Quick Start Guide: Adobe Illustrator for iPad

1. Intro: [MUSIC] For illustrators and designers, Adobe Illustrator is one of the best tools that you can have in your toolkit. As a vector-based program, the artwork can be scaled indefinitely without losing quality. Now that it is available as an iPad app, we can create vector artwork by drawing directly on the iPad, making it fun and easy. Hi, I'm Genna Blackburn, a surface designer and illustrator in Detroit, Michigan. I like to think of my style as a playful exploration of color and shape, stemming from my background in graphic design. As a licensing artist, I've had the pleasure of seeing my work on a variety of products out in the world. I have been using the desktop version of Adobe Illustrator for over 15 years and was very excited when the iPad version was released. The app is a much simpler version of the desktop program, but the ability to draw directly on the iPad with the Apple pencil makes this a valuable resource. This class is a quick start guide to Adobe Illustrator for iPad, meaning, I'll be covering the most popular tools and panels so that you can get started right away. This class is for the absolute beginner who just wants to dabble and create, as well as the professional who wants to add Illustrator for iPad to their toolkit. If you have experience with the desktop version, that will be helpful, but no prior knowledge of Adobe Illustrator is required. In this class, you'll learn the basics of the app, like how to draw with the Pencil tool, how to use the Repeat tool, and how to use the Vectorize feature. Then as we draw on top of the parrot sketch provided, I'll show you when it's best to use each tool plus extra tips and tricks. Adobe Illustrator for iPad is a great app for illustrators, surface designers, and graphic designers because you can create vector illustrations to use on a variety of applications, such as logos, art prints, and motifs for repeat patterns. I'm excited to teach this class about a program that I find very useful in creating my own artwork. One of my favorite subjects to draw is birds, and since this app lends itself well to my clean style of drawing birds, I thought it would be perfect for our class project. Let's get started. 2. Class Project: In this class, I'm going to teach you all of the tools needed to create a simple bird illustration. When working in Adobe Illustrator for iPad, I have found it helpful to work on top of a sketch to guide my illustration. I've created a sketch that you can download and draw on top of to make it easier for you to focus on learning the tools with the program. You can either grab that in the resources section of this class or if you'd like, you can create your own sketch to work from. If you'd like to work from your own sketch, you can draw one by hand and scan it in or take a photo of it, or you can draw one digitally that you can then import into the app. For this class, you will need an iPad with the latest version of Adobe Illustrator, as well as an Apple pencil. First, I'm going to walk you through the basic tools and panels of the app. Then we'll use those tools to create a bird illustration together. When your illustration is complete, upload it to the Projects tab of this class. I'd love to see what you create. In the next lesson, we'll cover the home screen of Adobe Illustrator for iPad as well as how to create a new project. 3. Getting Started & Create New Project: [MUSIC] Let's start by going over the basics of Adobe Illustrator for iPad. We'll cover the home screen, the app settings, and how to create a new project. On the home screen, you'll see some preset sizes up here to choose from and you'll also see some of your recent work down here. The projects you create in Adobe Illustrator for iPad will sync with the desktop version. When you're on your computer, you can open up the files that you started here on the iPad. Under Learn, you'll see some tutorials provided by Illustrator that are handy. To access the app settings, click on the icon in the top right. Under General, you'll see an option to change the toolbar to be on the left or the right, you can change the color theme to be light or dark and there are some other options as well. Under Input, I suggest you turn Palm rejection on. I found before I had this on that sometimes when I was drawing with the Apple pencil, I would sometimes accidentally be drawing with my hand and turning Palm rejection on has solved this problem for me. I also suggest if you have the second-generation Apple pencil to change double-tap to Deselect object or path. If I tap twice on the Apple pencil, I will be able to deselect whatever object I currently have selected on the iPad. This can be really helpful because sometimes it can be difficult to click off of something once you've selected it, so I like having this extra option of double tapping to deselect. But unfortunately, I don't think you can set this up on a first-generation Apple pencil. To create a new project, click on Create New in the bottom left. I have a preset saved for a 10-inch square, so it automatically shows that to me here. But if you want to come over here to the right, you can put in all of your own settings to set up a new document from scratch. We can give it a name and then you can change the units. I like to keep it on inches, so I have mine set to inches. Then, for the size of the document, one of the benefits of working in a vector-based program is that if you make something too small, you can easily make it bigger without losing inequality. Whereas in a pixel-based program like Photoshop, when you enlarge your document, the quality will suffer, so let's just go with an arbitrary size of 10 by 10 for now. We can always change this within the document later. You can change the number of artboards, but again, this is something you can also change once you're inside if you wanted to add or delete any artboards. Here's where you can select the color mode. You can choose from CMYK, which is for print, or RGB, which is for web. I prefer to work in CMYK, because I like having my work ready for print. Also it's easier converting from CMYK to RGB rather than vice versa because, if you're working in RGB, there are colors you can choose from that aren't available in CMYK, particularly bright blues and other bright colors. Sometimes in RGB, you'll be working with a really beautiful bright blue and then you convert it to CMYK and that bright blue turns this grayer $ version that can be very disappointing in comparison. I find that if I just start in CMYK, then I won't pick out any colors that are potentially unavailable to me in the future. Then we can just hit "Create File". [MUSIC] 4. Gestures, Common Actions Menu & Shortcut Tool: In this lesson, I'll cover three very useful ways to interact with the app; gestures, the common actions menu, and the shortcut tool. There are a set of gestures that you can use in Adobe Illustrator for iPad. For a list of all the gestures, click on the question mark in the top right and go to View Gestures. It will show you all the gestures that you can use. I'll go through a few of them now. First I'm going to draw a couple of rectangles to make this a little bit easier. Use two fingers to zoom in and out and also to rotate the Canvas. If you want to return to fit to screen, you just do a quick pinch and it will resize it automatically for you. Two finger tap is to undo. Three finger tap is to redo. You can also undo and redo with the buttons up at the top here. When you have an item selected, you will get this common actions menu down here at the bottom. This will change depending on what tool you're using and what objects you have selected. The first option we have right now is to change the opacity. We can drag using the slider here or you can also just click and drag down on the icon like that, which is also neat. If I had a stroke on this object right now, which I don't, stroke is an outline around the outside, I could use this stroke width option to change the width. Send objects to the back or bring them to the front by changing the stacking order with this option here. If I drag to the back, you'll see it goes behind that object, drag it that way, and it goes to the front. This icon right here is to move an object. I can't just click and drag on an object, but sometimes it's hard to select the exact thing that you want and move it. Sometimes just clicking and dragging on that icon is helpful. You can also lock your objects if you don't want to be able to move or edit it. Now you'll see it's locked up there and I can't move it. Click on that icon in the top left to unlock it. Use this option down here to group more than one object to move them as one. If I group it, now they act as one object. Click again to ungroup. Then this item is to duplicate. Now I've made an additional set of those and then the trash bin is to delete. Down here in the bottom left is the shortcut tool. One tap is for the primary shortcut, tap and drag out for the secondary shortcut. The different actions that the shortcut will do depend on what tool you're using. But basically, it acts like the Shift or Option key on your keyboard if you were working in the desktop version. For instance, if I were to select this and I wanted to resize it, right now it's not constrained. But if I hold down the primary shortcut and resize it, it will keep its proportions. If I click on this primary shortcut and drag out to the secondary shortcut, it will constrain it and it will resize from center. Also, the primary shortcut will allow you to select multiple objects at once. For a complete list of shortcuts, click on the question mark in the top right and go to view shortcuts. It will show you the primary and secondary shortcuts for each tool. 5. Panels: [MUSIC] Now let's go through the panels of Adobe Illustrator for iPad, which are all located along the right side of the workspace. Up here in the top right is the Layers panel. In a pixel-based program like Photoshop or Procreate, layers are very important because objects will automatically combine with what's below them if you are drawing on the same layer and will be inseparable as if you were drawing on real paper. Whereas in a vector-based program like Adobe Illustrator for iPad, layers are still useful, but I'm not nearly as vigilant about them because when you draw an object on top of another object on the same layer, they remain separate objects and can still be moved independently. If you open up the Layer, you can see the objects that are contained on that layer. You can select them separately. Let's say I wanted to select this yellow rectangle and I wanted it to be behind the green rectangle, I could just select it in here in this panel and move it to the back. That can be a really handy way to access different elements that are on the same layer. You can also toggle the visibility of layers, you can do the whole layer or you can do just objects within the layer, and you can also lock objects or the whole layer if you wanted to from here. Swipe left to rename a layer, and then you can click here and you can give it a name. If you have more than one layer, let's add a layer here, if you have more than one swipe left to delete. Next we have the Properties panel. The options in the Properties panel will change depending on what you have selected. Right now I have this rectangle selected, so I have a set of options for adjusting this rectangle. I can change the size. If I wanted it to be a very specific amount like five inches by five inches, I can put that in here and it will change it for me. I can also rotate an object in here, I can use the slider, or I can also put in a specific amount here. This option right here is to change the roundedness of the corners of the rectangle. So you can drag on the slider like this to change it, or you can also type in a specific amount. Down here I can change the fill color. If I wanted it to be a different color, I can do that, I can also change the stroke which is putting a line around the outside, so I just added a stroke, and let me turn that stroke up so you can see. Down here we have our stroke options, and here I'll turn that stroke up so you can see that I added a stroke around it. You can also down here change if you want it to have rounded corners. This will change the roundedness of the corner of the stroke, and this will change the cap of the stroke. This right here is the Precision panel. You can turn on a Grid and then turn on Snapping so that you can snap to grid. Using a grid is helpful if you want to be really precise. You can see now that I have the grid on, I can adjust the objects and it will snap. You can see it's snapping to the different parts of the grid. Right here, we have the Combine Shapes and Shape Builder menu. If I have more than one object selected and I come to this menu, I can combine all, Minus Front Intersect, Exclude, Overlap, or I can just come up to the Shape Builder tool, which is handy. Using the Shape Builder tool with multiple objects selected, to exclude the overlap, click on the "Overlap" to delete. Or to combine parts, draw through sections to make it one piece. Here is the Edit panel, and if you have an object selected, you can copy and paste from here. In the Align panel, you can align objects vertically and horizontally and also distribute them evenly. If I wanted these two objects to align to top, I can align to top using that option. You can also flip horizontally and vertically from within this menu. I'm not going to go into detail into the rest of these panels at the moment, I'm going to come back to them later, but you can see you have the Objects panel, the Type panel, Path, Repeat, and Links. [MUSIC] 6. Shape Tool & Color Palette: [MUSIC] Now let's start making shapes and playing with color. In this lesson, I'm going to introduce the shape tool and the color palette. Over here is the shape tool which I've already been using a little bit to draw these rectangles. Whenever a tool has a little triangle on the bottom corner like this one does, it means you can hold down and you'll get other options. You can also draw, besides the rectangles and squares, you can draw circles, triangles, stars, and lines. Let's try drawing a circle here. If I don't hold down any primary shortcuts, it will create just an oval. But, if I hold down this primary shortcut, then I can make a perfect circle. Again, if I hold down and go out to the secondary shortcut, I'll make a perfect circle from center. Down here is the color palette. You can build colors by using the color wheel. You can also use the CMYK sliders. And if you have specific CMYK amounts that you know you like, you can put those in here. You can also use the eyedropper to pick up colors in your document. Then once you have a color that you like, you can hit the plus sign and add it to your swatches panel down here. This circle up here is for the fill, which right now we have a green fill on this rectangle. This circle is for the stroke. Let's say, right now, I wanted this to have a green stroke and no fill. I could click on these arrows and it will reverse it for me. Now let's say I want to keep the green stroke, but I want to add a fill color. I click on the fill and then I can add whatever fill color I want like that. Now let's build a color palette that we will use later on for our bird illustration. You can download the color palette PDF I created for this class in the resources section. Once you've saved it to your iPad, click on Import and navigate to where you saved it. I'm going to align this vertically and horizontally to the art board and lock it so that it doesn't move while we're sampling the colors. Now, open up your color palette and if you're like me, I like to come in here and remove any swatches I'm not currently using or the swatches that came with Illustrator, but I always leave black and white because those are always handy to have. Now I'll use the eyedropper to pick up our first color and add it to the color palette. Then I drop again for this red, for the darker red. Then we have several shades of green [NOISE], and a blue, and a gold. Now we have all the colors will need to build our bird illustration later. Now I can come in here and unlock and delete this image. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to use the selection tool and the Direct Selection Tool. [MUSIC] 7. Selection Tools: [MUSIC] In Adobe Illustrator for iPad, there are two selection tools and they each work a little bit differently. They are called the Selection Tool and the Direct Selection Tool. At the top, the plane arrow is the Selection Tool. The Selection Tool allows you to select an entire shape and move it around and adjust it. If I wanted to select this entire rectangle and move it around or adjust the size, I can do that. When you have a shape selected with the Selection Tool, you'll see this circle up here and that allows you to change the roundedness of all of the corners at one time. Also with the shortcut tool selected, you can select multiple objects and then move them around together. The second tool from top is the Direct Selection Tool. The icon for this is an arrow selecting a point on a path because the Direct Selection Tool allows you to just select part of a shape or one point and move it around. If I wanted to select just this corner of this rectangle and move it around, I can do that independently from the rest of the rectangle. I can also use the primary shortcut to select multiple points and move those around together. If you have a whole object selected, these circles appear in every corner and you can change the roundedness of all the corners at once like you could with the regular Selection Tool. To change the roundedness of only one corner, select the point and drag the corresponding circle icon independently. When you select a point, you will get a set of options in the common actions menu. You can convert a straight edge to a rounded edge and then you get these arms to move and change the corner. Once it's rounded, you can change it back to a sharp angle with this option down here. Then I'm going to draw the circle to show you the Smart Delete. If I have a point selected, Smart Delete will delete a point while trying to maintain the nature of the curve as best as possible. You can see if I use it to delete that point, it got rid of that point, but it kept the nature of the curve as best as it could. I use the Smart Delete option a lot when I'm cleaning up something that I've drawn that has too many points. Sometimes coming in and just deleting a few points with the Smart Delete can even out the drawing a little bit without taking all the curves out. You can also just double-tap on a point to make it rounded and then double-tap again to make it sharp. [MUSIC] 8. Pen Tool: [MUSIC] Now let's talk about the pen tool and how to draw with it. The pen tool allows you to create points, and to make a shape. To close the shape, click on the point where you started, and it will make it a closed shape. If you want to have rounded edges, when you click, hold and drag out and you'll get these arms so that you can make curved lines. If you have a shape and you want to add a point, you can click anywhere on the path to add a point. You can also long press on a point to delete it. Let's say I wanted to draw a heart. I would click and drag these arms in the direction that I want the next curve to go. Then let's say I wanted this to be a hard edge right here. This point has two arms coming off of it, so the next point that I make will automatically have that curve attached to it. What I can do is click on this point, and get rid of that second arm so that the next point I make doesn't have that other curve attached to it already. Then click on the point where you started to make it a closed shape. Again, once you have a shape made, you can use the selection tool to move the whole thing around, or you can use the direct selection tool to grab part of it and move it around. You can also adjust these arms to try to clean it up, and make it a little neater too. In the next lesson, we'll talk about my favorite tool, the pencil tool. [MUSIC] 9. Pencil Tool: [MUSIC] The Pencil tool is my favorite tool because it's just like the Pen tool but you can draw more freely. You can just draw very loosely like that. If you're drawing loosely and then you want to have a hard edge, just pause and you'll see a little blue dot pop up. That means you can switch directions and have a hard angle. You can change the smoothing of your pencil tool down here. If you have it all the way down, it's not going to smooth out at all and it's going to pick up every little movement that you make and it's going to make a ton of points. Whereas, if you have it turned all the way up, it's going to correct a lot of that for you and smooth it out and use only a few points. I usually like to have mine set to around a four, so I get a little bit of smoothing, but there's still a lot of character to my drawing. Once you have a shape that you've drawn with the Pencil tool, you can hold down the secondary shortcut to move a point along the line. You can also use the primary shortcut to grab multiple points and move those around. Now that we've covered the Pencil tool, we're going to loosen it up even more in the next lesson with the Blob Brush tool. [MUSIC] 10. Blob Brush Tool: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I'm going to show you the Blob Brush Tool, which is a lot of fun to draw with. To get to the blob brush tool, hold down the pencil tool and click on blob brush. I'm going to go with the basic round 8 point for now. The blob brush tool is similar to the pencil tool in that you can draw very loosely, but it draws strokes that are immediately expanded into shapes. If draw something, you can see that all the points are on the outside of the shape, so it's automatically taken that stroke that I drew and converted it into a shape that I can then adjust like that. The blob brush tool has several settings that you can get to down here. With merge brushstrokes turned on, drawing on top of another object, merges it into one shape. If we draw something, and then we draw again right on top of it, it's going to be one shape. You can see this better by going up to the outline's view. You can see that it's made one shape. Whereas if I turn that off and then try drawing, you can see that if I draw on top of another shape, it keeps them separate. I'm going to turn preview back on. I'm going to leave merge brushstrokes turned on for now. You can also have pressure dynamics turned on or off. When pressure dynamics is on, how hard you press will affect the thickness of the line. If I press lighter, it gets thinner, if I press harder, it gets thicker. If I turn it off, you can see that no matter how hard I press, the thickness of the line stays the same. You can also change the roundedness of the corners, and you can also taper the ends or not. [MUSIC] 11. Eraser, Type Tool & Artboard Tool: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I'm going to cover the Eraser, the Type tool, and the Art Board tool. Over here is the Eraser tool, which is pretty self-explanatory. When you erase an object, it reconfigures the points to accommodate for that area that you've erased. Down here is the Type tool. You can click anywhere on the Art Board to begin, you can click and drag out to make a text box, or you can click and simply start typing that way. Once you've made some type on the Art Board, you can go to the Properties panel and change all of the settings for that type. You can change the typeface, you can change the size, the angle, the point size, if you want it to be all caps. All of the different options for formatting the type are in this Properties menu. Over here is the Art Board tool. You can see as soon as I click on it, I've got an option to change the current Art Board. I can also add another Art Board with one of the preset sizes that they have. If I wanted another Art Board and I wanted it to be letter size, I can add it like that. Then you can see we have more than one Art Board. You can also duplicate your art boards and delete them down here. To change the size of an Art Board to a specific size, select the Art Board and then open the Properties panel and input the size here. [MUSIC] 12. Repeat Tool: [MUSIC] Now, let's talk about the repeat tool. This one is a lot of fun to play with. If we create an object and then we go to the repeat panel over here and click on Mirror. We're going to get a mirror of what we just drew and you can make changes and it will reflect over here. The grid repeat option will repeat your object indefinitely. If I draw a shape and then I go over here and I go to Grid, it's going to repeat it indefinitely vertically and horizontally and I can adjust how much of the repeat I want to show by adjusting these sliders here. I can also change how far apart the objects are vertically and horizontally here, and you can also change the size of the whole thing. If you want to edit one of the objects and have it apply to all of them, just double-tap and then you can change the one object and it will reflect on all of the objects. If you want to change the color or the shape, you can do it like that. The last option is radial repeat. You can adjust the number of items being repeated. You can change how many of those items you want to show and double-click on an item to edit it. Then within there, you can edit the size, the angle, the color, and it will reflect among all of the objects within the repeat. In the next lesson, I'll show you another neat tool called vectorize, also known as image tracing. [MUSIC] 13. Vectorize (aka Image Trace): [MUSIC] Now let's talk about the vectorize feature. If you're familiar with the desktop version of Adobe Illustrator, you'll know this as image trace. This allows you to take a sketch and turn it into a vector drawing with just a few clicks. I will go over how to import a sketch in the next lesson. For now, here's a sketch that I've already imported. With this sketch selected when I navigate to the Object menu, you'll see the Vectorize option has appeared. After you hit "Vectorize", you have a series of options. Under Source, you can select Sketch, Line Art, Logo, Painting, or Photograph. You can play around with these to see which one works best. That one doesn't look so good. Let's try Logo. That's not too bad. I think I still like the sketch one better, so let's go back to that. Under Color mode, I always have black and white selected as I've found that vectorizing works best with black and white illustrations. I prefer to choose black and white and then recolor after I'm done with the vectorize tool. Under Output, choose whether you want Fills or Strokes. I almost always choose Fills because you'll see when you choose Strokes sometimes it doesn't really come out that great. Fills usually works best for me. Then for Threshold, Path Corners, and Noise, you can play around with these to try to see if you can clean up your drawing anymore. You want to get it as close as possible to what you want it to look like before you exit this menu. Sometimes there's a little bit of clean up that you have to do when you vectorize something this way, and you want to minimize that as much as possible. Under Method, the option on the left is Abutting which creates cutout pads versus the option on the right, which is Overlapping, which creates stacked pads. You'll see that's probably not the option we want if we want to keep it looking like our original drawing here. Then I usually make sure Ignore white is checked, otherwise, the white parts of your sketch will be turned into shapes that you will likely have to delete later. If you hit "Ignore white" then it won't include all these white parts in your vector. When you have everything the way you want it, click "Expand vectorization", and now your sketch is a vector and made up of points that you can adjust further if necessary. Something I might do to come in here and clean it up a little bit is, you'll see it's pretty good, but there are maybe some extra points in here that we don't need. Sometimes I'll just come in and hit the "Smart Delete". Just by getting rid of a few of them, you can see it just starts to clean up quite a bit. That's better. You can go in and do that on your whole illustration. Join me in the next lesson where I'll show you how to import a sketch so we can get started with our bird illustration. [MUSIC] 14. Import Sketch: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I'm going to go into more detail about how to import a sketch file so that you can draw on top of it. To use the pre-made sketch I created, go to the Resources section of this class to download the sketch file and then save it to your iPad. Next, import it by clicking on the import tool and navigating to where you saved it. The sketch file I've prepared is a PSD file, which is a layered file and I've saved each element of the sketch on a different layer so that I can show you this feature. I'm going to leave Convert layers to objects selected to maintain the layers in the file. Then click "Okay." Now, I'm just going to align this vertically and horizontally to the art board. Now you can see, in leaving all of the layers separately, we can go into the Layers panel and now every element of the sketch is a different component of the layer rather than just one flat image. If I wanted to just select a part of the sketch and move it around, I can do that. That's handy to have that option once you're in here. With the whole sketch selected, I'm going to bring the opacity down just a little bit, so it's a little bit easier to draw on top of. Then I'm going to lock this layer. Now we're ready to draw on top a it. Join me in the next lesson to learn when it is best to use each tool plus extra tips and tricks as we create our bird illustration. [MUSIC] 15. Draw a Bird - When to Use Each Tool + Extra Tips & Tricks: [MUSIC] Now that I've covered the basics of Adobe Illustrator for iPad, let's make a bird illustration using the tools you've just learned. I'll show you how and when I decide to use each tool as I go. I'm going to first name this one sketch so that we know what we're working with. Now we know that's our sketch layer and we can create another layer on top of it, and these will be for all of our illustrations. You can create a different layer for each part of the illustration if you'd like. I don't tend to make a lot of layers in Illustrator when I'm working just because it doesn't seem that necessary, but that's up to you. Now I'm going to start with this leaf up here and I'm going to start with the veins and the stem, and I'm going to use dark green for that. I want it to be the stroke not the fill, so I'm going to reverse that, and I'm going to use the Pen tool for these because these are nice straight lines and the Pen tool is really good for that, so I just click here and here. Now you can't really see that so I'm going to come in here to the properties panel and make that a little bit bigger of a stroke, maybe six point would be better. Yeah, that looks pretty good, and then I'm going to give it a rounded cap. All that does is just change whether the ends are rounded or straight, and I like them rounded, so we're going to go with rounded for now. Then I'll deselect by double tapping on my pencil and we can start the next part. Deselecting, and that looks pretty good. I might come in here with the direct selection tool just to clean this up a little bit. If I want these lines to be a little bit straighter, I can do that, if I want it to be really precise, I could turn on the grid, but I think for now that's pretty good. I'm going to draw the background of the leaf by using the shape tool and I want this to be the lightest shade of green. All of the corners are rounded except for one, so I think the easiest thing to do would be to round all of them using this circle here and then with the direct selection tool, I can come back, make sure I only have this one corner selected and undo that so that it doesn't have a rounded corner. Then using stacking order, I will send it to the back. Now we're done with that and now let's do this leaf here at the bottom. For this, I'm going to use radial repeat. I just need to draw one part of it and then it will repeat itself. For this, let's use the Pen tool again. Then I'll click here to break this corner so that I can change directions and then I'll just do like that, and that looks pretty good. I might want this to have just a slightly rounded edge to it, there we go. Now I'm going to select this and go over to repeat and do radial repeat. We want to increase the number of items being repeated until we get to a number that looks like pretty close to our illustration. That looks pretty good. Then I'll use these sliders down here to delete a few of them and I might double-tap here just to see if I can adjust this a little bit to get it to fill in just a little bit more. That looks pretty good. Then I'm going to draw this bottom part with the pencil tool. I'll just come in here and draw this. When I'm drawing with a pencil tool, when I get to a place where I want to have a hard edge, I just pause and then that little blue dot comes up and then I know that I can change directions and have a hard angle there and that looks pretty good. I'm just going to clean that up a little bit. Now what I want to do is expand this repeated motif up here so that I can merge it with this other part that we drew and then clean it up even more. With this repeated parts selected, I'm going to go over to Object and Expand. Now the repeat options are gone and this is just a flat shape. Then I can select that and this piece that we drew and go to the shape builder tool. Then just draw through all of the parts that I want to combine. Now it's all one piece. Now that it's all one piece, I can come in here and delete a few more points just to make it even cleaner. That looks pretty good to me. Now let's draw the parrot. I'm going to start with his eyes, so his eye, and I'm going to use the shape tool and hold down the primary shortcuts so that I can make a perfect circle. Then with black, I'll draw the rest of the eyeball, and if I hold the secondary shortcut, I can just click in the center and draw from center and that makes it a little bit easier to get it right where I want and then send it to back. Then I'll draw his neck. I think for this, the blob brush tool would work pretty well, so that's under the pencil. For that, I want it to be the lightest green. I have mine set to size 4, and I have this smoothing turned up to 75 at the moment and I have the rounded corners on, pressure dynamics is off because there isn't really any part of this illustration where I want some things to be thicker and thinner, everything's pretty even. I have pressure dynamics turned off and merge brushstrokes turned on. Now we can draw the neck. Let me try that one more time. If you've merged brushstrokes turned on, you can always pick up your pencil and start again and it will combine with what you've already drawn. That looks pretty good. Now because it's the blob brush tool, it has been expanded into a shape so you can see all of the points are on the outside versus a stroke, like with the pencil tool or the Pen tool where the path and the points would be down the center. The easiest thing to do now would be to select the inside points and just delete them. Now we have a solid shape, and then I might come in here and just clean this up a little bit. That looks pretty good and we can do the same thing with the beak. That's light red. I'll just delete the inside points and then I might just clean this up a bit. [NOISE] Okay. That looks pretty good to me. Now we can't see that line that's under there, so I'll just move that over for now. I'll use the Blob Brush tool with the darker red to draw this line right here. Move this back. If we wanted this to be perfect, we could make it a little bit bigger than the beak itself. Then select both and go to the Pathfinder tool, or the Shape Builder tool, I'm sorry, and delete the parts that we don't want to hangover. That looks pretty good. Now I'm going to draw the lines on the feathers. For this, we could use the Blob Brush tool as well like we just did. But I'm going to show you how to use the Pen tool, so you can see how to do this with the Pen tool, if you wanted to. I'm going to use the darkest green and I'm going to put it on the "Stroke". I'm just going to click here and click here, and then drag until I get the curve that I want. Then I'm going in to the Properties Panel and turn it up. Four looks pretty good. I'm going to turn on the "Rounded Cap" and I'm also going to turn on the "Rounded Corners". Because for this one it doesn't matter, but when you get to something like this where you'll have another point in the middle. I want that to be rounded as well. I'm just going to select it now because whatever we have selected is going to apply to the next lines we draw. Now, I'll de-select. Then I can do this one again. De-select. Now for this one, I'll just click here and click here and drag out. Because this arm is pointed in this direction, the next line that I draw, the curve is going to want to go in that direction. So if I were to just click right here, you see it automatically does that. The best thing to do here would be to click, click again, draw your angle, and then click on the point again to get rid of that arm. Now I can make a new curve in the new direction that I want to go in. You could just keep drawing the rest of them or we could do some copying and pasting. I will Duplicate and Move. Duplicate and Move. I'm just using the items in the common actions menu for this. I'll duplicate the double lines. There you go. Now I'm going to draw this wing here. I think the easiest thing to do would be to use the Pen tool. I'm going to use a fill of the, I believe it's the second lightest green or the second darkest green, we can change it later. I'm going to click here and click here to drag. Actually, I ran out of room to drag. Let's zoom out a little bit. You can just do this in one, just with the two points. Or sometimes you might want to make a point halfway just to get that curve to be a little bit more exactly where you want it. Then because it had a rounded corner up here. I'm just going to take this in and pull it in like that. Then now we just need to change the stacking order because it's in the wrong place. Then that looks pretty good. Now I'm just going to do the same thing for these feathers down here. This one right here is red. I'll just come in here and draw this one and then send it. Oops, I didn't mean to lock it. Send it to the back. Then I'll draw the next one. This one is blue and it has a rounded bottom, so I'm just going to do that. Then use the Selection tool to get the Common Actions menu and send it to the back. Then I'll draw the next one. That one is the darkest green, so I'll change it to the dark green. Then send it to the back. Then we have just one more. Let's see. Just do it like this. I'll make it this lighter green, not the lightest green, but the second to lightest green. Send it to back. Then I just want to make this a little bit rounded. That looks pretty good. Now to draw the body of the bird, we could use the pencil tool or the pen tool. I might use the pencil tool for this one, just because it has so many different corners and I think it will just be easier just to draw it with the pencil tool. Just come in here and draw the body. I'm going to have to come in here with the direct selection tool and clean it up a little bit. [BACKGROUND] I'm using Smart Delete. I'm using the arms of the points to fix the curves. This one needs to come up a little bit. There we go. That looks pretty good to me. Now I'll use the selection tool to get the Common Actions menu to send it to the back. [BACKGROUND] Is that it? I think that's it. Then for the legs I think I will use the pen tool, like we did for the veins of the leaf. This is going to be the gold color. Again, we have to come in here to the Properties panel to turn up the stroke and give it a rounded cap. Then I'll deselect and draw the rest of the foot. Then I can just come in here. If this looks pretty good, which I think it does, we can just duplicate this and move it over. Then I'll grab both of these. I'll just group them just to make it a little bit easier to move them later if I want to and send them to the back. [BACKGROUND] Now for this flower up here, we could just use the blob brush tool or the pencil tool to do this. But I'm going to show you how to do this using the vectorized feature, just so that you have that option in your tool belt. We're going to go up to our sketch layer and unlock it. We need to find our flower. It's this second one from top. I'm going to move it to the top of this, inside this layer so that it's easier to grab. Maybe I'll just lock these other ones so I don't accidentally grab those. I'll go to the Object panel, and then hit Vectorize. It has disappeared because it doesn't like the setting that it's on, that's better. Under logo what probably happened is that the threshold was turned way down or something so it didn't pick up any of the sketch. I've changed it to Sketch, and that looks a lot better to me. Maybe I'll go with that. Let me just try Line Art, just to see if that gets any better. It's a little bit muddier. I'll stay with Sketch. I could come in here and mess around with threshold path, corners, noise, to try to get it to be a little bit cleaner. But I think it's actually pretty good. I think I'm going to leave it. We have black and white fills. Then these settings are all coming from the source, because we haven't set to Sketch, so threshold, path, corners and noise are all set to what the sketch preset has. Ignore white is turned on, which is good. Now we just hit Expand vectorization. Now we have a vector piece that we can work with. I'm going to move this, now that it's vectorized, I'm going to move this up to our layer that has our illustrations on it. It was grayed out because I had this layer turned down. Now we can just lock our sketch again. Now I'm going to come in and colorize this flower. First what I want to do is delete the inside parts of the leaves, so that these are solid. You just delete twice to delete all the points. Then I'm going to delete this as well. Now this part of the leaves and the bottom part are all supposed to be green, so I will change it to this green. I think this second from darkest green will be nice. Now we have a few options. I think the easiest thing to do would be to also delete this piece here. Then what I'm going to do is draw a rectangle in the blue. The top part is supposed to be blue. I'm just going to come in here and draw it like this. Then if I pull on this arm right here I can rotate it. I'll just put it so it's about halfwayth down this top part. Then I'll select that and this bottom part and go to the shape builder tool. I can just delete the part that I don't want. Now it's done. Did I accidentally change this at some point? Now all we have to do is do the type and a little banner down here. We could just come in here with the pen tool and just go to all the different edges. Or we can draw a rectangle. I'm going to do it in red. Then come in here with the pen tool and add points right here and here. Then use the direct selection tool to move them in like this. That's another way to do that. Then we want to put some type on top of this. I'm going to come over here to the type tool, and make a rectangle on top of this banner. The first thing I know is that I want it to be white, and I want it to say Parrot. I'm going to come in here and type in Parrot. Now I'm going to come over to the Properties panel to customize it further. I want it to be all caps. I want it to be Futura, which is a font that you should have on your computer, or on your iPad. I'm sorry. I want bold. I want it to be centered. I'm going to come over to Paragraph, and hit Center. I'm going to make it a little bit smaller. Let's try 40. What I'm going to do is I'm going to come in here. This is the kerning right here. This is the space between the letters. I'm going to make that 100, just to give it a little bit of space in there. Then I'm going to use the selection tool to move it down a little bit. That looks pretty good to me. I might make it a little bit smaller. Let's try 38. That looks nice. Just make sure it's in the middle. That's that. Now all we need to do is add a background. I have a pink background in my version of this illustration. I might make a new layer for this and put it underneath our illustration. So when we draw on this layer it will automatically be underneath everything. I'll select the pink color. I'm going to make a rectangle. I think it might be nice to come in here under the Precision panel and turn on snapping, so that we can hopefully just draw it and it will snap to the edges. Perfect. That looks pretty good to me. There you have it. There's our bird illustration. [MUSIC] 16. Export: Now, let's talk about the different ways to export your illustration and the purposes of each. Two reasons you might want to export your illustration are to continue working on it on the desktop version of Adobe Illustrator or to share it to social media. To continue working in the desktop version, you have two options. You can export your file as an AI file by going up to this Export button, and publish and export, and you can do a quick export as an AI file. That will retain its vector properties and then save it somewhere like Dropbox, where you can then get to it from your desktop computer. Or if you have Adobe Creative Cloud Storage setup, you should be able to simply close your document. You just go to this arrow on the top left and it will take you back to the home screen and it automatically saves it when you exit. Then you should be able to open up Adobe Illustrator on your desktop, click on "Cloud Documents" and see your illustration there. Make sure your iPad is connected to Wi-Fi or the cloud files will not update, and you won't be able to see them on your desktop computer. If you would like to export a PNG or JPEG to share on social media, click on the "Publish button" at the top, and you can go to Quick Export as PNG, or if you want more options, click on "Publish and Export" and then go to Export as. Then you can change the filename, you can pick different formats, color mode, quality, resolution. Then if you have more than one artboard, you can select just some of the artboards or you can select all artboards and then click "Export" and save it to where you want to save it so that you can then post it on social media. [MUSIC] 17. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Congratulations on completing this class. I hope you now feel confident navigating the basic tools of Adobe Illustrator for iPad so that you can have fun creating more vector illustrations. If you have any questions, you can ask them on the discussions page of this class, and if you like this class, hit the "Follow" button next to my name. Please leave a review, I love to hear what you think. Now that I've taught you about one of my favorite iPad programs, if you'd like information about my other favorite tools and resources, I've put together a list that you can download at genablackburn.com/tools. Finally, I'd love for you to share your completed illustration on the class projects tab. I can't wait to see what you create. [MUSIC]