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11 Things Every Beginner Needs to Learn to Love Illustrator

11 Things Every Beginner Needs to Learn to Love Illustrator

with Russell Viers

 


In this workshop Adobe Certified Instructor Russell Viers distills his vast knowledge of Adobe Illustrator into 11 simple things that open up a whole world of possibilities. Before you know it you'll be playing around with art and logos and creating intricate designs by combining paths with the Pathfinder.
Topics include:
  • Creating shapes and lines
  • Modifying paths
  • Transforming objects
  • Using Illustrator's brushes
  • Creating your own brushes
  • Fun with text
  • Understanding layers, groups, and sublayers
  • Working with photos and other art
  • Placing Illustrator files

show more

author
Russell Viers
subject
Design, Illustration, video2brain
software
Illustrator CS5
level
Beginner
duration
3h 49m
released
Mar 22, 2011

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Introduction
Welcome
00:01 (MUSIC).
00:07 Greetings. I'm Russell Viers and I'm an Adobe
00:10 Certified instructor in Illustrator. In fact, it's my favorite of all the
00:14 Adobe products. I love it.
00:17 I use Illustrator for fun. If you ever come over to my house for a
00:20 party, yeah, we'll break out Illustrator and start designing logos.
00:24 That's how much I love it. And I really love to teach it.
00:28 I get to speak at conferences as, as well as, speak on site at design firms, ad
00:32 agencies, and corporations that use this software extensively.
00:37 The inspiration for this course was the number of people I meet who own
00:40 Illustrator, but never use it because they don't know what it does, or they
00:44 tried it and didn't understand it, or just find it too daunting to even try to learn.
00:50 That's why I've narrowed it down to 11 things you need to know to learn and love
00:54 Illustrator quickly. 11, that's it.
00:58 Once you learn these 11 things, you'll be able to use Illustrator to create and
01:03 edit art, logos, et cetera. And you're gonna love it.
01:07 I've seen it happen too many times. I'm gonna show you simple, yet powerful
01:11 tools you're already familiar with, like the pencil, eraser, a knife.
01:16 Then, we'll ramp up to combining paths into more complicated designs with the Pathfinder.
01:21 We'll even take text and convert it to art, so you could play with letters for
01:25 logos and really creative designs. When I teach Illustrator to a room of
01:30 total beginners, in less than two hours they're having a ball.
01:34 Playing and creating all sorts of designs.
01:37 You will too.
01:39 (MUSIC)
01:43
Collapse this transcript
1. Introduction to Vector Data
Vector vs. raster
00:02 If you're brand new to Illustrator, the term vector may be very foreign to you.
00:06 But it's important because it's the basis of everything we're gonna do in this
00:10 entire lesson. So you have to understand what the
00:13 difference is between vector, which is anchors and lines that create our art.
00:18 And raster, which we are probably comfortable with because that is pixels.
00:23 Yeah. We've been using pixels for years.
00:24 We're comfortable with that in photoshop. But, when we start talking about vector,
00:30 wow, that's really foreign. But the reality is, it's not, InDesign,
00:35 Quark, Pagemaker, they're all based on vector technology.
00:39 FreeHand, CorelDraw, MacDraw. Yeah.
00:42 The whole post-script language is based on vector.
00:45 So once you understand what it is and how to use it, you'll see there are many benefits.
00:50 For example, let's go to this raster photo here of this art.
00:54 Basically I took this art and I opened it in Photoshop, rasterizing it.
01:00 Okay, so you might be comfortable with this.
01:02 Maybe you've opened clip art in Photoshop, or you've opened a PDF file in
01:06 Photoshop, and now it's Pixels. So somebody says, hey can you move that motorcycle?
01:12 So what do you do? You take your quick selection tool, and
01:15 you try to select it, you hold your button down there as you're going along,
01:18 and everything's going fine. And then you realize, oh, I've gotta get
01:22 that, so you hold your alt key down as you come through, and now it really
01:26 starts getting ugly. Alright?
01:29 Well, so you think, wait a second. Let's go to the magic wand and I'll click
01:33 there and shift click and shift click and youre shift clicking around this art
01:38 because the magic wand and shift click selection tool they all work off
01:42 lightness values of pixils not objects. Photoshop has no idea what whether this
01:50 is a motorcycle or a balloon it just doesn't know that.
01:54 It just sees pixels and their colors. So if I take this move tool and start to
01:58 move the motorcycle you can see that what's left is the transparency.
02:05 Or if this was on a flattened file you'd have whatever the background color is.
02:10 In which case it would be white that would be here.
02:13 So now how do I take this motorcycle and move it?
02:16 Well, it's going to be a long day at the office because I'm going to have to
02:19 recreate this type, maybe use the rubber stamp tool or some other tricks but I'm
02:23 going to spend a lot of time rebuilding this art.
02:28 The exception to that would be if whoever built this originally built it in Photoshop.
02:33 On layers, okay then I can grab that layer and move it but when you open art
02:38 and Photoshop that was a created Photoshop rasterizing it well that's not
02:42 gonna happen it will all be one flat object.
02:48 Lets switch to vector, with vector if I go the layers panel in illustrator for
02:52 example It still says one layer. But notice that I can click on that
02:58 motorcycle and move it. Or I can click with the black arrow on
03:04 the motorcycle and move the entire group of objects.
03:08 I can select the word Moto and move that. Cycle, move that.
03:13 So all of these are separate objects. Let's take a look at it under view
03:18 outline and you can see that everything on the page actually is outlined because
03:24 that's really all it's made up of is anchors and lines.
03:30 What's the benefit of that? Well, several, aside from the obvious.
03:35 Which is, when the customer says, can you move that motorcycle on top of that o?
03:39 And move that text over there instead? Wow, that was easy.
03:43 Yeah. Because it's objects, we can do that very quickly.
03:47 That's one benefit. The other is, very quickly selecting objects.
03:51 And doing things like. Changing their color.
03:54 Another benefit is file size. These anchors and lines really aren't
03:58 that big, so illustrator files tend to be smaller than Photoshop files.
04:04 They're also not resolution dependent. If I zoom in on this letter o...
04:10 That jagged edge you see along there? That's the monitor.
04:14 There is no resolution to this file. There's no resolution until I actually
04:19 output it. When you print this, that's when it's
04:22 rasterized for that printer. So if it's going to a 600dpi laser
04:27 printer it It will be 600 DPI on the output.
04:30 1200 DPI laser printer, it's 1200 DPI. But in the Illustrator file, all this
04:36 text that's vector, there is no resolution.
04:39 So it's smaller in size, its flexible in resolution, and another benefit is scalability.
04:45 I'm just gonna zoom out here, alright, and I'm gonna go to my layers and unlock...
04:51 That background there. Now, watch what happens when I select
04:54 this art, and I just enlarge it, and enlarge it.
04:58 I could keep going, and going, and going, and, when I zoom in, there's the page
05:02 size there, but let's go to document setup, art boards.
05:08 And I can make this very big, choosing tabloid maybe.
05:11 Or even bigger. I can make a ten foot by four foot
05:14 banner, if I wanted. The point is that this is scalable.
05:18 Can you imagine taking this photoshop file, in RGB or CYMK, and making it ten
05:23 foot by four foot at a high enough resolution that it is going to look good?
05:29 That's gonna be a large photoshop file. But this file might very well still be
05:34 one or two megabytes. So, scalability, file size, flexibility
05:38 in very quickly grabbing objects, that's the vector world.
05:42 And that's what we're gonna spend our time on in this entire Video is working
05:47 with vector objects. In the last chapter we're gonna work with
05:51 photos which are raster. We'll talk about that then, but up till
05:55 then virtually everything we do is working with vector objects.
06:01
Collapse this transcript
Understanding anchors and lines
00:02 All right. For this lesson, we're going to create a
00:03 New Document. So, let's go to File > New, and under New
00:06 Document Profile, just choose Print, for now, and under size choose Letter, and
00:11 let's make it horizontal, or landscape like that.
00:16 Okay? Simple enough.
00:17 Let's hit Okay. And there's our document.
00:20 This is the playground, which we're going to use today as we work.
00:24 Now when we create this art, that we're going to do, we're probably with paint
00:28 programs, but when we start talking about anchors and lines in this vector world.
00:34 Wow, this is a whole new thing. So, I just want to demonstrate the hard
00:36 way to do it. Don't get freaked out when you see this
00:39 and run away and say, I'm never going to touch this, because we're going to use
00:42 this tool very little today. But I want us to go to the pen tool.
00:47 This third tool down on the left. Okay?
00:49 The pen tool. Hit p on your keyboard, and I want you to
00:52 just move it over your page. But don't click the mouse or anything.
00:56 Just put it there. All right.
00:58 Now, I'm going to create a very simple shape.
01:01 And I want the shape to begin there. Now keep in mind that I can always change
01:04 my mind later. But for right now, I'm just going to
01:07 click with my mouse, and look what happened.
01:09 It put an anchor right there. There's an anchor.
01:12 All right. Simple enough.
01:14 Now, I let go of my mouse. You can't see me right now but both hands
01:17 are in the air, all right. Look ma no hands, and I'm going to move
01:21 my mouse now over here, all right. Just move it over there, and then when I
01:25 feel like I'm ready I'm going to click my mouse again.
01:28 Boom, now it put the second anchor and it automatically put the line connecting
01:32 those two. Simple enough.
01:34 Now I'm going to move down here. And now, click again, boom.
01:37 There it is. Let's go all the way back to the beginning.
01:41 And I'm going to let it hover over that path.
01:43 And you can see, there's a small circle that shows up down by the pen.
01:47 And that's telling me, I'm getting ready to create a closed path.
01:50 If I move it out, see, that circle's not there.
01:52 Move this back there. There it is.
01:54 And click, and now I've created a triangle.
01:57 I'm going to show you much easier ways to create a triangle, so let's not get
02:00 caught up in that. We're just focusing on what are anchors
02:04 and what are lines, well, right now this art is made up of one, two, three anchors
02:08 and the intersecting lines. There you go.
02:11 If I go to view, outline mode... Now, I can see it just in its very rugged
02:17 sense here. It's just lines.
02:19 Okay, I'm going to go to view, preview again.
02:23 Now, how do I work with this shape? Well, if I'm on my black arrow, I had
02:27 this bounding box. And if I try to scale that, all right,
02:31 you can see how I'm reshaping That by stretching it, compressing it what have
02:35 you or I can move the entire shape like that, but if I want to really modify this
02:39 or I need to go to my white arrow which is called the direct selection tool when
02:43 I click on that you will see the bounding box disappears and you will see that if I
02:48 click right there watch what happen This anchor is blue.
02:57 This one is hollow or white, and so is this one.
02:59 So that's telling me that I'm only going to be working on this anchor right there.
03:04 Hit your arrow keys on your keyboard and you can see that anchor is moving and the
03:08 lines are adjusting with it. Can you see that?
03:12 There you go. Hold your shift key down while you do it.
03:15 And you can really see it move a lot faster.
03:18 That goes in ten point increments now. So I'm just using the arrow keys on my
03:21 keyboard, shift key. And I'm moving that anchor around.
03:25 Simple enough. Or I can grab it, and just drag it.
03:29 See? I can make this shape whatever I want.
03:32 It's very flexible. I can grab this one, move it over here.
03:37 I can hold my shift key down and select a second anchor, so now this one is hollow,
03:41 these two are selected, and now as I move, notice I'm moving both of those.
03:48 But the one that's not selected is staying anchored right where it was.
03:52 Well, that's pretty simple and these are just straight lines.
03:56 Let's go ahead and with your black arrow, select this art and hit delete.
04:01 Let's try something else now. Let's take this pen tool, click, click.
04:07 There's our line with the two anchors. Click, but this time, hold down with your mouse.
04:13 Now, I haven't let go on my mouse yet, and I'm going to begin to drag.
04:17 And notice that what I've done, is I've put handles on this anchor which allow me
04:22 to create a curve. Here we go.
04:27 And now I'll go back to the beginning and click one more time.
04:29 So now I've created three anchors. One, two, three, but one of them is now curved.
04:39 I have a curved anchor. There you go, that was fun, and I grab
04:42 those handles and I can play with the angle of the curve.
04:48 I can move that handle in. I can play with the radius of that curve.
04:53 Yeah! That's fun.
04:56 But you know what? I've decided that I don't want that to be
05:00 a curve anymore. If I go to my pen tool and hold down
05:03 there are four important tools here, pen tool, add anchor point tool, delete
05:07 anchor point tool, and this is the one I want to go to right now, convert anchor
05:11 pool tool. If I go to that convert anchor point tool
05:16 and I click on that anchor right there. Boom, it now becomes an angled anchor.
05:23 If I hold down on it, and drag, I'm at a handles back end.
05:27 So watch what happens when I click and then I go to this one and I drag.
05:30 Watch what happens when I click, and I go to this one and I drag.
05:39 See? I had the flexibility of very quickly
05:42 changing these anchors to curves or straight lines.
05:46 Just by using that tool. Drag, curve, click, angle.
05:51 Drag, curve. See?
05:53 That's fun. It's like a party weight and a half.
05:55 But what if I want more anchors on here? Well, I'm going to hold down.
06:00 And you could go to the add anchor point tool.
06:02 But you don't really need to. Because if I go to my pen tool, and I
06:05 move it over a path. You'll see the little plus.
06:09 Look, look, look, look, look. When I go right over the path.
06:11 Do you see the plus that shows up by the pen?
06:14 It's not there now. It's like an x, right?
06:16 The little icon to the right of the pen. But when I go right over the line there,
06:19 it changes to a plus. And when I click, I've now added an
06:23 anchor to that line. Let's click down here.
06:25 Go back to my white arrow. The direct selection tool, click, and now look.
06:31 I've created extra points on this. Well I've decided I don't like that one.
06:37 I could go to the delete anchor point tool, but I don't really need to, because
06:41 the regular pin tool, when I go over an existing anchor, it shows the little
06:44 minus there and when I click, I'm now getting rid of that.
06:49 So I can take any shape and continue to modify it long after its created, its
06:55 totally flexible so those are the anchors and it will automatically adjust the
07:02 intersecting lines as you move them or as you change them from angled to curved, or
07:09 as you change, the radius of that curve. Now I don't expect you to learn how to
07:19 use the Pen tool, we're going to use tools that are far easier then that in
07:22 this video. I just want you to understand what the
07:26 anchors and lines do, so that when you start opening clip art and working on it,
07:29 you can very easily get in there. And just by playing with the anchors and
07:35 lines, totally change your art.
07:39
Collapse this transcript
Strokes and fills
00:02 Now if you only wanted to do black lines and white fills your art is going to
00:05 probably get pretty boring pretty fat, so let's take this shape that we just
00:09 created using our pen tool and let's give it color, let's give it a border, and all
00:12 sorts of fun stuff that really takes this to a new level.
00:18 For us to do that we need to understand two important terms stroke and fill,
00:23 okay, so lets look over here at the tool bar down towards the bottom you will see
00:27 this fill and this stroke icon, notice the stroke icon is an outline and the
00:32 fill is solid, if the fill is in front and you go to your swatches panel, lets
00:36 say, and you choose a color, it will fill that shape with that color.
00:46 But I want to put a different color stroke, or border on that.
00:50 Lets zoom in and see what that's gonna look like.
00:52 See the black stroke right there, I'm gonna bring that to the front go to my
00:55 swatches panel and I'll choose a totally different color.
00:59 Let's just choose green there, and you can see that we've done that.
01:03 Let's zoom in even more so we can really see that.
01:06 Now that blue line going right down the middle of that green stroke, that's the
01:09 actual stroke. All we've done is apply a thickness or a
01:14 weight to that stroke and you'll notice that it goes half out and half in from
01:19 that stroke by default. Now the good news is we have a stroke
01:24 panel and all these panels are under window.
01:27 So if you can't find it just go to window, stroke, and it launches this
01:31 stroke panel. Minimize that.
01:34 You can also get it by clicking on that blue word stroke right there, and there's
01:37 some stroke controls. There's the weight.
01:40 There's the type you're gonna create here, and you can click on that and it
01:43 opens the stroke panel as well. So, there's lots of ways to work with strokes.
01:49 What I want us to learn here is this align stroke, which I can align it to the inside.
01:54 Or the outside of that stroke if I want to.
01:57 By default it's right there in the middle.
02:00 So as I increase the weight of the stroke, notice that it's growing half out
02:03 and half in because that's where I aligned it to was the center.
02:08 And that's the default setting. If you look right up here in the control
02:11 bar, in the last couple versions of Illustrator, we've been able to change
02:14 the fill and stroke right here, without having to go down here, and bring one to
02:17 the front, or one to the back. And it really is a nice change to the software.
02:23 Alright, so let me hit command 0, to make this fit window again, and you can see
02:27 that we've applied a stroke. And a fill that matches this.
02:33 Okay? And I control the weight.
02:35 Alright? I can play with the weight.
02:37 But, we have a problem down here. Look at that.
02:39 It flattened out, and I don't really want that, I want it to be pointy at that end.
02:44 That was the goal, anyway. Well, I want to introduce you to a term,
02:47 here, in the stroke panel, called limit. It's actually the miter limit.
02:51 And right it's at 10, in older versions it was only at 4.
02:55 Watch what happens when I increase that, eventually, I sent that limit high enough
02:59 that it goes ahead and makes that point. That's gonna be really important when
03:04 you're making stars, and other shapes with really tight angles on it.
03:08 Okay, let's go ahead and bring that stroke weight down just a little bit more there.
03:13 There we go. Simple enough.
03:14 So we have stroke, and fill. We can also put dashed lines on that
03:19 stroke if we want to. And now, in CS 5, we have a choice
03:23 between the way it used to be, where the corners looked horrible, and now it's got
03:27 this really nice, aligned corner feature, and that's new in CS 5.
03:33 We're not gonna go too deep into the dash lines today.
03:35 Let's turn that off. Okay, so let's delete this art for now
03:38 and let's start with something really basic like a line.
03:42 When I draw a line, the last stroke I created is there automatically.
03:46 That's six point green. There it is.
03:48 Okay, and in CS5 we have a new ability to change from a uniform stroke to some of
03:53 these variable width strokes. And if I increase the weight here, you
03:59 can really see that take place. That's new in CS5 and that's nice.
04:04 You can play with that right here as well with this width tool.
04:08 It allows you to grab that and just drag and create all sorts of different widths
04:12 on your strokes if you want to. If I go to view outline, you can see it's
04:17 still just a line. But with variable strokes, you've created
04:20 all this great effect here. Alright, so just for fun, I'm gonna make
04:24 some ellipses. I'm gonna hold my shift key down, draw a
04:27 circle there and fill that with. A color.
04:30 Good enough. Now I'm gonna Alt-drag Alt-drag Alt-drag
04:34 Alt-drag Alt-drag Alt-drag Alt-drag Alt-drag.
04:38 Okay. Now I can select all of those and I can
04:41 play with the stroke width. And I can change that uniform stroke
04:46 width to, let's say, something like that. And you can see that the circle is thin
04:50 on this side and heavy on this side. That's brand new to CS5.
04:55 Prior to CS5, you want see that uniform weight right there.
04:59 That's just the way it was, you could only do that, uniform weight all the way
05:03 around it. So your controls were.
05:07 Thickness. Aligning to the inside and aligning to
05:12 the outside. Those are your strokes and then your fills.
05:16 You can fill with not just colors but also gradients and patterns.
05:24 And those are available down here in the swatch libraries menu.
05:27 There's art history colors. There's color properties.
05:30 There's default swatches. And down here we have some gradients to
05:34 choose from. I can go to season and I'll choose that
05:37 gradient right there or that gradient right there.
05:41 And now you can see that I very quickly fill it with that.
05:44 I can also choose from patterns. Let's go to decorative, classic, and I
05:49 can now fill this with all sorts of different patterns.
05:53 So I can fill a path with patterns, gradients, solid colors, and I can stroke
05:58 it with patterns. Let's fill that now.
06:02 So you can see, I've stroked it with that pattern.
06:08 Let's try stroking it with a gradient. Yeah, you can't do that, okay?
06:12 Won't let you do that. You can learn what you can choose by
06:15 going right up here, if you've got the newer versions of Illustrator, and you
06:18 can see there are no gradients available to us here.
06:21 Only patterns and solids for the strokes. Let's go ahead and give that a red stroke.
06:25 But for fills, I have a choice of gradients, patterns and the solid colors.
06:30 So, now we know how to stroke, change the width, as well as fill it with different
06:36 colors and patterns.
06:40
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2. What Is Illustrator?
Why use Illustrator?
00:00 So you may be asking, well what is Illustrator?
00:03 What has it got that Photoshop or InDesign doesn't?
00:07 Well, it has a lot. Not only does it allow you to do things
00:10 that the other applications just can't do, some of the things That the other
00:14 programs can do, Illustrator does faster, and it also gives you more flexibility.
00:20 So, as you're gonna see in this series of videos, Illustrator is a great tool to
00:24 use for creating art, for creating logos, for creating ads.
00:28 But you may only use it at first, to edit art.
00:32 For example, I'm gonna go to file, open, and lets open this wood border.
00:36 Alright. Let's say that you're a newspaper, and
00:39 you're using metro or, or one of the other art services.
00:43 Well, this obviously is vector art. You can see that.
00:48 Well, how many of you have done something like this in the past?
00:50 Where you select this, maybe you place this into a design and you just.
00:54 Stretch this you need it to be taller. Right?
00:58 And now what you end up with is, well, the wood looks alright maybe, but this
01:01 art down here, that just looks horrible. It's all stretched, and that's not the
01:06 look you should have gone for. So I'm gonna undo, undo, and let's go
01:10 back to just a square border. What illustrator can allow you to do is
01:15 edit existing art. Maybe you want to use this, but it needs
01:18 to be for a tall ad or on a tall page, or, or wide.
01:22 It doesn't matter. What we can do is, working with these
01:25 vector lines, we can go in and edit that. So let me just select this really quickly
01:30 and go to object, ungroup, and make sure it's all ungrouped here.
01:34 There we go, okay. Now I am gonna go with my white arrow,
01:37 let's say, and select that drop shadow there, and just hit delete a couple
01:40 times, let's just get rid of that background.
01:43 Okay, so now I've just got the wood. Now you can see the vector lines that
01:48 makeup these pieces of wood. Alright, I could grab this wood right
01:53 here, and actually just drag it, because it's all groups together.
01:56 But I also wanna make the whole thing. taller.
01:59 So what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna zoom out here a little bit.
02:03 Hold my space bar and move this down. If I go to View, Outline, you can see all
02:07 the vector lines there, right? Well, I'm gonna only move some of them.
02:11 So instead of using the black arrow, and selecting the whole art.
02:15 I'm only gonna select some of the anchors, and move them.
02:19 Let me show you with a really simple piece of art.
02:22 Let me grab a rounded rectangle tool and I'm gonna draw a square with rounded corners.
02:27 Let's zoom in so we can this a little better.
02:30 See those nice round tidy corners? Well watch what happens when I grab with
02:34 the black arrow this bounding box and I stretch it.
02:38 You can see that I've warped those corners and that's not the look we're
02:41 going for. So let me Undo that.
02:44 Well if you remember what vector is, anchor, anchor, anchor, anchor, anchor,
02:49 anchor, anchor, anchor, right? This whole art is made up of only eight
02:53 anchors and the intersecting lines. What happens if I only select the anchors
02:59 on one side of the art, and not over here?
03:03 Now if I use, let's say, my arrow key to move this to the right, you can see that
03:08 these stay where they are. These stay in relationship to each other,
03:14 and all we did was extend the line that connects these two anchors.
03:20 That's all we did. So now I've got a wider art, and the
03:23 corners stay nice and round. Hm, let me delete that.
03:27 So if it works with round rectangles, what would happen if I move this down
03:32 here, switch to my white arrow, and only drag across the top half of this art?
03:39 Lets zoom in and look. Can you see how these anchors down here
03:43 are all white, or hollow, and these are all blue, meaning they're selected.
03:49 I'm zooming out a little bit. And watch what happens when I move my up
03:52 arrow to extend this. Alright now, let's zoom in, look at the
03:58 art down here. Not stretched.
04:01 See that circle is still nice and round. All I did was extend the wood.
04:08 But I didn't warp this at the top either. I only made this portion longer, but the
04:13 part at the bottom here still looks good. So now you can see how we can use
04:20 Illustrator as a tool to edit existing art as well.
04:24 Doing something as simple as taking a border, moving it in, selecting just
04:28 parts of it and making it the size we need.
04:31 Then saving this out and placing it in design that's were we want to build our
04:36 ad or finishing the ad right here and then saving this as a PDF or a AI file
04:39 that's gonna go into in design, so what you do with illustrator you create as
04:44 well as edit its a great creative tool very powerful at any tool
04:52
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Exploring the interface
00:02 If you've used any Adobe product before this is probably familiar territory to
00:05 you, so we'll just do a quick overview of this interface to make sure you know
00:08 where to look for everything. First of all, tools, okay, that's simple.
00:14 And if you're looking at the single toolbar you can make it a double toolbar
00:17 by clicking that little icon right there. I kinda prefer that at times, I don't
00:22 know maybe I'm nostalgic, if you look at any of the tools, or the little triangle
00:25 in the bottom right corner of it, that means, hold down.
00:29 And there are other tools buried or nested underneath there.
00:33 All the way to the right is this little icon here.
00:36 This little feature that allows us to tear that off, and make a floating panel
00:40 out of it. So now, all my type is right here instead
00:44 of having to go down here every time I want it.
00:47 I love that feature. It's not new, and I've wished Photoshop
00:49 and Indesign would add that for years. Up along the top we have our drop-down menus.
00:54 You could pretty much expect the same thing in other applications.
00:57 For example, all the panels are listed under window, and they are here in
01:00 alphabetical order. Sure, if you're going to do things
01:03 related to objects, it's here. Type, guess what?
01:07 It's under the type menu. But you'll notice that a lot of these
01:09 features are available in this control bar that runs across the top.
01:13 We've got it in Indesign. We've got it in Photoshop.
01:16 It's nothing new. It's just it looks a little different.
01:19 Couple things. When you're working with text, notice
01:22 it's dynamic and there's all these choices, but not as many as you see in Indesign.
01:27 Why? Because if I click on the word character
01:29 that's in blue, boom! It launches my entire character panel, or
01:34 my paragraph panel right there. So, it doesn't give us as much, because
01:38 we don't need as much, because it's all right here in this panel.
01:42 So that saves us from having to go over here, or go to window.
01:46 Type, character, and launching that panel, I can do it just by clicking.
01:52 And as we work, you'll notice that it changes.
01:55 For example, I'll select this art, and there's the stroke panel.
01:59 Or, transparency, or transform. So, this is dynamic, and it changes
02:03 depending on what you've got selected. Okay?
02:06 So, keep an eye on this control bar. Right here.
02:09 Over to the right we have our panels, and these icons may be totally foreign to you.
02:14 So for those of you who are beginners, I'm going to recommend you move your
02:17 cursor right here over the edge of this, and just drag out; and now you can see
02:20 that these icons have a name. Once you learn what those are, you can
02:26 always put that right back in there to hide it.
02:29 But for now let's leave it out there so you can see the names of these are as we
02:32 go over there. Which panels are available depend on
02:36 which workspace you're using. I recommend you go to Essentials for
02:40 right now or which panels you go to. The launch, and then nest over in there.
02:46 Behaves just like photoshop, and InDesign.
02:49 If you don't want it over there any more, you can always drag it out and get rid of it.
02:54 You totally mess up your workspace, because you've just been working late
02:58 nights, and everything's crazy. Window, workspace, essentials.
03:03 Makes it all nice and neat again, and once again I'm going to drag this right
03:06 out there. Now if I want to save that work space, I can.
03:10 I can save that, give it a name that makes sense to me.
03:13 Down here at the bottom, this is how we navigate our multiple art boards, the
03:17 percentage of preview, and this shows us what tool we're using, type tool.
03:23 Selection tool, line segment. It's a good way to learn what these tools
03:28 are called, but if you click on that, you can also show the date and time, number
03:31 of undos, or the artboard name that you are working on.
03:35 So as you can see, we didn't have to spend a lot of time on the interface,
03:38 because it's familiar to us. It's very Adobe.
03:41 It's like all the other products we use, just maybe some tools you don't recognize
03:44 what they are, or some features up here you don't recognize what they are.
03:48 So what do you do in the other Adobe products?
03:51 You hover. If I just let my mouse sit there, it says
03:54 live paint bucket blob brush. This tells me the stroke panel, stroke weight.
04:01 Variable width profile. So if I don't know what that is, I can
04:04 hover over it. And if I still don't know what it is, I
04:06 have a help menu I can go to. Or maybe you've bought a book that helps
04:12 you resource it.
04:14
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Using artboards
00:02 Before we start drawing, I guess we should figure out where we're drawing.
00:05 And that's on a thing called the art board.
00:07 And if you're using a version of Illustrator prior to CS4, your art board
00:11 was the document size. So if you set your document up as, let's
00:16 say, letter size, that's the size of your art board.
00:19 In CS4, however, they gave us multiple art boards, which is just fantastic,
00:23 because now I can take a single project and keep it all within a, one file.
00:29 So I can have a poster, CD cover, ads, all sorts of parts to the project in one
00:33 file, whereas priro to CS4 I had to have that in multiple files with different
00:36 names and it was really hard to keep things organized and consistant across
00:40 all those projects. But now with CS4 and CS5 I can go to
00:46 document setup and I'll say edit the art boards.
00:50 And now you can see everything goes gray except for this dotted line around the art.
00:55 And I'm gonna zoom out a couple clicks there.
00:57 There we go. With my cursor I'm just gonna simply draw
01:00 where I want the new art boards to be. If I want 'em a specific size, I can go
01:05 up here to presets. Set it up.
01:08 Maybe I'm doing a web page as part of this too.
01:10 Like a landing page for a website. Right here I can choose x g a.
01:14 And it will make it that size for me. I'm gonna undo that.
01:18 And I could even have like flash headers and all sorts of things, all within a
01:21 single project. I'm allowed 99 of these, alright, so if I
01:25 wanted an existing art board, though, like this one, and I want to duplicate
01:30 it, I just hold my alt key down and drag, and now I've dupklicated that board.
01:37 What happened to the art? Why did it take that with me?
01:39 Well, that's a choice we have right up here in this button.
01:42 So let me undo that. I'm gonna push that button right there.
01:46 And now, when I alt drag, yeah. Now I duplicated the art.
01:51 Because maybe I want a different color on this one than this one, or different text
01:54 or whatever. And now that we got multiple art boards.
01:57 I can grab, let's say, this background. Well, let me hit escape, so that I'm back
02:01 to the working art. And I'll grab this background, let's say,
02:04 and move it. Right over here I should have duplicated
02:07 that shouldn't I? So, hold the alt key down and drag it
02:10 over, and now I'm gonna have the same background on multiple pieces of art, so
02:14 that if I want to change it in the swatches panel If I set it up properly, I
02:17 can change all the art at once, as opposed to click change, click change,
02:21 click change. So, one new thing we got in CS5 was the
02:27 ability to name our artboards. So I'm going to go to document setup,
02:32 edit artboards, and I'm going to click on this artboard named artboard two, and
02:35 I'll just call this magazine ad. Here we go and I'll click on this one and
02:41 call it Newspaper Ad. And this will be the Poster.
02:46 And this will be the Flash Banner. We'll just call that Flash Banner.
02:50 There we go and I won't even name the other one cuz I'm too lazy to do that.
02:55 And in CS5 they gave us an arts board panel.
02:57 There it is. So poster magazine ad.
03:00 Now you're thinking, well why do I need that?
03:03 Well, maybe you want these laid out in a certain way.
03:06 And I want this up next to the poster. But I didn't change anything.
03:10 But if I go here and say rearrange art boards And I, let's say, let's put them
03:14 in a column, or let's stretch them across horizontally.
03:19 When I hit OK, now everything's nice and neat.
03:22 Ooh, I want the Flash banner first? Well, I could move that up to the top.
03:26 Fly out menu, rearrange art boards, and hit okay, and now the flash banner's
03:30 first, cuz that's first in that order. So a little bit of art board control there.
03:36 Let me hit escape, and whichever art board you're working on is gonna be
03:39 highlighted in a little bit darker. It's very faint.
03:43 Can you even see that on this video? Notice how this one has a darker border
03:47 than that one? When I click on that, it got darker.
03:50 Well, that kinda matters because whichever one you're on, when you hit
03:53 Cmd+0 or Ctrl+0, that's the one that you'll be zooming in and out of.
03:58 So that's the live art board and you can control that down here in this corner.
04:02 Let's go to the magazine ad real quick. Now, when I save this I'm gonna save it
04:07 with the art boards, of course. And if I save it as a PDF file, each of
04:11 those art boards is gonna be a separate page in the PDF.
04:15 If I save it as an AI file, when I place that in InDesign.
04:19 When I place that in Flash, or when I try to open it in Photoshop.
04:22 Any of those things. I can choose which art board it is that I
04:25 want to actually open and work on. So the art boards is actually kind of a
04:29 useful thing. Just remember that you don't have all
04:32 this fun stuff if you're using. A version prior to CS4.
04:36 All you have is a single art board, and you need to work within that.
04:39 Because anything extending off that art board, is not gonna print.
04:43 When I save this, this just doesn't exist.
04:46 And you got all sorts of stuff out here, and it won't print.
04:49 So if I wanted the art board to actually be that size, so all that stuff's going
04:52 to actually print, document setup, Edit Art Boards.
04:56 Now it looks like it is that, isn't it? But look, when I move it out of the way,
04:59 you can see that the art board isn't that size.
05:02 I need to actually make the art board that size otherwise that art won't fit
05:05 that, won't be printing out. It's only going to print out the size of
05:10 the art board so make sure they match, or you're going to have some surprises down
05:14 the road in your production.
05:17
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Saving and exporting
00:02 When you're done with your file in Illustrator, the question now is, now what?
00:07 Well we can save this file, Save As, let's say, and I'll choose under Format,
00:12 there's Illustrator AI. Well what programs use Illustrator AI?
00:17 Course and design does. Newer versions of Quark allow you to
00:21 place AI files. It just doesn't support the transparency.
00:25 So if I had a drop shadow in this, and I wanted it to blend to something in Quark,
00:29 that's not gonna work. Pagemaker didn't support it.
00:34 Older versions of Quark don't support it. So you may think, well, I'll just save it
00:37 as an illustrator EPS, and that's fine. It creates kind of a dual-part file, half
00:42 Illustrator, half EPS. The Illustrator part is still there in
00:47 case you open it and want to edit it. The EPS part is what's actually used in
00:52 your Quark document, let's say. But again, EPS doesn't support
00:56 transparency, so if you have a drop shadow that you want to blend to
00:59 something in Quark, it's not gonna work. Now, we have another choice here, PDF.
01:06 If I say this is a PDF file and I hit save, notice that I can preserve the
01:09 illustrator editing capabilities and that means that, guess what?
01:15 It's another dual-part file. Half illustrator, half PDF.
01:20 The PDF file does what it needs to do but also inside of that is all that
01:23 illustrator data that allows you to open it back up in illustrator and continue to
01:27 make edits. If I go to File, Save As, and I say this
01:31 is an illustrator file. Hmm, if I saved it as an illustrator
01:36 file, I can actually open that up in Acrobat, if I create a .pdf compatible
01:41 file, which is the recommended way to do that.
01:47 So, now, I can actually open up any illustrator file in Acrobat.
01:50 So, if I sent this illustrator file to a customer and they had Acrobat Reader,
01:53 they can actually look at it. They can't make changes, but they can
01:57 look at it and they can approve that. Now you'll notice in that list, File,
02:01 Save As, probably some things are missing that you might be wanting.
02:05 For example, how do I make a jpg of this if that's what I want, or a tif file,
02:08 where are all the other choices? Well we don't save as those we Export as
02:14 those and you'll see there's quite a long list here.
02:19 Some of them though may be formats we don't even know what they are.
02:23 DWG and DXF for example is great for the AutoCad drafting engineering world,
02:27 whereas here in this printing publishing world we're probably, well maybe I need a
02:31 JPEG for something I'm doing. I hope not.
02:37 But it's there in case you need that. Or tiff file, okay?
02:40 So there are other formats here, but where's gif in case I wanna put this on
02:43 my website as a gif? Well, once again, we have a third one
02:47 that we need to go to and that's File, Save for web and devices.
02:52 And in this module, I could look two up at the original art, and I can see what
02:56 it's gonna look like after it's compressed as a gif with, say, 32 colors.
03:03 Still looks pretty good. Little rugged around this edge, but
03:06 probably good enough for the website. I'm going to look at the gradient.
03:09 Yeah that looks alright. Well now let's look at it with even fewer colors.
03:13 16, you can start to see the dithering there, and maybe I don't want to use this
03:17 on the website. Maybe I want to g back up to 32, or maybe
03:21 I want to switch to a ping, or maybe I want it to be a JPEG.
03:27 And right down here at the bottom, it tells you that, depending on their
03:31 connection, how long it's going to take this file to download versus, say, a GIF
03:35 with only 16 colors. It's going to take 17 seconds.
03:41 So here's the before, here's the after, and I can see what sacrifices are going
03:44 to be made as I then save that GIF to upload to my website.
03:49 Again, for the printing world that we're in, especially knowing you're using
03:54 Creative Suite, I save all my AI files as AI unless I have a specific reason to
03:59 save it as a PDF. Those are the only two formats I use.
04:05 I do wanna show you one more nice little trick.
04:08 Let's say that I wanna use this artwork in InDesign, but I want it to be editable
04:12 vector data in InDesign. Well saving this as an AI file and
04:17 placing it in InDesign only places the art.
04:19 So I'm gonna show you a trick. I'm gonna select the rooster, and I'm
04:24 gonna copy that. I just went to edit, copy or command c,
04:28 and now I'm gonna go to end design and I'm gonna go to edit paste.
04:34 There's the rooster. Now if I ungroup it, object ungroup, you
04:40 can see that this is editable art in, in design.
04:47 I can actually delete parts of it. I can use parts of it as a picture frame
04:53 if I want, or just change the color of it here.
04:56 Totally editable here in, in design, and if I look at my links panel it's not
05:01 linked to anything. So, oftentimes, I'll use Illustrator just
05:06 to creative art that I'm going to ultimately copy and paste into design as
05:10 a placeholder or something that's artistic.
05:13 So, save, export, copy paste. There's lots of ways to get it out of
05:19 Illustrator for use in other products.
05:24
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3. Fun with Shapes
Creating shapes
00:00 Okay, now it's time for the fun to begin. We're going to start creating art from scratch.
00:07 And I've given you this background, just so we don't have to look at this dull
00:10 white page. If you create a new document however,
00:13 it'll be white. So, I gave you this purple background and
00:16 I locked it on a layer, which we don't have to get into that.
00:19 But basically, you don't have to worry about bumping it or nudging it as we draw.
00:23 Okay. Now, over here on the toolbar is the
00:25 Rectangle tool. That should be what you see.
00:27 If you don't, you may see one of these other shaped tools if you've been playing
00:31 around before. And what's important about this is that
00:34 these are just some basic shapes. They're a really easy way for us to get started.
00:38 So, if we go over here and hold down on any of them, let's just choose the
00:41 rectangle for now. Or, you know, one really easy way to work
00:45 is to go ahead and grab this tear off and bring this shape panel now up so we have
00:49 it easily accessible. All right.
00:53 Now, in this chapter, there are a couple really key lessons I want us to grasp,
00:56 because I'm guessing, if I didn't tell you, you could eventually figure out how
00:59 to draw a rectangle. Yeah that, that's pretty basic knowledge here.
01:04 So, we're not going to focus on that basic stuff right now.
01:07 I wanna show you just a few keyboard operators, little keyboard shortcuts that
01:10 you'll wanna use as you work. So, that you can really control your art
01:14 easier than if you didn't know these. All right.
01:17 But before I go there, I do wanna show you this.
01:19 If I'm on any of these tools and I merely click with my mouse, it will pop up this window.
01:26 Of course, they won't all say rectangle. That says rectangle cuz I'm on the
01:31 rectangle tool. I'm sure you would've figured that out,
01:33 but I had to say that. So, if I know that I want this box to be
01:37 5 inches by 5 inches, well, when I hit OK, there's my 5 by 5 box.
01:44 Okay, that's easy enough. Now, what I really wanna show you with
01:47 this, though, is that in Illustrator, just like in InDesign and other Adobe
01:50 applications, I could actually have this do Math for me.
01:55 Let's just say I'm working in inches, which is the unit of measure I've set up
01:59 for this document. But somebody says to me, hey Russell, can
02:04 you make me a box that's, say, 14 centimeters by 32 millimeters?
02:08 14 cm for centimeters by, let's just say, 20 mm for millimeters.
02:14 Notice that it converted those to inches for me automatically and I don't have to
02:18 think about finding a conversion chart and looking that up.
02:23 So, centimeters, millimeters, picas, there's all sorts of different units of
02:27 measure you can use to convert back and forth.
02:30 Okay. So, I can even have this do the Math for me.
02:33 Let's say that I've got my ruler and I measure a box and I wanna replicate it.
02:39 And it's 5 inches. So, let's just type in here five in, 5 in.
02:43 5 in but it's not exactly 5 inches. It's one millimeter shy of that, minus 1 mm.
02:49 And when I hit my Tab key, it does the Math for me.
02:53 It says, oh, well that is 4.9606 inches. I'm sure most of you watching already
02:57 knew that that was the Math but I need help with that.
03:00 So, I can have this do that for me. So, the height, watch this, 10 inches
03:04 divided by 2 is 5 inches. Again, that Math is easy.
03:08 But what if its not so easy, what if it's 4.785 times, that's an asterisk, to
03:17 there, 9.57. So, multiplication, division, plus,
03:22 minus, have unit conversion. All that's handy little information to know.
03:26 And that's anywhere in Illustrator where there's a number.
03:29 So, what was that lesson? That lesson was, take the shape and
03:32 either click to enter the values or have it do the Math or unit conversion for you.
03:37 Okay. Enough of that.
03:39 From now on, we're gonna be free hand drawing.
03:42 We're eyeballing it. We're just playing around here.
03:44 So, I've got my Rectangle tool. And I'm gonna start drawing.
03:49 And I want this to be a perfect square. Well, holding my Shift key with any of
03:55 these tools will keep it constrained to a 1 to 1 aspect ratio.
04:00 So, drawing and holding my Shift key, there's my square.
04:05 There's another square. Let go of my Shift and I get a rectangle.
04:09 Simple enough? Now, what you need to remember though,
04:12 and I see this all the time, people will start drawing, and they'll let go of the
04:14 shift, before they let go of the mouse and, you know, it doesn't work that way.
04:19 Let go of the mouse button first. Now if you're not getting the results on
04:22 your screen like I am, the white fill with the black stroke, hit D on your
04:25 keyboard, and watch your fill and stroke change to be white with a black stroke.
04:31 That D for, default fill and stroke. All right, simple enough.
04:35 Now, let's start drawing from this point down to this point.
04:39 Can you see that? Well, I don't really want to do that.
04:42 I want to draw from this point out. I want it to go from there out.
04:47 Well, I'm gonna hold my Shift key to keep it a square and I'm also gonna hold my
04:50 Alt, or Option key down. And now you can see that I'm drawing from
04:56 the center point out. That's really useful if I know a place in
05:00 the art like, notice my Smart Guide as I move around.
05:04 See that green line? And if I put my cursor right there on the
05:07 center, if I hold my Alt+Shift and start drawing, I know that I've just drawn that
05:11 shape from the center out, and by adding Shift, I've kept it square.
05:17 So, Alt+Shift works on all these tools to have it start from where you begin out
05:22 and the Shift keeps it square. Okay.
05:26 So there's one lesson learned. All right.
05:28 Rectangle tool, simple enough. Let's go to the Rounded Rectangle tool.
05:33 Now, the Rounded Rectangle tool might be useful to click, so that you can tell it
05:37 the corner radius and keep that consistent.
05:40 Otherwise, this next trick I'm gonna show you, may cause you to have inconsistent shapes.
05:45 So, I'm going to show you this trick but just know that if you really want corners
05:49 that are consistent, you'll wanna go ahead and put a unit of measure in there,
05:53 0.25, and now when you draw it, there it is.
05:57 Now, watch what happens when I don't click this time.
06:02 It keeps the last setting until I either change it, use this next little keyboard
06:06 shortcut I'm going to show you, or quit Illustrator.
06:10 If I quit Illustrator, it will go back to the Illustrator default of 0.1667.
06:16 All right. Let's get rid of those cuz I wanna show
06:17 you this trick. As I'm drawing with this Rounded
06:19 Rectangle tool, I'm gonna hold my up arrow down.
06:23 Up arrow down, that seems a little bit contradictory but can you notice what's
06:27 happening to the corners now? Do you see that?
06:31 The corners are getting larger and larger and larger.
06:35 If I hold the down arrow, notice that now the corner radius is slowly getting
06:40 smaller and smaller and smaller. Here's the lesson.
06:44 You probably won't use this on the Rounded Rectangle much, but the Up Arrow,
06:48 Down Arrow, Left Arrow, Right Arrow, can oftentimes, depending on which tools
06:52 you're working, allow you to make changes live as you're drawing this.
06:58 Now what's neat about this is, this now remembers whatever it was I set.
07:02 And if I click, you can see 0.3194, and it's gonna be that way for the rest of today.
07:07 You know, as long as I keep Illustrator open or if I quit Illustrator or if I
07:10 change that, then it changes. But from now on, until I do that, it'll
07:15 be these measurements. That's kinda neat.
07:17 But again, its worth doing that at some point, clicking and figuring out exactly
07:21 what that is, so that you can keep that consistent cuz tomorrow when you come
07:24 back to work and you quit, you're gonna forget what that was.
07:29 Here's the Ellipse tool. Really, there's not much different there
07:33 than the Rectangle tool. Shift keeps it a circle.
07:36 Alt+Shift helps you draw out. And if you click, you can tell if I want
07:42 a 5-inch circle or maybe you want an oval instead.
07:48 Okay? Now, we are getting tricky.
07:50 Here's the Polygon tool. Now, if I start drawing with the Polygon
07:54 tool, you can see that its a six sided polygon.
07:59 If I tap my Up Arrow, you can see its adding sides and if I tap my Down Arrow,
08:04 you can see I'm removing the number of points that is your Triangle tool.
08:12 I get that e-mail all the time. How do I make a triangle easily in Illustrator.
08:16 Well, its absolutely that simple. Take your Polygon and just tap.
08:20 Remember, it starts at six sides. Just tap Down three times and there's
08:24 your triangle. The next time you draw, you want
08:27 something different, hit your Up Arrow. There, there's your octagon.
08:31 All right. Up Arrow and Down Arrow, that's all you
08:33 have to remember. You wanna do it while you're drawing.
08:36 All right? I'm gonna give you one more little
08:38 keyboard shortcut to remember and this also works with all those shapes.
08:42 And that's the Space Bar. As I'm drawing this, I've realized that I
08:45 wanna move it to the top right corner. I hold my Space Bar down, and as I move
08:49 my mouse, there it goes, I'm still holding my mouse button down.
08:53 I wanna let go. Now I can continue drawing.
08:56 So, the Space Bar temporarily turns this into a Move tool.
09:00 When you let go of the Space Bar, now you can continue Up Arrow, Down Arrow,
09:03 whatever it is you want to do. And when you let go, that's the shape you own.
09:09 Okay? And remember, click, it remembers the
09:11 last thing you did. So, you can keep clicking and replicate
09:15 that as much as you want. All right.
09:18 Let's go ahead and select all those and get rid of those cuz I really wanna show
09:21 you the Star tool. You know, we can never have enough stars
09:25 in our design. It's just, it's not possible.
09:27 Notice the default star is a five-sided star.
09:30 Simple enough. But, I don't want five stars.
09:33 Well, I can click, and I can enter this manually.
09:36 Or, as I'm drawing, I can hit my Up Arrow.
09:43 Or as I draw, I can hit my Down Arrow. So, I can add, Up Arrow, subtract, Down Arrow.
09:54 I can keep playing with that. And if I hold my Cmd key or the Ctrl key
09:58 on a Windows machine and drag, notice that I'm controlling the links of those points.
10:05 Look at that, linked. I'm just Ctrl or Cmd and dragging.
10:10 Let go of the Cmd or Ctrl. I'm still holding down my mouse, Up
10:13 Arrow, Down Arrow. So, let's make those a little bit shorter.
10:17 Like that. Hold my Space Bar down, move it up here,
10:20 let go, and there's my star burst. So, drawing a star has lots of variables
10:25 just by knowing a few keyboard shortcuts. It's very friendly.
10:30 Now, what if I create a star burst with longer points here, and I'm gonna let go.
10:35 Now, I like it but I want a little bit of variation.
10:38 I'm gonna draw a rectangle. I like it but I want to vary it some.
10:43 Back to one of our earlier lessons, White Arrow, click on an anchor, it's live or
10:47 selected and the others are hollow. That means that if I drag that, I'm now
10:54 modifiying this path however I want. Same thing is with the starburst.
10:59 I can click on an anchor and as I drag it you can see that I can take every other
11:05 point and make it longer if I want. Make a little bit of a variety here.
11:15 And then, I can take the other ones and make them shorter if I want.
11:20 Even doing the inside points, if I really want a very jagged, very rugged-looking
11:24 star, I can sit here and just grab any point I want, and just vary it however.
11:31 No rules, guys. It's your design.
11:33 The point is, that these anchors are all editable on every single one of these shapes.
11:38 We're not gonna cover the Flair tool today.
11:40 We're gonna stick with just the basic shapes in this lesson.
11:43 So what did we learn? We learned that creating shapes is as
11:46 easy as taking any of these tools and drawing.
11:50 We learned that some of them, if you hit your Up Arrow and Down Arrow, have
11:53 modifiers that give it more sides or fewer sides.
11:57 We also learned, that if we take any of these shapes, and simply click, we can
12:00 create it by the numbers. But remember, when we use those
12:04 modifiers, when we quit Illustrator, it all goes back to defaults.
12:07 So, modifiers are nice, but it doesn't hurt to write down some numbers on a
12:11 piece of paper and keep them handy, if you ever want to recreate that artwork
12:16 another day.
12:18
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4. The Humble Line Tool: It's Not as Simple as It Sounds
Creating lines
00:00 You know, until recently, the only way to make a line in Illustrator was to take
00:04 the pen tool, click, and then click again.
00:08 And there's our line. Now we have tools that make that even easier.
00:12 But I'll show you that if you click and hold your shift key down.
00:15 No matter where your mouse is over here. It will make that a nice straight line.
00:19 So that's good to know, in case you do wanna use that pen tool.
00:21 But I'm gonna delete that. Because in this chapter, we're gonna
00:24 focus on these really nifty. The line tools, and there's grid tools
00:27 and line tools, and we're going to learn how to use those and we're going to learn
00:31 some keyboard shortcuts so that we can very quickly modifiy them and control them.
00:36 And in the end of this chapter, you're going to learn that something as simple
00:39 as a spiral. Can you imagine trying to make something
00:43 like this with the pen tool. It would be a nightmare.
00:46 But now we have a simple tool that allows us to do that.
00:49 Or maybe I want that to go even deeper inside of that circle like that.
00:53 And I want to control that.
00:57
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Line tools
00:00 For this lesson I'm gonna break the line tools up into two sections.
00:06 The actual line tools, and the grid tool. In this lesson, we'll focus on the top
00:11 three here. And I'm gonna go to the tear-off and
00:13 bring that out so it's actually floating as a panel.
00:17 The first tool is so simple to use, you probably wondering why are you even
00:20 covering this. Well, I think it's worth doing.
00:23 If I drag with that tool, I create a line segment, simple enough.
00:29 Now if I want it to be at a right angle I can draw and as I'm drawing, if I hold my
00:33 Shift key down, it will snap it to be orthogonal, 45 degree angle or 90 degree
00:37 angle as I draw. So now I can have some controls with that
00:43 Shift key. All right.
00:45 So, you're thinking, well, that was a pretty easy lesson, Russell.
00:48 Yes, it was. Now, if I go to my white arrow though,
00:51 just remember that if I click on at one end, not the other, I can then go ahead
00:56 and rotate that however I want. All right, so, pretty simple to work with
01:03 the line segment. Now, the next one, the arc tool gets a
01:07 little trickier. I'm gonna start drawing with the arc tool.
01:11 And you can see that it basically just makes a quarter round.
01:14 Now, that's useful, I guess. And if I click, I can control settings on that.
01:20 Like the length x axis, and length y axis, and the type, and man, what does
01:25 all that mean? Well, that can be pretty confusing.
01:29 So maybe instead of that I am just gonna start drawing and if I hold my up arrow
01:33 or tap it a few times I can control the depth of that as I am drawing.
01:40 I haven't like going on my mouse yet, I'm still drawing, here we go.
01:44 So now if I bring this down like this. Let's say I like that.
01:49 When I let go, there's my arc. Just remember that when I draw again,
01:53 it's going to keep that until I make a change or until I quit Illustrator, and
01:56 it will go back to the default. Now I am gonna click, cuz I wanna click
02:01 this little button right here and change this to closed, and let's see what
02:04 happens when we draw from now on. Now we're drawing, up arrow.
02:10 Down arrow. Okay so notice that it is still
02:14 controlling the angle of the arc, but the other two are closed and if I hold my
02:18 shift key down, it keeps it constrained so now I've got a very clear quarter
02:21 round on that arc. Now, this is kinda messy so let's get rid
02:27 of everything and let's once again look at the differences.
02:30 With the arc tool, click with it on open. I'm gonna go ahead and delete that.
02:38 As I draw up arrow, down arrow. When I let go it's just an open arc.
02:45 But, if I click or if I double click on the tool, I can change that to closed.
02:51 And now as I'm drawing, especially if I hold my Shift key down, right, keeps it constrained.
02:56 Up arrow, down arrow controls the depth of that arc, when I let go, now I've got
03:01 that shape, nice. The third one here, this spiral tool,
03:05 when we look at those settings, it can be a little bit confusing too.
03:09 Radius, Decay, Segments, Styles, see I have 'em flipped, one this way, one that way.
03:16 All right, let's go ahead and hit OK, and that's the default settings, but I am
03:20 gonna go ahead and start drawing, and I'm gonna hit my down arrow a whole bunch.
03:26 I am still hitting it and notice how it's bringing that out, and basically it's
03:29 just a single line segment. So I am gonna hit my up arrow again.
03:34 That goes back inside. So up arrow makes that seashell or that
03:37 tornado go deeper in there and the down arrow makes it come out like that.
03:42 There you go. All right?
03:44 If I hold my Cmd or Ctrl key down as I move, notice that I'm controlling the
03:49 depth of that. Alright, so we can very easily control
03:53 this without having to go to these controls.
03:57 But once you start learning what they do, then it helps a little bit.
04:00 For example, let's just look at decay in the way I did it there.
04:04 All right. And now, I'm going to do something like that.
04:09 I'm just holding my command key down and dragging.
04:12 And now when I click, you can see the decay's at 38.
04:16 So now you know that if you ever do something like that and mess it up, maybe
04:19 you just need to click and bring this up around 80.
04:23 And now when you start to draw, you've got more of that seashell look.
04:28 Maybe the best thing to do is just play around with it, as beginners just play
04:32 around with it, Cmd key Ctrl, up arrow, down arrow, and if you totally mess it up
04:35 and you can't figure out how to get it back, quit Illustrator.
04:41 When you start back again, it will take it back to the default settings.
04:45 Then you don't have to be all messed up about that.
04:47 Now, keep in mind, these are paths. So, even if I were to draw this quarter
04:52 round like this, I can always go to my white arrow, click on that point and
04:55 bring that out. Okay, I can modify these as well.
05:00 So we're not stuck with any of this. All right, the lesson here is, these are
05:04 places to start. That's all that is.
05:07 A place to start, get something down in front of you, and then from there you
05:11 edit the lines, the arc, or the spiral to be exactly what you want.
05:15 Something worth noting is that you can't create this type of a shape in InDesign.
05:21 If you remember, any vector shape here that you copy, Edit > Copy, and then
05:26 paste into InDesign, will be an editable shape in InDesign.
05:31 So just keep that in mind, that you can use that for text on a path, and other
05:35 fun things there, if you want.
05:39
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The Grid tool, Live Paint, and the Shape Builder
00:02 I remember when these grid tools first came out, there's the rectangular grid
00:06 tool and the polar grid tool. And I remember thinking, oh, that is just wonderful.
00:11 And I was so excited to use them. And then, after I created something I
00:15 realized, how limited I was in being able to edit them.
00:18 Let me show you what I mean. I'm going to start with the rectangular
00:22 grid tool. As I draw, holding the shift key down
00:26 keeps it constrained. That's useful.
00:29 The up arrow adds lines, the down arrow deletes lines, vertically and horizontally.
00:39 It adds and deletes with the left and right arrow.
00:42 So, up arrow, down arrow, right arrow, left arrow.
00:46 You can see how that controls your art. So if you wanted to make a checkerboard,
00:50 you could either count as you do it, or simply click.
00:54 And you can tell. Okay, I want the width of this to be five
00:57 inches by five inches. I want seven dividers.
01:00 And seven dividers. Let's just see what that does for us.
01:05 Okay, now there's our grid, and that's nifty, looks cool, except, I remember
01:10 when I first used it, I wanted to click in these, and put color in there.
01:16 There's nothing there. That's hollow.
01:19 Remember this is one of the line tools. If I were to, with my white arrow, click
01:23 on this line here and begin to drag. See?
01:26 This is just lines. There's nothing in there at all.
01:30 It's still useful. And I'm going to show you a trick in just
01:32 a minute. But just know that all you created was a
01:35 grid of lines. Not a grid of frames.
01:40 Two different things. So, let's delete that for now, and let's
01:44 go to the polar grid tool, and let's start to draw.
01:49 Again, shift key keeps it constrained to a one-to-one aspect ratio.
01:54 All right? Up arrow adds or deletes the circles
01:57 inside of this grid, and the left arrow and right arrow adds or deletes.
02:04 Lines that divide that, subdivide that. So if you wanted a bullseye, you might
02:09 hit your left arrow to get rid of those lines, your up arrow to create enough
02:13 circles, let's count those, one, three, I think I need one more there, and now I
02:17 could use that as a bullseye if I wanted to.
02:22 All right, when I let go, the problem is That these are just circles.
02:26 Now that's okay, because I could click on this, and I could go to the swatches and
02:31 I could fill that with a red for the bull's eye.
02:35 I could do that. I could also use my black arrow if I were
02:40 to select all this and go to object, ungroup.
02:46 Object ungroup. Object, sometimes you gotta do this a
02:49 couple times. There we go.
02:51 Now, each one is a separate line. So I could click on this one now, and
02:55 fill that with green. And click on this one now, and fill that
02:58 with yellow. And okay.
03:01 We can get this done. All right.
03:02 But I'm going to show you an easier way. All right, what I'm going to show you now
03:06 is really kind of an advanced thing, but I just think these grid tools are just
03:09 not as effective as they are with this next thing I'm going to show you.
03:14 So, just for fun, let's go ahead and start with the checkerboard.
03:17 Let's click again. Five by five, seven by seven, fine.
03:21 There we go. There's our checkerboard, but again
03:23 remember, there's nothing in there, nothing at all.
03:25 All right, so black arrow, I want you to select your grid, and you can see all the
03:29 little anchors selected there. We've got the whole thing selected.
03:33 Good. Over here on the toolbar is this live
03:37 paint bucket. It's K on your keyboard.
03:40 Just go and hit K on your keyboard. If you don't see it, there's a little
03:43 paint bucket icon. And I'm going to go over here to my
03:47 swatches and choose a color. I chose magenta.
03:51 It doesn't matter for this exercise what color you choose.
03:54 Now before we start painting, I wanted you to hold your right arrow just tap
03:57 your right arrow a few times and look at the color swatches above your paint brush
04:00 and you'll notice that what its doing is its going through the swatches.
04:06 You can actually change the colors on the fly, you don't have to drive all the way
04:09 over here to the swatches panel every time you want to change the colors, but
04:12 anyway Red is selected there. And I'm going to click, click, click, click.
04:19 And you see what I'm doing? I'm just clicking inside of these squares.
04:21 Now, what this live paint bucket does. Is, it allows you to fill between lines,
04:26 even though there's nothing there. There's nothing there, I'm telling you.
04:32 But the tool reads where there are intersecting lines.
04:35 And it's smart enough to say. Well, Russell wants something in there.
04:40 Let's change to black now, and I can go through here and I can fill this with
04:44 black, and now I'm going to create my checkerboard.
04:49 Simple enough, eh? All right, so without the live paint
04:52 bucket, there is only so much we can do with those lines.
04:55 With the live paint bucket, it becomes a really powerful design tool.
04:59 Create your grid, fill it with color, and now you've got your checkerboard.
05:04 Want to give it some perspective? There's other tools you can use for that.
05:07 But right now, you got this nice checkerboard.
05:09 We can do the same thing with the polar grid tool to create a logo.
05:14 Maybe we want a bullseye of some sort, let's just do something like this.
05:18 Something simple. Hold the shift key down and let go.
05:22 Live paint bucket, once again. I'm going to choose red and boom, boom, boom.
05:27 There we go. Bullseye, simple enough.
05:31 I want to change the other ones to a different color.
05:33 Life Paint Bucket. Let's choose yellow and boom boom, we're done.
05:37 Okay, Life Paint Bucket with the grid tools.
05:37 Let's go on further though. I had a friend ask me one time to take a
05:47 circle and I asked, how would I take that circle and break it into.
05:52 Eight even parts because I need each one of those parts around the outside of that
05:55 circle to have text in it, kind of going around like a color wheel.
06:00 How would I do that quickly? Well you could imagine if I took the
06:03 ellipse and tried to draw a couple of circles and then work them together.
06:07 And then draw lines and get in that. It would be impossible.
06:10 So I took the polar grid tool and I drew something like this.
06:13 OK. Simple enough.
06:15 Now I'm going to use the live paint bucket again.
06:18 I'm going to choose any random color and I'm just going to paint around the
06:22 outside of this shape. Something like that.
06:25 Great. I'm going to choose a different color and
06:27 I'm going to paint on the inside, all right.
06:29 I'm not even worried about, you know, what color it is because I want to get
06:32 rid of all this. I don't want what's in the center here.
06:35 Okay, now this is where it's really going to get fun.
06:48 I want to get rid of the inside of this, I don't even want it.
06:51 'Kay, I want to introduce a term to you, here, called expand.
06:51 All right, a little trick here, I know this is kind of an advanced thing, but we
06:51 gotta get through this. Expand breaks this down, I'm just
06:52 going to hit okay. Breaks this down into its non-live
06:55 components, and if you don't know what that means, it's okay for right now.
06:59 By expanding that, now I have the ability to ungroup it and divide this and tear it apart.
07:05 It's really a fun day at the office. If you have CS5, I want you to see this
07:09 next thing, because I can go here with the shape builder tool, and I can
07:13 actually start drawing across this middle area here and it actually unites these
07:18 areas that are graying out Into a single shape.
07:24 Look at that. I just took that entire center grid and
07:26 turned it into a single shape. Now watch what happens when I go to my
07:30 white arrow, select it, and hit Delete. It's not there anymore.
07:34 I just took that circle, and very quickly broke it into these smaller segments with
07:39 lines all perfectly round. And now I can put text in that area or
07:43 change the colors, or any number of other things.
07:47 I'm going to hit undo because if you have prior to c s five, it's not quite so simple.
07:52 So let me show you what we have to do there.
07:53 Object > Expand. We still have to do that.
07:57 But now I can Object, Ungroup or with my white arrow I can click on these pieces
08:02 and go in here and start getting rid of These pieces individually.
08:09 So yeah, it's a little bit more work, not as glamorous as the shape builder tool,
08:14 but it does work. And as you can see, with a little bit
08:19 more time I can go through here and get rid of the fills and The lines, okay
08:25 we've got to be very careful not to click too far or you might get rid of one of
08:31 these lines in the outside that you are hoping to keep.
08:42 One quick way to get rid of all these is to go to view outline and now when you
08:45 select you're only selecting those lines without worrying about.
08:51 Any other stuff there here we go, now we got rid of that we can go back to preview
08:55 mode and I accomplished the same thing, all right I start my circle with no inside,
08:58 but as you can see that shape builder tool that's pretty handy for very quickly
09:02 selecting multiple shapes in just uniting them as one single shape.
09:08 So what we learn here? We learned how to make grids both by
09:11 drawing, up arrow, down arrow, right arrow, left arrow, and by clicking and
09:16 entering the values. We also learned that those lines can only
09:22 do so much for us,'til we bring in the live paint bucket, to really fill those
09:26 in, and start creating some great designs.
09:31
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5. Illustrator Kindergarten
Drawing tools
00:02 We have a really busy chapter ahead of us.
00:05 We're gonna focus on these drawing tools and the three specific areas here are the
00:08 pencil tool and what's underneath that. The eraser tool and what's underneath that.
00:15 And the blob tool, we're gonna deal with these three.
00:17 In fact, I'm just gonna grab the little tear-off here and bring them out as
00:21 floating panels. So we have right here handy when we're
00:24 ready to use them. Alright?
00:26 This one, we can't do that with, cuz there's only a single tool.
00:30 Alright, let's start with the most basic, and that's the pencil tool.
00:33 How hard can this be, huh? We're gonna draw a single path.
00:37 So, let's just draw. Well, nothing happened really because I
00:41 didn't have a stroke color applied when I started drawing.
00:46 So I'm gonna hit delete, and if you had the same result, let's hit D on our keyboard.
00:51 And you'll notice that it makes the fill white, and the black stroke there so that
00:55 now when I draw you can see that I've got a black line on that area that I drew
00:59 with that pencil. Okay, so, the pencil you can say, well,
01:04 Russell, that's really simple. Why are you wasting my time with this?
01:08 Well, because there's a hidden gem in the pencil tool.
01:11 And that is this, if I don't like this line.
01:14 I've watched people delete it and try drawing again.
01:18 And then they delete and they draw again. But you don't have to.
01:23 With the line tool, you can start drawing, and let's say you are doing
01:26 something like this. And you're like, you know, I just don't
01:29 really like that. Instead of deleting, you can start here,
01:33 let's say, draw, end right here, and you're only going to redraw thin little
01:38 dotted area. Now that line has changed.
01:44 I don't want this. So I'm gonna start drawing, go off the
01:47 art, and let go. And you can see that I've changed the
01:50 direction of the end of that. Let's take a look at these hills down here.
01:54 I don't like those at all, so I'm gonna start drawing.
01:57 And I'm gonna put one more loop. And I'm gonna end right here.
02:02 And you'll see that it redrew from there, to there.
02:06 So the pencil tool, yeah we can draw with it.
02:09 But you can also redraw with it. Now think about this for a second.
02:13 If you can do that with a line, hmm, I wonder what would happen with a path?
02:20 So let's take the pencil tool, start on the edge of this path and I'm gonna draw.
02:25 See, I'm drawing? And I'm leaving the path now, coming down
02:28 here, coming over here, and now I'm going to come over here and end on that path.
02:34 Notice I begin on the path, end on the path, and when I let go, I've redrawn
02:38 that path. Now if I just start here, and draw
02:41 straight down, well, Illustrator doesn't know what you want to do.
02:45 So it's just going to add the line. What you have to do is be a little tricky.
02:49 Start by moving to the right, just a little bit, then draw, and then go where
02:53 you want to end, and go to the left there, just a little bit.
02:58 And I've told it, that's the area I want to keep.
03:00 I am gonna undo that, what if I want to keep this and not this well I am gonna do
03:04 the opposite, go to the left, go down, go to the right and now I get rid of that side.
03:11 So its a little tricky but if you start on a line end of the line with a little
03:14 practice you will find that you could absolutely redraw any path.
03:19 Later I'm gonna show you how to edit existing artwork by using this tool right there.
03:23 Let's go back to the pencil tool and just draw a simple line.
03:27 Okay, there we go, and that's not as smooth as I would like it to be.
03:31 I don't like that little point there. I want it to be more of a rounded point,
03:33 and I don't like that. Well nested underneath the pencil tool is
03:37 a smooth tool and I can go around this line just like that and notice how it's
03:42 smoothing out the line to make it more like what I want it to be.
03:48 Yeah, it's either reducing points or cutting down the angle of those to create
03:53 a smoother line. Love it.
03:56 Again, that could be used on any path. What if I wanna break this into smaller
04:01 segments or I just don't want this part of the path anymore?
04:03 One thing I can do is, right here, this path eraser tool.
04:08 And I'm just gonna come right along here and it's gone.
04:11 Or, let me undo that, I'm just gonna erase this little bit right there.
04:16 And that little bit right there. And you can see that I've broken this
04:19 into three lines. Well that becomes kind of useful if we do
04:23 something like this. I'm gonna take my pencil tool.
04:26 Once again, I'll just draw a shape like that.
04:30 And take my smooth tool and kinda go around that line a little bit smoothing
04:33 it out just a little bit there. It a little more appealing.
04:37 There we go. I'm gonna go to my stroke panel, and I'm
04:41 gonna put an arrowhead on one end. Make it kind of big.
04:46 And on the other end, I'm gonna put, the back of an arrow.
04:50 There we go, lets make that kind of big as well.
04:54 I'm gonna dash the line There we go. And let me increase the weight of it just
04:59 a little bit. There we go.
05:00 You know, I think those are too big now. Let me go ahead and reduce those.
05:03 Scale those back down to be a little bit smaller.
05:06 There we go. That's all new in CS5, what I'm doing now.
05:10 This part of it, the arrowheads. Now, watch this.
05:14 Let's say that I want to break this into segments.
05:18 If I take my eraser tool and erase that, and that, you can see that what I've done
05:24 is I've created multiple segments. Okay?
05:29 And I can only erase it if it's live, so notice these two are selected.
05:35 This one is not. I can't erase that.
05:37 I'm gonna have to click on that with the black arrow, and then I can erase that.
05:42 Okay? So now I've taken a single line and
05:44 broken it into a bunch of line segments. And that's something you wouldn't easily
05:48 do by drawing individual lines. So, drawing one big, continuous line and then.
05:53 Breaking it down would be easier. Let's say that you're doing directions on
05:57 a map. Even if you're using the pen tool, okay,
06:00 and you take the arrowheads once again on the stroke panel, and you.
06:07 Let's put an arrowhead on the one end, this on the other.
06:12 Once again I take that eraser tool, I can just erase at these points.
06:19 You can see how that behaves. So the erase path tool allows you to
06:22 erase part of a path and you can use this for text on a path too if I were to do
06:25 something like this. Take the ellipse tool but I only want
06:29 part of the ellipse once again. Erase that path and now I only have half
06:35 of a circle that's fun. Alright let's get rid of that, and let's
06:40 go to the other eraser tool. Now what's different about this one, well
06:44 let me go ahead and draw a shape, like this circle here, and let me go ahead and
06:48 turn off the dash line. And fill this with some color so we can
06:53 see this take place. There we go.
06:56 Now, with the eraser tool, see this circle?
06:59 See that cursor, the size of that? As I go across that art, I'm actually
07:04 erasing, from that art. Because I erased all the way through, I
07:08 erased this into two parts. So if I deselect and select just part of
07:13 it, you can see how now, this is two parts, two separate closed paths.
07:18 I'm gonna undo back to this, and I'm gonna go to my Eraser and I'm gonna make
07:22 that bigger. And I can do that by doing the brackets,
07:26 which is right next to the letter P. Or I can double click, and I can choose
07:31 the diameter this way as well. 'Kay, let's go ahead and hit OK.
07:35 Okay, so I've got my bigger brush now. I'm going to erase, erase, erase.
07:45 Notice what I'm doing. I'm creating either a parachute or an umbrella.
07:49 I don't know which you want it to be. But either way, if you try to do that
07:52 shape, as simple as that might seem, from scratch.
07:56 It's gonna take a lot longer than it does using the eraser tool.
08:00 So the eraser tool can be used exactly as it sounds to erase art that you don't want.
08:05 There it is, it's gone. Or it can be used as an artistic tool as
08:08 I've shown you by making this very quick umbrella or parachute.
08:12 Now with the eraser we have a scissors tool.
08:15 Hm, what does that do. Well, it helps to look at the artwork in
08:19 outline mode. The scissors tool actually allows you to
08:23 clip lines. Into separate paths.
08:27 So now you can see that I've broken this into two separate open paths.
08:33 All right, let's do this again, but this time let's look at it in preview mode.
08:37 Here's my art, it's one closed path, but I'm gonna take my scissors and I'm gonna
08:42 click and I'm gonna click. And now, let's deselect the art.
08:48 And if I select this half, you can see where I've made two open paths.
08:53 There's no stroke going down there. So, I've broken that line into parts.
08:58 Much like the exercise we did before with the eraser.
09:01 I could use this to take a line, and very quickly break it into segments.
09:07 So we'll once again use the pencil. We'll create our path.
09:11 Here we go and once again we'll use, let's say, a dotted line with an
09:15 arrowhead, that seems to be a good visual to do, arrowhead and then the back of it,
09:20 we'll use a dot this time. Now if I use the scissors, the
09:26 differences with the path eraser tool I can erase a lot of the path like that.
09:33 With the scissor tool it literally snips the path wherever you click and it breaks
09:38 that into those smaller segments. From that point you could grab the
09:43 segment and move 'em apart very easily. So it's a lot like the eraser and yet as
09:49 you can see, different. Now I'm gonna select all of that, get rid
09:53 of that. And once again I'm gonna create a very
09:57 simple shape, and fill it with a color. Let's fill it with blue again.
10:02 I have a knife tool. Now where's the eraser tool?
10:07 When I went through the middle of this, actually erased everything in its path.
10:12 With the knife tool, it does exactly as you would expect an X-Acto knife to.
10:16 Alright? I'm gonna start cutting outside the shape.
10:20 I'm gonna cut into it and up, and you can see that exactly where my knife went, it
10:25 sliced this into these two parts. So you may want a certain shape but you
10:31 don't know how to create it with the pen tool or from scratch.
10:36 Sometimes it's as simple as just taking any of the shape tools and then cutting it.
10:41 You want a certain look of, say, a sunrise.
10:44 I can take the star tool, I can start drawing.
10:48 Let's make the rays a little bit longer, let's put a few more on there.
10:53 'Kay, let's move this, let's fill this, turn the stroke off there, here we go.
10:58 And let's actually not have any stroke. Let's do something like that, and now
11:03 let's just fill this with a reddish gradient and I am gonna go to the
11:07 gradient here and make that radial. Okay, now that's only half of sunrise.
11:14 Now I could put a box over that, or I can take my knife tool.
11:18 I can start cutting outside of this, cut in here, cut across, to leave the bottom
11:25 half, and now I've got my sunrise. I need to redo my gradient there, so that
11:31 it looks like a sunrise. So now I've got half of that shape versus
11:36 the entire star that I have to now figure out how to hide it, or whatever.
11:40 So the knife really allows us to edit paths into segments, or other art into
11:45 smaller pieces that we can manipulate. Last drawing tool I'm gonna show you, and
11:51 then I'm going to start editing some art, is the Blob Brush.
11:55 And this one came to us just a couple versions ago, and I wanna show you the
11:58 difference between the Blob Brush and, say, the Pencil tool.
12:02 If I take the Pencil tool and I put a nice black stroke on it.
12:08 Let's go ahead and put a black thick stroke on that Pencil tool.
12:12 And lemme just draw just something here so I can show this to you.
12:16 So I'm gonna draw a shape there. And let's overlap with a shape there, okay?
12:18 And let's overlap that with something like that.
12:24 Okay, and it's just artistic, we'll call that artistic.
12:30 If I do the same thing with the blob brush, okay?
12:32 I'm gonna do the exact same thing, I'm gonna come down there.
12:35 I'm gonna come across there, and I'm gonna come down there.
12:39 'Kay, so kind of the same piece of art. If I go to view, outline, notice the
12:44 difference between the two. When you use the pencil tool, it's still
12:49 three distinct lines overlapping each other, and you have to control the stroke
12:54 to get the look that you want. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong
12:59 with that. But the blob brush gives us a different way.
13:03 And that is, that, wherever we overlap. It actually joins it as a closed path.
13:09 It's not lines, it's path. Watch what happens when I take this.
13:13 We're gonna stay in this outline mode for a second.
13:15 Watch what happens when I take the blob brush, and I continue to paint.
13:19 You can see that it will continue to treat this as a single piece of art.
13:25 Whereas, if I did something with this that way, the pencil tool.
13:29 I would have that many lines that I would have to manage.
13:32 And if I grab it and try to move one. Oops.
13:35 I'm gonna have to remember to group those, or select 'em and move 'em.
13:38 Whereas, this is a single object. Lets go back to preview mode and you can
13:44 see how I can click and then choose a different color for the fill and the
13:47 stroke and it effects the entire thing. And where they overlap, I get a different
13:54 effect than if I use the pencil tool. So the blob brush is a great artistic
13:58 tool for you to play with. Alright, now, let's open up this man
14:02 yelling and let's see how these tools working together can make a real
14:06 difference in the way we edit art. I am gonna select him, all one big group,
14:11 I'm gonna go to object ungroup. I don't want this hand in the art
14:16 anymore,I just want his head and this hand.
14:20 So, I'm gonna select these 3 pieces of art and delete those.
14:24 I'm going to select the cuff and delete that.
14:28 I'm going to select this part of his hand and delete that, that, that.
14:34 Now if I select his hand here and delete, notice the the hand was also one path
14:39 that makes up his face, his ear and the other hand.
14:44 Mm, that's not a good idea. How do we do that?
14:48 Well, once again, let's look at our drawing tools, we have lots of choices.
14:52 One, I could erase it. Could, come right down there and erase it.
14:59 Could do that. I could also take my Pencil tool, start
15:03 on the line, redraw, End of the line, and now I've gotten rid of it that way.
15:10 And the other choice, well, I can take my knife tool, come right in here, cut right
15:14 through there, and down. By going back to my black arrow, and
15:18 selecting his hand, I can delete that, and I've gotten rid of that face.
15:23 There's lots of ways, using these drawing tools, where you can edit existing artwork.
15:27 I'm gonna click on his arm here, that was his hand and I'm gonna turn that into
15:31 another shoulder with the Pencil tool, by starting on the line, redrawing, ending
15:35 on the line. If you don't like it just start again,
15:39 and draw again. You can keep doing that, and playing with
15:42 it and use the Smooth tool if you want. Now let's zoom in and take a look at his
15:47 shirt here. Notice, there's a tie and it's connected
15:51 to his collar, it's one piece. What if you wanna make the tie red, how
15:55 would you do that? Well, let's go to the knife tool.
16:00 Using the knife tool, and with that art selected, I'm gonna cut from the outside,
16:03 into the art, come across here and back outside the art, like that.
16:08 When I let go, with my black arrow on deselect, I can click on just the tie
16:13 portion, and I'll make it filled, let's say, with red.
16:19 Here we go. This part is missing.
16:22 Hmm. Why don't I just take the shirt, take the
16:25 pencil tool, draw down here, and across, and I'll put that part back into that shirt.
16:32 Simple enough. Let's zoom out a couple of clicks.
16:34 We can see how we've modified this artwork using the pencil, smooth, eraser, knife.
16:41 Using all these drawing tools to create. We can also use them to modify art.
16:46 So spend some time and just play with those.
16:49 Don't be afraid, you've always go unlimited undos if you mess something up.
16:56
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6. Modifying Your Paths
Fun with paths
00:02 You've seen posters like this in print or magazine ads or anything else.
00:07 It gets pretty complicated and you're thinking, now how did they do that?
00:10 You know maybe you don't even want to worry about.
00:13 But maybe you really want to create something like this and you're thinking
00:15 well that's a font. Well that's just a logo; they created that.
00:20 Yeah, they created that, but what did they create that in?
00:23 And the starburst with the three levels, and this guy here, and the moon.
00:27 Can you imagine taking the pencil tool and trying to draw a moon and, forget it.
00:32 Not interested. How do we create this stuff?
00:35 Well, there are a few basic tools, techniques and rules that you need to
00:38 learn when working with vector art and once you learn those, you can very
00:42 quickly and easily create that. And that's what we're going to do in this chapter.
00:47 Fun with paths. We're just gonna take simple shapes,
00:50 simple text, all sorts of things. And with a few simple, very easy to learn
00:54 techniques, we're gonna create this type of stuff.
00:58 Before I leave you to those champers, I just wanna show you this.
01:01 Remember, this is all vector. You can see the anchors and the lines in
01:05 all of this art. If I go to View > Outline, now you can
01:09 see behind the scenes of the show. And you can see that yes in fact, these
01:14 are just paths. So what we're gonna learn in this chapter
01:18 is how to create those paths. You get a whole new way of designing, as
01:22 you're doing your ads, your posters, your brochures.
01:26 Whatever it is, with paths, and a few magic tricks, we can do some amazing things.
01:34
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The Pathfinder panel
00:02 See this moon, how did we easily create that and how do we cut off this star
00:05 bursting all the other need things that we can do with paths.
00:10 How do we do that? Well we were going to learn in this
00:13 lesson how to take shapes, overlap them, move them around and then using this
00:16 pathfinder technology, chop 'em down into these smaller little bits so that we get
00:20 a whole new end result. Let's go to our Pathfinder Start here,
00:25 and let's do something really basic, let's create the moon.
00:29 Well, it's really simple, we're going to start with an ellipse.
00:32 And I'm going to draw a circle, holding the Shift key down, so that I get a nice
00:36 constrained circle. There you go.
00:40 Now I'm going to draw a second circle over it.
00:42 Now, if you can visualize what you want the moon to look like, because right now
00:46 I'm using the top shape. I'm visualizing a cookie cutter.
00:51 And so what's left is going to be this shape.
00:55 Right in here. So with my black arrow I'm going to
00:58 select that, hold my shift key down and select that.
01:01 So now I have the two shapes selected, simple enough.
01:05 Now remember which ones the top shape. Window, pathfinder, opens this pathfinder panel.
01:12 Now there are lots of buttons on here and we're going to get into that in just a
01:15 second but for this demonstration. I want you to click this second one right
01:19 here, which you can see where it says right there, minus front.
01:23 Well, minus front means when I push that it's going to take the top shape and
01:27 remove everything underneath it. And now watch as I grab the corner here,
01:33 rotate my moon, there we go. Now I just need to fill it.
01:38 With the swatch color that I want to use, and move it into position, behind the accordion.
01:44 Well it's not there, so I'm going to go to object, arrange, send back, and now
01:48 it's behind the word accordion nights. That was really easy to create.
01:54 I'm going to slide my art board over here a little bit, just so I have some room to
01:57 play with some other shapes. Let's start really simple, lets draw A rectangle.
02:03 There we go, simple enough. Hold down your rectangle tool, and go to
02:07 your star tool. And I ant you to draw, but as you're
02:10 drawing, hit your up arrow a few times, and maybe control command drag, so the
02:14 points aren't quite so big, there we go. And now lets draw a starburst.
02:21 Okay. Now lets move it just over the corner of
02:23 this rectangle for a bit, and lets go ahead and fill it with a different color,
02:26 so we can really see this take place. All right, so I've got a rectangle that's
02:31 one color. I'm going to go ahead and make that blue,
02:34 so it's a little bit more colorful. So I have a blue rectangle, I have a red starburst.
02:39 Two very distinct shapes. If I go to view outline, you can see that
02:43 they are in fact two shapes, 'kay. You can see where they overlap here, 'kay.
02:48 And you can visualize that though in preview mode, you can kind of see where
02:52 that's going to go, all right. So let's select both of those paths, if I
02:56 go to the Pathfinder, and push the first button, which is called Unite.
03:02 Guess what it does? It makes a single path out of both of
03:05 those shapes. If I go to outline mode now, There you go.
03:10 You can't see that part of the shape anymore because it doesn't exist.
03:14 Those have been molded into a single shape.
03:17 All right. So undo that, go back to preview mode
03:19 and, if I hit the second button, what do you think is going to happen?
03:23 Well, the star which is on top is going to be a cookie cutter and it
03:26 kind of just take a bite right out of what's underneath there.
03:30 Sure enough, all of this is gone. All that remains are these bits of the path.
03:34 I'm going to hit command z to undo again. This third button is called intersect.
03:41 What that's going to do is anywhere those two shapes intersect, let's look at it in
03:44 outline mode. Wherever these two are overlapping,
03:48 that's what's going to be affected here. So let's go to preview mode.
03:52 Make sure you have both selected, and boom.
03:56 All that's left is where they overlap. Everything else is gone, we don't need it anymore.
04:00 Command Z, this next one is called exclude.
04:04 It's going to take wherever the two overlap and, it's going to make a donut
04:07 out of that. Now watch what happens when I move this
04:11 art over the image. So you can actually see through the hole
04:15 that we just cut there. Let me give you an example of where we
04:19 might use something like that. Let's take the ellipse tool and I'm going
04:23 to draw a circle, okay. And now I'm going to use the star tool
04:27 and I'll draw a star. Now I'm going position that star right in
04:31 the middle. There we go.
04:35 Select them both. Now if I wanted that to match this
04:37 background, well if this background was solid it would be possible for me to just
04:41 fill that with the same color. Could do that.
04:46 But this background, as you could see, has a gradient.
04:49 So that would be a lot of work. So I'm better off selecting both.
04:53 Punching a hole right in the middle that now I can see through that hole to
04:58 whatever's underneath it. So what the pathfinder does is it does a
05:03 lot of punching. All right?
05:06 That's what it does. Now I want to create another shape here.
05:09 I'm going top go ahead and create a star tool again and another star tool.
05:13 Yeah, this is going to be really crazy. I'm going to go ahead and change the fill
05:16 color of that so we can see this. And let me move these down here.
05:17 There we go. So now you can see, if we go to outline
05:17 mode, we've got a lot going on there. Yeah, it starts getting really crazy,
05:19 depending on how busy our paths are. There we go.
05:27 Wow, yeah, that's crazy. So let's select them both.
05:36 Now in preview mode, down here we have a whole bunch of other choices as well.
05:40 We have divide. Now what did that do?
05:42 Didn't look like anything happened there. Hmm.
05:45 Well if I go to object, ungroup, I'm going to add this, and move it.
05:48 I'm going to grab this, and move it. Look what it did guys.
05:55 Everywhere the paths overlapped, it chopped it into a small piece.
06:00 This allows us to take any piece of art that's overlapping and very quickly cut
06:04 it up into smaller pieces for kind of an explosive effect, if that's what we wanted.
06:10 Or, maybe I wanted this And this and nothing else.
06:14 Well, I might of been able to do that in one of these, but by dividing it, maybe I
06:17 got a better result. All right, I'm going to undo a whole
06:20 bunch, Command Z, Command Z, Command Z. And go back to where it's just two paths again.
06:25 See, it's still just two paths. All right, I'm going to select both and
06:29 this next one here is called trim. Hm, what did that do?
06:33 Well, it looks like, nothing. But if I select it and ungroup, you can
06:39 see that it did a similar thing, but only with what was visible.
06:45 See before, it chopped even the underneath stuff.
06:48 Now, it kept the appearance of what I had.
06:52 Let's go back again, and you can see this. It kept the appearance of what I had,
06:56 but, in the end, I can ungroup it, and then move, parts of it, if I want to.
07:04 Notice that's a little different than the first one we did there, which was divide.
07:09 All right, I'm going to hop over a couple of these for right now, because they're
07:11 not important for us at this stage of our learning.
07:14 But let's go to this last one, which is the opposite of this one.
07:17 You know, you'd almost think they'd move that right up there beside that like they
07:21 do in End Design. This is minus back.
07:24 This is going to take the shape that's underneath and use that As the cookie
07:27 cutter to get rid of the shape in front. So you have minus front here and you've
07:32 got minus back buried down here. So for what that's worth.
07:36 All right, so let's put a star burst behind this accordion player so that it
07:40 looks like the art that we're working on there, okay?
07:45 We'll go ahead and nest that over there. All right.
07:47 So, how do we do that? Well, I'm going to zoom out, a couple
07:50 clicks here, so I gotta little more to work.
07:53 Let's grab the star tool. Let's go right here in the middle of his
07:57 chest and start dragging. Let's hold the shift key down so it's constrained.
08:01 Get it about the size you like and if there aren't enough points, add a few
08:04 more points, that's fine. If they're too long or too short, hold
08:07 the control. Command, get em the length you want,
08:10 there we go. All right, go ahead and let go and let's
08:13 reposition this a little bit behind him. And let's go ahead and fill that with
08:18 this light red color right there. Object arrange send to back.
08:23 Now the reason that's not going behind the background is because I've got that
08:26 on a separate layer and we'll cover that in another chapter.
08:29 All right, so I've got this star. And I have all this stuff hanging out.
08:33 Which is fine if I want to leave it there.
08:35 But I tend to want to be able to clean that stuff up so that it's just, it's not
08:38 just in our way there. So I'm going to go over here and select
08:42 the rectangle tool. And I'm going to draw a rectangle that
08:45 goes right down here to the edge of the art.
08:49 Can you see that? I'm going right down there in the corner
08:50 of the art. What color this is.
08:53 It doesn't matter. Okay, and I'm going to hold my shift key
08:56 down and select that. So now you can see I have both paths
08:59 selected, the star burst and the square, the rectangle.
09:03 Now you saw me do this earlier. Do you remember?
09:05 Let's do a little quiz. All right?
09:09 Which one of these tools will we use to just keep the star burst?
09:14 Well, I'm going to use the intersect, because what I want to do is keep
09:17 everything that, where the two overlap, I want to get rid of the rest of the
09:20 rectangle, and I want to get rid of the points on the starburst.
09:25 When I push that button, there, I got rid of them.
09:28 It brought them to front, because the rectangle was the front most object.
09:33 And so that, that's why it brought it to front.
09:34 So I'm going to go to object, arrange, send it back again.
09:38 And now I have got my star burst behind him so as you can see the path finder alas!
09:43 Allows us to take shapes overlap I mean just chop, chop, chop for some simple
09:47 very powerful designs like the moon, like a star burst and anything else that pops
09:52 into your head.
09:55
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Compound paths
00:02 Alright guys, you're not in grade school anymore.
00:04 We're gonna cover an advanced topic here. But it's one of those that you need to know.
00:08 You've got to know this. We're gonna talk about compound paths.
00:12 If you take a look at this letter A here, for example.
00:15 Let me just zoom in on it. It's not one path.
00:18 One path is the outline of the A. The other path is the star.
00:23 And together they create a compound path. Okay?
00:27 That sounds simple enough? All right.
00:30 So, anytime you've got a letter that has an inside, that would be an example of a
00:33 compound path. This here, this logo right here, is also
00:38 a compound path. There's one path that makes up the
00:42 outside, but then there's another path that makes up the inside.
00:46 This is multiple paths. Look.
00:48 One, two, let's go ahead and count this, three, four, and then the outside path,
00:52 there's five paths put together as a single compound path to make this look.
00:58 Okay, how do we do that? Well, let's go to this art right here and
01:02 let's just do it. Are you ready?
01:04 Then we'll zoom in on this letter, this type is already created as art, and I've
01:08 gotta box. So, I'm gonna hold my Shift key down and
01:11 select both. If I go to Object > Compound Path > Make.
01:17 There we go. That was it.
01:19 That's all there is to it. I'm gonna go over here and choose a fill
01:23 color for that. Let's make that, that color's fine.
01:27 Okay? There we go.
01:29 I'm gonna zoom out a little bit. And let's look at these letters.
01:34 They're all grouped together. Object > Ungroup.
01:40 Now if I select that A, again it's a compound path.
01:44 Let me zoom in there so we can see this. If I don't want it to be a compound path
01:48 anymore, Object > Compound Path > Release.
01:53 Now, it's two separate paths. There's the inside, there's the outside.
01:58 I can delete that cuz I don't want that anymore.
02:00 I'm gonna go over here to my Star tool and I'm gonna click.
02:04 And I'm gonna tell it to make Radius 1. Let's make this small, 0.25.
02:09 Radius 2, 0.5. And let's do 5 points on it.
02:15 Let's just see what we get. There we go.
02:17 All right, good enough. Now, that's a still little big but that's alright.
02:21 I am not even worried about the color, so if yours is a different color than mine,
02:25 don't worry about it. I wanna bring it right over here and
02:30 position it where it's in the center of that A.
02:33 Hold my Shift key down, just like we did on the previous logo.
02:37 I have the star and the outside selected, Object > Compound Path > Make.
02:41 Now, some of you who watched the previous chapter on Pathfinder might say, well,
02:44 can I do that with a Pathfinder? Yeah, cuz the Pathfinder makes compound paths.
02:51 It also makes non-compound paths, though. So, I think it's important that you
02:54 understand that I can release this star at any moment by going Object > Compound
02:58 Path > Release. And now, it's not there anymore.
03:02 I'm gonna hit Cmd+Z to undo that cuz I wanna show you that if I go to my White
03:05 Arrow and click on that star, the star is selected.
03:09 But that notice I don't have any points selected.
03:12 So, I'm gonna hold my Alt key down and I'm going to now have all of them selected.
03:17 Can you see the blue anchors now? Notice nothing else is selected.
03:22 I'm just going to use my arrow keys and I can play with the position of this now.
03:27 And all it's doing is changing where that path is, but it's still part of a
03:31 compound path. How cool is that?
03:35 All right? So, I'll play with that a little bit, get
03:37 it the way I like it. If I wanna change the size of it, I can
03:40 go back to my black arrow and I can make that just a little bit smaller.
03:44 There's my compound path, I can do that the same way on this O.
03:49 Object > Compound Path > Release. I'm gonna select the middle, delete it,
03:54 and go to my Star tool and I'm gonna make this one, just down here at the bottom,
03:58 I'm not gonna make it right in the center.
04:02 Oops. That over.
04:04 Select the background. Object > Compound Path > Make.
04:09 So now, you can just keep going through all your art.
04:13 Release the compound path. Make the compound path.
04:21 And as you can see now, it's quite easy for us to go through this text, and put
04:25 stars there to fit the feel of Accordion Nights as opposed to going and looking
04:29 for a font that might do that for us. So, we can create logos.
04:36 We can chop out for letters. Any time we wanna join two paths
04:40 overlapping for a more complicated design, compound paths might be there.
04:45 What's more important to know, I think in this lesson, is how to release a compound path.
04:51 Cuz you know the Pathfinder will do lot of this.
04:54 We can't release the compound path there. And I may wanna get rid of those star,
04:58 Object > Compound Path > Release. So, just remember that when you see
05:02 something complicated, you can break it into smaller bits by releasing the
05:06 compound paths.
05:08
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Outline stroke
00:02 In this video, I'm gonna show you one of my favorite tips.
00:05 It's one of my favorite tips, because, it's one of those things we need all the time.
00:09 And once we discover it, it literally change the way we work.
00:13 And I remember, when I discovered it, and I think it's still marked on a calendar somewhere.
00:16 It's just such a huge feature. Let's zoom in and look at this logo right here.
00:21 See those piano keys on the logo? How did I create that?
00:25 Well, human nature may have us do something like this.
00:29 I'm gonna go back to this original document before I did that.
00:33 And let's take our line segment tool. And I'm just gonna draw a simple line.
00:39 There we go. And let's put a stroke on it.
00:41 Something like that, maybe too big. Let's go with like five points maybe.
00:45 Good enough. And let me make that just a little bit longer.
00:49 Okay, now I'm going to, with this line that I've created or this stroke, it's
00:54 got a black stroke on it, okay? I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate this.
00:59 Alright, so I'm gonna hold my Alt key down and my Shift key, and I'm just gonna
01:03 drag to the right here a little bit and let go.
01:06 And now I've got the second key. I wanna keep that uniform going all the
01:10 way across the art here. So I'm gonna just hit Cmd on a Mac, Ctrl
01:14 On a Windows machine, D and I'm gonna keep hitting that, Ctrl+D, Ctrl+D,
01:17 control d, command d command d. I'm just going all the way across this
01:23 art to about there, and if it's not exact, don't worry about that right now.
01:28 Okay? Now, I'm gonna go to every third key,
01:31 actually, I guess every fourth key, one two three, and.
01:35 The numbers may not be exact, but that's okay.
01:37 We're just creating a logo here. And, I'm going to make that shorter.
01:41 Well, I don't remember exactly what the height was there.
01:43 I did one, but what are the odds of getting that exact?
01:46 And even if I could, I'm really lazy. So I'm gonna hit Cmd+D, again.
01:50 Notice that it remembers the last transition.
01:53 That we did. By the way, this isn't a shortcut
01:55 (LAUGH). That's just a good tip, but where I'm
01:57 going next is really what I wanna show you.
02:00 Here we go, and, perfect. Okay, so now I have the keys to this
02:04 accordion, we'll just say that. Alright.
02:08 Well, here's the issue guys. These are lines.
02:11 How do I use Pathfinder with lines? Let's look at this.
02:16 If I drew a simple square, there we go. And I drew a line.
02:24 Even if I make a really thick stroke on that line, and let's fill this shape with
02:28 the black. Okay, so that looks the way I want it to look.
02:35 But if I go to View Outline, it's a line and a closed path.
02:39 Well, you can only use pathfinder with closed paths.
02:44 You can only use compound paths with closed paths.
02:47 This isn't a closed path, it's an open line.
02:48 That's all it is is a line. Well, I'm pretty lazy guy.
02:53 I'm probably not gonna wanna recreate that by going over here and trying to
02:57 redraw that exact same thing. I'm just not gonna do that.
03:02 So what's the trick? Here we go.
03:03 You're ready? Select the line, Object > Path Outline
03:07 the stroke, what it does is it takes the stroke and the thickness that you've
03:11 applied to it and it makes an outline. Let's look at it in outline mode now.
03:18 See? It's not a line anymore.
03:19 It's now a path. So I can select them.
03:22 I can go Window > Pathfinder and unite them as a single path now, whereas, I
03:27 couldn't have done that when it was just a line.
03:32 Alright, so what are we gonna do here then?
03:34 Well, I'm gonna stay in Outline mode. And I'm just gonna grab here and drag across.
03:38 I select only my lines. I'm gonna go to view, preview mode.
03:43 And now you can see that I've got all those lines selected.
03:46 Ready for the fun part? Object > Path > Outline the stroke, and
03:51 now all those keys are paths. I can kind of position it where I want
03:56 it, hold my Shift key down, select the art behind it.
04:01 Window > Pathfinder. Second button is minus front, kaboom, and
04:06 now, you'll see that I've knocked all those lines out of this art.
04:12 Let's zoom out a little bit, you can see. That, as I move this around my page, you
04:16 can see through, the keys, to what's behind, because it's knocked out, it's
04:21 gone, doesn't exist. One of my favorite tricks.
04:28 Take a stroke, outline it, and now you can use it with Pathfinder to get the
04:33 desired effect.
04:35
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Offset paths
00:02 OK, so how do I get this look? How do I get this outline of the text there?
00:08 Make this starburst bigger like that, different levels?
00:12 How do I do that? You might think it's just scaling, but
00:15 let's go to this accordian nights offset paths document, and if I scroll over to
00:18 the paste board, I've given you an example of how it doesn't work.
00:23 I've got this c alright and it's a path you can see that and I am gonna copy this
00:28 and I am going to paste in front. So just put it exact replica on top of
00:34 itself, you can see that, okay. And I'll go ahead and change the color of
00:38 it cuz I wanna make this. Behind it with an outline like I showed
00:42 in the previous example. Try scaling it.
00:45 Hold your shift key down and just make it a little bit bigger, and you'll see that
00:50 you can't. I'm going to go to object, arrange, send
00:55 it back. So, now you can see that c in front of
00:58 it, but use your arrow keys and nudge it around a little bit.
01:01 See, it doesn't work, scaling only grows it out or shrinks it in.
01:07 Notice it doesn't take the whole path and have it come outside like I really want
01:11 it to do. So in order to do that, we have to use a
01:15 different trick, alright, it's called, offset path.
01:19 Let's start with something simple, like this starburst.
01:22 So with the starburst selected, I'm gonna go to Object Path, offset path, and turn
01:29 on preview. It's a good idea to turn that on.
01:33 And now you can play with the amount up here.
01:36 I just left it at the .125. And I'm gonna put this back down to 4 cuz
01:39 that's actually the default setting. Now look what happens to the points of
01:43 the star when it's on miter limit 4. It just kinda lops it off there.
01:48 And you can do that with Other corners of really challenging letters.
01:52 So, I recommend you really look at your art and increase that miter limit until
01:56 you make sure you have all your points there.
01:59 When you get it the way you like it, hit okay and now that's our bigger path.
02:04 But let's look at it here under view outline mode.
02:07 And you can see that I still have the original one there as well.
02:11 Now, if I use my white arrow, and I select that path, I can actually
02:15 manipulate it separately from the other one.
02:19 Let's go back to preview mode, and let's just do a simple fill to give that a
02:22 different color. Or, maybe I want to fill it with the
02:26 other color. And with my white arrow I'll select the
02:30 outside one and I'll fill it with a darker color.
02:34 That was fun. Now let's take this text, let's select it.
02:41 Let's do the same thing, Object, Path, Offset Path, Turn on preview, and maybe
02:49 0.125 is too big. So let's bump that down to just 0.1 and
02:54 see what we get. It's a little smaller; not quite as
02:57 obnoxious there. Let's go ahead and accept that.
03:01 Okay? Brought it to the front.
03:03 You can see that's selected. Let's fill that with this light blue,
03:06 'cause it didn't really bring it to the front, it just had it selected; looked
03:09 like it did, but it wasn't. So now we've given some dimension to that.
03:14 Text there, this starburst, and now the arts a lot more exciting, because we've
03:18 got multiple layers, highlights, and things like that.
03:22 So, sometimes you'll need to enlarge a path because you just need it to be bigger.
03:26 And, scaling doesn't work, so you'll do the offset path.
03:29 In this case, we use it to give our design a little bit of pizazz.
03:36
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7. You've Made a Path, Now What?
Transforming objects
00:02 If there's something you want to change in your art, you're better off learning
00:05 how to transform it than deleting and then starting all over again.
00:10 It maybe something as simple as a rotate or scaling it or skewing it or maybe
00:15 duplicating it, or any number of other transformations.
00:21 Maybe you want these two moons to line up perfectly.
00:24 There's all sorts of buttons, drop down menus, tools, keyboard shortcuts, that
00:29 allow us to achieve that without having to delete our art and starting again.
00:35 Or trying, omigod, can you imagine redrawing this same art over and over and
00:38 over again? We're not gonna do that.
00:40 We're gonna learn all sorts of neat tricks.
00:42 And then we're gonna learn how to organize them through groups and how to
00:45 arrange them with alignment. So, this is a busy chapter on
00:50 transforming those objects on our art.
00:55
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Duplicating objects
00:01 Alright, I think this artwork need some stars.
00:04 The stars I put in the text here, it's just not enough.
00:07 We've gotta really, really, really make this night happen.
00:11 So let's draw some stars. Let's for now go to window, layers.
00:16 And in the layers panel, I've actually broken this art up.
00:18 And I'm gonna turn off the visibility of the top layer and select layer two.
00:22 And that's where we're gonna put our stars for this exercise.
00:26 Okay? Now, I'm gonna go to my star tool and I'm
00:28 just gonna draw a star. And let me just hold my command key down
00:32 and make that a little bit bigger. Okay?
00:35 Yeah, that works pretty well. And I'm gonna go to my Swatches panel
00:38 here and fill that with, let's say, yellow for right now.
00:43 Okay, great, now I've got one star. Now I really don't want to draw another
00:46 star, an draw another star, an draw another star.
00:50 So how do we duplicate? Well I could go object, Hm, I don't see
00:54 any duplicate there. Hm, edit, no, hm, what would we do?
01:01 Well, I could copy it, and then I could paste it.
01:08 Alright, well that was pretty easy, then I could move it to position.
01:11 We could do that, we could do that. Before I show you the next trick I'm
01:14 gonna show you, let me just show this one little worthwhile thing about copying though.
01:19 I love this paste in front or paste in back, what that allows me to do, is if I
01:22 paste that in back, you can't see that it's there, but there is a star there and
01:26 if I enlarge this just a little bit. Look at that, and now I can fill that
01:32 with a different color and you can see where I've got one star exactly behind
01:35 the other. So there's times when you want to do a
01:39 paste in front or paste in back. But for right now let's try a different
01:43 trick, I'm going to move this star up here.
01:45 You ready for this? I'm gonna hold my alt key or option key
01:48 down and drag, and ta-da! I've duplicated it.
01:52 That was simple enough. But, I want it to be in line with this.
01:55 So, as I'm holding my alt key and duplicating, I'm gonna hold my shift key
01:59 down, and that will keep it constrained. To a right or 45 degree angle.
02:06 Okay, so now I'm gonna put that star right there.
02:09 Good enough. Now I wanna keep doing that.
02:11 Now what are the odds of me moving that the exact same distance all the way across?
02:16 Probably pretty slim. So look here, I've got Object > Transform.
02:22 Transform again. Forget this, remember the shortcut.
02:26 Command D, or control D. Now watch what I'm gonna do.
02:29 I'm gonna just hit command D, D, D, D, D, D, D, and now I just repeated that
02:33 transformation all the way across the page.
02:37 That doesn't just work with moving, or duplicating, it works with all sorts of transformations.
02:43 Object transform Move, rotate, reflect, scale, sheer.
02:47 So watch what happens if I take this one and I let's say move it down here.
02:53 I can grab this one, hit command or control D and it does the exact same
02:56 thing right here. Boom, it does it again.
03:00 It remembers the last transformation you made and you can do it over and over again.
03:04 So often times when I'm duplicating something, I'll Let's make this a little smaller.
03:10 I'll option drag, at an angle, let's just do that.
03:14 And then command d d d d, and you can see, that it just keeps doing the exact
03:17 same transformation. That's a great shortcut.
03:21 So duplicating, really guys, is as easy as, option drag.
03:26 And then move it where you want or if you want to step it, command D D D.
03:29 That's probably the best way to do it, with one exception, and that's copy,
03:33 paste in front, paste behind. There are times when that's the best
03:38 shortcut you can know.
03:41
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Aligning objects
00:01 So I'm still working on this poster, and I want these stars.
00:04 I'm gonna go to my Layers panel, and turn off that top layer, and select layer three.
00:09 And I'm just gonna draw a star here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and
00:13 here, just gotta bunch of stars. Alright.
00:17 Okay, and now I'm looking at 'em and I'm thinking, you know, I think I want those
00:22 lined up along the top. Well, if I select all of those, up here
00:27 in the control bar I've got all these alignment icons, or if I go to Window,
00:32 Align, I have the align panel. Now, this icon kind of tells us what it's
00:38 gonna do, but I just hold my cursor there, it'll tell me align left, align top.
00:44 So let's click align top, and you can see all those stars just snap to the top
00:48 based on where the highest anchor is. If I align bottom, you can see it lines
00:53 those to the bottom. Simple enough.
00:56 Align right. Now they're all aligned at the bottom,
00:59 and the right. Okay, I'm gonna hit Cmd z a few times and
01:02 make it messy again. Now in addition to that I have distribute.
01:06 So if I were to align these to the top. And I'm just going to move this down a bit.
01:12 I'm gonna bring this star out. Let's select 'em all again.
01:15 And align top. And this time I'm gonna distribute the
01:19 centers horizontally and now you can see that the centers of these objects are all
01:24 exactly aligned. Or, let me go to the show options in that
01:29 align panel and I can distribute the spacing between those stars evenly, and
01:33 now you can see that the space between em is exactly the same all the way across.
01:40 If I want to move them closer together Let's do this.
01:43 Let's actually center those. Here we go and let's move this one
01:47 further to the left. Select 'em all and redistribute the space.
01:52 And now we've bought 'em all closer together.
01:54 It's great when somebody says, you know, I want those to go all the way across.
01:57 I don't have to move and then guess and then guess.
02:02 All I do is move this where I want it. move this where I want it, now it's like
02:06 book ends. I'm gonna select 'em, recenter, and redistribute.
02:11 So maybe with stars its not as effective if, as say if I drew a box here, and a
02:15 box here, and a box here, and a box here. Notice they're all different sizes, which
02:21 is okay, I select them all. Distribute, Distribute the spacing.
02:25 Now it's even between them, or I could distribute the spacing based on the
02:29 centers of the objects, okay? So now the centers of those objects are equidistant.
02:35 Here, the space between the objects is the same.
02:39 Alright, so that's a nice little trick in aligning things.
02:42 I want to show you one last thing. I'm gonna take this box, and I'm gonna
02:46 take this white arrow there, the direct selection tool, click on that anchor
02:49 right there and move that up. And I'll move it out, just, just go crazy here.
02:56 Now I've decided that I don't want it like that again.
03:00 I want this anchor and this one to be lined up.
03:04 Well, if I select both anchors like that and I hit left, notice that it lined up
03:08 on the left. I'm gonna undo that.
03:11 And if I hit the right Notice that it goes to the right, okay?
03:15 So that worked fine. But watch what happens if I select in
03:18 like this, click. Shift click.
03:21 Now watch what happens when I hit left. It worked.
03:24 Undo. Watch what happens when I hit right.
03:26 It still goes to the left. The logic here is that the last anchor
03:30 you select is the one it's gonna align to no matter which one of those you use.
03:35 So if I wanted this to be a rectangle again I could select these two anchors
03:39 and say, there, then I'll select this anchor and this anchor and there, and now
03:44 it's a rectangle again. So you can align anchors as well as
03:50 multiple objects through the align panel. But keep in mind that once you select
03:57 more than one object, this comes to life up here in the control bar and you don't
04:01 really even need this align panel to do what you wanna do.
04:05 One final note on alignment. Right here we can choose to align to
04:09 selection, align to a key object or align to art board.
04:13 Hm, what does that mean, align to key object?
04:16 I want to take this star. And I'll change the fill color.
04:19 Make it purple, there we go. Now I'm gonna take this square, hold my
04:23 Shift key, select this circle and I'm gonna center them.
04:27 Notice that they both met in the middle. I'm gonna undo that.
04:31 Let me bring this to front. Object arrange, bring to front, there we go.
04:35 I'm gonna select 'em both again. And this time before I hit that, I can
04:39 tell it which object I want to stay stationary.
04:43 If I hit that star, notice the little outline it gives us, and when I hit
04:47 centered, then it brings the box to the star.
04:50 I'm gonna undo that. Select 'em both again.
04:53 This time, I'll click the rectangle. See the bold outline there.
04:58 And I'm telling it, I want that to be what it centers on.
05:02 So I can use these based on selection or a key object.
05:06 And if I leave it on selection, I don't have to choose the key object.
05:09 I just wanted to explain that to you. And then the art board, right there.
05:12 I can say, center this star on the art board.
05:17 There, and there. I tend, I would say 95% of the time I'm
05:24 on a line to selection.
05:28
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Grouping objects
00:02 There's nothing more frustrated when your art starts getting really complicated
00:05 than trying to grab something and move it and you realize you're only grabbing a
00:09 part of that. And what's really bad is when you notice
00:13 it until it's too late. You're well down the road and you go oh, great.
00:17 Now your choices are either moving it back ot just undoing until it gets back
00:20 to where you wanted it to be. So one of the things we want to learn in
00:24 this episode is grouping, so I don't grab that and then, oh now I've got to move
00:28 that and there's a lot going on there. It's really quite simple.
00:34 I select that, hold my Shift key down, select additional objects that I want in
00:38 that group and object group. There you go.
00:42 Yep, that was pretty simple. So, this is pretty complicated art.
00:46 I'm not gonna shift-click around. What I may want to do is, select, then
00:51 deselect the objects that I don't want included in that.
00:55 And, looks like I have them all, and now I can object-group that.
01:01 You want to ungroup. You can ungroup them as well.
01:04 Or, if I'm working with a group, like this, and I just want to work on
01:07 something in the group, if I double-click, I move into what's called
01:11 isolation mode, and now I'm only working on that object or that compound path, in
01:15 this case, within this group. So, I select it.
01:21 I'm only working on that 1 object. But I can hit command a, because I'm
01:25 working on a compound path. It'll go ahead and select all those objects.
01:29 There's a whole chapter on isolation mode.
01:30 I'm just showing you, you don't have to ungroup to be able to work on an element
01:34 within a group. Now, another nice thing to know is that
01:38 you can use your white arrow or direct selection tool to select subparticles to
01:42 a group. In this case, I wanna change the words,
01:46 accordion nights. If I click on those, only with the white
01:49 arrow, it selects that and not what's in the blue.
01:53 And now I can go ahead and change the color that way.
01:57 So the white arrow allows us to get within objects within a group as well, so
02:01 let's select just his face, and now I can go in here and choose that color for Just
02:05 his face. I'll wanna do the same thing with his
02:09 hands, with my white arrow I'd get right in there.
02:12 Choose that, and now I make those changes as well.
02:15 So it's important to know that the white arrow allows you to get within subgroups.
02:20 The black arrow will allow you to keep it as a group so that you can move it around
02:24 without having to spend a lot of time clicking on things.
02:30
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Arranging objects
00:00 All right. Now I'm gonna show you something that
00:03 drives people nuts. All right?
00:06 Until you understand what's going on, this'll drive you crazy.
00:10 In this artwork, go ahead and select that moon.
00:12 And go Object > Arrange > Bring to Front. Now, that's pretty straightforward, we
00:16 understand that. I think I want to put that moon behind
00:19 the letters but in front of that blue background there.
00:24 Kinda put it right between there. So, I'm gonna select the moon and go
00:28 Object > Arrange > Send Backwards, because I am gonna send it backwards,
00:31 behind one item, right? Well, that didn't work.
00:34 So, let's try it again. Object > Arrange > Send Backwards.
00:37 Let's try that again. That didn't work either.
00:39 Mm, why not? That's the next thing underneath there.
00:42 That's, that's what logic tells us. Okay?
00:44 But I wanna explain how this arranging is really working and then you'll go, aha.
00:49 I'm gonna create a new document. And for this demonstration, I'm gonna
00:53 rely on the layers panel. This is not a layers lesson but it helps
00:57 to see this. So, let me go to my Panel options and
01:00 make this large. Okay.
01:02 So, here's my layer. I'm gonna draw an object on right here.
01:06 Just put an object right there, and I'm gonna fill it with yellow.
01:10 There it is, it's on that layer, you can see that, there it is.
01:14 Okay. Now, I'm gonna draw another object.
01:17 Let's just do another rectangle, that's fine.
01:19 Didn't even have to be the same size. And let me fill it with another color, blue.
01:24 And notice that it's on top, in the hierarchy, on that document.
01:28 Lets draw another one, another rectangle here, and I'll fill this one with red.
01:33 And once again, you can see that that's on top.
01:37 So, what you're learning here is, that as we draw in Illustrator, whatever we draw
01:41 in chronological order is going to be on top until we intervene and do something else.
01:48 Okay? So, now what you can see is, that since
01:50 the yellow was built first, it's on the bottom.
01:54 Well, since these things aren't overlapping each other, it's not really
01:58 an issue. But when I move this over it, like this, okay?
02:02 Let's go one step further. Let's say that it was only in front of
02:05 the yellow item. And I were to say send backward.
02:10 Object > Arrange > Send Backward. Well, notice it didn't go behind the
02:14 yellow thing that we visually see as right below it.
02:17 But look right here. It went below the red thing, which we
02:19 know, chronologically was the last thing built.
02:23 So, therefore, it was sitting right below it.
02:26 So, don't think visually, when you send backward, bring forward.
02:29 Think in terms of chronologically when things were built.
02:32 Alright? Let's go ahead and undo that.
02:34 So now, again, green is on top, red, blue, yellow.
02:38 So, watch what happens when I put this all the way over all of them and I go
02:41 Object > Arrange > Send Backward. Yup.
02:44 Object > Arrange > Send Backward. Mm-hm.
02:48 Object > Arrange > Send Backward. So, you can see that what happens is,
02:52 it's looking anywhere in this document for what the next item below is, and it
02:56 will keep going there. Below it, you don't see that because
03:01 what's under it may be way over here and it may be small, and it's the thing that
03:05 you're sending it behind, not what you intended to.
03:10 So, it's kind of useful to understand how that works as you're doing that Object >
03:13 Arrange > Bring to Front, Send to Back, Bring Forward, Send Backward.
03:18 And if the document is on layers, like this one, if I'm on that layer, if I have
03:22 something on that layer and I go to Object > Arrange > Send to Back, it's
03:26 only sending to back of that layer. The background is on another layer, so it
03:32 doesn't go behind that. All right.
03:35 So, hopefully, what we learned in this lesson was, don't be so confused when
03:38 you're working on complicated art. And you say, Send Backward, and it
03:42 doesn't do what you wanted, it may be because there's a little square, a little
03:45 letter or something way off somewhere else.
03:48 And Illustrator thinks that is what's just below it.
03:54
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Transform tools
00:02 When we get right down to it and we're ready to make a few changes to this art,
00:04 just some final tweaking. There are a few tools that can help us
00:08 transform as well. Now, in the more recent versions of
00:12 Illustrator, the black arrow has taken on more power.
00:15 There was a day when it couldn't even rotate.
00:18 It was frustrating. Yeah, believe it or not.
00:20 That was like wow, hey that's nice improvement.
00:22 Okay there's things it will do now. But we go down here and we actually have
00:25 a rotate tool. Now why would I have a rotate tool if I
00:28 can just go with a black arrow. Well, notice that when I change the
00:31 rotate tool, there's that little axis that shows up in the middle.
00:35 Let's look at it again. This is the bounding box, okay.
00:38 So just kind of visualize the middle, and when I go to the rotate tool, it puts
00:41 that right there. Well I can actually hold my alt key down
00:45 and move this right up there to that point, and now when I rotate either
00:49 numerically, or if I just drag, that's the axis on which I'm rotating.
00:56 And you'll see that in all the tools, including the scale tool, so let's just
01:00 switch now to the scale tool right here, and let's say I wanted to scale this.
01:05 Well, notice it's gonna grow from the center out because that's where the axis is.
01:10 Alright? And I can do that with the black arrow.
01:12 So you're thinking, why would I do that? Well, if I hold my option key down, and
01:15 move that axis point there. Now, as I scale it, I'm going from that
01:20 point out. So it's a way for me to anchor things and
01:23 keep 'em there. So that's an advantage of those tools
01:26 over the black arrow. Another advantage is, you can be numerical.
01:30 I can select that moon, double click, and tell it.
01:33 Rotate that at whatever degrees I want to.
01:36 I can also hit copy at this point, and have it duplicated as I'm doing that.
01:40 Same thing with scale I can select this object right here.
01:43 Double click on scale, and I can do a uniform or nonuniform.
01:47 And this is important if there are strokes on that art I can have those
01:50 scale with it. So it's a one point stroke as I grow it
01:54 1.2, 1.5, whatever. Same with effects drop shadows and things
01:58 like that. So that's kind of important.
02:00 You can also preview it as you're doing it.
02:03 Another tool that's nested here with the scale tool that's kind of nice, is the
02:06 sheer tool. Alright?
02:08 So I'm gonna select this text right here, and I'm also gonna select that background
02:12 there and group those and I'm going to go to my sheer tool and just.
02:17 Angle those a little bit. And that's kind of nice.
02:20 Alright. That's good, that's good.
02:22 And another one we can do is the reflect tool.
02:25 Alright? So I'll take the reflect tool, and if I
02:28 double-click on it and turn on preview, I can say, well let's do it horizontally,
02:32 and let's copy that while we're at it. So now, I just made a duplicate of it.
02:39 Alright? And there we go.
02:42 Now we have a reflection of it that, of course, I would tone down the color and
02:46 things like that. We've got a reflection of it.
02:49 And you could do that both horizontally and vertically.
02:52 And so maybe I want to flip this moon; I want it facing a different direction.
02:55 Go to the reflect tool, Let's play with it, vertical, hit okay, and now the moon
02:59 is facing the other direction. Alright?
03:02 So, just remember these transform tools over here, as you're working.
03:06 And then we also have the free-transform tool, which does a lot of what we just
03:09 talked about all in one tool. Okay?
03:12 But, we don't have the controls of the axis.
03:15 So. I don't use this tool that much.
03:18 The biggest time I use that is with area type.
03:23
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8. This Isn't Your Average Brush Tool
Introduction to brushes
00:02 Sometimes, strokes just are, well, boring.
00:05 Yeah, I can create a line that goes from the city to the satellite down to the
00:09 radio, but it's just a line. Throw some lines in the sky, and no
00:14 matter how thick you make them, they're just lines.
00:17 So in this chapter, we're gonna meet the brush.
00:20 The brush is a great artistic tool, lets us do some really neat things from, well,
00:25 making it look like a paintbrush to artistic borders and lines, and well,
00:29 just a lot of really fun stuff. For example, I wanna have exhaust coming
00:35 out of the back of this rocket. Well, if I take my pencil tool and just draw.
00:41 Well, it's just a line and even if I make it thicker, you know, it's still kind of
00:45 a harsh uniform edge. Yes, I can play with some of the Presets,
00:49 you know, and try to give it a different look, but it's still a very clean edge.
00:53 It's not exhaust. So, let's delete that and let's go to our Brush.
00:59 Now, I'm gonna start in the back and let's just draw the, okay.
01:03 So that doesn't look like much, but if I select it, and I go to the Brushes panel,
01:07 now, I can apply different brushes to it, like this one for example.
01:11 I'll just push that, and, wait a second. That's not bad.
01:15 That kind of looks like exhaust coming out of a rocket there.
01:19 And if I select it, and go to my Stroke and give it a color.
01:23 Let's apply, let's say some blue to it. Mm, something like that or lighten it up
01:28 even more or say, darken it just a bit, whichever one floats your boat there.
01:33 Well, what's nice about the brush is, it's an effect that's been applied to the line.
01:39 And unlike Photoshop, where if I created that with pixels and then I wanted to
01:43 change it, that could be a lot of work. But with Brushes in Illustrator, with
01:49 that selected, I can go to the library here, and let's say go to Artistic Chalk,
01:53 Charcoal Pencil and look at all these choices I have.
01:58 So, let's just choose that one and you can see that it instantly updates, or,
02:02 let's choose that one, or That one. Hm, I kinda like that one.
02:08 So, let's close out of the library and you can see that it's added those brushes
02:12 to my panel right there. I can change the stroke width.
02:16 Continue to play with it. Let's go back to the first one I did.
02:20 I wanted kind of a rough look. And let's go ahead and bring the stroke
02:23 back down to one. So there you go.
02:25 I've applied a brush to that. That's fun.
02:28 But what about these clouds? Well, I have these watercolor brushes
02:32 that I've put in here that I can apply, and maybe change the thickness.
02:37 There we go. See, that looks kinda nice, yeah.
02:40 But check this out. I wanna give the illusion or the idea
02:43 that music is being streamed via satellite from one location to another.
02:48 I've created a brush of musical notes, so that now, I've given the idea that music
02:53 is being streamed as the rocket is taking off.
02:56 There are so many options, and in this chapter, we're gonna learn how to create
03:02 all those, as well as use what Illustrator has already given us to very
03:06 quickly start using brushes in our artwork.
03:12
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Using Illustrator brushes
00:02 Using brushes is actually quite simple. To use the existing ones is even easier.
00:07 We have a Brush tool and so you might think, hey, I'll use the Brush tool.
00:12 And if you do that, that's fine. You start painting, you know, you create
00:15 your line whatever you want it to be. And when you're done, it applies the
00:20 default brush which is this first little calligraphy brush right here.
00:24 Okay. So that was using the Brush tool and now
00:26 I just need to select it if I wanna change that brush and there's some basic
00:30 ones that come with it and most of them are ugly, to be honest with you.
00:35 There's one artistic, one decorative, one border here.
00:39 But down in the bottom left corner, is where our libraries are.
00:43 We have all sorts of arrows we could apply.
00:45 We could apply artistic borders, bristle brush.
00:48 Play with these, and spend a little bit of time digging around and seeing whats there.
00:52 For this demonstration, we'll go to artistic, and I'll just choose, lets say,
00:55 chalk and charcoal, or ink. And in there, you'll see we have a whole
01:00 bunch of different brushes to choose from.
01:03 So with this selected, if I click on that, it's just gonna apply that brush,
01:07 that easily. Let's apply that one.
01:10 Very good. That one's kinda fun.
01:13 And notice that when I click in the Library like this automatically adds it
01:16 as a brush in here. Now this is my brushes panel.
01:20 This is where I'm going to work from. But I'm just pulling from the library and
01:24 if I click on that, then I've got splatters.
01:27 Yeah, there we go, that's fun. The nice thing about this is you don't
01:31 really do any permanent damage. Right?
01:33 Now I'm going to close out of that library and I'm going to delete that line
01:35 because I want to show you. That you don't even have to use the brush.
01:40 Get this, I can take the pencil tool and let's say that I'm drawing this path of
01:43 the rock of the rocket, this inebriated pilot was doing.
01:48 And I hold down the pencil and use the smooth tool say, to smooth that line down
01:52 a bit. And Well, you know, maybe I could delete
01:55 a few anchors in there, here and there. Okay, there we go.
01:58 and I've given it a thickness there. Alright.
02:01 And then, after the fact I think, you know, I should apply a brush to that.
02:06 Click, click. See?
02:09 It's as easy as just clicking on the brush.
02:12 We don't even have to, you know, use the brush tool.
02:15 It's there, and it's pretty. Looks nice, but we don't even have to use it.
02:19 So let's delete that again. One thing I noticed though, the, the
02:23 default settings of the Pencil tool tend to allow you to make more jagged lines
02:27 then the default settings of the Brush. The Brush smooths out.
02:33 So it is a little easier to use the Brush tool, I'm just pointing out that you
02:36 don't have to. So with the Brush tool, I am gonna start
02:41 drawing the path, here we go and I'll apply any number of brushes I want to it.
02:49 Alright, simple enough. Now let's make the moon.
02:52 Let's put the moon up there and I want to show you that you can actually take the
02:55 ellipse tool. I'm gonna draw a circle there where the
02:58 moon is gonna be. And let's make the moon white.
03:02 Why not? And let's make the stroke of the moon
03:06 white as well. But, so that the moon looks more like
03:09 cheese like it supposed to, because we all know that's what it's made from, I
03:13 can click on. A brush and when I do that lets zoom in
03:18 and see, you can see that we've got kind of a rugged edge around that moon,
03:22 alright or may be I don't wanted to be quite that harsh, alright so lets go back
03:26 to the library artistic chalk circle and lets just see if there is any that we
03:31 like to give it kind of a nice rugged look, but not too rugged for us Okay.
03:40 Maybe we like that looks, so let's command zero, and there we go.
03:45 Let's change the color of that stroke to blue, and you'll notice that even
03:49 changing the color is one click away. Let's say we want the moon to be a little
03:54 bit darker, maybe grey or maybe even yellow.
03:57 Alright. So, let's just go to the swatches panel
04:00 and let's choose a yellow. For our stroke, and let's go ahead and
04:04 fill it with that as well. And then we'll go up here to our color
04:08 guide and we'll choose a darker moon. There we go, something like that.
04:12 Okay, and you can see that it's very easy for us to go in and put a rough edge on
04:16 anything, any edge that we want, it's that simple.
04:21 Okay, so draw your shape, circle, any of these shapes in here, even stars.
04:28 Draw any shape you want or draw with any of the line tools that you want and
04:32 simple click on any of the brushes that are here to apply them.
04:39 After you've created a brush like this. And you decided you don't like the line.
04:43 Just because a brush has been applied to it, doesn't change any of the rules of
04:47 editing paths. I'll take my pencil tool, for example,
04:51 and I'll start on a line and I'll draw a circle here.
04:54 And go off again, and you can see that I can still edit these paths.
04:59 I can take my white arrow or direct selection tool and select that anchor and
05:03 bring it up to the bottom of The rocket, just like that if I want to.
05:08 So you can continue to edit even though a brush has been applied.
05:11 So what you've seen is how easy it is to take any path, doesn't matter how it's
05:16 created, and with a couple of clicks of the button, you can apply any brush that
05:20 you want that's in the library.
05:25
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Creating your own brushes
00:02 Sometimes the libraries that come with the brushes down here just don't cut it.
00:07 You could look for it, you can go down here to boarders, decorative, or bristle
00:10 brush or decorative scatter and let's just see what they have there.
00:15 Okay, yeah, that's fun, but that's not what I'm after.
00:18 Alright. So, how do you create your own brush?
00:22 Well, it's really hard. Are you ready for this guys?
00:25 Let's say that I want to send a signal via satellite from this city to this radio.
00:33 So I'm gonna draw a path. We already talked about that.
00:35 We start with a path, click, click. Click, there's our path, okay, and let's
00:42 get the fill out of there. There we go.
00:44 Now I wanna apply these musical notes to that path so that I give this idea that
00:49 I'm streaming music from this city to this radio.
00:54 So how do I make a brush? Out of music notes.
00:58 Are you ready? You take the artwork, and you just drag
01:02 it right into the brushes panel like that.
01:05 It's that simple. Now, for this lesson, lets choose scatter
01:08 brush, and hit okay. Now, it asks us all these questions.
01:11 I'm just gonna name this music notes, and I'm gonna recommend that, as new users,
01:15 you just leave the default settings for right now, hit okay.
01:19 Alright? Now let's select that line there and
01:23 let's click on the notes. Ta da.
01:25 There you go, you can see that the music notes have been applied to that line.
01:30 Okay, well that was simple enough but what if we want other things done like,
01:34 for example, they're too big? We want them to kind of flutter, not just
01:39 be in a straight line, and all sorts of other things.
01:42 Well, I go over here and double click on the brush.
01:45 In this case, the music notes. Make sure preview is on, now watch our
01:50 art as I change the size. You can see them getting smaller.
01:55 That's nice. Okay, let's put them like right there.
01:57 But now they're too far apart so well, let's adjust the spacing.
02:02 Now you can see they're closer together. And that's kind of a nice texture but I
02:06 want them to look like fluttering notes. It's music, you know.
02:10 Let's have them fluttering around. So.
02:12 Let's go to scatter and let's change this from fixed to random.
02:16 And as grab this slider and move and grab this slider and move, I'm setting a
02:21 perimeter from the stroke on either side that those nodes are allowed to go.
02:29 Well, that's kinda nice that they're all, you know, fluttering, but what if I had
02:33 them spinning as well? So let's go to random, and let's move
02:37 that that way and move that that way. And now we've got all these random,
02:41 fluttering notes coming up to the satellite, and down to our music box.
02:45 And when we're done, just hit okay. Apply it to the strokes and the art.
02:51 And there we go! Done!
02:53 So we've now created a brush. How hard is it if you don't have a piece
02:57 of clip art like that? Well, it's pretty simply.
03:00 Watch this. Take your star tool.
03:03 Draw a star. Let's fill it with a color.
03:06 Now there are a couple rules that we need to remember when making these brushes.
03:10 Number one, it has to be vector art. You can't do it with photographs,
03:15 anything rasture. It also can't have any affects on it,
03:19 and, it also can not have gradience, anything that would render, that would be
03:23 any resemblence of rasture won't work. So I'm gonna grab this star, I'm drag it
03:29 right in there like that, hit, okay. Call this star.
03:34 And now we've got a star brush, okay, fine.
03:37 What happens if take my pen to a let's say, and I'll click out here and I'll
03:41 click over here and I'm just gonna create kind of an arc over the sky like that.
03:48 Okay, let's hit command zero. Let's get rid of that fill, alright,
03:51 there we go. Now I am gonna click on the star, and
03:54 there is that star going over that sky. Simple.
03:57 Doesn't have to be anything difficult. And I think even B clip art is something
04:02 we can create. Double click, change the size to smaller,
04:07 bring the spacing together, random scatter, random rotation.
04:16 Apply that. Let's go ahead and move that up a little
04:21 bit at an angle. And our art's getting kind of busy here,
04:26 so let's send that to back, bring it to front one.
04:30 And maybe, that's a little bit, you know too loud there.
04:33 So maybe we wanna change that in someway. But, I just wanted to show you the
04:36 concept that it's very simple, just take any piece of art, drag it right in there
04:40 and you're done. Alright let's go ahead and get rid of
04:43 that one. I didn't like the way those stars turned out.
04:46 Alright? Simple enough.
04:48 Creating. Just grab something.
04:50 Drag it in, apply it to the stroke, if you don't like it double click, make your
04:56 changes and you're done.
05:00
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Editing brushes
00:02 So here's your artwork and it's well under way and you show the first proof to
00:05 your customer and they wanna make changes.
00:08 Well editing a brush is actually quite simple once you know the process, but it
00:13 seems a bit foreign. You're wondering, well, how do I change that?
00:18 Well, there are a lot of ins and outs that we're gonna cover in this chapter.
00:22 We're gonna learn how to edit an existing brush and quickly apply it to multiple
00:25 brushes, or do some real localized editing of that brush.
00:29 Let's start with something simple like these musical notes.
00:32 The customer has said, you know I like the music notes, good, good, good.
00:36 But I don't like the color. I want to change the color.
00:38 Well, one of the easiest things to do is to grab this piece of art, in the Brushes
00:42 Panel, drag it right out. There you go.
00:46 There's your art. Now if I Zoom In and look at it.
00:51 You'll notice that there's now a second part to it.
00:54 This perimeter has been added. That was added by the brush itself.
00:58 The Brushes Panel added that when we dragged that in.
01:01 So I'm gonna go to my Wide Arrow and select the note, and I'm gonna go to my
01:03 Swatches Panel and I'll choose yellow. And I'll lighten it up a little bit,
01:08 something like that, something really light and simple.
01:11 There we go. Okay.
01:13 Now, Cmd+0, fit in window again. Let's go back to our Brushes Panel.
01:17 Now watch this art as I take this art and I'm gonna drag it.
01:22 But before I put it in the Brushes Panel I'm gonna hold my Alt key down.
01:26 So I'm Alt-dragging over the existing art.
01:30 Now I'm not gonna let go yet, because I want to explain something before I do.
01:34 This is gonna change all instances of this note to the new color or whatever
01:38 change we make. If I don't want to do that, I can add it
01:42 as a new brush here. If I add it as a new brush, then I can
01:46 toggle back and forth between the blue and then the yellow one.
01:50 All right? Those are your choices here.
01:51 I'm going to go ahead for this demonstration.
01:54 With my Alt key held down, drag it over the existing one and look what pops up.
01:58 There we go. Hit OK, and it says Apply to Existing Strokes.
02:03 Yes, and now notice that all those notes instantly change.
02:07 Customer says you know Russel, or insert your own name here, I just don't like
02:12 that yellow either. I don't know that I like the blue.
02:16 Can we, can we see some options? Okay.
02:18 Once again, grab that, drag it out, select it.
02:23 Let's change the color this time to something else like, oh, let's just make
02:27 it a deep red. Why not?
02:29 Let's just see what happens. I'm gonna Select that and let's drag it
02:32 back and this time I'm not gonna over write that one.
02:35 I'm just gonna drag it back in. When I do that and make it a Scatter
02:39 Brush notice though that it doesn't remember all those settings.
02:43 So you're gonna have to write down those settings or somehow remember what those are.
02:49 Okay. Now what you could do is I could
02:52 duplicate that brush. Now if I select this and I Option-drag or
02:57 Alt-drag over it. It remembers those settings and when I
03:02 hit OK, now I can select this line and I can toggle between red, yellow, red, yellow.
03:08 So here's a little trick for you to know if you wanna have a multiple versions of
03:12 that in your art. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and delete that
03:16 and I'm actually going to for this demonstration go ahead and.
03:20 I'm just gonna get rid of that stroke for right now, cuz I want to focus on the
03:24 line here, on the back of the rocket, 'kay?
03:28 Now, let's Zoom In, and let's look at this swoosh.
03:32 And can you see, all this, loose stuff that's kind of hanging out here?
03:36 That's what gives it that, kind of that charcoal look, and let's say that the
03:40 customer says, I don't really like that. All right?
03:44 Well, there are two approaches to this. One is to take this art and make it
03:48 editable and just work on this art alone. The other is to actually find the brush
03:54 and change the brush. So let's go over both.
03:58 Let's start with changing the brush itself for multiple instances.
04:02 For this demonstration I'm gonna go to File > New, just create any new document.
04:07 And I'm gonna take my Brush Tool and I'm just gonna draw a brush and apply any
04:10 brush to it, okay, so I'm gonna select it and apply.
04:15 A brush to it. There we go.
04:16 And I'm gonna, Option-drag, Option-drag, Option-drag, Option-drag, Option-drag.
04:23 Now, I have a bunch of versions of this brush right here.
04:27 Customer has said that they don't like that little twig down there at the bottom.
04:32 Now before I go any further I want us to look at this in Outline Mode.
04:36 Notice that this is nothing more than lines, that's all it is.
04:40 It's nothing more than a stroke with an effect applied to it.
04:44 So how do I grab onto that if there's nothing to grab onto?
04:48 Well there is, we edit the effect. How do we do that?
04:53 I'm gonna drag that out, just like I did the music note, I'm going to Zoom In on
04:58 it and see all this garbage down here? Well, that's the stuff that's given it
05:03 that kind of the rugged look on the outside.
05:06 I'm gonna take my Pencil Tool and start drawing on the line here and I'll end
05:11 about there, let's say. Actually let's smooth that out even more.
05:15 Let's come up to about here. There we go.
05:18 I'ma take my white arrow and select all of this.
05:22 Get rid of that. Get rid of that.
05:26 As you can see, we've smoothed out the bottom of that.
05:28 At least enough for, for what we're doing here.
05:30 Now I'm going to hit Cmd+0 to fit in window.
05:34 Again what we wanna get rid of is this part that's hangin' out down here at the
05:37 bottom of all the lines. Select this art, and I'm gonna hold my
05:42 Alt or Option key down as I drag this over the brush.
05:46 Well, I'm gonna leave all the settings exactly as they were.
05:51 'Kay? So that it recreates it.
05:53 And I'm gonna tell it to Apply it to the strokes in the art.
05:55 Now watch all seven of those instantly change.
05:59 One, two, three, four, five six, yeah, six of 'em.
06:02 I can't count. And I'm gonna get rid of that right there.
06:06 Did you see how that worked? So see that little bit right there?
06:09 Let's Zoom In and look at that. That right there,they say you know i
06:13 don't like that, all right, grab this drag it out let's Zoom In look.
06:19 Well there it is right there I am gonna go to my Wide Arrow to Select that and
06:25 Delete okay, gone. I am gonna grab this brush, Alt-drag it
06:29 over the original. Hit OK, Apply it to the strokes, and look
06:31 I just updated every single one of those.
06:32
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Making unique borders
00:02 If I want a border around this, I can click on this and, yes, I could, you
00:06 know, put a stroke. Could do that, nice big stroke.
00:11 Yeah. I go to Stroke panel and I can put dashes
00:15 on it. We start running out of options pretty quickly.
00:18 So once again, we're gonna turn to our Brushes.
00:20 And if I enlarge this, you'll see that there is one border tool there in the
00:25 Brushes panel. And, alright, maybe, but I want something
00:30 more exciting, so I'm gonna go to the Library, and you'll notice there's an
00:33 option for Borders. Dash, decorative, frames, geometric
00:37 lines, novelty and primitive. Alright, that's fun.
00:39 Lets see what they have for decorative borders.
00:43 Alrighty. Hm, how about that one?
00:46 Or that one? Or that one?
00:48 Or that one? Alright, so you can see that we're a
00:51 click of a button away from applying some rather horrid looking borders.
00:58 Alright, some of them are as bad as others, but in the end, the opportunities
01:03 to use exactly these borders are probably limited.
01:08 There's gonna come a day when you are going to say, I'm going to make my own border.
01:11 Okay, so I'm gonna close out of this library and let's create our own.
01:15 We're gonna use this flag here to create a maple leaf border around this art.
01:22 Now, I showed you earlier, how I can take very easily just something like this
01:26 maple leaf, and drag it in, and create a scatter brush out of that.
01:32 Now if I did that, and I clicked on this border and applied that, okay, you can
01:36 see it there. But notice the corners don't really line up.
01:42 Now, I can try to get them to line up by double clicking on it, and playing with
01:47 the spacing and the size. I can try.
01:50 But, you know what? I'm telling you, I've done it.
01:52 You're gonna always have 1 corner that's off.
01:55 Alright. So we've got this horrid looking border
01:57 now that we've gotta really make a real border.
02:00 And I think one of the best ways to learn how to make these what are called pattern
02:04 brushes is to take an existing one. Any of these, it doesn't matter.
02:09 And, I'm gonna drag this out and we're gonna use this as a model.
02:13 Hm, that's interesting. Look there's this piece here, and this
02:17 piece here. I wonder what that means.
02:19 Let's look at another one just to get an idea.
02:21 This one actually has this, and then this one, and this one.
02:25 What could those be? Well, I'm gonna slide this over and just
02:28 show you. If I take my pen tool and I click, click,
02:32 click, click and then I apply that brush, notice how the sides have a look, this
02:39 corner has a look and this corner has a look.
02:45 The outside and inside corners on this one are treated differently.
02:50 On this one, if I select this and apply this brush.
02:53 They're not. In fact, this one didn't come with an
02:56 inside border. So this particular border will only work
03:01 on rectangles, right? But if I did something like this, if I
03:08 took this rectangle, and this rectangle and I use the Pathfinder to make a new shape.
03:16 Window > Pathfinder, now watch when I apply this border you can see that it
03:21 only lines up on this portion. There is nothing here.
03:26 So we're literally limited on that particular one, cuz whoever made it,
03:30 didn't plan on having any corners like this.
03:34 Alright. So let's look at this one.
03:35 Slip here at this one. Alright, now this one works.
03:40 It's the same art on both corners, but that's okay.
03:43 It still flows all the way through. Alright, so now that we kinda know what's
03:47 going on, let's drag this out and look at that.
03:50 Okay, so this is the sides. This Is a corner, and this is a corner.
03:59 Alright, you got that? Okay, so now, lets get rid of these, then
04:03 we hit Cmd+0 to make this fit in the middle there.
04:08 And now I'm gonna take this Canadian flag, and let me make this a little bit smaller.
04:12 Here we go. And I'm going to drag it in to the
04:16 brush's panel. This time, I'm going to tell it I want it
04:20 to be a pattern brush. When I hit OK, notice what pops up.
04:26 We'll call this maple leaf. And can you understand these little
04:30 diagrams here? Let's just take a look at them for a second.
04:33 Here's the path and the arrow is over here.
04:36 And it's showing this square in the middle of the path.
04:39 So what we're telling it is I want this maple leaf to be the middle of the path.
04:44 This one is empty, this is the outside corner.
04:47 This one's empty, it's an inside corner. And look, I can even put art for an
04:52 ending and a head. So if I want to create a really unique
04:56 arrow, for example, I could do that, 'kay?
04:58 Now, I'm gonna go ahead and hit OK, and notice that it added that brush.
05:03 I got the two maple leaves there, but I don't have a corner and I don't have an
05:06 inside corner. So I'm gonna take this art and I'm gonna
05:09 hold my Shift key down, I'm gonna rotate it 45 degrees and make it just a little
05:13 bit bigger. Like that.
05:16 Why not? And I'm going to hold my Alt key down or
05:19 Option key, and drag that art over into the brushes panel, I'm still holding it
05:23 down, and I'm putting it in that little square to the left of those maple leaves
05:27 in the brush. When I let go, pops this up.
05:34 Now, let's look at it again, we want this maple leaf, on the sides, on we want this
05:39 maple leaf, on the outside corner, let's hit Okay.
05:44 Now just to go all the way with this, let's flip this around.
05:48 And let's shrink it down, really small like that.
05:52 And I'm gonna hold my Option key down, Alt key.
05:55 And drag it on top of that square. So look what we're doing.
05:58 This maple leaf on the side, this in the outside corner, this in the inner corner,
06:02 and I'm done. Alright, now, let me select this border.
06:06 And now, when I select my new border, let's take a look at it.
06:09 Let me zoom out a little bit, and now you can see, that I've created this Maple
06:13 leaf border around this art. Let me go ahead and fill this with white
06:18 so you can actually see this a litte better.
06:21 There you go. We've got this maple leaf going all the
06:24 way around and we've got the maple leaf on the outer corner.
06:27 If I took my pen tool, click, click, click, click.
06:34 Me turn off the fill there, and let me stroke it with that brush.
06:38 You can see that on the outer corner I have the big maple leaf and on the inner
06:42 one I have the small one. Alright?
06:46 So that's a scatterbrush. And you can do these with any piece of
06:48 vector art. If you're doing a car ad and the customer
06:51 says hey, I need the Ford logo or the Chevy logo or whatever brand it is, I
06:54 need that in there. Or I need a brand of soft drinks, right?
06:59 It doesn't matter. I want pumpkins for a Halloween ad that
07:01 I'm doing. it doesn't matter.
07:04 Any peice of clip art that you can create, you can very easily just drag
07:07 right in there, and you can create these custom borders doing that.
07:12 If you wanna play with spacing or other things in there, you can double-click,
07:16 make sure Previews on. And you can see here that as you play
07:20 with scale, right, you can play with the scale.
07:24 The spacing, alright? 110%.
07:27 Let's take that down to 60%. Alright?
07:31 So we can continue to play with this even after we've created it.
07:34 Hit okay. Let's apply that to the strokes.
07:38 And now we've got our nice border there. So as you can see, it may not be as easy
07:42 as just a simple scatter brush, but once we learn the basic techniques and we use
07:46 an existing brush as a model, get an idea of how that works.
07:52 You can see that creating out own really isn't that hard.
07:57
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9. Time for Some Words
Fun with text
00:02 They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but my opinion, this picture needs
00:06 some words. So, let's look at where we're gonna go
00:10 during this chapter. We're gonna talk about type, fun with
00:14 type, and if you look at this piece of art in front of you, this is 100% text.
00:19 Yeah, even this artwork right here, its text.
00:22 And we're gonna talk about how to take glyps, or dingbats, like zav dingbats,
00:26 and other artfonts, and turn them into workable art.
00:30 We're also gonna learn how to take text, which wont allow you to apply a gradiant
00:34 to it. See, can't do it.
00:37 Can't do it. Can't do it.
00:38 We're going to learn how to create outlines, so that now I can apply a
00:41 gradient to it, as well as do other things.
00:44 Like, notice the center of this O. Watch when I move the motorcycle, there's
00:47 not one. We can modify this text beyond what we
00:50 can do in the humble, character panel, and paragraph panel that maybe you're
00:55 familiar with from in design. We're gonna go beyond that.
01:00 And we're gonna create outlines on text for a whole list of things.
01:03 We're gonna play with the glyphs. Also in this chapter, we're gonna learn
01:07 the difference between area type and point type.
01:10 And why that matters. And why they're different, how they're different.
01:13 And when to use one and when to use the other and their behaviors.
01:16 So even thought htis may not be a comprehensive type chapter, we're gonna
01:21 learn some really basic, fun things that allow us to take basic text and actually
01:27 create artwork from it.
01:31
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Point vs. area type
00:00 In working in Illustrator there are two ways of applying type.
00:06 In InDesign if you've ever used that, you know that you need to take the type tool
00:10 and actually drag the box before you can begin typing.
00:13 In Illustrator that's not the case. I'm actually gonna take this type tool
00:17 and I can actually just click and I can begin typing.
00:20 So I'll type. MOTO, there we go.
00:21 And I can highlight that type either with my mouse or by hitting Cmd+A at this point.
00:31 And up here in the control panel you'll see I've got some controls like I can
00:35 change the font, change the size. Look right over here, see the word
00:40 character in blue, and if I click on that, it launches my character panel and
00:44 if I. Choose my fonts there, I could actually
00:48 get a preview of what I'm looking at. I'm gonna use basic fonts that I'm gonna
00:52 trust you have at home, like Ariel Black. And I can choose the size if I want, or
00:57 maybe I don't know, maybe I just wanna guess at it.
01:01 And I've got all the other controls that we're used to using, and other type applications.
01:05 We've got leading, kerning, tracking, horizontal scaling, all sorts of controls there.
01:11 But I'm gonna stop right there, and I'm gonna go to my black arrow, and you can
01:15 see that there's a bounding box around that.
01:19 And if I grab a corner and start to drag you can see that I can modify that how
01:23 ever I want. I can also do it with the sides.
01:27 Only by choosing a bounding box on the side I can only move horizontally whereas
01:31 at the corner I can just go nuts. Whoo hoo.
01:36 You know I'm gonna undo Cmd+Z, Cmd+Z here we go.
01:40 Now if I do that by holding the shift key down, now it constrains it and I don't
01:44 have to worry about mutating the text to make it look warped in any way.
01:50 Now I wanna change the space between these letters just a little bit so I'm
01:53 going to put my cursor in there. And if I got to the character panel,
01:57 you'll see the kerning right there. I'm actually going to use a keyboard
02:01 short cut which is alt left arrow. So that now when I'm here I just alt left
02:05 error and I bring those together, move my cursor there, move my cursor there.
02:10 There we go, so that's a little bit closer together.
02:14 Back to my black arrow and I'm gonna move this into position.
02:18 Now this is point type. Because I took my type tool and clicked
02:22 and then I began typing, okay, it's based on a point.
02:26 So I wanna delete that. And I'm gonna select this and I want you
02:29 to watch what happens when I changed it to be centered.
02:33 It jumped because the point, the insertion point where I clicked with my
02:37 mouse well when I started typing it was flush left which means that if I wanna go
02:41 to the next line I have to hit return. And then I can begin typing again.
02:47 Well that got a little skewed on us there, so let me Cmd+Z, Cmd+0 to put it
02:51 back in the window there. But the point is that if we begin typing,
02:56 by clicking, it's gonna start from that point, which was right there, out, and
03:00 it's gonna keep going, and going, and going all the way till Houston, until you
03:03 hit Return. Now if I center it, what I'm telling it
03:08 is that insertion point I want the text centered on that now.
03:13 So I'll move that back into position. Now if I hit Return, notice that the
03:18 cursor has come underneath that. It's centered and now any text I add
03:23 stays centered on that point. Right there that's the point or I am
03:28 gonna Cmd+Z back to that. Watch what happens when I flush right,
03:33 well now the insertion point is here still in the same place.
03:38 But now its pushed all that text all the way to the left of it, so that now if I
03:42 hit return and I type something see its gonna stay flush right.
03:48 So let's look at it again Flush Left, Centered, Flush Right always on that point.
03:54 That's what Point Text does. Now, that's fine if I want to be able to
03:58 control it by grabbing the corner here, holding my Shift key down and changing
04:04 the size like that. But if I want to put bodies of text, like
04:10 if I want to put a paragraph. Well, if I would have set a point type
04:17 there and start typing, start typing here, notice it's centered, let's
04:22 selected that. And let's make that flush left, okay, and
04:27 there we go. Now I'm gonna hit Return, more typing
04:33 here, and still more. So I've got three lines of text, now what
04:38 if I want to move the word, more, up here after, here, and have, and, and, still
04:42 come up. I wanna reflow this paragraph, is what I
04:46 wanna do. Well if I grab that bounding box and
04:49 start to move it, I can't. See point-text doesn't reflow inside of
04:54 an area. It only allows you to modify its size,
04:57 shape, and that sort, but it won't allow me to reflow it like you'd be used to
05:01 doing in other applications. If I want the word more up here, I
05:06 literally have to put my cursor there and hit backspace.
05:12 Put a space back in there, move my cursor here and then hit return.
05:17 I'm gonna have to come down here, backspace, hit my space, come over here,
05:23 hit return. I'm gonna have to manually do that work
05:27 with point type. So, as you can see, well if I wanna put a
05:30 paragraph of type in there, that's probably not the best approach.
05:34 That's probably the best approach for single words, maybe.
05:37 Artistic use of words, like you're doing a logo, you just want to put a single
05:40 word there, that might be a good use of that.
05:43 Because you want to play with the size and what have you.
05:46 But if it's body copy, I want to go to my type tool and this time I'm gonna drag a
05:49 frame with the text tool. Notice that it creates an area there, and
05:54 I'm gonna start typing here, and I'm gonna select that text, and I'm gonna
05:59 bring this down to a more manageable size.
06:05 Let's do 21 for this exercise, and this is area type where I can continue to
06:09 type, and have it reflow in the frame. Okay, there you go.
06:16 Now I've put a paragraph of text there. Watch what happens when I widen, the text box.
06:24 See, the text automatically reflows. If I want to go narrower It reflows.
06:30 So now it behaves more like InDesign if you're using that program.
06:35 Or work express. As we're working within a frame in the
06:38 type of reflow. Well, what if I want to enlarge this text?
06:42 Well, I have to go up here, and now choose something like that.
06:47 Unless you know this little trick. Go to the transform tool and now if you
06:52 grab, notice that I am scaling the text and the frame and if I hold my shift key
06:56 down, I am keeping it constrained. So now it's still area type but I sized
07:03 it on the fly versus having to go up here and choosing a set font size.
07:10 To be honest, in most cases, you're probably gonna choose a set font size.
07:14 You're gonna want 14 point or 12 point or 10.
07:16 But if you do want to just randomly play with that, go to your free transform tool
07:20 and now you can just scale it that way. So that's area text, or area type, and
07:26 this is point type. There's a use for both, and if you do one
07:31 when you meant to do the other, you may have to do some backtracking to get that
07:36 to behave the way you want it to.
07:40
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Using glyphs
00:02 With almost every font there are these hidden characters that you don't learn
00:05 about unless you try something like this. Maybe take your type tool and draw an
00:10 area and you just start banging on all your keys.
00:13 And then you hold your Alt key down and start banging on all your keys.
00:17 And eventually as you're doing this, and then Alt Shift, eventually you may find
00:21 that one upside down question mark or that cross that you're looking for.
00:26 If you've ever done that, you can stop it, because now, in Illustrator, as well
00:31 as inDesign, under type, we have the glyphs panel.
00:35 The glyphs panel allows us to see every single character available in any given
00:40 font that we have selected. In this case I have Ariel black selected
00:45 and I'm seeing every single character in this version of Ariel black.
00:51 So it's possible that you have Garamond and Garamond Pro and both of them have
00:55 totally different sets of characters. So just be aware that hidden within these
01:00 fonts are some great little nuggets that we might be able to use.
01:04 For example, a smiley face. The card symbols, musical note.
01:09 Did you know that those were in Ariel black?
01:11 To be honest with you I didn't until just this second as I was down here.
01:14 And there's some patterns here and all sorts of stuff.
01:18 Now you may not use them all, but this is the point I'm getting to.
01:21 Let's say that you need a special character like the Euro symbol or some
01:25 sort of a umlat over a letter. Well, it's right here in the glyphs panel.
01:30 Alright. Just look for it and if that font has it,
01:32 it'll be right here. There's the yen for example and the
01:35 copyright and the bullet, TM for trademark.
01:39 There's the degree symbol for all of you who have been doing a capital O and then
01:42 superscripting it. You don't have to do that any more.
01:46 Where I wanna go with this is a type of font called a dingbat and.
01:51 You've probably seen this before if you've ever done zaft dingbats.
01:53 I'm gonna go down here in this little box in the bottom left corner and type zaft
01:57 dingbats and hit enter. And there you go, there's every single
02:00 character available to us in zaft dingbats.
02:03 Okay, that's fun, but it's not nearly as fun as some of the other fonts.
02:07 For example Web dings and I'm gonna bet everyone of you have web dings loaded on
02:11 your machine. And if you look at web dings all there
02:15 different characters and down here in the bottom right corner I can click on the
02:18 little mountains there. Okay, and you can see all these
02:21 characters la, la, la there's really good ones here.
02:25 And I want you to select that little motorcycle there, okay?
02:29 But before we do that, I wanna show you how to do this.
02:32 Because it's text, I know we're in the glyphs panel and it may not feel like
02:36 that, but it is text. So I'm gonna take my type tool and I'm
02:40 gonna just click out here in the pace boards so we can see it.
02:44 Now if I want that motorcycle, I'm just gonna double click on it, and there it is.
02:50 It's in 14 point type. If I highlight that and enlarge it, now I
02:54 can see it bigger. It's a font.
02:57 That's what I'm telling you, it's a font. And I can take that.
03:00 Let's close out of this panel. I can scale this.
03:03 And now you can see how I can take this font, this glyph, and I can add it to my art.
03:09 Now obviously I'm not done, but you can see how we can use glyphs, or these
03:13 special characters, as a source for art. We don't always have to go looking for clipart.
03:20 You might be surprised at what fonts right now are on your machine that offer
03:25 some really interesting characters for you to use in ads, posters, any type of design.
03:32 Glyphs. Just get in there and dig around for a
03:35 bit and you'll find some really great stuff.
03:39
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Creating outlines
00:02 Okay, type is fun, yeah great, and there some neat things we can do with the text.
00:06 But there are limits, there are things we can't do with text.
00:10 And a simple example of that is, I can't fill this text with a gradient.
00:15 I can't come over here and select one of these gradients that I wanna use maybe to
00:18 give it a kind of a metal look with these silver gradients, can't do it.
00:23 Because it's type. I can't put a picture in there; I can't
00:25 do any modifications of the paths. Basically it's type.
00:29 So how do I go from it being type to it being editable art?
00:34 Well, it's actually very simple. Type Create outlines.
00:38 There it is. Just remember that, Create outlines.
00:40 When I choose that, notice that now I have the anchors and line, this vector
00:43 art that we've been talking about all along.
00:46 Let's go to view outline. Now we're seeing this art in outline mode.
00:53 Look at the word cycle down here. It's a font.
00:56 But I go to type. Create outlines, and now you can very
01:00 clearly see those outlines. Now, what does this do for us?
01:04 I'm gonna move the motorcycle out of the way for just a second.
01:06 As I take my white arrow, and I grab the two ends, the two anchors here, on the
01:10 end of the leg of this M. Notice that they're blue, the rest are
01:15 hollow, and if I move my down arrow you can see that this is no longer an M.
01:20 This is now art. It's just a path.
01:23 That's all this is. Let's go to View, Preview, and now you
01:26 can see that I've modified that M to be something totally different than the font
01:31 ever was. So how does that help me?
01:35 Well, I can modify the art, and I could put gradients in there.
01:38 So let's select the word moto. Let's hit that gradient there.
01:41 Notice as I'm choosing these gradients, it's applying a gradient to each letter.
01:45 I actually wanted to do it to the whole shape, the whole compound path as we call that.
01:51 So I'm gonna go to the gradient tool and from right around the middle of this O
01:55 I'm just gonna drag out, and now you can see how the gradient is one big gradient
01:59 across the whole thing. Great.
02:04 Now if I'm on my black arrow, if I select this or this, notice how it's a group of
02:08 all the letters together. I'm going to go to object, ungroup,
02:14 object, ungroup, and now Each letter is on its own.
02:20 Okay, great. So let's take this motorcycle and move it
02:23 right back in the middle here. Well the problem I'm having now is, the
02:28 middle of that o, making sure it lines up for the look that I'm after.
02:33 So I'm going to select the o Alright I gotta get through there.
02:37 So let's move this motorcycle back out of the way for a second as I focus on just
02:40 this o. I'm going to go to my white arrow, and
02:44 select the anchor on the inside of that o, and you can see that that one's
02:47 selected and the others are not. But only that path is active.
02:54 If I hit my backspace or delete key and got rid of that one anchor, activated the
02:57 others and I am gonna hit it one more time, and then I will see I have no more
03:01 center in the middle of that O, which allows me to move this back in the position.
03:08 And I have some room here to play with it to still have the effective the head
03:11 being the middle of the O but that happened to be as precise.
03:16 That was so much fun. Let's do it again on this one.
03:19 But let's do something different. Let's select that, delete, delete.
03:23 Same thing as I did before. But now let's take our star tool.
03:26 Why not? Because we can, I'm gonna hold my Alt and
03:30 Shift and I'm gonna draw star right there.
03:33 I'm gonna hold my Shift key down, and now I've got the star and the circle both selected.
03:40 I'm gonna click on the outside one more time, so it's highlighted, which allows
03:44 me to align the star to the center, I think it's pretty accurate, but I wanted
03:47 to just be sure. And now I'm gonna go to Window,
03:51 Pathfinder, hit the second button here that minuses the front, and you'll notice
03:54 I've made an O with a star in the middle of it instead of the regular O.
04:00 You know what, I don't like that, I think the points are too long.
04:03 So now I'm gonna grab the tip of that star and just bring that down a little bit.
04:09 And maybe I'll bring this one in just a little bit.
04:13 See, the point here is, that once this is art we can do whatever we want, there are
04:17 no limitations. Whereas if you don't know how to do this,
04:20 you're spending all your time looking for a font that does what you want, and that
04:24 just may not exist. And I don't think any of us have the time
04:28 to go around making our own fonts. Alright.
04:33 Now I've got the gradient the way I want it.
04:35 I've put a star there. I've knocked out the center of that and
04:38 I've extended the leg of that m. Good enough.
04:42 But what about this? Remember Glyphs?
04:45 It's a font. See, I can highlight it.
04:48 Web dings regular. What would happen if I went to type,
04:52 create outlines on the motorcycle? Now if I go to view outline.
04:57 Look at that, the motorcycle is also art. So any of those glyphs that you have, any
05:02 of those dingbats that you have on your system, you can apply those here and very
05:06 quickly turn them into rt. So what do we do now?
05:10 Well, let's add some color to it. And really the easiest way to do it is to
05:14 go over here to our live paint bucket. If you don't see it immediately, it's
05:18 under the shape builder. But if you just hit k on your keyboard
05:21 you'll get it. Live paint bucket.
05:23 Well, I'm gonna go over here to this gradient for example, the turquoise, and
05:27 I'm just gonna click right inside that part of the motorcycle, and I'll click in
05:32 that part of the motorcycle. Hmm let's choose a darker blue for the rider.
05:39 There we go, and let's choose this metallic gradient.
05:42 Let's just use a solid silver there for the mask and let's make black gloves.
05:49 And lets choose a nice bright blue, handle, right there.
05:55 And as you can see, we've now colorized, what was once just a glyph, we've now
05:59 made it color. How did we do that?
06:02 We created outlines. The same thing we did with the text.
06:06 Now I need to move the moto, and the cycle over just a bit more.
06:09 To give room for this text, right here, to be red.
06:13 So, lets select this, move it over a little bit, space it out maybe, play with it.
06:20 We could even rotate, any number of other things that we want to do, to make that
06:23 type the way we want it. Because now, once again, lets go to view outline.
06:28 As you can see, we've outlined all the text that we wanna use for our logo.
06:32 Why didn't I outline this? Well, because this isn't artistic.
06:36 This is text that the customer may wanna make edits to all the way up to the last minute.
06:41 So, I'm not gonna create outlines on that.
06:43 Only the art text, or the text that I want to have an artistic effect.
06:47 There you go. With basic text, we have now created our
06:51 entire art just by creating outlines.
06:56
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10. Working with Your Art Gets Easier with Layers
Mastering layers
00:02 In this chapter, we're not just going to get a demo of layers, we're gonna master
00:05 layers, because this is a really important component to being able to work
00:09 in illustrator. A lot of you might be thinking, isn't
00:13 layers kind of an advanced topic? You know, I'm a beginner here.
00:16 I'm just getting started. Maybe.
00:19 I think it's one of the core tools that you need to understand to be able to work
00:22 well in Illustrator. So we're going to cover it now so you
00:25 know this and it's amazing what you'll be able to do with your documents after you
00:28 see how this works. Plus, I'm guessing that most of you have
00:32 had some experience with layers in Photoshop.
00:35 And even though it's different, there is enough similarity there that I think
00:38 you'll be able to grab this very quickly. So in this chapter we're going to learn
00:42 how to manage all that. Now let's open the document, Los chickens
00:47 end, and go to window layers. When you open this panel you're gonna
00:52 see, that this art is actually broken down into a bunch of layers, you can't
00:56 tell that by looking at it. But here you can see, that in fact the
01:01 chicken is on its own layer, that can be turned on and off.
01:06 Just as I can do with the barn. I can also turn on and off different
01:10 layers for different versions. Maybe a different colored background for this.
01:14 I can also move them up and down just like in Photoshop for different hierarchy.
01:19 So maybe I want the text in front. No, I don't think that's working so let
01:23 me bring that back up in front. We're gonna learn how to lock layers, so
01:27 that I don't have to accidentally bump that, and move that.
01:31 So, by the end of this chapter, you'll be able to not only break your art into
01:34 multiple layers, but also understand how to manage them.
01:38 Including, sublayers, where every object on that layer, is on its own sublayer.
01:44 You could even select things, from the layers panel, without having to come over
01:48 here to the art and select individual pieces.
01:52 Go to the layer, one click, and there you go.
01:55 So this is an important chapter, in being able to work with our documents.
02:02
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Understanding layers, groups, and sublayers
00:02 So, let's learn how to take simple art, figure out what layers it's using, and
00:06 break it into multiple layers so that our job is easier.
00:10 I'm going to go to File > Open. And I'm gonna go to the Chapter 10 Assets
00:14 folder there and I'm gonna open Los Chickens.
00:17 Start is the name of that file, Los Chickens, Start.
00:21 And I've back-versioned this all the way to Illustrator 8, which pretty much
00:24 covers all of our bases, I think. And I'm gonna expand this to fit my whole
00:29 window and Cmd+0 to fit in window. That's exactly the same thing we would do
00:34 in Photoshop or InDesign. Now, if I go to window layers, there's my
00:39 layers panel. And I'm gonna grab the tab and bring that
00:43 out because we're probably gonna make lots of layers in this.
00:46 Now, if I select this art, you can see all the vector lines there.
00:51 And you can see there is one layer and that's always going to be there.
00:55 I don' t care if you have an old piece of clip art that you got off a CD somewhere
00:58 or someone e-mailed it to you and nobody even knows anything about layers.
01:03 There will always be layer one, that's a top level layer and you just got that.
01:09 Now, off to the left of that is a little triangle.
01:12 And if I click on that, it opens it up and I can see that there's a sublayer
01:16 that's the group. So this has obviously been grouped.
01:20 I can also see that when I do a single click, and it all becomes active there.
01:25 But I can also see it here. Now, if I expand the group, I can see
01:29 every single object that's in this piece of art.
01:34 Every single dot, line, triangle, circle, it doesn't matter.
01:39 If it's in this document, it's in a sublayer of some sort.
01:44 Now, if I select this group and I go to Object > Ungroup, or Cmd+Shift+G, notice
01:49 how the group goes away. And now I've only got the top level layer
01:55 and then all the objects that create that.
01:58 Okay. Now, if I click off, now you can see that
02:00 I can click on just the body of the chicken and there it is active there.
02:06 I'm going to zoom in a little bit by hitting command plus a couple times and
02:09 now we can see this a little better. One nice thing about these layers and
02:14 sublayers is that instead of coming over here and trying to click on his eyeball
02:18 and possibly bumping it or moving it or, or maybe I'm looking for a piece of art
02:21 that's behind something else and it's really hard to get ahold of that.
02:27 If I look right over here, and see the previews, there's the eyeball right there.
02:32 I can actually click to the right and it selects the art on the page.
02:37 So, I don't have to even touch the art to be able to select or make active, that
02:41 piece of art, which I can then come over and choose a different color for the eye
02:45 in one way or another. Now these panels, if you're brand new to
02:51 this, might be little hard to see. So, I'm gonna go to the flap menu of the
02:55 Layers panel go all the way to the bottom to Panel Options.
02:59 And now I am gonna make that large, so that now we can see that.
03:02 There we go. Now we can see it a little bit better and
03:04 I need to extend this panel even more so we can see it.
03:08 There's the eyeball, there it is. There's his waddle right there.
03:13 If I wanna select that I can click here or I can click on the art.
03:17 Either one will get that job accomplished.
03:19 Okay, so we have this single top level layer, but I want to break it into those
03:23 multiple layers, so I can turn on and off portions of it very easily.
03:29 Now we have a couple choices here. It would be possible for me to select
03:33 just the chicken. Make a group of just that chicken.
03:38 And you can see that, that group is a sublayer of group that can be turned on
03:42 and off. This is one way to do it.
03:46 It's not the way I prefer to do it because with top level layers, we can
03:50 turn top level layers off and on, as far as their visibility goes, in InDesign.
03:57 I could also bring those layers right into Flash and animate this art.
04:01 So, if you're going to do anything beyond Illustrator, I think it's good practice
04:05 to make top level layers when it's appropriate.
04:08 So, we'll go through this now. I'm gonna ungroup this chicken again,
04:12 Object > Ungroup. Now you can see that once again I just
04:16 have a single top-level layer. All right.
04:18 So, let's click down here at the bottom, this Create New Layer icon, which is the
04:22 same as Photoshop, same as InDesign, same as Flash or I can go to the Flyout menu
04:26 and, say, let's create a new layer. Alright.
04:31 Now I can name it at this point, but maybe I don't know what I'm gonna put on there.
04:35 So, I could do that later if I wanted. I happen to know that I'm gonna put the
04:38 chicken on there. And I'm gonna put poultry because we
04:41 still haven't decided whether it's a chicken or a rooster.
04:44 So, I'm gonna do that. So, here's everything's on this layer and
04:47 I need to move just the chicken, or rooster to the poultry layer.
04:52 And I'm gonna select it, hold my Shift key down, grab his wing there, and now
04:56 I've got the entire chicken selected. Now, look all the way to the right of
05:02 that layer 1. You can see a little blue square there
05:05 and that tells us that something in that graphic is selected.
05:10 Well, in this case we know that, cuz we just selected it.
05:13 And if I grab that square and move that up to the poultry layer, you can see that
05:19 a few things happen. Number one, we get a red square and the
05:24 blue one disappears. Number two, look at the bounding box and
05:29 the outlines, anchors and lines of the arc, they become red, which is the color
05:33 of that art. And if you look at the preview, you can
05:37 see that the chicken is on it's own layer and the background is on separate layer.
05:41 Okay. Now, I wanna do that to other objects in
05:44 this art. So, I'm gonna expand this, see what else
05:48 is underneath there, and I'm gonna add another couple layers there.
05:53 I'm gonna select this barn by going right over here and clicking.
05:56 You can see that I got a portion of that. And I'm gonna hold my Shift key down and
06:00 just come through here. And I'm selecting multiple paths that are
06:04 parts of this barn and I can see little objects there.
06:09 And because their color is unique to the barn, it's easy for me to know to stop
06:13 because the brown is the fence. So, I can actually see that.
06:17 You may not be that lucky on all pieces of art.
06:20 So now I'm gonna grab that and drag that up to layer three.
06:23 There we go. Lets do this to the fence.
06:26 Hold the Shift key down and I'm gonna move that up to its own layer.
06:30 All right. We are making progress.
06:32 I want to have four layers though. I still got to do the grass and the sunshine.
06:38 So, I'm gonna create two more layers. Expand this.
06:42 I'm gonna select the grass and I'm gonna move this up.
06:46 You may notice that I'm missing something.
06:47 I forgot the solid background there and that's down here because it was
06:51 underneath the sunshine. So, I'm gonna select it and I'll move it
06:56 up at this point. There we go.
06:59 Uh-oh, it's on top. Well, I could do Object > Arrange > Send
07:03 To Back or I can expand that layer and drag it underneath there and now I've got
07:06 it the way I want it. Let's close that back up.
07:11 One last thing to do. Actually, the sun's already on its own
07:14 layer, so I'm gonna use this for type in just a bit.
07:17 Now look at the order of things, what a mess.
07:20 Now if I select this layer, make everything active and I go to Object >
07:23 Arrange > Send To Back, well, nothing's gonna happen because in Illustrator,
07:28 you're only sending to back or bringing to front of objects on that layer.
07:34 So, it allows you to control things a little bit easier than when you're
07:37 working on a really complicated art. And when you send it to back it goes
07:41 behind everything and you really only wanted that green to go behind these
07:44 green lines. So, to send it back now, I actually move
07:48 that layer underneath to the bottom. There we go.
07:52 And I'm gonna bring the chicken up to the top.
07:54 Now his little feet are on the fence there and now I've got it in the order
07:58 that I want it. Now, let's say I select this barn, and I
08:02 group it. Object > Group.
08:04 There we go. And I'm gonna expand the group and I'm
08:07 gonna select the door by Shift+clicking, until I have all the parts of that door selected.
08:14 And now I'm gonna group that. Object > Group.
08:16 So, now you can see I've got a barn group and a door group.
08:21 I'm gonna double-click on that and I can name this door.
08:24 I'm gonna double-click on this and I can call this barn group.
08:30 So, I can actually name objects by double clicking on them.
08:33 Notice that I got too much accidentally. I can see that right here.
08:38 When I select those, I actually got the wrong door.
08:41 So what am I gonna do? I'm gonna select those two objects, and I
08:44 can just move them out into this layer. Let's mover the other one out.
08:49 And now, if we look, they're not in that door selection anymore.
08:53 I'm only selecting that. So, by taking things out of a group and
08:56 into a group, you don't even have to ungroup anymore.
09:00 It's just a matter of moving them in this hierarchy to where they belong.
09:05 Okay. So, now I can turn off just the door if I
09:07 want or I can lock just the door. So, by breaking it into these layers,
09:13 it's becoming very manageable for us. Okay.
09:16 So, now you've learned how to take a very simple piece of clip art and break it
09:19 into layers, if it hasn't already come in that way.
09:23 And if you're getting anything from a CD, anything off the internet, chances are,
09:26 it won't be broken into these layers. And this is something you'll have to do yourself.
09:32 If you're creating art from scratch, this is something you'll do as you'll go.
09:36 And I'm not big on naming layers. I'm guilty of that.
09:39 But in this case, I've become a big fan of it.
09:42 I strongly recommend you double-click and you name this fence, and you give it
09:45 names that make sense to you, so that you can identify it very quickly as you get
09:49 more and more of them. But also, as you work with other
09:54 applications, it's gonna be very useful to be able to identify those quickly.
10:00
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Working with layers
00:00 Let's open the Los Chickens layered CS file and you'll see that we've got the
00:03 art broken down into these top level layers.
00:07 We've still got the barn in groups. Alright well we want to do some more with
00:12 this art. Let's put a background in there.
00:15 Now even though I don't have a layer selected, you don't see one highlighted
00:19 in blue right? Well, it actually is selected.
00:24 Look right there, see the little triangle, that microscopic corner notch?
00:28 That's telling us that whatever we do now is going to apply to that layer.
00:31 You know, I never stress this because let's say that I take my rectangle tool
00:36 and I draw a frame. Okay, yes, it went on that layer.
00:41 I'ts not the end of the world. I can take that green dot there that
00:44 shows that I've got that selected, and I can move it to its own layer.
00:50 Grab that layer, move it below, and there's the background.
00:53 Well, I don't really care for that color, so let's go to the swatches panel.
00:57 And I'm gonna go to the library, and I'll choose maybe some gradients here.
01:01 And since this is a farm picture, I'm gonna go up here to fruits and vegetables
01:05 and just click on a few of these to play with a bit, see if I find any that I like.
01:11 Alright, that ought to do it. Okay, now we'll close out of that library there.
01:16 Alright, so let me go to the swatches and choose that one.
01:19 Go to the gradient panel and make this minus 90 degrees there.
01:25 There we go, isn't that lovely? Or, maybe we'll try This green one right here.
01:31 That one's kinda nice. OK, lets do that one.
01:33 So now you can see there's the thumbnail. Little preview.
01:36 Let's double-click on that. Now I'm gonna call this background green.
01:40 Clever name, eh? Okay, and it's on the bottom there.Now,
01:44 I'm gonna do some work on this art so I'm gonna lock That art there.
01:50 And by locking that you can see that I just can't get to it.
01:54 And even if I hit command a for control all, it's gonna select all the art that's
01:59 not on a locked layer. I can even lock sublayers.
02:03 For example, if I wanted to. I could lock just the door group.
02:09 Or, I could lock just that one path. Now, that gets a little confusing because
02:14 if you look here, you'll notice there's no indication that, that layer is locked.
02:19 And that may cause you some problems down the road cuz you're wondering why isn't that.
02:22 Behaving the way I want it to. Okay, so I'm going to open that up and
02:26 I'm going to unlock that layer for now, because I want to select all of this art
02:30 and I want to scale it. So I'm holding my Shift key down as I
02:35 grab these bounding box corners and make the artwork bigger there.
02:40 Here we go. Now, again, it's good habit.
02:43 Maybe to create the layer in advance, so that it's a little easier to keep an eye
02:46 on things. But different than Photoshop.
02:49 It's not as big of an issue. If I take my type tool, for example.
02:53 And I click right here, and I type chicken.
02:57 And I select all. And I'm gonna make this a lot bigger by
03:00 grabbing the bounding box, and just shift dragging it.
03:04 Okay. Well, it's on that poultry layer.
03:06 And I realize, oh, that's, yeah. That's not where I want it.
03:08 Once again. New layer, grab that dot, move it and now
03:12 you can see chicken is on it's own layer. I can get rid of the chicken to see
03:17 what's underneath it if I want to. I can turn off the visibility of all the
03:20 art and just work on the type if I want to.
03:23 By clicking on that little eye ball to the left there.
03:27 So I am gonna choose a different font. Let's choose something farmish.
03:31 Farm-ish. I don't know if that's a word or not, but
03:34 we're gonna choose something farm-ish like mesquite.
03:38 There we go. I think that's pretty farm-ish.
03:41 So I'm gonna hold my shift key down and enlarge that word chicken.
03:45 Now let's just see how it looks with everything.
03:47 Well. That's not exactly how I want it, I want
03:50 the chicken in front of that. First, though, I think I'll choose some colors.
03:54 So let's go back to the swatches panel and I don't have any swatches there
03:57 because that piece of art is old, or it's from a CD, or whatever the reason is, I
04:01 don't have anything there. So once again, go to my swatches library.
04:06 Default swatches, maybe. Could do that, and I'll just choose the
04:11 basic CMYK swatches. Alright, and I'm gonna select all of
04:15 these and just drag them right in there. There we go.
04:21 And let's choose a dark Brownish color maybe, something like that.
04:26 Nuh, don't like that. There we go, that's better.
04:29 But it still doesn't solve the problem of the chicken, which I want on top.
04:34 So once again, grab that layer, move it above and now you can see that the word
04:37 chicken is behind the actual chicken. Now I also want to have a choice for
04:42 rooster, because you know some people think its a rooster not a chicken, I
04:45 thought a rooster was a chicken, but we will debate that at another time.
04:50 I want to duplicate that layer I can go the fly out menu and say duplicate layer
04:55 seven or I can drag that on top of the new layer icon.
05:00 And now I've made a copy there as well. Now there's a third way to do it that I
05:04 like to show because it's just good to know.
05:06 I can create the blank layer there, and with that word selected, now if you know
05:11 this in the Adobe world, if I Option drag something it duplicates it, right?
05:18 Once you know that shortcut it's so valuable because you can sit there and
05:21 go, hey I wonder If, when I move that to that new layer, I wonder if I hold the
05:25 alt, or option key down, when I do that, will it duplicate that.
05:31 And, as you can see, it does. And that's really a useful, little tip,
05:34 that I just gave you there. I'm gonna turn off the visibility of the
05:39 layer seven chicken, and I'm gonna change this text to be Rooster.
05:44 There we go, alright. Maybe I'll just make that a little bit
05:48 smaller, so that it fits a little differently there.
05:51 And, I'm gonna go to the swatches panel, and I'll choose, just a totally different color.
05:56 I'll choose, like, this reddish color there.
05:58 Little bit too close to the other one, so lets just choose a darker version of it.
06:02 There we go. Alright, now lets go back to our layers
06:05 panel, and look. So I have, chicken, and rooster, as
06:10 options that I can toggle between. If I have them both on, as you can see,
06:15 it's probably not the best look. So now I can choose between which one I
06:19 want visible, for any particular piece of art.
06:23 I want to play with the different background too, so I'm gonna Duplicate
06:26 that background, and by unlocking the art and selecting it, I'm going to go back to
06:30 the swatches panel, and I'll just choose a different gradient, choose one of the
06:34 other ones that we were playing with earlier like maybe this red one.
06:41 I kind of like that one. Okay.
06:43 So now, i can turn on and off. The different backgrounds.
06:48 And turn on and off the different text. And I've got different versions.
06:52 Okay. So as you can see, what we've learned in
06:55 this chapter is how to change visibility. How to lock.
06:59 And how to recognize which layer you're working on.
07:02 As well as duplicating layers, or duplicating objects to layers, by holding
07:07 down the alt and then dragging that.
07:12
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Isolation mode
00:02 Let's open the image, Los Chickens in CSAI.
00:06 And let's go to window, layers. And if you want to, you can enlarge the
00:12 preview by going to the panel options and choosing large.
00:16 Now we can see those layers a little bit better.
00:18 I want to talk about something in this chapter that you've probably done by accident.
00:23 Whenever I'm in front of a live audience and I'm teaching illustrator and I show
00:25 them this they go oh, that's what that is.
00:28 I've been there by accident a million times and I didn't know what to do.
00:31 We're gonna learn this because once you master isolation mode you're really going
00:35 to be able to work a lot faster. You're gonna love this, I promise, you're
00:39 gonna love this. If you've ever done this by accident,
00:42 just double-clicked on a piece of art, you'll notice that we get this gray bar
00:46 runs across the top and what we selected is editable.
00:50 Right? You can see that.
00:52 I'm going to undo that by hitting Command z, but everything else is grayed out.
00:57 And you're thinking, Now, how did I get here?
00:59 And you might have been clicking around and trying anything you could, and
01:02 accidentally maybe double clicked outside the art.
01:05 And then it went back to normal and you're like, Oh, okay, now I see.
01:08 All right. And then you're working a little bit
01:10 longer and maybe you want to select the text.
01:12 Well, double clicking on the text does change from the selection tool to the
01:16 type tool. But if you double click on the
01:18 background, for example, Where'd my art go?
01:21 Well, we're working in isolation mode. Alright?
01:25 I'm gonna double click off. And I'll give you a great example of how
01:28 this works. Let's go to the barn layer, and expand it.
01:32 And you'll see the barn group. And let's expand it again.
01:35 And you'll see the group called door. So we actually have three groups.
01:39 Now, even if you're creating art, and these aren't named.
01:43 If this just says layer eight, and this just says group.
01:46 And this just says group. It still works the same way.
01:48 I just named them so that it's easier for us to see what's going on.
01:52 Now, let's say that I want to work on the barn, only the barn, and I double click
01:56 on the barn. Now, because the barn is a group, it
02:00 isolated that group and everything else is grayed out.
02:06 Look what happens if I try to move the chicken.
02:08 Can't, or the rooster, can't, background, nope, not gonna have it.
02:14 Because I've isolated just the bar, and look at my layer's panel.
02:18 I'm only working on that group and only sub-layers are visible.
02:23 Now, what if I wanna change the door? I'm gonna double click on the door Now look.
02:27 The barn, grayed out. I can't work on the barn now.
02:31 I can only work on the door. Now I can still work on sub-layers of
02:35 that door, right? But everything else is grayed out.
02:39 Now I can go back to the barn group. Up here in the top left corner you can
02:43 see the bread crumbs. Barn, barn group, door.
02:48 I can go back to the bar and group, by clicking there, or I can click on this
02:51 arrow, and go back one more level, and one more level.
02:55 Or, lets just go there again, double click, double click.
02:59 Or, if I just double click off the art somewhere, now I'm back in my original
03:03 art again. Now why is that useful?
03:06 Well one reason is, maybe I don't want to sit here and lock, lock, lock just to
03:11 work on the barn. That's one reason.
03:15 It automatically will lock the position of everything else.
03:18 Because if I hit command a now notice I can only get the barn.
03:22 So I've locked the position, just with a simple double click.
03:25 I'm able to now work, only, on that barn. That's one benefit.
03:30 Another benefit is, if you've ever done groups, and this doesn't have to be Illustrator.
03:35 Lets take Quark, or Pagemaker even, Indesign, doesn't matter.
03:39 If you've ever grouped multiple objects, you know, that if you want to add
03:43 something to that group, you had one of two choices.
03:47 Either ungroup everything, select that extra thing in addition and group it all
03:51 again, or just group that on top of the previous group.
03:55 So what you have now is groups on top of groups on top of groups.
03:59 Well, watch this. If I double click on the barn I'm only
04:02 work on that group. Double click on the door I'm only work on
04:05 that group. What would happen if I zoomed in.
04:09 On this door, right there. Again, I'm only working on the door.
04:14 On the door group. What would happen if I took my star tool,
04:19 let's say, and I just drew a small star and I'm gonna fill that with yellow.
04:27 There we go. So I got a yellow star.
04:28 On the door of the barn now. Let's look at the group.
04:31 It automatically added that to that roup. I don't have ungroup and regroup.
04:36 I don't have to select multiple objects. By drawing or creating anything while in
04:41 that isolation mode of that group it automatically does it.
04:45 I'm gonna position that a little bit better there and I'm gonna hold my alt
04:48 key down. And drag that so that I have a duplicate
04:52 of it. Now notice I have two stars already
04:55 automatically in the door group. Easy.
04:59 Now, I can either go back to the barn to do more work on the barn if I want.
05:03 Or, the arrow, keep going back. Or, as I showed you earlier, just double
05:07 clicking off will take you back. And there you can seethe little stars in
05:11 the door. If I ever want to change those, I don't
05:15 have to go to the layers anymore. I don't have to worry about this.
05:18 Double click, double click and there I am in that sub layer.
05:23 I can now double click and notice that I am only working on the star, simple.
05:29 Isolation mode. Yeah, now that you know what it is, once
05:32 you start creating these layers, and once you start creating groups, you're gonna
05:37 find that just by clicking you're able to get in there, get the job done, and get
05:41 back out.
05:45
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11. Bringing in Photos and Other Graphics for More Fun
Working with photos and other art
00:02 Sometimes when you're working in Illustrator, you need to bring in photos,
00:05 or maybe you need to bring in art you've created in Illustrator in other files.
00:09 There are several ways to do that. And in this chapter, we're gonna focus
00:13 on, how to place pictures properly, and when to use embedding versus linking, and
00:17 we're gonna place some graphics. For example, file, place.
00:22 Seems just like in design, if you've used that or cork or anything else.
00:26 We need to know that when I choose this art right here, for example, do I link it?
00:32 Or embed it? And how do I know the difference?
00:35 Well, we're gonna learn how to look at it the link panels to digest what's exactly
00:39 going on in our file. And when I go to file place.
00:44 And I need another vector graphic, perhaps something created in Illustrator,
00:48 and go to place that, whether I link or enbed it.
00:51 The question is, do I really wanna place it, or would it be better for me to open
00:55 it in Illustrator, copy it, and paste it in here?
00:58 All those are questions that we're gonna answer in this chapter, working with photos.
01:03 Working with Illustrator files and we're also gonna show you how to take a picture
01:08 like this and crop it, because it's very foreign if you've never used Illustrator before.
01:15
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Placing photos
00:02 When you look at all the products in the Creative Suite, Photoshop, Illustrator,
00:05 InDesign, there's a lot of crossover where you're able to do the same thing in
00:08 any of those products. And so, sometimes it just comes down to a
00:13 personal preference. Well I prefer Photoshop or I prefer InDesign.
00:18 No matter which is your favorite though, there are times when working in
00:21 Illustrator placing graphics, placing photos, is the best way to do it.
00:26 So, it's important that you know how to place a photo and how to work with them
00:29 in Illustrator. It's actually very simple.
00:32 File > Place. There you go.
00:35 File > Place, just like InDesign. And you look in the folder for the file
00:39 you wanna place. In this case, the Fiat photograph there.
00:43 And I hit Place. But, but wait.
00:45 Before I do that, we have a really important decision right over here.
00:50 Do I wanna link to an external file, or do I want to embed that?
00:53 Well, let's go ahead and link for now. And when I place this, this is gonna be
00:58 much like working in other applications, Pagemaker, Quark, InDesign.
01:04 What I've got in the document is just a low resolution preview and it's linked to
01:08 the hi res. And let's go to Window > Links, and you
01:12 can see that right there in the Links panel, it shows me that document.
01:17 And if I double-click on it it'll tell me the path of where it is.
01:21 Okay? And it, it's got some basic information
01:24 here, all right? And then up here, it tells me something
01:27 really important. I'm at 269 pixels per inch.
01:30 That's the name of the file. It's grayscale mode.
01:33 So, there's some information there, to help me monitor this file.
01:37 I'm gonna go ahead and place another photo.
01:40 File > Place. But this time, I'm gonna go ahead and
01:42 embed it. All right?
01:44 I'm going to unlink, all right? Deselect the link right there.
01:48 But what I'm doing now is I'm saying go ahead and put the full version of that in
01:52 this document. What that means is I can have this
01:55 document open in Photoshop making changes and it won't effect what I see here cuz
01:59 the entire photo is embedded in this document.
02:03 One time when that's really useful for you is, if you are gonna send the
02:06 Illustrator file to someone else and you don't want to worry about sending the
02:10 support files. Okay.
02:13 So, I could take this photo, for example, go to the flap menu, the Links panel.
02:18 And now, I can embed that file. And now you can see that both of them are
02:21 embedded in this document. What's the downside to that?
02:25 Well, if your photos have a lot of memory, 1 megabyte, 5 megabytes, 20
02:29 megabytes, that can really balloon the file size of that illustrator file.
02:35 So, whereas you're traditionally used to rather small Illustrator files, now all
02:38 of a sudden, you've got these that are 50 megabytes or more.
02:42 And you're wondering, wow why is that so big?
02:44 Well, It's because I've embedded all that data right there in that file.
02:49 Now, watch what happens when I take this photo and I shrink it down.
02:53 Notice that it shoots up to 1400 pixels per inch.
02:57 Well, I don't need that much. I just don't need that much information.
03:00 That is if I've decided this is the size it's gonna be.
03:04 Once I place it, scale it and I've decided that's the size I want this to
03:07 be, I can go to Object > Rasterize, and I'm actually using the exact same
03:11 technology that I would get if I opened it in Photoshop and downsampled it.
03:18 I can set the resolution. I can change the color model.
03:21 If there's any transparency, I can make that stay transparent or go to white.
03:26 So, I have some controls here. I can even preserve spot colors or have
03:30 those all convert to CMYK during the rasterization.
03:34 Well, when I hit OK, watch what happens. This file is now 300 pixels per inch.
03:40 So, when I save it with this embedded data, it's gonna be considerably smaller
03:43 than it would have been if I didn't do that.
03:47 So, one thing to think about, if you're done with your art, you're gonna send it
03:50 on to someone else, you may want to downsample some of those raster graphics
03:53 if they're too big. I'm gonna go ahead and undo that.
03:57 So, now it's big again. And let me just take it back to that size.
04:01 So, I've got this embedded file and I wanna relink it to another file.
04:05 Well, I can do that with the Relink button down here.
04:08 I can do that with an embedded file or a linked file.
04:10 So, I'm gonna relink. I'm gonna choose this photo but what do I
04:14 wanna remember? Link it.
04:16 Okay? If I don't want it embedded, I wanna keep
04:18 it linked to the external file, this time I'm gonna tell it link.
04:21 And now, watch what happens, this file is now linked to an external Photoshop file.
04:26 Now why is that important? Well, number one it keeps the Illustrator
04:30 file size smaller. Number two, I can continue to make
04:33 changes in Photoshop. Let me scale this picture up, make it fit
04:36 that page a little bit more. There we go.
04:39 And I'm looking at this, and I've decided that I want to make some changes to this
04:43 in Photoshop. Well, if you've ever done this in
04:46 InDesign, or Quark it's the same here. I'm gonna hold my Option key down, and
04:51 double-click on that file. It now opens that in Photoshop for me,
04:56 because it's linked. Embedded files won't do that.
04:59 So now, I'm gonna select that layer and I'm gonna go to Image > Adjust > Use
05:03 Saturation, something like that. Let's hit Colorize.
05:08 Let's make that match that background on there, kinda close, looks pretty good.
05:13 And now, I'm just gonna hit Save on my keyboard, Cmd+S.
05:17 All right? Now, let's go back to Illustrator.
05:19 It's gonna say, hey, some of these files have been you know, modified.
05:23 Do you wanna update them now? And I am gonna say yes and look what happens.
05:26 It now updates with that linked file. So, there's a benefit of linking, is that
05:32 I can start building my Illustrator document before anybody is actually done
05:36 with the photos. I can link 'em and as they're working on
05:40 those, I can modify those. One other thing worth noting here is,
05:45 when working with Photoshop files on layers that have transparency, watch what happens.
05:51 I'm going to take this JPEG. JPEG's don't have transparency, right?
05:56 They don't have layers, right? And I'm going to relink this right here,
06:01 to the other window in rome.psd, and I'm gonna link that or embed it.
06:08 That's not the point here. The point is, that this version, let's
06:12 zoom in and see it. This version, if we open it in Photoshop,
06:14 you would see that there's a transparent, gradient fade there, okay?
06:18 Let's go ahead and do that, I'm gonna Alt+double-click, opens in Photoshop.
06:22 And you can see there's transparency there.
06:24 See it right there on the layer mask. Okay?
06:26 What's the point? The point is that if you put transparency
06:30 in a Photoshop file, then Illustrator will recognize that.
06:33 That includes knock outs. That includes gradient fades.
06:37 Any form of transparency that you put in a Photoshop file, you'll have preserved
06:41 right here in Illustrator. So as you can see, the actual art of
06:46 placing a photo is rather easy. The hard part is knowing when and when
06:51 not to embed or not embed and the benefits of those.
06:55 Just remember, if you embed it, it's actually in that document and it all goes
06:59 with that Illustrator document. The downside is ballooned file size.
07:04 If it's linked and I send this Illustrator document to somebody and they
07:07 don't have that high res file. They're gonna have trouble in the output.
07:11 See, I remember to send those along with it if you're going to have them do the
07:16 final output or any other work with that Illustrator file.
07:22
Collapse this transcript
Cropping photos (using clipping masks)
00:02 An email I get all the time is, hey Russell how do I crop a photo in Illustrator?
00:07 Well, you don't really. It's not like PhotoShop where I'm gonna
00:11 take this photograph and crop it down. And it's not like in design, or quark
00:16 where you place it into a frame necessarilly, and then you can move the
00:20 frame around a crop. It's a different animal in Illustrator,
00:24 so it's really important we understand what's going on here.
00:27 And what these things are called are Clipping Mask.
00:29 We're gonna use Clipping Mask, and we're gonna do a couple tricks here.
00:33 But basically in this chapter we're gonna learn how to, and I'm doing the
00:36 proverbial quote marks in the air here, Crop, a photo, in Illustrator.
00:42 But we don't. Just to be sure, we don't crop photos, we
00:44 merely mask out, or clip, what we don't want to have visible.
00:49 So lets just do a really basic one right now.
00:51 Well, I've got this art here, and I'm gonna zoom out a click there, and I'm
00:54 gonna make this bigger Then the page, by shift-dragging.
00:58 And you can see that the art extends off the page.
01:02 You can see that, okay. Well, lets say that I wanted to really
01:06 crop, right there. Or, lets go down, back to the size of it,
01:10 what I really want, is I want to crop this in the bottom half of this frame.
01:15 Well if I grab the handle here and bring it down.
01:18 Yeah, that's not a good look. Okay?
01:21 So, how do I get rid of the top half of that?
01:24 Okay? Well, it's actually very simple if you
01:27 know just a couple op steps. Number one, draw with any of the frame
01:32 tools, pencil, it doesn't matter what you use to create this, but you need a path
01:36 that is the frame. Okay?
01:39 So I'm gonna draw just with the rectangle tool.
01:42 That frame is over the picture the fact that its filled with black I am
01:45 absolutely going to ignore that it doesn't matter for what we are doing
01:48 because that fiill is gonna disappear as soon as we make this clipping mask.
01:54 Now I am holding my shift key down and I am also selecting the photograph that's
01:58 gonna go in it okay, so frame is on top. The picture underneath.
02:04 They're both selected. Object.
02:07 Clipping mask. Make.
02:09 Tah-dah! There you go.
02:11 It's that simple. Now, what if I wanted to move that
02:14 picture up or down or around. Well, I can double click on it.
02:19 You can see up here that I'm in isolation mode, and if I click again I'm actually
02:23 working on the photograph, and now I can move that down and around, hold my shift
02:27 key down, maybe scale it just a bit. When I double click, to go back to the
02:33 original artwork, you could see how that's changed.
02:36 Or if I double click, I can be working on the frame.
02:40 I can move that up. Move this back down closer to the car.
02:45 Alright, so I can still work on the frame, double click out, and now there's
02:48 my changed art. You know, I don't like the fact that the
02:52 tires are clipped off, so let me double click, double click.
02:56 Now move that up. There we go.
02:59 Lets double click off, and now you can see that I moved that inside that frame.
03:04 Now, if I hover over it, you can actually see a blue frame that shows me the
03:08 picture frame edge. And if I click on that, well, nothing's
03:13 happening, see? It's there but I'm not really working
03:16 with that. So it's best to kind of become familiar
03:19 with isolation mode and learn how to get in there.
03:22 Now if I select this, up here in my control bar are these little buttons here
03:26 that said Edit clipping mask or Edit content.
03:30 Can you see that? Well now if I click on the Edit contents
03:33 button, you can see the frame that pops up.
03:37 And now I can move the contents and actually see what I'm clipping as I'm
03:41 doing it, because maybe I didn't want the car at all, I really just wanted the tree
03:45 in this. Okay?
03:48 And now I can go back and edit the frame, and now just moving that up or down
03:51 changes the clipping. We'll I don't like that.
03:54 let's actually go back and edit the contents and bring that car back up into
03:58 that frame. So there's lots of ways to work with the
04:01 contents once you've got it in that clipping mask.
04:05 Alright, now, what if I don't want it in the mask anymore?
04:09 Well, object, clipping mask, release. Now I've released it, the frame is still
04:14 there, and I can delete that, cuz I don't want it anymore.
04:18 Alright, so that's one way to create a clipping mask.
04:22 I want to show you another way, and this is a little trick that's kind of neat to know.
04:25 Okay, I'm just gonna click over here and type Rome.
04:28 There we go. And I'm going to select it with the black
04:32 arrow, and I'll choose impact. Something really big and bold, and let me
04:37 hold my shift key down and scale that. Alright so, there's the word Rome.
04:42 A little bit too big, lets bring that down a little bit more.
04:44 Here we go. Bring the letters together with alt left arrow.
04:48 There we go. And one more little trick here.
04:51 I'm gonna go to type, create outlines. Now this word is, basically, it's a frame.
04:58 Now I'm gonna show you two tricks. Trick number one, I've got the word Rome selected.
05:02 I'm gonna shift click on the background. Object, clipping mask, make.
05:06 Hm. Why didn't that work?
05:09 Well, it's because each of these letters is a seperate path, and I didn't make
05:14 this a compound path. So, object, compound path, make.
05:21 Now, the black disappeared, but we can still see the outlines there, so I'm not
05:25 worried about that. I'm gonna shift-click on the background,
05:29 and go to object, clipping mask, make. And now you can see, that inside of that
05:34 text, is that photograph. That's one way to do it.
05:38 Alright, I'm gonna undo, all the way back to this being live text again.
05:43 Alright, you ready for this guys? This is a cool trick.
05:46 I'm going to copy the background. Edit, copy, alright, I'm gonna delete the background.
05:55 I'm gonna select this text, notice it's live text, it's not outlines, and right
05:59 down here, we've got three buttons, and the one all the way to the right is draw
06:02 inside mode. Draw inside.
06:07 When I click that you can see these little dotted lines at the corner of the
06:11 word Rome. I'm actually gonna be drawing inside that text.
06:15 If I go to Edit, Paste, look what happened.
06:21 It actually put the picture inside that text, and now I can move that text around.
06:25 Look at that. Well here's what's really neat, I can
06:30 still change the font, never use Hobo, that was just an example, please, please
06:35 I beg you, never do that. So as you can see the words, I can change
06:41 the font, I can highlight this And I can alt-left arrow, or right arrow, or I can
06:46 use my command shift comma to shrink the font, or enlarge the font.
06:52 So, this is live text, with a photograph sitting there inside of it.
06:59 And I did that by going to draw inside mode And then pasting.
07:03 And now that's inside of there. So, that's a nice little trick, but what
07:06 is it? It's really just a clipping mask.
07:09 And if I go to object clipping mask release, now we're back to just type and
07:14 just a photograph. So, cropping photos is just as easy as
07:19 making a frame. Any frame.
07:22 I am not doing this to be pretty I just wanna prove my point, I can take my
07:27 pencil tool and draw any path I want, lets close that up here we go, take my
07:31 smooth tool smooth that out, so it doesn't matter what technique we use and
07:36 if we take that path and also select the picture object clipping mask make or,
07:41 select the path. Draw in side mode.
07:48 And if you paste anything that's in your clipboard, it's now inside that shape.
07:54 So, any path with a clipping mask or draw in side mode.
07:58 Just a side note, that draw in side mode is new in CS5.
08:02 Sorry to get your hopes up if you guys watching are using older versions.
08:06 So anything prior to CS5, you need to use the clipping mask.
08:10 CS5. Has that draw inside mode, so you can
08:13 select it, draw inside, and then just paste.
08:17 Alright? So what did we learn here?
08:19 We learned that you didn't crop a photo, you merely masked out, and that tool is
08:23 under object. Flipping mask, and that's the term you
08:27 want to become very familiar with, cuz you're gonna be doing a lot of that.
08:30 You're also gonna be unmasking photos a lot as you work on them.
08:36
Collapse this transcript
Placing Illustrator files
00:02 If you watched the previous movie on placing photos, you may think well I can
00:05 skip this chapter cuz how different can it be placing Illustrator files.
00:10 It is. It's a totally different animal and we
00:13 wanna really know what's going on with this.
00:15 So let's say that I've got an illustrator file that I've created externally here
00:19 that I wanna place right here. So let's go to File.
00:23 Place. I'm going to choose this Rome art AI
00:26 file, and I can link that and that's not different than working with photographs.
00:33 I can crop this to the art, the crop box, the bleed.
00:38 There's all sorts of settings here. We're going to go ahead and crop this to
00:40 the art and hit OK. And there it is on my page.
00:44 And I'm going to hold the shift key down and shrink that down a bit.
00:47 Go ahead and bring that up here. Now at this point it's going to behave
00:51 much like just any other file. Its linked.
00:55 If I edit this in illustrator it will update here.
00:59 Let's go ahead and do that. If I Option or Alt double click on this,
01:03 it's gonna open this in Illustrator for me.
01:07 There we go. And I can make changes to this.
01:10 So just like where with photos, this is an external file that can be worked on.
01:15 Okay, that's great. But what if I wanna work on it in here?
01:18 This is the real question. Window, Links.
01:23 Now if I go up here and embed this you might think what if I embed this file?
01:27 Well if I embed it, now its in there, but it's still one entity, its an entire file.
01:35 I can't get in there and click on the individual handles of the r and this to
01:39 change it. it's still as placed art, it's only embedded.
01:45 Hum. Well, what if I want to change the color
01:47 here, I want it right here as if I copied and pasted it, well, object expand,
01:51 alright, but before you get excited about this there's only one problem.
01:57 Let's go look at the original file. Notice that this line is a brush, right,
02:01 and I applied it with the brush right there.
02:04 So that means if I go to view Outline, you can see it's just a line, with a
02:09 brush affect applied to it, okay, just an affect.
02:14 Well, what happens when I go here, to this art, that's embedded, and I wannna
02:18 edit it here? Well if I go to Object, Expand, now I can
02:23 edit it here, that's the good news, alright?
02:29 I can go to my white arrow, and I can come in here, and I can select that R and
02:32 I can change the color of it. Alright?
02:35 So, yeah, that 's good news. There's only one problem.
02:39 Remember this was a line. Let's go in here and look at it in an
02:44 outline view. Now look at the mess that we've created there.
02:48 We've got the drop shadow is expanded, the art is expanded, there's clipping
02:52 mass going on along here. Look at the brush, it's no longer a brush.
02:57 In my opinion, you're better off not placing art if you wanna be able to edit
03:01 it in this document. In my opinion, you're better off opening
03:06 this selecting this art, copying it, going back here, and pasting it in this document.
03:15 Now notice that when I paste this and I move this up here, and I hold my Shift
03:19 key down to reduce the size, take this, bring this down in size, all right,
03:24 they're two separate elements now, Which is okay, it's what I want.
03:32 But now when I go to view, outline, notice that the text is one item, and the
03:36 line is one item. But when I go to preview mode, see, it
03:41 looks the way I want it. I can select this.
03:45 Notice it's still live text. Whereas before when I did it, remember
03:49 what happened? It went to outlines, the gradient went to
03:53 outline, the brush went to outline, but by copying and pasting, I keep everything
03:58 that's editable in this document. So, when you place an Illustrator
04:04 graphic, even though you can embed Alright.
04:08 In my opinion you're better off opening that up, copying it, pasting it in here
04:12 and then working with it that way. The exception to that would be is if
04:17 someone else is working on this part of the art.
04:20 Well, again, delete this. In that case file, place.
04:26 Find the art, link to it, place it, and now as that other artist continues to
04:33 work on this art. You simply update that.
04:38 But you're not gonna edit it here. You're gonna let them do that.
04:42 So two different approaches. Someone else working on the art, and
04:45 you're just placing it, working on the document itself, or you wanna be able to
04:49 control this. In which case you're gonna copy and paste
04:53 that in there.
04:54
Collapse this transcript


Suggested courses to watch next:

Illustrator CS5 One-on-One: Fundamentals (23h 12m)
Deke McClelland

Illustrator CS5 Essential Training (10h 37m)
Mordy Golding


Up and Running with Illustrator (2h 52m)
Deke McClelland

Drawing Vector Graphics (2h 32m)
Von Glitschka


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