Vector Illustration: Top 5 Overlooked Tools in Adobe Illustrator

1. Class Trailer: This is a Swiss Army knife I've had for 15 years. To be honest, some tools that are really easy to access and I use this a lot, while others are hidden and mysterious. For example, this notch right here, I have no idea what this one does. Just like the Swiss knives, Adobe Illustrator sometimes works the same. Hi, my name is Esther Nariyoshi, I work as an Illustrator and Surface Designer, and I'm also a top teacher here on Skillshare. There are a lot of ways we can describe how Adobe Illustrator works. But when it comes down to day-to-day operation, it's basically wrangling with anchor points. The more we are acquainted with our toolbox, the better we will be at wrangling. Today, we'll look into five most overlooked tools in Adobe Illustrator. All of the tools that we're going to cover today are buried under other familiar tools. As a result, they don't get used super often. This class is designed for advanced users who are very at home with Adobe Illustrator already. But we'll benefit so much more at a closer look at the tools. We will get to know our tools by illustrating a fancy letter together. Hopefully the newly discovered gems will help you to add a touch of polish to your illustration. For your class project, you're welcome to work alongside me following the exact steps, or you can zero in on one or two techniques and just focus on that. Whatever you choose to do, take screenshots and share them in the project gallery. Like always, the discussion tab is the best place to have your questions answered. I'm really excited for this class. Let's get started. 2. Tool 1: Arc Tool: In our first lesson, we're going to learn some handy techniques using the arc tool. The arc tool can be super useful in many circumstance and I find it most helpful when I need to transition between two straight lines. Here we are in Adobe Illustrator. A couple of housekeeping things before we move on. The current workspace that I'm using is called Painting, where you can find by clicking on "Switch," "Workspace," and select "Painting." By default, we only see the basic tools. We need to bring out the full menu by clicking on the three dots at the bottom and then the hamburger menu on the upper right-hand corner, and select "Advanced." The arc tool we're going to use in this lesson is hiding under the line segment tool, which is this straight line right here, and the keyboard shortcut is forward space. When you long press, you should be able to see the arc tool, just go ahead and select it. Make sure you have a stroke color selected and just go ahead, and play with it, just to have a feel of it. You may not be super intuitive what this tool is good at, but we're going to get to that in a second. The arc tool allows you to draw a buttery-smooth arc on the fly, even with just a mouse, which is really hard to achieve with the pen tool or the curvature tool, or even shaper tool, which are my top three tools for usual tasks. The closest I can think of that does the same thing is the Pathfinder, which requires a few extra steps because it's a combination of shapes. Let's see how we can draw the transition between the straight line with the arc tool. Let's get started by building the foundational structure of the letter L. I'm just going to quickly use the rectangle tool to build the skeleton of the L and add a bit of serif details here and there. Since this is an advanced class, I won't talk through every detail. But if you have any questions that you wish to ask, you're also welcome to just post them on the discussion tab. I'm going to align to key object here, to the middle and to the top, and then duplicate by holding "Option" and "Shift." Then add another serif here, to the right of the bottom and then align these two as well to the bottom, and to the right as well. In this way, we have a basic slab font version of our L. I'm going to select all the shape and make them into one compound shape by pressing 'Unite' under the Pathfinder. If you're using a different workspace, your Pathfinder panel might be located at a different spot or not be visible at all. If that's the case, you can come over to Window and find whatever panels that you're looking for. All right. Moving on, let's zoom in for a second. The goal of our arc is to add a block of shape that looks like this to transition for our serif. Let me just zoom out and grab my arc tool, and turn off my fill. Only keep the stroke color, maybe make it a bit thicker so we can see. I'm just going to click and drag on my art board. As you can see, this is the opposite direction of the shape that we want to make. I can go ahead and click on X on my keyboard to flip the direction. I also want to close the arc. What I mean by that is, when you press C on your keyboard, it will automatically add a corner to your arc as if this is a curve that's going through a rectangle. Before releasing our mouse, let's learn a couple more keyboard shortcuts. One is to press F on your keyboard to flip the entire direction of the shape. The other thing is to press X on your keyboard to only flip the direction of the belly. This helps you to customize your shape on the fly. You can also hold the Shift key to constrain the proportion. I'm going to release my mouse and switch the stroke and fill, by pressing "Shift X." This way I can just resize it and stack it to the perpendicular lines. Once I'm done filling out all the corners that I need, I can just go ahead and make a bigger compound shape out of all these little ones. If you're mathematically inclined, you can double-click on your arc tool to bring out the options. Inside the pop-up Window, you can define whatever parameter you want to have precise control over otherwise, you can just draw visually. I'm going to go ahead and click on "Cancel" because I don't need specific numbers in this case, and then just use this block for my L. Also, before you release the mouse, you can click up and down arrow to change the slope of your curve. That was a lot of information. Let's just do a quick recap. When we use the arc tool, we can press C to close the arc and X to flip just the curve, and F to flip the entire shape. We can press up and down arrow to change the degree of the curvature. When we hold the Shift, this will give us a perfect quadrant of a circle. When we hold our Space bar, this will allow us to move it around. Don't worry too much about memorizing everything. I know this is new information and it takes some time to let it sink in. For this reason, I have created a visual guide for you to reference after the class. You can download a PDF from the resource area of this class so you can always come back to it whenever you want. Now, coming back to our letter, I'm just going to use this little wedge to transition for our serifs. This method is super helpful because I think it takes away the pressure of making a perfect curve every time you go around a corner. In this case, you can just take care of the corner by itself and then just add it back in. Even if you want to change the slope of your transition, you can just change the shape and the proportion of this curve by using the free transform tool. For example, you can just drag it on along one axis. In this way, it's a little slower transition along the vertical line. Then I'm just going to "Command Z" to undo it. Then just go ahead and grab your a little wedge to move it around until you're done with all the transitions. It's a pretty stress-free way to approach curves. Sometimes curves can be very time consuming in a design process. I'm glad this could be helpful. There you go. Now, I'm going to select all the little shapes and bundle them together into one shape by pressing "Unite" under Pathfinder. Sometimes you do have to clean up a little bit. In this case here, I'm just going to use the Minus key to delete the anchor points. There you go. Last but not least, I will give my L a slight angle by using the free transform tool, which is letter E on your keyboard. Just hover over the top and start moving. I'm holding down my Shift key while moving along so it doesn't stretch my letter necessarily. So far, we have covered how to add a curvy wedge to our rectangle and we have learned how to change the angle by using the free transform tool. For the next step, we're going to take a curvy wedge out of a rectangle and we're going to practice all three skills by creating a slightly different version of our serif L. Just a quick walk-through. We have a few rectangles to make up the basic structure of our L and our goal is to use these little curvy wedges to make our compound shape. Let me just undo these real quick. The main tool we're going to use to achieve this goal is called shape builder. First, we're going to select all the shapes and then press Shift M on your keyboard, or also you can click on this icon. By default, shape builder assume that you want to lump all of the shapes together. For example, if you just drag through these three shapes, it's going to make a compound shape out of these. Let me just undo real quick. However, if you hold your Option key, the plus sign will turn into the minus sign. Basically, this will let you do subtraction based on the shapes. If you remember, we have this little curvy wedge sitting on top of the rectangle. If I were to select all of the shapes and press Shift M to activate the shape builder tool, while holding down Option, I will take up this little wedge shape out of the rectangle. It is that easy. Then I will do the same thing for this corner right here. I just realized that I needed another transition at this corner right here, so I'm going to stack it here and then size it to a bit bigger. Sometimes you can achieve the same result using the rounded corner. What I mean by that is, say that you make a rectangle of some sort and then direct to select one of the corners, when you hover over, you can round the corners by just dragging. But the limitation of this option is that the corner will always be perfectly rounded, you cannot change the proportion of the corner. However, if you were to use the curvy wedge method, I can use the free transform to change the proportion. I know right now it looks like the dots has been stretched, but if it were to change it to a solid color, you will see my point. Our curve is a lot more flexible. It doesn't have to stay perfectly rounded corner, if you know what I mean. I'm just going to delete this and bring this guy back a little bit. Now I'm going to select all the shapes and use my shape builder tool to lump it all together. You don't have to be super precise. Just make sure you touch all the shapes and then just release. You might need to clean this point up by just pressing the minus on your keyboard. Then we're going to use free transform to give it a slight angle. There you go. Now that you understand how arc tool works, go ahead and pick a different letter. It could be your initial, your pet's name, whatever you want to draw at the moment and give it a try, because practice makes it perfect. 3. Tool 2: Join Tool: In our second lesson, we're going to take a closer look at the Join tool. This can be really useful in finding an alternative approach to drawing. Instead of seeing the entire path as a continuation of anchor points, we can just see it as a combination of multiple paths. This is important because it allows you to focus the shapes you draw the best and base additional complicated shapes off of those. Let's look at a practical example. In this lesson, we're going to learn how to draw this little pointy curvy shape using the drawing tool. When I see a shape like this, my first instinct is to draw using Pen tool or curvature tool from the beginning to the end. But I'm going to challenge myself and also invite you to change our perspective and to see this not as a continuation of one shape, but really a combination of different shapes. So let's get started. First, I'm going to pick up the Arc tool to draw half of the curve. I can use the up and down arrow to change the curvature. It's really a personal preference. Then I can just release once I'm done. Then I want to make a copy by Command C and paste in front command F and then reflect pressing O to make a perfect copy. Then I'm going to slide it across holding Shift. What I need over here is really the bottom half of the intersection. So I want to select both and come over to the drawing tool right here, which is hiding under the shaper tool. If you have the shaper tool here, you can long press and then select Join tool. When you have both paths selected, click on Join tool and then just draw across. In this way, we have one compound shape. I'm going to double-click on my layer to change the anchor points color because this time is blue and I want to maybe switch it to gold so we can see the contrast better. There we go. Much better. If you're familiar with how Illustrator works, you might be thinking maybe Shape Builder Tool does the same thing. Let me just show you real quick. So we have the two arc intersecting each other. If we were to use the Shape Builder tool and hold the Option key to take parts away, it does some of the cleanup for us. However, when we use the Shape Builder tool, it does not make a one compound shape, it only cuts our shapes or our path into different sections. If that's what you need, maybe Shape Builder tool is better suited for you. But in this case, we want everything to be connected. So that's why we use the Join tool. With a curvy, pointy part taking care of, we're going to extend the edge to a straight line. Let me just grab my Line Segment tool to make a perfect horizontal line. Because we have used Arc tool for our curves, we know the bottom line and transition perfectly into this line. So we just need to make sure we take out this part in the middle. I'm using the Scissors tool right now, which is C on your keyboard. Then just delete the middle section and then we want to connect these two points. There are different ways of joining these two points. The most obvious one is to use Join command, which is Command J on your keyboard. As long as you have the two points selected using either selection or direct selection tool and then press Command J on your keyboard. It will draw a direct line between the two end points. Also, you can use the Pen tool, which is P on our keyboard. Then just click on one anchor points and then go over to the other side. You see this little link icon appearing. Just go ahead and click and you will make a direct line ends. Let me just undo real quick. Technically, you can also use the Join tool to bridge the gap. But this one, I find it hit and miss. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. I was unable to find any document to explain the threshold. So I would rather use the Join tool only for cleaning up the intersections. So I'm just going to use the Command J on my keyboard and then go over to the other side to do the same thing. Command J. So now we have our basic pointy wavy line, and now we want to add additional lines above it. I'm going to grab my Line Segment tool and then just make a straight line at the bottom. I do want the two lines to overlap each other at first. So I'm going to select them both and just align to the bottom. In this way, when I make additional line right here by holding Option and Shift and I can just do the same distance by pressing Command D. In this way, I can make sure the distance between the lines are the same. Then I'll just take away the bottom one. Next up, I will use the Shape Builder tool to take away the additional part. So I'm going to press Shift M on my keyboard and hold Option key. Then just click on the parts that I don't need, right here. Now I have achieved my goal. By the way, all the tools that we covered today do not have any native keyboard shortcuts. If you want to change that, you can press Command Shift Option K. To bring out your keyboard shortcuts dialogue, we can click on the Search bar and find our tool. For example, arc. Over here you can see we don't have any shortcut associated to it. Say that if you want to use A and you can press A on your keyboard, immediately, you will see this little warning message telling you A was already taken. Of course, we know it's the Direct Selection tool. Then I'm going to remove that and try again, maybe Shift A. This one is clean. It all looks good. I'm going to go ahead and press Okay. You will have this little window telling you to name your keyset file. I'm just going to call it Esther and click on Okay. When you go over to your Arc tool, you will see that you have the new keyboard shortcut right next to it. For the same thing, you can assign a different shortcut for your Join tool. Again, it's Command Option Shift K, and then search join, to get the Join tool. The shortcut, I will do Shift J because J is already taken. Then I will just click on Okay. I want to press yes to make sure I want to affirm this update. Then there you go. Our Join tool now has a keyboard shortcut. Now that you understand how Join tool works, go ahead and create this shape on screen. In the next lesson, we're going to learn a new tool called Path Eraser tool. 4. Tool 3: Path Eraser Tool: Sometimes art for deductions can offer you surprising, elegant solutions that are hard to achieve with just drawing or creating or designing. In this lesson, we'll look into path eraser tool and see how the art of deduction can help you in your design. Hatching is a common creative technique to add 3D dimension to our letters. These are just some of the examples from a 100 years ago. As you can see, the cross-hatching marks adds a lot of charm to this letter. In this lesson, we're going to pick up the path eraser tool to recreate some of these textures. Over here, I have a bunch of straight lines with different width profile. You can choose your own width profile by clicking on this icon right here, and select different variations. To use the path eraser tool, you need to select your path and then come over to your shaper tool under the drop down menu, choose path eraser. It is right above the join tool we just covered. Instinctively, I would want to use the pointy part of the pencil to draw, but in fact, since this is an eraser, we want to use that eraser part to draw. We want to align the eraser to our path and then just draw across. By default, everything else is unselected. You want to hold your command key to switch temporarily to your selection tool to select another path you want to work on, and then upon releasing of your command key, and you will go back to whatever tool that you were using before, which is the path eraser tool. Go ahead and do the same. Hold your command to select the next path, and then you erase it. This is basically how it works. Depending on what kind of texture you envision, you can create your own cross hatching marks using this. I'm going to select my group and then make it a bit thinner and possibly longer, and then I'm going to share it by using free transform, and then move it over. Actually, I'm going to move this guy down to make it bigger. I would want to add some subtle texture right here. I will just go ahead and bring my texture over so the angle is not exactly right. I need some finessing. This seems to work. Then I'm just going to change the blending mode to multiply. Then here's my effect. I do want to mention that this tool is different from the regular eraser tool. The regular eraser tool deal with areas, for example, if I have a shape right here, then I can use the Shift E to get my irregular eraser tool, which is right here. I can use my bracket to change the size of my eraser and then just click and drag to erase certain area. This will subtract an area out of whatever shape, and you can also double click to change your eraser's dimension. It can be more oval or round, and it can randomize the angle and roundness and you can play with it when you have time. I'm just going to click on "Cancel". The path eraser tool only deals with individual path. For example, if I were to use the path eraser tool on here, it does not work, except it does erase the border between these two as I was drawing along the line. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to use the path eraser tool for any area. Just remember path eraser is only for paths and regular eraser is for areas. I just want to make that distinction. This tool might be the easiest to understand among all five. I'm going to sneak in another technique under the same tool. If you look at here, we have some yellow rectangles. My instinct is to create a bunch of rectangles on top of each other, which is what I did initially, and then I realized that we can do something similar using the path eraser tool. This is pretty much what I did at the beginning, except the height is a bit different, but I will show you a way to do that with the path eraser tool. We can go ahead and create just one vertical line here and then change this line with two super, super big, say a 100 point, maybe even bigger, let's do a 150. This is still just one path, even though it looks like a rectangle. I'm going to go grab my path eraser tool and then just erase parts of it. What's nice about working along one path is that the path is always selected. In this way, you can have a bunch of irregular rectangle pretty quickly, and then you want to go ahead and select it and expand it so that we're not dealing with paths, we're dealing with rectangles. There you go. By the way, if you want the space in between to be even, you can go to your Align panel and then choose the bottom one as the key object, and say you want 20 pixels in between. Then just click on this Vertical Distribute Space. This will give you exactly 20 pixels in between each rectangle. This is another really neat trick that you can use. On the left of the screen, we have some almost identical lines. The second example have some skipping effect by using the path eraser tool, and the top example just have straight lines through. In my opinion, the second example is a lot more charming because it offers imperfection that adds a lot of character to the work. I hope it was clear and easy to understand how to use the path eraser tool. Go ahead and use the next three minutes to mess around and play with it. If you need any direction, you can use this shape on screen as your guide. 5. Tool 4: Spiral Tool: Drawing elegant curves can look simpler than it is. In this lesson, we're going to cover Spiral tool and see if we can get any help from there. Let's jump right in. In this lesson, we'll work on the little curly swirls that we see in the decorative part of the letter. The tool we're going to use is called the Spiral Tool. It is right under the Arc tool that we just covered. You can go ahead and click on the Spiral tool and select a stroke color and take it out for a spin. As you can see, we have some predefined spirals. It just scales up and down as we drag. But before we further customize the spiral, I would like to go into my View and turn off the Snap to Pixel. This will just give me more flexibility when I draw. Similar to many other tools in Adobe Illustrator, you can use many keyboard shortcuts to modify the look of the result on the fly. I have a sticky note right here to help us remember. Again, you can download all the information in the projects and resources area. I'm just going to go ahead and click and drag. From the get-go, you can hold the space bar to move your spiral around and if you want it to be a different direction, you can press R on your keyboard to flip it around. You can also add the segments and remove the segments by pressing up and down arrow to modify the length of the spiral. You can also hold the Command key, which is also Control key on PC to change the decay. There is a technical way to explain what decay means, but basically this controls how tightly you want your spiral to be packed. Also, if you hold the Shift key, this will snap to 45 degree at a time. This will allow your spiral to sit upright or change from there, 45-degree at a time. These are the major modifier keys or keyboard shortcuts that we can use on the fly. Let's just recap real quick. Let me give it a different color just for the fun of it. Go ahead and select your Spiral tool. When you click and drag, you can hold your space bar to move it around. The R key will let you flip the direction and reverse the direction of the spiral. You can also press the up and down arrow to change the counts of the sections within the spiral. If you hold Command key on your Mac and Control key on your PC, and then just drag on your artboard, you should be able to change the decay of your spiral. If you want your spiral to sit right, you can hold Shift, this will snap to a 45-degree at a time. Again, if you're a number lover, you can select the Spiral tool and then just click on your artboard once. It will bring out the spiral dialogue where you can define the size of your radius or the rate of the decay, or number of segments or direction. If you want that very precise control, here's where to get it. I'm just going to click Cancel. For the next few minutes, we're going to work on adding a bit of swoosh to the end of these straight lines. Let's start by using our Spiral tool, of course. First I want to just click and drag and focus on the form of this spiral. I'm holding down my Command key to make sure the decay looks good too. Then once I'm happy with what I'm looking at, I'm going to go ahead and click on Shift to make sure it's sitting 45-degree. The reason why I care about the orientation in this case is because at the end I want this tail to extend into a straight line. I'm going to sample the stroke over here and then use my Pen tool. Just click on the tail and hold my Shift key to extend it out and press Escape when I'm done. Now I have a spiral that has a straight tail, so I'm going to scale it down and maybe try it out in terms of the position. I'm going to bring out my preference by pressing Command K and make sure I have those scale strokes and effects checked off. In this way, when I scale my stuff up and down, it will remain the same stroke width. I do want to take out one more section off of here because this seems to be a little more ornate than I want it to be, so I would just press minus to bring out my Pen tool and then just click on these anchor points to remove it. Then I'm going to go ahead and create another swirly tail on the other side, so I'm going to take out some of those sections and then hold Shift and also press R on my keyboard to change the direction. Then release, resize it until these two intersect. Let me just zoom in. If you're not sure you can select both and then press Command J to join them. Same thing for the other side, except it seems like there is some misalignment, so I will move this guy until my smart guide tells me that these two overlaps and then select both and Command J. Here is how you work with the Spiral tool. Now hopefully you understand a little bit better about the Spiral tool. Go ahead and create these shapes on screen and try to use the modifier keys as much as possible when you create on the fly. I will see you in the next lesson. 6. Tool 5: Reshape Tool: Our last tool. Do anchor points feel like domino pieces to you? That all you wanted to do is to adjust that one point and 20 minutes later, the whole thing is a mess. Let me just say you're not alone. Let's see if we can get any help from our last tool. The Reshape tool in Adobe Illustrator can help you tweak an open path with a single anchor point, instead of having to adjust multiple segments. Over here I have a quick example. This is the open path that I have created hoping to incorporate it as part of the typography. If you have Reshape tool selected, which is hidden under the Scale tool. You can just grab any point from the middle or on the sides for that matter, and just drag it around. As you can see, it still retains the integrity of the shape but functions like how the loaded spring works. When you release it, you will add one organic anchor point in the middle of the path. When you grab the point in the middle, the two endpoints remain in the same place as if there are two nails, nailing them down but you can change whatever that is in the middle. But if you were to grab the other endpoint, it will keep the first one down. You have one anchor point that remains the same. In other words, you can just grab one point of the complex curve to make minor tweaks instead of wrangling 50 different anchor points all at once. If I were to turn this whole shape into an arc, I can just drag it up using the Reshape tool. If you want it to be strictly upright, you can hold your Shift key while you drag. Let me just release right here. You might be wondering what's the difference between the Warp tool and this tool. Let me just show you real quick. This is what we have done using the Reshape tool. I made a copy right here to show you what the Warp tool does. If you go to the Effect, Warp, and Arc, as you can see, when you increase the number, everything goes outward. It's a different type of effect because everything expand a little towards the end, at the top portion of the shape. However, if that's what you're looking for, the Warp effect is your friend. You may be familiar with the Direct Selection tool, which is A on your keyboard. This one deals with one anchor point at a time. If you were to just drag one anchor point around, or even when you select between the anchor points, it's going to adjust exactly what's in-between these two anchor points instead of dealing with the whole shape. I thought I'd mention the difference between the two. Sometimes you don't necessarily want to change the entire shape. Say that I want this spiral to stay the same as I move the general curve. So what I need to do is to select my Reshape tool and hold the Shift key when I click around to put down more nails. Say that I want this segment and these ones to stay the same. You want to make sure as you hover over the path, you see this little tiny square next to the hairline, and this will tell the Reshape tool to keep the general shape same. In this case, when I release my Shift key and move things around, as you can see the spirals stayed the same. Let me give you another user case real quick. Over here, I have a letter V in linework format. I also have some decorative line around. Everything looks pretty and symmetrical, except when I decide I want to make this part a little thicker. Now I have a problem. I'm going to turn on my layer right here. As you can see, if I were to make the V thicker, there is a lot of visual tension between the letter and the swoosh. Instead of adjusting anchor point by anchor point, I'm going to use the Reshape tool. Let me just take away these guys and lock my V down by pressing Command 2, this part as well. I'm going to select my open path over here and choose my Reshape tool and just grab one hand and just scooch it over. I do want to keep it level so I'm going to hold my Shift key until this is at a better spot. Then I will continue to use the Reshape tool to move the middle curve a little bit to the right. This whole process literally took me two clicks. This almost works like magic. The limitation of the Reshape tool is that it only works on open path. If I were to use the Reshape tool to change the shape of this oval. It only moves things around without changing any shape. It also adds one extra anchor point that you don't need. If you were to change, let me just undo a couple times. If you were to change the closed shape in similar fashion, I would say Curvature tool may be worth trying. If you select this tool over here and just grab wherever you want to shift and just move it up and down. As you can see, it's pretty organic. I wouldn't say this is still easier than working with individual anchor points unless you're super comfortable working with Bezier curves. My homework for you in this lesson is to create one open path and make three variations using the Reshape tool. 7. Final Thoughts: Practice makes it perfect. While the lessons are still fresh in your mind, let's make something. Whether it's your next fancy business card, or a birthday card for someone special, or even a name tag for your dog, pick a letter that is meaningful to you at the moment. Just a quick reminder, you can build the letter form from scratch with the help of the Arc Tool, and you can use the Join tool and Spiral tool to create decorative elements around the letters. Use the Path Eraser Tool to create some hatching marks or accent shading. Last but not least, use the Reshape Tool to adjust any open paths as needed. Feel free to revisit any lessons in the process when you need a refresher. Remember, you can change the playback speed on your native Skillshare media player across devices. That's all I have for you. Congratulations. If you would like to stay up to date to my future classes, follow me on Skillshare. I'll see you next time.