From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

954 Introducing Illustrator on the iPad

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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954 Introducing Illustrator on the iPad

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- Hey gang, this is Dick McClellan. Welcome to Dick's Techniques. I began this series with episode zero, zero one, creating ice type. The date was January 4th, 2011, which means today is the 10th anniversary plus one day. Now, back in those days, I was using Illustrator CS5, which is why it's so fitting that today I'm going to introduce you to Illustrator 1.0.0 for the iPad, which I have to say is not only a really great app, but it compares favorably to, and sometimes exceeds Illustrator for the Mac and PC. Don't believe me? Here, let me provide you with a very general overview of exactly how it works. All right, so here I am inside Illustrator on the iPad, and notice that I have a dark interface. If you're working along with me, you might have a very light interface, in which case you can darken things up, so you have more or less the same look and feel as you do in Illustrator for the desktop that is the Mac or PC, then just go ahead and tap this gear icon in the top right corner of the screen, tap app settings, and then change the color theme from lightest, which is terriblest to dark. And you'll be able to nicely offset your artwork. All right, now to dismiss the dialog box, I'm just going to tap outside of it like so. Zooming is a pretty simple affair. If you want to zoom in you pinch outward, if you want to zoom out you pinch inward like so. If you want to fit the art board on screen, then just do a quick pinch. All right, but I want to pinch in just so that the art board takes up the entire interface. And now I want you to notice this touch ring right here. You can drag it to any spot that you like. I prefer to keep it on the right-hand side of the screen because I'm left-handed. And now notice if I press and hold in a touch screen, we've got an inside and an outside, which gives us access to a primary and secondary constraint. And so let's say then I'm working with the rectangle tool right here. And so notice if I tap and hold on that tool, I get a fly out menu of shaped tools. I'll just go ahead and select the rectangle. And now I'll drag either with my finger, by the way, or with an Apple pencil, if you want to get more precise results. If you want a perfect square, then tap and hold in the center of that touch ring. And then if you want to draw the shape from the center out, then move to the secondary ring, the outer ring that is to say. Now, I don't want to apply any constraints, so I'll just go ahead and release that touch ring and continue to drag. Now notice that we have a handful of options below the rectangle, including second from left, this stroke width option. And if you want to see what any of these items mean, just tap and hold on any one of them, then just tap again to dismiss that hint. All right, so I'm going to drag upward like so in order to increase the stroke width aka the line width and eventually I'm going to set that to 36 points like so, and you can see the value in that heads up display above the rectangle. And now let's say what you want to do is round off the corners, then switch from the black arrow tool up here at the top of the vertical toolbox on the left-hand side of the screen, to the next tool down, which is the direct selection tool. It no longer looks like a white arrow as it does in Illustrator. So I guess Adobe is trying to get us to stop calling it the white arrow tool all the time. In any event now notice that we have these round corner widgets, and so if I drag any one of them, I'm going to round off all four corners like so. If you want to enter a specific numerical value, then notice these icons on the right-hand side of the screen, the third one down right here brings up the properties panel at which point you could just go ahead and click in that round corner value and enter whatever value you like. I'm going to change it to 64 points, and notice that the value is applied on the fly. And then I'll just go ahead and tap that icon once again, to hide the properties panel. Now, let's say that you want to edit one corner independently of the others, then armed with that direct selection tool, go ahead and mark Key that corner like so. Now notice we have one and only one round corner widget, at which point I can drag that guy in order to, in my case, increase the roundness of the top right corner. All right, now let's say, I just want to delete this shape, then I'd switch back to the black arrow tool up here in the top left corner of the screen, and then notice the final icon below the rectangle, it's a little trashcan, just tap it and that shape will go away. All right, now let's say you want to draw something slightly more complicated, such as a regular polygon, then go ahead and tap and hold on that rectangle once again and select the triangle from the fly out menu, and now drag to create a triangle. And if you want it to be a perfect equilateral triangle, then tap and hold inside the central portion, not the outside, but the primary on the inside. And so I kind of mess things up there, I'm going to have the tap and hold again, and that will constrain that shape to an equilateral triangle. All right, now what I want to do is change the number of sides. And so notice this widget right here, if you tap and hold on it and then drag, you're going to increase the number of sides. And ultimately I'm going to take it up to six sides so that I have a hexagon. All right, now I want to change the color of the fill, and I'll do that by tapping on this white circle over here at the bottom of the toolbox, which brings up the color wheel, which includes by the way, a little eyedropper in case you want to eyedrop a color from your artwork. In my case, I really don't because there is really no color except for black and white. And so what I'm going to do instead is drag inside this little square right here in order to add a fairly saturated shade of red. All right, now I'll tap outside the color picker to dismiss it. And then it'll drag this guy to a slightly different location. All right, now let's say you want to duplicate the shape on the fly, well, in that case, you want to bring back your touch ring, and so notice if I press and hold on the central portion of the ring, then as I drag, I'm going to constrain the direction to a multiple of 45 degrees. I however want to create a duplicate and so I'll move to the outside of the ring, and now notice that I'm duplicating the shape on the fly. And I'm going to do that a couple of times here, just so I can demonstrate a few other things you can do. And then I'll tap that central polygon to select it, and I'll change its fill by tapping on that red circle right there, and I'll drag on the outer ring until we get a shade of blue like so. And now I want you to notice this first icon underneath the polygon, this guy right here, if I tap and hold, it'll tell me that it represents the opacity. And so I'll tap again to dismiss it and then I'll drag in order to reduce the opacity of the shape. And so notice that I'm dragging down in order to make that happen. All right, now let's say I want to change the stacking order of these shapes, that notice the third icon below the shape, if I tap and hold, you'll see that it's stacking order. And so you can use this option in one of two ways. You can drag upward to move the shape forward or downward in order to move it backward like so. Another option I'll go ahead and put it back where it was, is to tap on the icon at which point you get this kind of slider bar, drag to the right in order to move the shape forward or to the left to move it backward like so. All right, I'm just going to go ahead and move it to the top of the stack and then tap outside the polygon in order to bring back my options. All right, now I want to direct your attention to the little lock icon, pretty much in the middle of those icons below the hexagon. If you tap on it, then you'll lock the shape like so. And notice in the top left corner of that bounding box, we have a little lock icon. If you tap on it, then you will once again unlock the shape. All right, so if you've been using the traditional version of Illustrator for any period of time, you know that you have a preview in an outline mode, you can switch between the two by tapping the top right icon, this guy right here. And so notice here's the preview mode and here's the outline's mode. So you still have that option available to you inside Illustrator on the iPad. I'll go in and switch back to preview here. And then one other thing, let's say that you want to change the size of your art board, you do have an art board tool over here in this left-hand tool box, this guy right here. So I'll just go ahead and tap on it to select it. Now, the way things stand now, it brings up a fly out menu of presets. Let's say you don't want a preset, you want to dial in your own numerical values. Then bring up that properties panel once again and notice that we have width and height values right here. You can lock them together if you want to so that you maintain the proportions of your art board. I don't want that, so I'll just unlock the values once again. And now in addition to tapping inside, let's say the H value and entering a different value, such as 780, which is going to be a pretty short art board as you can see right there, the other way to work is to drag back and forth. So notice as I'm dragging inside the width value, I'm scaling it upward and then I'm scaling it downward when I drag to the left. And so I'll just go ahead and randomly take that guy down to 1,218 points. And that is my basic introduction to Illustrator running on an iPad. Looking forward to next week. That's when we'll switch our efforts from the basic workings of Illustrator on the iPad stuff to actual creative drawing stuff, using the pencil, the blur brush and the pencil tool, not to mention an actual Apple pencil clutched in an actual hand. Dick's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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