Pen Tool Plus: Master Adobe Illustrators Most Versatile Drawing Tool

1. Class Promo: Have you ever wondered how illustrators get those super crisp, smooth lines? Are you a traditional illustrator looking to take your art to the digital world? Well, you're in luck, this class we're going to take your traditional art and turn it digital by using the power host tool in Adobe Illustrator the Pen Tool. Hey guys, my name is Tyler Parson, I'm a freelance graphic designer and illustrator based in Edmonton, Canada. I've worked on many different projects like editorial illustrations and illustrated logo designs. Although I started out as a traditional illustrator and at first I was reluctant to try digital, after I took the plunge, I fell in love with digital art work. In today's class, we will learn the fundamental building blocks of vector illustration by learning how to use and ultimately mastering the Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator. Throughout this class, we will dive into the basic operations of the Pen Tool to create smooth shapes and lines, as well as speed of your workflow by exploring a variety of methods on how to use this robust tool. As we go through the class, we will tackle tailored practices to help you control this tool in various situations and understand how this tool can help you easily customize basic shapes to create a more original design. By learning the Pen Tool, you'll be able to create logos, icons, graphics, illustrations, and so much more. Many Pen Tool classes may give you a good foundation into the Pen Tool. However, I believe just knowing the Pen Tool itself is not enough. Over the years, Adobe has continued to improve and introduce new tools that compliment and improve your workflow while using the Pen Tool. In this class, you'll not only learn the Pen Tool, but a variety of complementary tools that will allow you to truly understand how to create clean vector artwork. The best thing about working with vector tools is your artwork is infinitely scalable so you know, you're getting the cleanest lines possible. This class is for anyone who is interested in creating awesome vector illustrations with a smooth appearance and perfect for those just starting out in vector illustration. By the end of this class, you'll have the ability to easily vectorize any subject, create clean vector topography, and create clean custom geometric forms. If you learn the Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator, the possibilities are truly limitless. I can't wait to see you in class. 2. Welcome To Class!: As you saw in the intro, the Pen tool is central robust tool that has endless possibilities. Because of this, this class will be broken down into sections. In each section you'll get practice assignments to implement what you learn. In doing so, by the end of this class, you will have a group of simple vector illustrations. For your class projects, you can simply submit the illustrations as individual pieces, or you can gather them together and make a fun collage of all your work. Here's how the class will be broken down. In the first section, we'll go through the basics of the Pen tool itself and understand exactly how it works and what it can do. During this section, we will learn additional tools that will complement our use of the Pen tool to increase your vector illustration capabilities. We will learn how to add, subtract, and convert anchor points. We will understand how to manipulate the paths with the selection tools. In addition to the Pen tool functions, we will explore more tools that will help us operate on our paths to get the best results. In the next section, we will go through a variety of methods on how to use the Pen tool in Adobe Illustrator. A tool is only as good as the operator using it. By learning key Pen tool methods, you will increase your overall understanding of the tool, as well as gain insight on when to use certain techniques. The methods we will explore will be the free-form method, the straight to curve method, the curvature tool, and the peak method. There are many ways to use this tool, and after learning these methods, you'll have an advantage above other vector illustrators. At the end of this class, you'll be well-equipped with how the Pen tool works and what techniques work best in specific situations so you can pick the technique that works best for you to create your vector illustration. If you were just starting out in Adobe Illustrator, I highly recommend taking my course, vector illustration for beginners. In that course, I cover everything you need to know about navigating Adobe Illustrator and some of the basic tools of the program that I may use in this class, but not go into much detail. Every file that I'll be using will be available in the project's panel. There'll be the Pen tool basics illustrator file, the Pen tool method worksheets, and additional resources like a keyboard shortcut cheat sheet. We will be using these worksheets to go through the class, so go download those, and I'll see you in the first lesson. 3. Pen Tool Basics: Intro to Illustrator: Hey guys, welcome to the first-class of the Pen Tool class course on Skillshare. In the first few classes will cover the Pen Tool Basics. We'll understand how we can use the Pen Tool, how we can adjust the Pen Tool, and how we can use other tools in order to complement our Pen Tool features. Let's jump into the first practice sheet. In the first practice sheet here we can see the Pen Tool Basics practice sheet. Now I want everybody's just start off on the same page. What we want to do is we want to just look at the screen a little bit and navigate and look at our workspace. I want you to go up to the top right corner, go to the Workspace menu, and I want you to go to Essentials Classic. If you're not seeing what I'm seeing, I'm going to reset essentials and you should probably get something like this, just so we're on the same page. We're all looking at the same thing. You can toggle in and out the options on the top right corner of the columns here and down a few steps, you can see the layers panel. It's two stacked icons. You can open up the layers panel. Now, all our worksheets are grouped up into this system. Now, I've created graphics on top and on bottom, as well as a practice layer. I'm going to make sure that you are selected on the practice layer. If you're selected on the graphics layer, you won't be able to create the path with the Pen Tool. It'll have some error saying, you can't do this, this layer is locked, so make sure you're on the practice sheet and we can close that now. Navigating the menu a little bit over on the left-hand side you can see the toolbar. The toolbar has many different tools that we'll be using in the class. If you hover over the tool, you can see what the tool is and also you'll see a keyboard shortcut. I'll do my best to tell you the keyboard shortcut when we're going through the class. However, if you don't know the keyboard shortcut, you could always hover over it and you can look at the keyboard shortcut there. Now some of the tools on the toolbar, they actually have little triangles at the bottom right-hand side that shows us that this is actually a tool block. Now, you can open up the block of tools by just clicking and holding on that tool. It'll open up a bunch of other tools. You can also click here and you can pop that toolbar out and have additional tools that all permanently active or accessible on your menu and I can close it there. There's many tools that we'll be using throughout this class. If you can't find anything, you might have to look at the drop-down menu and find them there. For the most part, we're going to be using the Pen Tools as well as the selection tools and some of the other complimentary tools, like the smooth tool, join tool later on in the class. Let's jump into the Pen Tool Basics practice sheet. We can see the title here and we have a little diagram that I've created. This diagram just shows you exactly what the Pen Tool is doing. The Pen Tool is creating a path in Adobe Illustrator, this path can have certain characteristics. If it has no characteristics, it'll be simply a path that is basically invisible. In order to make your path visible, you have to give it a stroke. You can give your half a stroke by going up to the top bar here and you can see that the stroke, and you can increase the stroke weight and you can give it a color here. You can drop down menus here and you could give it a color and you can also add fill. A fill will fill in a color in-between all your points. Now, when we're using the Pen Tool, we're simply creating a path plotting something called anchor point. These orange blocks here they are anchor points. These are the points in-between your paths. When you have two points, it creates a single path. Then if you want to make a curve, we can actually drag out these Bezier handles. These Bezier handles push your path in specific directions and it allows you to create nice curves using the Pen Tool. Let us understand exactly how we can use the Pen Tool in our first practice worksheet. 4. Pen Tool Basics: Now your worksheet might look similar to mine. It has some paths already there. We can just simply select everything by using our selection tool and we can delete. Now the pen tool is over on your toolbar keyboard shortcut is P on your keyboard, or we can select it in the toolbar here. Now to create straight lines, it's very simple. You just take your pen tool, you click where you want your first point and you can see that there's a blue line. This is the ghost or the future line which you are going to create by plotting a second point. Now we can plot a second point and you can see that it created a path. If we select it, we can see that it has a stroke color of black and a 12 point stroke. I can use my pen tool and I can click back onto that second anchor point that I created and this will allow me to continue my path. Now I can click, click and click, and I've created a straight line. How do we create curves then? Curves, remember, they have those Bezier handles that I showed you in the diagram. Now, all you got to do to create a curved line is you click and hold. Click and hold, where you plot in your anchor point. Don't let go and drag out the Bezier handles. This will actually force your path to create a curve. It has a specific amplitude of how forceful your curve will be. You can extend it so it's super heavy or just a light curve. I'm going to do that here and I'm going to release and now you can see that the blue path it actually has a curve with it because it's forcing it to go in this direction and then it follows my cursor. Now I can plot a second point. I could drag out my handles and I can plot it there. Now you can see we created a nice curve. Now what if you wanted to change the second side of your amplitude? Let's just make a second path above it. I'm going to click and drag, make it similar and I'm going to click on the top point here and I'm going to drag out the Bezier handles. Now if I hold Control or Command on a Mac, now what's going to happen? It's going to allow me to control the amplitude of only the second Bezier handle. One's going to have a slight amplitude and one's going to have a really heavy amplitude like this and we'll see exactly what happens. Now if I plot my point, now you can see it's forcing the path to go all the way there. Then it comes back to where I plot my last point. I'm going to plot it right here. Now, you can see that we can really modify the curves that we're creating using the pen tool. Now what if you wanted to change the direction of the curve? Actually, that's very simple as well. Let us see on our example here, I'm going to plot my first point, pull out my Bezier handles, and I'm going to click my second point. I'm going to drag it so my back Bezier handle lines up with the circle and then I'm going to hit Alt or Option on a Mac and now you can see that the Bezier handle is broken. It actually allows me to individually adjust this single Bezier handle. Remember controller command, it breaks the amplitude but not the direction, but Alter option, it'll break both the amplitude and the direction. Now I can move this handle down to the opposite side and now you can see that I created a simple wave. If we go into our Layers panel, we can just turn off the title graphics and you can see exactly what we're creating here. Nice, clean, smooth curves. Now when we are creating paths in Adobe Illustrator using the pen tool, a lot of the times we want to create closed paths for our illustrations. A closed path is simply when two end anchor points line up with one another. Click on our first point, and then we'll drag it on the handle, and then we'll click second one, drag out our second set of handles and now if we hover over our initial point, actually you can see our cursor changes slightly. There's a little zero or a little O that is right beside the pen tool. This shows us that we're now creating a closed path. This closed path will essentially create a shape. If I were to give it a fill, you can see that the fill will be contained within all the paths. I'm going to jump over to the side and you can see here we can actually click on either the stroke, give it a stroke color and it has a stroke color of black. Or I can do the fill. If I double-click, I can open up the Color option and I can give it a color. Let's just give it a read and now you can see here, since it's a closed path, we can see that there's a stroke all the way around our illustration. However, if we go to our first illustration and give that with a fill color, you can see that at the bottom, it doesn't have a stroke attached to it because it's an open path. Actually, there's no stroke that's going to fill because the path doesn't exist in between these two points. That's our closed path and our open path. Now if we want to have more control over our pen tool, we can use the modifier of the Shift key. The Shift key allows us to constrain the proportions or constrain the direction of our paths to go either vertically, horizontally or 45 degrees. If we click P on our keyboard, we can plot our first point at the bottom. Now I'm going to plot my second point here. Now you can see the handles want to go wherever they want. But if I hold Shift, it will actually force the handles to go in a vertical direction, 45 degrees or a horizontal direction. I'm going to go vertical and I'm going to release. I'm going to do the same here. I'm going to hold Shift so it is completely horizontal. Line it up again with my last, my point over here on the side, vertically down. Click on the point and I'm going to go 45 degrees. Now when I'm holding it, I'm not holding a Bezier handle right now, but I'm going to force the straight line to go at a 45-degree angle. It goes from the previous anchor point, holding Shift, it will force the next line to be somewhere in the 45-degree path. I'm going to plot it here, and I'm going to 45 degrees. It won't be perfect because it wasn't lined up, but I'll close the path anyways and there you go. Now we can see how we can create a closed path, open path, constrain the proportions, how we can actually modify the amplitude of our second handle. How we can break the second handle and create a sharp point rather than a smooth curve. Actually, there's many things that we can use the pen tool for. Let's jump into the pen tool practice sheet right below the worksheet and let's see how we can implement this in a practical example. 5. Pen Tool Basics: Practice: What I want you to do is I'm going to try and trace some of these objects with the pen tool using your newfound knowledge of how to use the pen tool. As an example, I'm just going to clear the fill here by clicking the stroke here or the one with the slash; that means no fill. With the house, I can do a vertical point by holding Shift, and then I'm just going to plot the top point of the roof and close it there. I'll just draw a simple box for the house. Not perfect, but it's good enough. Now I want you to do the same. You can draw the car, you can draw the wave. The wave is pretty cool. Just like we did at the top, we can use our pen tool. We can drag out our handle. We can break the handle using the Alt or Option key, and plot the points and make a simple wave. There we go. The heart is also pretty cool. Click "P". Drag it or point pretty wide and then drag it or point really wide. Hold Alt or Option. I'm going to mirror what I'm doing here. Then I'm holding Alt or Option now, and it allows me to only control the one handle, and there we go. We created a cool heart. Go into the practice worksheet and try out some of the other practices, and then jump over to the next class where we'll learn how to use the selection tools to modify and adjust our existing paths. 6. Selection Tools: Okay. In this class, we'll understand how to make adjustments on our existing paths using the selection tools in Adobe Illustrator. Let's jump right in. You can find this selection tools over in the top right corner. They are the first two tools you'll see in the toolbar. If you hover over them, you can see that the selection tool is V on your keyboard and then Direct Selection Tool is A on your keyboard. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you simply how it works. The general selection tool or the black selection tool allows you to select the object over all. It'll select all the points and it'll adjust them all together. I'll show you how to do that. I have a simple, what is that? An orange slice, I guess here. I have the V selection tool activated. Now you can see that I can drag it around just by clicking on it, right? I can scale it, right? If I want to scale it proportionally, I just hold Shift. That's a modifier to hold things and constrain the proportions or the directions, right? Also if I hover over the edge by one of these widgets, you can see that a curved handle opens up with two arrows that shows that I can actually rotate the object. If I ever need to control the entire path that I've created, what I want to use is the general selection tool. Now the direct selection tool is a little bit different and this is what you'll be using a lot to make adjustments to your paths that you create with the pen tool. If you click A on your keyboard or you find the direct selection tool at the top right corner, it's the white selection tool. Now what I can do is when I click on my object, you can see that there's no bounding box anymore, but the anchor points are actually activated. Here we can see that there's three anchor points on our object. If we select one, you can see that it shows us the Bezier handles that are along the path that, that anchorpoint is connected to. What we can do is we can either grab the anchor point itself and move it or we can grab the Bezier handles and we can move it. With the direct selection tool, you can grab the Bezier handle on one side and you can adjust the amplitude of the one side. Now it looks like Jell-O, something like that. Yeah, very good. I can make a really cool and interesting curves using this tool. If I need to make some weird mountain or anything like that, so basically that's it. If I need to scale something, use the general selection tool. If I need to rotate it or just move it. But if I click A, I can adjust the handles themselves. I can move the anchor points to where I want them to go. When you are working with your Pen tool, sometimes you may not place your anchorpoint in the exact spot that you want to. Actually one of the cool features in Adobe Illustrator is the fact that you can control where your anchorpoint goes after you're pulling out your Bezier handles. Let us see how we can do that. I have these things selected. I'm going to delete them. I'm just going to click on my first point here, and I'm going to click and drag out. Now, when I'm dragging out, it's going to allow me to drag out my Bezier handles, but it can't move where the Anchorpoint is. However, if I hold the Spacebar while dragging in my handles, put them to where I want them to go, and I drag it out. Now I can move my Anchorpoint to where I want it to go, maybe up to the first one or the middle one or the top one. Now if I release Space, it'll allow me to adjust my Bezier handles again and I'll pull them up to there and back to there. If I drag it up this way. I actually wanted to move it to the bottom. I can hold space and move it to the bottom Handle, and I can make my [inaudible] at there. That might be something very useful when you're creating with the Pen tool is the fact that even though you're creating with the Bezier handles, you can adjust the position of the anchor point while you're adjusting your Bezier handles know that that's an option for you when you're using your Pen tool. Now another thing that I want to show you is simply how you can change the fill and the stroke. The path that you're created has a fill and a stroke. You can see over here. You can see that it has a fill and a stroke attached to it and it's on the left hand side in your toolbar. The fill is the top one right now, and the stroke is the bottom one. Now, what you can do to switch the fill and the stroke, you can simply go up to this arrow. There's two arrows and you can swap the fill and the stroke. You can see that happening there. But if I wanted to use a keyboard shortcut, I use keyboard shortcut Shift X. Now in our layers panel, what you'll see, is that the fill is on top and the stroke is on the bottom. If I wanted to pick a color, it's picking the color of my fill and now my stroke. But what if I want to pick a color for my stroke? I need to move that to the top in my toolbar. How do I do that? In my toolbar, I can click on the one that I want to do or with a keyboard shortcut X, it'll just swap the position of your fills and strokes on your toolbar so that you can simply click and drag. Let's show the options there. Now I can change the color of my stroke. Now I can change the color of my fill, hit X, change the color of my stroke and hit X and change the color of my fill. There we go. Those are some options that you want to use when you're adjusting your path in Adobe Illustrator using the Pen tool, make sure that you know how to use the general selection tool and the selection tool available to you and to adjust the points after you've created the path. At the bottom, you can see that we have a selection tool practice sheet. You've got a little crab here, that clause are in a weird position. We have a little Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, a mountain range here. Now, all we want to do is we want to use a selection tools in order to position and place these objects where they need to go. To create the mask and it has Anchorpoints on there. I don't want to use the general selection tool and just move it over. I want to make an adjustment with the direct selection tool. I want to clip this Anchorpoint, I'm going to drag it down. I'm going to drag the top one down. Now I can use my general selection tool V, and I'll pull it over and now he has a cool little mask. Now the crab, he's got a couple of claws off to the side. Now I can put it into place. But I think I also want to rotate it like that. I also need to scale it down. If I hold Shift, I can constrain the proportions. I'm going to try and position him into place. Again, rotate this one, maybe like that. Close enough, like pin the tail on the donkey but pinned claws on the graph. Now the mountain range. Now you can see when I click on here, you can see that it has a lot of different Anchorpoints. All I want to do is, use the direct selection tool and I'm going to drag them up all the way up there. If I hold Shift, it will constrain it to go perfectly vertically. Right up to the top. There we go, I created a simple mountain range. Now, go ahead, try those practices and let's jump into the next class. 7. Pen tool Options: Hey guys, in this class we will go through some of the pen tool options so that you can adjust your paths in more creative ways, so let's jump right in. The Pen Tool Options worksheet here, and as you can see at the top, we have the anchor point tool, the add anchor point, or the minus anchor point tool. We're going to go through those one by one. You can find them in your toolbar off to the left-hand side. If you click and hold onto the pen tool, you will see the pen tool options come up. We're just going to click and take this whole toolbar. Now we have them accessible to us here. I'll just place them at the top. Now we know the pen tool, we already used it. You know how to use it, you're an expert of it now. Now we're going to jump in and learn some of the other tools. The first one we're going to go through is the anchor point tool. The anchor point tool is Shift C on your keyboard. Now you can see it has a little cursor there. What this does, it allows you to grab the anchor point and convert it from either a Bezier handle and convert it to a point with no Bezier handles or vice versa. You can actually click on a point and you can drag out new Bezier handles. This will allow you to create curves out of straight paths, which is really cool. Now what we can do here in the first example, I want to convert this circle to a square and this square into a circle. All I need to do is click on the anchor point. It gets rid of the Bezier handles there. Click, and now it is the square, awesome. Now what if I want to convert this square into a circle? Shift C, that'll activate the anchor point tool. Now I'll drag out some new handles. Just remember when you're dragging out, you want to drag in the correct direction. You can see that it's forcing it in the opposite direction, then the path actually wants to go. You want to make sure that you're going in the correct direction. I can hold Shift to constrain the proportions, I can drag it out a little bit like that. Drag it out a little bit like that. Drag it out a little bit like that, and drag it out a little bit like that. Now from a square I created a circle. That's really cool. Now you can see this example of the eye, what I want you to do with the eye is eye is not a diamond shaped like that, it has some curves to it. I'm going to click on the white part of the eye Shift C. At the top, I'm just going to drag out, constrain the proportions and make a curve at the top and make curve at the bottom. Same with the iris. I'm going to drag it out, make a curve at the top. There. Now it looks more like an eye. This teardrop, it's too round at the top, I want it to be sharp, so I just click. Now we made an eye that is a little crying, but it's okay. It looks pretty cool. That's the convert anchor point tool. It's really cool and really effective. You can actually plot points without any Bezier handles and then later on, add those Bezier handles really quickly and really efficiently. You can focus on where you're putting the points, rather than focusing on fiddling with the Bezier handles at that time. The next thing that we can do is actually we can add anchor points to existing paths. The add anchor point tool is up on the toolbar or it is plus on your keyboard. If we hit plus on our keyboard, you can see that the pen tool icon comes up with a little plus on the bottom right of it. Now we can find a path and we can add an anchor point onto an existing path. I'll add one at the bottom and one at the top, and now what we can use is our Direct Selection Tool. I can select both of them by dragging over both anchor points. I can take both of these anchor points and I can drag them up now. If I click on it with my general selection tool, I can move the whole thing. If I click on it and I hold Alt, you can see that double arrow comes up. It means I'm making it duplicate. I hold Shift to constrain the proportions. Now if I wanted to make a second copy, I can hit Control D., Control D duplicates that transformation. There we go. We got two duplicates and we're making it cool. Arrow road here. That's really awesome. Now, the last option that we want to show is the minus anchor point. Now, the minus anchor point is very cool in Adobe Illustrator. The minus anchor point tool is the minus button at the top section of your numbers in the keyboard. What I can do is I can actually subtract anchor points. This path has way too many anchor points than it's actually needed. The more anchor points you have, sometimes the less smooth your path will be. Actually, we want to try to have as limited anchor points as possible in order to get the smoothest line possible. Let's subtract some of these anchor points. Now what you can see here is that when I remove an anchor point, what happens is that the Bezier handles, they aren't adjusting as I really wanted them to. It doesn't look like the flame anymore. If I minus these ones, I probably don't need all these paths. I probably only need four anchor points to create this nicely. How do I subtract the anchor points without compromising the integrity of the shape itself? What you can use is you can use the modifier shift in order to tell the shape, to adjust the Bezier handles in order to retain the shape that exists currently. Let's hit minus on your keyboard, let's hover. Let's select first and hover over our anchor points. Now if I hold Shift and subtract the anchor point, now you can see the Bezier handles are actually adjusting in order to keep that smooth line. I'm going to subtract, or maybe not that one. I might need that one. Hit Control Z to undo that. I'm going to subtract this one. Maybe subtract this one and this one. We went from a lot of anchor points to only five anchor points. Now we can create our six anchor points, and now we could create this nice smooth looking flame. We can do the same with the inner flame. Now, if we go into our objects and we can toggle the visibility of the top graphical. You can see that this one definitely looks a lot smoother than the other one that we created. Now, in addition to the minus anchor point tool, we can actually delete anchor points. Sometimes you want to subtract an anchor point. When you subtract the anchor point, what that will do, it will actually keep the integrity of your path. It will actually keep the anchor points that are on opposite side of the one you minus and connect them. However, if you hit delete anchor point, it will actually remove the path connected to those anchor points as well. Sometimes that's actually pretty useful. On this cat, we have some cat ears and cat whiskers or some fur. But it doesn't look too good because we have a path in-between here, but we don't want that path there. What I can do, I created an anchor point in-between. If I hit A on my keyboard and select that specific anchor point and hit Delete, now you can see that it is deleted the path itself. Again, select that anchor point, delete and delete. Now that's looking a lot better than it did before because I didn't need those connected points. But they are separate shapes. As you can see here, there are separate shape, but when I hover over or bringing on top, it looks like it's all one shape now, since the paths are overlapping and there is no path connecting the two end points, it looks really good. Sometimes we will use that technique of overlap in order to create more three-dimensional and also utilize the open paths to create our illustrations. That's the difference between minus anchor point and deleting an anchor point and how you can potentially use those in your illustrations. If we jumped down to the pen tool options practice sheet, all you'll need to do is make the sale fit. You can find out a way to do that. You can also add anchor points to create the leaf. I'll show you how I did that one. We want to make this leaf here. Now if I select my path, you can see that I have a few different paths or anchor points. I can add anchor points by clicking the plus icon or the plus key. I can put a path of right on the edge where it starts to go in and write in the middle. Now if I zoom in here, I can use my direct selection tool and I can drag this handle inside and create leaf shape. Again, add anchor point, and add one in the middle, A and dragging. Now what that allows me to do is adding those anchor points after the fact. It allows me to retain that nice smooth shape that I've created, the outline of the leaf. Then I can add in those anchor points and make those adjustments after the facts. The external shape hasn't really changed except for it has some texture going inside the shape. That's one way you can use that. I'll allow you to try to finish the boat here. Let's jump into our next class. 8. Operating on a Path: Hey guys, in this class, we'll learn how to operate on our paths. We'll take existing paths and learn how to use key tools in order to adjust them like the scissors tool, join tool, smooth tool, knife tool, and we'll understand how to use them in our illustrations. Let's jump right into it. I have the operating on a path worksheet open here, and what we're going to do is we're going to go through one-by-one, the cut tool or the scissors tool, the join tool, knife, and smooth tool. Let's zoom in to the cut tool here. The cut tool or other words, the scissors tool. I just referred to it as the cut tool because the keyboard shortcut for this tool is C. In our toolbar here you can see scissors, what the cut tool allows you to do and make separations on an existing path. If you had a closed path, it will actually separate and create an open path, then there'll be two separate anchor points where the cut line is. How do we use the cut tool? Well, the cut tool is really useful for creating overlap in your illustration, sometimes you may want to create overlap and then cut the line after the fact, just so you have a smooth transition from one to another. How can we use this? I want to create this nice little heart here with a little bit of overlap. I created the shape here, and you can see that it's one singular path, however, it goes over the edge here. Now, what I can do is hit C on my keyboard and I can cut along the path. Now if I cut right on the intersection, I don't know which side of the path is on top. It might cut the wrong side and I don't want that, so I'm going to cut slightly before the intersection right over here, so I make sure that I'm on the correct path. I can also cut slightly behind on the other side as well. I'm going to hit V and now you can see that it's separated and make two different paths here. I'm going to take that part, and now you can see it has a little bit of overlap there and I'm just going to use my direct selection tool, move it back slightly just so it fits right underneath my existing path. Now you can see that it has a nice overlap, it gives a little three-dimensional feel to this flat illustration. The next thing that you can do is you can do it again just with a more complex shape. Here's a little cloud. If I select all my path, so you can see it's actually multiple paths here, and I'm going to hit the cut tool and I'm just going to go on the intersections and I'm going to cut, because I don't really have a preference of which side needs to go on top as long as there's a little bit of overlap. Now, all I need to go do is find which side was overlapped and I can delete them. Just like that. Now where I see a little bit of overlap, I can go back and use the direct selection tool and move them into place. There you go. I have a little bit of overlap there, it's not exactly the same, but that's okay. I am okay with that. For the scissors tool or the cut tool, use C on your keyboard. The next one is the join tool. Now the next few tools, they don't have an official keyboard shortcut, but I'm going to show you add in custom keyboard shortcuts after we explain the tools. The join tool, it will join two paths at the end points and it'll meet at the overlap of the trajectory. What I mean is these two paths are overlapping and there's a clear overlap where these two paths meet. If I use the join tool, I find the joint tool here and I just draw over top of those two paths or which paths I want to join up. You can see that it automatically joins them at that intersection. That's really easy. But what I mean by the trajectory, I mean that these two paths, if they were to continue, this one continues going up and this one would continue going up as well. If I were to join these two paths into one path, they would actually continue on their trajectory up until where they would intersect and that's the point in which they would join. That's the join tool. Again, no keyboard shortcut, but I'll show you how to add that in shortly. Knife or erase tool. The knife tool, it works only with closed path. I'll show you how that works with this nice little bread and butter here. The knife tool you can find over here near the cut tool. It's the same block as the cut tool, it's the knife tool. What that does, it allows you to cut into a closed path. If we were to try to cut this heart here, it won't work because it's an open path. But this closed path, it allows me to cut into the closed path or right through the closed path and create two different paths like that. But as you can see here, you can see that there is a path here in the middle. Now if I use my direct selection tool, I can actually pull this anchor point and separate it from the other one. That might be really useful when you're creating paths. You can cut into them and create multiple paths. I pulled the wrong path over. There we go. You can cut into the butter like that and the erase tool actually eats right into your object or your path. This will work with both closed and open paths. There is a keyboard shortcut for the erase tool is Shift E and you can see that there's a little circle icon here. I can just drag over top and it'll erase or eat into it. If I wanted to take a bite out of my bread, I can simply take a nice chunk out of my bread. Then I can slice it with the knife tool just like that and separate it. That's how we use the knife or erase tool to customize our paths a little bit. Now the last one is the smooth tool. The smooth tool is really cool, especially if you're having a hard time making a smooth path. The smooth tool allows you to smooth out the anchor points and the paths accordingly. All you have to do is you have to select your object and find the smooth tool and all you have to do is you have to drag the smooth tool over your object and sort the way that you want it to smooth. Let's drag over these paths and we're smoothing them out and making this not so happy snail, a little more happy. Now that he has a nice smooth shell. You can really refine your path, You can start with something that's more blocky in shape and you can use a smooth tool to really round out those curves and now it looks really nice. It went from an unhappy slug to a very happy slug with a nice smooth shell. Those are our operating on a path. You can use those to refine the paths that you've already created, join and connect those paths easily without having to fiddle with those anchor points, and you can cut through the paths to create two separate objects and also use the cut tool to create overlap in your illustrations. Now like I said, the join tool, knife tool and smooth tool do not have keyboard shortcuts. But I want to show you how you can add your own custom keyboard shortcuts and which ones I used for these specific tools so that you can use them yourselves. 9. Customize You Keyboard Shortcuts: You can access these tools in the toolbar. However, I want to have those tools at my fingertips. I don't want to have to always go drag, click into this, or even pull this out and have them over here. I want them to be easily accessible, just on my fingertips. How do you do that? If you go to Edit, you can go to Keyboard Shortcuts and you can open that up. Now, anything that's in the toolbar, you can add a keyboard shortcut too. Now if I click the knife tool or the join tool, let's start with the join tool. I can search the join tool, and now you can see it has a keyboard shortcut of J. That's because I added that already. But it should look like this for you. It has no keyboard shortcut, no symbol. Now, if I were to just add in a keyboard shortcut, if I've just put J, it'll actually say the keyboard shortcut J is already used by the column graph tool. If I already have a keyboard shortcut that is being used, you'd have to overwrite the previous one to add this. You could do that, but I want to keep it as it is. I'm going to find a keyboard shortcut that is not being used and that's Shift J. That's pretty easy to remember for the join tool is Shift J, shift joint. So I'm going to do that and we're going to hit "Okay", and I'm going to hit overwrite that's fine. Go to Edit and I'm going to go back to keyboard shortcuts. Now we're going to use the smooth tool. Let's minus shift U. But if I didn't have one, I can use, let's see S. S is already used. Shift S is already being used. So I can't use Shift S or S for the smooth tool. What am I going to use? I'm going to use Shift U. U is already being used, but Shift U is not being used. Why did I use Shift U? Actually Shift U it's right above the Js. It's in that same spectrum of these tools that I'm using, operating on a path. Also the U and itself, smooth U similar sounding. Also the U is a very smooth shape. That's how I remember that the smooth tool is Shift U. So I'm going to add that in, hit "Okay". Then the last one, going to go to edit keyboard, and it is the knife tool. The knife tool, I can try K for knife. It's already being used, so I don't want that. I can use Shift K, it's already being used. What I'm going to use for the knife tool? I'm going to use Shift I. I is already the eyedropper, I know that. But Shift I doesn't have any keyboard shortcut yet. Why did I use I? Again, it's right next to the U and right above the J. It's in a similar area to all the tools I'm going to be using. Knife, I has a similar sound to it and it's easy to remember. That's how I customize my keyboard in order to create my keyboard shortcuts for these operating on a path tool. I named my keyboard, the Kyles Keyboard. You can name yours, your name and your keyboard. I'm going to hit "Okay". There we go. Now, if I want to access any of these tools, Shift J, I have the join tool, and I can join these paths over here and Shift U. If I want to smooth paths, I can go in and I can use Shift U, and I can smooth these paths. Now it's all wonky. It's not what I wanted and it's smoother. If I wanted to use Shift I or the knife tool, I can find a close path and I can cut off the roof like that. That was very easy to add in those keyboard shortcuts. Now the next thing that I want you to do is I want you to jump down to operating on a path practice sheet. In the practice sheet, you'll see a few different examples of how you can use these tools, and I want you to try it out for yourself. We already made a cloud in the examples before. So I want you to do the same. Try to use the cut tool to create a good overlap. I want you to use the knife tool or erase tool to create some grooves in this specific shoe here, join tool, make this happy little star, and smooth the snail trail to make a happy little snail. I'll let you practice those and I'll see you in the next class. 10. The Freeform Method: Hey, guys. Welcome back to class. In this class, we will go over the first pen tool method in order to put down line-work for your illustrations. The first one we'll explore is the Free-form method. This method is really simple, and if you're just starting with Adobe Illustrator, honestly, this is the best way to learn the pen tool. It is because you just mess around and have fun with it, so let us jump in and explore the Free-form method. We've got the title page, and we have our little worksheet here, long worksheet here. Remember P is for pen tool, and you click and drag to create a curve, and really the Free-form method is just the method that I'm going to go over, and I call it the Free-form method because there's no real structure to it. You can really do whatever you want. I like using this path when I'm making really organic shapes or I want to put down line-work relatively quickly. I know how the pen tool works. I know that I click and drag to create a curve, and click a point to create a straight line, and that's what we're going to do. Then after you create your paths, you can always operate on the path using the operation on the paths tools that we looked over. You can see that there is a bunch of different fruits, and your assignment is to trace the fruits with the pen tool. By doing so, you'll have a lot of experience and understand the capabilities the pen tool has. I have a few already traced. I'm going to just delete those, and I'm going to start from scratch for you guys. Looking at the orange here, all I'm going to do is I'm going to plot my first point, maybe I'll start at the bottom. I'm going to make sure that I have a stroke, and maybe a stroke width of five. I'm going to create the orange here for you guys, and all I need to do is drag out my points, we'll shift to constrain the proportions, and then I'm just going to start plotting my points. I'm not thinking about where they are, I'm just thinking about the curves like that. I created that orange pretty quickly, and I can always go in here and I can refine some of the points, maybe add some anchor points here along the path, and then I can use my direct selection tool, and make some of those bumps that we had, like that, a little more bumpy there. Then, I can also create this little ridge here with the pen tool, start over here, one point, and then theirs that, and then just a point, curve, point, curve, point, curve, point, like that, and then I can create this little thing here. There's a curve at the top point, point, curve, point, and then one more time, I'll just create like that, a couple of lines there. I created the orange, now what I could do is I can go over to my side panel here, stroke panel. I can go Show More Options, and you can see exactly what you can do with a stroke. You can round the end caps, so as an example here, you see this stroke here, I can either have a bud cap or I could change it to round cap. I'm just going to select all my strokes, I'm going to give them all a round cap and all around corners, so it's nice and smooth like that, so that's my orange. If I go over to my layers panel, I can turn off my reference there, and I have a nice outline of the orange. Let's move over to the banana. I'm going to hit P on my keyboard, and I'm going to start creating a path for my banana here. It looks good. I can drag this out and make this a curve, and there's a curve, and then I can make this a curve and zoom in here and make that a curve, and a flat, flat, curve, curve. I'm just dragging out to where I think a curve needs to be, and curve, and curve, and end. Curve out the banana. I can make this ridge here as well. I'll just plot a point there, create a nice little curve there. That's looking pretty good. Maybe I'll adjust this center one, little more curvy. Cool. I got a banana. Maybe I want to curve. If I don't want a curve to start here, I can click back on it, and it'll get rid of that second handle, and now I can start a curve on the other side, rather than breaking the handle entirely, I just remove it by clicking it once. I made the banana. Let's make the apple. I'll start from the leaf, and I'm just going to take my anchor points, and I'll just pull them back so they're underneath the leaf. Good. Then, for this one here, I'm just going to cut my path, so C cut, cut, and I'm going to get rid of this center section here. Now with that path, I'm going to pull this anchor point in and pull this anchor point in. Now, I made my nice little apple. This is the first method, this is the Free-form method, and it's really simple. Just plot your anchor points, pull all your Bezier handles, try to make those curves as nice as possible. You can think about where you might want to place those curves, and those anchor points, and be more precise. You can always go in and refine those paths. Use the smooth tool to smooth out the edges if you don't feel like it was smooth enough for you, or you can use some overlap in your illustrations and cut out the sections that you don't need. It's really up to you. It's Free-form, so you're free to do however you want with it. But for this class, your assignment is trying to outline as many of those objects as possible, the orange, banana, the leaves, the peppers, and even the wine glass. Try, and outline them with the outlines using the pen tool and the Bezier handles just to get familiar with it, and see what you can do with it. I really look forward to seeing what you guys do with the pen tool. In our next class, we'll dive into a new pen tool method that will make it super easy to make nice, clean, geometric shapes. I'll see you in the next class. 11. The Convert Anchor Point Method: Hey guys, welcome to the next class which is the curve method. The curve method will be broken up into three different categories. It'll be broken up to the convert, the corners and the curvature. So we're going to be talking about the three Cs. The theme of this method, the curve's method, is under the C. You'll see many under the C related imagery and actually have a few sketches that you will be able to outline and trace with the pen tool using these methods, and by the end of this, you'll have a lot of different assets that you can submit for your class project. Let's jump right into the first curve method, which is the convert. We're going to use the convert anchor point tool in order to create nice curves by placing their points in strategic ways. Let us jump right into it. I have here open the straight to curve method practice sheet. Essentially the straight current method means that we're going to start with straight lines. and then after we plot our points, we're going to create curves out of it. Let's see how we can do that. We have three different worksheets. We have a convert, the corners and the curvature tool. We'll start with the convert anchor point worksheet. What we're going to do is we can see that I've already plotted the anchor points, so you can either go into the Layers panel, you can create a new layer, turn off and hide the practice sheet and you can apply your own points or just follow along with me here. The convert anchor point tool allows you to create curves out of existing line work. The first way you can use it is obviously we need to activate the tool, so Shift C to activate the convert anchor point tool. You can either curve at the point itself like we did before, or we can actually grab an actual path in-between two anchor points, and we can curve that path. What it'll do, it'll actually create Bezier handles at the two anchor points that are on either side of your path, so that's really cool. Now I'm going to try to make a heart out of this shape. But as you can see, the Bezier handles aren't really working as I want them to do. In order to get a very clean line out of it, what we can do is we can hold the Shift, which is a modifier that allows your Bezier handles to actually go perpendicular to your path. If I hold Shift, you can see what happens. Now you can see the Bezier handles coming out from the anchor points are going exactly perpendicular from the path that was created, so we can make nice clean smooth path just like this. I could drag it out, and we can drag over the second point here and again, hold Shift. We can make a beautiful heart in just a matter of seconds. You can plot those points yourselves and then utilize that. We're going to make a happy little cloud here very quickly. Shift C. I'm going to grab my handles. I can either keep it like this, not too bad, or I can hold Shift and get that nice smooth looking line, and just drag out and shift. Perfect. One more thing, we're going to make a little happy little bush and drag those out. This is the straight to curve method. We're going to use the existing points from straight lines and convert them into beautiful curves. The best thing about this is that you're limiting the amount of anchor points you're actually placing in your illustration, and that's going to make the curves much more smooth and much more clean. The less anchor points you need to use, the smoother your image will be. Let's jump over to the next practice here. The next practice is to convert the peaks of the points to your curves, just like we clicked and dragged the path in-between the two anchor points, we're going to actually click the anchor point at the peak and we're going to allow that peak to become the curve itself. The Bezier handles will come from that anchor point. Let's start with the jellyfish. If I click on the jellyfish, you can see that it has anchor points placed at specific locations. At the corner points where there's an intersection and there's two anchor points down at the bottom here and one at the top here. If I hold Shift C, what I can do is I can actually grab this top anchor point and I can drag this out. Now the good thing about using the peak method rather than pulling out from the center is that I can actually over-exaggerate the curve. It actually goes out further than the anchor points, it's actually in-between that you can't do with the previous method. Now that I have that, he has a nice wide jellyfish head. I can take these handles here and I can make a nice little curve here. Now he is a happy little jellyfish. We need our happy little jellyfish. Now, let's quickly make our flower. Our flower, I plotted the points quickly. Now at the peaks, I'm going to just pull out, drag out each handle, and I'm going to make a nice little flower. There we go. Happy little flower. Let's make the head a little cactus, Shift C and just remember which way you're dragging the handles. There we go. We need a flower, a jellyfish, and a cactus super quickly using the straight to curves method. Now what I want you to do is I actually have some illustrations here. Some clouds over here, I have a clam and I have a crab. I've already made the crab, but I'm going to just erase the crab except for the eyes, I want to keep the eyes. I'm going to drag them off to the side here. I'm going to recreate this crab here. I'm going to use my pen tool, I'm going to plot the points. Wherever I see a corner point, that's a good place for me to plot the points. This one is over exaggerating, so I can actually plot a point at the peak of where it is. Now what I can do is I can hold Shift C, and now I can drag out this top point and I can drag it out to where I want it to go. Now this bottom point, I can drag in between the two points just like that. Now I can do the bottom section to plot the points. Now what I can do is Shift C is I can make that curve at the bottom. Now as you can see, this top shape, I want to actually underneath. There's a keyboard shortcut that allows me to move things forward and backward in our Layers panel, it is the Shift N square bracket. The left square bracket pushes it backwards, and the right square bracket pushes it forward, sorry, Control square bracket, go forward or backwards. There you go. I can click it and jump it forward, jump it backwards. Now this is not the color I want, so I'm going to quickly change the color. Nice red. Remember I can shift the position of my stroke and fill so I can grab a darker red like that. There we go. I can put his happy little face back on him. Control Shift square bracket, pushes it right to the top. There we go, a happy little crab. We can do the same with our claws. To make the claws, there's a peak there. What I can do actually is I can just make a simple triangle like that. Enclose the path Shift C, one and two. Look at that. In just a few motions, we made a nice clean shape. Let's do the same with this. I can put a path there and there, just like that. Shifts C, I can drag this one out and drag this one out. Now I got a nice claw and I can move this to the back. Cool. I can actually duplicate this by going to the old function, that's the reflect tool. I'm going to reflect the object onto the other side. Now I can make quick little arms, just plot a point. I can just drag and curve this point. I don't want this to have a fill, so I'm going to get rid of the fill, and I'm going to bring that to the back. Here's nice little thin arms, that's fine with me. Or reflect it to the other side and just move it into place. I'll quickly just make some legs curve and I'll give it the same fill eyedropper and put that underneath, just like that. All I'm going to do is I'm going to just duplicate his legs and reflect them on the other side. There we go. We made a nice little crab really quickly, really easily with the convert anchor point tool, and it's the straight to current method. There's two ways you can use the convert anchor point tool; is either you can either find the peak, or you can find in-between the two anchor points and pull it out. What I want you to do is you can try and create the clam and definitely try and make some cloud using this method as well. I can't wait to see what you guys create. Try it out for yourself and I look forward to seeing you in the next class where we'll go over the live corners feature in Adobe Illustrator. That makes it super easy to make clean, crisp corners with a nice round finish. All right, I'll see you in the next class. 12. The Live Corners Method: Hey guys, welcome to the next class where we'll go over the live corners feature in Adobe Illustrator. This is part of the curves methods, and it is very cool. Let's jump right in. We're going to go into our curve method practice sheet in the live corners section and we'll go over it right now. To access the corner widgets, you have to use the Direct Selection Tool A. When we click onto our object, you can see that our object has our anchor points. When you click with the Direct Selection Tool or even the general selection tool, you'll see that it has little widgets near the corner points. Now, this is only activated when you have a corner point without any Bezier handles. As an example, if I hold Shift C and I slightly give this Bezier handles. Now if I click "A", you can see that it does not have any corner widgets. It is because a curve has already been made with the Bezier handles. Now we don't want to do this for this specific method to get rid of those Bezier handles, if you accidentally place them there, all you have to do is activate your Convert Anchor Point Tool, click on that point, and then it reverts back to a regular corner. And if we hold "A" and click now you can see the widget is back. Now to use the widgets, all you have to do is you drag over the points you want to activate. You can see that if I drag over one, you will see only one corner widget or "Shift" and drag over the other corner. Now I can drag them in. As you can see, it's actually creating a nice smooth corner. What it's doing, it's actually creating Bezier handles. If I were to click on that anchor point, you can see that it automatically created me Bezier handles for us. The system is actually doing all the work of creating this smooth corner, this smooth curve for us, we can select A, select this line and this line. You can see our corner widgets are still active because we haven't done anything with the Bezier handles. Now we can pull them in, and we can make a nice smooth path. You can try that yourself. We can select an object with the general selection tool V, hit "A", and then the widgets will appear. Wherever there is a corner, the widget will activate and we can drag all of them at the same time. Just like that. Now we can make a nice smooth curve like that. Really quick, really cool. The next one we have a little bird here. Now, the bird is very geometric, very blocky. What I want to do is I want to actually occur. We can take our Direct Selection Tool. All we need to do is we can select the points we want to curve, and just curve them in. Select and curves select and curve, select this point, curve it out. Select this point. There we go. You don't have to go all the way. You can adjust wherever and curve that in and curve this point so quickly, you can plot your points to where you want them to go, and then you can quickly curve them out using the live corners feature in Adobe Illustrator. This is super cool and it is super efficient to create nice geometric a smooth corners. One of my main uses is just to give a little bit smoothness to the wall of the corners. If I have a sharp corner and I just want to make it a little smoother. All I'm going to do is I'm going to add a slight corner point, and you can actually set a specific radius for your corner point. Now what I like using this for is actually for texts and typography. Sometimes I don't want to customize my typography a little bit, make it a little softer by adding round corners. How you can do this is you can take the texts that you have. I'm just going to duplicate it down here. I want to add a corner point of a 20 point radius. The first thing that I need to do is I need to create actual shapes out of this. I'm going to go "Control Shift" and "O" to create outlines for my text. What I'm going to do is I'm going to click "A" on my keyboard and you can see that all the corners where there's no Bezier handles, they are activated and you can see the little widgets there. Now up at the top toolbar. You can see that there's a Corners option. Now what I can do is I can actually set a specific radius for the corner points. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to put 20 points, is going to hit "Okay". You can see that it automatically adjusted the corner points to exactly 20 point radius. It really smooths out that text. You can see before and after. It looks quite different actually with those round corners, and it only took a couple seconds to do. Now, what will go into as we'll actually try and utilize this by plotting our points with the pen tool and then going in with the corner widgets and adjusting it. How I'm going to do that is I'm going to actually create this whale here. I'm going to use the pen tool. I'm going to plot my points. Now when I'm plotting my points, I want to consider where the curve is, so I can see this curve here. I want to extend my line all the way up. The corner is at the same height as this line here. Then later on, I will actually round this corner in. I'm actually going to extend my path further than where I need it. Then I'm going to pull my path in with the corner widgets. I'm going to plot a path there. Again, the same principle here. I'm going to overshoot it because my corner is going to come in and around there. I'm going to line it up with that there. Then I'm going to go past there. Let's zoom in and I want to line it up with this line there. Then maybe I'll plot a point there and there and plot a point there. These corners too, even though they're not 90 degrees. Actually, they can have a round corner because there's no Bezier handles attached to them. I'm going to have there it looks good. All the way down to this bottom section, all the way down. I'm going to round this corner here, here, here, and here. We got to general whole whale shape there. It doesn't really look that great yet, but just wait, we're going to activate using the Direct Selection Tool. I'm going to drag over this corner and I'm going to pull it in, look at that. Now I'm going to increase my stroke weight just so we can see what's happening. I'm going to grab my corner widget, I'm going to curve in it, curve in it. Now even though these are not 90 degree, I can take it and I could round it. Now one thing that I didn't do there is I put it right at the peak of the corner, which is going to have to pull in. I'm going to have to actually overshoot it. I'm going to bring it out. Now this corner should line up with this curve and I should be able to pull it in nicely. There we go. Pull that corner out, pull it in. That's a nice smooth line there. I'm going to do the same with this corner, right there and this corner here and there and one more. Awesome. Now it has another shape here. I'll just create another shape with the pen tool. Overshoot it, overshoot it. I'm just going to make a simple box for now. I'll show you how to get rid of it. I'm going to use the corner widget here and round that corner there. Now to get rid of these bottom sections on what I'm going to do is I'm going to use "Shift M". This brings up something called the shape builder tool. The shape builder simply allows me to combine or remove shape from one another. Let's see how that works simply. Simply, all I have to do is I can drag over two shapes to combine them. Or if I hit "Alt", it'll change to minus and I can subtract shapes. All I'm going to do is I'm going to go under the shapes that I don't want and subtract them just like that and then I'm going to combine these two shapes into one like this. Drag over. Even though you didn't really see much these are now two different shapes. Then I have the fin here that I want to create. I'm going to plot my points. Remember, I want to go outside the curve. You can hold "Shift" to constrain the proportions. I'll put it there. Now activate the Direct Selection Tool and create that curve. That's looking really cool. Now I want to add some color so I can select the top path. I can use my eyedropper I on the keyboard. I can select the color from this whale up here. I can do the same with the bottom one. I can select that bottom half. Again, select the color from the whale up there. Again with the thin, I can select the color there. Now you can see that the fin here, it's an open path so it actually blends nicely with the top part of the whale. That's really cool. Try that out for yourself. Try to create this whale using the round corners features. Remember, you want to overshoot your corner and then pull it back in. For your practice, I want you to try and draw the anchor using the live corners feature. You can use some shapes for sure if you want using the ellipse tool and the rectangle tool in Adobe Illustrator. But for the most part, try and just use the pen tool and use the live corners feature plot out the points where you think and try to pull them in. Then also you can draw a shark using the live corners. Then also, if you want, definitely feel free to add in your own sketches. Try and put it in your own sketch. Using the live corners, try and plot some points and put them in there. I'll see you in the next class. 13. The Curvature Tool Method: Welcome back. Now we're ready for our final curve method, which is the Curvature Tool. The Curvature tool is such an intuitive and really cool tool to create clean, crisp curves with a click of a button. It's like a sister or cousin tool of the Pen tool. Just as a Pen tool, it creates a straight line by clicking two points. Actually, the Curvature tool does the opposite, by clicking and clicking you're actually going to create a curve automatically, no fiddling around with Bezier handle. Let's jump right in and see how the Curvature tool works and how we can apply it to our illustrations. Jumping in, we're in our curve method practice sheet. Down at the Curvature tool part, we can see that the curvature tool, the keyboard shortcut, is the Shift and Tilde key that'll activate the Curvature tool in the toolbar. It is right beside our Pen tool. Now, the Curvature tool is pretty cool because it automatically creates curves where we plot our points. We click, we click again, and it's going to try and make a curve depending on our third point. It's going to base the trajectory of our path between three different points, first, second, third. We always want to place our points at the peaks of where we want our curve to lie. We're going to place it at the peak and then we're going to place another one at the peak and at the peak and at the peak. You can see how easy it is to create a curve. I'm just going to get rid of my fill, and there you go. I didn't have to fiddle around with Bezier handles at all. If you don't like working with Bezier handles, maybe the Curvature tool will be your best friend. We can also make straight lines with the curvature tool. All you have to do is simply double-click. You double-click, it will create a corner point, straight line, corner point, corner point, Double-click. To create a curve, single click, Click, Click. If you want to make a corner point, Double-click, and then you can start your curve again. Corner and you can always go back and you can change one curve to a corner point. Just by going back, you can hover over your widget there and then you can change that into a corner point or change it back to a curve just by double-clicking. If you want it to be a curve, you can adjust it quickly. The curvature tool, you don't have to fiddle around the Bezier handles you can create easy corner points and awesome clean curves because the system is doing all the work for you. Now there are some limitations. You can't customize the curves as much as you can with the Pen tool and if you want more custom work, you might have to go back in and use the Pen tool. Also the curvature tool, it'll plot those points to create the curves, but that also means you don't have too much control of where you get to place your anchor points. When we jump out and select this with the V selection tool, you can see that all those points that we plotted, those are all anchor points, so it won't limit your amount of anchor points. In fact, the Curvature tool might increase the amount of anchor points you potentially use, but the system will do its best to create a curve out of those anchor points. When you go back into it and you want to make micro-adjustments, you're going to have to fiddle around with a lot of anchor points while using the curvature tool. That's just something to take note of when using the curvature tool. Let us see how we can use this in our illustrations. You want to add the point to where you want your curve to peak. That means at the top and at the bottom of your peak. If I were to outline this, I can see the corner point there, Shift and Tilde key and that's our curvature tool. Then there's a point here that's our peak and then it goes down so there's another peak down here and a peak at the top and a peak at the bottom and it will automatically force that curve to where it wants to go. You have to know how the Curvature tool works in order to get nice clean lines. But you can always go back and you can adjust and move around and you can see that it's automatically adjusting the adjacent points as well to create a nice smooth line. It's pretty intuitive. It'll force it to make nice smooth jelly lines, which is really awesome. Using this tool, we can quickly create pretty organic shapes or more geometric forms with it. Again, there are limitations, but I want you to try this out. With the Curvature tool, Shift Tilde, I want you to try and outline and practice drawing these seaweeds. You'll be surprised at how fast you can actually get these shapes down. With the Pen tool, it might take you a little bit of time to adjust the handles where you want to go, but with the curvature tool, super quick and super fast. I honestly love the Curvature tool for this. Find the peaks, this is a corner, Double-click on it, and there you go. Nice and clean, corner point. Find the peak, and corner point, find the peak and the corner point. Again, you can go back and you can adjust and move your points in order to line them up to where you want to go. Shift Tilde. Cool. Then let's do it again. Go through and try to make some seaweed and some rocks really quickly, really efficiently get used to how this tool works and you'll be surprised at how fast you can put down smooth line work with this tool. I love the curvature tool. What you can also do with the Curvature tool is you can use it in accompany with the Pen tool. Just as we did the straight-to-curve method with the Convert Anchor Point tool and with the Round Corners tool, you can also do this with the curvature tool. The curvature tool, it forces the line to meet nice and curved and it allows you to just where the anchor point goes. When you use the convert Anchor Point tool, you've already placed the anchor points to where you want them to go. The Curvature tool has its advantage that you can actually adjust the placement of the Anchor point tool without fiddling with the Bezier handles. Let's see how we can do that with this fish. With this fish, select, and let's go Shift Tilde. Now you can see that there's points on there already. It is a straight line so far. We're going to add some points and we're going to bring out the curves. Now you can see that it made a nice, clean curve from that point to that point and we can just add multiple points in order to get the curve we desire. There we go quickly and easily. We created a nice clean curve. Let's give that a nice curve there. Between these two points that it looks like a peak there, a peak there, and maybe one there just to drop it down. We can move this over and over. Look at that, nice, clean line work, super fast, and super efficient. We can add one point in there and there and there and there. One thing to note with the Curvature tool is it'll automatically select the path that it's hovering over. If you have multiple paths over top of each other, you got to really be careful with the Curvature tool because it'll select whatever path it touches. Even though I have this path selected with the curvature tool, if I hover over the path where the fin is and click on it, it'll create a point there and it'll automatically start working with that one. If you have an open path, it'll try to continue on with that path so you got to watch out for that. Then again, this is a corner point, but I want it to be a round so I can Double-click on it and it'll automatically adjust that corner point to make it a round corner point. There's one more here and as you can see, super quick, super efficient outline that fish in really no time flat. You just have to place those points at specific locations and then you can move around those curves. Essentially you just want to lay out and plan out where your corners are and then after you lay out where your corners are you can take the curvature tool, you can apply some corner or curve points and adjust them automatically on the fly and you'll get some really clean results. Play around with this and over here there's a few illustrations. Again, there are these under-the-sea illustrations, pun intended. There is the seaweed, there is the snail, and there is a seahorse. The seahorse we'll use in the following classes when we refine it, so definitely try and utilize the Curvature tool to create the seahorse and all these other ones and then for a challenge, you can try and draw the octopus. I'll see you guys in the next class. 14. The Peak Method Part 1: Hey guys. Welcome to the final pen tool method, which is the peak method. When we learned our methods, it started from the most organic which is the free-form method, and then getting a little more precise with plotting our points with the live corner features, and the convert anchor point features and then the curvature tool. Now this is a very precise method of using the pen tool, and it makes the most accurate results with really, really clean line work. It's especially important when using it for typography as well as for logo design, so let's jump right in and understand what is the peak method and why is it so important that we understand it when we use the pen tool. So jumping into the worksheet here we have the peak method. The peak method is a very simple method on how to use the pen tool and let us look at the worksheets here and starting with the circle example. Actually, when we create a circle in Adobe Illustrator, it automatically uses the peak method. Let me explain what that means. So when we create a circle in Adobe Illustrator, and we hit A, we can see where the anchor points are actually placed. You can see that they are placed precisely at the left, right, top, and bottom and the Bezier handles are perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical. And this creates a very clean shape. So we can take the idea that was created from here and apply it to our illustrations. So the circle we can see that it has the anchor points are completely horizontal and completely vertical. Now, we want to apply that to our typography and our designs in Illustrator, so let's jump over to the next example. This is called the box method. Essentially, the box method shows us that our image, especially, a circle it should contain within the box. And our busy handles also should be contained within the box. If we can our pen tool out, we can start by plotting the pen tool, looking for the peak, the most vertical point, or the most horizontal point. And that's where we will apply our anchor points and then control are Bezier Handles. I'll show you why it's very important. So if I plot my point here, and I drag out my anchor points or my Bezier handle, sorry. I can hold Shift to constrain the proportions perfectly horizontal. That's going to be very useful when adjusting our Bezier handles. So I can pull it out like that, and you can see my curve is coming up. Now it can go to the next furthest point on the side lot and hold shift to constrain the proportion. Now I can pull up my handles. Now, one thing you want to consider is that these Bezier handles should always stay within the box. They should never go outside the box. So we're going to contain them within the box here. Now we're going to go around our circle, and we're going to plot the points at the peaks. This allows us to use a very limited amount of anchor points to get a very precise result holding Shift to constrain the proportions perfectly horizontal. Plotting our point on the next line here. That's right, I've got to click and drag. Now you can see something that's going on. That bottom section, it's going to look like it's not going to align, but we can fix it after the fact. Let's just pull it up pretty strong and pull this out, holding and constraining the proportions. Now it's not perfect, but what we can use is the direct selection tool, and we can actually select our anchor point, and we can pull in that handle. Now, since it's perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical, we can use Shift to constrain the proportions. So we know that it's going to stay in alignment. If I let go of Shift and I try to do an angle, actually it's going to be hard because the line is going to move back and forth. But as soon as I hold Shift, the line is locked, and it's not going to affect the other side at all. We're just going to [inaudible] this anchor point, pull up this one a little bit, maybe pull in this one and try to align that up. And now we can get a really clean result. Let's pull this one back a bit and pull this one out a bit. And now we've got a really clean line. If we hide our reference, we can see our circle looks really good and it only has four points. Let's turn on our reference. Let's do the inside. Find the peak, pull up the Bezier handles, find the peak, pull up the Bezier handles, find the peak, pull out the Bezier handles. We can also hold Alt to bring in our one side. Remember, hold Alt or Option and hold Shift to constrain the proportions, and let's go back with our direct selection tool. To activate the direct selection tool while your pen tool is activated, you can hold and control, and then you can really fine-tune and refine your lines using this method. It's really good. Turning off our reference there, we can see that. Now what we can do is we can change the fill and the stroke, and we can use our Shift M for the shape builder tool, hold Alt to subtract and subtract the center, and now we have a nice clean O, and it has really precise line work. And it only contains four points on the inside and the outside circles. And that's blocks method. Essentially the peak method or the box method, you're placing your anchor points at the peak, horizontal, or peak vertical point on your illustration, and then you can adjust your Bezier handles really easily using this method because you can constrain the proportions by using Shift, so it's always perfectly horizontal, always vertical, and you can adjust it very precisely. 15. The Peak Method Part 2: The next thing that I want to cover is rulers and guides. Now when we have an S here, we can see that there's actually, it's not an O, so we can contain it all inside the box, so we might want to use rulers or guides to line up and find where that peak is. I set up some rulers here, but I'm going to delete that, and I'm going to show you how to create your own. Starting with this S here, I'm going to go into view, and I'm going to find rulers. We're going to show rulers, it's hidden like that, show rulers. Now what we can do is we can actually click on the ruler at the top section, and we can drag out a ruler right to the peak where we see the peak. There we go, we got ruler there. We can do the same with the horizontal, find the peak, and we can do the inside point, find the peak there, and the next inside point, find the peak there, and the next outside point. We could do the same with the inside of the S and the bottom of the S. There we go. Since we have our peaks and our corners are just going to be corner points. We're going to start at the corner, find our peak, pull out our Bezier handles. Make that curve, find the next corner point, pull out, or our next peak, pull out our Bezier handles. We're going to give the line a stroke. Give it a stroke weight. Good, so we can see what we're doing, and then here, the next line is over here. I'm going to try and drag that out. I can hold control on my keyboard when my pen tool is activated, it will activate the direct selection tool so I can go back, hold shift and adjust that second point there, and I could try to get as precise as I can. The next one is down here, there's a point here so I can pull back, remember this Bezier handle, it should not cross this line here where the box is, pull this one back slightly and right to the corner. Let's pull this one out. Always holding shift to constrain the proportions or the direction. Hold shift, drag out right at the peak somewhere there. Drag out, and this one there's no horizontal here, so we've got to go to the next vertical point, drag it out. But then we want to adjust this one to go higher and make that nice smooth S shape. But then we want to pull this one back down so it's inside this box and pull it over here, constrain the proportions. That's looking really good. When you have a line that's going from a vertical peak to a vertical peak or vice versa, or horizontal peak to a horizontal peak without transitioning through the opposite. You want to add something called a stabilizer. Stabilizer is essentially a point that you place within your illustration in order to have a little more control. How do I do that? I'm just going to hit the plus icon on my keyboard, and in-between these two points, I'm just going to add a point here. Now, illustrator will automatically set the Bezier handles to keep the curve that we created. But what we can do now is instead of fiddling around with these two points that we created, we have this additional points so that we can manipulate this a little bit more, and we can adjust the curve. Just gives you a little bit more control over your overall design, and that only four points that don't transition through the opposite peak. If you're going from vertical to vertical, you might want to add an additional point in-between as a stabilizer, and then you can adjust that point individually and you'll have a little more control. Otherwise, just focus on the peaks, horizontal, vertical, and corner points. Before we move on from the S, I want to show you you can adjust your guides a little bit. The guides, actually, since we pulled them out from the ruler, they actually span the entire width of our workspace. Maybe you might want guides, but we don't want them to cover the entire range of the workspace. What we can do is we can actually select them. But if you can't select them, you can go into guides. Go down to guides here, and you can lock guides or you can release guides. We want to unlock the guides and now we can select them and we can use our C, our cut tool, and we can actually cut our guides. Now it is like the top part, the sides, and the other side. Now we have our guides, but their own thing within this area. For the practice, for the peak method, I want you to try and recreate either the pen tool plus a logo or you can put in your own illustration and try to utilize your illustration and use the peak method on that, so you can write your name in a simple typography and try to use the peak method to create it in Illustrator. If we jump into the practice sheet here, you can see that I already went ahead and I created the pen tool logo. If you select it, you can see that the points that I used are on the perfectly horizontal or vertical, and you can use that as a reference to try and replicate it. Now there's some sections where I actually decided to use a corner point to round it off with a corner point, so I just made it a nice straight line. I made this a corner point, and I use that to round the edges of it to soften up the logo a bit. In those cases, actually, when I drew it out with my pen tool, I drew it out with a sharp edge and then later refined it with my corner point or my corner widgets. That's one thing that you can do to create the logo. If you want to change it up a bit, feel free to do so, but have fun with it. If you have your own file or your own image that you want to trace, definitely uploaded here, and you can try and use the peak method and apply that to your own illustration, and I can't wait to see what you create. In the next class, we will actually go over some refinement of your paths in order to create really illustrated results. I'll see you in the next class. 16. Refining Your Path: Hey guys, welcome to the final class where we will go over how to refine your path. We'll create a more illustrated style out of your paths, as well as how to quickly apply color to your illustrations, a base color at least. Let's jump right in and see what we can do. I got the refining your path AI file open here, and you can see that it's got the title page here and we got our worksheet. Refining our path. First, we'll understand the stroke profile and profile presets. Sometimes when we see illustrated images number 1, they look pretty good because they have a varying stroke width. A stroke width is simply the width in which you apply to a stroke. If I have two strokes here, it's 34, maybe 120, now you can see that as varying stroke width, but they're consistent from end to end. You do have your stroke panel which you can make some adjustments to your strokes. You can add a round cap or round corners. If you have corner points, it'll round them up, or you can do flat edge or something like that. We'll add round corners to the end, round caps. You can do a few little things, you can make dashed lines if you wanted to. But what I wanted to really show you is the preset widths that you can use. Either in your stroke panel, or up on the top when you have your stroke selected, you'll see the profile menu. The profile allows you to give your stroke a specific profile, it means it has a varying width through out your stroke. It can be uniform, that's the default, or we can do the profile with one. It allows you to have a taper on both ends, so that's pretty cool. Or you can go through and you could try each of them individually and they're all here, what they would look like. Sometimes you want both ends to be tapered, sometimes you want one end to be tapered, sometimes you want it to have a wavy feel to it. Depending on how you want to illustrate, you can pick any of these for your strokes. Another thing you can do that's really cool is you can easily customize your stroke profile by using something called a width tool. The width tool is a really amazing tool for customizing your strokes and in your illustrations. You can activate the width tool by going Shift W. You can find it in your panel here under the Width Tool. What you can do is you can see when I hover over the path, it gives me a little widget and a plus icon. It adds a point where I can add a width. Now if I click on that point and I drag out, I get an increase the size or the width of that stroke at that section. Now you can see I can give it there, if I grab the other end and I drag it in more, we'll get a nice tapered look. I can add it into the middle and make the middle bigger, added smaller there, and I have really strange looking stroke now. But you can do a lot with the stroke widths. It means that you can actually create a whole illustration just with strokes. Now what we're going to do for this class is we're going to take on illustration that we did. We use the curvature tool to outline this seahorse here. What I did is I applied the width tool to it and I actually created some dimension to it, it looks a little better this way. Then after, I gave it some color. Let's see how I did that. We'll start with this first one. I already illustrated this in a previous lesson, and I went through and I created this. Now I'm going to go through one by one and I'm going to use Shift W with the width tool. Now this one, I don't really need to use the width tool because I know that I want a thicker in the middle and tapered on both ends, so I have a profile that can do that. I can just increase the size of it to where I want and I can move it into place. There you go, it's that easy. Now maybe that's a little too thick, I'll do that, and right there. That already gives it a little more dimension. The overall feel of this one, the stroke width is just too small. What I can do is I can adjust all the stroke widths to a little thicker, maybe five point, that's already looking better. The inside paths, usually you want them to be a little thinner than the outer edge. That's looking good. Now what I can do is I can use the stroke width tool to adjust individual parts. Maybe this smile, I can use the taper at one end, but it's on the wrong end, so I want to go to my stroke menu. Here you can actually flip it to the other side. Now you can see I easily created that nice smile with the tapered look. The outline for his body, I'm not going to really change, it's going to stay the same, but maybe I might make this section a little different. But before that, let's clean this up a little bit. Now I can see that this is overlapping. I'm going to use C on my keyboard, and I'm going to cut the path just at the end there, and I'm going to do that. I'm just going to go ahead and clean up the line work a little bit. Now with the width tool, I can create a little more dimension on my seahorse. Shift W for the width tool, maybe I might want it thinner over here, but thick in the middle, and thinner right here. Thick, thin, thin, maybe like that. Then maybe after the middle, it'll come in a bit. Ultimately it can taper in let's taper it right in there. That added a little more dimension to that, now let's do that with the fin here. Shift W. Maybe I want it a little thinner on the inside and thicker, then thin, thick, thin, and thick again. That's a pretty cool. I will give this all colors so you don't have to worry about the in-between sections right now. Let's go through and just thin out some of this middle section. Just so it gives the points a little more contrast. That's looking really cool, and it looks a lot better than how we started. What I could do is I can just change this, hold Shift X to switch the stroke to fill. Then I can add the anchor points, a couple of anchor points on the eye here. Just as we did with the leaf, we can just pull this in here, it gives a little highlight and it looks a little better and a little cartoony eye, looks good. Maybe with this one, we'll also use the width tool, and just give this a slight little taper near the bottom. 17. Refining Your Path Part 2 : Now that we got our outline refined using the width tool and the stroke profiles, we're going to actually color it. You could color it by giving everything a fill so we could just give everything a nice little fill like that and then maybe this. But as you can see, I didn't make close path so it's going to actually be a little more difficult to create this. There's two ways that we can do that. We can either use the shape builder tool or we can use the Live Paint feature. I'm going to show you the Live Paint feature option. I'm going to undo that. I'm going to make a duplicate of it. This is going to be a destructive editing, destructive coloring so you won't have your editable line work anymore after you do this. Make sure when you're using this method, you want to make sure you duplicate your line work. If you need to go back and refine something in your line work change something, you can do that. I'm going to duplicate my line work that I created, I'm going to pull it over here. Now the process of how we color using the Live Paint feature is just under here. The first thing that we're going to do is we're going to make all our paths into shapes. Right now they have a specific width so if we tried to live paint, meaning basically fill in this image here with color, actually it really won't work that well. The first thing that I want to do is I want to give this a fill because this I want over top of everything. I'm going to fill it in with white and I'm going to move it to the top. This is the illustration that we're going to create. If I go to the option Live Paint and make, it's going to tell me that the visual attributes, the brushes, they're a little too complex. When I hit Okay, and try to paint this, actually what happens is it got rid of a lot of the width that we created, a lot of the dimension but we don't want that. We want all that dimension, we don't want all that varying line width. I'm going to undo that and I'm going to go through this process. I'm going to expand the appearance. So we go to Object, Expand Appearance. What that did is for the majority of our strokes, it actually created paths, but some are still strokes. The ones that didn't have the width applied to it remained as strokes. Then we go into object again and we hit Expand. Now it'll take all those strokes that we had and it'll be created into fills. Now this is very important. The next part, what we're going to do is we're going to merge everything together. Everything that is black is going to be merged together, everything that is white is going to be merged together. This is why we wanted to put a white fill inside this stroke. We're going to click everything. We're going to go to our Pathfinder panel. If we can't find it, go to Window, Pathfinder and we're going to hit this merge button here. Now everything that was black, it's all one shape now, everything that is white is also one shape now. What we're going to do is we're going to select everything, go to object and we go Live Paint, make. We have the Live Paint activated. We're going to go over and find our Live Paint bucket. Live Paint Bucket, we're going to select a color from our swatches and as you can see, it has three swatches there, and now we can use the arrow keys to jump in-between our swatches. So his body wants to be blue, I can switch to the darker blue for this section here and his fins and then blue for this, maybe switch the fins to orange, something like that. Make sure everything is filled in and then white for his iris or as the white part and that's it. Now that we've filled everything in, we're going to Live Paint and Expand. We're going to go into Object, Live Paint and Expand. Don't release, Expand and now it is a cleaned up colored shape, little different than that one, but that's okay. That's how you refine your path using the width tool and the shape profiles, as well as how a color method process you can use to color your line work. Try it out for yourself, there might be some issues. If you have any problems post it in the discussion panel and I'll try and answer your questions. When using the Live Paint there's a lot of things that could go wrong, but if you follow that process, Expand Appearance, Expand, Merge, Live paint and Expand, you should be fine. I'll see you in the next class. 18. Class Project: Hey guys, welcome to the class project section where we'll create our final class project. Throughout this class, we've done many things with the Pen tool, and in this class, we're going to bring it all together. Now there are three ways that you can submit your class project. The first thing you can do is you can go through your practice worksheets and you can select an illustration that you're really proud of. You can select that illustration and export that selection and submit that in the project panel. Just select an individual piece and submit it there. I really look forward to seeing it. The second thing you can do is you can create a collage of all the illustrations that we've created in this class. Let us jump in and see how you yourself can do this. I have my class project over here, and as you can see, I've created a collage using many of the elements that we've created in this class. Another method in which I went about to create this class project is very simple. I've created a new file here titled Class Project and I've created a 1080 by 1080 Canvas or artboard. Now, what I've done is I've actually taken many of the things that I've created in classes, and added it to a library. There's two ways you can create your collage. The first way is you can actually go into your practice sheets and you can select different elements that you want to add to your class project. You can group them all together and you can drag them, or you could just copy and paste them into your class project. Now I have it here. I can group it up and I can add it into wherever I want. The second way is you can actually create something called a library. I have a library over here and it has many different assets that I've created throughout the class. Now how I did that is I went into my library panel. You can see on my left-hand side the two books stacked on top of each other, create New Library. Once you create your new library, you can actually drag and drop the elements into that library. As you can see, I've done it already. All I've done is in my previous classes, I selected all the elements. If you can't drag and select everything that is visible on your practice worksheets, all you have to do is go into your layers panel and unlock the reference layers. These have elements that I've created, but you've created the elements on top. What you can do is unlock those so you can add it into your selection. You can open up your library and you can drag and drop it there. Now you can see it's in my library, in my Pen tool course library. Now what I can do is I can go over to my class project. I have it in my library still. Still, I can drag it out and I can resize it to however size I want and I can put it into my class project. Now you can see I can easily do that with all the elements that I've created in my class. You can go through all your worksheets, select the things that you really want to add to your collage, and bring them and rearrange them. You could also add elements by using the Pen tool to create some fun shapes around to add some color to your collage. You can add in some of the elements that were created for the title sequences, and you can just have fun with it. Just do something, whatever you want with your collage. How can we do that? We can go to File, we can Export and Export for Screens. We can select Artboards and we can select the Artboard and scale of one and export Artboard to the file that we've selected. Now the last type of project I want to see from you is an original illustration. If you feel comfortable with the Pen tool and your illustration abilities, you can definitely create an illustration of your own using the Pen tool and then submit it in the project panel. I really look forward to everything you guys create in the next class. I just want to say, thank you. 19. Thank You!: Hey guys, I just want to say thank you so much for taking this class. It has been a pleasure to be with you along your creative journey. I really look forward to seeing everything you guys create. So whether that be a simple illustration or an illustrated collage or an original illustration, post it in the project panel. I really look forward to seeing what you guys create. I really hope you were able to learn something from this class. But if you have any questions at all, feel free to post in the discussions panel and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. I would really love to hear what you thought of the class. So if you have a spare moment, please consider leaving a short review. It doesn't have to be much, just a couple of words. I really appreciate it. I really look forward to creating classes here for you on Skillshare. If you haven't already, please follow me here on Skillshare so you'll be notified when any new classes come up. Thanks again for taking this class. I really look forward to travel with you along your creative journey. See you next time.