Adobe Illustrator Basics: Shape Tools, Color, Effects & Exporting

Hi there, my name is Dan Scott, and I am an Adobe certified instructor for Illustrator here at Envato Tuts+. And together, you and me are gonna learn the basics of Adobe Illustrator.

Now this course is for beginners, there is no need to have any previous knowledge in Adobe Illustrator, or design or drawing or illustration. Okay, we're gonna start right at the beginning and work our way through,

step by step. During this course we're gonna work through practical real-world projects together.

Learning the tips and techniques necessary to make each of those projects happen. We'll start with the techniques that you'll need to create just about anything in Illustrator, including custom shapes, the wonderful shape builder and

the simple to us curvature tool. We'll explore lines and brushes. You'll master how to use and manipulate type.

We'll use our new type skills to make our print flyer. We'll work through how to create your own custom logos and icons. I'll show you the sneaky secrets Illustrator has to discover and

use beautiful colors and gradients. You’ll learn how to push, pull, cut and manipulate artwork like this. We’ll take our drawings and make repeatable patterns like this.

And I’ll easily show you how to redraw these images in this vector style. Last but not least, we’ll make sure that you can save and export your print and web documents like a professional.

Also throughout the course I set lots of class exercises so that you can practice all the tips and tricks and techniques you are learning as you move through the course.

So if you've never opened up Illustrator, or you have and you struggled a little bit with it. Follow me and I will show you how to make beautiful artwork in Adobe Illustrator.

All right, to get started what you need to do is you need to download the exercise file. So there will be a link on this page for source files.

So look for the source files, in there is everything that we work on together during the course. Plus it has all of the things that I set for you as class examples.

So at the end of a lot of the videos, I kind of said some not homework, fun things to practice the skills you're learning. And when you finish those practice lessons, not homework,

I'd love to see them. So there's a couple of ways of sharing them. One is in the forum here on Envato Tuts+.

So if you go to the forum and search for Adobe Illustrator for beginners, okay, and you'll be able to post your exercises in there. The other thing you can do is tag us on social media.

So post your examples on Twitter. We have two things, we are @TutsPlusDesign and also personally I am @danlovesadobe, so tag both of us.

On Instagram it's bringyourownlaptop. Okay, so yeah, share what you've done, share with the world. Make sure you tag us so we can comment and look at it as well.

The other thing to do is, or the next thing we need to do, is we need to go through and just get our computers all looking the same, so yours looks like mine.

And we're gonna reset the workspace, and make sure we got the right units, and increments, and that sort of stuff to get started. So let's jump into the computer now and sort that out.

First up, let's open up a file so that we can get our workspace similar, so your version of Illustrator looks the same as mine. Because the trouble sometimes with this first start screen here is it can be

different for everybody. So let's go to File and let's go to Open. Now what you wanna to do is you wanna find the Exercise Files you've downloaded.

Here they are here, Exercise Files Illustrator. And in here I want you to find the file called Getting Started, and then click the Open button.

All right, so the first thing we need to do is we need to reset our workspace, just so that we're all looking the same. And we can do it along the top here.

There's this little app bar, okay, and yours might say something different in here. But drop this down, and what you want to do is you want to click on Essentials.

You want to see if there's a tick next to it, so click on it. And the second thing you want to do is come down to that exact same menu and go to Reset Essentials.

And that will just put it back to kind of a default setting. Now if yours still looks different, it might be that you're using an earlier version of Illustrator.

And what that's going to mean for you is that you can continue along with this course, say, 90% of the course is going to be still fine for you. What you are going to have a little bit of trouble with is finding out where some of

these menus are, because they have moved around just a tiny bit. What I mean by that, if I grab my Type tool and I click and I start typing. You can see over here it automatically says, here's my Character panel, and

there's my Font and Font Sizes. This Properties panel did not exist in earlier versions of Illustrator. Super handy, I love it.

But in earlier versions what you're gonna have to do is when looking at this Character panel or things in this appearance. What you're gonna have to do is go up to Window, and open them separately.

This is how older versions worked. If I go down to Type, there's Character, okay? So it's the same panel, can you see?

He matches him, but he's just in a separate little window. So that's going to be a fun game if you're using, say, CS6 or CS5. But don't worry, you can continue on with most of this course.

So just make sure you have it set to Essentials and that you've reset them. Next thing, let's look at the units and increments. Let's change the units you're using.

What you need to do is have nothing selected. The best way to have nothing selected is grab your black arrow, the Selection tool here.

And just click off in this grey area here, just so that nothing is selected. Watch when I select on something, this Properties panel changes. But when I click on the background here, into kinda no-man's-land,

it gives me kind of general overall settings for the document. In this case, it's currently set to centimeters, okay? I'm gonna change mine, and work in inches in this course.

But let's say we're working, say, with some web or a UI design work in Illustrator. You can click on pixels, it doesn't really matter, but

this is the place to change it. It's in a slightly different place than say, a lot of the other Adobe products like Photoshop or InDesign where it's kind of done in the Preferences.

So that's just something to note here, we're gonna pick inches. One last thing we'd do before we move onto start making things is just some basic navigation.

We'll cover a lot more during the course, but zooming in and out and moving around is quite important. So there is a long way, you can use this, see this little magnifying glass here?

The zoom tool, click on that. And you click once, click twice, okay, and it just keeps zooming in. To zoom out, you can hold down the Option key on a Mac, or the Alt key on a PC.

So look down at your keyboard. If you're using a Mac, it's the Option key. If you're a PC, it's the Alt key, and

you can see the little icon changes from a plus to a minus. And then I just click again with my left mouse button, okay, and it just zooms out. So that's the long way.

What you'll find is I'm not gonna cover too many shortcuts really early on. But the one everyone uses to zoom in and out is, on a Mac, hold down your Cmd key and tap plus.

If you're on a PC, hold down the Ctrl key and tap plus. Okay, so plus is just up in your numbers, kinda along the top of your keyboard, there's a plus and a minus.

So minus zooms out, plus zooms in. One last little bit of navigation is to move around, say I want to see kinda down a bit further.

See these little sliders on the side here, okay, it'll look a little different on a PC. But there'll be a little kind of a slider bar that you can go up and down.

Same with down at the bottom here, you can go left and right. Okay, that is the long painful way. That is fine when you're new, you can do that way.

But let's do one last little shortcut, is if you hold down the space bar. Can you see at the moment I'm on my selection tool? Okay but if I hold space bar down, look at the icon that changes.

It becomes a little hand. Okay so space bar down, becomes a little hand, and that just means click, hold, and drag.

Okay, so space bar down, clicking the mouse, and just dragging it around. All right, that's it for the boring navigation stuff in Illustrator. I'll remind you of those shortcuts throughout the course, so don't worry.

But now, boring stuff over, let's get into the super exciting world of creating things in Illustrator using shapes and lines. All right, I'll see you in the next video.

Hi there. In this video, we are going to set up our documents that we can start redrawing this cute little sheriff penguin using all our shapes.

We're gonna create a new document, show you how to bring in and use layers to lock this pencil drawing in the background so that we can redraw over the top of it. All right, let's get started.

All right, first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna create a new document to draw our penguin on. Let's go to File, let's go to New.

Now in here we've got a bunch of pre-sets, okay. Along the top here you've got like if you wanted to design a mobile phone, kind of a website.

We're gonna start with print, okay. And in here we're gonna pick letter, and along here we're gonna change our units to inches.

We're gonna make it landscape, and what you'll find is yours is probably twirled up down at the bottom here. See where it says advanced options, click on that word and

this little extra option opens up, okay? And we'll change our color mode to RGB. And we're not gonna cover the full differences between RGB and CMYK.

But, just so you know, if you're new, RGB gives you a bigger color field, okay? More richer colors. CMYK is a little bit more washed out.

But if you're gonna eventually become a commercial illustrator or commercial designer using illustrator. You probably need to research a little bit more the differences between the two.

But the short version is just use IGB, even if you go into commercial print, printers have some amazing software to convert it to IGB, which they need and often it can give you a better result.

So RGB, perfect for pretty much all circumstances these days. Let's click create, all right. Next thing we gotta do is save our document.

So next up let's go to File and let's Save our document. And what I want to do is, now if you're on a Mac, like I am, okay. You might have to click this little arrow to see a few more of the options

here, okay. If you're on a PC, things are very similar but a little different, okay? Now, depending on your ability you might just save onto this top and

just leave it at that. What I'm gonna do is be very organize and click on New Folder. And I'm gonna put it into files.

Okay, I'm gonna put a folder coolest one, my penguin. I'm not sure if that's how you spell penguin, looks good enough for me. If you're on a PC it's slightly different, I think there's just an icon along the top

here, that says New Folder, hover above them. Create a new folder called class files, name our document penguin, and let's click Save.

Okay, these Illustrator options, just leave them all by default and click OK. So, to get started, what we've got is, I've drawn, hand drawn a penguin, and we're gonna redraw over the top of it, and that's a really common way that I work,

and a lot of illustrators work. Is that it's easier to draw in my notebook, take a photo of it or rescan. And actually just draw on top of it in illustrator.

So how everyone works? You can go straight into illustrator but it's gonna give us at least template to draw over the top of, just to make it a bit easier for us now.

So to make that happen, let's go to File and let's go to Place. Place is the word, it's interchangeable with import. Illustrator likes to call it Place, though, so File, Place,

we'll bring in our image. Let's find the exercise files that you've downloaded, and in there should be one called penguin.jpg.

Now, before you click Place, what we're gonna do is click on this word Template. I'll show you what it does. Let's make sure a template is clicked, let's cut and place, and

what ends up happening is, with my black arrow, if I click off in the background. Can you see? I can't move this image. So what it does is, it brings it in, it puts it on its own layer.

It locks that layer and dims it down a little bit, so it's easier to draw over the top of. And mines put in the middle of this document.

Yours is probably off to the side here a little bit. So, let's look at unlocking that layer and moving it around. So, up here in your layers panel.

Layer one is where we're gonna do our drawing. This layer, here, called Template, you can kinda see Template Penguin. What it's done is, it's created a layer, and has locked it, okay?

So it means I can't move it around, which is super handy. But let's say I wanna move it over a little bit, let's click on the locking icon.

Click on this now, and now, okay. Just using my black arrow. Just clicking and dragging the center anywhere, okay?

Now it's unlocked, okay? So I hope you can see the benefits of using the template. I can lock it again now, we're back to my layer one, okay?

Make sure it is highlighted, and I can do my drawing on that layer. And this helpful little liar is just underneath dimmed down a little bit. The capacity is down a little bit and it's locked making it easier to draw.

All right, that's it for setting up our document, just getting ready for drawing over the top of. What we'll do in the next video is that we'll start drawing with our shapes, okay.

Lines and rectangles to make our cute little penguin. That, for some unknown reason, is a sheriff. Mainly because I needed to show you how to draw a star.

But let's do that in the next video. Hi there, in this video we're going to redraw this pencil penguin, okay? Over the top, using shapes and lines, using illustrator,

we'll turn them off and yeah. [LAUGH] Short little squat penguin. Look at how happy he is.

All right, let's get started. All right to get started, what we're gonna do is we're gonna grab. Our rectangle tool over here in my toolbar.

If you can't see the rectangle tool, it might be that if you click and hold this kind of where this option might be, it might be set to something like the ellipse tool.

And to change that back to the rectangle tool, all you do is click, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, until these options appear, and then just click on the rectangle tool.

Also to get started, just make sure you're on your layers panel, and make sure you're on layer one. In your Properties panel,

I wanna make sure we're gonna change our fill and stroke. The fill is the center color of our rectangle and the stroke is the line around the outside.

So what you do is you click on this first little icon. Doesn't matter what color it is currently. Pick a random color.

Okay, cause we're gonna change it in a second but I just wanted you to get used to it. Then you can click back on this icon to close it back up.

And then the stroke, click on this. And just make sure it's set to black. Then you don't actually have to click back on this, you can just click anywhere and

it closes back down. And I wanna make sure that the stroke is set to one point okay? It's just a nice thin line that goes around the outside.

So let's draw a random rectangle, don't worry if it doesn't kinda line up, we're gonna use it for the body of our penguin. So you can see the fill is the center color, and

the stroke is the line around the outside. What you might see is kinda like faint blue line or red line, depending on your computer.

But it means, it just means it's got selected. So if we go back black arrow, this is your kind of like safety tool. Always go back to your black arrow if you're not too sure what to do.

You got all this selection. Just go back to the black arrow. It's the one you're gonna use the most.

And what you can do is click in the background here. So I just clicked once and it deselected our rectangle. You can see the stroker on the outside a lot clearer.

So it just goes blue when we have it selected. So what I like to do is, I like to keep the black line but not the fill. To do it, you have to have it selected, so

black arrow, click it in the middle, anywhere. And over here, click on fill, and to have none, see this little red line here? If you hover above it, it tells you, but that means I want nothing in there,

please. And I'm just gonna click in the background to close that little fill panel. Great, so I've got a line around the outside but no fill.

And what you'll notice is it's a little bit different to select. So I click in the background now. What happens is if I try to click the center, you can see it just doesn't work

like it did when it was filled with green, cause there is not center now. So if I want to select this rectangle now, I have to click the edge ones. So black arrow, click the edge and it should be selected.

Now what I'd like to do is using these white squares, okay? I just want you to resize it, okay, so that it kinda matches the edges of our little penguin here.

All right, not very exciting. Let's get into the slightly more exciting when we start looking at the corners. So black arrow, make sure the edge of it's selected,

you see these little targets in the corners, these are called corner options. And all they do is click, hold, and drag it with your mouse, just drag it towards the center of the rectangle.

[NOISE] So it's making all the corners not surrounded. Okay, so that's kind of what I want. It's got the top and not the bottom.

Okay, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna use this thing called Edit, we're gonna use Undo. It just goes back one step, okay, undo it, undo what you did.

And it keeps going back. You can Keep hitting Undo right back to the beginning of the document. You can also Redo it.

Now, I'm gonna use the shortcuts throughout this course, because it's a really common thing to do, go to Undo. And on my Mac it's Cmd+Z, on a PC it should be Ctrl+Z, and

we can just got to the long way, it's fine. What I'd like to do is I would like to have just one of the corners selected. So look at this little icon here, take note of the color.

I'll click it once, you can see it's kinda changed, it's inverted. So it's kinda selected when the other ones are not. What I mean by that is if you click and drag that one now, okay?

So you click it once and then click and drag it. You can see just to fix that one. I can do the same here, click it once, it goes to the alternate color.

Now, click and drag and them, okay. I can kinda just work with these individual corners. Now, my radius is a little bit different on both sides, so

what I'd like to do is go to Edit > Undo, Edit > Undo again. So it's back to being a square, and I'm gonna show you how to click both of them. So you click the first one, like we did before,

just click it once with a black arrow. But if you hold your Shift key down on your keyboard, Shift key is gonna play a pretty big part in Illustrator, okay?

So hold down Shift, click on the second one, and it means that I can select more than one at a time. So these at the bottom aren't selected, these guys at the top.

If I click one of them, click hold, drag it. They both come off the right, now I know they match. And a last minute change to my design, I'm gonna click this bottom one once, and

just tuck it up. I want it to have like a little penguin belly. [LAUGH] He was a bit stumpy before, he's still stumpy.

But anyway, you don't have to follow exactly. So we learned what fill in stroke is. Stroke is around the outside, fill is in the middle,

and we looked at these corner options. Let's start building some other parts. Let's draw the circle for his kind of eye there.

So I click, hold, keeping holding down your mouse, and then release on this Ellipse tool. So with the Ellipse tool, what we're gonna do is click and drag over here.

And what you'll notice is, I can click and drag any sort of size. So that's fine, cut any sort of weed size. Gonna undo a few times, what I'd like to do is I want it to be a perfect circle,

ok, shift is a, really kind of usable tool. So if I start dragging out, if I hold on to the shift key while I'm doing it, you can see it locks in the height and width, and that's true with rectangles or

stars, polygons, circles, okay? So I'm gonna get it to roughly the right size. I'm gonna grab my black arrow.

I'm gonna click either the edge, or if you can see this dot here, grab the dot, okay, that will center. If you got it the wrong size, okay, say it's just still too big, and

you try to line it up and you're like, [SOUND] it's kinda close. But what you can do is you can resize it. Just like we did before is that I can grab any of these little guys in the corner.

The trouble with resizing it this way is, you can see I'm kinda distorting the shape. So what I wanna do is, before I do it, so I've undone a couple of times,

is if I hold the Shift key and grab any of the corners, doesn't matter which corner it is, okay. It will lock the height and width like we did when we created the circle, okay?

So holding Shift just kinda locks the height and width until I get to the right size and my circle is not perfect, okay? So don't worry too much about it.

Another thing you can do here is if you're finding that you're trying to line it out and it's like jumping all around, okay. Get a close where you want it and then with your keyboard,

start with my black arrow. Look down on the keyboard, you've got your up down and left right. Your cases.

I'm just using my case hierarchies just to kind of tap it around the little bit. Okay, little bit left, little bit up. That often can be a nicer way to just kind of do fine adjustment in illustrator.

All right, let's do this little upside down curve and makes him the happy content [LAUGH] penguin. Anybody seen Penghu?

Anyway, he's my inspiration for this one. So what we wanna do is, I could draw a curve. There's lots of ways of doing curves.

This is really easy way, though, is if you click and hold down. So hold down the Line Segment tool, there's an Octal, okay. So with the Octal, just draw anywhere out here.

Doesn't really matter too much which way it goes cuz we can rotate it. So do it so it's kind of a nice curve-ish. What I'd like to do is go back to my black arrow.

Remember, this is our default go back to it tool. And it does so many things. We use it to resize the circle a second ago.

We can also use it to rotate. Now, what we need to do is, we need to zoom in a little bit. So who remembers what the shortcut was?

You remember, right? It's Cmd+ on a Mac, or Ctrl+ on a PC. So let's zoom in a little bit.

I'm going to show you why in a second. And to rotate this thing, we need to be in a kind of special zone. So when we're resizing it before remember we held Shift, and we drag this up and

down to make it kinda bigger and smaller. The rotation is very close, so clicking in the corner and dragging resizes it but just as we figure out, and

then this kind of like, so too close, no, perfect, too far. Perfect. This is kind of like every corner has this kind of like rotation zone in it.

You wiggle with your mouse around and hopefully find it. You're looking for that kind of bent arrow. And if you click hold and drag there, just click hold, drag your mouse,

it'll stop moving it around, okay. And just kind of find it again, drag it around and so it's kind of, a curve that you could use for an eye.

Now, I wanna move down a little bit. I could use these little sliders, they're fine. What's the shortcut?

You remember, spacebar, click, hold, and drag, okay? And just move it down, and mine's way to big, so I'm holding Shift, just kind of rotating it around a bit.

Don't worry if it's not the right, perfect curve, we're gonna show you different ways of doing it in a second but eh, that's close enough. Drag it down in the corner using my arrow keys just to line it up perfectly.

So to join nice, good-looking curves, you can use the actle. You can rotate it by that little special area, kinda just outside the scaling part. Just out a bit further, that's rotation.

Next thing, we'll look at is, we'll look at the stroke. This stroke, if I click off in the background, it's pretty thin, I want to kinda be nice and thick in the inside here,

cuz it's a bit more of a design feature. So I'm gonna select once with black arrow, and over here, okay, where it says stroke, I'm going to use this little up arrow.

You can drop this down and pick one, or you can just use the up arrow, just a click and pick a size. I'm gonna pick 4 point, for no good reason, just looks thick enough, and

that looks fine. I'm gonna click off in the background. And I've got this kind of like rainbow kind of shaped thing.

What I'd like it to do is I'm gonna eventually round all these corners. Just the thing I'm going for. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you a little trick.

You click on the stroke here, we're gonna look at what's called capping. Capping is the end here. Can you see that it's a straight line?

I would like it to be like a little bulbous end, okay? So I'm gonna click on it once. Over here, our stroke, we don't have many options, right?

We have color and we have the size of it, but if you click on the word, Stroke, ta da. There's all sorts of nerdy stuff in there, okay.

So what we're gonna do in this case is, it's called the capping, the unfortunately named butt cap, and then there's a second one the, round cap. Click on that, you'll keep straight face, right?

Okay, the second one, round cap, is kind of what we want, right? It's kind of this nice, more gentle end on it, okay? This one here, the last one, I don't use projecting cap, I kind of just,

the butt cap, there's a projecting cap. You can kinda see what it does, it puts it like a square on the outside. I can use the round cap.

That can really help your later on when you're working with Illustrator, you've got some really, like ugly edges or ends of strokes. Just switch into rounded cap can like finish them off nicely.

We'll look at stroke a little bit more in another video, but that's it for now, let's click off in the background, click off. Happy, smiley, content penguin.

All right, next up, we'll do some triangles. So I wanna do the beak, I wanna do the flipper. [LAUGH] Is it wing?

I don't know, penguins, and his tail. So they're all kind of triangles with rounded edges. So to do a triangle, is you hold down the Ellipse Tool, the Rectangle Tool, and

you gotta move to this one called the Polygon Tool. So a triangle is essentially a polygon, just a three-sided one. By default, you're gonna get a pentagon?

I don't know. I'm not sure what that one is, but I'm gonna delete it using my Delete key on my keyboard.

What I wanna do is just click once instead of dragging out, and it gives you the polygon options. So I've got the polygon tool selected, and I just click once on my screen.

It gives you some options before you start drawing, and I'm gonna pick three sides, please. Not gonna worry about the radius for the moment, I'm gonna resize it once I'm done.

So three sides, click OK, and I get this kind of giant triangle. So first up, let's resize it and rotate it, so I'm gonna use my black arrow, make sure it's selected by clicking the edge of it.

I'm gonna make sure it has no fill, make sure it has a black stroke, and I'm not too worried about the size of it just yet. So to resize it and rotate it, resizing, remember is just

grabbing this corner a bit here and just getting it down to a size. Rotating it is that magical area around the outside. Now, what you might wanna do is, at the moment, when you're rotating,

it just kinda goes around in random degrees. If you hold Shift, remember that magical tool? Okay, hold down the Shift key on your keyboard, and you start rotating it, okay,

you see it does it in 45 degree increments. You might want your nose to be that sort of shape. So clicking either the center or the edge, move it around,

get into position, resize it, rotate it around until you've got a nose. It doesn't have to be the same as my nose. I wanted mine to be flat on the bottom, so I'm gonna try and

rotate it using the magical rotation. Make sure it's big enough. Get it to overlap quite a bit in the back here, okay.

I'll show you one in a second. Arrow keys just to have it down, triangle's overlapped a bit more. Why? Because I wanna change the kind of

the roundness on the end, okay. So I'm gonna grab this little corner option, a little tug it in and drag it in. Make it a little bit bigger, drag that corner in,

and you can see that done it to all sides. You could do our secret trick, remember, when you click on it once, and just do it individually, but it's a little bit easier just to hide these in here.

We're gonna make both the nose black and and his little body black. So we wanna reuse this, I'm gonna have it selected, okay. Hold my beak there, I'm gonna edit, Copy, Edit,

Paste, okay, and I'm gonna put this down here. Missing about that, looks like a good flipper to me. Copy and Paste it again.

I am going to rotate it around. I just used Command + C and Command + V on a Mac. You can use Control + C and Control + V on a PC.

There we go. Now, you'll notice, I'm trying to line it up in the bottom here. It does some clever stuff where it tries to like automatically line up.

If yours is not doing that, it's called Smart Guides. Go on View, and you can see my Smart Guides is turned on. It's got a check next to it, okay.

It just means it tries to align things up automatically for you, and it's super handy. It can also be a bit of a pain, as well.

So you can go to View and to uncheck it, if you're not liking, like jumping around, lining up stuff. Some people don't.

All right, the last thing I'm gonna do is his body. Should've done that earlier, okay. When we had the Rectangle Tool, and I grab the Rectangle Tool, I'm gonna hover,

you can kinda see it says Path, that just means I'm just going to start bang on the edge of his body here. It's really handy, it's one of those Smart Guides, okay.

I'm gonna say, click, hold, and drag. I've got my rectangle. Don't worry to much about the stroke around the outside.

Remember black arrow, I'm gonna grab this, click once, drag him down to match. And same with this one, I'm going to click him and drag him up to match my, that's probably why it didn't do the little belly earlier on.

I'm just adding more, kind of things that could go wrong for us. So I'm gonna try to line it up. Actually, I'm gonna bring it, yeah, here you go, perfect.

[LAUGH] That's why it didn't do it. So we've got the body, let's do the feet as well. So I'm gonna do the foot with the Rectangle Tool,

grab just that corner with my black arrow. I don't actually have to go with my black arrow, it's just a good habit to get into. Click on it once, drag it down, what I'm gonna do is copy and paste them, so

Command + C and Command + V, two of them. And I try to them line them up. It's pretty good at lining, I'm not depending in which corner you grab it.

So notice that if I grab the center here, it intersects, very good, nice. He's got two little feet at the bottom. All right, let's look at the couple the other drawing tools.

We're gonna use just the regular, old straight line, okay, the Line Segment Tool. It had some fancy word for just drawing a line.

And all you do is click, hold, and drag, okay. Click, hold, and drag. Those are two little, I'm not even sure what they are,

little feathers out the back of his head? But what I'd like to do as well is change the width of this, okay? I'm gonna match, maybe, this.

Remember it was four point, I think, that we used for that? And we changed the capping, okay. So what I wanna do is do both at the same time.

So what I'm gonna do is go to edit undo. It was kind of back to the same shape it was. So like we did with the corner options, we can select more than one at a time and

it's that same key. So I have my black arrow, I have the first one selected, then I hold down shift and click in the middle of the second one.

So I have both of them selected at the same time. Now over here in stroke I'm gonna say I'd like you to be four point, and under stroke I'd like to change from that one to that one.

All right let's look at the last, well last kind of new thing that I want to show you. We'll draw the rectangles and stuff for the water and the weeds, but

this one here where he get a sheriff badge is [LAUGH] only purely so I could show you how to draw a star and a polygon. And you know how to draw a polygon probably.

Okay, click hold, the rectangle tool, we saw it before, polygon. And it remembers the last setting, so the last time we used it, we said be three sides, so it's kinda defaulting to that now.

So what we're gonna do is, remember, just click once out here, put it back to what it was, which was five sides. Click okay, and we get our pentagon, I think.

Octagon, no, pentagon. I wanna lock in pentagon, okay? And I magically got mine the right size.

If you don't remember, grab the edges here, hold down Shift while you're dragging those edges, it will lock the height and width. And just kinda move it in by grabbing the edges.

Okay here we go, if it's the wrong fill and the wrong stroke, with it selected you can go and change the fill to none, and the stroke there. Let's do our star, so the star is there, is an actual star tool, so click and

hold down this little kind of shape group, and grab the star tool. And if you click, hold and drag out, you'll get just a regular star. To adjust the star, you're gonna undo it, click once,

and you can decide on how many points it has and how pointy they are. Just to mess around with the radiuses to experiment with it, it's hard to describe. But my one's fine the way it was I'm gonna leave everything by itself.

I'm gonna cancel, and just draw the star. Now to lock it into a perfect kind of horizontal and vertical, hold Shift, remember that magical tool.

When in doubt, probably hold down Shift. Grab the black arrow. Click, hold, and drag.

Get it close. Hold down Shift grab on to the corners, drag it out. We're getting good at this, alright.

What I'd like to do is make sure all the, it will try its very best to align these perfectly. Okay if you're like I know it's not aligned perfectly, so

what you can do is select both of them. Remember our trick, have the star selected? Which key do you hold down?

That's right, Shift key, click the center of this pentagon, and what you'll see over the side here is that you've got your align option. So I wanna make sure they're aligned horizontally center, and

vertically center, and they are perfect already. I'm gonna move mine off hold Shift grab both of them just to show you what it actually does.

Now the r perfectly centered so I'm just gonna mine way off so it makes it more clear of what we're doing. So I'm gonna make sure it's horizontally center and vertically center.

Can never remember which is which so I just click both. All right so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drag it I've got them both selected. And I'll hold down Shift key, I want them to be a lot smaller.

So Space bar to move her along, grab one of the edges, hold down Shift, to get it to a kind of I don't know, sheriff badge size. All right, the last couple of things we're gonna do is I'm gonna zoom out a little

bit so I can put in. That is meant to be the ground and that is meant to be the water, if you weren't sure.

I'm going to grab my rectangle tool. I'm gonna click, hold, and drag, and I'm gonna get close to this edge. And it's gonna, [SOUND], it happens all the time.

Where you kind of just get close to it, and Illustrator kind of you get lost this way. So I've got this giant rectangle.

To get back, okay, we can go to View and just go to the one that says Fit All in Window. It kind of gets you back to home base.

Command zero on your keyboard, okay. On a MAC, or control zero on your keyboard is a really common shortcut, to do the same thing.

Otherwise, let's go to View and go to one that says Fit outward to window or fit all to window. Okay, we'll get back to here.

I'm gonna delete with my keyboard. We'll go to undo to get rid of the giant rectangle. I'm gonna draw one that kind of goes just here.

Other one. [SOUND] And I'm gonna draw in my circles. And I'm gonna cheat a little bit with the circles.

I'm gonna draw a circle. Zoom in a little bit. I'm gonna copy and paste it instead of drawing lots of them.

And resize them That's not even cheating. It takes just as long. Maybe even just easier drawing them.

Holding Shift maybe to get a perfect circle. Yeah okay that first way is easier. All right, next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add some color, well actually,

forgot the tuft of grass. I'm just gonna use my above the Act tool, there you go Act tool. There's gonna be a bit of rotation going on so, maybe not.

That'll do. [LAUGH] Beautiful. All right, we're gonna come back and look at strokes in a bit more detail to maybe

give these a little bit more prettiness but for the moment that's gonna do for me. What I'd like to do is add some fill colors cuz at the moment you use I don't know, weird shapes and sizes, so I'm gonna fill work our way through,

adding fills, messing with strokes, resizing strokes, grouping, arranging and we'll do all of that in the very next video. All right I'll see you then.

Hi there, this video we're going to take our drawing from the last video and do this to it. We're going to color him in, but along the way we're going to use grouping,

arranging. What isolation mode is? All sorts of fun stuff, lets get started.

All right, let's look at grouping, arranging, we're also gonna color them in. If that sounds real simple, hang around cuz there's things like isolation mode that you really need to understand before moving on.

All right, so first up, let's turn off our trace layer, okay? It was useful for getting us here, but we don't need it anymore. So under your layers panel, let's just turn the eyeball off, or

this little icon here. The first icon in the Layers panel, we don't need it anymore. You can click on it and hit the trash can way down the bottom here and

that will just get rid of it. And I'm just gonna leave mine there, I'm gonna undo, just turn it off. So let's first of all look at grouping and then isolation modes.

So I'm zooming in, I want to do a couple things. I want to grab my pentagon and I want to give it a black fill. So I'm going to click on fill, make it black.

And I'm going to get the stroke and none color. We have a small problem, as there now star. You can see if I use my black arrow, I can just hover above and eventually,

find my star by just clicking the little blue line that appears, it's there. But because it's black on black and it has no center, it can't be seen. So let's have a look at fixing that.

So, stroke, I don't want any stroke on it. And the fill, I would like this option here for white. Cool, so I wanna group these two.

So I need to select both of them, sometimes you can't click both. I'm gonna zoom in just a little bit. Makes it a little easier to click individual items when they

are really close. So I clicked on my pentagon, okay? I'm gonna hold shift, and click on my star.

So, I've got them both selected. So, what I want to do is group them, so that they kind of stick together. Okay, so I can go up to Object and go to this one that says Group,

there it is at the top. All that means now, is if I click off in the background and I click back on just either one of them, they’re both kinda connected.

It’s not forever, okay, I can go to select and go to Ungroup, and that will separate them up again. But that’s how to group them, grouping is handy.

One thing you will run into is something called isolation mode and this is where most people get lost in Illustrator. The people that I teach quite a few then add double clickers,

they love double clicking stuff. [LAUGH] What happens is, I don't know. We know from lots of programs, you're gonna double click things but

if you double click in illustrator, everything goes wrong. So if I double click a star, double click, okay. What happens is the background greys out and I can still work on these guys, but

I can't work on the background anymore. All that's happened is you've entered something called isolation mode. And the way to really tell is at the top here, can you see this thing,

this gray bar here didn't appear before. I'm gonna go back out of it by clicking this arrow twice. Okay, so I'm back out of it, it'll appear up here, I'll move so it's easier to see.

If I double click on this, this little bar appears and everything else that's not in that group is kinda blanked out. Why do we have it?

It's mainly to confuse everybody that I'm teaching, but it actually has a really good use. It means that when I'm back outta here, so I've got these things together.

But I wanna kind of move them, I want the star in a different position to the pentagon. So, instead of going to Ungroup and then moving around and then regrouping them.

What you can do, is just double clicking them. And think of it as going inside that group, we've kind of dived inside. Everything else is grayed out, it's not important, now we're inside this group.

Okay, now these guys are separate again. So I can go actually, I want my star to be, I don't know why, but you want it down there.

And what it means is, I can click this arrow to go back to layer one and then all the way out to exit isolation mode. Just keep smashing away at that little arrow untill it goes away.

And now, there's still a group, okay? But you were able to dive inside and change it. So I'm gonna dive inside again, grab it, stick it back roughly in the middle,

roughly enough. We're gonna stick both of them and arrange them. And again, you can keep clicking on the arrow to go back, or

double click the background. That kind of jumps you out like bit of a quicker shortcut. So if you ever get lost and think ike man, that thing's not working, it's not locked.

And from inside of here, you can see a lot of these things don't work, these menu items, their all grayed out. Because we're in this kind of like special world isolation mode.

Double click the background to come out, everything will come back to normal. So if you're lost, click the arrow or double click the background and you can come out.

Hopefully you can see the use of isolation mode. Let's look at another things, so I'm gonna work on both of these little thing here, and I'll click on this.

We're gonna put the edges member of this foot. I'm gonna click fill, I'm gonna pick an orange, just randomly from in here. And I'm gonna have stroke of, none.

I'm gonna click this fella, this other foot, and I'm gonna do the same thing. I'm gonna make it slightly darker orange, okay? And I'm going to have a stroke of, none.

Now, the trouble is is that this one that I kind of want at the back is in front of my front foot. Just because I, I drew him last, okay?

But if you draw ends up on top of the last things. So what I can do is I can select them, I can go to Arrange, and I can go to Send to back.

And there you go, that's how to arrange things. And we're gonna do lots of arranging now. We're gonna get the layer order all right.

You can use layers but in Illustrator, unlike something like Photoshop, you generally only have one layer that you work on. You can add more but because these are all kind of individual vector objects

Illustrator, allows you just to kind of arrange them and bring them to the front. If you want this guy at the front now, I can click on Arrange and say bring to the front, Arrange and Send it Back.

One other really useful thing to know before we go through and start coloring stuff is that, watch this. If I grab my penguin, I'm just grabbing all of the penguin bits.

Okay, so I've just dragged a box instead of holding shift, okay? And shift clicking it all, that would work, okay? It'll be there for a long time.

What you can do with your black arrow is just click, hold, and drag a box kinda roughly around. Can you see I haven't colored the feet?

Cuz I don't want that rectangle at the bottom, which is my ground. I'm gonna go just above there, and because I've overlapped those last little objects it should select them all.

That's one way of doing it. What I'd like you to do is, by default I can't exactly remember whether it's on or off.

I'm gonna show you both ways. So, what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna scale this down. So I've got everything selected.

I'm gonna hold my shift, so it scales it proportionally, grab the corner. I'm gonna scale it right down to my teeny tiny version of my penguin. Something weird happens, [LAUGH] right?

All of the stokes are, they don't scale down proportionally, okay? That is still like a nice solid, where is my eye in the middle? Remember we made him four point, he is still four point, so I'm gonna undo.

So there's gonna be times when you need that to scale down, where you want these strokes just to remain the exact size you told them to do be. So ,to do that let's click off into the background, but nothing selected.

This is option here the scale stroke and effects, okay? So with nothing selected you can turn on and off. You'll be turn on and off recently, for me, I turn it on and off quite often.

Okay, so I cut it off, I'm going to drag oral this guys. I'm going to shrinking them right down. To be a little mini penguin, you see all the strokes came along for the ride.

Other than to see a tiny penguin, I wanted to show you that little technique, okay? Before we move on. So I'm going to undo so he's back to his regular size.

When would you want to use this? Let's say, that you're drawing something that's a bit more, say, you're a fashion designer and you need a stitch, okay?

And you need to resize it, but you need that stitching detail to stay the same. Or say, you were drawing like I've taught open planners. This illustrator gets used by lots of different people,

say this is a road, okay? And this is another road, say these are not these are roads, okay? And I wanna scale them up and down but I want them to keep the same

thickness to match everything else at some of my document. Okay, so I wanna scale it up and down but I wanna retain the thickness. But most of the time, have nothing selected, just make sure it's on.

That's a, I bet you probably 70% at the time, you just gonna need to leave it on. But no, that's where it is when you wanna scale it down, you can turn it off and it will keep its stroke size.

All right, we're gonna work through and color this fella using our new found grouping, arranging techniques. I'm gonna click on the body.

I'm gonna say you my mind have got to fill a black. And a stroke of wait, actually, I might do him last because he kind of makes these a little bit harder to use.

So I'm gonna click on him. I'm gonna shift and then click on the eye because I wanna do the same thing. I want them both to have a white center, and no stroke please, awesome.

Now, I'm gonna click on the body, and I want the body to have a fill of white. And, nope, I want it to have a fill of black and I'd like to have it no stroke. Okay, so my alignment's actually working out fine except for

my little flipper here, you can kinda see him. So it's a little bit hard to find that flipper. I can kinda roll around and I eventually find them.

And that's actually probably just perfect. Click on them, and I can say you, my friend, have a fill of black, a stroke of white.

And I wanna bring you to the front, by going to Arrange, and say Bring to Front. Another way to do it, I'm gonna undo, okay? So I can't see it, right?

There was a kind of skeleton view you can use, it's called Outline. If I go to View, and go to this one that says Outline, okay? It's a common thing to use, Cmd+Y, okay?

Or Ctrl+Y, can you see, it's just like a really wire-frame version. So you can do things like, actually, click on him cuz it easier to see in this view. I can go to Arrange, Bring to Front.

Then go to View, and so you see Cmd+Y toggles between GPU View. Which is [LAUGH] not a sexy way of calling it, but it just toggles outline to view, outline to view.

So, I do that quite a bit if I lose something. If I'm like, mm, I'm pretty sure there was a flipper here somewhere. I can just go to command y on my Mac, or control y on my PC, and just select them.

I'm gonna grab you, I'm gonna give him a no stroke. [SOUND] I want you to be the same, you are going to have no stroke and a black fill my little beak.

I'm gonna grab you who are nicely grouped, my little sheriff's badge penguin. You'll notice, I should've selected all of these on one go, because they're all doing the same thing.

I can do another little trick is, can you see this little eye dropper tool here? Okay, it says eye dropper tool, so to make it work I have this selected. Okay, the outside of it, grab the eyedropper tool, and

then click on the middle of my beak here. And it goes and steals the same settings, so it changes the fill and the stroke to match it.

It's handy little advanced one. All right, what I might do is I might grab this, is gonna be a fill of some sort of grey thing here.

And I'm gonna show you a few other color options. So grey, I'm not sure why it's grey. It's ice, I just wanna a really monochromatic design.

This edge of this for the water, what I'm gonna do is, say you've got these presets in here, okay? Just, these are premixed, they're called swatches.

Adobe has just said these are the ones, they're just some defaults, and they're good. But say you want your own custom color.

See this little icon here? Color mixer? Okay, it gives the option down at the bottom for

this thing here called the RGB spectrum. It's just a little rainbow-colored thing, click anywhere on it. And it's the tip of the little eyedropper will be the color, so

you can pick any old color you like. Move it around, pick any old color there, common on. That's gonna work for me ish.

All right, a bit more green. And I'm gonna get rid of the stroke on these guys, same with you. Goodbye, stroke.

And now, I'm just messing around, you can skip through the next video now. [LAUGH] I'm gonna go through and color all of these holding shift to grab them all, here we go.

We're gonna go fill with white. Now, remember if you want to go back the swatches, click on this first one. And I'm going to have a stroke.

I'm going to put in a little bit of a background color because I want to see my white belly a little bit better. So I'm going to put in, you can change the background color, okay?

You know how it's white there the page color? You can't just go and say set background color like you can on some programs, you actually have to draw a box.

So rectangle tool, I'll draw it all the way across covering the whole thing. I'm gonna give it a color of that really light grey, there we go. And I'm gonna give it a stroke of none, and

I'm gonna say arrange in the back please. And that just means that you can see the belly of my little dude there. And if you're like me, I don't like his little potbelly now [LAUGH].

I'm gonna click on him, click on that guy once, to get the corner. And just drag him back down, so he's got a nice square belly, [LAUGH]. All right, my feet a little bit, so

you can kinda see that he's got feet at the side. All right, so that's us for this video. We have created a little potbelly contender penguin.

And what I'd like to do is give you a task now, okay? So I'd like you to create your own creature. The boundaries are,

you have to use the tools we've learned in the last three videos. So just things like simple shapes like our triangles, pentagons, stars, rectangles. The corners you can use?

I don't want you to use any of the other tools, just these simple tools we've used. The other thing is let's keep your animals, I'm gonna give you some boundaries.

We're going for ocean going animals. It could be in the sea, or like a penguin, kind of related to the sea. So pick another animal and doesn't matter whether you hand draw it and

then scan it in. Or whether you just draw it straight in Illustrator, it's up to you. Now remember, this is your first drawing, so

don't worry if you're like this isn't good. I would love to see it, okay? So if you take a screen shot or save this as a JPEG.

If you're not sure how to save a JPEG, we'll do it later in the course, okay. Look for a video court exporting from illustrator. You can kinda sneak it here to that one just so you can get the tape work out or

you can just do a screenshot. And I'd love for you to upload and tag it to me in Twitter and Instagram. So on Twitter, I am danlovesadobe.

Also tag in totsplus, okay? So I invited totsplust. They Tod's plus design on twitter, and on instagram, I am being your own laptop.

Tag me in, I'd love to see what you did. So pause it now, go do that. And then I will see you in the next video where we start looking at something called

the shape builder tool, all right? I'll see you then. Hello, and welcome.

This video is all about the Shape Builder Tool. We're gonna take the drawing we did earlier, this one, and do this to it. What do we do?

Okay, we cast some shadows, can you see? Before, after. We cast some shadows on the penguin using a real quick and easy tool,

using the shape builder. We also did some stuff with the eye there where it's kind of a pie shape cut out of the circle.

If you have tried illustrated before, and you've missed around with the path finder, and that was really tough, this is a replacement for it, it is awesome, you'll love it.

It's been far too much time hoping this up, let's just jump in, and learn how it works. All right, to get started, let's go to File, let's go to Open, and

in your exercise files, there's one cool cheap builder tool, we want the one that says 1, shape builder tool 1. Not particularly exciting, we just got some shapes, now,

these are nothing special. Just like we did in the last videos, just I drew some circles, and some squares, and a star.

Now, where the shape builder is quite cool, we're gonna just learn the basics here, and then, we're gonna go back and do what you saw at the beginning there where you kind of add some shadows and.

So when that all selected, so I grab my black arrow, I've drawn a box all the way around it, or you can hold Shift, and click one, try clicking them all. Either way, once you got the ball selected, we want the Shape Builder Tool.

It's this one here, so hard one to describe. Two targets and an arrow. Okay, click on this guy here, it's underneath the pin,

notice a couple of ways to use shape builder, so by default, you can kinda see my cursor there has a little plus. Okay, and what that allows me to do, is these are two separate shapes.

What I can do is click in here, hold, drag, drag, drag, and kinda like clicking my mouse, holding and drawing a line in between all three of these. And watch this when I let go, it magics them all together.

So now, if I go back to my back arrow, click off in the background, this is just one shape that's all been joined up. We're gonna undo, I'm gonna select them all again, and

I'm gonna show you some other things it does. So shape builder, okay, by default, it's got the little plus, but if I hold down the option key on my Mac, or Alt key on a PC,

can you see it changes from a plus to a minus? And now, let's me do things like this, I want to delete this trunk here. Just kinda snips a wall out where they overlap.

If you've ever tried doing that with the path finder tool, maybe you've used illustrator in the past, man, that was a pain. So clicking and dragging across things, joins them up,

holding down Option on a Mac, or on a PCs, allows you to click and delete things, super handy, I'll show you it's other really good use. So I'm gonna draw a big rectangle across all of these guys,

just cuz I wanna show you something. So I've drawn a rectangle, gonna grab my black arrow, gonna select all of them. I'm gonna jump to my Shape Builder Tool, and does another good thing.

Rather than just joining up and removing things, you can actually color shapes where they all overlap. Cuz remember this rectangle's just a rectangle, okay,

I wanna color some intersections, so I'm gonna select them all, black arrow, back to my Shape Builder Tool, go to my Properties panel, and then here, I can pick a fill color.

So I can say, back to my swatches maybe. I'm gonna pick blue for no good reason. I'll pick [LAUGH] for another no good reason.

And what we can do, is click it to drop it back in, and now, look what happens, look, magic. I can just color bits where they overlap.

Now, you might not find this amazing, I do. It’s just super quick and easy for coloring vector. I can pick different colors.

So instead of trying to joint them, and break them apart, and make them complete shapes, I can just click a fill color and just click on one of these separate shapes.

Now, if you feel totally underwhelmed by this tool, It's cuz I got a really simple exercise here, just to get the basics going. So remember, click and hold, and drag across to join things.

Hold down the Option key, or Op key on a PC to minus things. You can drag across with minus as well, to minus big chunks. And remember, with nothing held down, I can just pick a fill, and

then, just click on them to color. So I'm gonna close this down, and we're gonna open up another file. So I'm not gonna save it, cuz we didn't do anything very exciting.

Some terrible colors there. What I'd like you to do now, is get a file, get it opened. I want you to open up Shape Build It 2.

So this exercise here, we're gonna do some more practical uses that actually build a two, and hopefully, you'll see the value then. First thing I wanna do before I get started, black arrow, I click on my sky.

This is kind of big grey box in the background here. What I wanna do is something unrelated to the Shape Builder Tool, but often useful when you've got this background color.

I wanna put it on its own layer and lock it, so it's not getting in the way of me working on my penguin here. So with it selected, let me go to my Layers panel, I'm gonna

make a brand new layer, that's this little turned-up page here, create new layer, of the top all the way up here, it's giving me the thing called, Layer3. I'm gonna double-click the word Layer3, gonna call this Background.

Just to give everything a name, Layer1, okay, is where all my drawing is, so I'm gonna double-click Layer1, and this is gonna be my drawing. So background has nothing on it at the moment.

It's a layer with nothing on it. What I'd like to do, is put the sky on it, and then lock it. So to do that, black arrow.

Make sure the sky is selected. You can see this little blue dot here. Okay, that means, that, that's indicating that it's on this layer here.

The sky's actually on the drawing layer. To move it to the background layer, click and hold this little blue spot, until he goes to this layer.

That just says, I've dragged him from drawing to the background layer. The trouble with the background layer, it is above everything else. You can kinda see it up here.

You see background first, then drawing underneath, and remember that template we had right underneath at all. To change that, grab background, click Hold, and drag the word.

You can see these little lines up here everywhere? It's kind of a weird like, so click and hold drag the weird background, until it appears just underneath the drawing there.

You might have to practice that a couple of times. If it goes wrong, go to Edit > Undo, and see if you can get it into the right position.

So how do I know this is on the background layer? See that eyeball, turn it on, turn it off, turn it on, turn it off. So I know that's the background layer, it's underneath,

I'm gonna click this little lock icon like I did for the background. What it means now, is if I try to move it, I can't. All right, next thing I wanna do, is just make sure I'm on my drawing layer.

That's the one I'm gonna work on. I'm gonna go back to my properties panel. All right, so what I'd like to do, is I'm gonna change this eye.

It's gonna go from content penguin. I'm gonna hit Delete on my keyboard. I'm gonna give him a different kind of eye like you saw at the beginning there.

I'm gonna grab the ellipse tool, I'm gonna draw a nice big ellipse. Holding down Shift to get it to be perfect. I'm gonna give it a fill color, I'm gonna give it no stroke.

What I wanna do is a second circle. So it's really common in cartoons to kinda have that sliced out eye, okay? So I'm drawing another ellipse, holding down shift.

It doesn't matter which color it is. Cuz we're gonna actually delete it. But I'm just making it blue, so it's easier for you to see.

I'll move back to my selection tool. Gonna grab the center of it, and just kinda overlap it there. So it's kinda half off.

I'm gonna slice that out of the eyeball. To make it look like a kind of a reflection. So I'm gonna select both of them.

Go to my Shape Builder Tool. And what was the key how down to delete things? Do you remember?

That's right. It's the option or cannot be seen. And I can say, you go, you go, and a cool thing about that now.

You see how that was, got a cookie getter. I got my black arrow, like a diagram, and you can see it's actually a hole cut out of it.

So I'm gonna hold shift, grab the edge, and get it to a Penguiny size, eye ball size [LAUGH], you can decide on how big you want this eye, all right, up to you. Or is it gonna be, yeah [LAUGH], all right, it's enough, so let's minusing,

we kinda minus that circle from that circle, what I wanna do is join something, so I'm gonna click with my black arrow with the white belly, I'm just gonna drag it up here, so it kinda overlaps.

I'm gonna kinda get it so it matches up with the noseish. Cuz that's the kinda look that I want. I want it to be cool, kinda one.

So I'm gonna click this. Hold shift, and click this at the center. So they're two super units spot, but using my handy dandyShape Builder Tool,

I can drag across holding nothing down, just drag across them, kinda draw a line through all three, and papers though, it's one unit. Cool?

And remember the other use for coloring parts? We're gonna add some kinda like fake shadow, so let's grab the line segment tool, and I'm gonna draw a line, let's zoom in a little bit, so you can see,

I'm gonna draw a line segment that kinda goes from there down to, you can draw it all the way through. Let's draw it all the way through just so

you can see what to do with the left over bits. I'm gonna do you. So drawing a line through it.

I'm gonna grab my black arrow. And I need to click both the nose and this line. Your line might have a big thick stroke on it.

That's fine, it doesn't matter. What we need to do is have that selected, hold Shift and click the nose. So you got both of them selected.

Back to my handy dandy Shape Builder Tool. Remember for coloring, we need to have the Shape Builder selected first, then go to Fill, okay, then pick a color.

I'm just gonna pick a, kind of a lighter gray, and I'm just gonna click on this. Maybe a slightly darker version. It's meant to be light hitting his beak, anyway.

So it's worked, I colored it, but this is an overlapping hanging bit. Now, remember, what key to hold down to remove things: it's Alt on a PC, Option on a Mac, and I can just click on it.

Cool? Love that stuff. Next thing I wanna do is the same with this, and it's just repeat.

So I'm gonna grab my line tool, I'm gonna draw like a little highlight that kinda goes through here. Shift click them both.

Now, what you would have noticed there or might not have noticed, is that I started using a shortcut, and I'm gonna show you just cuz shortcuts are great. So I was on my line segmental, I drew it through here,

then I wanted to go back to my Move tool. And the Move tool, if I hover above it, can you see it has a little V in brackets? That just means that if I click my V key on my keyboard, so

it's not on there at the moment, watch, this big E jumps, okay? If I wanna go to my Shape Builder Tool, it's a weird one, it's Shift+M. I use it all the time, cuz I use this tool all the time.

Okay, Shift+M, so if you're using the Pencil tool all the time, you can see in it, I don't use the Pencil tool very often, so I don't even know what that shortcut is, but I know V is the move key,

I know Shift+M is the Quick Selection Tool, there's the Shape Builder Tool, I know P is the pin tool, T is the type tool. Just the stuff you use very often, just hover above it, and

it will give you the shortcut. Some of them don't have some, because they just don't get used very much. All right, so V key, I've got them both selected.

Shift+M to my Shape Builder Tool. I'm gonna pick a fill color, my friend of that dark gray, like it wants. Hold down my Alt key, or Option key on a MAC.

One more cash shadow, and then we'll do one more special trick that the shape builder can do, so don't leave just yet. So first of all, I wanna join these two fellows together, so I'm gonna hold Shift,

click both of them, go to my Shape Builder Tool, draw a line through them, throw one unit, and what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna duplicate it. So I'm gonna go back to my black arrow here, I'm gonna copy it, using edit copy,

and edit paste. So I've got this little speech bow. [LAUGH], but it's built out of.

So what I'm gonna do, is I'm just gonna offset it a little bit. Now, because my smart guides are on, it's very clever and tries to kind of line everything up, which is exactly what I want, actually what I might do is,

Do something like that where it's kind of just down a little bit. So now, what I wanna do, is I'm going to select both of them, so shift, click both of them.

If you're not sure if you got both of them, just kinda move them, and then undo it to go back. I use this for that kind of vector cast shadows all the time.

We're gonna use the same trick, pick a fill color. We'll use that lighter gray. That doesn't work, unless you're on the Shape Builder Tool.

I was on my section tool there, so when I changed my fill, it just changed everything. Make sure you're on your shape builder first, pick your fill color, and then,

over here, just click on that once. Okay, get your black arrow. I've got all this junk left over, this thing here,

I don't need him anymore, delete. I used him just to kinda get that the wall's a bit bright. A bit better, you get what I mean, right?

So I'll use it to cast the shadow. There's a weird thing down the bottom here. I'm not sure where he came from.

I'm gonna hit Delete, he's gone. So I promised you one other little trick you can do with the Shape Builder Tool. Is that, remember when this tail was separate from the back?

Of joining with this Shape Builder Tool, it allows you to do cool things like this. Grab your white arrow, we've been using the black arrow quite a bit. The black arrow is perfect for moving big lumps around the whole thing,

everything needs to go. If I use the white arrow, the white arrow is for moving a little parts within the lump.

Okay, so let's say, it is here, if I use the black arrow, remove this corner. It moves everything, okay? But if I grab the white arrow, click on the corner once, then try and

drag it, I get kind of little bits of individual control. And we'll look at that a little bit more when we use the pencil. But for the moment, the cool thing about it, is it says, I'm gonna click on here,

and you get this corner radius. Can you see it? A little dot on the inside of the angle.

I can click and drag it up, and I get these kinda nice curves. So the same thing for the gray one, click and drag him up, and get these nice kind of angles going on.

You can do the same for this star here, and back click it with the white arrow, it's called the direct selection tool, okay? White arrow, you might just zoom in a bit, if you found it a little hard to work on,

grab that, and just tuck him in. Cool? So you got any points that you're like.

I like them, but I just want them to be curved. Curved tool, they are cool corner options, and they are awesome. All right, so that's our penguin.

With some cast shadows, and some holes cutting things. It's called the Shape Builder Tool. I should finish it there, but I'm not.

I'm gonna grab the line tool, and I'm gonna cast a shadow. I don't know in the water from the land. Okay, holding shift grab them both, like a fill collar.

Remember, this is not gonna work, okay, we've got to have an undo, got the Shape Builder Tool first. I'll leave it in there, because you'll do the same thing, I do it all the time.

I should know what I'm doing, I'm gonna pick color from my switches, and now, I'm gonna click it in there. Click off from the backgrounds, black arrow.

[LAUGH] It's cool, it all kinda soothes, except for this thing where we drew, I wanna delete him so bad. Bye, we'll come back later on, and

I will show you how to give him a bit more flavor using something called brushes. But for the moment, we're gonna move on to the next video where we create a kinda custom logo.

What I really wanna do is show you how the Shape Builder Tool works. When we're not just drawing penguins, but when we're working, say, with icons, or logos.

And we'll do that in the next video. Hi there. In this tutorial we are going to turn this pile of lines into this

M that looks like it's kinda wrapping around on itself. We're gonna use our shape builder tool again, but we're gonna learn other tricks and tips for it so you can continue your mastery of Illustrator.

Let's jump in and get started. All right to get started with this one, just gonna go to File and we're gonna go to a brand new document.

So File New as defaulted to my recent items, if yours hasn't go to Print, go to US later, or A4, I'm gonna pick landscape just cuz, and down here under Advanced Options I'm going to switch it up to IGB.

Okay, let's click Create. Then Save it, so File, Save, as I was using my shortcut there, File Save is Command S on a Mac, Ctrl S on a PC.

And on my Desktop, I've got my class files, man, how efficient are we? This is gonna be my M logo, and often when I'm working on things, anything in Illustrator I'll put a v1 at the end, and a v2, and

a v3 when I'm kinda doing updates. Never call it just logo cuz then you have to come up with something else for your number two.

And it might be two or you might put in, never put in final. Final's the kiss of death, cuz then you have to come up with final-2, and final-revisited, clever names.

So I find that v1, v2, v3 works just fine. Some people like to put the date at the end, up to you. MyLogov1, sounds good to me.

Click Save. Never have to change this. Just click OK.

And to center my document, Command-0 on my keyboard. Okay, just get it right in the middle. If you're on a PC, it's Ctrl 0.

All right, so I'm gonna draw my logo using straight lines, okay? And we're gonna use the Shape Builder to kind of delete the bits we don't. Good project to see how useful the Shape Builder tool is, creating just more,

stranger shapes. So we're gonna use a line segment tool, I'm gonna draw all out of lines. And I want a straight line up and down.

I'll click and drag though, remember it goes any which way I drag it. But what key could I hold down on my keyboard to get to go straight? If you guess it, Shift key.

Okay, if I hold down the Shift key, it locks it into 45 degree increments, and I just want it to be straight up and down. Okay, so I'm gonna drag it down, how long,

everyone's M is gonna look a little different. I'm just gonna free hand it. So I want two of these little lines.

So with my black arrow, I'm gonna go to Edit > Copy, Edit > Paste. So I had it selected, Edit > Copy, Edit > Paste. Grab the center, drag it along and it should just try and line up.

If it doesn't try and line up, just make sure you're under View, your Smart Guides is turned on, should be a little tick next to it. If it's not, give it a click, and you should start working.

So let's group these two, okay, Object, let's Group them. Cuz I wanna, with them selected, go to Copy, go to Paste, so I've got a second set.

I'm gonna draw the inner part of the M, okay, at an angle. And remember, just using my black arrow, some vaguely outside of the corner we get the little bent arrow.

Click and drag it until you feel you've got the angle right. And there's no right, I'm just kind of drawing something. Also make sure that they overlap quite a bit, why?

Because we gonna kinda get them overlap and use our trick that we used when we did the shadows, to kind of fill in things and snip off the lines we don't need. So if they're not quite long enough you can just drag the ends like this to make

them a little bit longer. What we'll also do is we'll group these two together, cuz what we're gonna do now is instead of trying to get the right angle on

the other side is we're just gonna reflect this one across. So what we're gonna do is select them both, let's group them just to make it easier on ourselves.

And then go up to Object, and there's one in here called, so Object, Transform, there's one in here called Reflect. Now weirdly, your trainer, your preview's not going to be on.

Okay, this is weird. Horizontal, vertical, picking an angle, it doesn't matter, it's not gonna show up over here.

So what you need to do is turn on Preview, so that if you're like me and you're \vertical, horizontal, there's even a little handy icon there. Thank you.

Okay, if I click OK now, the trouble with it is that it's kinda deleted my original and reflected it across. That's what this little copy button here means.

It means that I can make a copy of it and flip it, leaving the original there. Let's just click the button then and see what it does. So there you go.

You've got your original areas there, and the new one. If you'd just click OK you'd only have this fellow left. So what I'd like to do is kinda line them up roughly.

So they look like an M. Don't worry too much about it, what kind of M you have, I'm trying to visualize the M in those sticks.

What I wanna do though is make sure that they're aligned cuz the moment this one hangs down lower than this one. So I'm gonna select both of them and I'm gonna say, it's arranged,

it doesn't really matter which one, but it needs to be vertically. Here you go. So at least all the way down the bottom they're together.

Okay, next thing we wanna do is zoom in a little bit. Maybe use lines to kinda cap these ends off, so I'm gonna use my line tool, no fill, black stroke, maybe use one point.

And what I'm gonna do is, watch this, if I hover above this, okay, line, you can see this where it says path. Path is the name that illustrators, it's the nerdy name for a line, okay?

So Illustrator will call it paths. The cool thing about it is see this where it gets up to here where these two lines join?

It says intersect. This means do you wanna draw something that intersects these two lines? I'm like, [INAUDIBLE] yeah, that's awesome.

Thank you illustrator. I wanna click, hold and drag it, and what you wanna notice is that, what's the handy shortcut I can make it to go straight?

That's right, Shift, and I find with using this tool it's always better to go past where you need it. It's easy to trim off, but sometimes it can be a little bad if you don't get it

quite banged in there perfectly. I find just going past where you need it to be is a lot better. Same thing over here, click and drag all the way through.

What I might do for this one here is click hold and just drag through than I need it. It gives me a better result. Some of these bottom ones I'm gonna click hold and drag across all of these,

all the way through, and now we're gonna use our super fancy Shape Builder tool to trim off all the stuff we don't need. So black arrow, draw a box around it all, make sure you've got it all selected,

gonna grab our Shape Builder tool, and we're gonna start deleting things. To delete things, remember, what key do you hold down? That's right, Options Mac, O PC.

And click and drag through all of this stuff. Sometimes you need to do it twice, just cuz, okay, drag though it all. Click in and drag it through, you can just click them once, click them again.

[LAUGH] Sometimes, you get to click when you don't. There's some stuff in here I want to drag past, get rid of you. Get rid of you, get rid of you.

Click through all of that, through all of that. Here we go, I've kind of trimmed it up to something that looks a little bit nicer, at least more like an M.

Now I want to kind of make it so that this bit goes all the way and it joins it across, so remember you don't have to hold anything down to join them up. So I'm gonna click and drag across all three of these to make it one unit, and

I"m gonna drag these two to kinda give this like folded origami M type thing. Probably the most overused [LAUGH] printing thing in the world, folded M shaped papers stuff.

That's all right, I'm sure if you Google it you'll find 100 logos that look like this. But what I hope you got out of that is showing you how you can create

something out of nothing just using simple lines. It doesn't have to be complete shapes or rounded corners. You can just draw a pile of sticks,

you can hand draw with your pencil tool which we'll do in an upcoming video. Then tidy it up with the Shape Builder tool. So you can move on now, all I'm going to do is I'm gonna color it, okay, and

what you'll notice that, can you see this is actually separate parts now? It's not actually a full unit, so I'm gonna select it all and color it using my Shape Builder tool.

I go on about the Shape Builder tool being my favorite, it's because I've taught Illustrator for years and years, maybe, I don't even know. 15 years, and up until Shape Builder tool got made,

man, it was hard teaching people Illustrator. But it's easier now. Anyway, so I've got it all selected on my back arrow, I've shifted to my

Shape Builder tool, and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pick a Fill color. I'm gonna say I want, I mean I'm just gonna work with black and white. We'll deal with color a little bit nicer later on in the course, so

hang out for that. And I'll pick a darkish color to do that one and maybe and that one, we'll work it out.

[LAUGH] Winging this, we just slightly lighter gray for this one, and even a lighter gray for this one, even lighter, come on, Dan And

this last one here will be, I don't know, dark or a bit lighter. [LAUGH] I want to use color, but we're segmenting these out so we're not overwhelming everyone.

Glorious. One thing I might do is can you see these little guys point out in the corners here? I'm gonna get rid of my strokes completely,

we'll covered a bit more when we do lines. But I'm just gonna delete them so Strokes, it gonna be none. So I've just got kind of a full color.

Whenever you're presenting a logo, I always find, I don't know why, it might just be me. And you draw a giant rectangle in the background because what I like

to present on is a darker kinda gray. Logos are cool, maybe we get to use them in this dark gray, but they always look nice, presented against a nice solid gray.

So my black arrow, I got it selected, I'm gonna say arrange into back. And I pick the same gray to that. [LAUGH] See my friend, needed different gray, darker?

Yeah, look at that. How good is that M? All right, that is gonna be us [LAUGH] I hope you enjoyed it.

I enjoyed making it. I too want you to enjoy the [LAUGH] joys of drawing lines. You've probably done the M with me.

I would like you to pick another letter. Try not to pick anything that has a roundy part, because we just draw it with lines so pick a letter then can be drawn with straight lines.

And I'd love to see what you do. Try your first name or your last name, whatever the first initial is or the last initial is.

Mine's Dan Scott so it's terrible. Ds and Ss are not good for this tutorial. So my middle name is W, for Walter, so I can just turn this upside down I guess.

But I want you to practice drawing a different letter, an E or an F or an L, something that has straight lines, and I'd love to see what you did. Remember on Twitter we are @danlovesadobe, and make sure you tag @TutsDesign as well.

It's Tuts Plus Design, those are both for Twitter. If you're more of an Instagram person, tag me in it. I am bring your own laptop.

All right, let's get onto the next video where we, instead of using simple shapes to make illustrations, we're gonna use something called the Curvature Tool to draw our own custom stuff.

There'll be curves involved. All right, let's jump into it now. Hello, illustrator learners.

In this video, we are going to draw these icons using the curvature tool. It's like the pen tool, just a bit easier. Let's get started.

All right, to get started, let's make a new blank document, so File, New. It's already loaded with my last thing I've done, okay. So I've set it to inches and it's just remembered.

Landscape, US letter, okay. I'm gonna click Create. I'm gonna bring in something we're gonna trace and a little tip for you.

If you are bringing in things to be traced, if I leave it here, you can see it's kinda offset a little bit to the right of my screen. It's gonna put my trace document overlapping this edge here.

But if I quickly go to View and go to Fit Upward to Window, okay, so it's in the center. Now,when I bring it in, it's going to be in the middle.

It's a weird little quirk. All right, so go up to File and go to Place. In your exercise files, there's one called redraw icons.png.

And just make sure it's a template cuz it's gonna put it on its own layer, fade it out so we can trace it over the top. Click Place, awesome.

Okay, so there's my redraw layer. And we're gonna use this thing here called the curvature tool. That looks very close to the pen tool.

If the word pen tool is not new to you, you probably know the pencil. Which we're gonna cover in the next video, is man, it's hard to learn. Not impossible, just harder than the curvature tool.

It's a new tool, the curvature tool. I love that Adobe Illustrator invented this tool, it's super quick, super easy, I love it.

It's like the simplified version of the pen tool. Okay, so give it a click. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna zoom in on this,

it's meant to be a pallet, like an artist's pallet paint thing. Zoom in again. And we're gonna start with a circle in the center here.

So we could just use the ellipse tool, I know, but we're learning the curvature tool. And for a circle, just so you know, there are four points that make up a circle.

And how you use the curvature tool to do it is you click it once at the top, once on the side, once on the bottom, and you can see there, I'm gonna start again. Click once, nothing happens.

Click again, and you're like, this is not very curvature tool like. Okay, and it's not until you kind of move the mouse out, I'm not doing anything, it just kind of starts guessing about what you wanna do, which is super cool.

Click once at the bottom, click once there, click once more to close it all up, and it's a pretty good circle. I haven't done it perfectly but it's pretty clever.

What I'll do as well is I'm going to turn my fill to none and my stroke to black one point. You do that as well, or pick anything.

[LAUGH] Just turn the fill off in the middle so we can see through. So drawing circles, easy enough. What we're gonna do now is this outside where there's curves going each way.

So where do you know how to collect? We kind of know from the circle here that there kind of should be a point out here, maybe one at the bottom.

But all the rest of them are like where do I put this curvature tool? And the answer is it's just where the apexes are, where the middle of a curve is.

So you can kind of see there's a curve here and there's another curve going the other way. I'd say that's the middle of this one and

kind of there's the middle of this one going that way. So let's start there in this dip. So I'm gonna click once, remember nothing really happens.

I'm gonna click the second one at the top here, cuz that feels like the middle, this feels like the middle of this one. We can move them afterwards, don't worry.

And again, we get this wierd straight line, and it's not until we kinda move over here do we decide, now don't worry about the curve, the blue line coming out. Don't try and line it up here, just know that, remember

our circle before kind of had one over here and there was one down at the bottom? And you can see this curve looks not very good, right. But when I come down to this second one,

there's a little bit of faith involved, okay. You learn how the curvature works a little bit, kind of from experience. It's kind of a little bit hard to explain sometimes.

But if you put the curves kind of halfway around this curve, a little bit down here, maybe another one there. You can delete and add them later on.

Now this curve here, where is the center if it, kind of about there. And then back to the beginning here, and all I do is click once and it completes it all up.

Cool? Now the last thing about it is a really fluid line. Okay, a couple of things that you might run into trouble with is you might find it

a little bit tough using the smart guides. I've turned mine off, I cheated at the beginning, okay. I should have said at the beginning, but go to View and

I've turned smart guides off by clicking the little tick and it just turns off. And make sure you turn it on later on cuz it's quite helpful. I'll try and remind you.

But sometimes, like I said at the beginning, the smart guides can just be more hassle than they're worth. All right, what else can we do with this curvature tool?

Say you kinda like it and you're like, almost there, this one's a little bit wrong. So I'm still using my curvature tool, I can just click, hold,

and drag it around, okay. Cuz I told you one needs to be there and one needs to be there. But when you are doing it on you're going to be like, I don't know where these go,

you're just going to click all over the place. So what you can do is fix them up, just throw them in, don't worry, get them in roughly where they need to go, even if it looks paired, okay.

You can grab these guys, click on them, it kind of goes blue, and I can click and drag them just how I want. You need to be a bit further up there, and maybe you around here a bit more, and

maybe you look better down here. You can see I'm kind of trying to fix it by moving these guys around. Cool, what else can you do?

Maybe you've not got enough, okay. Say you didn't put one over here, okay, and it's just and you just can't do it. You can move this one around, and you can move this one down.

There's just not enough control, right. So I need another one to help me out. So to add another one, all you do is use the same tool, and

just you can kinda see the icon changes from this. See the little plus appears? So asterisk plus, okay, the little plus button just says I'm gonna add a point,

and then it'll give you a little bit more control. And a kind of tip I guess, the pro tip is, it will be most smooth with the least amount of these little dots.

They're called anchor points, okay, the fewer of these you can have, the nicer the curve will be. So you might get tempted just to put in loads of these because then you

get to do this really fine adjustment. Okay, and it doesn't matter how good you are. I'm pretty good, okay, but if I have lots of anchor points, okay,

it can look kind of good. But then if I click off and I'll turn off my trace layer, can you see it's just a little wobbly by the bottom?

It's not bad, okay, but it's just sort of, it's not super smooth like up here. Look how good that is, and look how little bit wobbly that is. Okay, delete points, use the same tool.

So curvature tool, give them a click, and all you do is hit delete on your keyboard. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, and goodbye. [LAUGH] All right, now there will be a point where this curvature is good but

it's hiding some of the nitty gritty detail, okay. So if there is times when you just need a little bit more control, what you can do is you can ditch the curvature tool once you've got it all in there, and

start using this guy here. Remember the black selection tool, okay, the black arrow? That's for moving this thing around, kind of the whole thing physically.