This video serves as a comprehensive beginner's guide to Adobe Illustrator, aiming to demystify the software for new users. It covers the fundamental interface, core vector concepts, essential tools, and practical applications like creating shapes, manipulating paths, organizing layers, and applying color. The instructor emphasizes Illustrator's vector-based nature and its advantages for scalable designs, providing analogies and step-by-step demonstrations to make complex features accessible.
I can provide a full text transcript of the video. Please note that this will be a direct transcription of the spoken words and may include conversational elements, repetitions, or stutters.
Here is the full text transcript:
Hey guys, welcome to the complete beginners's guide to Adobe Illustrator in 2024. I've been a graphic designer for over a decade, specializing in logo type design, and I've been using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and the suite of Adobe tools ever since I started. Adobe Illustrator can be quite confusing for those who are first getting into it. So, I thought making a video explaining it and giving everyone a rundown of how to use this tool and how to learn to use it better will help a lot of beginners out there. So, if you're a beginner designer, someone who's just working inhouse, even if you're a seasoned designer and just want to learn some of the basics of a few of these tools, then this is the video for you. Just before we get into it, if you do enjoy this beginner style content, consider subscribing down below. join and be part of over 800,000 people who have subscribed to the channel to learn more about graphic design. Okay, first of all, download Adobe Illustrator. You do that from the Creative Cloud app, which looks like this. Download Adobe Illustrator. Now, once you've downloaded Adobe Illustrator, you'll be brought up with this window. It's the new window. This is where you'll find all the project files. Adobe Illustrator actually has Adobe Cloud or Adobe Creative Cloud where you can upload your work and it will automatically save to the cloud. So whether you're on a desktop and then go to your MacBook or your iPad, it will all be there. When we press new file, we'll get a bunch of these different templates. Essentially, the way that the templates work is that they give you the most known and the most used sort of templates. We're going to go for web large 1920x 1080, which is the same aspect ratio as this video. Over here, we have the width that we can change. We can change the actual name of this. We're going to call this beginner tutorial. We're going to make sure it's in pixels. We can change this from points, inches, feet, yards, millimeters. We can also bring up this box here, which gives us the advanced options. This option is really important depending on what you're designing or creating in Illustrator. If you want to create something digitally, RGB is what you want. If you're creating something printed or physically going to be printed, then CMYK is going to be your other option. The reason why we use CMYK is because we have in the printers C for cyan, magenta, yellow, and K. And K is black, gray. I'm going to stick with digital for now, but then we'll explain print more later. Screen raster effects, just keep that at 72. And preview mode, we're going to set to default. Now, you'll notice that we have artboards here. We'll just leave that for now. We don't need any bleeds. We're just going to press create. And when we press create, we're opened up with a window and a tab. The cool thing about Adobe Illustrator is that you get tabs just like in Photoshop. So if I decided to create another document, let's say this is an A4 document that is a print document. We can have that open as well. We can sift through these different tabs to go to different files. Now this looks very daunting at first. So let me explain what's happening on screen. Over here we have our toolbar. This is where we find most of our tools, including the pen tool, the selection tool, the shape tool, and much other tools, many more tools. Over here on the right, we actually have the properties panel. This is where you'll find a lot of things. We also have the layers panel and the libraries. The properties panel are the properties of each shape that we create in Illustrator. So, when we bring in a shape, such as I'm going to bring in a square, we can see the properties of this. When we select it, we can see the fill, which is the color inside, the stroke, which is the line around it, and how large that stroke is in points, and the opacity, and maybe some effects. Essentially, the properties panel is where all the properties live. So, if you need to change a shape, color, the stroke, you need to even transform it and make it a little bit bigger, you can do that within the properties panel. The layers panel is just like in Photoshop. Illustrator works in layers. Libraries is your Creative Cloud libraries. So, for instance, if I like something uh I don't know, like a color palette like this Neo one, a logo, and I want to save it in my libraries, it means I've got quick access to bring that back out of the libraries into my document. Up here, we have a few buttons as well. The main one that you probably want is up here in window. If you can't find something that I'm using, always go to window and you'll see we get this huge long list of different windows that we can bring up. For instance, I want to bring up layers. So, I'm going to bring layers up here and I'm going to drag layers out. Everything in Illustrator when it's in a window can be dragged out and back in whenever you want. And you can place this anywhere. In fact, I can bring properties out and just bring it underneath layers here. And you can see I can resize all of these and place them whatever I want on my screen. Okay, let's talk a bit about Adobe Illustrator and how it works. The most confusion happens in Illustrator is when drawing shapes of how it actually works. So, if I wanted to draw, let's say, a black square, I'm going to just like bring out a black rectangle here with the rectangle tool. And I just dragged it out like so. Now, I'm going to go back up here and I've got my selection tool. We have two different selections. We have the selection tool and we have the direct selection tool. And you see if we hover over these, they give us some tool tips of how this actually works. Essentially, the selection tool allows me to just select a shape by clicking on it and dragging it around. The direct selection tool focuses on the nodes. These are called anchor points. And this is the baseline of vector art. The main difference between Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop is that Illustrator is completely vector art. What does that even mean? In Photoshop, we can edit pixels. Have you noticed that when you go into Photoshop or for instance any image, let me pull up an image here and bring it into Illustrator. If we zoom into this image here, you can see it gets blurrier and blurrier until we can see pixels. That means there is fidelity. There are pixel counts in this image. The higher the pixel count, the more resolution it has and the further we can zoom in. However, in Illustrator with this object here, I'll just change the color quickly so we can see this better. No matter how far we zoom in, it'll never get pixelated. And that is because vector artwork inherently uses mathematics instead of pixels to draw. And because of this difference between pixel art and vector art, a lot of people get overwhelmed and confused. However, let me just explain Adobe Illustrator and how vector works for you really easily. I'm going to go ahead and open up a file that I've worked on previously. It's a poster. This is all vector. I can zoom infinitely into this space here and into here. And it will never lose quality. That is because each one has these sort of paths around it. You see these paths with these weird handles? This is where everyone gets a bit confused, which rightfully so. It's kind of daunting when you first look at this is in how do these shapes even work? Well, the way that vector graphics works is through math. Luckily, we don't have to do any of the maths. All we need to do is draw. If I bring up this circle option here, I'm just going to go to the rectangle and hold down, we get a bunch of these options. I'm going to hold shift whilst I drag out a circle. If I select this circle and then go up to the left to the direct selection tool and then drag a selection around this circle, you'll see that we have points and what are known as handles. These are the handles. This is the point. Now, a way a shape is created in vector is through the connections of one or two anchor points. If I bring up the pen tool, which is how we manually draw a vector shape, and I just draw, I don't know, some weird squiggly line, you'll notice there that the shape's getting kind of filled in. I'm just plotting in some anchor points. And then we close the shape. And there we go. We have a shape. The way that vector works is it calculates the distances between each point and the curvature of it. and it does some crazy maths and gives you this shape, which means that we can now scale it up and down infinitely. When you're using a font, for instance, and you zoom into the font, you'll notice that it will never lose quality either. And that's because fonts use the same vector system as Adobe Illustrator. Now, the main reason why we use vector artwork is because when we're creating a font or a logo or an illustration, we may need to scale that design up or down. And also, we want to have perfect resolution with that scale. Vector artwork allows us to achieve perfect resolution at any scale that we see fit. It can fit on a billboard or it can fit on a business card. It can fit on a ring. So no matter what we draw inside of Adobe Illustrator or a vector, it can be scaled up and down. Now you see here we've got these two shapes. You got one here which is a circle. Now the way that vector works is by manipulating shapes and using these shapes to create illustrations. And this leads to more of like a simplistic illustration like you're seeing here. So I'm going to select this shape and let's say I want to edit this circle a little bit. There's a few things we can do. I can select it and we have what's known as the bounding box. This is the transformational box. If you click on any of these, you can transform the shape in any way you want. If you hold shift and select this, it will constrain the angles all the way through. If I hold shift and option or alt on a PC and hold shift, it will constrain it and transform it from the center. If I just hold option, it will transform it from all sides in the center meeting in the center. If I hold option and move the shape, it will duplicate that shape every time I click and make another one. Now, the way that we can edit this shape here is we can actually use the direct selection tool. So, when we're just moving shapes around, we use the selection tool and then when we want to edit a shape, we use the direct selection tool. So, click on this one here or you can use A as a shortcut. Any shortcut will be directed on the actual tool itself. Then what we want to do is select our shape or we can do a selection of something like this. So we can select certain nodes or anchor points. I'm going to select this top one here by clicking on it. I'm going to drag it down. Notice how the shape kind of works. This is the best time to learn how the pen tool and how vector artwork kind of works on a computer. When we move this, it kind of creates some strange effects here. It doesn't make sense. If I just undo by pressing command Z, you'll notice that these handles can be moved as well. We can actually constrain do anything we want with these handles. If we hold shift and push a handle, it will keep it to the horizontal or the vertical axis or I could just like mess around with it as much as I want. The main thing is Illustrator works by just making these weird shapes and we can start from a circle and create many other shapes from it. So, how does Illustrator work for creating clean shapes? Well, there are a few ways, but first I want to give you an analogy of how I think Illustrator works compared to Photoshop. Imagine this artboard here, which is this white box, is a real artboard. It is a piece of paper that has other pieces of paper, which are your shapes on top. And they are physical shapes that you can move up and down. You can actually fit one shape on top of another shape. Like you can fit this book and then you can fit this pencil and then I could put the pencil behind the book or on top. Or I could cut the pencil out of this book. That is the same way that Adobe Illustrator works. It's just virtual. I've got one red circle there. If I bring in a black square. So I'm just going to draw a square and I'm going to change the color down here to black. This black square is going to naturally go on top of this red square. And that is because of the layering system that we have. You see here on this layer panel. Don't worry about all the jargon. It looks a bit complicated, but it's not. Layer one is here. And you will be in layer one. So, we're going to press this button and it will give us the individual layers. You can see we've got the rectangle here and then we've got the red circle there. The red circle is behind the rectangle. So therefore, if we were to move this square, it's always going to be on top. However, if I go to this rectangle here and just drag it below the square or the circle even, we will see that it's now always behind the square. So this is how it actually works in Illustrator. It's like physical but it's digital making it easy. And we can do the same again. We can bring the rectangle on top. We can bring it behind. We can also select one shape, right click on that shape, and we get a bunch of different settings here. Don't worry too much about these settings. All we should do if you want to change where something is layered is go down to arrange and then we can bring to front, bring forward, send backwards or send to back. Bring to front will mean that it will come right to the front of the layering system. Bring forward will bring it one layer up forward to you. Send backward will bring it right to the back of the layering system. And send back will send it back just one. So let's just bring it to front. And there you go. It's brought to front. Now something you may have noticed during all of this is this weird box that follows you around. Whenever you click on a shape, you'll get this contextual taskbar or this contextual bar. This is quite recent and new to Adobe Illustrator and is very helpful for beginners because it has everything you could ever need really for quick work inside of this taskbar. Let's go through it. First of all, we have generate. This generate is the text to vector generative button. And we can actually generate something inside of this rectangle. We can write dark moon and we can select the subject, the scene, icon or a pattern. We're just going to create a scene and we can actually take a style as well from another image. But we're just going to press generate and you will get this box that pops up generative AI in Adobe apps. You are signing here that you're going to use it correctly. So make sure you read the license before agreeing and using it. Now it's going to go ahead and generate it and you'll see this loading bar and it depends on how fast your internet connection is and how fast Adobe is at generating your prompt. But you'll see here that we get a fully text vector dark moon prompt which has been created for you. If we click on this and we go to the properties panel to the right and again if you don't see the properties panel go up to window and then go down to properties and you'll see it pop up. So we select this and now we can actually change through the variations that it's created for us. We can even create a detail in vector graphics. So we can bring the detail down or we can bring it right up to complex. So this box here has everything you need. We have generate beta. We have edit path. When you press this, it will automatically just give you the direct selection tool, which is pretty nice. Over here we have repeat object. And what this allows us to do is if I just scale this down a little bit, if I press repeat, we'll get the radial, grid, and mirror. Let's do radial. This will create a radial grid around this object here. It might look a bit strange right now, but if I press this down, you can see that this is changing the instances, which is the duplicates of this square. And the more we bring it up and down, the more we get. If we press this one here, it will actually increase the space, the circumference of the whole thing. And we can get some fine tuning here. This one shows us how many we want. If we want to cut it in half or something, or maybe we just want half of it like so, then we can increase it here and then bring it around. And we can still move this up and down like so. We can create some interesting patterns and visuals within this. This button here will duplicate the object. So, if you press that button, you might see nothing's happened. But in fact, if we look at the layer panel, as I'm pressing this button, we have duplicated it. If we press this button here, it will lock the shape. Now, no matter what I do, I can't select this with the selection tool or the direct selection tool. That's because in the layers panel, you'll see this little lock button here. This lock button determines that whether a shape is locked or not. And this can be very useful when designing things like this when we've got a background here. But let's say we want to select all of these mountains here and I haven't layered them correctly. They're all in this kind of just one huge layer here. I don't want to go through and find it. So what I want to do is select this object and we can go ahead and lock it. So now we don't select the background object or even this object. I don't want to select that. I just want to select these mountains here. Now notice when I select these mountains, the contextual bar will change and it will give us new things we can do. For instance, we have generative beta which is already there. We also have now recolor which is different and group. These two are very different. Let's go through them differently. Group does exactly what you think. It will group objects into a layering system to which will group them together so you can make edits on the fly and transform it on the fly. This is great for just organizing similar objects. So, let's go ahead and select these. I'm going to hold shift and select this one and this one. And I know they're selected because I can see the outlines there. I'm then going to press group. That means now when I select them, they will all move as one. But as well as that, we can check if it's a group by going to the layer panel, going down, we can find the group. Where is the group? Here it is. This is the group. And within that group, it has got all of the layers. So this is a great way of organizing your layering system throughout the project. Now, when you're in a group and you want to change just one item, there's a few things you can do. We can either ungroup the whole group, and that will mean that we can go ahead and change that one item. But that's a bit annoying. Instead, we're going to go into isolation mode, which sounds really complicated, but it's not. So, click the group, then find the shape that you want to edit. I want to edit this one here. Well, I'm going to double click this. And when I double click it, it will just pop out in front of me. The background will go kind of a gray color. And then now we can actually go through this entire group and select all the objects. Make our changes. To zoom in, I'm going to press Z or we're going to go to this microine glass and we're going to just scroll in like so. Well, not even scrolling. We're just clicking and dragging. If we want to move around, we're going to hold the spacebar button, which is pan. And when we hold that and click, it will allow us to pan around. So, zooming, panning. Now I can go to my direct selection tool and make any of these changes that I want. Maybe I want this to be, I don't know, like slightly nicer looking like a tooth. Maybe it just doesn't fit right. But you see the level of precision we have. I can also select an anchor point here and use my you won't see it very much, but use my arrow keys down at the bottom to go left and right. When I'm done, you can see here I'm going to just press layer one and I'm going to press escape. And we have escaped and we have the edit that we've made. So now we can go through this and we can select certain shapes. We can highlight and drag. If you want to be more precise, we can go ahead and click and shift click. But I prefer to drag because there's normally shapes within shapes. And press group. Now, whenever we group them, we can just move them all together as one. Group, group, group. Vector programs have what are known as boolean options. And this is where I normally lose people or people get lost when it comes to vector artwork. Boolean is essentially just a yes or no, a true false kind of equation. I'm going to go up here to window and I'm going to go down to something called Pathfinder to show you. This is an old old sort of tool. We don't really use it all the time anymore. However, it is incredibly useful and it's vital for you to understand in order for you to get a good picture of how Illustrator really works. Let me delete these shapes. Let's say I want to create a target. So, I know that I want a circle and then I kind of want a white circle. So, what I can do is I can highlight this, press command C to copy it, and command F to paste. When we press command F, it means paste in front. If we press command B, that would be paste behind. Same as the ordering of the shapes. If we press command V, it will appear somewhere random. So, now that I've got two, I'm going to go ahead and scale down by pressing shift and alt. I can scale this down to about here. And it's still black, so you can't see anything other than the outline. There are a few things we could do. You might think going over to your color panel and double clicking on it, dragging up to white, and pressing okay will do the job. And yeah, it looks like it's being cut out of the black. However, remember when I said Illustrator, it's very literal. It's like paper. It's like real life. We physically need this to be cut out. Right now, if I drag this over and off the artboard, you'll see there is a white spot that we can move around. That's not what we want. We want this to be cut out. So, we get the background gray in this black. Otherwise, whenever we print this or put it onto a poster or put it onto any sort of media, you'll see this white object. It won't actually be white. Sure, you could go ahead and click this and press the eyropper tool or I and then click the background to get the color and it will look like it's been cut out, but it's not because if we drag it back to the white, it's not been cut out. What we need to do is find a way to cut this shape out exactly. There are a few ways we could do it. The noob way of doing it will be using an eraser. So, we could make guides out of this and use an eraser, but that's just silly. Instead, what we want to do is select both shapes. The great thing about the selection tool is when we drag, we select both things. When we click, we can click one. Select both shapes. We know they're selected cuz we can move them. In the pathfinder tool, we have a bunch of icons that look hella confusing. Don't be confused. It's all good. Let me explain them. We're going to go ahead and duplicate these like so. So, we have a few options to go off. If I highlight this, if I highlight this and then go to this pathfinder option here, it will highlight unite and it will say option click to create a compound shape path. Disregard that, don't worry. If I press unite, what will happen is the top shape will unite with the background shape. So, kind of fusing them together. Let me show you this again. Let me just drag this circle which is on top of this black one. Select both of them. If you don't select both of them, it will not work. Press unite. And you'll notice it will turn gray because the top object is gray and it will physically fuse them together. We know this because if we go into the direct selection tool here and drag over, it's actually created the paths for us and fused it all for us together. But what if we want to cut it out? Well, that's where the next one comes in. This one is called minus front. Now remember when we talked about the arrangement of the front to back? Well, minus front literally means it will minus the front shape from the back, deleting the back shape. So, I'm going to select both shapes and we're going to go ahead and press minus front. And you'll notice that it will turn white or turn whatever the background color is. And that is because there is nothing in this section here. You can see it as me going over the artboard. There is nothing in there. It has been cut from the shape. This is really useful because it allows us to create geometric changes to a shape by a click of a button without any guesswork. We know it's perfectly done. Now, this next one here is called intersect. This has another function and again it's a yes or no mathematical equation. If I highlight both of these shapes, no matter where they are next to each other, they have to be kind of on top of each other. What it will do is it will find the intersection and delete it. It will not worry about the outside section here and it won't worry about this. It will only worry about this area here and that is because it's intersect. So let's press intersect. Boom. That is going to delete everything other than what has intersected in between. If I press exclude, it will actually exclude what is intersected instead of taking it and making its own shape. these other ones down here such as divide. When you press it, it feels like nothing's happened. However, what has actually happened is it's divided each shape. And we know this because if we press ungroup because it's automatically created a group and we move this, it has basically done a cookie cutter stamp and allows us to move these shapes like so. So that has divided the shapes by the cut points. Interesting. The good news is that you don't need to know any of that. And that is because Illustrator is far too easy nowadays. It has come a long way. Let's create that example of the target. Again, I'm going to select this. I'm going to create a duplicate by pressing this contextual bar. I'm going to hold option shift to drag this down. Select both shapes. And instead of going to the pathfinder tool, we're going to delete that. We're going to press shift and M or go over to the left here. and we get this cool thing called the shape builder tool. This allows us to more modernly do the same thing as a pathfinder tool but without knowing all the little icons and buttons. Let me explain. Now we're on the shape builder tool. Our cursor has gone to a crosshair. Now when we highlight the shape you'll notice that it's understood which shape is which. And if I click the shape you'll notice what will happen. If I drag it will unite them. If I click this shape it won't do much. it will actually click take out the back of that shape but intersect it. If I hold option and click it will minus that shape from it. The great thing about this is that we can actually create a bunch of shapes like random shapes like so. Highlight them all. Press shift and M. And with this tool we can whenever we want to we can delete a shape if we want to from here or we can add this shape in like so. And we're doing this by dragging like so. Or if we want to, we can delete this out one with the option button. And then with this one here, we can just bring together like so. And we can even delete that one too. We can create any shape we want with mathematical precision. Now over here on the left, we have a toolbar. This is where we find most of our tools that we use on the screen. And if you hover over one, such as the direct selection tool, we'll get this nice little video animation showing us exactly how it works with shapes. So it's very visual. If we go down here, you'll notice we have something called the rectangle tool. If we hold on this, we can select more shapes. We have like an ellipse tool. We have a polygon tool. We have a star tool and a line segment tool. Anytime we have this other arrow next to a tool in the toolbar, if you hold on to it, we'll actually open up another tool that's directly linked to those groups of tools. Loads of shapes, brushes, blob pen, brush, pencil tool. Here we've got the rotate. So this is the transformational tools. Here we have the eraser and the scissors tool, shape builder tool, gradient mesh, dimension tool, ink, drop, puppet, things like that. So if I hold on this and we have the ellipse tool and we drag out an ellipse, I'm going to change the color. Something that people may not know is down here we have our colors. This is known as the fill and stroke value. In Illustrator, we have something called the fill, which is the filled color. Let me put that in red. I'm going to double click, and it'll bring up the color picker. I'm just going to go to bright red. And you'll see that the fill is bright red. Now, if I press V, which will give me my selection tool. I'll click away so we don't see the box. Going to press Z to get my zoom tool. I'm just going to scroll into zoom. You'll notice it's got this black line around it. That is the stroke value. That is what a stroke is. Every shape has the ability to have a fill and a stroke. So let's have a look. Here is the stroke value. Now if I click on them, you'll notice it will come forward and backwards. I can double click on them and we can select a color for it. So for instance, if I want this stroke to be kind of blue, I can select blue. But what if I don't want a stroke at all? Well, something you can do is down here there's this tiny tiny little button. You'll see it's got this cross in it, this red line. If we press that, it means there's no stroke at all. And if we go to our fill option and press that as well, that means there is no fill option. So there's currently nothing in this shape. Now, depending on what you're doing, you might have a stroke in there. So if I go ahead and double click this, let's go to a nice yellow. Let's find a nice yellow. And I want a black stroke on this. Let's do that. Boom. So that is how you add colors in. But what if you wanted to find some color palettes or whatever? Well, if we go up to window and go down to color, don't click this because you get a weird panel. What I like to use is either the color guide, which is here. And what this color guide does is it gives you a guide of colors depending on the shade that you're on. If we go down here, we'll get loads of different kind of colors and palettes. If we click here, we'll get all the different harmony rules that we can use. And it's all mathematics from the color wheel. But there you go. It's quite interesting. We can do high contrast if we wanted to. And then we have our tones and shades and tints and all that over there. So from here I can choose like a stroke that will be red or I can choose a red color. I can choose back to my yellow color. And you'll notice that these are high contrasting which is exactly what it said it would do. So we have a color guide. I'm going to put the color guide just here. I'm going to get rid of this color panel. But I want to go up to window as well and go down to swatches. Swatches is probably the best window to have for color because it allows you to save color palettes and any color that you like to quickly grab when you're designing or putting in a shape in Illustrator. Again, I'm going to drag this and just drag it underneath. We're going to start to build our window panel here. So, we have like colors that we need. Now, if you want to be all pro and you want to have everything all organized, you can actually bring up the color swatch panel and just shove it into this window. So, we have a tabbed view. You may also notice that my whole window is white or kind of lighter color. Well, the reason why I've done this is because it's easier for me to see. I prefer it in white a lot of the time. And the way that you can do this is by pressing command K and this will bring up the preferences. Go down to UI or user interface and you'll be on like black or gray. Just go up to white if you wanted to. You can actually increase the scale of the UI as well depending on how easy you want to see it. All this doesn't matter. Just do whatever you want to do. Okay, let's try and recreate these clouds here. These are easy shapes to do. However, they can be quite challenging if you've not used Illustrator. First of all, let's just get rid of our stroke and let's choose a black fill like that. Now, the way that I work out how shapes work is by their base or their primitive shape. I know, for instance, that these clouds can be made either with the pen tool or other shapes merged together. So, similar to the last video, we're going to actually merge some shapes together and play with the color values to get them to look like clouds. We're going to bring up our circle tool or ellipse, or you can press L on your keyboard as a shortcut. I'm just going to hold shift and drag out a shape. It doesn't matter about the color right now. Then, I'm going to duplicate this again. Now, there's a cool way of doing this without having to go into this tax bar here by pressing Alt or Option and just dragging with the selection tool. You can duplicate as much as you like. I'm going to duplicate once. Make that probably a bit smaller, a bit bigger. I'm holding shift to keep it into a sort of perfect circle. I'm just going to drag this one. And we have this sort of cloud shape here. Now, we can mess around with this as much as we like. I'm just looking at the top right now because the bottom kind of looks strange. And we'll fix that in a minute. Once you found the sort of shape that you like, select all of them. Don't group them, but just alt drag or duplicate them. This means that we never essentially lose our work. We can always go back to this if this goes terribly wrong. From here, I'm actually going to go ahead and press M, which will bring up my square tool, my rectangle tool. And with smart guides on, and the smart guides are essentially just a snapping feature. It will snap our sort of cursor into the anchor point position so it's all perfect. You can get that by going to view and going to smart guides and making sure that's on or pressing command U. I'm going to just go from this anchor point kind of all the way over here like so. Okay, that looks weird. It kind of looks blocky, but you're starting to get the picture here. We notice we've got a few problems. It kind of is sharp down here. Doesn't really look very good over here cuz it's a point hanging
out. There's a few ways we could deal with this. We can select this one shape and drag it in. But then we've got this rounded bit there which isn't too bad. However, that doesn't work very well. The other way is we can go ahead and take this anchor point by using the direct selection tool or pressing A to give you that tool. And we can select this anchor point and just drag it to somewhere along the extreme part here. And that will give us a nice sort of perfect view there. The next thing we need to do is round these corners off. Now, Illustrator is brilliant at rounding corners when you don't want them to be round. If you need it to be round, this is the way to do it. If we just select the shape, you'll notice that nothing really happens. But if we go to the direct selection tool, we get these little kind of blobs here. When we hold on to them or hover them, you notice my cursor changes. That change means that if we were to click and drag, it's going to round the corners off exponentially as we round them. Now, if we only wanted to round one corner, just press one or select one anchor point and then press that tool and it will round that corner. If we wanted to round two corners together, just simply select two like so, holding shift or we could click and drag. But when doing that, you might select another object by accident. So, I'm just going to click two like so. And we're going to round them like that. Then I'm going to highlight everything with my normal selection tool, option, click and drag. And we're going to just transform this up without pressing anything. I'm just going to transform this up all together. Then I want to group this together in case we want to come back to it. I'm going to delete these first couple there cuz we don't need them. But I do want to be able to just drag this around and keep them all together. So I'm going to select all of them and we can press group here. Or you can right click, go down to group. Or we can press what is quicker, just command G, and that will automatically group it in our layers panel here really easily. So it's now all grouped. We're going to duplicate it one more time just because I don't want to lose this shape. Get used to duplicating it. Makes a lot of sense. It means you'll never lose work on the fly when you're doing things. Then what we're going to do is use the shape builder tool or the pathfinder tool, which is over here. So remember when I talked about the boolean operations when we have unite, minus front, intersect and exclude. Well, we can highlight all of these and press unite and that will unite all the shapes together. If I go ahead and press command Y, which brings us to the outline mode, which is how vector really is mathematically. It just shows us the lines of vector. You'll notice here we've got a bunch of lines together. That's a load of shapes on top of one another. If I press the unite function, it will get rid of those shapes inside because it has united them all together. And you can see how the paths are now working together. Press command Y to go back to preview mode. We can either use the pathfinder function or we can go to the shape builder tool, which is what most people would do. Shape builder tool. We're just going to highlight everything, drag them together, just do this. And this is how the shape builder tool works. This taskbar is in my face, so I'm going to move that down. Boom. We have our basic cloud. That is one way of creating a cloud. Now we can create more clouds by just like you know editing them slightly like so. Maybe even scaling them down. We could increase certain sizes. Make them look really thin. Probably a bit too thin. It's not bubbly enough. Looks like kind of just a blob. Now main point is Illustrator allows you just to duplicate things for free for as much as you like really. So don't be afraid to duplicate it. Okay, colors. How do we fix these colors? Well, I want the color to be very similar to that of this cloud here. Now, notice we have a black line around this cloud, which is what's giving it that tattoo effect. We have that blue inside, which is the cloud color, and a highlight. Let's see how we do this. Well, first of all, now that I've done with all my shapes here, I want a new artboard. This is a really important aspect of Illustrator. Imagine this is your whole personal space and this is a sheet of paper. This is just like taking another sheet of paper and bringing it into your desk. So, I'm going to go to window and we're going to go down to artboards and that will bring up this other box here. I'm going to drag this box underneath my colors cuz I kind of need them. Now, you notice this one says artboard one and then we've got this plus button here that looks like the layer panel one. If we press that, it will create a new artboard to the right of it. Essentially, we've just duplicated or made another artboard the exact same size as this one. Another way of doing this and to create your own style and shape of artboard is press shift0, which will bring you to this tool here called the artboard tool. What this allows us to do is edit the artboard, make different shapes of artboards like so, and it will label them artboard one, two, and three accordingly over here. But let's say we create a bunch more artboards like so. we just create loads of them and we don't like the way they're positioned. The artboard function here which is called rearranging all artboards will bring up a box where we can actually say okay we want let's say there's five there's 10 artboards. Okay, we we'll do five and five spacing. We'll do 30 spacing and we'll move the artboard with them and it will organize our artboards like so very fast. Or we can just delete them all if we wanted to. It's a really powerful tool. Okay, let's just take this. So, we're going to drag, alt drag, copy it over. Boom. We're going to choose a nice blue color. So, over in our swatches panel, we're going to choose, let's say, this one. It doesn't matter which one really. Now, notice in the swatches panel, we actually have this fill and stroke value swatches like over here in this panel. Illustrator can seem confusing because there's a lot of the same icons everywhere, but essentially each of these panels is a tool that can be moved around. Don't worry too much about it. I use both of these depending on whatever I'm doing. So, select this and we're going to add a stroke to this. So, I'm going to go press the stroke to make sure the stroke is on top. Or we can press X. If you press X, you'll notice that the swatch will switch around from the fill to the stroke all the time. And I'm going to press black. That looks okay, but it's not really fat enough. We need a fat stroke around there. Well, how do we do that? We're going to select our cloud. And then if we want to change the properties inside of a shape, then we go over to the properties panel over here. This is where everything is where you can transform it. Look, we can like make it move around the artboard precisely. We can do anything we like over here. We can even reflect it. We can flip it. We can do all sort. But what I'm interested in is the appearance. Now, this is basically what is known as the appearance panel. If you don't like going to the property section, go up to window and head down to appearance and you'll get the same panel popping up where you'll have the same exact and even more functionality in there. I'm going to put the appearance panel somewhere down here. Okay, let's make this stroke fatter. The way that we work this out is by trial and error. We go over to the stroke panel over here. We select our shape. Make sure it's highlighted. Go over to the stroke panel. And you'll notice it says one point. If we increase this, it will make the stroke even fatter, which looks brilliant. It looks better and better. This is what we wanted. We wanted a fat stroke. Or we could press here and it will go down in points. Now, depending on what you want, we can change the measurement of this by pressing command K and go down to units. And we can actually change the points for the stroke from points to inches, millimeters, whatever you need to. But generally speaking, it doesn't particularly matter. Okay, let's say we like that. But there's a few issues. One of those issues is whenever you increase the stroke, it messes up with the middle of the color and you don't want that. But you want an extremely fat 100 point stroke. Well, what do we do? Well, this is where Illustrator again blows your mind because we can go over to the stroke value and click it and another box will pop up. Don't worry about this box. It is absolutely fine. Let me explain it to you. Let me create a single line. I'm going to go over to my shape tool and create a line segment. Boom. This is one line. And notice it doesn't have a fill. It's only got a stroke. A lot of line work in Illustrator kit is done by strokes. If we press N or go to the pencil tool and pencil some stuff in with our mouse, you'll notice it sticks to the same stroke value that we've made. So, what does that mean? So, if we go to the stroke value here, I'm going to just decrease it to let's say 40 for now. Now, all this panel does is essentially change the way the stroke looks. So the cap, the cap is this bit at the end. How does it look? Well, if we wanted it rounded, we could round them like so by pressing this one. If we wanted it to be projecting, that means that the actual stroke value will go around the anchor point too, but it will keep it, you know, kind of square. These two strokes are exactly the same in height and length, but this value here looks larger and is larger because we've chosen the protruding cap. So let's say we want this stroke to be round. Now let's say we've got a square here. Now it doesn't matter what cap we've got because it's got no end line. It's an infinite loop. But let's say the corners, they don't look right. They kind of look too jagged. What do we do? Well, there's a few things. We can actually go to this corner value here. And when we press the rounded corners, it will round the corners on the outside of the shape. So you notice that the shape inside is still sharp, but on the outside it's nicely rounded. We also have a miter or a bevel join here, which will just bevel it off. Now, a big one that people don't realize is the actual alignment of the stroke. This is huge. When we select this stroke and we see that the path is here, notice if I go to outline mode, it is in the middle. Well, what if we didn't want it in the middle? We wanted it outside of the stroke. So it never goes into this actual box in here. Well, if we press this stroke value and then press I think this is the outside one. That will force the stroke value to be the same. However, it's on the outside of the path. Now, we can do the same for the inside as well, which is the middle option. That will keep the stroke to just the inside. It will never come out of the shape or in the middle. It will just put it smack bang in the middle. Now, there's a bunch more options down here like dash line. We can actually create dash lines like so by creating gaps, you know, and creating these weird sort of patterns as we go. I wouldn't worry too heavily about those dash lines. I don't bother with them. However, we've got profiles here, which can be quite useful. Now, we've got a uniform profile of our stroke here. However, we can change it to this other width profiles as we go along. And you notice it goes pretty crazy and different every time. it will change the width of that stroke, which would be great for illustrations, especially if you're drawing and you want it to be precise. Okay, so what about this? Well, we need to first of all bring this stroke to the outside of the shape cuz when it's in the middle, it doesn't work. When it's on the outside, we get the nice fat look. It's a bit too fat right now. So, I'm going to just scale that fatness down. We're going to sort out a couple of little anchor points here. We notice we got this anchor point. We're going to just delete that one there. And that means now whenever we increase the stroke weight, even if it's at 100%. It will never affect the shape on the inside or the amount of shape. It will actually just affect the outside of it too. But I'm going to bring this stroke value to let's say 60%, as that's like a better option. Or let's say 70. Let's just go 70%. Lovely. Okay. Now, we need to put in a highlight. An easy way of doing this is just by going ahead and creating another circle. But we don't need a stroke. So we're going to get rid of this stroke by making sure stroke is on that first value. Pressing this button here. We're going to switch to this one and press white. Boom. We've created this sort of ellipse here. Now you might be wondering, oh, how do we Oh, this is how you rotate. Oh, this is how you rotate. You go up here and you do whatever. I normally just press R for rotate and I just rotate it anywhere here like so. Put it here. Mess around with it. What we can do is delete this shape from this cloud. But if we do that, as you'll see, it will go black. And that is because we have a stroke on this cloud which is interfering with that. So in this case, I'm going to keep it as just two shapes. This is white. That is black. I'm not going to do anything other than highlight both of them and group them together. And now we have a cloud that we can essentially duplicate, mess around with, and even if we wanted to change the color by pressing recolor, we can change that blue to a nice orange, which is the opposite color. And how fast was that? We can create a pretty nice juicy looking cloud. And now we have a nice selection of like multicolored rainbow clouds. If you like this yellow color and you want to keep it for further inspiration or use it further in your work, whilst it's selected and you've got the color in your foreground, go to the swatches panel, press this button here for new swatch, and we can actually bring up a whole new swatch that we can reuse. But it will ask us to name it. We can just say nice yellow. We're going to call this a spot color. Now, what spot color does is basically act like a global color around Illustrator. Process colors mean that it's not going to change all the colors on the artboards if we change it. But if we have a spot color, it will change everywhere. And you'll notice whether it is a spot color or not by the little icon next to it. That is what spot color means. Let's say I like this orange as well. So, we're going to ungroup this. Find the orange. And I'm going to press there. I'm going to say orange there. Make sure it's a spot color. Boom. I like it. Same with this blue. But we notice that these colors are just kind of by themselves. Well, I want to create a whole new kind of group of them. Down here, we've got a bunch of new color group options. I'm going to press this one and say colors for posters. I'm going to drag my other colors in there. And we can actually export this color or save it for another project if we wanted to. Another thing we can do for color in Illustrator is highlight all our work. And you'll notice we have this recolor button. where you notice it. It's in a few spots actually. It's actually over here is where we can recolor a few things. But I'm just going to press recolor. And you'll notice we'll have a few different things here. We'll have recolor, generative recolor, and some advanced options. Essentially, we can change this color by just moving the wheel around. So, the actual spots will stay in the same point, but we can actually move things around to change the entire color very fast. Another thing we can do is when we press recolor is go into the advanced options. And here we'll have a lot more to work with. We can actually press this button here and change the hue itself. Change the saturation of them all while still keeping it in the color wheel. But the creme de la creme of coloring in Illustrator is now in the form of generative recolor. This is using AI to recolor your work. So we can say nice summer's day here and it will generate and you have to agree but it will generate some color palettes based upon what you've written there just like you would and everything else and it'll show you some previews here. We can actually add colors in here as well which will be a part of the generative recolor and we can press these select whichever ones we like. This is pretty great if I had this option here. So, I'm going to create another version of this artboard by dragging the whole artboard, selecting my whole piece of work, going into recolor, generative recolor, and I can actually change a lot of what this looks like based on a single prompt or based on a couple of buttons. There's no need to change the whole thing by hand. We can say salmon sushi, for instance. This is one of their default color aspects here. And now in this window when we click on these different ones it will change the color. Well let's say I don't know dark sky. We can completely change the color palette of our work on the fly using AI to help us reimagine what this could look like. It may seem like a lot of tools but in reality there isn't many tools that you'll actually need to use but it's good for us to know about. So let's dive straight in. Okay. The first two tools look very similar. This one is known as a selection tool. If I just bring in a box like so, or a square, this selection tool allows me to just simply select objects. The way that I see Adobe Illustrator is that it's a piece of paper. This white bit is a piece of paper and the selection tool, which is this main cursor. This allows us to literally pick up and drag. If we click and let go, it'll drag. It's a bit different to normal apps like Photoshop. In Photoshop, it's kind of like we have a layer system. In Illustrator, we do have a layer system up here. However, we can simply just click and drag shapes on our artboard here. Now, if you're in Adobe Illustrator and you've just started, you probably see this as your main window. It looks quite different. Now, I want to share why this happens. This is the new essentials view. Illustrator has different views for us depending on your preference and depending on what you're doing. And we can find these views up at window. We go down to workspace and we have all of these different ones. This is essentials. But if I go to essentials classic, it will open up this. And this is what we've always known, but recently they slimlined it down. I've kept it at this to make it easier for myself to know what's happening. But I will now switch it over to essentials just so you see what I'm doing in a way that you know. This is called the contextual taskbar and this was released last year in 2024. Anytime you click on a shape, this taskbar will change depending on the context. When we're in select mode, it will say add a shape and we can add sort of any shape here. And this just makes it easier for all of us to find a shape that we need to. You'll notice that I don't normally have this out because I'm so used to all the tools and where they are. I'm kind of like a boomer when it comes to Adobe Illustrator. But for anyone who's just starting out, such as yourself, it might be beneficial to have this because anytime you're in Illustrator, you may not know where to start. And we always start with a shape. You'll see this other button to the right of that called generate vectors beta. Now, what this does when we click on it, we get this big box that pops up. And we all know what this is. This is AI. I don't particularly use AI in Adobe Illustrator, but if you're a beginner and you just want to get an idea of something, let's say um a cheese plant uh with yellow and orange colors, we want it to be a subject. We want to change the details. It's pretty self-explanatory. We can choose from prompt inspiration, change the colors and tones. We want a warm tone, number of colors. We want let's say let's say two colors. And we can press generate. And what this will do is it will generate in full vector form an illustration based on AI. Regardless of your thoughts on AI, this is a pretty cool feature for anyone who just wants a simple idea. So here we go. We got a cheese plant that has been it doesn't look very good. Let's try the other ones. That will look slightly better. It needs more color variations. But as you can see, this is fully vector. We can keep zooming in. It's got anchor points, but it doesn't look the best. but it could do if you're in a bit of a tight spot. The next icon we have is artboards. Now, this can get quite confusing if you're new, but don't be overwhelmed by it. An artboard is simply an area. Remember when I said that this whole place is like a table. All this gray is a table. And this white part here is like a piece of paper that we've cut out. And then every shape is like another piece of paper that we're putting on top of that paper. So, we can manipulate it around. Well, an artboard tool essentially gives us more artboards and this is why Illustrator is so powerful. We can choose a different preset and there is a lot of presets for this. We can just simply duplicate our artboard or we can change some artboard options here. There is so much to dive into, but essentially an artboard allows us like so to just create another artboard. So maybe we have different versions of a logo but we don't want to create new files every time. Well, we can create new artboards. or if we're creating a presentation, new slides. Then we get this other button with three circles in there. This just shows us the properties panel on the right. As you see, it just highlighted it. It will pin this bar to a certain position or it will reset the bar's position. We can actually just drag this around wherever. Now, the cool thing is when we select an object, this will change. So, you'll see that it says generate vectors, gen shape fill beta, and edit path and repeat. We can do a repeat like this, like a grid. Essentially, all the tools that you'll most likely use will actually be in this taskbar here. So, that is the selection tool. There's a lot to do with this tool, but it allows you to select objects all the way throughout your canvas. The next tool is down here. This is called the direct selection tool. Now, this one gets people a bit confused, but essentially remember how vector works. We have one point known as a node or an anchor point like here, and we have another one. And if we create three of them like so and join them all together, it will create a shape. But essentially, it's just three nodes like so. Well, the direct selection tool is designed to essentially transform and change and manipulate different points. So, if we don't want to select this whole shape, but we want to move this part of the shape, we'll go to the direct selection tool, select this shape, and select this node. And we can move this node around. And we can do it with any of them as well. The direct selection tool also allows us to manipulate the handles of a shape as well. If I go to it now and I select this, you'll notice that this is one curved line, but it has some handles. I'll explain more about what these handles do and how to use them and whatever later on. But essentially, the direct selection tool is how we get these handles up and how we can move them and manipulate them around our work. Interestingly, in Illustrator, you'll get these tools on the side. However, when we see a little icon next to that tool, if we just click and hold, it will expand that to a different layer of groups. Now, when we see this icon next to a tool, we can actually hold down when we're clicking and it will give us even more tools. For instance, we've got the group selection tool. We've also got the lassle tool and we can actually just expand that by clicking that button there and keep that up here if we wanted to. The lasso tool will allow us to create a selection by just simply drawing a path around something which is sometimes needed if we have certain anchor points in a certain position. See this? I can select these two if I wanted to. Without that, I would have to select one node and if I go to select another one, it's not going to stick with the selection. So, we would have to press shift, which is what I most of the time do. The next tool is called the pen tool. And this one is really tricky for people who are just starting out and even seasoned designers. The reason why it's tricky is cuz it's very counterintuitive. It just doesn't seem to be like a pen. I don't know why they call it the pen tool because when we use a pencil tool, we can just draw and it will create a cool shape. But when we use the pen tool, it creates all these weird handles and whatnot, and it becomes very difficult to actually create shapes with it. Well, if you want to dive deeper into the pen tool and how it works, it can get kind of complicated. But if you want to, you can click the link in the description where it gives you a master class completely for free, another YouTube video for you to learn how to professionally use the pen tool. But essentially what it allows you to do is plot different points, either straight points or we can create curved points. This allows us to create custom shapes if we wanted to. And the best time to use that is by using a reference image and drawing around it. Again, if we hold down on this, we'll get something called the anchor point tool. And notice to the right of that, it actually gives us the key command or the shortcut, the hotkey. If I press this, it's just basically this other selector. This allows me to change the handles. It won't move the actual point. It will just change the handles like so. It's a really freaky tool and you won't need to use it very much, but it's there for you in case you need to create handles. Like for instance, here there's no handles. Well, I can just use this tool to create some handles here. And it allows us to really go crazy with it. Now, a tool that I would recommend you to use instead of the pen tool when first starting out is called the curvature tool. And this is a relatively new one that they've added. The curvature tool allows you to create curves easier. So, if I wanted to create a circle, I can do that. It will create the right amount of curve that I need to explain it. I'm going to actually show you how to use it. Now, I've got an image here that I've locked and I've changed the opacity so I can draw around it and make it a vector. This is not a vector image right now. It's just one that I got of Unsplash, a nice little flower. If I go to my curvature tool and I make sure that I've got a black stroke so I can see it. All I have to do is anytime there's a curve change, I just have to click and it will follow that curve like so. And I'm not using any hot keys to do this. It is simply just doing it by itself. If I want to change the angle or make a straight one, all I do is I press alt or option on the point and I create a curve. Do it again. There we go. And I just basically just map the points around it. It's a very genius tool to actually use cuz you can actually see the preview of the curve as you're doing it. And it makes for some pretty professional results as well. The next tool is the shapes tool. I call them primitives. They're called primitives because they're the prime shapes that you'll use in Illustrator. I can create a square. I could go all the way down to a star tool. And with the star tool, we can press the up and down keys to change these as well. And when we let go, you can actually see we get some more of these selection parts here. We can actually change the radius. We can change the curve of these as well if we wanted to. We can change the amount of points with these little graphics on the screen. We can do that with the polygon as well. The next tool is the pencil tool. And this is one that a lot of people love to use. This one allows you to simply draw paths like so with your mouse, which is pretty crazy. So without using the pen tool, you can actually draw paths. Now, it doesn't look great when you're using it with your mouse all the time. So something we can actually do with this is we can double click on that and we'll get this thing called the pencil tool options. This allows us to change the fidelity, whether we want it to be accurate to exactly where our mouse is pointing or whether we want it smoother. If I press smooth and let's create a nice blob, it's going to smooth out the path a little bit for us and it remains vector. If we hold on that, we get the blob brush tool. This is essentially a brush that we can just use. And again, if we double click on this, we can change the options of that too. Merge with selections. We can make it really smooth if we want to. And you can see how it changes and makes it nice and smooth. This is great for illustrations. We can change the size of the blob brush tool by using the left and right bracket keys on the right hand side there. The paintbrush tool is essentially the same as the blob brush tool. You shouldn't need to use it too much, but what it does is it actually instead of creates a live shape, it creates a stroke around it that we can manipulate afterwards. Then we have the text tool. select this and we can start writing anywhere and bring up text like so. If we hold on that text tool, we can actually go to the type on a path tool. Now, this is interesting because we're working in vectors and we have paths. If I just bring out a circle like so, and go to the type on a path tool and click on it, we can start writing text like so. And the text will go all around that circle. We can increase the size of that text. We can change the font of that text as well. and it will maintain it on that path. But we can do it for other paths as well. We can create this nice scurve here and we can actually write on this as well and it will follow that path. It makes typography a bit interesting. The vertical type tool is exactly what you think and you can see the icon change. It will just write vertically. The next tools are all about transforming. So we have this called the rotate tool. If I press the rotate tool, it will simply rotate at that axis right there. Now, we can click on this shape wherever and it will rotate from that point. You see, from any axis that you want, but it automatically goes to the center at first. The scale tool is very similar. It will allow us to scale our shapes, but it is a bit strange to use. The reflect tool is the same as that, allowing us to reflect two shapes at one point. The shear tool will allow us to shear the object or move it from a weird perspective like so. It kind of get this crazy cool looking weird patterns happening. The next tool is the eraser tool. It's very very self-explanatory. It's a brush tool like so. And let me just bring it up. So, we can increase the size with the right bracket button. And if we just click on the selected shape and erase, it will simply erase those shapes. The scissor tool is a bit different. It allows us to make cuts in paths or if we have a perfect circle like so, we can use the tool to separate certain paths from each other at the points. The next tool is called the shape builder tool and this is one that a lot of logo designers use. Illustrator works a bit differently. We have something called boolean operations which in vector terms, illustrator terms, it's a yes or no. It means true or false. Now, if I wanted to create a cresant moon, I could either draw it out or I could draw the base shape like this circle here. And then I could duplicate this shape. So, let's duplicate the shape. But let's change the fill to white like the background. I want to have this shape here. But the problem is right now this shape is essentially just one big shape with a white one in it. That wouldn't do well. Well, we can either use the pathfinder function. The pathfinder is over here. And this allows you to basically unite these shapes together to merge them to subtract shapes. So, delete shapes from other shapes and all sorts of other crazy complicated things. Well, the shape builder tool makes it really easy. Let's say this is not white, but it is blue. Let's select both of these shapes and go to the shape builder tool. You'll notice that my cursor has a plus button. When that plus button is there, that means if I was to hover over something, you'll notice it's separating the shapes and it's highlighting them. Well, I could unite these shapes together by clicking and dragging. If I press option or alt, you'll notice that cursor changes from a plus to a minus. That means if I click with that held, it's going to subtract that shape. So, if I want to create the cresant moon, I can create two shapes like this to create a perfect cresant moon by simply just dragging like so. And that has cut that shape out really easily. But let's say I want a block at the bottom of this. Well, if I want to create a block like so under the moon, so it looks like it's rising. Well, that's two shapes. We can see that when we highlight it. We can either go to the pathfinder option and press unite, which will unite those shapes together so they are one shape instead of two. Or for more complicated shapes, we can go to the shape builder tool and just simply just drag them together like so. Now we have one shape that's united. The next tool is the gradient tool. We all know what this means. This means adding a gradient. Let's choose the gradient type and we can move it. Pretty self-explanatory. We can move it. We can create a new one. We can change the gradient style over here on the right. And we can always go back to that gradient as well if we want to. Something else we have is the mesh tool, which allows us to create a gradient mesh, which is a bit complicated, but essentially allows us to create 3D looking meshes. If I just keep pressing with that mesh button tool here, you'll see it's creating kind of like a 3D mesh. Now, if I select one of these nodes, change its fill to like a pink, you'll notice, oh, hang on a minute. We're sort of getting this weird gradient look. We can manipulate that mesh as well. The next tool is called the dimension tool. Let's say I wanted to know how big this box was on my artboard. And this is really important for manufacturing or blueprints. When you click it, you'll notice we get this other box that pops up just here. This shows us the linear
dimensions. This allows us to do angular dimensions and circular or radial dimensions here. When I click from one spot to another spot, I can drag out over here and it will give me the exact dimensions of that shape. If I have a circle for instance, I can do the radial dimensions as well. The next button is the eyropper tool. This essentially allows us to sample shapes. So let's say we've got these two shapes. This one's got a fill. This one's got a stroke. Well, I want this one to have a stroke. Let's sample that. Or I want this one to have a fill or that black color. The width tool is the next one. If we have a stroke like so, it's just one linear path. This stroke weight is four points. But let's say I want it to kind of get thicker in the middle and gradient out, taper out. Well, width tool allows us to do that. Selecting it and going to a stroke, you can click and move. Boom. And it creates that width feeling there. Pretty cool. Now, I've got some awful looking shapes here, but the next tool will explain it. This one's called the blend tool. This allows us to blend two options together or to two shapes together. If I press this shape and this shape, it will blend the shape and the color. And we can still manipulate where that shape is to create a cool looking effect. This is the artboard tool, and we've already shown you this. And this is the zoom tool. And under the zoom tool, we have the hand tool, which is normally just spacebar. If we want to quickly get around our document, just press spacebar, and that will bring us the hand tool there. If you want to zoom, press Z or Z if you're American, and you can zoom in and out. I hope you guys enjoyed this video and found it helpful. Please subscribe if you haven't already, and let me know if you would like to see part four of Adobe Illustrator for beginners. See you soon. [Music] Stop. [Music]
