Draw basic shapes

- [Instructor] Even with the first release of the application that would eventually become Animate CC, there has existed a rich set of vector creation and manipulation tools. Today we have a wide variety of these tools to choose from. Let's have a look at some of these now. For this, what I'm going to do is just lock down our edge_decorators layer, select the Photo layer and then create a new layer directly above it. Here we'll be able to just draw freely with everything else locked down and not have to worry about manipulating any other assets in a negative way, so over inside of the Tools panel, up top here are generally selection and transform tools and then right below you get your vector creation tools, so let's start out with some simple ones.

Here we have Align tool and Align tool only exists with stroke. So, there's no fill when you create with the line tool. You can of course change the size of the stroke and you apply it by just clicking and dragging, so it's rather simple. Right next to that we have the rectangle tool which allows us to draw a rectangle or if we hold down the shift key, it will create a square for us. Releasing shift and we've got a rectangle again.

Now, note that rectangle has stroke but it also has fill associated with it. Similar to the rectangle tool, we have the oval tool and if we long press on any of these tools that have a little white triangle at the lower right corner, we can see that there are actually groups of tools here. So, I'm going to choose instead of the regular oval tool, the oval primitive tool. Now, what this is going to allow me do is to draw out my circle or oval and using the selection tool, if I have this selected, over here I can define oval options even after it's created like the start angle, the end angle, and even the inner radius to make some really interesting shapes.

If I were to choose the basic oval tool, I could set these to begin with, however, once I create the shape and select it, I'm not able to further manipulate those aspects. We also have a tool here, the color star tool and if we select that with nothing else selected of course, so we're going to use the selection tool to select or click on the pasteboard, before selecting our tool so that we can see the different properties of that tool and down below here we have our options for poly star and here can choose between a polygon or star, I'm going to choose star and we can select the number of sides, the point size and so forth and hit OK.

Now if I go ahead and click and drag, here I've got a little star that I've created. Let's go ahead and use the selection tool to draw a selection rectangle across all of these shapes and notice when I release my selection tool, that only the shapes on the unlocked layer are selected. I can then go ahead and delete them from the delete key on my keyboard. Looking at a number of these other pieces here, we have the pencil tool which the pencil tool is going to draw in only stroke similar to the line tool, so what we can do with the pencil tool is just do a freehand drawing like this.

Similarly, we have the brush tool whereas the pencil tool draws in stroke, the brush tool draws using fill. And we have a number of different options here for our brush including the size. So, let's draw a little squiggle with that and we can see how that works. Both of these tools are great for free form drawing. In addition to this, we have the paint brush tool which can map vector artwork onto our strokes and we'll see that a little later.

Similarly we'll see how to use the text tool when we talk about text. However, we also have a pen tool here and for those coming from Adobe Illustrator, you'll note that you can use the pen tool in a very similar way. Once your initial anchor point has been set, you can choose to click and select a different anchor point and then pull out these different handles to draw out an irregular shape like this. Now, the pen tool of course takes a lot more practice getting used to if you've never used it before than a lot of these other tools, so don't be disappointed if you don't know how to use it straight off.

I'm going to once again select all these objects and delete them. The tools we've just seen provide the building blocks of more complex shape creation within Adobe Animate.