Vector Illustration for Beginners: Launch Your Creative Journey with Adobe Illustrator

1. Welcome to Class!: [MUSIC] Whether you want to design a logo, an editorial illustration, or just have some creative fun, Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard for vector illustration. To create something that's infinitely scalable is a great asset to have because you never have to worry that the quality of your work is too low to display. Vector illustration gives you this ability. My name is Kyle Aaron Parson. I'm a Graphic Designer and Illustrator based in Edmonton, Canada, and I want to welcome you to a vector illustration for beginners. For more than a decade I've sidelined as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator, and in that time I've been able to work on many objects like award-winning logo design, editorial illustrations, and I even got a chance to illustrate my own coloring book. Adobe Illustrator has been a cornerstone of many of my projects although at first I had a hard time working in Illustrator because I came from a traditional background and I didn't understand what tools did what tasks. However, working in Illustrator over the past decade has allowed me to understand how the tools work and what tools work best to create engaging illustrations. These are the things that I want to teach you today. I believe having a firm foundation in Adobe Illustrator is a fantastic way to launch your creative journey. Over the course of this class, I'll show you how you can take advantage of many of Illustrator's essential tools. We'll cover how to customize your workspace so that you can focus on your creative work, how to use the layers panel to separate your illustration into manageable sections, and I will also guide you through the basic building blocks of vector illustration such as how to use the pen tool and get you acquainted with the shape-building tools in Adobe Illustrator. Along the way, we'll learn key keyboard shortcuts. Through this you'll be able to quickly navigate your screen and produce your illustrations. Learning a new program can be daunting. Trust me I know everybody is a beginner at first, however, I made this class so that anyone can follow along. As we make progress through our illustration there will be micro lessons that will get you acquainted with some of the tools that we'll be using in the class. Through this not only will you learn how the tool works but you will also see a practical way to apply it to your illustrations. Although this is a beginner class, I believe that even if you have some experience in Adobe Illustrator, you'll benefit from some of the tips and tricks described in this class so that you can add it to your current practice and launch your creative journey. If you're ready to launch your creative journey with vector illustration, I will see you in class. 2. Your Class Project: Your project for this class is to create your very own vector illustration in Adobe Illustrator. You can follow along and recreate the illustration I'll be doing in class or you can take what you learn and apply it to your own design. I have provided the sketch that I'll be using in class so that you can follow along and recreate the illustration, as well as the final Illustrator file so that you can use that as reference. Along with the project files, I've provided a cheat sheet of key keyboard shortcuts and tools that we'll be using in class. If you don't know how something is done you can always reference the keyboard shortcut cheat sheet and find your answer there. Then you can quickly get back to your illustration and make some progress. Getting familiar with the keyboard shortcuts takes time, however, I found that this is one of the best ways to speed up your illustration practice. Even if you have to use the keyboard shortcut cheat sheet from time to time, eventually, you'll build a habit and it'll become second nature to you. We won't be going over tools in any specific order, however, when a tool is needed as we make progress on our illustration, at that time, I will briefly explain about the tools so that you can understand how it works and then you will see how we can apply it to our illustration. For tools that need a bit more explanation, I have made micro lessons to get you familiar with the tool and how it works and then we will jump back into our illustration and see a practical way how we can apply it. If you're ready to get started download the project files and I'll see you in the next class. 3. Setting up Your Document: [MUSIC] Welcome to the first class where we'll go over how to set up your document and also organize the windows in Adobe Illustrator so that we can access the tools we need to complete our illustration. Let's jump into Illustrator and figure these things out. Jumping right in here. We can see that when we open Illustrator, it opens up to the home menu where we have a few different options. The one that we need to consider right now is the new file option. Let's click "New File" and set up our document. Illustrator has an assortment of custom documents setup for specific illustration purposes, whether that be for Web, film or video, art and illustration or for print. We're just going to click on Print and we're going to make a custom illustration. Depending on what we're working with, we can choose the type of measurement we want to use in our illustration. For the sake of simplicity, we're going to go with pixels and we're going to change it to 1,000 by 1,000. We're going to hit "Create." If you want a different document size, that's all up to you. But for this class, for simplicity sake, we're just going to set it to pixels and 1,000 by 1,000. Jumping into the document here we can see a few things. Over on the left-hand side we have our toolbar, in the middle here we have our art board. Our art board is where our illustration will be contained. At the end of the class, when we export our illustration, only the items within the art board will be exported. We got to keep that in mind as we develop our illustration. We can see that there are different types of menus here. Now, we don't need all the menus open for our illustration, but we do want some of them and we want to organize our document a little bit. Illustrator has a few different pre-made templates of different types of workspaces depending on your needs. If you want to look around at the essential, essentials classic, layout, painting, printing, and those ones, you can definitely feel free to check those out. But for us, we're actually going to customize our workspace to fit the needs of our illustration. We can do that by using the Window menu. In the Window menu, the first thing that I want you to open up is control. This opens up the control bar at the top so it allows us to easily access some of the key tools that we need to complete our illustration. The second thing I want you to do is I want you to turn on your toolbar, change it from basic to advanced. This opens up a few different tools in our toolbar so that we have access to assortment of tools rather than just the basic ones given. This will be useful as we continue to create our illustration. If we go over to the right-hand side, you see docked panels over here. What we can do is we can customize this to fit our needs. We're not going to use properties, so we can actually drag it out and exit it. We're not going to use libraries for this class. We are going to use the layers panel, but we're not going to use the comments. We clean up our workspace a little bit, but now we want to set up key menus that we will use throughout the class. Let's jump back into Window and let's go down to the Align panel. The Align panel opened up here and it came with a few different panels with it. The Transform panel I'm going to drag out because I'm not going to use that, but we're going to use the Align panel and the Pathfinder panel. We're going to drag it up and dock it with our Layers panel. What we can see here is that it allows me to open only one panel at a time because they're side by side. However, what I can do is I can stack them one on top of another. I can drag it up and put it in between the two and have all the panels open at the same time. What's cool about this? This is a docked panel. There's a little toggle at the side that collapses into icons so that you can have them open or closed as you need. When they're closed, you have the ability to open one panel at a time. We'll keep them open for now and as we go through the illustration, we can open and close them as needed. In the Windows panel, let's go to color. We're going to dock it not in the same column, but we're going to make a new column just for our color purposes. We're going to click on Color Guides and we're going to drag it out and get rid of it. We're not going to use it in this class. The next thing I want you to go down to is the Swatches panel. We're going to take out some of the other panels that we won't use, like the symbols panel and I'm going to drag this underneath my color panel. Now I have two docked locations. We have the color menu with our swatches and our color, and we also have the other docked menu, which has our layer panel, our pathfinder panel, and our align panel. The purpose of this class was to show you that you can customize your workspace to fit your illustration and your needs. Play around with it as we go through the class and if there's something that you need that isn't open, you can always access it in the Windows folder. I'll see you in the next class where we will learn how to quickly navigate the screen. 4. Navigating the Workspace: [MUSIC] Welcome to the second class where we'll learn how to navigate the screen. I brought in our vector illustration for beginners keyboard shortcut cheat sheet. This allows me to easily see the keyboard shortcuts that I need to complete my illustration. We're going to go through the first three columns very briefly so that you understand what they do. The number one thing I want you to realize is that all of these tools that I'm going to go through are in your toolbar on the left-hand side. However, instead of going always back-and-forth to the left-hand side and selecting your tools, it's much easier and much more efficient to learn the keyboard shortcuts. At first, if you don't know the keyboard shortcuts, keep this keyboard shortcut cheat sheet handy so you can reference it when needed, so that you can quickly learn the keyboard shortcuts and add efficiency to your illustration practice. The first thing that I want to go through is navigating the workspace. The first one is the spacebar. The spacebar opens up the hand tool or the pen tool so we can click and drag. Holding space, we click and drag and we can pan around our screen. The second one is Control Spacebar. If you hit "Control" and the spacebar, it opens up our zoom tool. If we click and drag that tool, we can zoom in and out of our illustration. Using these in tandem allows us to quickly move through our illustration. The next tools that I want to show you are the selection tools and the shape tools. In order to understand the selection tools, we first have to make a shape. Let's begin with our shape tools. The first one is our rectangle tool. Our rectangle tool is M on the keyboard and when we do that, we can click and drag out a rectangle of any size. When we click and drag, without holding any hotkeys, we can loosely get a rectangle and it drags out from the corner. However, if we want to drag it out from the center, all we got to do is hold Alt on our keyboard and now we can create one right from the center. Depending on what you're creating, you might want to do it from the center, you might want to create it from the corner. This works both for the rectangle tool as well as the ellipse tool. Another thing that you want to consider is the fact that this is not a uniform square. What if I want a perfect square? How do I do that is I just hold "Shift" on my keyboard and it constrains the proportions to create a perfect square. If you're using the ellipse tool, it will create a perfect circle. If I want to create a perfect circle or a perfect square from the center, I hold "Shift" and "Alt" and it'll create it from the center. That's a quick explanation of how to use the shape tools in Adobe Illustrator. The next thing I want to show you is the selection tools. The first selection tool is the V on our keyboard. That's the general selection tool and the one you might use most often in Adobe Illustrator. This allows you to quickly select an item and move it around or quickly scale the item. The difference between the general selection tool and the direct selection tool is the general selection tool selects the shape as a whole, but the direct selection tool allows you to select specific points of the shape in itself. If I hit "A" on my keyboard, it allows me to activate the direct selection tool. Now I can click an individual point and I can drag that point anywhere I want. One thing I can do is I can select multiple points. If I hold "Shift" and click, I can grab those two points and I can drag those two points anywhere I want. Another way to do that is if I click and drag over my points, that creates the same selection as if I did it Shift click. That's our selection tools. As an added bonus to understanding the selection tool, we have to understand that we can do a few things with it. With our V key activated, we can click on our item and as we're moving it or before we're moving it, we can click "Alt". This allows us to duplicate the shape. As you can see, when I hit "Alt" on my keyboard, it changes to a double arrow. That means I'm going to duplicate this shape one after another. A perfect copy will be taken there. If I hold "Shift" on my keyboard, that constraints the proportions to drag it out perfectly horizontally. I can drag it perfectly 45 degrees or perfectly up and down vertically. Now we understand how we can navigate our workspace very easily using the key keyboard shortcuts such as the spacebar, and using the selection tools like V and A to either generally select or directly select specific things in our artwork. In our next class, we are going to place our sketch into our illustration and really start bringing our illustration to life. 5. Beginning Your Vector Illustration: [MUSIC] All right, guys. We're finally going to get started in creating our illustration. What we're going to do first is we're going to place our sketch into our artboard. How do we do that? We can go up to file and we can go down to place. That opens up the menu and we can find the folder where our sketch is in and we can hit "Place" and we can click and drag the sketch into our artboard and we can click our V tool and move it around wherever you want. One thing that we want to do is we want to get rid of some of this dark area on the side, so we can go up to the top bar menu and click "Crop." We can drag out our handles and we can fit our crop to wherever we like and we will hit "Enter" to activate the crop. The next thing that we want to do is we want to open one more menu that I forgot to open, and that is the transparency menu. I'm going to open up the transparency menu and I'm going to dock it within my colors and I'm going to open up the transparency menu. Now what I can do with the transparency menu is I can go in and change the opacity, I can bring down the opacity of my sketch layer to maybe 60 percent, so it's not so harsh and it fades into the background because we're going to be building our illustration on top of this sketch, we don't need it to be too prominent. The next thing that we can do is we can open up our layers panel and we see that we have our item on our layers panel and we're going to label that sketch. What we can do is we can lock the layers that we're not working on, so we don't accidentally select the stuff on that layer, so we're going to lock that layer and we're going to go down and create a new layer and I'm going to name that rocket. We set up our document with the sketch layer underneath, we created a new layer where we'll do our rocket ship illustration on. How we are going to create our rocket ship is we're going to use the basic building blocks of illustrator, and that is the shape tools. When we use the shape tools, we are able to get very clean mathematically correct shapes and lines and curves, what we want to do is we want to be able to build with these shape tools. We're going to hit "L" on our keyboard and we're going to start creating a circle. One thing you can see here is when I drag out my circle, it has a white fill. Actually, I don't want to work with the fills right now because I still want to see my illustration in the background. I want to switch this from a fill to a stroke, so over in the side panel here, you can see that I have my fill and my stroke, my stroke currently is empty and my fill is white, so I can actually click this toggle here and I can swap my fill and my stroke. Now that's cool, but what I want to do is I want to change this color to black, so I can double click on that stroke and I can change it to black, now you can see my stroke has changed to black. Now I'm going to delete this one and recreate it, so I'm going to hit "L" on my keyboard, and I'm going to click right in the center and I'm going to drag it out, but I want to make a perfect circle, so I'm going to hold Shift to constrain the proportions and drag it out just about there. Now what I want to do is I want to line up this circle with the edge of my rocket ship because it's pretty much a perfect circle like that. The next thing that I want to do is I want to make the second edge. I already made the circle, I don't have to make it again, what I can do with my V selection tool activated, I can hold Alt and click and drag it to the side holding Shift to make it perfectly horizontally, I can line it up with that second side. All right, guys. One thing I want to show you how to use is the Pathfinder Panel in Adobe Illustrator. To understand this, we have to understand the basic building blocks of Adobe Illustrator and that is actually the path. I'm going to switch this circle back to a black fill and I'm going to hit "Control Y." Control Y allows me to see the skeleton of my illustration. Even though there was a black fill and a black stroke, in essence, they're both these circle paths. A path is the skeletal structure in Adobe Illustrator, and then all the colors, gradients, strokes are built upon the paths. Now the Pathfinder Panel allows us to use existing paths and finds new paths out of them. In our next micro class or our micro lesson, we're going to learn how exactly the Pathfinder Panel works and how we can use it in our illustration. 6. Micro Lesson: Pathfinder Panel: [MUSIC] Welcome to our first micro lesson on the Pathfinder panel. The Pathfinder panel makes it super easy to create custom shapes in Adobe Illustrator. It takes the existing paths that you've created and finds new paths out of them. That might mean it takes your existing paths and unites them into one single path, or it might take the points where your two paths intersect and make a new path there. There are many ways that the Pathfinder panel can create new shapes for you. Let's see some of the options and what are the results of these options? When you use Unite in the Pathfinder panel, it'll find the path surrounding all your selected objects and create that into one new path. When you use Minus Front in the Pathfinder panel, it'll take the path that is higher in your layers panel and remove it from the path below. If you use Intersect in the Pathfinder panel, it'll find where your two paths intersect and create a new path there. When you use Exclude, it'll find where your paths intersect and create a shape using everything else. Now that we understand a little bit about the Pathfinder panel, let's see how we can apply it to our illustration. [MUSIC] 7. Applying the Pathfinder Panel: [MUSIC] Now that we know how to use the Pathfinder panel, we're going to apply it to our illustration. So let's jump right in. The first thing that we see here is that we got our two paths or two circles. Now, what we want to do is we want to create one path that is just the outline of our rocket ship. We can select both of them and go to our Pathfinder panel. With our Pathfinder panel open, we have to decide how we want our paths to interact. We can either do unite minus front, intersect or exclude. We have a few other options underneath. But for this one, we want the path where the two intersect. Simply we're going to click "Intersect". What did that do? It created a new path out of the paths that we're currently existing. That's what the Pathfinder does. It finds new paths out of the existing paths depending on their relationship. Hey, the next thing that we want to do is we want to square off this bottom section. We're going to create a rectangle underneath by using the M key. We're going to drag a simple rectangle and select them both. Now, what we want to do is we want to remove the bottom section. We have a few options. We can either unite minus front, intersect or exclude. I think the best one is minus front because we first had the rocket ship and then we built this one in front of it in our layers panel. So if we hit minus front, after selecting both, we will get our shape. The next thing that we want to do is we want to build up our wings. How we can do that? We already have an existing shape here and we're going to utilize that. We can hold Alt on our keyboard and we can drag out that shape and we can line it up with the outer edge of the wing. We can take that one and we can line it up with the bottom edge of the wing. Perfect. Now what we want is we want only this section and we want to remove the other two sections. In order to complete this task, it's actually easier to use a different shape-building tool, which is called the Shape Builder tool in Adobe Illustrator. So that is going to be our next micro lesson. 8. Micro Lesson: Shapebuilder Tool: [MUSIC] Welcome to our second micro lesson where we'll learn the Shape Builder tool. The Shape Builder tool is Shift+M on our keyboard. Just like the Pathfinder panel, it allows you to take the existing path that you have selected and find new paths out of them. However, the Shape Builder tool allows you to customize your selections with ease. Let's see how the Shape Builder tool works. The first thing we need to do is select all our objects. Once we select our objects, we click ''Shift+M'' on our keyboard to activate the Shape Builder tool. Now that the Shape Builder tool is activated, we can add or subtract from our selections. If we just simply click on the object, it creates a new path. However, if we hold Alt and click, it subtracts from the selection. When we click and drag, we can combine multiple sections of our existing paths. If we hold Alt and drag, we can subtract multiple sections of our existing path. By using this tool, we can easily create custom shapes with a click of a button. Now that we understand how to use the Shape Builder tool, let's apply it to our illustration. 9. Applying the Shapebuilder Tool: [MUSIC] Now that you understand how to use the Shape Builder tool, let's apply it to our illustration. What we can do is we can select everything in our illustration and we can hit "Shift M" to activate the Shape Builder tool. Now, all we want out of this is this section here. All I'm going to do, is I'm going to click on that section to add it as a new shape. Now what we see if we go into our Layers panel and we open it up. If I undo that, we can see I start with three shapes and then I use my Shape Builder tool and I click and a fourth shape emerged. It is the shape of built where all these three shapes intersect. Now what I can do is I can click the ones that were not affected and delete them. Now I'm left with just that single shape. Now what I can do is, I can actually duplicate this shape on the opposite side. That is going to introduce one of our first transformation tools, and that is the Reflect tool. How do we activate the Reflect tool? O on our keyboard activates the Reflect tool and it does what it says. It reflects it like a mirrored image or a mirrored copy along something called an anchor point. The anchor point is automatically put in the center of the object. However, we don't want to reflect it on the center of the object. We want to reflect it on the center of our rocket ship. When we first open up the O tool, we have the ability to click anywhere on our work board to move the anchor point to where we want it. I'm going to click right at the tip of my rocket ship because I know that's perfectly center. I click there and then I click my wing to drag it and I can hit "Alt" to duplicate it and I can hold "Shift" to constrain it to a perfect 90 degrees and now I have a perfect mirrored image of my wing. Again, if you need to access these tools in the Tool menu, you can find them on the side. If you want to access specific tools, sometimes they're hidden within other tools. The Rotate tool might be on top, but if you hold and select it brings up other options, just like the Shape tool. If we click and hold on the Rectangle tool, we have access to a few other shape tools like the Ellipse tool, Polygon tool, and Star tool. The next thing that we want to do is we want to add in a few little details. We want to make a tip and we want to make a base of our rocket ship. We're going to hit "M" on our keyboard and we're going to bring a rectangle right underneath and we're going to bring a rectangle right over top. [NOISE] Now what I want to do is I only want this section leftover from this shape. If I select this shape, my rocket ship and my base shape, and I hit "Shift M", I can then hold "Alt "on my keyboard to delete the sections I don't want. I don't want the outer section of this box and I don't want the outer section of the top box. Now I'm left with this shape, this shape, and this shape. The next thing that I want to do is I want to create the nozzle for my rocket ship. I'll zoom right in here and I'll hit "M" on my keyboard to bring up the Rectangle tool, and I'll drag out a rectangle. Now, I want to make sure that this is perfectly centered on my rocket ship. How can I do that? Is I can use the Align panel in my panel [inaudible]. My Align panel allows me to line things either to the left, to the right, vertically center, or horizontally centered. I want to have it horizontally centered with the top, with my rocket ship. I can select my first object, and I can select my second object. Now if I click another time on one of these objects, that creates it into a key selection and it allows me to align anything to that particular shape. Since that's the shape I want it to align to, I don't want it to move. I'm going to create it into a key shape and everything else that's selected will align to that shape. If I go into my Align menu and hit "Horizontally Align" it'll align it perfectly center. Let's just change that a little bit so you can see exactly what happens. Now if I select both, click on the top one and align. You can see that it perfectly align to my rocket ship. We're going to taper our nozzle. We want to have an outer taper. I'm going to bring this in and I'm going to use my Direct Selection tool. I want to taper out the bottom edge. One thing I can do is I can select one and I can drag it out, and I can select the other and drag it out as well. However, it's probably not perfect. How can I make it perfect? Let's hit "Control Z" on our keyboard to undo that. Now we can select both at the same time and we can hit "S" on our keyboard. S is the Scale tool. Now it automatically put our anchor point right in the center and that's perfect because we want it to scale from the center out. Now, if I click on one, I can drag it out and both of them scale from the center. If I hit "Shift", they stay horizontal. I'm going to bring it out like that. I'm going to make one more nozzle underneath in the reverse way. I'm going to hit "M" on my keyboard, I'm going to bring it there. I'm going to select that object, make it a key object, and align my bottom one horizontally. Now I'm going to Direct Select the bottom ones, hit "S" on my keyboard and I'm going to bring them in slightly like that. Now we have our rocket ship. It's really taking form and it looks very clean and crisp as a vector ship. Guys, so we're going to take what we created and we're going to apply some color to it in our next lesson. 10. Applying Color Fills: In this class, we're going to switch our strokes to fills and apply some color to our illustration. The first thing that we want to do, is we want to select all our line work, and we're going to hit "Shift X." This changes all our fields, all our strokes to fills. So now, everything is a cool black fill. Now we can select each object, and we can apply a color to it. So we can go to our Strokes panel, and we can take a color, and we can apply it to our design. I went ahead and already made my own color palette, that I'll use in this illustration. So If you want to use this color palette, you go right ahead, or, you can create your own mixing and matching. One thing you can do is, you can go into your color options here, and you can eye drop any color you want, and you can refine it by using the panels here. You have other options. You can either use RGB, you can use hue, saturation, and brightness. This might be the easiest to modify the colors in when you're first getting started. You can pick the hue, you can pick how saturated the hue is, and how bright it is in your illustration. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to go back to my swatches, and I'm going to use my preset color palette, to create this illustration. So I can select each part, and I can apply a color to it. I'm going to just hold "Shift" and click the sections that I want to apply the color to, and apply them with my swatches, and I'm going to apply it like that. I'm going to select this one and make it darker, and this one a lighter gray. So we quickly applied colors to our illustration. The next thing that we're going to do, is we're going to create custom details to really bring our illustration to life. 11. Using the Rotate Tool: In this class, we're going to add a few more details to our rocket illustration to really bring it to life. The next thing that we're going to do is we're going to create a simple people by using the L tool on our keyboard. We're going to click and drag it out and holding Shift to constrain the proportion and holding Alt to drag from the center. Now, we're going to align it like that. What we can do is we want to make a duplicate right over top of this one here. I'm going to hit "Control C" to copy and "Control F" to paste in place if it's in front right in front of my previous one, and I'm going to shrink this one down just a little bit. I'm going to bring this and give it a little darker tone, and I'm going to give this one maybe a red. That's looking pretty good. The next thing that I want to do is I want to make some rivets in the outer edge of this peephole. How can we do that? Is we can create a simple circle right at the top. As you see this, you see that a magenta lines popping up. These are called smart guides. If you don't see them, you can go to View and you can go to Smart Guides and you can activate them. It'll help you align things as you're creating you're illustrations. I'm going to go right up to the top and I'm going to make a little rivet right at the top. Remember holding Alt and Shift to constrain the proportions, and I'm going to create my simple circle like that. I'll give it maybe a dark gray and I'm going to do one more. I'm going to copy paste in front, and I'm going to shrink it down and I'm going to give it a lighter tone just like that. I'm going to select both of these and I'm going to group them together. If I hit "Control and G" it groups it together. When I move it, it all moves as one shape. I'm going to Control Z and put it back to where it was. I want to rotate this around the entire ring of my peephole. There is a transform tool called Rotate. You can find it in your menu over here or you can hit "R" on your keyboard. Again, the anchor point is aligned directly to the center of my shape but I don't want that. I'm going to try and find the center of my inner circle. I'm going to click on that, and it allows me to place my anchor point right there. If I click and drag, you can see that it rotates around my peephole perfectly. One thing you can do is you can transform it, and then you can use a keyboard shortcut to repeat that transformation multiple times. I'll show you how to do that. We're going to click on our center, and now we're going to click and drag holding Alt and duplicate it. Let's do it about there. If I hit "Control and D", it duplicates that transformation and repeats it over and over again. However, it's not perfect, you can see that these ones are closer together than the other transformations. It's because I didn't set up the degrees properly. I'm going to undo that Control Z. What I can do is if I activate my rotate function and I click on the center, now if I hold Alt and click on my center, it brings up the rotate menu. This allows me to input a specific degree, let`s say 30 degrees or 12 degrees or anything that I want. If I know the amount or the specific degrees I want, I can input them here, or if I know a specific amount I want, let's say if I wanted exactly 16 rivets to go around the outer edge of my peephole, I can do some math. I know that a circle is 360 degrees. If I go 360 degrees divided by 16, it'll give me the exact degrees I need to create 16 rivets around my peephole. Instead of just hitting "Okay", I want to make a copy of it. I'm going to make a copy of it. If I can Control D, I can continue creating my transformation all the way around until I get back to my center point. In this class, I showed you very quickly how to use the rotate tool and the repeat transformation keyboard shortcut, Control D, to easily create a ring around your peephole. Peephole is a funny word, so I had fun saying it. Awesome. I'm sure you guys are tired of me saying the word peephole. That will conclude this class. I'll see you in the next. 12. Adding Detail: [MUSIC] In this class, we're going to add a little more detail to our rocket ship and then move on to making some flames. We're going to go into the bottom and we're going to create a stripe design on our bottom edge here. How do we do that? Is we hit MR in our keyboard, and we're going to make a rectangle just over top of it, like that. Now, what we want to do is we want to hit E on our keyboard, and we want to select the bottom two sections. We want to taper it in by using the scale tool. Hands on our keyboard and dragging them inwards just like that. Now, I want also one line in the center. Instead of using the Rectangle tool or the Ellipse tool, I'm going to quickly use the Pen tool, which is P on our keyboard. The Pen tool is very easy to use to create straight lines. All you got do is find where you want to place your first point about right here, and then I'm going to hold Shift, drag down to the bottom, and I'm going to click again to create a straight line. Now I have a path right there. I'll give it a stroke like that. Now I have all these paths. I got this one, I got this box, and I have my center line. Now I want to divide this into four different shapes. How do I do that? I can select my center line, my first path that I just made and my bottom path, and I can go into my Pathfinder panel. Now I want to create four shapes. I want to divide this path into four sections. There is a Pathfinder menu tool called Divide that will split my path according to what's already there. I'm going to hit "Divide". Now you can see if I hit A on my keyboard, you can see that there are four different sections separated by where the paths were created. When I use my general selection tool, it is all grouped up into one group. How do I ungroup it? If I click on it and I right-click on it, I can go Ungroup. Now I can select each individual piece. I'm going to give it a new color, going to my color swatches, and I'll give it that color. Now I want this one also to be that red, but I want this white one to be this exact blue. What I can do instead of going to my swatches, I can use an Eye Dropper tool. I on my keyboard and then I can go over to this shape because that's the color I want this path to be and I can select it and it becomes that color. Guys, that's how we create some cool texture. We use the Divide tool in the Pathfinder panel, and we also learn how to use the Eye Dropper tool, very simple in Adobe Illustrator. In our next class, we're going to let our rocket takeoff by making the flame using the Pen tool. In order to do this, we're going to understand the Pen tool through our next micro lesson. 13. Micro Lesson: The Pen Tool: [MUSIC] Welcome to our next micro lesson where we'll learn how to use the Pen tool. To activate the Pen tool, press "P" on your keyboard. Now that we have our Pen tool activated, we can click to create a point. When we click and create a second point, that creates a path. Now we can continue to click and create multiple points to create a shape. When we click our first point, we create a closed path. To create a curve, you need to click and hold, and then you can drag out to activate the Bezier handles. The Bezier handles allows you to create a curve from the path you will make. Now, what you can do is you can hold Shift to constrain them to be perfectly horizontal or vertical, or 45 degrees. When you're happy where your Bezier handles are, you can release it and start to create your next point. Now, you can click and drag out your next Bezier handles, holding Shift to constrain the proportions. Next, you can click and drag for your third point, and finally your fourth point. After that, you can create a closed path and pull it out to finish your circle. You can further customize your path by clicking and dragging, and then once you are happy with your first path, you can hold Alt on your keyboard to break the handle. Once you break the handle, you can start a new direction for your next path, and you can click to create a wave. Now that you understand simply how to use the Pen tool, let's see how we can apply it in our illustration. 14. Applying the Pen Tool: [MUSIC] Now that you know how to use the Pen Tool, let's apply it to our illustration. The first thing that we want to do is we want to separate our flame layer from our rocket layer. We're going to lock our rocket layer so we don't accidentally work on it, and we're going to add a new layer. Now on this layer, we're going to hit P on our keyboard and we're going to activate the Pen tool. We're going to click and drag out the top section of our flame. Then we'll drag it out and drag the side section of our flame. We can hold Shift to constrain the proportions vertically, and now we can select N, make the tip of the flame like that. Now in order to break it, I can hold Alt on my keyboard, and break the handle, and pull it back going the opposite direction. Now we can get the tip of the flame. Now I can click and drag on the other side, and complete it here. That's looking really good. Really simple, cool flame. The next thing that we want to do is we want to make multiple layers of our flame. How can we do that? We can use the Scale tool in Adobe Illustrator. If we hit S on our keyboard, we can pick where our anchor point is. I want it more in the center here. I want to make at least four versions of this. I'm going to hit the S key and I'm going to hold Alt on my keyboard and it'll open up the Scale menu. Now I can scale either non-uniform or uniform. I want it at uniform. However, I want it to increase the size, so I want it more than 83 percent. If I use my arrow keys, I can bring it up to maybe 120. I hold Shift and use the arrow keys to go up by tens, and if I just use a single click of the arrow keys, I can go up by ones. So 120 seems like a good amount, and now I'm going to hit Copy because I want multiple versions. Now you can see in my layers panel I have two versions of it, and I'm going to hit Control D to do it two more times. Now we have four paths. Now I want to give each section a different color. If I go over to my Swatches panel, I can give the first one a nice orange color. Now I don't want this one to be on top, so I want to bring it down in my layers panel. One way I can do it is I can click and drag and pull it down just like that. Now I can give my next color, let's say a bright yellow. But I want to bring this one underneath my other two. How do I do that? Instead of jumping back into my layers panel, I can use Control and left square bracket key, and that'll actually bring it down in my layers panel. If I went too far, I can bring it up using the Right bracket key, just like that. Now I can drop this one down one layer and we got our cool flame. Now what I want to do though, is I want to switch this red to the outer edge. I'm going to make this one orange, and I'm going to make this one red like that. That's looking really good. Now, I want to put this all behind my rocket ship. I'm going to open up my Layers panel and I'm going to bring that layer under my rocket ship. I'm going to click and drag everything until it's right at the edge of my rocket. That's looking really good. We're going to create a path for our flames to travel along. I'm going to hit M on my keyboard, and I'm going to simply make a rectangle of the same color of my last flame just like that. I'm going to bring it to the back. If I go Control left square bracket, I can bring it down in my Layers panel. Now I'm going to click on that one, I'm going to copy and paste in front, and I'm going to just bring it in. Now if I transform it and I hit Alt, it transforms from the center in. That's really good. I'm going to use my Eyedrop tool, I on my keyboard, and select the yellow color. Now it's underneath that flame, so I want to bring it above that flame. Now you can see that there's a path or a trail from the two outer flames. One thing that I want to do to clean this up, instead of having multiple layers, I'm going to change this into one single layer holding using the Pathfinder panel, using the Unite tool. Then I'm going to click my red flame and my red path and unite them together into one path. One thing that's really cool in Adobe Illustrator, you have the ability to round out the corners in Adobe Illustrator. These are called live corners. Any object you have that has a sharp corner can be rounded using the live corners function. How do we access that? We can use our direct selection tool. Now if I click with the direct selection tool, you can see that there are a couple of nodes at corners here. Now, I can actually click on this corner and I can drag it out and it rounds off that specific corner. Now if I hold Shift, I can click two of the nodes and round them at the same time. Now I'm going to do that with my second one. Holding Shift, select both and round them off. It just gives it a nice, clean look if you round out those corners. [MUSIC] In the next class, we're going to build up our smoke and let our rocket just blast off into outer space. See you in the next class. 15. Creating Smoke: [MUSIC] Welcome back to class and we're going to build up the smoke to let our rocket takeoff. What we're going to do is we're going to actually lock these layers here, so that we don't accidentally work with them, but we want everything on the same layer in the layers panel. What we can do is we can go over here to the layers panel and we can click on the side box here to lock the layers. Now, even though that layer is unlocked, we can't click on those objects anymore. That allows us to work without accidentally selecting some of our parts that we don't want to work with at this time. Now we're going to build up some of the smoke. The way we're going to do that is we're going to use the Ellipse tool. First thing that we're going to do is we're going to create some smoke coming out from the red line. I'm going to select that red color and I'm going to hit "L" on my keyboard. Now I can create smoke that is of the red color. I'm going to hit "Okay, " and now I'm just going to use this ellipse as a base and drag it out and make multiple versions of this path. Now I can increase the size and drag out some like this to fill up the space and I can go back and take some of the smaller versions. I can even take one and make it even smaller and start building it up like that. Maybe one medium size one and some really small ones. We built up some smoke here and it's really billowing out from this rocket ship, but we don't want a bunch of shapes. See in our layers panel, it's all a bunch of random shapes and pretty messy. What we want to do is we want to create this into one single shape. Again, what can we use? We can use either the Shape Building tool or the Pathfinder panel to merge these shapes. However, if we use the Shape Builder tool, we'll have to run through and select all these objects. Let's undo that. Faster way for this specific purpose is to use the Pathfinder panel. Let's go to the Pathfinder panel and we're going to hit on the button that says Unite. Now that'll merge all those shapes, all of those paths into one single path. I'll hit "V" on a keyboard and that's looking great. The next thing that we want to do is we want to send this behind all our flames right now, so we're going to bring it backwards. Now we want this not only on this side but on the opposite side as well, so we're going to mirror it. How do we mirror it? We're going to hit "O" on our keyboard, which is the reflect tool. Find the center of our rocket ship, hold, Alt, drag, hold Shift, and it will reflect perfectly 90 degrees. We're going to combine these two into one shape by using the Unite tool again and we're going to go to our layers panel and we're going to lock this layer. Now we can't work on that one. We're going to create another set of smoke. We're going to layer the smoke one on top of the other to create a little bit of depth in our illustration. Let's create a new set. This one, let's make it yellow. Starting down here and let's start with some big blocks. Fill up this area down here as well. Looking pretty good. Let's go back to some of these smaller sections. Make a couple between those two sizes really make that smoke stand out. Let's make some smaller versions, and add some variety, some quite small. Let's bring this one over here, this one over here, let's make that small and make a couple, like it's floating off. That's too big there. That's looking pretty good. Really quickly made some some. Next thing that we want to do again, we want to go to our Pathfinder panel and unite it all together. We're going to hit "O" on our keyboard. We're going to find the center of our rocket ship, hold Alt and Shift and we're going to reflect it. What I'm going to do is I'm going to head and build two more layers of smoke, one One the back as a gray tone and one at the front as a white tone. [MUSIC] All right guys so there we go. We made our smoke and allowed our rocket to take off. The next section we're going to talk about the blend mode and how we can simply make our background. 16. Micro Lesson: The Blend Tool: [MUSIC] Welcome to our next micro lesson where we'll learn how to use the blend tool. The blend tool is activated when you hit ''W'' on your keyboard. The blend tool is used to do what it says; to blend one object to another object or one path to another path. You can also use it to blend colors. You can find one hue and you can blend it into another hue. It'll take the characteristics of the first shape and find the iterations between it to form it into the second shape. Let us see how this can be applied. In order to activate the blend tool, you first have to select at least two objects. You can hit ''W'' on your keyboard to activate the blend tool and you can click once on your first object and once on your second object, and that will create the blend between the two objects. Now you can see that Adobe Illustrator is blending these two shapes in both shape and color. Let us see another way that we can apply the blend tool. Let us select our second object. That is hit ''W'' on your keyboard, click once on your first object, hit once on the second object. Now you can see that it created a smooth blend between the blue and the pink dot. How can we customize our blend? When we have our blend tool activated and we hold Alt, we can click on our blend to open up the blend options. Now that the blend options are open, you can open up the spacing panel. In the spacing panel, you can either choose smooth color, specified steps, or specified distance. What we can select is specified steps. This allows you to determine how many blend steps will be between the first shape and the second shape. Let's go five [MUSIC] and preview. Now you can see that there are five blends between the first blue shape and the second pink shape. We'll hit, ''Okay.'' Now that we understand how we can use the blend tool, let us see how we can apply it to our illustration. 17. Applying the Blend Tool: [MUSIC] Now that you know how to use the pen tool, let's learn how we can create a simple background for our illustration to really make our rocket ship pop. Jumping right in here, what we can do is we can go to the layers panel, we can lock our flames layer, make a new layer underneath that layer. We can name it BG. [NOISE] The next thing that we want to do is we want to create a blend from the center going outwards. We're going to create that using the ellipse tool. We're going to create one ellipse in the center right behind the flame. We're going to change the stroke to a fill and we're going to give it a fill. We're going to give it a dark blue fill. The next thing that we want to do is we want to duplicate it. We're going to copy and control B to paste it in the back. It's pasted behind our current one. If we change the color to the lighter color and we expand it, you can see that we have our dark color under on top still and our lighter color underneath, and that's what we want. The next thing that we want to do is we want to select both our circles and we want to activate the blend tool by using W. We can click on one and click on the other to blend them together. Now that looks very smooth and clean. However, I want to see the transition. I want to see the blocks of color transitioning from one to another. How can we do that? We can hit "Alt" on our keyboard and we can activate the blend tool option. Now instead of smooth color, which we see happening here, I want to go to specified steps. I can actually choose the increments of how many blends I want from one shape to another. Not 178, that's too many. I want maybe eight in total. Let's preview that. That's exactly what I want. It looks really cool and it really makes the rocket ship pop out. I'm going to hit "Okay". Now what I can do is I can go to my layers panel and I can open up that background layer lock that blend. Now I want to create a simple moon and some stars. Let's first start with the moon. Let's use the Ellipse Tool and let's drag out a circle. Now I want to give it a color, maybe the bright yellow or the light yellow, and I want to drag out a second one right beside it. Because I don't want a full moon, I want to more crescent moon. I'm going to select both of them using my shape builder tool "Shift M". I'm going to click "Alt" and drag over to subtract the section I don't want and quickly made a simple crescent moon. The next thing that I want to do is I'm going to fill this night sky with beautiful stars. Let's hover over our ellipse right now and click and hold and we can open up the panel of shape options. One of them is the Star Tool. I'm going to zoom in and I'm going to create a simple star like that. Just like we did with our smoke, we can alt and drag it around like that. But that might take a long time to fill up our sky like we want. There's other ways that we can make it more organically and we're going to use the Brush Tool. Let's undo all that and we have our star selected. Now if we go up to the controls up here, there is a brush definition. Now, I can create a new brush up here with this star selected. I can create different types of brushes depending on my needs. But for this purpose, I'm going to use the Scatter Brush. The Scatter Brush allows me to take an object of any shape or form and apply it to a stroke of a path and it'll scatter it depending on the criteria I give it. In the Brush Tool option, we can change the size of it from fixed to random because we don't want them all at the same size. I might want them quite a bit smaller and 100 percent, I don't want any bigger than the one I have. The next one is spacing. I want them spaced out randomly. I don't want them spaced out evenly, so I'll bring it down maybe a little bit, but I'll space it out even more. Then I wanted to scatter all over the place. I will change that to random and I'll bring it in a bit and scatter it out a lot. The rotation, I don't want them all vertical. I want it all random. I'll bring it down 116 degrees and maybe up 135 degrees and I'm going to hit "Okay". Now what I can do is I can click "B" for my Brush Tool with this brush selected here, this Scatter Brush. Now if I click, I can drag out and paint like a paintbrush and paint a path on my art board and you can see that the stars are appearing. Now, I can just paint around and fill my night sky. Now if I go into my Scatter Brush and double-click on it, I can actually change the properties. What if I want smaller stroke, smaller stars, more scatter like that. You can see that it's actually updating in real time. I want more rotation, more spacing, maybe less spacing. Let's hit "Okay". [NOISE] Let's apply it to strokes. I can select my paths and I can actually change the point size to also change the size of the stars. That's looking really good. We made a very cool night sky in very little time. Give this a try using the blend tool and play around with the brush tool and create a simple crescent moon for your illustration. I can't wait to see what you guys create. In the next class, we'll learn how to export your amazing work so you can show it off to the world. 18. How to Export Your Illustration: [MUSIC] We're going to learn how to export our illustration. We're going to go to File Export and Export As. Now we can give our title a name, let's name it rocket. We could select the file type over here. We can click "PNG, JPEG, TIFF, SVG," anything like that. But for our sake, we'll just do a simple PNG because it's accepted in most places. Now, if I just hit "Export" right now, whatever is in this document will be exported, even the stuff outside of my artboard. One thing you want to do is click "Use Artboards." If you have multiple artboards, you can click the range or which specific artboards you want to export. However, in our case we only have one, so that's perfect. Now remember, our artboard contains our illustration. When we use artboards, only the stuff contained within the frame of our artboard will be exported and that's exactly what we want. Let's hit "Export" and export our illustration. Now this menu pops up depending on where you're sharing this, you might want to change some of these properties, we'll just change it to 72 PPI because we're going to share it on the web. In our Skillshare project, you don't need a giant file size, just use 72 PPI if you want to get your illustration printed, maybe change it to 300 PPI. Our artboard is completely full so we don't have to worry about whether the background is transparent, white or black. It doesn't matter and we're going to hit "Okay." Now we can jump into our file and we can see our beautiful illustration right there. Guys, the last thing you need to do is export your work and post it in the project panel here on Skillshare. I really look forward to seeing everything you guys create. It definitely encourage other students as well when they see fellow students post projects in the project panel, it shows them that they were once a beginner, but now they have the ability to create vector artwork. I'll see you in the next class where I just want to say thank you. 19. Thank You!: I want to thank you guys so much for attending this class. This is just the basics of Adobe Illustrator. What I want you to do from here is to continue to explore the things that we've learned, experiment with the tools, and learn something new. Then you can create different types of artwork to display for your project. Don't worry too much about creating amazing work. Just have fun and explore the possibilities of vector artwork, and if this is your first time working in Adobe Illustrator, I commend you and I really thank you for joining me in this class. I can't express how excited I am to see your creative work. If you're open to sharing your work, definitely post it in the project panel. Me, like many others, would love to see your progress. I really hope that I was effective at explaining some of the essential tools in Adobe Illustrator and covering many of the basics. However, I know that I'm lacking and there might be something that I've missed, so if you have any questions regarding anything in this class, please post in the discussions panel and I'll answer your questions. Then if other students have questions similar to yours, they can find their answer there. If you learned something or enjoy the class, I would really appreciate it if you'd leave a positive review. I'm always looking forward to creating new classes for you guys here on Skillshare. Give me a follow so that you'll be notified when a new class is posted and feel free to check out some of my other classes here on Skillshare. [MUSIC] This has been a blast to get you started on your journey in vector illustration. I really look forward to walking with you along your creative journey. If you want to stay in touch, you can follow me here on Skillshare or you can follow me on Instagram @kyle.aaron.art. There I post some of my current projects, my fun illustrations, as well as I post updates on future classes that I'll be posting here on Skillshare. If you want to stay up to date with the current things that I'm doing you can follow me there. I want to thank you once again for taking this class and I'll see you later. [MUSIC]