Vector Basics: Mastering the Illustrator Pen Tool with Fun Results!

1. Class Introduction: Welcome to vector basics; mastering the Illustrator pen tool with fun results. My name is Tim [inaudible] and I am a freelance illustrator and designer. I design logos, create typography, and I also design art prints that I sell on my society6 shop Fresh Prints. I do a lot of vector work. The reason why I came up with this class is because I feel like the difference between OK vector work and Awesome vector work is simple. It's basically nice curved lines and really mastering the Pen tool. In this class we will cover Bezier curves, an intro to the pen tool, and we will practice. At the end of the class, we will do a class project which is creating from scratch an animal portrait with the animal of your choosing. The things you need for this class are simple. You need Adobe Illustrator and you need an idea of what you will draw. Do you know what you'll draw for your class project? That's a good one. Let's get started. 2. Intro to the Pen Tool: Now to get started, let's do a short intro into the Pen tool. The Pen tool can draw in mainly two ways. The first one is you can just take the pen tool, I'll zoom in a little. Keep in mind, I'm in Illustrator and I've created an art board. My art board is letter size or eight and a half by 11. This will come in handy when I supply you with a practice sheet, which will place on a layer and then you can draw over it. Mine will be sized to enact a lip by 11, so you'll be able to drop it in and it'll work perfectly. I'll see the Pen tool. The first way that the Pen tool can draw is just to click around with straight lines, not worrying about curves. That may work for some things, but not for what we're doing. The other way that you can draw is to use Bezier curves, which is clicking and dragging and forming nice smooth curves. Basically curves are named after an engineer, Pierre Bezier.The math is so overwhelming that I'm not going to even pretend to understand it. But the basic concept is very easy to understand. Each curve line segment is made up of two anchor points. When you make a curved line, each endpoint has a handle. The direction of the handle changes the direction of the line. As I change, and I'm using the direct select tool, it affects one angle or one point. Now to draw a line, you just click, drag, click, and drag. If you kept doing this, your line would pretty much go on forever. It isn't until you close your line or path that it becomes a shape. I'm going to be talking a lot about paths in shapes or lines and shapes. That's basically what I'm talking about. When you do a Bezier curve, click drag. That is a line. Then when I close it off, that becomes a shape. Because there's a beginning and an end and they meet back at each other. Now, what we're going to look at and how we're really going to practice this, is we're going to cover some common curve types and this will serve as good practice. The first curve type it will commonly see is an arc. You click drag and click drag. The reason why this is an arc is because our two handles that we see here are pointed in the same direction, more or less, not much the same direction, but at least the same side. They're both pointed towards, we'll call it the sky. Because then if we're going to draw another line, which is another type, this one, click drag, pointed to the sky, click drag pointed at the ground, the opposite direction, it forms somewhat of a hill or an S, a very subtle S. These are going to be the main two types of curves we're going to deal with. We're going to do a lot of arcs. Think of rainbow, and then a lot of especially an animal faces when we do our class project. A lot of curves like that. As we're drawing, we're going to come across a lot of corners. To illustrate that, I'll start with a circle here, going to make an ellipse. We're going to hold down Shift while I draw it so that it's perfect. Then I'm going to take my direct select, delete this point just so it's an arc. As we see here, the handles are on both size and the handles are even with each other. This is a smooth corner. We'll deal with smooth corners a lot. Then another type of corner would be if we just clicked, clicked, clicked. This is a true corner. I'll probably refer to it as a sharp corner if we're drawing stuff like that. You've got a very smooth corner because your handlebars are like this, and then a sharp corner where you don't even need handlebars because we're using straight lines. Then another corner that we'll commonly use is if we took something like this, I'll just copy it, paste it front and I'll drag it down here. We'll have all of our common corners all in one art board. I'm going to do my direct selection tool. I'm going to delete this point. I'm going to keep this half. You see how this, even though I deleted this half, this handlebar keeps going. What I'm going to do is break this angle and break this handle. By doing that, I got my pen tool. I'm going to click Alt or Option. I clicked alt option and then I'm dragging. Now, I made this corner that has a broken handle or a broken angle as I call it. What I did was disrupt that handle that kept going like this and changed its direction very abruptly. This is going to be very helpful when we're doing different types of drawings, especially with our animal shape. A lot of for and a lot of, maybe ears will have something like this where it's a curve, but it's also a sharp angle. These are our main corner types and we covered our main line types. This is just to give you an intro into things. Now what we're going to do it in our next video is do a lot of practice and cover a lot of the shapes that will be really helpful in mastering the Pen tool. As a recap, to do a Bezier curve, click drag, click drag. When you do that, you create handles, two sets of handles to your path. Let's continue. 3. How to Draw With the Pen Tool: Now we're going to cover how to draw with the pen tool. So what we're going to do, I made a art board that's eight and a half by 11. I'm going to go and place this file which you guys will have access to on the class page. So we're going to place this in the corner here, and it's going to fit perfectly to a eight and a half by 11 sheet. Then I'm going to lock this layer and I made a new layer called lines. Then with a very bright stroke, when you use my pen tool. What we're going to first cover on the keys to success are handle location and the length. The handle length when you're drawing the pen tool is very important. It's really going to determine like if I do a long handle, it's going to stretch this out. Then if I do a short handle, it's going to affect your angles and your curves. So just playing with that and really getting used to shorter handles, longer handles and things like that are really going to help your shapes. So all of this first section is that you can trace over. I know it feels lame to trace. Am I not doing anything original? This is important just to give you the feel. I saw in my PDF I have some shapes that are kind of organic and maybe animal like, maybe like a bat's wing or rabbits ear. That these will just be helpful for you to get a feel for coming through and just practicing. I'm holding down shift so it's straight. Not all of these, you'll have to do that, but that's part of the practice here. So we'll go over it and this is kind of off, and that's really what the practice is all about. It's coming in here, Direct Selection Tool and just tweaking. You don't have to get these perfectly over them. But when you do get them close, you're saying, okay. So when I do this, this is a good length. When I do this, it's a little longer and it affects the line this way. So that's all this practice is really going through, and I'll do one of these because it's trickier. Here when I pull it out, this angle, in this way, that's what it looks like. Then I have to break my angle here and then do that. So it's really just getting a feel for what kind of handles make, what kind of curves and shapes and things like that. So that's what this top area is. Then this is to show you how we're going to put our animal together. You make different shapes and then you put them together, or we're going to draw half of it. Like this could be half of a nose, and then in the next video, we'll flip it and then it'll turn into an actual nose. So that's pretty much the handles. You can play around with those and just keep drawing with your pen tool and seeing what happens when you do certain lengths of your handles. So really, that's the main topic of this half here. Now point placement is very important. So someone I really like on the internet, great designer is Von Glitschka. He came up with this very cool way of looking at Point placement, and so it's based on a clock or a circle. So when you draw a circle, I'll just draw one here. Then we look at all of our points. Reason why our circle is so perfect is at the top, the right, the bottom, and the left. We have our points and then our handles are evenly distributed to form this circle. It's a perfect circle. So the clock is based on that. I know that we're not always going to be drawing circles. But it's applicable to so many things. So I have a couple of shapes here that I drew, which you could trace over, and then what I'm going to do right now, I have a clock over here. I'm going to take this clock. Just copy it and just show you what happens and what we're talking about in terms of point placement. So on something like this. We're going to stretch our clock out, which is totally fine. But what it is, is to show you, even though you're not drawing a circle. When you draw something like this, you're going to have a top, which would be your 12. Then you're going to do a side, which would be your nine. Then you come down here and this is your six. If you tried, this would be a don't if I had to cover do's and don'ts of pen tool. If you say, "I'm just going to do this and then I'm going to come back." I don't need another point. I'm just going to do that because you're extending this so far. You're expecting too much out of your curve is what you're doing. Is because you're missing your side point. A lot of times you'll say, I can just make this curve. It'll be fine, but it just doesn't work. So you do have to remember these side points. When you're drawing something like this, that you need to include, we'll call it your nine or your three. Go ahead and fix that. But it just gives you a little more area here, another point that is really helpful. So if we kept going through these and did another clock, what we would see on something like this at an angle, here's a point. I had to do another point here and then come over and things like that. So as you're tracing over these up here, just for fun, you can think about what would the clock be? What would my point be here at 12, 3, 6? Maybe another 6,3,12. For me it simplified things and it really works when I'm building things. So even down here, here's a little more practice. What I have are half a shape, half an ear and then I'm showing you how make them a little smaller. The reflected side. I built half the phase here, reflected it, half the year, reflected it, and which we'll cover later. So this shows you how objects in our class project are going to make up a face. Like first, you'll do an ear, and then you do half a face, and then you do have a trunk. Then when you reflect these and place them, it makes an elephant. So I don't want you to get overwhelmed when we talk about building an animal face or an animal portrait. It's really building simple shapes which are like this face. This would be your 12. That would be your six, and that would be your nine. If we were talking about our shapes and our clock. I'll just do one here just to do it. I'm going to hold shift, I'll hold that down. You're not always going to hold shift, but sometimes it's necessary that we break our angle, then we come down for a flat bottom. We break this. So yes, simple shapes when flipped will make your face, which will keep covering. But please reach out with any questions as you're practicing and just play around as much as you need to, to get used to all these different handles and the point placement. Hopefully this sheet really helps you practice as much as you need to. Then we'll get started on our class project here. 4. Class Project: Choosing an Animal: Now let's get started on our class project. The first thing we're going to decide is, what are we going to draw? I've decided to draw a raccoon. Raccoon is pretty basic, but there's also some fun stuff going on in the fur, and some patterns and shapes. I'm going to do that. You guys should choose something that interests you. You can do anything you want. If someone does a hammer head shark, that's awesome. If someone does a cat, that's totally fine. It's whatever you want. You're going to have to decide so that you can start looking for reference material. You're going to go on the internet, your favorite search engine. I am going to type in, raccoon face photo. I put the word photo in there, so that you mainly get photos, as opposed to like other illustrations. We're going to open this up. We mainly have photos and these are good. Of course you're going to get some weird stuff like whatever this is. But all in all, this is good reference material, especially considering how we're going to draw this, is relying on symmetry. You want a very balanced, a front-facing photo. This is good stuff. You don't have to worry about rights, because we're not going to copy this, we're not going to trace it. This is just for reference. I'm going to just start saving these. The importance of reference material can best be described. If someone asked me to draw SpongeBob, I'd be like, I'll draw a SpongeBob from memory. Once I did it, it would probably look bad because even though I thought I was doing the right thing, I didn't have reference. If someone showed me a picture of SpongeBob, I would know this is what his nose looks like, this is how his eyes look like, so I do a much better job. Here I'm going to find one more. That's all we're doing, is finding photos that show us this is fun, I like that one smiling, that's good. I'm finding, you know, two or three images. I'm doing three. We'll put on our art board and we'll just have around for reference. Once we save those, we'll go into Illustrator. Here's my art board. My art board is four inches by four inches. Now what we're going to do is place those three images and your reference materials, your images can change. I may go back and choose some different ones here afterwards. It doesn't matter. They can change. It depends on what you're looking for. If you save a couple and then decide, these aren't the perfect ones. That's totally fine. What I did was place them on a layer I called reference. I'm going to lock that layer and then do a new layer, that's going to be called Lines. Now we can turn off and on, that reference layer. Now that we have our art board and our reference materials, it's time to get started with our foundation of drawing. 5. Class Project: The Starting Line(s): Now that we have our reference material saved on our art board, we're going to start laying out the main shape and laying down the foundation for our drawing. Like I said in the last video, this is four by four inches and we have a layer here called lines, which is going to be where we draw some loose lines. Some of them will use in the future, some of them we won't, but they will serve as a foundation and the basic blueprint for the shape of our face and things like that. I'm going to start drawing with, instead of black, something bright. I like to do cyan. This drawing is going to be based on symmetry, much like this photo where it's like if you drew a line down the middle, which we're going to do, and you flipped it, it would be identical. We're going to do that. To accomplish that, we're going to need a guideline to help us. We're going to slide a guideline from our rulers. If you don't have rulers showing up in your art board, it's going to be Command or Control R. We're going to select that. Then we'll go up to align here, align to art board and center it. This will be very helpful. It will help us flip our drawing, because what we are going to draw half of it over here, and then we're going to flip it and it's going to become our complete animal face. Let's get drawing with our lines here and start making our animal. As we start drawing our different animals. What we're going to do is lay down pretty much the shape of the head. I'm going to look at my reference and you can look at yours and I see that on the top here, it's pretty smooth. As we've talked about, our sharp corners and our smooth corners, to make a smooth corner that we flip, you're going to use your guide. Let's cover this real fast here before we get going, make sure under view, makes sure that smart guides and snap to point are clicked. Smart guides are these nice little notes that show up and they're basically just help you say you're on the guide as opposed to not being on the guide. That's going to really help you. On the guide here, I'm going to do the top of the head. I'm going to click drag, hold down shift so that it's a nice straight, nice smooth curve. Because then when I flip this, it's going to be a perfect round top, which is going to be great. Then I'm going to come over here, and remember this is like our clock. This would be like nine on the clock. I'm going do a curve here. Then we're going to break our angle like we've talked about. Then I'm going to come on down. This would be six on the clock. I'm going to go and then click, hold down shift, and pull it. That's going to help it be a straight angle for when we flip it. As you look at this, you go, that doesn't look like a raccoon. It doesn't yet, because the beauty of this, we're going to take our direct select tool and really play with our shapes. I'm going to go in here and make this curve down. Then this, I want to come up a little more. I'll make it straight and I don't know if it needs to be. I'm going to do that. That's one-half of the shape. I'll draw a little more before I flip it just to have a little bit of substance going. I'm going to go to my ellipse and draw a circle. I just get that going. I understand that not all of you are going to have round eyes like this raccoon, I'm going to perceive this as round, so if you do need to do a shape of an eye, a human eye, let's just do that for fun. I'm going to click drag and then we're going to break our angle or break our handle. Hold our option click and then close it off and it's going to be a straight line. I know it's a straight line because when I drew that, there was a little guide that showed up by smart guide and that's what you're going to draw on to. Now we're going to do shift X and make that a solid fill. Now it's a closed shape. Now I'm going to go up object transform, transform each. You see our preview, it wants to flip it that way because we have this clicked on the side and we have X clicked. We're going to do it on the y or vertical axis and then we're going to do this right there, so it's centered. That's going to be perfect. See as I toggle this. Now, if I did, okay, it would just flip it, but I want to copy it so that it'll keep your existing and then make a new one. There you go. I'm going to take that and I selected all that with my selection tool V, put a pathfinder merge so it's one shape. We're going to do shape tags. There we go. Not only are we going to flip our drawing and merge it to make a full face, you can also do things like I just did for the ears, the eyes, the nose. You draw a one-half, you flip it, merge it, and then you have your shape. That's something you would do if you have an eye. Now I'm going to do some of the fun things with the fur. Maybe the eyes a little lower here. We're not going to worry about that too much. I'll quickly do some of the fur things and the lines. We don't have to draw perfectly in this shape. I'm going to show you something very cool, the shape builder later, that's going to help us really quickly and easily make this fit within our animal face here. I click drag, and I was going to continue. Now as I kind of see in my reference, I'm going to do something like this. It's perfectly fine that our lines are coming off the shape like I said. This is just to get some loose lines down and give us the idea. I'm not going to do a perfectly symmetrical ear right now. I'm just going to click drag. Drag a little bit. Break our angle, optional, and then click drag. I'm not going to worry about it being perfectly symmetrical. I don't know if it needs to be. I'll close this off just so we have it. I may change that later, but this is at least an ear right now, and now I'm going to do the nose, and I see how the nose, it almost comes down to the bottom. But it has this flat bottom, which I'm going to take advantage of, I'm going to have it right here, click shift, drag. Then just like the clock, this would be six, this will be nine, and then will come up I will say that's our 12. I'm going to break this, here, I'm going to zoom in, break it, I already broke it I think. Then just you see how my guide just showing me that I'm in a straight line there, I'm just going to click. I'll just make that straight across. I don't know if I'll keep that, but. It's looking like a raccoon. I'm not saying it's perfect, but that's not the point. That's not the point of this video, this particular video right here. This is just to get some lines down and to say, all right, this is the shape. This is what the eye will look like, these are basic lines, and believe it or not, it will not take too much time between right now and in our next video for this thing to really look like a raccoon and they have us going towards the end of this project. I'm going to do some lines, like some fur lines here, add a little bit of detail and then I'll do a little bit down here as well. This is going to be different for everyone, if you had something like a turtle, it's not going to have fur lines, but it will have lines and different shapes and colors for the scales or the different parts of the face. Even though your project may be entirely different from this one, or your animal. This is still very vital part of drawing it, laying out our lines. I'm going to do here is click drag, and I'm not going to create one line, I'm going to have these overlap each other. I'm going to do. This is just to give me some loose lines of I don't know if I want to do that. That's what a lot of this is, it's trial and error, I can't do this. It'll meet, let's see, I might have this come around and come in like this, we'll have to see if that'll work or not. Then we'll also do just align, you see how this has whiskers, this won't be final, but we'll just do click, drag, click drag, and have a nice long whisker there. That'll just show us like see, that's looking like a raccoon already. Now what you're going to do just to make sure you're on the right track, when you flip this, I'm going to select all of this. If I just click on my guide O Alt Option, sometimes this doesn't work without grouping at all. Sometimes it'll flip things and it'll look like Picasso, it won't look like the animal. Sometimes I group it, but this one pretty much works, I'm just going to stick with it, copy. What this is, is a test, this is a test of like, "Is this what I'm looking for?" Some of it, yes and some of it not. Up here, this is a little pointy for my liking, I'd rather have it stretch out, and then I'm not too thrilled about I feel like this is narrow. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it. But at least it's on my radar, and I feel like the nose is too high up. What this does when you flip it, it helps you see like, "What do I need to change to this?" The fun part of this, we're going to keep this side, but we're going to change this side. Then we'll delete this side later. What this is doing is helping us see a before, will see this before and after. You get to see them next to each other and go, "You know what? I'm not a fan of this, so I'm going to tweak it here." Then it allows you to see how far you've come, which is cool. I'm going to click that, and I'm going to drag this out. I want it to be a little rounder so that when we flip it, it's really round. Yes, I wanted a little higher, maybe a different angle, I feel like it's a little, we'll see,. Then here we'll bring this down. We'll have this a little lower, and make this, I'll bring this down, so let's delete this. I'm actually going to delete this line to see if maybe I'm just not a fan of it. See what it looks like without it. I'm going to select them all again, optional, copy, that's a little better there. I'm happier with this. I'm not saying it's finished, but at least I like words going. Now that we have our outlines, we're going to keep going in our next video, and we're going to fill these lines in with some colors and delete some of these over hanging things and really start filling in our drawing. You're going to be amazed, this is going to start ramping up and looking like a finished product very soon. 6. Class Project: Drawing Our Shapes: The next step we're going to take is really important. What we're going to do is take this drawing that now is a series of lines, and we're going to fill those lines and make them into shapes. Then we're going to tweak them. This is a very important video and a very important step. Through this video, it's really going to take shape in this animal, whatever you have in front of you. It's really going to start looking like a final project. What I'm going to do here is delete this side, because we're going to flip it, but we're going to flip it individually as pieces. This next step, if you don't follow with me and if you don't do it with me, it'll be boring to watch. I really hope you're following along with your class project and doing it with me because this is an important step. Right now, all of our lines are on one layer called lines. Now we're going to make a new layer. Each object is going to be on its own layer. I'm going to do an ears layer. I'll just do these all right now and then we'll paste them at different points. We have ears, what else do we have? We have eyes. Now this is going to start getting different for each person. Some of us might not have noses. I don't know. It's a little nose layer. Then what else? I have this dark area around the eye, so I'm going to call it dark eyes. Then what else? I have the hairline. I'm going to do that. It's going to be on its own layer, hairline. You can call these anything that makes sense to you. I'm big into layers and I'm big into organizing files, so this is important. Then we have a whisker layer, whiskers. Then what you can do, so that we get it out of the way is to think, oh, I'm going to have a main shape. I'll call it main face, and that'll be the main shape of our face. That should be everything, I don't thing I'm forgetting anything. Now that these are not in the correct order, but you're going to think about, all right, what's the layer order that these are going to be in? What's going to be on top and what's going to be on the bottom. We'll start with the eye, the eye will be on top and so will the whisker. I'm not going to cut this. I'm not going to delete off this line's layer. We're going to leave your lines layer, all this stuff right here intact, just in case we need it, to need to go back and use it. I'm going to just take my selection tool, click on it, copy, and then I'm going to go to eyes. Sometimes it doesn't want to paste in front. I'm going to try it one more time, and if that doesn't work, it did not. I'm going to lock all these except for the one I want. I'm going to do eyes. Then what's next? Dark eyes is going to go under your eyes. Let me unlock that. Then when you take away the lines layer, you can see that what we're doing is making sense and actually going on the right layers. What's going to be next? These hairline that'll go on one. Hairline should go beneath dark eyes, so that we can see it. Like I said, I hope you're following. If you're working on a shark, you're doing the teeth, you're doing the eye. If you're working on a chicken, maybe you have a beak, maybe you have a crazy thing on top of its head. I don't know what's it's called. Forget if I copy this. I'll just do it again. We'll copy over to the ear, and the ear is going to be on the bottom because I'm actually going to have my ear underneath the face. The ear is there, things I have left take away by lines. I have the main face, I have the nose that I still have left. Let's do the nose. Nose can also go on top or towards the top. Even though this takes a little time, it's really going to help you organize. Our layers are going to be in the right order. We're going to have layers, and it's going to be very easy to just change these into shapes. We're going to have color and we're going to have, a pretty realized animal face here. It's going to be good. Other things I have, I've got my main face and I've got my whisker. I'm going to copy that. Main face is going to be above ears. That's correct. Then I have whiskers. I think that's the last thing. Make sure lines is unlocked. Our whiskers' on top, paste in front. When you are copying these and pasting, you want to make sure you're either pasting front or pasting behind, because then it pastes it in the correct position. If you just do paste, your whisker might end up over here, or eye might be over here, who knows? I always do paste in front, paste behind. If not for the order, then you're doing it for the exact placement. It's just smart to do. It's a good habit to get into. I took away my lines layer, and everything still shows up. You know what I'm going to do here? I'm going to take my guide, take it off that layer, and I'm going to make my own guide layer, so that I always have it on, because we're still going to use that. Now we have everything on its own layer. That's going to be very helpful. I'm not going to worry about color too much. As we're filling these things in, I'm going to make a pretty much gray scale. You can do gray scale or you can pick whatever colors you want. We'll worry about color right at the end. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take most of these shapes. I'll lock my guide just so this clicks to my actual. That closed off, shift x. Now I'm going to start closing these shapes off if they aren't closed. That's basically going to make them from paths. It's going to make them to shapes, so then I'm going to give these shades of gray. What that's going to do is just start filling in color. We're going to start looking at this stuff and going, oh wow, it's coming together here. I'm just going to start picking. We're going to close this off because we're getting to the point where we're going to use this shape builder. You know what? I'm going to make this really dark. When you do start filling in with color, even though it's gray scale, you do up to start thinking about, all right, what are the dark objects? The eye here is going to be very interesting. You see in my reference, my eye is pretty much black and this is close to black. I want this dark area around the eye to be dark, and I also want this to be dark. But I do have a couple of choices. I can either make my eye white and that really stands out. Here I'll also do this nose to really show you how this will be taking shape. Whisker. Not quite sure how I'll end up drawing the whisker but here's a quick thing I'll show you, you can go to Stroke, show options and then I'm going to; instead of cyan, I'll make this white. I don't do this often but sometimes these can come in handy. These are different profiles of strokes, they don't always work for what I'm doing but as you see, the width is the highest in the middle and then it thins out and pretty much it disappears on the ends. So that applies, if you apply that to your stroke, it actually does that and then as your width increases, your stroke increases. I'm at two point right now, it does that. That's a cool arc shape there, or path that will look pretty good for our whiskers. This is looking more and more like a raccoon. Now what I drew, maybe you have some of these as well, you drew a couple lines that are going to serve as guides for maybe some details in your animal so at this step I'm going to do my hair, you know how this raccoon has a couple of spots that are the hair. I'm going to do that here so let's make a new layer, it's going to be under my dark eyes. I forgot my hairline and I'm going to keep it on hairline because hairline is, or I'm going to keep hairline and then do a layer above it. So this is my guide and then I'm actually going to draw the shape over it. I'm going to zoom in here and just like this hangs off, I'm also going to do the same thing here and then we'll take care of it very soon with our own shape builder. I'm going to use my Cyan guide here to help me decide how I'm going to break this handle and I'm going to do, let's see what's going to look good here. I'm not sure it's going to be great in the final but we'll just try it out. I'm going to break this again and just have it hang off. This might not work but let's see. I'm going to bring that back. This is going to need some tweaking, but we can certainly do that, so with my direct select tool. Let's take away this hairline just to see if that's looking okay. If you're ever drawing lines and you want to make sure how they look, like really look then you do command Y and then it's like an x-ray, it's the outline; you see it in outlines. Then you can see if your curves are really looking good and you don't have any color and you don't have any distractions from how it really looks, so it gives you the truth pretty much and you also get to see what this shape looks like underneath, so I do that, I toggle back and forth a lot, that's very helpful. I did that and that's hanging it off which is totally fine and then I'm going to do, you see this little hair here that comes over? I'm going to do, let's do that under the nose, what's that going to be called? Mouth white and you can name these anything that makes sense. To me, that makes sense, to someone else they'd be like, ''What.'' So that's going to come in and then I'm going to have it meet here and it will follow that contour. This is just some detail that we're going to add in, hopefully this will look okay. I'm going to zoom in a little bit and we're going to break this handle, and then this is going to meet at our middle and that's just going to make it easier to flip. So now that I've drawn that, I realize that layer needs to be under my dark eyes, there we go. Let's go to outlines just see you can see. I need to trim three objects and I'm going to do that right now. I'm going to change these to objects to a different color just so you can see them because right now it's hard. I'll do blue, it's cool, I like that. So this is a very fun, I can unlock all this stuff. This is shape builder. When I first saw shape builder, it was pretty much my reaction was probably the same reaction as the first people at the world's fair when they saw a TV for the first time, it was crazy, so hopefully you'll have that reaction too, maybe not. The first one we'll do is this one, this light area around the eye and then I'll click on my main shape, hold down Shift, click. So I have two objects. What I'm going to do is go to shape builder, click on that and you see where there's a plus. For this we're going to do minus so that's going to be Option or Alt, you hold it down, don't click it just hold it down, and then you go over the area and "boom." If you didn't quite see what happened there it's okay because we're going to do it two more times. I'm going to do this piece; Shift, click shape builder. Remember we want option and you can click there. We are going to do it one more time. I can go back to the to get my selection tool. We are going to do this piece and this piece, here we go. Shape builder, hold that option Alt minus, click. What this did was basically made it so easy to clip this stuff and it's perfectly aligned with the shape, it's so helpful. I used to have to do different pathfinder methods to do that. I'm going to change his back. You know what? I like this blue so I'm going to do this, copy it, paste it, and I'm going to do something here. So in this next video we're about to do, we're going to add details and this will be a little sneak preview into doing that. What we're going to do here, I'm going to take this to my eye dropper, do that because I like that blue. I thought it was cool. This is how I'm going to do my eye. I'm going to take this and you might have an eye that you can do this with, copy, paste in front. I'm going to make it pretty much a black and you say, " Oh no, the eye went away, the nice blue eye." Don't worry, because we're going to do transform scale and now the last thing I did must have been non-uniform, so we're going to click on Uniform and we're going to make it, let's see. We'll see it, that's good 67, that's good. You can preview it so that you can see. You're going to do okay and then, this is fun. We're going to click, copy, paste in front, drag the corner here, hold down Shift. What that does is you can scale it from a corner, so it goes up here to white for a nice reflection and we're going to make this a little smaller. That's just a little sample of what we're going do; the types of stuff adding highlights in our next video but as you see here, it started to look like a raccoon and we're going to select all this, click on our guide or go hover over our guide, O option and then we did a vertical copy. As I'm looking at this, I might make my eye bigger, but it's starting to look like a raccoon, it's starting to look like our finished product. So we will keep going and start adding details. 7. Class Project: Adding the Details: Now that we have our animal pretty well underway, we're going to add some details and maybe change some colors, and that's going to really be the final step. I'm going to add some highlights and shadows, and I'll show you some simple things that you can do with the pen tool that really helps you do that. I deleted the right side because we're still going to be making tweaks to things, I made my eye bigger, I'm added some whiskers, and so let's keep going on adding some details. The first thing I'm going to do is tweak this ear. I'm going to add a shadow and a highlight. I have my ear, and then I'm going to add a new layer here, shadow and then you can either draw a line inside and then use a shape builder, but I'm just going to draw it from scratch, so click, drag and all this is the interior of the ear. Click, drag, and then I'll show you in my reference, but I saw this little like nub that he had on his ear or she, this raccoon and so I'm going to just add that and that's just going to be a little piece of detail. Let's zoom in, break that angle. As I look at this with outline mode, I'm going to see that rather have this be a smoother curve, there we go. What I'm going to do here, I'm going to make this a little lighter. See, it's pretty subtle there. We're going to actually make two shadows, so I'm going to take what we already have this ear shadow, duplicate it, click that down, and then this ear shadow, it's going to be, I can either have it be my top or bottom is going to be my bottom because I'm going to make it darker. In vector work, you can have a flat shape, which is great, but if you start adding these different shapes inside of it and they have different subtleties, it really adds some depth, so that's what we're doing here. I mean, this is fine, but I'm going to draw a line here, divide it, and then make this darker. It's just going to add some depth, so I'm just making a curve here. I'm going to take away, I don't need a fill on this. Basically, I have a line and I have the shape. I could use my shape builder, but I'm going to show you guys something I don't know if I've done yet, which is divide under Pathfinder, so I divide it and then you always have to remember to ungroup it because then these are now two different pieces. I'm going to delete that and then I'm going to make this, just going to go up here like a darker color. You know what, as I look at this, I want this to be this color, and then I want this to be like pretty much black. Let's see how that looks. Here we go. Now what that's doing is just adding some little details, and now the next thing we're going to do is add a highlight onto this ear, which we can also duplicate our ear layer, because we're just going to use what's already drawn and then what we can do here, we're only going to use one line so I'm going to take my direct select, click on it, and then I'm going to copy it, make a new layer, ear highlight because all we're using is that one line. Lock that, paste in front. I'll zoom in so you can see this here, and then I'm going to ''Option'', ''Home'', ''Click''. I'm going to do a sharp edge here, let's see how this works. It's going to follow the contour, I'm going to cut my angle there, close it, and now I get to choose like a highlight color, something like that. Since it's like next to the white, it doesn't really pop. Let's just go ahead and do this. We're going to make a background color, so I did M to make a correct angle or a square, and then I'm just going to choose like a random. I mean, you can choose anything. No idea how this is going to work, I have it too bright. We just wanted to show something like that. There we go. I know that's crazy bright, but at least we can see our highlight now, and we're going to the whiskers, and then I'll just lock this. Now, let's do another step. What we're just going to do, we're going to add a middle line to the face, and that's going to be above my main face line. This is going to be really simple. I'm going to go to my middle guide, click "Drag", I'm going bring that back and make that just a color. What that's going to be is when we flip it will cool, but it's basically just like another marking on the fur that we'll just add some detail. Then something else you can do, we'll just do this now. I'll do a nose highlight. You don't always have to draw half and then flip it like this, I'll do a long circle or ellipse. It's just an oval. I'll make this actually, I'll make it pretty much close to white. Then I'll go to Align on our board like it was, and then it's aligned. I might make that a little smaller. Now, I don't want to flip that, it's just going to be there, that's going to be a nice little highlight for the nose. You can do little details like that, I think will look pretty good. We're going to, not too much more here, we're winding down. I'll do one more align that's going to serve as a highlight to this part on the top, help us bring some detail to this part. You know what, I'm also going to do another detail here as I think about it. I have this detail and I'll just draw this on the same layer. I'm going to go to my guide, click "Shift" and drag, and I am going to follow the contour of the top of the head as best as I can. I'm just going to add in like just a fur line. Option I'll break my angle there, break my handle, bring it back. Now as I look at this, I'm going to tweak that angle here. We want this to follow this a little bit. I'm going to correct that angle, maybe bring this down a little. Little markings like this go along way. They just add a little bit. I can't say I'm totally thrilled with that, but like I've said earlier, this is something that you can keep tweaking and always go back to. I'm going to pick something that's just a little darker, just to be subtle. I can do the same here. I dropped her. I'll keep that dark. This is coming together. I was going to put a highlight up top, but I think I'm good. Now I'm going to just show you how we'll flip this. You're pretty much going to unlock everything that you want to flip. Highlight everything. Reflect it, copy, hide my guide. I may tweak some things, but we've got a nice symmetrical raccoon here. Now I'll show you some quick things before, I think I'm pretty much done where we can mess with some color. I'm going to hide this. What we can do, take that way. This is not a course in color, but I'll just give you a few tips here. Color guide is awesome. You're going to get that from your window it's up here, color guide. Then you can click on a color, click on it here, and then all these options show up, which are based on the color guide. You can look at these groups and if you like one, I'll just do this. I'll click on "right complement.", and then I'll say "save colors as swatches" and it'll save it right here. Then I can go through, I'll click on this Grey and then do "select" "same" "fill color." It's going to select any of the same fill color, and then I'll just go in here. I don't know if this is going to work, but I can go ahead and select, save, fill color. I'll do something a little darker. You can just play around with color. You might come up with colors that you never would have thought would work. Like I didn't think when I started, I wasn't going to do a blue raccoon. Maybe this won't stay blue, but it's at least for now. Let's see if that will work. See you can do yellow highlights. I don't know if this will look good. It's interesting. This basically, the color guide gives you options to do something that you find never would have thought of. That's fun. Yeah. As you're finishing this up, add your details, play with color if you want, and that's pretty much it. What you can do, we'll go in here and I know this isn't perfectly to my raccoon, but can't say I'm totally in love with this color palette, but that's okay. We can always edit it. That's very easy to edit. We'll actually just make this really dark. Now you have, hopefully I've finished animal head that you can save and you can add it on, you can put it on wallpaper. You could do a pattern to put on products like I do. Or you could just put this as a print and hang it in a kid's room. The reason why I like these animal heads is they're so versatile and you can do different colors and it's a lot of fun. I also love working in a square like this because I can export this. Export as and I can do a JPEG and then boom, it's ready for Instagram or ready for social media. I hope you've come up with something great and please post this to the class project. I really want to see what you guys come up with. I'm going to pick my top three favorite ones and I will give you shout outs on Instagram. I'll reach out to you, I don't want to make it too much of a competition, but I do want people to strive for the best that they can do. Well, thank you. Time for our closing. 8. Thank You!: So in closing, I basically want to say thank you. This is the first skillshare class I've taught, so I appreciate you signing up. Now, as we've covered everything today and mastering the Pen tool, I want you to know that this is the foundation. It's going to take practice, it's going to be a while, until you really feel comfortable and really master it. I've done it for a while and I'm still learning. So if you have any questions about this class, feel free to leave those comments on this class page, or if you're on Instagram, if you message me on Instagram, I'll get back to you. I always appreciate it when I reach out to someone I don't even know, and they get back to me. It's always great. So I will do that for you. This class is for you guys, and I hope you all have learned something. I'll see you later and I hope to see you in my next one.