Pen Tool Perfection in Adobe Illustrator: Expert Tips for Beginners

1. Welcome: Hey, design trends, it's likely you've found this class because you're really struggling with using the Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator. I understand drawing with vectors can be a little bit frustrating and it can be technically challenging. I mean, it took me a few years to get down drawing with vectors and using the Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator. It is annoying. It is frustrating, especially if you don't even know how it works. Most people think it draws like a pin and you start to use it that way and it's like lips. What's happening here? But that's not the case. There's a specific way to use the Pen tool when drawing in Adobe Illustrator. And I'm going to show you the best practices. Animus show you some tips and tricks that I've picked up over my 35 years and Design. If you don't know me by now, I'm Chico, I'm a Surface Pattern Designer and design educator. You can find other courses of myelin Skillshare. And here's a little peek at some of my work. You can check out more of my work on my website at City of chico.com. You can follow me on Instagram at Studio duct Chico. In addition to teaching on Skillshare, I also teach on my own design platform and have a membership where I teach Creative entreprenuers how to level up there design skills. But for today, we're gonna get into the using the Pen tool. And it's one of the most powerful tools that you can have in your tool belt if you're working in Adobe Illustrator. I want to make sure that everybody who's in Illustrator or designer really understands the best way and most efficient way to use the Pen tool. So get ready because after this course, you're gonna be using the Pen tool like a pro 2. Project: Have, you know, by now, the Pen tool can be very challenging to learn. And so in order to take some of that burden off of you, I'm gonna make this project easy. I'm going to provide you some demo sketches. And you're gonna be able to trace and work from those demo sketches. And you're gonna be able to produce a Poster, or a greeting card, or an invitation, or a logo design. You see the skills that I'm teaching you through these demos can be applied to anything. I might teach you how to draw the number two is the shape, but you can take those skills and draw any shape you want. That can be the foundation for you learning how to start letters, to design a font, or to design a logo. You can also use these techniques as foundations to build and create bigger illustrations in Adobe Illustrator, I'm going to teach you a technique on how to design a script. Really easy by Tracy in a script with a path. But we'll take it to another level. And you'll be able to change and rearrange these things to make your own Poster. Now you don't have to use any of the sketches that I am providing. You can make your own words up and sketches of your own so you can deliver your own message about ice cream. Maybe it's a greeting card about summer love. Maybe it's a Poster advertising than new ice cream flavor. So there's all different ways that you can interpret this project to make it your own. But don't forget this projects just to guide you through so you can really focus on the technical skills that you need to achieve in order to become an expert using the Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator. After you've done this course and then this demo lesson, I guarantee you're going to be able to have the skills to take them and use them on any of your own projects. Immediately. You're gonna be able to really make your projects shine and make them look the best that they can look when you're drawing with vectors 5. Vectors 2: So let's take a closer look at how pads are drawn in Adobe Illustrator. When you draw with vectors, you can draw with a line, a simple path. The line could be straight or it can be curved. You can also draw with closed shapes. Whenever you want to fill a shape with a color, the shape needs to be closed. So you can see here I have a square at all the points on all the n's connect and I have a circle. This circle we're going to have to use the direct selection tool to see the anchor points that are used to draw this circle. But we have for anchor, this circle is only drawn with four-point. If I click on any of these shapes, you can see that there are the anchor point. And then whenever we have curves, we have handles. Handles describe about one-third of a curve. Also see that all the agar points are strategically placed at the apex is of the curd, whether it on the top or the bottom or the outermost point. So these are two important factors when you're drawing with the Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator is to remember the rule of Thirds and keeping your points at the apex. I'll go over some of these techniques in the next lesson to show you how I use these tips to draw, I'll see you want to remember when manipulating your vectors in Adobe Illustrator, the difference between the selection tool and the direct selection tool. The selection tool will that you select a path or a shape, and it will let you move that path or shape around. It will let you rotate it. It will let you control the object as a whole. The direct selection tool, on the other hand, will let you select an element directly as a part of a vectors. So you can select the handle and control the handle. You can select an anchor point and control the anchor point. You can select directly on in line segment and drag the line segment. You can also click and drag and select more than one anchor point. Let me zoom in so you can see that when anchor point is selected, it's filled in blue. And when it's not selected, it's hollow and white. And don't forget that all of these elements, the colors and everything that you're seeing here, that's the visual part of Adobe Illustrator rendering and effect. When we go to View Outline mode command Y, we're just going to see the outline vectors of our Shapes. Command Y once again will take us back to the preview mode and it will be able to see the preview of what are vectors look like? 6. Rule of Thirds: A really good rule to remember when drawing in Adobe Illustrator with the Pen tool is the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds applies whenever you're drawing a curve. So let's take a look at this circle, for example. You can see the circle only uses for points to plot the entire circle. Let's take a look at one segment of this circle, this curve, this one segment between these two anchor points. If we look at this, we can see that this one curve is described by this handle and this handle that extend from the anchor points. Each of these handles describe about one-third of this curve from here to here is about a third. And from here to here is about a third. And then the middle third is left to description by what's happening with these two edge handles. So let me trim on this layer to show you a little better. You can see that if I divide this up in a pie shape, that this is about one-third, this is about one-third, and this is about one-third. And you can see that's where our handles extended to. If I start drawing outside of this shape and pulling beyond the third, I start to get more of a square shape. And I start to get a not so beautiful curve. So that's a really good starting point for getting your curves. Now, like I said, it's not a rule, but it's a really good place to start. You can see even on this curve here, that from this point to this handle here is about one-third of this curve between these two points. And from this point to this handle is about one-third of the curve. Let's turn on this guidance, see here. So you can see that's about one-third of the curve. Another good rule to remember when Drawing is that these points are all plotted at the apex is. And also you notice that the handles are all horizontal or vertical. This also keeps, Here's curves looking really beautiful and smooth when you start to learn to draw it this way. So keep these in mind and in the next lessons, we'll get into drawing with your points. On the apex is 7. Precision Drawing Vector Shapes: Okay, let's jump into Adobe Illustrator and I'm going to show you how we can draw with the Pen tool using a few of the techniques that we have learned so far. So let's go to File New. And a window is going to pop up. And you can go to Print and you can select letter for now. And I'm going to change my color profile to RGB. It's macro for color profile. And I'm going to change this to 72 DPI for now and go create. Okay, So over here you can see we have our layers. If you don't see your layers, you can go up to window and go and add your layers. You can see here we have one artboard, so we're going to start working with one artboard first. And I went to go to File, Place, overhears the key command, Shift Command P, and find your demo assets and import demo too. So you can see here I have a little icon of my image, and I have this little arrow up in the corner and that's where the corner of my image is going to play. So I'm just going to click it here on the page. And we've got it about right here in the center, which is great. And you can see this is gonna be my sketch layer. I'm going to double-click that. I'm going to call the sketch. And I'm going to add a new layer. Before I lock this layer, I'm gonna double-click it and I'm gonna go dim images to 50%. This is going to act like a piece of tracing paper in a way. So I could see a dimmer version of my image and I'm able to draw on top of it on the other layer. So I'm going to lock this layer now. Firstly, I'm going to create a layer called plotting points. So when I'm drawing, as I'm drawing, I'm actually going through looking ahead at each curve that's coming ahead and then figuring out where I'm gonna put my points. So to illustrate that for you, let me just show you really quick where I would plot points. Remember I said we want to put our points apex of each curve. So I'm going to start at the corner. And I'm going to plot one point here, probably, probably here, probably here. Here at this corner. Down here, we might put one in the center of this curve here. I'm going to put one at this corner for sure, for sure at the top of the apex, I'm following my way. I'm going to use the yellow. Draw this number to go around here. Let's would be the next apex out, the furthest must out. Go down here. Now maybe on the way down to this point, I might need anchor point in here. And when I have anchor points, at most like a 30 to 45 degree angle like this or like this. Those handles aren't going to be vertical. They're gonna be usually following the shape of the curve like that direction. Okay? So we continue going down. We put it anchor point here. You might need to anchor point in the middle of this curve because it's a funky curve. One up here, one at this corner, this corner, this corner, this corner following up this curve here, around this curve at the apex here, and this corner. And then we're going back across the joint and close it here. So you can see that there's very minimal points. We're going to need to actually put on this number to plot our number two with vectors. You want to use minimal points whenever you're drawing with vectors as possible to describe your shapes. So let's go over here to our pin tool and start drawing. Now remember when you're drawing, you're always drawing in the same direction. And whenever you have a corner or in straight line, all you have to do is click and click. So what I mean by that is if I'm drawing a straight line, is I'm gonna click, click, click, click, click, click. Now. Now you can see that I can just keep making corners anywhere that I want and make any kind of shape that I want. So here's just a funky little man, really quick. But if I want to keep these straight lines always at 90 degree angles or 45-degree angles. I'm going to hold my Shift. As I click. You can see the shift keeps everything at a 90-degree angle or a 45-degree angle. No matter where my Pen Tool is, it will either be dragged on accident. It will either be a 45 or a 90 degree angle. Whenever you want to draw a curve, the trick to that is to click, hold, hold Shift, and drag. Now you only have to hold Shift if you're trying to keep your handles vertical or horizontal. And that is actually the preferred method I use to draw shapes. Sometimes you have a handle that is off of that because of the shape that you have and it's necessary. But a good starting point is to have your handles be At the, your points be at the apex is in your handles go vertical and horizontal. So always remember to drag and draw the direction. And even if you get a wonky shape like this little corner over here, you can always go back and use your direct selection tool and drag. You can drag the anchor point, you can drag the handle and you can manipulate that shape. So don't get too worried about getting it perfect the first time. Somebody just drag over and select all of those and delete them. And let's go in and start drawing our number two. So I'm going to select my Pen Tool. And let me zoom in just a little bit more. Actually, let me go here and I'm going to make a new layer called drawing layer. In them the lock my pin, plotting points. Now in drawing layer I'm gonna make black. For our stroke. I have my Pen Tool selected and I'm going to start on this quarter. Actually, I'm going to start here because I want this to go straight across. So it's best if I start here and go this direction and I know that this line will be straight across. If I hold Shift, I'm going to start here. I'm going to hold Shift. I'm gonna go up to about where this is. I'm going to click hold Shift. I'm holding down and didn't let go with my Pen tool and dragging. Now I'm gonna go this direction. Click. Now you can see that curves perfectly locked in there pretty much. I'm gonna go hold Shift so it straight across that line, perfectly horizontal. I'm going to add one click and hold and drag. Click, go up, click and hold and drag till it's about meeting this curve. And then I'm going to click here and hold and drag. And I'm watching the upper handle as I'm dragging so that I can lock in that curve, keeping in mind the rule of thirds. Now I'm going to click on this one and hold and drag, draw, go in the direction that I'm drawing. I'm going to click this corner point. I'm going to click here and hold and drag the direction I'm drawing. I'm going to click up here. Now in this case I'm gonna do something different. I want a vertical handle here so that I can control the curve. So I'm holding Shift and I'm going to let go. Now, you can see I have a handle that extends above this line. If I click over here right now, it's going to make a curve that goes up and comes down toward this direction because that's the way the handle is extended. Watch see how the curve goes up and comes back this direction. I don't want that. I want to perfect corner here. So the way I can make a perfect corner is I can just click here once again and you can see that handled disappears. Now I can hold Shift and go straight across. I can hold Shift and go straight down. Hold shift and watch. I'm gonna be way off of this point just to show you what shift does. And when I click, the handle goes straight across to that point. And hold Shift. Now here I'm gonna go up to this curve. But if I do that without putting the handle here, I'm going to have to make a really long stretch. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to click here. And I'm just going to drag the direction I'm drawing it, put another anchor point in and I'm looking at the idea of the rule of thirds of where I'm going to drop this handle. I don't wanna go too far. I want to watch that bottom curve, the handle on the bottom and look at the handle on the top as it applies to this curve. You can see I left to add about one-third. And I know I'm probably gonna go have to readjust this curve. But I'm gonna just keep drawing clicking and holding Shift. Clicking and holding Shift. You can see this is too far out. That's because this handle comes up too far. I'm going to keep drawing and I'll come back to that and fix it. And then I'm going to click here and I'm going to hold Shift and drag it up. Okay, Now let's make this a little bit thicker so we can see it. There's our shape we just drew. You can see it's a stroked, but because we closed it, let me go back and show you one thing here is when you're drawing a shape, you can see that when I put my pin tool over this point, the last point, then it gets a little circle in the corner. Let me hide this layer to show you better. It gets a little circle. See, when I roll over this point, that little circle that pops up. That means I'm making a connection. I'm closing the shapes. So I'm gonna click and I'm going to hold Shift and drag up. So now I'm going to go back and look at the shapes. Here's our shape. Make it thicker so you can see or stroke. I can go and toggle this now and go to make it fill. If I want. You can see there's a fill there. And you can see here that there's some hiccups In some of the curves. So we want to go back and look at these curves and find out where those hiccups are. I'm gonna hide this plot point. And I'm just going to zoom into my to. One thing I can see here is we have a bump right where this point is. So rather than having this bump, let me change these green guides so I can show you better. When I double-click on this and go from creams, it's easier to see anything. Maybe not send it. I'm gonna go to magenta. So now you can see the magenta line is our path. And I have a point here. And I have a point here with handles, and then I have a point here. What I wanna do is drag a handle out so I can control this side of the curve. And I want to drag the handle out here so I can control this side of the curve. And then I'm probably going to delete this point. So how I'm going to start doing that is I'm gonna go over here. And I'm going to click and hold down and go to the anchor point tool. I'm just going to click here. You can see that when I drag out, it changes it from a point to occur with a handle, I'm going to hold Shift, so I keep that locked over here horizontally. Now I want this handle to move independently. So I'm going to hold option when I click and click and hold. And now I can move this handle independently. If I don't click and hold and I just hold Option and click it, it will delete that handle. So we're gonna go back and I'm going to hold Option and click and hold, and I'm going to drag my handle where I want it. I mean did the same thing over here. I'm going to click my anchor point. And I'm watching that top curve here because I already have that locked in place pretty much so I don't want to get too far away from what I've done here. Now I'm going to hold option and click and hold and drag my curves about where I want it. Now I'm going to delete this curve. So I'm gonna go over here, click and hold, go delete anchor point, and delete that curve. And now using my Direct Selection Tool, I'm able to go over here and controlled this curve from both sides. And now I don't have that bump here. That's one way you can still move that one of those bumps. Over here. You can see that there's a hiccup in here. And I just want this to feel a little smoother. I'm breaking the rule of thirds. So I'm gonna go back here, pull that a little bit further back. Maybe pull this down. And you just need a little bit of tweaking back-and-forth to get those curves looking beautiful. Up here. This looks a little bit flat, right here. You can see the curves should be a little bit smoother. And that's because this is kinda breaking the rule of thirds. I'm going to bring this in. Sometimes you need to move your anchor points a little bit. It takes a little bit of adjusting between the handles and the anchor points. As you start to work your curves out, you can see it's a little flat here now I went too far. Now I might need to bring this backup. So you're just going to work those points little by little until you get those nice smooth curves. So now we have our number two. And that's how you would start drawing a numeral or a logo using the Pen Tool? 8. Precision Drawing Vector Lines: Okay, We have our number two down and we learned how to draw a shape and close the shape. So let's learn how to draw a open-ended path and see how we could use the Pen tool to do something like a script. I'm gonna go over here and let's go to our artboards. I'm just gonna go over here on Add Art board. And we're gonna do the same thing. We're gonna go over to. Actually, let's make sure we're on our sketch layer first. I'm going to turn on that layer, unlock it. And let's go to File Place and find your demo that says scoops. We have our scoops. It's already dimed on the setting and I'm just going to lock it. And we're gonna go back to our drawing layer. You could make a separate drawing layer, so you can call this Drawing Two. Let's do that. And then I'm going to go call this scoops. Let's say we needed to create some script lettering. This is how you could do it using the Pen tool. So we're gonna go back to our Pen tool and using the techniques we learned, we're going to look at where we're plotting. Now, I have a tiny curve here. So I'm going to really zoom in because I have to manipulate these tiny little curves. So I'm going to click here on the point. This is my apex, that's right here already. I'm going to click. And I'm going to click and drag not too far because my next apex is right here. So I'm just clicking and dragging. I'm gonna go around and click and drag. Now you can see I'm probably going to need to point here to make that work. And you can also see that I'm working with a fill. So we want to go and turn that to a stroke. So let's just go here and swap that out. And let's make our struggle a little thicker so we can see it and we're drawing. I'm just gonna keep drawing and keep in mind that I probably need to put a point back here when I go back. But keeping that in mind, I now knowing need to probably put a point here. I'm just going to keep that at the angle of the curve. I'm going to go back to my apex here. I'm gonna put a point here at the angle of my curve. Go back to my apex here I'm always looking at the rule of Thirds as I'm drawing. I'm going to actually pull this out. So I have a handle here at the end to work with. Alright, so that is first pass at the Drawing Tool. Now we're gonna go back here with our Direct Selection Tool and we're gonna go make some adjustments. So immediately now I need to pull this up to probably need to pull this down a little bit further into here and just make that curve. And I don't have to be totally true to my sketch. It's just a sketch, but it gets us in place to understanding where we're going to be plotting our points and making those curves. You can see that was pulled out too far. And I immediately, when I pull it in and start to look at that rule of Thirds, that immediately comes really nice. Alright, so now we know that we have, this is flat up here. And we're gonna go back to our Pen Tool and we're going to go at anchor plate. Just plop it right there at already put some handles, go to our Direct Selection Tool and just pull that guy up. For my own liking. I'd probably like to pull this out a little bit further and pull this in. And going back to the rule of Thirds, maker, are curves really smooth in there? All right, so that's the first pass. Now we're gonna go and we're going to trace all of these letters. The great thing about making the sketches, you can make mistakes like after I did this and it felt really fluid. This see feels like it's too compressed. It's kind of stretched horizontally compared to the round shapes I have here. So I want to go back and use one of these other Cs. So I'm going to skip drawing this one when I do my drawing and I'm going to start with one of these. Probably. This one feels pretty good. So I'm gonna go over here and let's start drawing with my see. Go back to my Pen tool. Click here. Now this one might be a tricky path because it comes up so vertically. So I am going to add one here just so I can pull a little bit away from that point. Click and drag. I think I'm going to put one on this point. This apex, you can see where it starts to get flat. That's where your apex is. Where this starts to get flat right here. That's from apex is I'm going to click here. I'm going to drag out Okay, then I can start to go back here and manipulate my curves and really get them looking beautiful. Now, for example, I put this one here and it might actually be causing me a little bit of a 60k. It might look better if I get rid of it and just work between these two paths. So I'm gonna go over here and go delete anchor point. Just going to drag this out. You can see that start to working out a little bit smoother there. So you're just going to go through and do a pass and complete these letter forms. Starting with the OH. Now I'm going to draw all these letter forms separately so that I can connect them. And that will give me a little bit more control over the logo as a designer. So don't be afraid to move your anchor points to adjust your handles, to do whatever you need to do to get those Shapes looking really nice. There we go. So that looks really beautiful. Swooping. This little curve might need a little bit of work here. I think this point is a little bit. There we go. And I probably just going to copy this AUX command, select it all command C, command V to paste. And it will just pop it right in here. That saves us some work. And then all I have to do is adjust this point with the Direct Selection Tool where it meets the P. And this will make it look a little bit more natural, but it feels the same, but then it's connected to a different points. So the sweep moves a little differently, which is nice to have when you're doing handwriting. I'm going to connect this 0 to this P at this point. So I'm just going to click on that point that exist with my Pen tool. I'm not going to hold Shift because I want it to feel more like handwriting, so it's okay if it's a little loose. And what I'm going to do down here is this one little bit tricky. I'm gonna put a point right here. And I'm gonna kinda break my rule, make this happen. And I'm going to put a point about here, following my line up, and then I'm gonna go back to my apex rule. Sometimes when you get those tricky things, you have to break the rule. But you can see I'm not worried about getting it perfect as I'm going around. I'm just getting it out. I'm going to go back to my Direct Selection Tool, work with that rule of Thirds and pull everything into really nice shape here. Now, when I zoom out, I can see where this one's giving me some trouble here. Right? Now I have this point that's probably don't want, so I'm gonna go over here to my caps. And let's look at the corner. There we go. We'll just put that corner on it. And let's do our last S here. Click here, click and drag, click and drag, click and drag. I'm going a couple a little bit further down. In, in-between these two points. I can drag, drag, drag, go out probably about this far. Out to the end here. Okay? Go back with direct selection tool to work out those curves a little bit more. If you want more control, you can always zoom in. And that gives you more control of your placemat. Can see here I have a little bit of a kink and that's because this is coming down so far. Down. Pull that curve out so it doesn't have a kink. Still see there's a cube here, which means this probably just needs to come out a little bit further. Maybe This actually needs to move a little bit morally. There we go. A little bit better. It's coming out too far here. This needs to come up. Pull this out. Like I say, it's a little bit of nuancing back-and-forth, but you get it down. Now another thing you can do is let's take our C and put it up here. And I can scale this now. It feels like it's a little too small, so I can scale it up. I can go and make this connect. So let's go back to our Pen tool or just going to connect it here and keep going up and make that scoop. Bring this down. Now you can see I accidentally put a corner in there, so I need to go back to my anchor point tool and click and drag and make that a beautiful curve again. There we go. Now we have our words scoops. Let's hide our sketch. And then another thing we can do is let's get these rounded tips. So you go to the cap, you see that made it really nice and smooth. But a FUN thing that I love. Love this curve right here, this out a little bit. That's better. Fun thing that I love is the width tool when you're working with strokes like this. So if you want to make a logo or some script that has a little bit more depth to it. You can go over here to the width tool Shift W. And you can click at any point on this stroke. And you can make it wider. See how it's getting wider from tip to tip there. So you can go and give your typography a little bit of volume. Now, I want to make this a little skinnier here on the cross stroke. And I want to make it a little skinny on this cross stroke. And I want to make it wider on this side. So we give it a little bit of curvy this to make this wider. This Part a little bit Wagner, but let's make this cross stroke up here a little bit thinner. So you can see, can do some really cool things by manipulating the text with the width tool and get more dimension to your typography. This feels a little flat here. Oops. So that's one way that you can create more dimension your typography. Using the path tool. You just keep playing with it until you get it right. Once you make some adjustments to get your typography figured out, you can highlight your script and go to, well, let's take a look at this up-close first so we can see what's happening. If I click Command Y back to outline mode, you can see that I'm just using one line, one path to describe these letter forms. But when I click Command Y again, for preview mode, I have some beef to them. There's some weight on these. So I want to keep that intact as a shape rather than a path. Let me zoom in so you can watch what happens. See my path there in the center. I'm gonna go to Object, Expand Appearance. You can see that that path moved to the outside of the shape. Now if I click Command Y, you can see that I actually have shapes instead of a path. So these are all now closed shapes. Now, I have released the option to go back and manipulate that path once I expand my appearance. So let me go back to the parents version again. Undo it. I have my, my line shape here. When I do this sort of stuff, I always want to be able to come back and work on my shape if there was an error or the client wanted to change. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to make a copy of it. Let's make a new artboard first. Let's go to Artboards and just go plus, you have a new artboard here. Let me go back here, make sure everything's selected. Command C for copy. Go over here, command V for paste. And I'm going to set it here in the center. Now I'm gonna go up to Object, Expand Appearance. And now I have a copy that's outlined shape. These are individual shapes. Let's look at Command Y again. These are individual shapes. I want them to all be one solid shape, so I don't want them to be manipulated anymore. So I'm gonna go over to my Pathfinder tool. And I'm going to go unite and watch what happens, especially here where there's overlap. You're gonna see that these all merged together and become one shape, unite. And there we go. Now I have one shape that I can color and Command Y to see my preview mode. I'm going to color it with a fill now instead of a stroke. So now you can bring your, I'm going to hold Option to make a copy. You can bring your text over. So now we could make a logo or we can make a Poster. So let's make a new document, and we'll take these elements over to the new document and start a new lesson. 9. Vector Drawing Illustration: Okay, Before we start and make a Poster and a new document, Let's actually make it Illustration to go along with our Poster. So go to Artboards and you're going to create a new artboard. And you're gonna go file place. And you're going to find your to scoop ice cream. Good place. And now you can click. Now you can see this is a huge Illustration. When it gets placed in here, what you can do is you can click this upper corner and hold Shift to constrain the proportions when you scale it. And you can drag it up into the image, onto the artboard. Other thing you can do is let's delete it and import it again. Place, ice cream place. And now instead of clicking, I'm going to click and drag. And that will actually occupied the place that I want it to on my artboard. Now what we're gonna do is trace this illustration. So let's go back to our layers. And we want to put this on the sketch layer. So we have it in here already. So I'm just going to copy it and delete it because now it's on my clipboard. I'm to turn on my sketches so I can see them and then unlock my sketches. I'm going to lock the layer that it was on. Go to Sketch and go Command V to paste. Actually I'm going to do command F. Command F also pastes, but it paste directly in front. So now you can see I have everything faded out because I have a 50% the amine on my place images. I'm going to lock my sketch layer again, just like we did with our others. And let's make a new layer called ice cream. Let's make a new layer called ice cream. Double-click in there and you can change the name. I'm going to zoom in. I'm clicking my spacebar and command and just dragging across the area that I want to zoom into. And let's start with the cherry. So I'm going to go over to my Pen Tool. I'm going to start in the corner because it's the easiest place, which is going to be this little pit here in the corner. And click once. And I'm gonna go around this direction using my rule of Thirds. And I'm clicking and dragging a little bit lower. Going down to this apex, clicking and dragging. And then closing it, you can see the circle at the corner. I'm going to color this red. And we can go in here. You some quick to just smooth out these corners and get these curves nice and smooth. So let's say that's our first script lesson thing I taught you in the script lesson. So to make the stem, we're gonna do the same thing I taught you in the script lesson. And we're just going to start with one line. Really easy. Okay? Switch it from fill the stroke. Now we can see our stroke here. And I'm just going to use the Width Tool. And I'm just gonna go to this end and make it lighter. See what happens. We put around cap on. There we go. That looks a little better. And now I'm going to expand the appearance of that. Now I have a shape. Now I have my charity shape, and I have my cherry. Okay? So now we have a lot of curves to go on here. If you expand this later, you can turn off the cherry if you want. Or you can just imagine where this curve is at the top, which I'm gonna do. I'm going to start there at the top and I'm going to click. And I'm going to go around and just keep up clicking and dragging changes out so I can see just the stroke. Don't care about the color too much right now. Now when I click on here, because it's handled comes out so far, I know it's going to do something wonky. See how did that? I don't care. I'm gonna keep going to click here again. So I have a corner, click and drag, go down to this bottom apex, click and drag a little bit. Because I'm gonna go readjust this click into the corner. Click again, so it stays a corner. Click and drag, go into the corner. I'm imagining where it is. Click again, so it stays a corner. Click and drag. Go up the corner. Click again, click and drag. Click again. Click and drag. Click, click. Now here I'm going to probably put on the side, at the bottom, the bond at the side. I'm gonna make this round so it feels a little bit more fluid like it's dripping Now here I'm going to put one on the inner part of this curve that comes in and then the outer part of the curve where it comes out. The bottom of the curve, outer part of the curve, the inner part of the curve. And then here I'm just going to put an extra one. Click for a point. And the apex click and drag. Find the apex click and drag. Click, click. Find the apex click and drag. And I'm almost done. Click and drag. Tips. It does that sometime. There we go. So now we have our main shape. I can flip flop it out and we can go to change the color to whatever flavor we want it to be. Let's make it orange server, somewhere in there. And this still feels funny to me. So I'm going to take my direct selection tool and just pull that angle of pull this out a little further. Pull this one up a little further, and this one N. Such as doing some little nuance into my forms here. You can see here, I might want this to pull in more, to have more of this drip fill. So I could go over here and go add anchor point. And as I put it in there, gives me handles, kinda can just drag this and zoom in for more control over the shape. And still working with that rule of Thirds there. So it's a little bit of back-and-forth. So we can actually copy this scoop of we wanted to cheat and make it easy. But we're gonna go around and do this exercise one more time with this next group. So go over to our Pen Tool. And I'm going to go and imagine where this is starting. And let's see right here, I'm going to draw out over to the side click and drag, click, click, click and drag, click and drag. Click, click. Actually undo that and go back in here and look a little bit closer. Let's make that so it's wavy. So I'm going to click and drag, click and drag. And all of these. I'm going to have to go back in and readjust. And I know that now I haven't filled so I can't see. So I'm gonna go flop this. We go back to the stroke. Click, click, click, click, click and drag, click click. You can see working with these apex is really will get you drawing smooth curves really fast and really easy in Adobe Illustrator. Up here to the top and drag out. Just come back and fix this. I can fix this. Six this guy. Okay, let's flop out the fill. Let's make this kind of a pinkish color. Maybe. I'm going to go Shift command, left bracket, and that sends it to the back. So now we can see objects on top than that. I'm going to click the cherry and go Shift Command right bracket, and that brings it to the front. You can, can also control that over here, if you expand your layers, you can see each individual vector shape has its own layer. So you can draw, drag them in order if I want to put this cherry stem on top, I can do that. So there's different ways to order your layers. And this is where you can manage that manually. So next thing we're gonna do is draw this ice cream cone. Now this is a little challenging because we have a lot of waves. So it's going to take a lot of clicking and dragging. So I'm going to start here on this wave and click and drag. And you basically just have to click and drag. And it's now holding Shift on this one because we're at an angle and it can feel a little bit organic because it's a handmade cone. But you can see kinda just keep clicking and dragging. I have a fill, I should change that to a stroke so I can watch that a little bit easier. The perfect. I'm just going to work my way around the bottom of this cone. Kinda struck the same process. Now when I'm dragging with the hand tool and holding the spacebar, and it lets me drag down the Illustration so that I can see my whole scene. We've got a little too close with that. So I'm gonna go back here. And then up. Now I need to close the shape and I don't really want to care what it looks like behind the scoop. So I'm just gonna go up here. I'm just going to draw it. So I have enough cone, click and drag. And we're going to flop it to a fill. We're going to find a nice cone color, maybe a little warmer, something like that. And I'm gonna go Shift Command left bracket, send it to the back. Right. Now we're starting to build our ice cream cone. So now we're gonna get it some texture and we're just going to put a few cross hatches on here for some hash marks to make it look more like a waffle cone. First thing I'm going to do is just draw from point-to-point. And I'm going to flop it from Phil to stroke. And I'm gonna get a deeper color here. So I'm just gonna go, Let's get a deeper brown. Something like that. There we go. And you can click P and it will release it so that you can start a new path. If I can see, if I keep clicking up here, if I want to make one more diagonal, watch, it keeps it connected. Command Z to undo. If I click P, it will start the Pen tool again. Okay? So I'm just going to go and click P to release it. I'm going to just make some Z P. Now, I'm gonna make these go behind there in the end. But the reason why I'm putting them up here is because it's gonna give me some depth. When this, these images start to overlap these textures. And if you do Command zero, it will take you to a full view of your image. So now we have an ice cream cone and we're going to want to, you can see now each of these strokes has its own layer. So a way to avoid that and clean up this file would be, I'm going to drag over everything. So everything is selected. You can see that the things that are selected have the pink boundary. I'm going to hold Shift and I'm going to unselect the scoop. And I'm gonna hold shift and unselect the cone now. And now all that's selected are these hash, hashes, these textures. So now what I'm gonna do is command G to group those. Now they're all grouped together. And if I expand this, you can see here's a group that says hashtags. Hashes. They're all on one layer. Now, I can grab that group and drag them right above the cone layer. And you can see now they're behind the scoop 10. Create a Poster Design: Okay, So we've made a few elements, we've made our typographic numeral, we've made some script, and we designed a little ice cream cone Illustration. Let's take these and start to compose them. Let's say you wanted to make a menu or advertisement, a Poster. Let's go into File and go New. We're going to do the same size of print. So we're gonna go to print, we're going to do letter. And I'm gonna go to RGB color. And I'm just going to work in 72 DPI. Go create. Okay, So let's go over to our original document. And I'm going to copy. I'm going to use my selection arrow and I'm going to click and drag over everything. Command C to copy. I'm going to move over to this document now and Command V to paste. So I have all my elements here. So I think when I'm gonna do just to have a little bit more control over my design and layout and working with my elements is going to make some layers. So I'm gonna make a layer first, and let's double-click in there and call that background. I'm going to drag that to the bottom. And let's just go and put a square in there. Let's switch it from stroke to fill. Let's come back though to make it cleaner. Like a puppy blue, something like that. Okay. And that's gonna be our background. So now let's go to our selection tool and we're going to select number two and hold Shift and select on scoops. And if you click and drag on that, you can see these are both selected now. So I'm going to copy Command C and delete them. And I'm gonna go new layer. And I'm gonna go Command V to paste. And they're pasting it on my new layer here. And I'm going to call that two scoops. Okay? So those live here and let's just hold shift to shrink them, scale them down and put them up in the corner for now. Then let's take our Illustration and that's on its own layer already because we've deleted everything and we're going to call this ice cream. Okay, so let's go and give this color that we think will. Let's make scoops from wait. Let's get this to kind of like a nice orange like that. Just kinda overlay it just like change the angle a little bit. Now, I'm going to lock this background layer so it doesn't move. And I'm going to drag over everything and move my ice cream over here. And let's try to make these colors a little bit more appealing. Flavors. Now I need to pay attention to the contrast of the cone, as well as the background color. Let's make this kind of more of a background color is not working for us. Making a light blue. Unlock it. And let's make it more like this lady blue like this, that's better. That's better. And then this needs to be a brighter red. So we're going to slick both of those in command G to group them. Make them brighter red. Let's make this more of a blue, pink. See. Now we've made a Poster pretty quickly. It could be a menu, it could be an advertisement, a flyer. But you can see how quickly you can draw with the Pen Tool and create Graphic Elements and graphic illustrations and bring them together to do something really cool with them. And because this is Adobe Illustrator, remember everything is infinitely scalable. So I can click this and I can scale it way up and I'll never lose quality. So you can see how this could be the beginning of something really cool. You could go in and you can add some. Let's get the rounded rectangle tool. Make some little sprinkles. Start one will keep them. Eyedropper tool, and we'll keep them in our color palette that we have here. The option just clicking color white. And then once I have a few copied, turn them around, they can breach. I'm keeping my charity shape to the front. See I have it on the layer above. I'm going to copy all of these command C. And that'll walk two scoops, ever put them on ice cream layer where they belong command F to their in place. Now I can move this to the front Shift Command, right bracket. And that's the sprinkles on top. We've got some beautiful color going on. There. You have it. You have a cute little Poster to use for advertising for your business. You can print it out. You can use it on Instagram. You can use it as a menu. There's all sorts of things you can do with it. Once you're done, you're going to go to File, Export, Export As Use Artboards. Select JPEG. You're gonna give it a title, ice cream Poster. And you're going to export it. When you export it, you want to export it at whatever resolution you desire. I'm gonna do 72. And I'm going to make sure our optimize is selected and go. Okay. Now let's take a look at our file that we just export it. And here's a look at the file that's Export. And then we have open here in Photoshop. You can now put this in your images and upload it to your Instagram or whatever you want to do. 11. Wrapping up & Thanks!: Hey, you, I told you that you'd be proud of by now. I know it's probably a little tricky and you're still getting used to it. But keep using this tool and you are going to be drawing like a breeze. Now you have completed this little Poster Design and I would love you to upload your interpretation. If you take the ice cream and make it different flavors, you make it 30 scoops tall. You put some sprinkles on it, some fudge on it, more whatever you want. I would love to see your interpretation of this ice cream cone and how you incorporate typography or other graphic elements into it to make it your own. Don't forget, you can make this to be a greeting card, a Poster, a motif to use in a Surface Pattern Design. There's all sorts of different things that you can do with this simple graphic. But don't forget, it's not really about this project. It's really about going through this exercise and learning those technical skills that you're gonna be able to provide. And they're going to level up your design skills into the future. I can't wait for you to upload your projects and see what you came up with. I hope I made the experience of using this technically challenging tool a little bit more FUN, and I hope you feel a lot more confident. You can see more of my work at Studio dash chico.com. You can follow me on Instagram at studio dot Chico. And you can learn more about my membership at multicolored minds.com. If you want to learn more from me, makes sure to check out my other Skillshare classes. For example, this class is a perfect stepping stone into getting into designing a modern monogram in my other Skillshare class. So I hope to see you there. Thanks again everybody and let your creativity shine bright.