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

955 Illustrator on the iPad: The drawing tools

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

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955 Illustrator on the iPad: The drawing tools

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Today we're inside Illustrator on the iPad in which we'll examine the free form drawing tools, starting with the pencil tool. Now, if the very mention of pencil tool invokes flashbacks of tragically herky jerky path out lines that looked exactly like what they were, primitive examples of computer assisted design, then let me assure you, those days are a welcome thing of the past. Adobe has equipped the last several versions of Illustrator with a pencil tool that practically reads your mind, and Illustrator on the iPad is no exception. Combined with an Apple pencil, the pencil tool is the vector based free form drawing tool that you've been hoping for. Oh, and along the way, I'll take you on a tour of the anchor point level path operations, including simplify, smart delete and more. Here, let me show you exactly how all that stuff works. All right, so here we are inside Illustrator running on an iPad, no surprises there. And I'm going to start over in the left-hand toolbox by selecting the fourth tool down which is this guy right here, the pencil tool. And then I'll draw a kind of wavy line as if we have four fingers, let's say, and then I'll go ahead and release. And you can see, even by default, we get pretty smooth results, assuming that I'm drawing with an Apple pencil, which I am. All right, now I'll go ahead and switch back to the black arrow tool up there at the top of the toolbox. And I'm going to tap and hold on this option right here so that you can see. It controls the stroke width, aka line weight. And so what I'm going to do is just tap on that icon in order to bring up the slider bar. And I'll take the line weight up to 12 points, let's say. And notice if I zoom in here, you can see this, we have a butt cap. And so if you prefer to round things off, then tap on this icon to bring up the properties panel, over here on the right-hand side of the screen, and then select the round cap. And we get a nice rounded cap, like so. All right, that's up to you of course. I'll just go ahead and do a quick two finger pinch in order to fit the art board on screen. Now, I want you to notice these options that are available to us when the black arrow tool is selected. It starts with opacity over here on the left-hand side, and then goes to this guy, duplicate, followed by the trashcan, of course. And what I'm doing is tapping and holding on these icons. If I were to just tap the trashcan, of course, I would delete the object. All right, so I'll go ahead and undo that change by tapping the undo icon in the top right region of the screen. But I want you to see how things change when we switch to the direct selection tool, which is the next tool down. For starters, I'm seeing a ton of anchor points in blue, at least by default. And they're circles, which indicates that they're smooth points. I'm also seeing those white control handles which allow me to adjust the curvature of the segments. I'm going to go ahead and marquee all of these points in order to select them all. And I want you to see the new icons below the path outline. They start with this guy, cut path. And that's not going to cut the points to the clipboard. It's actually going to clip the path. So you get the same effect you'd get with the scissors tool inside Illustrator. And we go along, this guy will convert the points to smooth points. Not really necessary 'cause they're already smooth points. This will convert them all to corners. I'm going to show you that one because that's going to get rid of just about all of the control handles. The only ones left are these guys associated with the end points. In any event, that's not what I want. So I'll tap the undo icon a couple of times to get back my smooth points. Next we have join, then we have simplify. We have smart delete, and then once again, the trashcan. And you can confirm all those icons, not only by tapping and holding on them, but you can also tap this icon right here below the T over on the right-hand side of the screen, and notice that it lists the names of every one of those icons in the exact same order they appear below the object. Now notice that we have too many anchor points. You may be tempted to go with Simplify path right here. And so I'll just go ahead and tap on it. And if you're not seeing the names, by the way, you have this little arrow icon right here that allows you to collapse and expand the names like so. I'll go ahead and tap on Simplify path. Now, these days in Illustrator for the desktop, whether you're working on a Mac or PC, Simplify works really, really well. It doesn't hold up quite as well here on the iPad. And so notice an example right here, this anchor point has been converted from a smooth point to a cusp point. And what that means is that I can move each one of these control handles independently of each other. If you want to get back the smooth point, there's a couple of things you can do. One is you can select the point and click on this guy down here, Convert to smooth. Or, even more easily, you can just double tap on that point to convert it to a smooth point. Notice the control handles are now locked in alignment with each other. Or you can double tap again in order to convert it to a corner point with no control handles whatsoever. However, I'm going to show you a better way to work. I'll go ahead and tap the undo icon a few times here until I regain all of my original points, the ones that I drew with the pencil tool. And what I'm going to do here is tap on this anchor point right here, let's say. And then I also want to select this anchor point. But because I pressed and held on it, I went and deleted it. That's not what I want. So I'll just go ahead and undo that change. If you want to select multiple points, then remember you have this touch ring right here. And if you press and hold on the inside of that touch ring, then you can select multiple points at a time. And so I'm just going to select these guys, let's say, as well as these two up toward the top of the last finger. And now, instead of tapping on Simplify, I'm going to tap and hold on this guy just for a moment so that you can see, it's Smart delete, and compare that to the trashcan. If I were to tap on the standard delete icon, then I would get rid of those selected anchor points as well as their neighboring segments. Obviously that's not what I want. So I'll just go ahead and tap undo. And that not only brings back the points, but it leaves them selected as well so that I can tap on Smart delete, the icon next door to the trashcan, at which point, Illustrator deletes those excess anchor points and redraws segments in between the ones that remain. All right, but an even better way to get smoother results with fewer anchor points is to select the pencil tool and tap on this wavy line down here at the bottom of the toolbox, which brings up the smoothing slider. And so by default, it's set to four. I'm going to take it up, let's say to eight. You can go as high as 10, by the way. And then I'll switch back to the black arrow tool for a moment so that I can tap on the trashcan in order to delete that object. And now I'm going to tap on the zoom value up here at the top of the screen. And I'm going to dial in 106%, happens to work well for this art board size. And then I'll switch back to the pencil tool. And I'll set about drawing something here. I'll go ahead and draw a head, let's say. And then I'll draw an arm. And so notice, because I'm lifting my stylus in between those brush strokes, I am forcing a corner point at the intersection of the head and the arm. All right, now I want to create a straight segment, and to do that, all you have to do is tap. And notice that's going to connect the previous anchor point to the new one that you just created. And now I'll draw a kind of foot. And notice our join right here. I'm going to zoom in so we can see it. It's a mess at that location. So what I want to do is bring up the properties panel once again. And then, notice that my touch ring is in the way. So I'll just go ahead and drag it over a little bit so that I can access this icon which is going to give me a nice round join. All right, now I'll hide the properties panel. I'll go ahead and do a quick two finger pinch in order to center my zoom, and then I'll dial in 106 again, just so we can see where we left off. And now we'll tap in order to create another straight segment, and tap again. And now I'll draw another foot, let's say, followed by another tap. And I just want to show you, because I have such a high smooth value, I can now draw with my finger and still get pretty darn smooth results. Not as smooth as what I was seeing with a stylus over there on the right-hand side, but still pretty good for a finger drag. Don't like it, however, so I'm going to undo that brush stroke and paint a real arm with my Apple pencil. All right, couple of other things you can do with the pencil tool. I'll go ahead and move my touch ring over here a little bit. And now notice, if I press inside the central portion of the touch ring, and then I drag across, notice that I'm creating a straight line segment at a 45 degree angle, and now I'm drawing some more. And now I'm drawing some more segments, which is not really what I want. So I'll just go ahead and undo that brush stroke, and I'll tap the inside of that touch ring and just drag it across like so. And now I'll release the touch ring and draw a couple of curves segments here. All right, another thing you can do is tap and hold on the touch ring and drag to the outside, at which point you can draw a straight segment at any angle. And so I'll just go ahead and create a couple of eyes like so. And now, using that outside edge of the touchscreen again, I'll go ahead and add some straight fingers here. And so this gingerbread character is becoming somewhat of a cactus. And now I'll just draw a couple of segments down below, like so. All right, now let's say I want to change the fill color. And so what I'm going to do is switch back to the black arrow tool and partially marquee the mouth and the outside edge of this figure. And now I'll tap on this white circle near the bottom of the toolbox, which represents the fill. And I'll change it to a kind of shade of bright green, let's say. And I want that mouth to be a hole. And so what I'm going to do is tap this icon over here on the right-hand side of the screen, just above the T. And that's going to bring up these object functions. Notice that you can group the objects. You could create a clipping mask. I'm going to tap this last item, Make compound path, in order to turn the inner path into a hole. And I still have some problems. All of my open path outlines have fills. And you can see that's the case by these paths down here at the bottom. Notice that they have white fills. I want to get rid of those fills. And so what I'm going to do is select all. Now, if you have a keyboard attached to your iPad, then you can press Command + A, just as you would in Illustrator running on a Mac. I do not have a keyboard, however, so I'm going to show you a different trick which is to bring up the layers panel right here, and then double tap on layer one up there at the top. And that will select everything. All right, now I'll close the layers panel. And what I want to do at this point is de-select the green stuff. And so I'm going to tap and hold in the center of my touch ring, and then I'll just tap inside the greenish figure to de-select it. All right now, I'll tap that white circle once again down there at the bottom of the toolbox, and I'll change the fill to none, right there, and that will get rid of all the fills. And now I'll just tap in order to hide the color picker and de-select the artwork. All right, now it occurs to me, I want to give this guy a dress. And so I'm going to go ahead and switch back to the pencil tool, very important. And then I'm going to draw this curve segment right here and now I'll draw a little straight segment, and now I'll paint downward and over. And then I'll go ahead and paint back up like so, and in the end, Illustrator ended up auto joining those end points, which serves me just fine. And now I'll bring up that color picker once again, and I'll change the fill color to a bright shade of yellow, let's say. And now I want to add some frills. And so I'll just go ahead and paint like so, and it's working out beautifully because I have that high smooth value. Now I don't want a fill associated with this shape. So I'll tap on that yellow circle once again and I'll change it to none in order to get rid of the fill. All right, now I'll just go ahead and switch back to the black arrow tool, and I will tap off the object to de-select it. And you know what? A piece of artwork this good deserves a signature. And so I'm going to switch back to that pencil tool, I'm going to move that touch ring out of the way. And I'll just go ahead and create a D and bring out the properties panel. And I think I want to take the line weight down to six points, let's say. And then I'll hide that properties panel so I can see what I've done. And now I'll just go ahead and draw the rest of my name, like so. And you know what? If it's too big, you can always switch back to the black arrow tool, just partially marquee those objects and drag one of those corner handles, and you'll end up with a more tasteful signature. And there you have it, one of the best pieces of artwork you'll ever see created entirely using the free form pencil tool here in Illustrator on the iPad. If you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have two, count them, two follow up movies in which we explore still more drawing tools, specifically the underrated blob brush, and the highly rated pen tool. Deke's Techniques each and every week, keep watching.

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