'll notice that it's moving in a specific increment. Now, you can change that if you want it to jump a full inch, or if you want it to jump a half an inch, however you want, wherever you want it to be, you want a lot of control, meaning when you drag this shape, you want to be able to just butt it up perfectly, not touching but really close. Maybe there's certain reasons why you don't want to have to be confined to a larger increment and not be able to lock it in that space. I'll show you what I mean when I zoom in. If you hit Command K, that's where your Preferences are. If you hit Command K, it says keyboard increment. That's what I'm talking about right now. That's what you see when you're moving these shapes. Right now it's at 0.0139. Maybe I wanted to add an inch or two-inch increment, I hit "Okay". Now, when I move that shape, I'll move it to the right, you'll see it jumps a full inch. You can do that if that's how you'd like to work. When you're trying to nudge things over, you can set that keyboard increment to whatever you want. That's a really important tool, I think. I'm not sure what I had, I like what I had, but let's see. Yeah, that's nice. I like small increments so I can maneuver it around to where I need. Now that you know how to move the increments around, let' s say I want this orange square just to snap to the side here and find that edge of the other one, and just stick right on there. What you can do is go up to your View, up at the top, you go down, and you'll notice that there's a few options right down here; Show your Grid, Snap to Grid, or Snap to Point. Let's start with Show the Grid. If you hit Command and then your parenthesis or your comma button, you'll see this grid pop-up. Now, you'll see that when I go and drag this around, it's not particularly snapping to the edge. Let's move this guy out of the way. I have to manually go in there and try to put it right on that line. Maybe I want to make my life a lot easier and just have it snap to that line. That's when I go to View and I'd Snap to the Grid. Now when I zoom in, watch what happens, let's see. Sorry, my computer's lagging a little bit. I switched computers if you haven't noticed. I'm on CS5 this time. Anyway, let's say, I wanted to snap it right here on these edges. It's a whole lot easier, it just snaps to those points. Now I can just let go, and it aligns perfectly with that grid. You can take off that grid and it'll still do the same thing. It'll still snap to those areas so you know you're still following a grid. Another thing that you can do and the last thing I want to show you on the snapping is the Snap to Point. That one's just really nice because it'll just snap to other objects, which is really nice. If you don't click it again, it'll continue to snap to the grid, so turn that off. Now I'm just snapping to a point. There you go. Go right over to it and it just gravitates right towards the edge of that. If it wasn't lagging too much you got to see it. You can have shapes just snap to each other's edges and they'll butt up right against each other and be a flush. That is super helpful when you're working. That's using the increment's command K, brings up your preferences, you can change that. View down there, you can go Show your Grid, Snap to Grid and Point. All those things are great and dandy. But let's say, you want to make some changes as well to the full artboard that you're working on. If I pan out here, you'll see this artboard. Maybe I want to change the shape, maybe I want to change the bleed, or I want to change the orientation, maybe I want to add another one that can all be done right here at the top, you'll see this says "Document Setup", if you go ahead and click on that, you can go back and change your bleeds and make the units, you can change that. Everything that we went over in the setting up our document, that video at the very beginning. But you can make those changes here. But if you go to Edit Artboards, specifically, there's a lot you can do. If you click on the edges here, you can just take it like any other shape and you're extending your artboard. You can go up here and change that as well, up here at the top and you can change those dimensions. You can even go over here in the Presets, and you can change it to like Letter, Tablet, whatever you'd like. Maybe you want to change the orientation, that option is still here. You can name your artboards, which is handy, especially if you have a lot more artboards. But you can see right here, it says "New Artboard", if you click on that, then you can go over here and then paste another artboard there. Now you're working with multiple artboards, which is nice. In our last video of the entire class, I'll go over saving and getting ready to print. But that will come in handy, save you a lot of time. So yeah, you can continue to add as many artboards as you want, and they'll be numbered. They'll print off in that sequence. To go back, you just have to go back to your black arrow, and then it'll take you right back. Now you have all your artboards. One more thing before I close, let me put a shape on here. Let's just put it right here in the middle of this artboard. When I copy my artboard, maybe I want the content to come with it, and maybe I don't want it to come with it. Because sometimes what you can do is you can copy just like you would any other shape. If you hit "Option", you'll see it has two arrows, the white and the black arrow. You click on that canvas and you drag to the left there, and you let go. It made a new artboard but it also copied your work. If you want to make multiple versions of that same piece of art but you wanted to transfer over, you can do that. Now, let's say you didn't want to take that work with you, this is the button right here that you would change. It says "Move and Copy Artwork with the Artboard. So you can unclick that, then you can click "Option", click and just drag it over and make a new artboard, just like you would any other shape. There you go. Hopefully, those few things will be of some benefit to you. If I didn't even say it already if you hit "Command S" that's to save. I think that's a pretty crucial one I never told you. So "Command S" will go ahead and save. I'm looking forward to going through the rest of the videos with you. Thanks. Bye. 4. 4. Free Form Building : Now, you've been properly introduced to Adobe Illustrator, you've even set up your first document so things are going well so far. Now, we're going to get into form building. The way that I do it, and I know it's basically the staple of Illustrator, is using the Pen tool. Just as a little precursor to this tutorial, the Pen tool is a little tricky to use at first when you're learning it just because it has so many little cool options and things that it does that are very helpful, but also hard to use until you get a little bit of practice under your belt. Don't get too frustrated and just throw it off to the side because you'll love it down the road. Like I said, 99 percent of my illustrations in my portfolio are actually built by using the Pen tool; Just pointing, and clicking, and adding anchor points. Don't fret. It'll be a good learning experience for you. During this whole tutorial and all the rest of the following tutorials, I'm going to try to use as much as I can the advertisement that I have chosen and start building straight onto that as I show you these tools and how they function to make it easier for you and I can work alongside of you. Let's go ahead and place the image here in the File. I'll go to "File", "Place". I have it here on the desktop; the image, so I go "Place", and now it's in my art board. Obviously, when you're building it doesn't really matter, but when you save it, and you're finalizing it, everything in here is going to be printed. You can move that off to the side onto your non-work space, and not work with it. But for the sake of this, that's typically what I would do. But for the sake of this tutorial, I'll bring it back here so we can see it, it's all clear. Now, I failed to mention in the last tutorial a couple quick things for navigating around the Illustrator interface, and I want to teach those to you now. You can zoom, which I'm assuming you knew you could do or you found a way to do it, but if you click here in Zoom tool. Click, click, click, image then zooms. If you hold Option, click, click, click, it goes out. Problem with that is it's just frustrating to have to go click over here on the side. What I do is I just do Command Plus or Command Minus to zoom in or zoom out. Also, to move around the board, I want to move this. I will go over here to the Hand tool, click and drag and I can move my canvas wherever I want and all the art. Instead of moving this stuff, it's really just moving basically your view so you can maneuver around your workspace. The way that I like to do instead of clicking over here is just hitting Space bar. When I click and hold space bar, click on my mouse and drag it, I can move round. Okay, some quick tips. Now, we're on to preparing this so that we can build on top of it. What I would do is take it and go to the "Transparency" panel over here. I would knock back the Opacity to about 30 percent. Will work, I think fine. I click off of that. You can see that it's definitely subdued quite a bit. That way I can build on top of it and won't be distracted too much by these shades. But I can still see the outlines, so we're good. If you don't have any of these tools, just another note. If I'm going through here and you notice that they're missing or they're not in the right order, that's because I've rearranged them to fit my needs. You can do that. You can just click on one of these, drag it out, and click and hold it and put it back into place and you can re-shuffle those all you want. But if they're not there and you're worried about that, you can find them at the Help. I can do the transparency. I can just go down, Transparency, click on it, it'll open it up for me. If you noticed in the Window menu, you drive down. But here are all your tools. If I'm mentioning some that you don't have, go to "Window", go down here and find them or if you can't find it still, go to Help and type it in. That should help you out. But now I went over layers in the last video so you know how to build this, you know this is on a layer. If this little blank area right here, if you click on it, it shows a little lock pad or a lock there. The reason why I use it is just so that I can't touch that, and it just stays in the background so I build shapes on top of it, it's not interfering. Then I'll add a new layer down here at the bottom. We'll start working on that layer and building on top. Here we go, we're going to start using the Pen tool. Let me zoom in and let's pick something. I usually like the top layer, if you will, which is his hat on top of his head and all that stuff. I will go ahead and open the Pen tool, which is actually over here. I'm going to start placing points. when I click, I'm adding an anchor point. Then between the anchor point, you'll see a line form. You're just connecting these dots. You can see why I like to subdue it a bit so that what I'm building on top really shows. But I'll keep clicking. This is where I'm talking about the pencil can be a little bit frustrating if you don't know how to use it. Some people would just click and finish that off as a square, but it's not; it's rounded. I would click actually farther down, missing the angle or missing that curve. I'm going to do it again. If I click and I hold and I drag, it will make that curve, so a cool thing that the Pen tool does. Now, I can click over here. I should probably click a little bit further. Then I can go click the next point, do the same thing. Now, onto what happens, this is another finicky thing that you'll have to know how to avoid, which is now that I'm going to finish and complete this path, I click on it. It does this little curve because it's trying to mimic that curve. That feels more natural for you, which is handy in a lot of cases but right now it's not because we're trying to trace something. The way that you can do that is Command Z, goes back. That's your Undo button, Command Z. Now, it's not bad. Then you can go ahead and click on there, reconnect, and then click. You'll see that circle pop up, that means it's finishing a path. You click on it and now you have it finished. Now, it doesn't look quite right because of the colors. We can fix that real quick. You have a stroke and you have a fill. Our hat from what it looks like, it's just a fill, so we'll go back and make sure this is highlighted. Anything you're working on, make sure that it's highlighted so that it makes the adjustments to that. But over here you have your fill and your stroke. The stroke, you can change it. You can either take it off, which we'll probably want to do, or you can change the colors. Let's just take it off, this line in that corner means no fill. Take it off. We'll go over here to the fill. You want it to probably be black since it's black, and there you go. When you want a quick little hotkeys to toggle back and forth between your fill and your stroke, it is Shift X, really handy tool, or you can go down here in the bottom corner and do the same thing with those arrows. Slaps the fill and the stroke. I'll probably want it back there for now. To demonstrate further another use of the Pen tool, let's go over here. Now, you're going to know now that these are some crazy angles here. I will probably build this for the shapes, I'll do that in a later tutorial. But just to show you how to use this Pen tool, you can do some pretty crazy things with this. If I'm going to do a perfect half circle here, I usually click on the middle of it, which I'll show you here. Let's say I'm going to start right up here on the top of this pipe, and I want to click here. I'll click down here. This is a way to do it, and then you'll be able to alter it afterwards. We'll learn and make the basic shape of it. Let's do this Shift X, we're just in outline mode. I'll click here in the middle, click after that. You'll figure out ways to do this on your own, that may be quicker and easier. I'm just going to show you you have a range of ways that you can decide on your own what you'd like to work with. You'll notice that I'm just trying to get the main, I'm not worrying about the curves. I'm just going through and clicking through. I'm just getting the furthest end of that curve, I'll click there and add a point. You'll see why I do that later. Let's do this real quick. It doesn't look great, but now you have some cool things called Bezier handles. It sounds like a big fancy word, but they're actually really cool tools and not too hard to understand. If you click A on your keyboard, you'll see as your arrow turns white, that's just to highlight specific points. You can actually click on that point and drag it somewhere else, or I'm grabbing the marquee tool, click and drag over those and I can adjust just those points. Kind of cool. If you click and hold on the Pen tool, go down to "Convert Anchor Point tool". Now, you have this little carrot-shaped thing. Basically, if you click on a point and you click and drag, you can see that now, you have these little handles form, the Bezier handles, and then you can change the shape of that. We want to add a curve on this, so we know that curves is, so I'll click with the Bezier handles. If you hold it, it'll make sure that this arc is perfect on both sides, which is really handy, or I can just click and if I feel I want to make it a little bit different, I can mess with just one side. You see there's a range of possibilities you can go with there. But you go over here, click and drag. On these furthest points, click and drag. Again, I'd probably do it a little more accurate. I would just build this a bunch of shapes, but I want you to be able to see how neat this Pen tool can be. I'll just stop there. But basically, you can see how the shapes start to form. That's really from using this Convert Anchor Point tool. I use that in conjunction with the Pen tool all the time, and it's a super important tool there. We'll go through colors and whatnot later in unit 2, but you already know that you can go to the film units. Now it's there, we're getting closer. Just a few things you can do with the Pen tool. One last thing actually before I forget is, if you click on one of these areas, if you go to back to your Pen tool, click "Hold", hold your Pen tool, and if you click the plus button when you're on the Pen tool, that'll make it so that you can add a point anywhere you want on this line, on this edge here. If I click right here, you'll notice I just added a point. You could see it right there. Then I've just proven the point that these are just completely smooth no matter how far you go, zoomed in, so just for the vectors. But you see that little point there, I'll go back and I'll click "A" now that I've placed the point, and now, I can just highlight that one anchor point. I can click it, and drag it, and now I have a new point. I don't have to go through and re-draw my shape. You can just add or I can subtract shapes, or subtract anchor points by clicking on the Pen tool and then clicking the negative sign, hovering over that point, click on it, it disappears. What that does to, like our example here in this corner, if you click on that anchor point, and see it just fills it right back up. But yeah, you can also even do the plus. You can add the points here in the corners, then you could delete this one. I'll zoom in. I've added this, I want to curve this corner here, I've added an anchor point there, there, and then I can hit the minus sign when I'm on the Pen tool. Delete that one, hit "A", so now, I can go ahead or actually do Shift C. That's the last thing I said. You click on it, and you can pull it and drag it, and you can actually make that curve yourself. Do the same thing for this side, and you've curved the edge of that. Lots of possibilities to the Pen tool and building. Have fun with it, practice it, and build your shapes there, and then we'll go over how to further manipulate shapes, build on shapes, and layer them, and all of those things here in the next videos. I look forward to going over that. Thanks. 5. 5. Building with Shapes: We're back. This is the second portion of our form building. In the last video we learned how to create custom forms or shapes by using the Pen tool and creating our own paths by using anchor points, and clicking and just free handing those. That's a great tool, that's a great way to build your forms. But there's another way that you can build your forms and sometimes it's easier and quicker, and can just basically save you a lot of time, and that's by using existing shapes that are already here in Illustrator. They already have some pre-made shapes that you can go through. They're here on the left-hand side. Now if I click and hold I can go ahead and see all the different shapes that are available. So if I click on the rectangle tool, what's neat about these is after we, I'll show you how to create the shapes by putting shapes together you can go ahead and build your form, and then if it's still not looking right there's ways to manipulate those forms even further to get exactly what you need. Go ahead. Well, I'll teach you the rectangle tool first. If I just click and drag you can build a rectangle. If you click and hold it and you can drag, you'll see that you can, before you let go, it won't build a shape until you let go. You can build it out to whatever you need or size. Thing is, it's not super accurate. If you just want to throw out a shape you can do it that way, but if you want to be pretty specific with the size you can just go ahead and instead of clicking and dragging, just click once and it brings up this little menu for you that you can go ahead and choose the width and the heights. Maybe I want to do four inches wide and two inches tall. Click Okay and there you have it. Now maybe I want to make a perfect square, which is a way to do that as well. If you click, drag, but you hold Shift while you're doing it, that'll go ahead and make a perfect square. It will scale a square. Pretty cool. Moving forward, we'll do a head and you can do the rounded rectangle. Not much different, same functionality except it has the rounded edges, and if you want to change how dramatic those edges are you can go ahead and click, well, before you let go is hit the up arrow key and that'll make it even more dramatic. You can see it there. As opposed to if I hit the back arrow key, you'll see that's just a really subtle edge or a curve. It's up to you, you can go ahead and set that. What's really nice about this is that you can get a perfect rounded edge. It's nice if you're making like a bottle or the bottom like a polar if you're going to do something with perspective, it's really nice because I can go ahead if I max this out using the up arrow key, now you go ahead and you have that perfect rounded edge on there. Nice. Another tool, another shape that you can do. Let's mix up the colors here. I'm going to [inaudible] green. I'll click and I'll use the Ellipse tool. The Ellipse tools works the exact same way, but there's something that you can go ahead and build your ellipses to whatever size you want. If you want it to be a perfect circle, same thing, hit Shift, it'll do that. But a lot of times you'll notice that when it's scaling you'll see that it's scaling outwards from the top left-hand corner, is where that shape is originating. That's a problem because a lot of times I'll want to have it stem right from the center because I want to make the circle right here. In order to do that you just have to click Hold, and then you hit Shift and Option, and then you drag outwards. You'll see that it scales from that center, originating from that center point. That one is pretty crucial because it's saving a lot of time and a lot of frustration. If you want to go ahead just the last time, so you Shift, Option or Shift, Alt, and it starts from that center point. Two other ones, you have the Polygon tool. It all works the same way. But you'll see that if I hit the up arrow it will go ahead and add sides. If I hit the bottom arrow or down arrow it will go ahead and take away those sides. Eventually you'll see that you can start making a square or even a triangle, so you can get that shape as well pretty easy. It's the same thing. Then the last one is the Star tool, which is actually pretty cool. Let's go ahead and you'll see that you can have your star there. If you want to add more sides you can go ahead and hit the up and down arrows. You can go ahead and build more sides. If you shrink it there. Let's say I wanted the center to be that size, and then I hold the Option key or Shift command. There you go. If I hit the Shift command you'll see that it makes those points go out even further and protrude further, so you could start making like bursts almost there in your screen. Pretty cool things. Those are your basic shapes. Now I'm going to show you how to use those and I'll use my Ad actually to show you how I would build that out. I'm going to go ahead and show you. I have it here on a different layer. I want to go ahead and actually make it. So I want to make this pipe. You can see that it's basically just a bunch of shapes put together. I can build that fairly easily and more accurate than what I would do. If I was going to use the Pen tool I have to hand do those curves, make sure it's the same on this side. You don't have to worry about that right now. What we want to do is first I'll unlock this layer and then I'll go ahead and click here. If you hit R, that's rotate, and you click off to the side of it, not on the image. Just click and then just start rotating to the left. Just drag it over to the left. You'll see that I'm straightening. I want this pipe to be perpendicular so that I can go ahead. It would be easier to build that way. I'm getting pretty close. That's pretty close. If you need more help you can go ahead and click on the side here and drag out a guide. Make sure it's perfectly straight there. But it's up to you. Now we're here. Let me go ahead and lock this layer. Again I don't want to have this in my way. Go back to layer 2. I'm going to build on top of this. I'll zoom in, Command plus, and now I'm here. I want to build these shapes and there's a bunch of different ways we can do this. This will probably the most accurate way. If you have something like this go ahead and use this method. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to look at it and I'm going to see what these main shapes are. I see a lot of ellipses and I see that I can build this out of probably just ellipses and my rounded rectangle tool. You can finesse it further if you'd like, but I'll just show you the basic shape of this pipe. Let's go ahead and use a different color here. Let's do a brown. I'll do a brown color just to match it. But we'll start with the ellipses. You can spot immediately the ellipses or mainly what they are. I'll click and drag, and there's one. Maybe I want to expand it to be a little bit bigger. Now I want to just expand from the center point, so I hit Shift, Option. I click off to the side here on this box, and I can drag it and make it a little bit bigger. That works. This one looks a little bit straight right here, and so it looks more like a rounded rectangle to me. I can go ahead and click and I can drag that. Maybe I want to bring that down a little bit. That's about right. Then I'll want to go ahead and find all those other ellipses. There's a couple other ones down here I see, I see another one right over here. Now that I have those. Now this shapes could seem tricky, it might seem like you'd have to go ahead and take the Pen tool and custom build that shape. I have a much quicker way. Go ahead, let's change the color so you can see what I'm doing. Let's choose actually orange or something. I'll go with the rounded rectangle. That's basically what this edge is right here. It's the bottom of a rounded rectangle. I'll click way up here and you'll see I can drag it down. It's pretty close to that size, so let me bring it over here. Now I can't really see what I'm working on, so I usually like to hit Shift X, and just switch it to the stroke mode, and I can go ahead and resize this over here using the edge of this bounding box or these edges here. Let's see. That looks roughly center. I won't keep on working on that. Pretty close. What I'll do is since I have that, now there's this other shape right here. I'll probably just want to subtract it from this shape. That might be the easiest way to do it. I'll build another one right here. Bringing that in a little bit and yeah, that's pretty close. I'm going to make that a different color because that way I can see it when I fill these both ends. I'll fill command x, I'll fill that one. Now I want to take this green shape out of this red shape so that I can just have that knocked out and build that forms. In order to do that, there's a way to play with shapes and that's in pathfinder. You go over here to the right, you click on there and you'll see pathfinder. There's all different types of options. I won't bore you with going through every single one of them. It's trial and error sometimes on how to use them. Just put two shapes together, and start clicking in. Once you've highlighted both shapes, you can choose these pathfinder options right here and see how it affects it. But if you hover over it, it'll tell you what it does. I don't want to unite the two shapes. I want to minus it from the front, that sounds about right. Let me highlight both of these. Click and then click on the other one by holding Shift. Then I'll go over here, and this is my front, click on that. There it goes. It takes it out of there, so now this is its own shape still, and just subtract that from it. Now, you can see that it's about the right shape but now I need to take it off because it's hanging over now. Way to do that is I use the eraser tool over here or shift E. You can change the size of your eraser really easily by using the bracket keys on near the right left bracket keys on your keyboard. Right one, makes it go bigger, left one makes it go smaller. Just a little tip. If I want to make this, if I want to go ahead and erase this, I just click, it only erase what I've already highlighted, and I've highlighted this red part. It didn't need to go there, yeah that's fine. I wanted to make this, I can actually use the eyedropper tool. We'll go into more detail about colors and what not, but if hit eye, or you go over here on the left and you hit the eyedropper tool, just if this is whatever shape you have highlighted, you want it to be changed to a different shape or a different color or something else. Make sure the shape that you want to be filled in is highlighted and then you use the eyedropper tool on the other color. You click it, and I'll change it. There you go. That's looking pretty good. I mean, you can go ahead and finesse this. You can subtract points, if I hit the letter a, it will go to the white arrow, which means I can just mess with one point at a time, one anchor point. You've got dragged it in a little bit and taper this end for that pipe and that might look a little more correct but basically, there you go. If you zoom out a bit with command minus sign, you can see that basic part of that pipe. That was fairly easy to build and you can go through and start using these pathfinder tools to really speed up your process. There's some things we want to do here. If I had this as a different color, I wanted this to be a different shade of brown. I mean, like a lighter shade of brown. I didn't want this shape to be in front of this shape and without going into different layers, it may seem impossible to do that. What you can do, is when you want to layer your shapes, if you click on it, you can actually go to your, let's see if I can find that. I'm so used to using just the hotkey, but it's actually here, I was right. So select. You hit command and let's move that to the front. You hit the command and you hit the bracket at the same time. That'll go ahead, if you hit the right bracket, it will move it up. It'll bring that in front and that'll be in the back or if you hold command and having selected command you hit the left bracket, it will place it behind it. Sorry if I get a little bit confused on where to find it here in the navigation and it's because I use the hotkeys for way too long and eventually you'll get there too and it's a lot easier to work that way. But yeah, command with the bracket will be bad. I'll go ahead and change that with the eyedropper tool, move it back. Maybe I want these all to be the one shape. I don't want all these their own separate shades mainly because it's nice just to be able to have them all grouped together and when I change the color, it will change it for the all of it. You can do that by using that unite tool over here. You can click on it and now it's all one shape. Another thing that you can do if you want to just feed, if you don't want them all to be one shapes so you can manipulate them later, a way to keep them all grouped is by hitting command G. Now, you'll see when I click on it, it's like all of them. If I didn't do that, let's just say it's all ungrouped, if I click on one of them, now I have to do that. If I want to drag it, it'll take them all as separate pieces. I don't want that. I'll just highlight all of them, hit command G, and now only these elements are in the same layer, I didn't move any of the layers but now they're just grouped together. That's nice just because you can go ahead and group different parts of your illustration together so that they stay there and you don't forget about any of the pieces. Yeah, it's just easier to track them. If you want to ungroup them, you hit command shift G, and it's ungrouped. There you go. Command shift G, ungroup, command G is to group them. But I'll go ahead and unite them because it's a little bit easier for me to work with. Now, I guess I have a tool over here. For those using CS6, I'm not sure if it's in the earlier versions or not, but there's something called the shape builder tool. I'll do that using, let me go ahead and just take this, turn off that layer and let me just move off to the side here so we can see what we're doing. Let me just do this with an example with some circles here. I'll make this circle again, just copy and paste that over. I have these three circles here. Now, I'll just do two circles. I want to make a moon shape. In order to do that, I obviously just need to make that crescent moon-shape. An easy way to do it would just be to overlap these two, and you can go into pathfinder over here on the right, and you can find ways you can do the minus front. There's ways to do that. Now you have your moon shape but if I wasn't to do that, there's a quick way to solve a lot of problems. If you click here on the shape builder tool, I've had two shapes and a little dotted arrow there. It's a pretty neat told because now when I go ahead and I'm hovering over all the selected, if I select both, now if I hover over them, you'll see that it gives like a little gridded area shading over top of it. That means those are the ones I'm going to be working with. If I click and drag over two of those shapes, and I let go, it'll go ahead and merge them together. What that did was I had two circles, now I have one circle and I have a crescent. Let's say now I want to take it and you put, I don't know if you can see that very well here only if I use it different, there we go. I'll use yellow so you can see that a little bit better. If I go back to that shape builder tool, now if I want to drag over, but I want to delete them, drag over those two, but now I want to delete them. You hold Shift or, sorry, option. You'll see a little minus sign pop-up near your cursor and you let go there and it just deletes them. It's a really quick way to do instead of having to look through pathfinder. Just to be dragged to join shapes or drag option to delete them and it can just save you a lot of time. Just thought I would share that tool. I'm trying to think if there's any other last things that I want to show you. I guess the only other thing that I would show you is, with these shapes is a lot of times I want to keep these shapes aligned. Well, that's an outrageous pink color. I'll just go ahead and unite that one so there's no part. You can see that these things are not straight. When I copied it over, one is higher than the other, but let's go ahead and say even this thing. I want them to all be in the same area. A lot of times you have bunch of icons or you have a bunch of shapes that you want to line up in a row. They're all over the place. The way to do that would be to highlight the ones you want. If I highlight, lets say these top three, I want to make sure these are all aligned. If you go to the very top of your menu up here, you'll see all these things, these are all alignments. Or over here on the right hand side you'll see the alignment box tool. You click on it and then it gives you all the different options and how to align these objects. Now, this is super handy. I'm sorry it's making this tutorial a little bit longer, but it'll be helpful for you. You can trial and error on these and they show you what they do. Maybe I want them all to be the same. The tops of these other align at the same spot. If I click it says vertical align top, I'll click on that. Now, you can see all of those are exactly the same on the top, which is really nice. But now they're not lined up. They don't have equal amount of spacing in between them, and you can do that with this tool right over, no that was not it, there you go, that's all right there. Horizontal distribute center. You can tell like the icons may throw you off, just hold over and just experiment with them or you can go over here and do the same thing. But it's nice because then you can go ahead and align those things. You combine them together, you can align, make equal spacing, you want to align them to the baseline, and just clean up your designs. Just a lot of time saving moves that I wanted to show you. Yeah, I think that's it for the shapes. In the next video, I'll go over being able to use the things like the paintbrush and be a really free form and not plotting points anymore and not dealing with those points but you're actually free handing these in stroking them in. That would be your paintbrush, your pencil, and in going ahead and showing you maybe the line and how to manipulate your lines to look a little bit different and to do what you need them to do. That's all coming up. Hope this helped and I'll see you in the next video. Thanks. 6. 6. Strokes and Lines: All right, and we're getting into some more familiar ground. In this video, we're going to go over just drawing and painting here in the Illustrator, things that you typically connect with Photoshop for. Don't get me wrong, I still do if I'm doing anything very digitally or very painterly, I'll like to bring it into Photoshop. But Illustrator has some amazing tools and the best part about Illustrator, if you draw an Illustrator, it's all vectors. You can manipulate those lines and every portion of those lines, which is awesome and can definitely help you customize your shapes after you've drawn them. It's a nice way to clean up, a lot of people use it for typography or lettering. It's kind of nice to be able to manipulate everything in Illustrator. But it also works with just painting shapes and stuff like that. Let's just talk about the line first because the lines is pretty cool. Here in Illustrator seems pretty standard, but there's some cool things you can do so I can decide the length of the element is clicking here on the middle, or I'm going to set the angle. But I'll just click and drag. I'll hold "Shift" so it's a straight line. I'm going to make sure has a stroke on it here, there. Let's make it a little bit bigger so we can see it. I'll zoom in that line. Cool thing about the line: it's not a shape, so you can go ahead and it only has two end points, so it's easy to manipulate. If you hit "Shift C" again that I taught you at the Pen tool, Convert Anchor Point tool. You click on that side you can go ahead and we can change the shape for it easily. We already know how to do this. Cool part about this is, if now if I like this shape, I can go to Object, Expand. I just went ahead and made it into a shape. It's no longer a line, it's a shape. You can do that with anything you wanted. The benefit to doing that is if for example, let's say, you can go up here and you can change the nature of this line by changing the widths into like a tapered off edge. Maybe like that and you want it to be a shape instead of just a line. You can change that. There's all sorts of this things that you can do to it. Let's go back to uniform. I'll go down here and I can change it. There's some other settings you can get and make it into an arrow. Or I can go add like a little bit of a texture to it and you can create your own, and we'll go over textures in the next unit. The cool thing about this is, now it's a line so I can go ahead and I can manipulate that shape. How I want it like I said. Well, maybe I want to keep it this way. It won't stay this way because if I want to scale it at all, next to us, next to a shape, maybe I have this circle that I want to keep with it, or series of circles. I have this nice series of circles. The stroke weight on this is one, or maybe two right here. Now watch what happens when I try to scale them. They're not going to scale evenly because the stroke will always remain the same and you'll see what happens. Let me zoom in a little bit. If I try to scale these down, you'll notice that this stroke never got any smaller. The line length got smaller or shorter to fit this, but this stay the same. If I want that size ratio to stay the same, I'm going to have to convert that into a shape. That'll be the perk of making these, going up here in Object, Expand and ow I have that into a shape. When I scale it now, it scales nicely and evenly. That is a definite perk and a great option, when I'm here in illustrator you wouldn't have been any other programs. Now you know kind of the nature of the line and what you can do with the line. But you also have a paintbrush. I usually like to use a webcam tablet. You can use your any type of tablet or you can just still use your mouse. That's completely fine with brushes. I'll just go back to just a line. It's basically just drawing a line. Nothing super special. If I highlight this, you'll see that they're just lines. I can do the same thing here with the pencil. Does the same thing. They're just lines. The Pencil tool is nice because it just sticks with the lines and you can adjust them afterwards however you want. If you want them to look like that ragged edge which is kind of had to use, it only works if you use it really small. But you don't really have too many options there with the pencil. Now with the brush on the other hand, you have a whole set of brush presets. You can click over here. Here you have all sorts of options, you don't have to just keep it straight. You can have like an angled brush, you can have a texture brush, you can import more brushes. For example, I just want to have made it, texture brush. Let's go here. Let me go out and I'll show you it's too a bit dark. I don't like keep working on this guy. I'm going to do this. You'll notice that it can change with weights. You can vary in weight along that line, but it's still a line. It's nice so I can go in and I can manipulate my lines however I want. Which is kind of cool. It still feels natural, but then you can go ahead and alter it however you please. There's all sorts of brush presets in there, you can do onset. The way that you can get more, either you go here in the Brush Libraries menu and you can also do that by going here, Open Brush Library. That's just right in the top right-hand corner of that Brushes panel. Down here to Open Brush Library, vector packs, grunge brushes, hand-drawn, it looks like a grunge brushes and so you add those. Here they are. It's kind of look crazy. I can click on those and it kind of leaves that road. The cool part about that with having the textures and what not is now, since they obviously won't scale well if I leave them like that, they'll just turn into a little mess on my screen. If I want to shrink this down at the rest of my artwork, it won't scale. I just go back to Object, Expand Appearance. Now, there you go. Now it's a shape. There's lots of different options that you can use when drawing with the paint brush. I can go, like I said here the whole time and just to show you different brushes like your calligraphy brushes, those are sweet. Let's see here. Here we go. Let's make this a little easier for you all to see. If I want to draw with a calligraphy brush, it's cool, you can go ahead and do that. But lots of options. Now, with the brushes, there's something as you're always drawing with a line. Now in a second, I'll bring up my ad and I'll show you another tool. Let's call the blob brush. Now, that one I like a lot because if you remember Microsoft Paint, you're just drawing and it doesn't make a line which you can't manipulate as well, but if you're just trying to fill in a big area and make a shape, the blob brush is the way to go here on the left. Let's do the blob brush, or I may as well just show you now. Size this up by getting the right bracket. key instead of being a million lines, it's just one solid shape. Those are just shapes now. That's the benefit, isn't it? If I was to do this with a brush, this would be a series of just lines, so that's the difference. Trying to think, if I want to get too too much more detail here, there's one thing, let me show you this. I failed to show you in the last one, but I want to make sure I let you see a couple of extra things. These are a little added bonus things before I demonstrate these brushes on the ad itself. But a couple things, I want to copy this. Copying is really easy, command C, and then command V is to paste. Doesn't paste it in place, so it's frustrating especially if you want it just to be on top of here so that I can just move it on over. What will happen is if you do this, you just do command C, hit command F instead, and it will always paste it right on top of the other one, so paste it in place. Super nice and super helpful because if I just want to move this right next to it, I don't want to have to work with alignments or anything, just hold shift when you're doing it. Actually click on it and start dragging it and then hold shift, and then you can just put it right next to it and you'll see that it is perfect. That's one thing. Now that I've moved this and also I've done it with copy and I've pasted it in place, so another way to do this is if I want another one of them right next to there, I can duplicate this. If I click on this then I hold option, you'll see that there's another arrow. This is a little secret, I don't know how secret it is, but if you use a brand new, this is a secret. They'll give you the double arrow, you got a white and a black arrow. That means you're going to duplicate this. When you click on it and start to drag it, and after you started dragging, you hit shift and it'll align it back again, and you can drag it off to the side and it's copied. Now, the cool part about that is it gets even better. Now, that you've copied it, you've duplicated it just with your single holding of the option button or the alt button and dragging, once you've done that, it'll copy this exact move if you just say duplicate, which is command D. Boom. Now, it's equidistant here in between these two circles. That's perfect. If you want to go ahead and make sometimes for quick patterns, it's really easy and really helpful just to use those. If I had the star tool, well, I'm not sure what kind of star that is. But like that, if I hit "Option", click on it, click "Option", drag, have a new one, I'm going to hit command D, it'll keep doing that all day long. So really cool things. One last thing with these shapes you can do, let's just say I'm going to take off with the hit subtract when I had the pen tool so I can take that up. Maybe I want this shape, I just duplicated it, I just hit "Option" and drag it across there. I want this shape to be flipped. I right click on it, go down at "Transform", and then go down to "Reflect". This will bring up the option to go ahead and flip that. Flipping it horizontally means it'll go up or down, it'll flip it that way or vertical it will flip it sideways. That's what we want to do is we want to flip it sideways. Boom, there you go. Again, if you want to flip any object, I know you're going to be needing that at some point so I wanted to make sure I said right. Right-click on it, "Transform", go down to "Reflect", vertical, if you want to go horizontal, this is what that'll do, it'll flip it that way. That's just a little tip that I want to make sure I don't leave out. Let me bring up the ad now. Here it is. There is some possibility. We've already got some of the Pen tool, we did the hat with building the shapes and manipulating those preset shapes, we are able to make the pipe. Now, for things like the rope here, would probably be easier with the paintbrush, and also here with these flowers, it'll probably a little bit easier with the paintbrush. Let me go ahead and unlock this, take that layer, go to transparency, I'll make it undo. I'll better click on it. You can add about 30, I think that's good. Go back to our layers, let's lock it, go on layer 2 Now, I want to go ahead and draw these flowers. Probably the best way to do this, I just take my paint blob brush, and that brush will probably be the most likely to be the easiest one to do just because it already created as a shape, and that's what I'm looking at for in this instance. I'm going to change to hot pink so that we can see what we're working on. Again, if you hit the brackets, the left bracket will make your brush smaller, the right bracket will make it bigger. That works with everything like your erase or anything you're going to be painting with. I'll zoom in even closer. So here's this flower, you want to make this a little bit smaller, and I'll go ahead and I'll just draw in this flower. You'll probably have things like this in your ad that you'll need just to draw and to make your life a ton easier, just use the blob brush tool. That'll be the easiest way to do it. I am sorry, if you don't have a blob brush tool, it's still possible. You just use your normal brush, and just your normal brush, let's just do it in a different color. I'll do that in a bright green. This is your normal brush, so it's still doing these lines. It will still accomplish it, it just takes up, it'll just be one more step. After I do that, it will just highlight it, go to object, expand. Try one more time, object, expand again. Those are all those shapes, then you have to go over to your transform palette and hit unite. There's a lot of little steps that you'll be able to save if you have this one. Let's just hit "Shift X" for a second so we can see it. Otherwise, we had a little circle in the middle, and we're going to make a shape there, it might be the easiest way to do that. Let's make that but a red color. Let's go a head, red. I'll make this one yellow, and go back to command X, or Shift X. We have that, and then we can go ahead and draw in the next one. We'll go ahead and use hot pink again, just so I can see some contrast when I'm working and using the blob brush. Yes, I'd go through and draw all those, and that's how I do those flowers. If you go back, I would just like them. The other one that I would use it for would be here, maybe on his mouth, and especially on this rope. You don't want the blob brush tool on this one, you'll just want your normal brush because you want to make these in the lines. You can do that, and then we can take those lines afterwards, you zoom in. We can take those lines after we've drawn them with the pencil tool or the brush tool, and we can customize those how we want. We can change it to whatever you need to do, and you can taper those off. Let's see. I guess you can even find a texture on here that would work. Maybe that one will work. We can go and see 0.25, maybe 0.5, shrink that down. You know what? That might even just work as that through the line right there. You could do that to all of them, and then when you zoom out, yeah, good work. There's lots of little ways you can find out what will work and multiple ways to do the same thing. It's just all up to you. Hopefully this helped, gave you some idea of how to use all of these brushes and pencil tools. I would go around and just play with it and experiment with it. Remember, it's over here, you have your brush presets. If you click on any of those brushes, you'll be able to find out all the details. There's lots of different things, they're just trial and error I think at this point because it's not super important that you learn it right now, but you can go ahead and really customize all of your brushes. Again, you can go in there and just double click on any one that you already have. I can even change the angle of that brush or whatever I need. But yeah, I think that'll be all I need to teach you now, so I think we're done with the first unit of Form Building. Go ahead and use this and build out all of your ads or build out your full print ad. Then you'll notice here, if I take off this, I want to make sure that this is 100 percent. You'll notice things like this pattern of stars, maybe the texture, that printed texture. I can get that later and we'll work on typography. Really getting the right colors with some overlays. There's a bunch of little things that we'll go over in the next one, your superficial type things, and we'll really pull this piece all together and all the way round off your knowledge of Adobe Illustrator. Thanks a lot, I'll see you 7. 7. Color: All right guys, we've finished with building forms and now we're getting into forms stylizing. This Unit 2 is going to be covering things like colors, patterns, textures, topography, things like that, all the icing on the cake here for your ad. You can see how far I've got on my ad using the tools that we learned in the first unit. I was able to go ahead and make these shapes with the Pen tool and make these ones with the paint brush, and stack some elements together, some of those pre-made shapes, you can use the Pathfinder. But yeah, I was able to make all of this with exactly what I shared with you in that first unit. Now in this one, I specifically want to talk about colors. This video I want to talk about colors. I'll show you how I got these. Now I've already shown you a few things on color, if you picked up on it as I was going through the first part, some of the first videos. But let's work this airplane right here. If I click on this airplane, as we know, we can change the stroke. We can give it a stroke up here, or we can take that stroke off and I want to give it a different color fill. You can see that there's some pre-user called swatches that you can choose from, that are just colors that will stay up there for you and that you can always access. It's nice and handy. There's a million and a half places that seems like I illustrated to you mess with colors. So that's handy and a little bit more confusing sometimes. Don't get confused, just know that each of these color has a different function or some of is easier to access when you're working on this side of the screen. There you have it and you know how to go down here. Let's actually go up here to the top. There's a little palette there, a color palette. If you click on it. Now we're going to start diving a little bit deeper into what makes this color. You can manipulate that a whole lot more just using these sliders here. Now the color mode that we're in is CMYK or printing colors. You're working with the colors, cyan, magenta, yellow, and your black. You can actually move those sliders around and adjust that. I want to to take out some, I want to add a little bit of magenta, which is your red color, and I want to add that into my yellow, so that I can get a little bit more of an orange. I can click on this slider and drag it over and customize that a bit. You just have a little bit more control, over here you don't. Right here you get to mess with that a little bit on those sliders. Down here you have the CMYK spectrum. If you just click anywhere on there, it'll automatically pick that color for you and change your shape. But the problem with that is it's super accurate. It's hard to just click around. If I click at all, I do it just so that I can get it close enough on the spectrum of, I know marking threads, I'll just click over there in the red area until I get some colors, and then I go ahead and manipulate it over here on the sliders. Another thing that you can do with this, is if you double-click on that square there, that fill, you can go ahead and mess with that. All of that hues and value or another hues, the values of that one hue, now one color, the yellow, I can go ahead and even saturate it a little bit more and make it really yellow. This little box over here, what it's showing you, you don't get a preview here, you get a preview right here. That color is what is now, and then if I move it around this top color is what you're changing it to. I can move these sliders around to change that color, and then within that, I can go ahead and de-saturate a bit, make it darker in value and all those types of things. Nice tools. Another thing is a hex code, I'm not sure if you're familiar with it. You may be familiar with hex codes, and basically that number there corresponds to each color. All the colors you can create, each one of them has their own unique code here that's created anytime you make a color, so you could copy that. If I cancel out of here, and let's say I want to change this sheet to that color. I'll go double-click on here. I can go down to that form right there. Command V, paste it there, click "OK" and I'll change it to that green color that I saved as the hex code. Problem with that is, it's not really efficient. It's nice when somebody is giving you the hex codes for a color palette for something you're working on. But when you're building it your own, it's really nice just to have swatches made available, so that you can constantly change. Because a lot of times I'll be working with the same colors, like I'm here I'm working with this pink and awful lot or this orange and this red, the yellow a whole lot. I want to make sure I have easy access to those and I'll have to go find every time or even I drop them. Because the problem with an Eyedropper is this. I'm going to make another one right here. I'm going to go "Shift X" just to outline it. If I have it outlined and I use the Eyedropper tool for the pink, that works. But if I want an outline, actually let me change this to that pink color and use the outline. I drop that pink, I want this whole plane to be pink. If I click on it, something that's outlined, it'll make it outlined as well. The Eyedropper tool picks up whatever the appearances and that changes there on yours. It's frustrating sometimes, and especially if this is you're borrowing or use the Eyedropper tool on another thing that has a stroke and it's a different width, it will copy that over. The best way to do it is just to create your own swatches. Let's go back. Let me change that back to white. That's bugging me. Let's go ahead and I want to use these colors over again. If I click right here, there's a thing called your swatches panel, which is right over here on the right, looks like it's a little grid and you see that's what we saw earlier up here. There's a little version. If I go down to the bottom here, I want to create my own folder full of just the colors for this project. I'll go and click on this folder here. So this says "New color group," and I'll just go ahead and make a name this, I can name it Vintage Ad. Click "OK". You scroll down on this and you'll see it's right there and it's that color was added automatically to it, because I had it selected. Now what I'll do is, if I click on another color like this steal color that I want to add to it. Clicked on "My Color" then I go over here and click on that folder that I want to join it to, and then you'll see a little add a new page or new swatch, if you clicked on that, you can name the swatch and click "OK", then it adds it into your group. You can do that with all your colors, your red, click on that group, add it, and pretty soon you'll have your whole color palette in there and it's just really easy to access. Now, if I want to change this hat color, I'll have to Eyedrop it and try to find where the other instance of that color is or go find it up from my color palette. I can go through one of my swatches and say I'm going to make that pink. Click on the pink, I notice the red pink because it's over there. Pretty handy tool. Let me add this one color here because I'm going to use it next. I make sure I can have all these colors to work with. So you know how to use the swatches, everyone, you have your own swatch now. If you want to add a gradient, and I was told in design school never to use gradients. I think it was because people just don't do a good job of using them. I have to get that out of my brain and I have since then and being able to use them tastefully, I believe, and I know that it can be done. I want to show you how to use gradients. Don't hate me if you were taught in designing school not to use gradients, because there is a use for them, and this is why. You have right here, if you look up on the original ad, you see that red and then it fades often to that orange color. I want to mimic that here on mine. This one, it seems a little complicated, but it's not super complicated. It maybe a little bit small to see in your screen, so I'll try to talk it with you best I can. Click on what I want to change the gradient color or what I want to change into a gradient. I'll click on this, this is it's own shape. You can see that vast. So I'll just highlight it, if I go here on the left and there's a gradient tool. You can use that one or you can go over here on the right, and click on the gradient here. I'll area down preset. That's cheating. I won't use that yet. I haven't already said I'll just go to white and black. This is what will happen, typically when you click on it. If you click over here in your gradient, so you can click on anything and give it a gradient. That's usually if it's already there, that means you've already had the color gradients set up. You can do is just if you have that highlighted, go over here to the right, you have the same exact looking tool and it's called gradient. You can go ahead and click on that color and it'll automatically fill it. Now if you're still on a gradients hole, you click and drag anywhere, you'll be able to change the direction of your gradient. On this slider you can see if you hover over it. There's a little black or little white square. You can actually change if you want the white to fade out or you want the black to fade out. You can change that all you want. But over here we don't want it to be a white and black, we want it to be that orange color into that red. So let's go down the gradient service, these little arrows here. If you double-click on them, you can go ahead and change the colors. You can make up your own color, or since we already have it as a swatch, but on your swatches panel on the left, and we want that orange colors, so click right there. Perfect, we have it, we'll go back and click back. For now, what I do is actually make them both that orange color, and then I'll double-click on that orange color once again, one of them, either side and we can fix that later. I don't want to be in swatches anymore. This is where those sliders come in handy. I want to make that a little bit more red, I'll go and add more magenta. There we go. Now there's that red color, but the red is taking over. If I want to go on here, I can change the slider, like I said, and I can drag it up, and I can make that red sit back a bit, and that looks pretty good. I could do the same thing over here in my gradient slider and I can actually move that or I can take this little diamond and I can move that and change that gradient around. But, if you get really crazy, you can click on that gradient slider scale here right underneath it. You'll see a little plus sign pop up, and you can add even more gradients. If you double-click on it, you can see if I add that yellow, you can target more crazy, but we're not going to do that. Just keeping it simple. That's how you use the gradient tool. Last thing I want to show you, now that we have his vests, I'll be in the right color, which is nice, is apply one, I just show you how to select one color throughout the whole keys. What that means is, let's say I'm working and I want to change, I guess at some of these yellow, or these pinks and stuff are all I'll change. I'll make a few of these things all the same color. I'll make them plain, I'll make the pipe, I'll make his jacket and his hair and a flower. I'll make them all the same color. We can experiment here. I'll make them all green. They're all the exact same color green. Now, I'm going to want to take that green. Now, while I'm working, I want to click and highlight, I want to change the color of everything in that green. I don't want those ones to be green anymore. Maybe I want them to be the correct color, which is like, I'll make it orange. But I'm going to have to go and click hold "Shift" click on another one, highlight it as well, and find all the instances of that green. You can imagine if you have a very complex piece of art, it would take a long time to do that. We don't want to do that. All you have to do is click on one instance of that color, and then if we want to go over to your, let's see, you select up here., and then you drag down you score the same. You can look in the same appearance or blending mode or fill color. Right now we want to fill color. You have all these different options and you can use those, you can experiment with those later. But right now I just want the fill color, so if I click on "Fill Color", you'll notice what it does is it highlights every single one, that's that color. Super helpful and a big time saver. You don't want to go through and highlight all of those individually. Now I can go back and say it was that orange color, now I can swatch this, click on that orange and it changes every instance of that color into the new color that I chose. Anyway, I hope this was helpful and the next class, we're going to go over into some textures, and patterns, and maybe some topography. Stay tuned and thank you. 8. 8. Typography: In this video we're now going to be moving into typography with an Illustrator. Typography you don't mess a whole lot with type, with an Illustrator, that's what you'd save for Adobe InDesign setting out like if you having a full layout or a booklet or whatever, and you're setting out long paragraphs of text, that would be for InDesign. With an Illustrator, you are just going to stick with the small strings of text and maybe have a few paragraphs here and there, but it's not really built to deal with that and you wouldn't want to, you'd want to just bring it all into InDesign anyways. Here for their ads, you'll notice it's just short headers and this would be perfect for what we are going over. I won't go into to detailed of explaining those paragraphs and whatnot, but we'll just stick with the single lines. Pakistan International Airlines and you do type that out so I can show you. There's two ways to set that to start typing. You can hit just t or you go over here on this side and you see that the t and you can go and click on that. That brings out your type tool. If you click on the screen, let me just zoom in a little bit. If I click on the screen, it goes ahead and just sets up the type so I can start typing. I can type. I can actually start typing all day long and I'll never drop to another line because I don't have any bounding box around it restricting where that type will go. That's that one. But if I click that I use a type tool, I click and drag. Now if I type, you'll see that it stays within that box. The biggest difference between those is obviously it's nice to keep with them that box you'll have to set your own drop the lines. But by having that when you scale this box, it'll keep it all nicely fitting. It will scale to fit within that. I shouldn't say scale but it will fit all the type within that and drop it into unnecessary lines and break the words that it needs to. Down here if I do the same thing that I play with that bounding box it'll happen as it'll start stretching my type, it'll just change the size. Just a little something. You can do this hold shift though, when you do. Otherwise, you'll really squish and harm your type, which we don't want to do. You don't want to stretch, or squish your type. It's just bad font, don't do it. Yes. Those are the main differences there. Real quick so I can show you some things that you can do when you're in the paragraph section. If you can go down and over here there's a letter a, and that's your character panel. If you click on it, now you have some more options here to mess with and this is where these things can take into effect. Actually, I'll just show you one thing why it's in the sentence. You could only have to do is worry about the letting. That's the biggest thing there. That's the space between these two lines of text. If I just go ahead and this little thing right here on the top right, that tool. I have to keep this highlighted. That will change the space between those lines. That's you're letting. That's where you can do that. You can also change the space and I'm going to get out of this, go back to this line. I can change the spacing between the tracking, which is the spacing between all the layers within your text here. If I go up, you actually click on these little down arrow to open up a panel so you can do it incrementally. But I can even add in my own, maybe I want to make this 200 huge tracking, but you'll see it just mess with this spacing. That's great to know. Also, another good thing to know when working with type in Illustrator is you can mess up the individual, you can mess the kerning. Tracking is all the letters, the spacing in, all the letters. Kerning is between two letters. If I click on my cursor in between two of those letters, I can actually do a hotkey which is option or alt and you do that right and left arrow keys. The right will give you more space. Left will take away that space and we make it closer. Sometimes when you have typefaces, they are a little wonky with their kerning and that's just because some letters don't, but up to other letters very nicely. You can feel free to play around with that. But now you know where it's at. Then over here, you can change the size and you can change the size of type, this is the last place you can change the size. So up here, or you can change over here. The difference between the two pairs of panel further actually, the panel up here if I go and I can look through all my typefaces and I can change the typeface, I click down, it'll change it. But it's hard because they're all the same typeface. They aren't things same typeface, but the names are all in the same typeface, so it's easier to tell over here in your character panel and you go and click over here and now you can see them in their proper typeface, in their respective typeface. That's a little bit easier to search through text and try to search and find the right font. Excuse me. Let me type in the correct text here. That says Pakistan International Airlines. Maybe I want to add a little bit of tracking here. Maybe just 10, something small. Then also what you'd want to do, once I've set that there's a few other options that we can do this. I'll leave down there on your right. I'll start working on the next bit here, I'll do Geneva. Obviously that's not caps and I want it to be, maybe I've already typed, maybe I've typed something super long. I don't want to retype it. You can actually go up to the type bar up here in the type section in the menu, go down and you can go to change case. You can actually just go change to uppercase right here and well. If you forgot to do it and you type the whole thing that no, I want to change it to sentence case, go down. sentence case, make your life a lot easier. Yeah, lots of options there. Now maybe you want to put your type on an angle or you can obviously this is a bounding box which allows you to do the R. Now you can rotate that text. But maybe you want to add a little bit of it and make it a little bit more oblique. You can do this use this little tool that I failed to mention earlier. You can do this for other shapes too if you go down to your shear tool. It's this little like double window thing and you go down and shear. Then when I click off to the side and I drag, it will start moving that text and if I hold shift, it'll work it within that same plane and you can make it or if I click it down and shift sometimes is nice because then we can do things like just add it on an angle. The shear tool, pretty handy. Don't get too crazy with the type note. If it gets like, I don't want you to hurt the text too much, but there's ways of doing that tastefully and altering your own text. Now if you really like to alter your own text, your own fonts, you're not going to be able to alter these ones because you can't alter these forms because they're text. You can change that by going to type again and then you have another option which is called Create Outlines. You do that and makes them into shapes. Right now I want to mess with one individual one, if I hit "Command Shift G", that will ungroup them. right now if I hit "Command G", they're all grouped. If I highlight all those again, command G, they're all grouped letters, then Command Shift G, they're ungrouped. Now I can mess up with one individual letter. Maybe I like this G, that maybe I want this to be a little bit longer. That crossbar on that G, I want it to be longer so I'll drag it out or I want it to go into itself. There you go and you're crazy. But you can go ahead and now these are shapes that you can do whatever you want. You can bring out here. Convert anchor point tool with your shift C. Click on an "Anchor", or an anchor point, then drag it around or you can go crazy with it. Those are some things that you you do with an Illustrator to really play around through type. Now, couple other options are you can type on a path or you can type within a path. I should say maybe within a path then a shape. Let's take this type. Let me make a line here. Make the path basically just like what you want your text to do. I want to give it a stroke of just mere whites. I can see it over there. I'm going to go ahead and maybe give it a little bit of a shape here. If I double tap on the R, I can just go ahead and type right on here. If you hover over it, it usually gives you the option. If you're just on our normal line, you can click on it and you can start typing. If you just hover your way into the little light wave arrow, like the little wavy line goes through your cursor. Or you can go up here and you can go type on a path. Now I'm just clicking on that path, wherever you want to start it and just start typing. Pakistan International Airlines. Perfect. Then you can just see it just build it right there on that path. It's pretty handy. Now if you want to go and put that text, you want to do a bunch of text inside of a shape, just take whatever the shape is, just take the fill and the stroke out of it and go back to your text tools, hold onto it and go into your type or your area type tool. Then just click on the edge there and then I'll let you start typing within it. If I can actually go command A and select "All". You can go and it will select all, every letter in that. You can change the size. Maybe I want to center it, you can change if you want to center your text, you are left align it to all the alignment tools are right here at the top. I want to center it, or obviously, if you go over to your paragraph. Now I shouldn't say obviously right after on the right here you see the characters. You can actually, if you want to mess with things like how that all lays out, you go to the paragraph tool and you can change all of that right here. All the lining can take off the hyphenation, which is nice sometimes because I'm not a huge fan of the hyphens. Or I can type and it'll fill it right in that area. I want to say that, that's all I'm going to go over for typography. The coolest part about Illustrator is that allows you to create them into forms, which is really easy to work with. I hope this one gives you some idea of how to work with it. If you have any other questions, obviously put them up in the question answer board and we'll just waiting to see you in that. We'll go ahead and start up in the next video, we'll probably go more into some effects and then after that we'll go into saving and exporting our files in that preparing it for print. Thanks and I'll talk to you later. 9. 9. Exporting and Final Words: You've finally made it through all the material here in the course. Congratulations, I guess, first, and hopefully you are able to complete your poster to the best of your ability. Again, I know a lot of you chose some more difficult ads to replicate, so no worries about that. As long as you're able to experiment and to use those tools that we went over, that's a win. Here, you can see that I have a completely finished for the ad that I had chosen, and now I want to just leave you with just little few thoughts here on, when you're saving your file and getting it ready for print or just exporting into a different format for if you wanted to take it to web or for a PDF or whatnot. Let me move forward. As you remember, when we set up our ad boards, we added the bleed there and it has that red line there to match your artwork up to. If I was going to print this, maybe I'd like an edge on mine either way, but I would take this art and if I expanded it all the way up to here, let's just say since this isn't the exact size of my ad, I'll just shrink it down for the purpose of this tutorial. So I pull it down. Now if this was the actual size of my artwork and it ran all the way to the edges there, in order to prepare it for printing, and if you want this to bleed off of the sides, you would have left a little bit of extra on all of these sides to go all the way up to that red line. So I would have this extend at least to that red line, and then it sets up your bleed. That way, this black line right here, your ad board, is what you're going to have in the end that you're going to want to cut off. You're going cut like trim off all this excess over here, but just to make it easier on you, and so that the printer can do it, you want to have that bleed set. That would mean that you would make this bigger. I'm stretching it now, but you would create your artwork to match that ideally beforehand. Then that way when you print it, you can go ahead and then shave off those edges. Cool. Then let's go ahead. One more thing before we get ready to print, let's say you had this image in this file. If I'm going to save this, even if I was just going to save this just as an Illustrator file and I wanted to send it to a friend or someone else in my company and they were going to make edits to this or they're going to take it and just have the workable Illustrator file to use for their own purposes, you would need to make sure that this image is either linked or it's embedded into your art work or in your file. The difference between linking, you'll see right up here. If you go up to your window, you can go down to links and click on that and it'll open it up. Over here and you'll see your image, and then the other image that you bring in there. Those are only the images that if you go "File", "Place" and you bring those in. If you just drag an image in here, it doesn't recognize it like that. So you need to just place them in. Then if you go over here, you'll be able to see the details about it. If you have multiple links on and you're not sure which one's which, you can click and it'll bring you right to it on your work. Then you can relink it if for some reason you moved that file. If I pull this screen ad a little bit, you'll see it right over here on the right-hand side, actually right there. It's on my desktop. I just placed it here from my desktop and that's where it's linked. Let me just show you. If I was to take this and I was to throw it away, for example, and I go back into Illustrator, you'll see that there's a problem there with that link. So if I was to save this as an AI file, you wouldn't have this image in there. It would say there's a link missing. If I go here, double-click on it, it says there's no location. It doesn't know where it's at because you moved it from where you initially had placed it. A lot of times you can relink it now from the garbage can. Let me undo that. But that would be a tip of how you do it. Then if you can go up there and you want to relink it, you have that option right here. Then you can choose where you had relocated that file and then it would keep it right in here. Now the other option like I was saying, you could do is embed the image. That's right here. What that does is it takes all the image information and places it within the AI file so you don't have to worry about moving. You could throw away this file right over here, the original file, and you wouldn't have to worry about losing it in your work. The pros and cons to this is, when you embed an image, what it does is it embeds all the data with it too. It's adding more space and making your files larger. Sometimes it can make it lag when you're working in it, so that's the downside. The positive would obviously be that you don't have to worry about linking it. Then linking it doesn't save the information in it. So if you gave someone the AI file, you'd have to also make sure that you gave them the images that you had linked to in your work. But your files are extremely smaller so that helps with workflow. So take a choice. Sometimes if you only have one image, sometimes it's nice to just embed it and get it out of your hair. Okay. Enough about those. I'll show you now just a few options of exporting your artwork or printing your artwork. You obviously can save. I'll just "Save As" here to just show you what you'll see. Now if I just want to save it to the desktop, you can say where you want to place it just like anything else. Excuse me. Then you go to your format, and you can change it as an EPS, which is recognized by a few other programs, but if someone's looking, it still reads vector. Your Illustrator, and you have a few others here. I won't go into detail about each and every one of them. You can look them up on your own time. The ones you will use are Illustrator, you save that, or you could do a PDF, is what I use often. If you push "Save", you'll see another window pop up. It'll give you the presets to choose from. Again, there's quite a few in here. The ones that I would just talk to are the smallest file size right here. That one is just if I'm going to send a preview to somebody, I guess that could be used for web things. It doesn't need a very high resolution, but it'll basically save your file at a super small file size. It maybe a little bit pixelated or whatever, depending on what the artwork is. With a vector image like this simple, it wouldn't take out too much quality. You just couldn't enlarge it very much. It's nice to send over for demos to a client. They each need to see it. Then you have your high-quality print that's for printing high-quality and press quality. Could both be used for printing larger and physical prints there. When you save the PDF as well, you have a few options over here. You can preserve some of the editing capabilities if you open it into Adobe Pro and in the Adobe Acrobat. You can go ahead and actually mess with some of those in layers, which is nice, as a PDF. Then just if you could view PDF after saving. Obviously you'll get to see it before record after it's done. Then the only other one I had to show you is marks and bleeds. You have a bleed on this. I would just say use the document bleed settings. You don't have to set your own again because you already have it set up because we did that before hand and we're prepared. Then you have your marks. You may want to just add in those trim marks. I usually do it just that way. If you're looking over here, it would show these little tick marks and I guess I'll show you right now. Let's just go say PDF and see what it does. Let's hope I did this right. Okay. Perfect. Maybe let me just scale this down a bit. There you go. You'll be able to see right up here the trim marks. This will give you where you can go ahead and cut it, and it gives you that little bit of extra room for error just in case you don't edit exactly and you're not getting any little white and hanging over in your artwork. That's the beauty of adding the bleed. There you go. That would be something ready for print. There's a couple of other options. You can export this as a different type of file, maybe a PNG for web type things, or JPEGs, even a Photoshop file. You can save them and we'll save these Illustrator layers and you can open that up in Photoshop and work with it, which is handy. Those are the options with exporting. I guess the final one, if you're going to print, you have all these options here, but I'm trying to think of the ones that you don't need the most. Page setup. This is your little preview. You have a page setup here. I'll go ahead and continue. You can go ahead and alter these for the you film in whichever printer. You have your sizes, your orientation, the scale if you wanted to add. I would keep it at 100 percent if that's what you have already set to in your file setup for. How many copies? Don't check, "Ignore Artboards" because you want it to only print what was in that artboard. You have your marks and bleeds, same type of thing. You can add the trim mark so it prints those out as well. You can keep the document bleed settings checked because you already set up your bleed settings. Again, I don't want to go into too much detail into those. I think that once you get to that point, you'll be able to figure it out and be able to play around with those different settings. If you have any trouble with those types of things, you can let me know and put that in the question and answer section. All right. I think I touched on everything. I can't think of any more things. Maybe the last thing would be, when you're setting up or when you're getting ready to export in your files, make sure you're having the right color mode so you can go down here to "File", "Document Color", and CMYK is for print, RGB is for web. That will make a difference although the colors will shift. Sometimes dramatically, sometimes only a little bit. But make sure you have that for what you're wanting to do. All right. Well, thanks for being a part of the class and I hope these videos helped you. I understand I didn't go over every single tool here in Illustrator, but this class was designed specifically to just teach you the tools that I felt were most necessary and will teach you how to use the program quickly and efficiently and to pick up on those main tools. Because once you learn those then you can start experimenting with other things and looking those things up. If you really are stuck on something that you want to do, again, ask your peers. You have that option on the class feed and then Q&A for me more directly. I wish you the best luck. Don't worry again, about your artwork if it doesn't look beautiful. The idea is just to make sure that you learn the tools. Last thing I want to say is, if you are taking these ads and if you're mimicking these ads, make sure you don't credit them as your work and put them on your website as such. Make sure that you give the artist the credit and state that you are simply replicating it as a practice. All right. Well, thanks so much. 10. 10. Bitmap Textures: All you Illustrator fans, this one is for you. I carefully chose this tutorial keeping all of the Illustrator fans in mind because I'm definitely in that camp. I like to keep as much as I can in Illustrator just because I like to work with vectors. But the problem is, when I try to bring in my scanned textures, the file sizes are too large and they make my whole working experience there in Illustrator a lot slower. My file sizes are huge, and it's really hard to go in and custom change the color of those textures that I bring in. This is for you guys, and it's going to show you how to take that file size and shrink it dramatically by converting these into bitmapped images and then saving them as TIFFs. Here's a scanned in image and let's go ahead and make sure, yes, it is a layer. Go to your image mode, let's gray scale this. We'll deal with colors in Illustrator. Then we want to go ahead back to image. Once it's gray scale, I'm going on a threshold. Adjustments, Threshold. This takes out all the grays, so you're just black and white and go ahead and play with this until you feel like your texture is at the point where you want it to be. That's fine, and you can clean up the edges with the pencil tool here. Make sure it's just on white and you can clean up any of those edges, those little straggling little dots. They're all around the side. I can clean that up, whatever, I have this here. Let's go ahead now that we have this. Go to your Image, your mode and let's turn this bitmap. Flatten the layers, yes. I usually put it 300 pixels per square inch but you can go ahead and change that depending on the size of your artwork. Click "Okay". Now we have this bitmaps but we're going to save it as a TIFF. Let's go to save as, rolled paint, that's great, desktop. I'm going to save it. It usually save as a Photoshop, just go down to TIFF and then click "Save". Now you see so what we had before was a six megabyte texture. Now let's see what our new sizes go to. Right-click get info. Now it's only 385 kilobytes, much more reasonable, much easier to work with in Illustrator. Here I want to open up and I have a vectorized image of a piano. Very Picasso [inaudible] piano at that, and these colors are obnoxious and I actually made them that way because I wanted to show you something. I didn't want to have to spend a whole new tutorial on this but if you're having trouble with unifying a color palette once you've put it into your artwork and those colors just you don't feel are jiving too much and you want it to be like a warmer palette and feel a more unified or even a cooler palette, go ahead and put a box around this whole thing. You can change it to your cooler or your more warm color. Let's just say I want to use this color right here. I use the yellowy-orange and I go to my Transparency and go down all the way to color. Now let's apply that over all of those different colors. It's equally distributing this new hue throughout all the other hues that I have in my palette. I don't know if it's a great trick to follow but it is definitely one to help me get an idea of what my color palette could be and start unifying it just a bit more. Maybe that yellow is just still not working for me, I can work with that. But now this will just help you see the possibilities and maybe that's too strong. But yeah, you can start seeing that these colors are looking a little bit more unified than they normally would be. That's a little trick that I use sometimes to unify my color palette. We'll work with these obnoxious colors, that's fine. Let's go ahead and take these. Let's go to File, Place, and now on our desktop we have the road paint.tiff, and let's go ahead and push "Okay", and here it is. This tiny little file, you actually use copy, copy and use this all throughout your image and it will definitely still be a smaller file size than what you would have been if you would have dragged in that full scanned image right out of Photoshop. What you can do is, I usually use clipping masks. If I want this shape right here to have this grungy edge on it, I can go ahead and click on it, Command C. Once I hit command C, I bring this over just so I can see the edge here, and then I'll do Command F which is paste in place, but with Command V, it would just paste it somewhere else. But I want to hit Command F so it's there right in the exact same spot and then I'll highlight all three things. You can see that there's multiples of this now. So there's one at the very bottom. You're sandwiching this texture in between. I want to capture just those three and then I'll right-click and make clipping mask. Now that texture is sandwiched in between there and if I double-click on this, I can move just the texture around by itself and I can shrink that texture, and I think at the edges that I want, I can rotate my text here to see maybe it's a little bit too much a flat edge, maybe that's a little better and I can enlarge that. Click off to the side here, and there you go. Now I can effectively add those scan and textures into Illustrator which is a great tool. Another thing now before I let you go is if you double-click on there, you can actually change the color of this texture all you want. Let me get this color here. Now it's the same color, a little bit darker in my little trick that I like to do, just so it's subtle, and there you go. You can change the color just as easy as you would any other vector shape, but you can change your texture color which is awesome and incredibly helpful. Hopefully, this tutorial was incredibly helpful and I will let you go. This is it. Thanks. 11. 11. Vector Patterns: This tutorial is all about making patterns in Illustrator. Custom patterns that you create that are completely vectorized, and we're going to make their own swatch, and therefore automatically tiled. That will save you a ton of time, rather than just creating them and copying all of your shapes over and over again. Then using those, you can actually create it as a swatch. The importance of patterns already we talked about just being able to add some extra visual interest to your image. But also, being able to use it as a tool for establishing a hierarchy in your composition. Being able to de-emphasize some of your elements on your page or emphasize them depending on how you use these textures. They're super important. I want to go over them and show you how to do this. Now I'm using Adobe Illustrator CS5. But if any of you are in CS6, I know that there's a tool that does this all for you. But the reason why I'm showing this to you still is one, because I only have CS5. But two, I want to show you how a pattern is built so that you already have that knowledge, and I think that's important in understanding how it works. First things first is you want to create a square. You always create a pattern within a square. It can be tiled. Let's go ahead and make this 300 pixels by 300 pixels. We'll go ahead, and let's just make this back. I'll also take that back on right there. Now let's move this over here so that I can see my colors I want to use. The idea is we want to, anything that overlaps that, any shape, let's say I have a shape over here, anything that's outside of this square. If anything comes on the outside, it has to be duplicated on the other side, and it has to wrap around. That's just the nature of a pattern and has to be able to be seamless. We'll go ahead and take this, wrap that around the other side if it's hanging off. It goes for any other elements in here. We'll start with actually locking this background layer because we don't need it right this second. Let's do command 2, and that just locks one element within any layer. Then command option 2 will unlock that. Let's lock, command 2, and let's start building our patterns. If you're ever afraid that or of what's been keeping you from making patterns in Illustrator is math related things, don't worry about it. Illustrator is doing math for you, and I'll show you how that works. Let's just say we're trying to build this pattern. I'm going to take this shape and this circle and just put it right hand in the corner. not not even, so we'll just put it right over here. I wanted to reflect on all these four corners, but I can't just haphazardly just bring it over because it needs to be exact. What I do is Command C, and then you hit Command F, so you've copied, and now you pasted it in place. It went right on top of that because we're going to use that, and move it over here. When you go on your x axis, which is this one, horizontal, you can actually go up here and click right after the numbers. You can add a plus sign, and then a 300. We're already working in pixels, so we already know that it will go over 300 pixels. Then you click off to the side and tada, it's already moved it over there. Easy as that. I can go ahead command C on both of these, Command C and then Command F. Now I can bring those on the y-axis right here, the vertical one. Click plus 300 because I know the size of this square, and it's going to move it perfectly over there. Awesome. Now we have the shape over here. It sound like a diamond shape in here. Diamond shapes, for some reason, you can't just go out and take a square, and then make into diamond. If anybody has a work around this, please let me know. But for now, this is what I have to do. I just take another shape, just any shape, bringing it inside up here. Then I take both of them, and I unite them. I go to my Pathfinder tools, and then unite them. Then now, I'm able to scale that into a diamond shape. Not sure why it does that, but it might be fixed again in the newer version if you guys are fortunate enough to have to have that. But this is what I have to deal with for now. Let's go ahead and use a different color. Let's say I want this right here. I want to put another one right here. I'm going to have these. Let's make a little bit smaller. I'll try to center them, but I'm going to have them offset a little bit to just to show what we can do. Actually let's just do this. I'm playing around too much. Let me just cut the chase here. Now you can do any other shapes that you want to put on here. Just your normal square. Now I have put it over here. Again, it has to be on the other side so command C, command F. Go to the x-axis plus 300. Well, let's go over there. Well, this is good enough for the demonstration. Let me just erase these things. I want to unlock command option 2, unlock this square. Keep it where it's at, but take away the color. You don't need to color. You want to save this pattern as something transparent. Unless you want that color there, fine. I don't because it usually looks like a little edge there. So just take that all out, and then go to your swatches panel, highlight everything. Take everything, just drag it straight into the swatches, and then you can delete all this. Very cool. Because now, I can go ahead and take this. I'll make a circle and click on this. Not that color, there. Now I have a pattern. Now I have a repeating seamless pattern that I've just created as a swatch, and I can click on just like I would any other color to fill any shape that I create. It will save you a ton of time, and it's scalable. You may wonder how because when I go like this, I can change it. But maybe I want to keep the shape the same since I don't want to have to change my whole move, my whole shape to make the inside pattern grow or shrink. Maybe I want it small, but I want the patterns, I want the shape big when I want the pattern inside small. We can actually change that by going into your Object, Transform, Scale. Now it automatically changes. Its clicked on your objects, so you don't want the object to scale. You just want the pattern to scale. Click off of that, and yeah, so I had this already set at 50. But if it is at a 100, you could see what we have normally. But you can shrink that, and this is a 10. That actually looks a lot cooler when it's a lot smaller. But yeah. So that's the way to change the scale of the actual pattern within your shape, so you don't have to move your shapes around. Then you can just click ''Okay''. It doesn't actually change it for the pattern itself in the swatches because when you click on it, it will go back to that normal size. The scaling just happens individually for your different needs. Another cool thing is I don't have to stick with these colors. If I want to change those colors, you can actually click on that swatch that you had over here. Click it, drag it, pull it out here, and there you go. Now you have your original artwork. Click off of there, you can ungroup everything. Command Shift G because it's all grouped, and then you can click on these individual elements. I want to change all four these to not read, but I want to make them a yellow color. I actually click on one of them, Select, Same, Fill Color, and I want them to be yellow. Then when I'm done with that, take it, color it all, drag it over here, and now I have a yellow version. I can erase this, erase this. Let's make a triangle, but I'm going to use it with the yellow version. I have the different versions there. You you change color, you can change the scale, and it's now a swatch, just super easy way to make patterns in Illustrator. Let me show you one more thing while I'm in here because I think this would be super important for you to know as well. Maybe I want to take this pattern, but I want to apply it evenly, distribute it evenly amongst the bunch of different shapes. Let's say I have this shape here. I'm going to go ahead and change this back to yellow. Then let's say I have like a, this is our polygon over here, and then a circle over here. None of these are connected in any way. But I want it to lay even, and I don't want to have to individually do all of these. Maybe the best way to show you this is with a different type of pattern, maybe with a line. I want all of the lines to line up completely. If I was to draw a line right here, I want it to continue right through here. If I did this line pattern here, and then I applied it separately to this shape, you would have lines over here and not have them match up. But I want them all to match up. To show you what I mean, you actually have a lot more options that are preset within Illustrator. If I go into my swatches, I can go wherever here in the top corner, click on that, and I can open up a Swatch Library. Now there are some better ones. You can go down to your Patterns, and go to your Basic Graphics. You have Dots, Lines, and Textures. Just if you didn't know that, that gives you your halftime look at the dots, and then you have the lines. I'm going to use the lines for this, and show you exactly what I mean. I want to use this. There you go. I want those lines to be there. But if I did these lines, and I offset this, and I click that. If I move this shape, I can move this, and now you can see this line wouldn't continue into this circle. I want them to line up perfectly, but I don't want to move my whole shape. In order for these to line up, what I can do is take these. I will highlight all of these. I'll go to Object, and I'll convert them into a Compound Path. That means they're not going to be united in the shapes, but anything I applied to it will happen across all three. For example, I Make. So now this compound path, if I click on it and I click this texture, now these are perfectly lined up with my pattern and my shapes. If I wanted to individually even just move this, you'll notice that the texture will always line up perfectly with those shapes no matter where I drag them. That's a cool little thing if you want that texture lineup specifically with lines to look like you applied that texture over the entire piece of art, not just individual elements. Hopefully that makes sense. I'm anxious to see all of the wonderful patterns you create. Hopefully they were more beautiful than the ones that I created today for this example, but I hope that helps. Thanks.