00:00Hello, my name is Dan Scott, and this is the Adobe Illustrator Advanced course
00:05During your course, you'll go from an okay user in Illustrator to a super duper, super awesome superhero in Illustrator
00:12So, who am I? I'm Dan Scott, I am an Adobe certified instructor, and I've been a designer for about 16 years now
00:18In the course, you'll be given a brief specifically for you so that you can build beautiful graphics, uh, alongside the course videos, so that you can practice what you're learning, plus build projects that'll be great for your portfolio
00:30You'll learn how to use artificial intelligence to boost your Creativity and ideation, you'll learn the quick way to take hand-drawn sketches and vectorize and color them
00:36Partway through the course, you'll have the building blocks ready to set you loose on a huge variety of beautiful effects and techniques, and we'll all just agree to ignore the weird costumes, deal? Just focus on the cool effects, not down in a caterpillar suit
00:46We'll make beautiful charts and graphs for your documents
00:56There is so much in this course, I want to go through it all here, but you'll have to check out the course outline for the full list of topics
01:06So, if you're okay at Illustrator, but you know, That there is tons more potential trapped inside of it
01:16Uh, join me for this Illustrator Advance course and become an Illustrator [Music] superhero
01:21All right, you've made it inside the course, welcome, you're in here with me
01:27Uh, to get started, I want you to download the exercise files
01:31Okay, there'll be a link on the page here somewhere
01:35Okay, download exercise files, unzip them, get ready for the course
01:38Um, inside those um exercise files, there'll be a shortcut sheet, okay, you'll see it labeled in there, and you can print that off and stick it next to your computer to help along with the course, scribble down any kind of New, obscure ones that are relevant to you
01:44Okay, circle the ones on there that you like
01:50Okay, so they're in the exercise files
01:54Uh, the other thing you can do is speed me up or slow me down
01:59Okay, some people think I speak fast, some people think I speak slow
02:02I don't know how I can be both, but hey, there you go
02:06Uh, there'll be a cog in the bottom corner, you can just turn it up to whatever speed you like, look for a little gear icon and look for a speed
02:09Uh, also let's reset our preferences, 'cause, uh, so that yours looks like mine
02:14We'll jump into the computer now and do it together
02:17Let's jump in
02:20First up, you don't have to do this if you don't
02:23Want to mess with your Illustrator setup? Here, we're going to reset a bunch of stuff to the factory
02:26Um, I'm going to do it now so that mine's more likely to be like yours, and if you want to follow along exactly, you can do this as well, but if you're comfortable enough with an Illustrator, you don't have to do this
02:31First thing we're going to do is just open up any old document
02:36On a Mac, go up to Adobe Illustrator and go to, no, yes, we are
02:40We're going to go to settings, and we're going to go to the general
02:44Okay, if you're on a PC, go to edit, down to preferences, down the bottom here, okay, and go to the same thing, general
02:48Okay, we go and all I
02:52What I want you to do is click these two, reset all warning dialogue boxes, and then reset preferences
02:56I've already done mine
02:59It'll ask you to restart Illustrator, and then come back in here
03:03So once you've done that, okay, come back in again and open up a blank dock and go to window
03:08I'm going to go to workspaces, okay, and I'm going to be working on this class in Essentials, and I'm going to make sure I hit reset Essentials, so it kind of rejigs it how the factory is, and yours might match mine a lot better
03:13Couple of other things is there's a toolbar on the top that's really handy
03:17It goes away when you reset Essentials, you might
03:21Have turned it on, you might have never noticed it, so this is a good one
03:24So go to window, and along the top here, there's a couple of different options
03:28This one here, called control, gives you this top app bar
03:30It's just really handy when you're working, I think, especially when you're advanced
03:33There's lots of good stuff up there
03:35You don't have to have it on, pretty much all of it can be found in the properties panel, but I like to have both options
03:37The other handy one is over here, the toolbar
03:43This is the basic toolbar, and it's just got the tools that people use the most, or the latest tool that they're trying to show off, okay
03:49So this will change a little bit, so if there's something in this course and you're like, "Hey, it's not the, it's not over here anymore," it'll be hiding under these three little dots
03:54You can click on them and you might find it being bumped over to here, okay? You can just click on it and say, "All right, I want the polar coordinates tool," which I don't use very much, okay? But I can start using it, okay, by just clicking it in there
04:00I can click undo
04:07You can add them to the toolbar by clicking the three little dots and say, "Man, I use this all the time." I'm going to click, hold, hold, drag, drag, drag, and find a spot for it if you want to get rid
04:13Of a tool, I'm going to click over here in the background, and just actually, I'm going to go back into here, and then you can click and drag it off into no man's land, and it just kind of comes away
04:24What I do want you to do though, is so yours looks like mine, is up in the same thing, go to three little dots, and go to the top right up here, and say, let's switch to advance, cuz we're advanced now, we're no longer basic
04:35Another one to check before we move on, I'm going to grab the rectangle tool and just draw out a rectangle, okay? I'm going to go to my move tool, and you'll see this thing here, it's called the contextual task bar, kind of
04:42Whatever you have selected will give you options that it thinks you might want to use, okay? Uh, this thing might be turned off, okay? Uh, under window, go down to contextual task bar to turn it on, okay? Problem is, it's kind of in the way
04:49I find it in the way, anyway
04:56You might not, so I'm going to grab the type tool, drag the type box, okay? That's really awesome, but often I don't, it's kind of covering this
05:04I like to just grab this edge here, can you see this like little shady dot thing? Okay, click, hold, and just drag it somewhere, then it won't appear underneath and kind of in the way
05:10I just like it, I like it, it's awesome, I just like it down
05:16The bottom here, if you do wanted to get it to snap again, see these little dots here, you can say more options and say, "Let's reset that bar," okay, and it will go back to being close
05:22It's not right or wrong, you might like it really close to it, that's actually really handy, often doesn't take me long before I end up dragging it out of the way
05:27Last one is, there are lots of class projects in the course, and just in case you're kind of newish, the way to save those class projects in this course, okay, we'll do exporting advanced at the end of the course, but I want to do this at the beginning, okay, you've made this beautiful design is
05:39Wonderful, okay, and I want to export this to be sent in as a class project, so I'm going to go to file, and we're going to use the one that says "export, export as." That's a real simple one, we'll do more advanced ones later on, and in here you can save a PNG, is probably the best, or a JPEG if they're getting a little big, okay, and that will be enough to be uploaded for the course, but again, we'll go through advanced exporting
06:06You'll see a category at the end of the course that has a whole bunch of cool exporting options, but it's towards the end, so that'll do for now
06:13All right, that's it for now, boring stuff over, let's get into The fun course, actually quick outro
06:17All right, let's get into the course, but actually quickly before we do, you spot him there
06:22Is he? See that black ball over there? You'll see him in the first videos
06:26He's home sick, sick, look how sick he is, so sick
06:31Say hi to everyone, camera there
06:35Hi, wait, where's the camera? There
06:39Oh, hi, bye
06:43Say, enjoy the course, enjoy, enjoy the course, nailed it
06:46Hey everyone, uh, in this video we are going to get a brief that we can use throughout this course, not essential, but I think, um, having a brief when we're doing these projects rather than just following me, I don't know, it's going to make some really
06:58Good portfolio pieces, but also, I think it really helps cement it in your head when you actually have to think about your own project
07:03So these projects are, uh, unique for you
07:07Okay, so if you go to randomprojectgenerator.com, it's a website me and my team have built
07:11What you're looking for is Illustrator Advanced, next click generate my project
07:15All right, looks like I've got the city of Granada and I've got a donut shop, so that's the small business that I'm going to be designing for throughout this course
07:21You'll get something different, if you don't like it, you should probably just keep it
07:26Okay, working on a Client that's not perfect, might, you know, something that might be outside of your comfort zone is probably good
07:32Uh, there is a retry button, do not click it more than three times, okay? Um, but grab this, have a read through
07:40The short version is that we're going to design lots of little things throughout this course for this company, okay? And yours will be different, okay? But basically, it's kind of like a hipster style, kind of business, kind of a local one, not a big international brand
07:51Have a read through, I've tried to give you a persona, okay, of like what kind of person we're designing for, so keep them in mind when you
07:56Are designing it and bring on the course
08:01Me, all right, let's get started
08:06Hi everyone, in this video, we are going to look at some of the artificial intelligence that is built into Illustrator
08:11Okay, specifically in this video, we're going to look at Text to Vector
08:15You might have bumped into it and played around with it a little bit, and it kind of works
08:19This video, we're going to kind of master it to get it to do our bidding
08:23We're going to start with some basic prompts, we're going to get those prompts to match some of the styles that are on our artboards
08:32I'm going to show you some cool tricks where we can pull Styles, see
08:40This here, this is a vector graphic, but the designs and colors is pulled from this graffiti, cool huh? It gets better, look at this illustration style, that's the sample image, and look, these are the vectors that were pulled from it, they match the colors and the style super well
08:48I find it's a way easier way to use, um, some of this generative stuff to give it a sample image, rather than to spend ages in the prompts
08:53The prompts are good, picking styles for from references is even better
08:58All right, let's jump in and become the boss of text to vector in Illustrator
09:03All right, to get started, uh, in your exercise files there's a File in here called "text to vector 1," can you open up that Illustrator file for me? Uh, it might say that it's an older version of Illustrator
09:11I back saved it so that everyone can open it without problems
09:16Um, we're going to start on this first artboard here, this white doc, okay? And just a quick run through, um, well, we'll even start with a tip
09:22When using it, you can go and use it in your properties panel
09:29I find it tricky in here, okay? It's like all this other stuff in here, so I'm going to go to window and I'm going to go down to, uh, text vector, okay, and have it as its own panel, and I'm going to clear out the thing that I was demoing
09:37Playing with, and the other thing is, is that you can actually just type in, let's type in "candle," and it will just generate it on the kind of nearest dartboard that you're working on
09:43Okay, you can give it a little bit of help
09:46Let me speed through this
09:48There we go
09:51Okay, so it's great
09:53Okay, it's given us, uh, at the moment we're on subject
09:57Okay, it's given us a candle
10:01Um, it's given us just a size
10:05You can say, "Actually, I want a small one." Okay, so you drag out the rectangle first, doesn't really matter what's in it, okay, whether it, mine's got a white fill and a, um, no stroke, it doesn't matter, but with it selected and you do the exact same
10:09thing, it'll try and squish it into there, so you can get the proportions right
10:14Here you go, got a small candle, and this is more important when we are doing things like the scene option, this one here
10:20So subject is, think of it as like, yeah, object or creature or illustration, regular old thing
10:26I'm going to draw out the size of the artboard, 'cause I want the scene to fill it, otherwise it just makes a square
10:32So I'm going to say, so candle make his shop in steampunk style, okay? I've had subject, I'm going to go to scene and do it again
10:37There you go, so scene will set the background, seems funny one, it's all very vague and stuff, it's
10:43Cool, it's a good starting point, but if we draw the rectangle first, at least we get it kind of like cropped into the kind of shape that we want
10:49Now, I'm going to just move this over, and some of the big, wow, the big L things that I had is when you've got nothing on your artboard, you get kind of like some sort of new shape that kind of came out of whatever you've typed in the prompt
11:01If you're like me and you are not as clean and tidy and you're really messy, so let's go to artboard 2
11:08Okay, do the same thing and grab my rectangle tool
11:14I like drawing the rectangle first, I don't know why, you don't have to, but if I do it over here and I Say I want a candle, I'm going to make sure it's on subject and I hit generate
11:21You know what I didn't realize for a long time is that there's an option under the style setting here that actually, let's have a look, can you see what it's done? Okay, it's gone in, by default, this is, this is on at the moment, by default, it might be off, I'm not sure
11:34Okay, you have to check yours, but under Styles and settings, okay, in here, the match active artboard style is on, and it's really clear here, can you see that it's, things just happen to be on my artboard, not because I wanted to match them, it's just they were there, I was like working on
11:41Another project, it's cool
11:49You can see this kind of skull pattern going on and picked all the color colors from it
11:57It's very similar to this stuff, so you just got to be mindful if you're looking for like some sort of unique character or subject or scene, you need to make sure that is turned off
12:09So if I go plop, turn it off and do the exact same thing, rectangle tool, actually what I'm going to do is duplicate this one, so I'm going to select it, hold down my option, cter Mac, oh cter PC, you stay there, go back to this one here and I can say with it off, do the exact same thing, do it again please, you can see there it's gone and kind of
12:22Created something new, so that's one thing to be mindful of
12:25Uh, match active style
12:29Now, what I find even more useful is this one here, says pick styles from a reference
12:32Okay, so let's go and do this one up here
12:34So we're going to go to the graffiti
12:37I'm going to draw a rectangle
12:39I use the M key, it's a shortcut for M Square, um, but so hit the M key, draw a rectangle, and I'm going to make it a bit smaller, and I'm going to do, I want a subject
12:47Okay, I want to pick a style, okay, and can you see it highlights the, um, the image
12:55Okay, I don't have to be outboard and just click on it, okay, and you can pick it from anything
13:01I'm picking from a, um, pixel
13:07Image, it's brilliant, okay? And I'm going to go "candle," and I'm going to hit "generate," and we are going to get ready
13:13Oh my goodness, look at that! It's gone through and like, picked the style from the JPEG, it's so good
13:18Let's have a look at some of the other options
13:23Oh, good, good, good, the colors
13:31It's not just the colors, though, can you see it's tried to do some graffiti, is kind of stuff
13:40It's a really good way to kind of like, even if you're not using this image, it's a sample image, okay? Even if you're not using it, it might be just the way to get where you want to go rather than using the prompt, 'cause sometimes you're like, prompt with Graffiti on the side using vibrant colors, but not that color
13:48Okay, you can use this to kind of, you know, just use it as a style guide, and let's do this one here
13:52This one's pretty awesome, so let's go here, rectangle tool, let's draw candle
13:57I'm going to have to reset the style, and then I'm going to click the styles again, click on this
14:01This will change, they're changing this panel quite a lot, so you'll find it, there'll be a style set in here
14:04So I've picked my style, I'm going to hit the same thing
14:07All I've got on my prompt is candle
14:10I'm not sure if you've done it
14:13I've tried to like black and white sketch drawing type thing, and it's Getting better, but it's so much quicker and easier just to grab an image that kind of looks like what you want and look at that
14:23Oh, so good, look at it! I'm just so impressed with myself
14:29And let's have a look at some of the old
14:35I'm going to hold down my option key on Mac, or Alt on PC, to drag out a couple of copies, because it's nice to kind of, instead of just flicking through them, is just to have them all up on screen and go, "Oh, that one kind of works
14:40I love the color they added
14:44Where do they pull that color from?" Not sure, but it's a great complimentary color
14:48What I find it useful for as well is when you're designing icons, this is one of the
14:51Designs from the Illustrator Essentials of course, and Melvin Neos, okay, his turtle, love it
14:55Okay, I'm going to go here, here, and let's say I need a corresponding icon that is a candle, so I'm going to go to Icon, okay, and I'm going to say let's reset the style, let's pick it from the turtle
15:06Okay, I find icon sometimes it's good and it gives you way too much detail, so under icon basically it's what it's really doing is, can you see the minimal versus complex, so icon, I don't know, I feel like it's just a drag down subject, which is kind of what it is for me, it's a little hit and miss, so if you find yours not as great, me too, it will get
15:16Better though, the cool thing about this tool is that this is the worst it's going to be, so it's going to get better
15:27So I pick the style from that, let's go generate icon minimal vectors, see what we get
15:33Okay, I give it to you, Illustrator, you've done a pretty good job this time
15:39Find out when I'm using it in my own kind of work, maybe candle is just a nice simple thing that it can make
15:45I'm finding it's generating a little bit much detail, it's not perfect, it's got the stroke on the outside that doesn't really happen there
15:50I'm hoping that will get better as well, but man, you can't deny, look how good these are
15:54Hey everyone, it is
15:59Class project time
16:03Uh, for those of you who haven't done any of my courses before, um, I create a class project after some of the videos where it makes sense to give you a project to do
16:08I set some tasks so that you can practice what you've learned, rather than just follow me along, you get to actually participate, and you'll learn more
16:14You'll have something you can actually use for your portfolio
16:20So yeah, um, you will find the class projects in the exercise files
16:25Okay, there is a document in here, PDF, so download the exercise files and you will find the uh, class projects in there
16:30Okay, they'll build out as we go through
16:34The course, so number one, I'll show you what we're going to make first, and then I'll show you the description
16:39So, how cool is this? Okay, so basically, we want to use what we learned in the last video, which was, let me zoom out, um, you know, we, we did that style where we did a candle, and I wanted to match the style of, um, an illustration or a drawing or a photograph
16:55So I want you to do the same thing, but I want you to use, where is it gone? I want you to use the brief that you were assigned earlier, so go to that randomprojectgenerator.com
17:01Okay, get your, remember I got donuts, I can't even remember where from Granada
17:07Okay, and so, That's the one I'm going to be working on, so whatever yours is, find an object that kind of embodies what you're making
17:13Um, doesn't have to be too literal, like mine's pretty easy, it's a donut, and yours might be a little bit more obscure
17:19Figure out an object, and I want you to find at least three images that have kind of a visual style
17:27I went for the stippled look, I found that 'cause it looked cool, found that 'cause it looked cool, and we're using it as inspiration, so we're not really, you know, just go off and find anything anywhere
17:33Okay, type in things or moods or artists that you like, okay, bring in the images into Illustrator
17:39File, place, if you haven't done it before, okay? And then use what we learned in the last one, where we go and use the style pick from it, okay? And I typed, I put a donut with sunglasses, I don't know why, I feel like this brand and Granada needs um sunglass wearing doughnut, but go through practice with a few very different images, and then I want you upload them both to the class project and share with me on social media
17:49I can't wait to see what you guys do
17:59I'm so happy with myself with my little sunglass donut
18:08So quickly again, um, make sure that you've got your brief from the random project generator, okay, for your small
18:12Business, think of an object that represents it
18:16You can change it later on, don't spend too much time on that
18:19Using that object, use the text "Vector," okay, that we just learned in the last video, and create, uh, three or more graphics, okay, or graphic styles
18:30You can do loads of them, just kind of cut it down
18:40I want to see a zillion, billion kind of nice, distinct visual styles, okay? And yeah, then I want you to either take a screenshot or save an image and upload it to the assignment section here on the site, okay? And as well, if you would, social media and tag me in Instagram and Twitter and join the Facebook group and the LinkedIn group, whichever is your better flavor, and share it on there
18:50Let everyone know that you're doing the Illustrator Advanced, because I bet you they're going to go, "How'd you do that?" You can tell them we did it together in this course, and the one thing is, include the sample image, because that's what really makes this awesome, is you can actually see where you got your inspiration from, and have a look at, see what other people have done as well, because it's, it's amazing to kind of go, "Oh man, that's kind of what I want," and you can go off and, I don't know, we can all help each other
19:02All right, enjoy messing around with text vector
19:14And stealing, uh oh, we're going to use the word appropriate, we're not stealing, okay, we're borrowing um styles from images, it's very cool, have some fun, and I'll see you in the next video
19:20Is this homework? It is not, it's totally not homework, it's fun practice, it's very different
19:26All right, next video
19:32Hi everyone, in this video we're going to use text to vector to make patterns like these, okay, we're going to end into some props, okay, we're going to look at the pros and cons, the things that it's good at, the tricks to kind of make it work, plus at the end I'll show you some more kind of tips and tricks for using any of the
19:50Sort of artificial intelligence in Illustrator, there's credits that you need to look out for, variations to tidy up, but let's jump in and start making pens
19:56All right, to get started, go to your exercise files and open up the text Vector O2, working on the second one, okay? And just make sure under window and down the bottom here, open up the text to Vector panel, okay? And we're going to be looking at this patent option here, it works differently than the other three, okay? So patent has its own special abilities
20:19Um, we're going to select the shirt down the bottom here, okay? So just click it once and we're going to start
20:23With it, it's really good at doing especially organic and kind of randomized abstract stuff
20:27It's a little less good at doing kind of really geometric patterns
20:31Um, so let's go floral
20:35You don't need to write pattern, so I'm just going to type in floral and and see how it goes
20:39And there you go, got some floral pattern
20:41It's pretty bananas, good
20:43Oh, I do, do like it
20:46So great for flowers
20:49What you'll find is that it totally ignores the background color, so whatever color is in here originally just kind of starts again
20:52I'll show you how to specifically pick colors in a second
20:57Um, I just want to show you some of the buts that it
21:02gets not as good, so let's look at, I was experimenting with like, her and bone and like, hounds tooth, kind of like a, a really typical fabric pattern
21:07It knows what it's meant to do, but it ends up with suboptimal results at the moment
21:13You give it a try, there you go, this is kind of the thing, but not quite the thing
21:18What it's really good at as well is being very generic, so I can say gardening, okay, so type in gardening, bam, mine's done
21:22Uh, we're jump cutting in this video, so if yours is taking longer, it does take longer
21:26H Jason's jump cutting it for us, thanks Jason
21:30Um, you can see here because I just typed in gardening as a general
21:33Kind of theme, it gave us cool gardening stuff
21:36Okay, it's brilliant
21:39Um, it does get lost sometimes, like I was like, oh, I'll put in pajamas
21:42You can see I was looking for like pajama style stuff, but I actually just got a collection of pajamas
21:47You can put in groups of things, so I can say I would like a fox with a flame, with, ah, what else do I want? Fox, flame, bottle
21:53Okay, kind of from the Illustrator Essentials, of course, that was one of the brands where I was working on, at least
22:00Okay, and you don't have to put comma in
22:05Okay, you just put in groups of words, and you can see I've got a fox, I've got a bottle, and I got some flames
22:09Oh, it's very Cool, ah, there you go
22:13Actually, let's do a test together
22:16I didn't think you needed commas, but let's add them to see whether it breaks it up a little bit better
22:19I'm not sure why I had a beach ball in there, there you go
22:22In this case, it actually did a lot better by kind of separating them and not kind of maybe thinking it's one whole sentence or one word, there we go
22:27There's always like the third one seems to be a lot more random than the first two, but it's so good, I really love it
22:33One thing you're going to want to do is to be able to control the colors, okay? So this is what this little option is here, okay, color controls, okay? If I Click on this, there are some basic presets, so let's go, let's go for, uh, pastel, okay, and that's all I'm going to change and hit generate again
22:39There you go, so you can influence it in a kind of a generic color way
22:45Oh, I like that one
22:51Also, though, you can go through and actually specify colors
22:55Now, I've got some colors over here that I want to use
22:58I can go to specify colors
23:01They need to be in your swatches panel
23:04At the moment, there's not an eyedropper tool that I can find at the moment, okay, so I want to add them to my swatches first
23:07So over here, I'm going to select these three, okay, and I'm going to go to my swatches panel window
23:20Down to swatches, and I'm going to say here, I'm going to say add selected colors, okay? And if I drag this down here, there are my colors there, one, two, and three
23:30So now over here, let's close down this swatches panel, let's go over here, selecting on this, you specify colors, I can say yep, and then yep, actually you got to do them one at a time, hit plus again, yep
23:38And it will use your colors, kind of okay, like it's going to use them as a general rule, not a real absolute
23:51So if you're using like Pantone's or specific colors, it's not good at like just actually only using those colors, it kind of uses it to kind of influence the colors rather
23:57Than actually do it, let's have a look, there you go
24:01So you can see it's not perfect, you can see they've used different shades of it all
24:05Hopefully, a bit more control will come over that, but still, so cool
24:08You can limit the colors as well, so I can say actually 30 is too much, especially if you want to pull it apart afterwards and there's just too much going on
24:14Let's turn it down to three
24:20It doesn't work with three, there's just not enough detail for it to do what it wants to
24:25It's okay, you can see there even with a specific three colors, it's gone and used black as well, so yeah, it's, you can't be super tight, you can edit it
24:32Afterwards, of course, okay, I'll show you how to do that in a sec, but you'll find your, what is a good limit of colors for the things that you're making? If it's kind of really simple flat flowers, then you can go for like the three colors
24:44We've got a fox that has no face now, because there's just not enough colors for it to do its thing
24:47There you go, that seems like a really good mix
24:51It's tied into the colors, there's enough variation in there to get all the detail
24:55Oh, I like it
24:58So a bit more advanced stuff, let's look at what happens when these patterns are made
25:02If you haven't done patterns before, we did a little bit in
25:07Essential scores, we'll get another section later on in this course, um, under, um, it's called color and patterns, so jump to that if you are dying to get more into patterns
25:12The basic one, while we're here though, is, um, once it's generated these, if you go, you might have seen it when we went to window and swatches, okay, you'll see that they're actually being put in here, so we've got loads of swatches in here
25:24So if you are working on this and experimenting and then sending this to somebody, you might want to go through and delete some of the, um, swatches if you're not using them, so I'm going to click off in the background, so
25:30I got nothing selected, and then I'm going to click on this and hit delete, okay, and you can remove them from your swatches panel
25:35The other thing you can do is, if you want to edit this now, if you're like, "Oh, I like this, but I don't want to go and mess with it," okay, it'll be in here under your swatches, okay, so this is my text patterns, the last one that I made, okay, you can drag it out, and there you go, okay
25:48This is like, this is no longer a patent, it's just the shapes, okay, so I can go in here, and I'm going to go to command or control Y for outline mode, you can see this is all vector, good stuff now, so we can get in here with our direct
26:01Selection tool and start messing around with things, mess around with them badly
26:07Okay, just for instance, okay, we can go through and start messing with these things by dragging them out of the pens
26:13Again, we'll go into pens a little bit more in the course, but I didn't want to leave you hanging here
26:19This is kind of more general for all of the AI features in Illustrator
26:25Okay, the first one is the variations, so if I click on this again and I open up my, um, either let's just twirl this down
26:30Okay, rather than the panel, you can see here I've got all these variations, they're cool, but say you don't need them anymore, they Are increasing the file size, okay, and you might just not need them, you don't want anybody to see them, you don't need them, you can just go through, click on them, and say let's say delete variation
26:42The other thing to note about using um text Vector due to this pattern, but any of the actual AI features, okay, I say AI gets confusing, right, artificial intelligence is what I mean, so any of the uh text Vector stuff here in Illustrator or in Photoshop or Firefly, they actually um cost credits now, okay, so it costs, it's quite expensive for this to actually be done by Adobe, it's not actually happening on your computer
26:54When you type "Fox" and "beach balls," um, it actually goes off to Adobe
27:06Adobe processes it on servers, and then they send it back to you, and they are giving everybody a certain amount of credit as part of their licensing
27:13It changes
27:19I'm on the kind of generic, uh, you know, all software Creative Cloud license
27:25I get something like, I think it was a thousand
27:31I'm not going to say the number, even though I have, because they're still working through this and what they're actually going to give people
27:37I have never bumped into that limit, so you can go into your account settings, um, and check how many credits you got left and how many, uh, Apply to your account, because you might run out, you won't, you know, they've done lots of research about the uses so far
27:43I use it all the time and I've never got anywhere near close to my limit, and it's a monthly limit that will kind of roll, uh, reset again every month, so just so you know, there are, um, credits, and they're called generative credits at the moment
28:01So go and have a look how much you've got as part of your plan, how much you got left, and last one before we go, is there's one thing that AI doesn't seem to be able to do anywhere at any time
28:08I'll show you, there you go, hands
28:13Don't ask it to make hands, because hands end up looking Really weird, you end up with bent fingers and fingers going the wrong way, and did anybody notice that? Let's move, do this
28:19You notice her hand, this is the first time you've seen it, you're like, "Oh, okay, so hands are really, uh, averagely done in any sort of artificial intelligence." I don't know why that is
28:25This problem, one last thing I'm going to do is, I like this one here
28:31Oh, that one's good, no hands
28:42I'm going to copy and paste the rectangle, and I'm going STI right over the top
28:53I'm going to fill it with, I'm going to fill it with black, and I'm going to lower the opacity, okay? And I'm going to select both of them, and I'm going to Right click and go to arrange and send them to the back, okay, just to have a bit of, I don't know, visual difference between the two, my poorly shaped, uh, rectangle, there we go
29:00All right, that's it
29:07Uh, time to go find some coffee and donuts, right? See you in the next video
29:14Hello, it is me in the real life, uh, little interlude here just to see you enjoying it and then see if you'd hit the like and subscribe button, that way next time I release another long form video like this one it comes up in your YouTube radar
29:22Also know that while this video is kind of longish, this is actually only the first small part of the larger
29:27Illustrator Advanced course, I give away this chunk so you can be more awesome, but if you want to go further, more class projects, uh, design challenges, the all-important certificate, okay, you can check out the link in the description for there
29:40There's 100 plus videos, check that out if you want to go further, but for now, continue on with the video
29:46Dan, okay, whatever way it goes, go that way
29:53Hi everyone, class project time, I want you to create a pattern background, okay, we're going to make a push-pull sign, uh, for the, uh, store that you're doing your design work for
29:57Mine is the Granada donut shop, yours will be different
30:01You've used the uh, random project generator to get something
30:06Okay, so just make something in the background, and it's the push-pull signs that go on the doors
30:11I don't mind how they look, what shape they are, circles, squares, rounded corners
30:17I've put like a, just a box that matches the background with the opacity down, filled with black, just to give it the kind of darker look
30:21Depending on the patterns that you end up getting made for you, you might not need it
30:25The main thing is, I want you to experiment with the pattern maker, have a playground with limiting the colors, typing stuff in, have some fun
30:30What you will bump into, though, is one little problem, like let's move this off here
30:34If you move this, this might happen to you
30:39You'd be like, "Oh, how do I stop that?" Surprisingly, it's quite tricky, it's in a weird place, so I'm going to go to, I'm going to show you where
30:44Go to window and go to the, um, where is it? Pattern options, okay? And in pattern option, no, not in pattern options, it's under window, transform, so open up the transform panel, okay? And in the transform panel, I'm going to have this selected, okay? I'm going to say, you little fly out menu, okay? Under here, there's the option, the default is transform object only, just means when I'm dragging it
31:06Moving it around, it only moves the object, not the pattern
31:09What we want is, we could just do the pattern only
31:13We want both, we want to move it, so everything comes along, that feels more natural
31:16Check, your default might be different to my default
31:20I'm pretty sure that's out, it just, it looks weird by default
31:23This is the way I like it
31:26Cool, so I'm going to put mine back, back together, and let's have a quick look
31:30It's in your class projects, so make a push pull sign, use the text vector, just in a screenshot, or save them both and upload them to the assignment section and share them with me on social media
31:34All right, enjoy messing
31:38Around with the uh patent maker
31:42We do have a section member later on that goes into more detail about patents
31:46It can be hard to know how to group these things up in these courses, so it comes a little bit later
31:49Just have fun messing with the artificial intelligences
31:52All right, I'll see you in the next video
31:56Hi everyone, in this video we are going to look at generative recolor in Adobe Illustrator
31:59Now, we covered this a little bit in the essentials course
32:03In this video, we're going to take it that next step further, the advanced version
32:07Okay, we're going to look at adding kind of specific colors to coach the AI to get it
32:12To do what we want, plus once we get results, I'll show you ways of kind of adjusting it, brightness and saturation, if it's close but not quite right, plus some of the weird things that it does and how to get around it
32:17All right, let's jump in
32:23All right, first up, open a file called "Gen Recolor 01." It's in your exercise files, looks like this
32:28I made a little logo lockup for, um, the exercise
32:33I want you to select this top one here, and we're going to find the recolor panel
32:35It's pretty easy to find
32:38They've got loads of options
32:41Uh, there it is there in my contextual task bar
32:46It's over here in my properties panel
32:51You can go to edit, go to edit
32:54Colors, generative recolor, however you get there, often you get there on this panel
32:56Okay, what we want to go is to the generative, uh, recolor one
32:59So, generative recolor is the artificial intelligence kind of helping us recolor stuff, it's very cool
33:02Okay, there's some sample prompts down here, let's click the first one
33:05Huh, what is this one? Salmon sushi
33:07I find it very hard to know how to describe this, it seems very random, like how can these all be salmon sushi? Um, I guess there's a salmon color in there, I guess that's it then
33:14But anyway, if you find it difficult, I find it difficult
33:24I, what was I doing? It was really weird, like I did
33:34Urban, I like the word Urban, I don't know why, gives me a color scape that I like, but if I go Vivid Urban, okay, these colors here, like okay, but if I went, what was the other one, it was Urban, it was vibrant Urban, okay, I really liked, every time I hit vibrant Urban, gave me really good colors, and then Vivid Urban didn't, so we'll get better at understanding the prompts and what to write to get the things we want
33:44Also, the people developing the understanding of what we type in will get better as well, so hopefully that gets better, and one of the problems that you might have run into is that I really like this color and this color
33:56I want two of them, so I'm going to drag out another version, and the recolor kind of goes, at the moment, it's not, you know, like I wish I could just say I want all four of them, please, or the other thing is, when I select on it, you know, like earlier on the uh text to Vector, it stays active, if you know what I mean
34:12I'm hoping they change this in the future, okay, but at the moment, you got to kind of do it again and type in Vivid Urban and get another one
34:19Um, the other uh kind of more advanced push for this one here in terms of the course is using these sample colors, so what I want to call out here is that if you want a really specific Colors
34:25See, I've got some colors here
34:31If you really want those, don't use regenerative color, okay, because you can just click on it
34:38I'm going to click on this part of the font
34:44I'm going to use my eyedropper tool, and I'm going to say, pick that font
34:51So if you've got really specific colors, just color it the way you need to, okay? And I found when I was using it, I was trying to, like, get it to use specific colors, and it doesn't want to, kind of wants to help you randomize or at least find, explore new colors
34:55So I'm going to go into it
35:00So the other thing is, it'd be grayed out
35:04You've got to actually type something in, so let's type in "muted." Okay, and I'm going to go plus the color
35:09You'll notice as well, if you've watched the earlier videos, that I can't pick these colors that are over here, okay, because they're not in my color swatches
35:15I can go into this color, um, palette here, and it's a little bit weird
35:19Yours might be different
35:22Mine, I think they all default to CMYK, and you go up to here, and you're like, "Oh, still a little bit bung." So I got to pick a color, then go into here, a little flat menu
35:26I'm going to pick HSB, because that's the one I like using the most, and you can pick from down the bottom to get started, and then you can mess around with the hue, okay, and the Saturation of that hue and the darkness of that hue, so you can pick a color kind of, I don't know, ad hoc, but if you want the swatches to appear, because you're like, "I'm using this throughout the brand and I want it to influence, but not completely replace these colors," okay, so I can go, we're going to go to window, we're going to go to swatches, and we're going to go into here, we're going to say add selected colors to our swatches, there's one, two, and three
36:02Now I can close it down and say, all right, generative recolor, let's go to recolor generative recolor, type in muted again, okay, I'm going to hit plus, and there it is there
36:15I'm going to have to click off, click back, plus you got to kind of do this, and like, can't do them all one go at the moment, so now let's go generate
36:21There you go, it's used these colors
36:25Oh man, that's not even close
36:30Um, better, there you go, that one is there
36:34Oh, not even, is it influencing it at all? A little bit, I can see it in there, but anyway, it's stuck that one there, it's kind of close to it
36:39You can go through and say in here at the moment, good result, bad result
36:44Okay, I'm going to go through and say just generate again, give it another go, computer
36:48Better, better, not better
36:53Okay, normally works a lot better than this, but I guess the big The takeaway is that these colors aren't going to, like, inject themselves in, they're more of a way to direct what kind, you know, your prompt plus this color
37:06You can just type in blue in here as well, okay, doesn't have to be very specific, okay? You can type in blue and get rid of these, and it will kind of influence the colorway as well
37:12The last bit of advanced is that when you do, like, say you're like, "Oh, this is close to it, I like it, but I'd like it to be more vibrant, even though I Z muted," okay, you can either go into the little dotted menu, so click on the one you like, okay, and you're like, "I like this, but I just need to make it more." Saturated, I can go into this option and go select and edit colors, or I can just click this, you end up at the same place
37:33Watch, it just jumps to this tab here with all the colors selected
37:37We're going to do this recolor tab later on in the color section, but for the moment, go into here
37:42Okay, these two here are quite useful
37:46This one here is the brightness, and this one here is the saturation, okay? So you can click on this first one and say, "I want them to be more bright or less bright," okay? So say you want them to be a little bit brighter, okay? And this one here, I want the saturation to be up a little bit, oh, too much there, a good way of
37:58Kind of getting it close using generative color and going, "Oh, I just want to tweak a little bit, give me a little bit more or a little bit less." All right, that's it, generative recolor, a cool artificial intelligence bit inside of Adobe Illustrator
38:10Um, actually, lastly, before we go, this font, I've outlined it in your uh version, so it's just a shape
38:19If you're like, "Oh, I like that font," I do
38:27It's called BC Mixer, it's an Adobe font, okay? You can get it from the fonts.adobe.com, and who is the fontographer? There it is there, a BC Mixer, okay? And where's the type designer? There he is there, okay
38:30Thank you, Philip Krauss, love the font
38:34It's got loads of cool weights, oh, it's lovely
38:37Anyway, sidetrack
38:42All right, that is actually it for the video, I'll see you in the next one
38:47Hey everyone, in this video we are going to look at the differences between the scissor tool, the eraser tool, the knife tool, the shape builder tool
38:52They're all kind of used to kind of cut things up in Illustrator, but they all have their own kind of like quirks, pros, and cons, and I want to go through them all with you
38:59I'll show you the ways and reasons I tend to use them, because a lot of, there's a lot of crossover in these tools, but everyone's using Illustrator differently, and I want to
39:05Give you all the tools to figure out which one works best for you, and that's meant to be a coffee bean
39:09I had to put a reference over here to what a coffee bean looks like
39:14Anyway, uh, let's jump into the video
39:18All right, first up, open up a file called "knife scissor eraser shape Builder" from your exercise files
39:24It's just an orange background that I put a tiny gradient in, so all you really need is, you don't need this file, you just need a shape, okay? Have the shape with a fill, but no stroke, okay? That'll be a good way to get started
39:30Now, let's start with the Eraser tool, okay? And it is, where is it? There, looks like that little icon
39:36There looks like an eraser in it, and all you need to do to use it is to kind of click and drag through something
39:42Okay, I'm trying to draw a coffee bean, that's why I've got all these kind of like mood boards over here
39:47Undo, if yours is not working, can I show you a couple little tips for using the Eraser tool? First is, if it's not working at all, if I grab my Eraser tool and I go over here and I go, yuk, okay, it's not working
39:59You can kind of tell why, right? I have this selected, but not that, so I can do this one, but not this one, or alternatively, what I can do is have nothing selected, grab the Eraser tool, and I can go through both
40:05Of these, oh, fancy
40:11All right, I've undone a few times, um, because what I want to do is I want a few versions of this
40:17I'm going to grab it with my selection tool, okay, and I'm going to hold down my option key on Mac, ALT key on a PC, and try and drag it out straight, okay? So I've got this, and I'm going to go command D on a Mac, control D on a PC, and give myself a few versions of it
40:28Now, one thing you would have noticed about the Eraser tool is that your brush size was, I know, smaller than mine probably, okay? So let's go into it to change the size of the brush, okay? So I've got this size here, you can either double click the tool, so basically
40:37Every tool in Illustrator is double-clickable, that's a good tip
40:47Okay, and in here you can play around with the size, you make it bigger or smaller, and if you're doing lots of work with the eraser tool, you can use the shortcut, okay, which is your square brackets
40:56So on my keyboard, okay, next to my P key is the open and close square brackets, and if I mash on those, it'll make the, um, size bigger and smaller, so get something appropriate, and then I'm going to kind of draw what I feel like is a, um, being
41:02Oh, it's not bad, okay
41:08What you'll notice is that while you're dragging it, okay, I'm going to do another one there, I don't want to
41:12Wreck this one
41:16Can you see my actual line is a bit yucky? What it does is, it actually smooths that out and blends it a bit
41:20Okay, so you end up, oh, why is it not um, drawn on it? 'Cause I had this one selected and not this one
41:27Okay, so if I had nothing selected, grab my eraser tool, which is the shift E key, weird
41:33Okay, you'll notice that when I'm dragging it, even though it looks really jittery, look, okay, once I let go, it'll be nice
41:36All right, I'm going to undo that
41:39So that's the eraser tool
41:42You end up with kind of like two chunks, just erases the bit in between
41:46Now, let's say I want to just cut it into two parts, okay, that's what this tool here is
41:52For the knife tool does a similar thing to the eraser tool, which will happen if I click and drag through it
41:57Okay, do you notice it's kind of jittering? I'll get the, um, actually, I'll draw another line
42:01Can you see, get the, you should be zoomed in
42:04Now you see it, little jiggles around
42:06Okay, so it's trying to smooth out
42:09It's hard to do stuff with a mouse, kind of like, I don't know, you can do precision, but you can't do smooth
42:11So what it's going to do is, watch this, if I draw the same sort of thing through there, it's kind of smooth it out nicely
42:17And the cool thing about it is, if I grab my black arrow, click off, I've got two halves
42:20Okay
42:24That's the knife tool, you can see the difference, right? The eraser tool just like knocks a chunk out, whereas the knife tool, okay, slices it and you've got two parts
42:28It's up to you what you need in this case
42:32All right, so who's left in the gang? It is the scissor tool
42:37He's got the very good C key
42:39People use this a lot
42:42I find it tricky
42:44I end up pulling out the shape builder, which I'll show you at the end, but it can be handy
42:47Now, what you'll first find out is if you try and do what we just did with the knife to watch this, see, you can't just draw through things, you actually have to click on the outside line of something, so I got nothing
42:51Selected, or you can have something selected, and watch this
42:55Can you see when I click around the edge, it starts working? Kind of watch this
43:00If I get right at the top, click in there, and I click once at the bottom, I have now used the scissor tool
43:04You'll be like, no, you haven't, it's done nothing
43:08Oh, but it has
43:13If I grab the black arrow, watch this, I've got two halves now
43:18So, using the knife tool or the eraser tool is pretty painful to do that slice, especially straight up and down or between two anchor points, so the scissor tool can be handy that way, where it gets used the most by people
43:27I'm going to duplicate this up again, shift
43:37Dragging, holding shift and option on a Mac, shift alt on a PC, what I want to do is instead of a fill with no stroke, I'm going to switch these around, okay? So now I have a very thin stroke, but no fill, okay? Or shift X is the shortcut for toggling between those two, so anyone, okay? So I want a stroke on the outside, no fill, going to zoom in a little bit, I'm going to go to my properties panel, I'm going to say give it a bigger size, anything
43:46So where the scissor tool shines now is if I have these two selected, go to my C key for scissor tool, okay? And if I say actually I want to kind of like slice a piece of this out, I want to go you and you
43:58You're like, again, hasn't done anything, it kind of has
44:02Watch, I've got this chunk that was left up the top, I've got this bit in the middle, and I've got this bit here
44:06So if you need to kind of like slice things into pieces, that is a scissor tool
44:10Not sure what I'm doing with this one, but I'm going to grab the pencil tool, which is uh, hiding underneath the shaper tool, okay? And I'm going to double click it, make sure smooth is maxed out, click okay, and I'm going to have nothing selected, and I'm going to go wavy line
44:22It's meant to be, I don't know, steam, SL, uh, yeah, steam SL inside of a coffee bean, I don't know what I'm doing, let's
44:30Select it all, let's go to stroke, and let's go to the rounded cap to give it a slightly nicer edge
44:37Throughout the advanced course, I'm going to throw in stuff we did in the essentials course, for people who did the essentials, be like, "Oh yeah, forgot about that," or hopefully the repetition will help you kind of like cement it
44:48And for those people who have jumped to the advanced course, you be like, "I don't want you to miss out either." All right, let's do one more, going to duplicate this down here, and I'm going to go, uh, stroke profile, wavy one, nice
44:57Not sure what's going on there
45:05Okay, so we've got the eraser tool, we've got the Knife tool, we've got the scissor tool, and one of the things with the scissor tool is, let's do it for this one here
45:13So I'm going to select this, and I'm going to grab my scissor tool, C key, and I'm going to click on this endpoint, and it's going to freak out
45:19For some reason, the scissor tool will cut things into, you know, segments, into sections, but it can't clip the end bit off
45:23I don't know why, it should
45:27Okay, so if you want to get rid of that, grab the direct selection tool, click on this endpoint, and just hit delete
45:30There's other ways as well, but I don't know, it's one of those things where I'm like, you sure can't do that? Yep, I'm sure
45:37The scissor tool is a little bit weird, and also, I'm going to be honest, what I tend to do instead of the scissor tool, because it has so many strangenesses, I've just duplicated this out
45:44I'm going to grab the pen tool, and I'm going to say, I just hit P for the pen tool, okay? I'm going to add a point there, add a point there, grab my direct selection tool, click this chunk in between, grab the selection tool, click off, click back into the chunk that I want to get rid of, and delete it
45:50Is that easier? Totally isn't
45:57There's a lot more steps in that one, but I don't know, the way I do it, I figured I'd share
46:03Now, the knife tool and the eraser tool and The scissor tool, I often just use the Shape Builder tool
46:09We cover this in Essentials again, and we'll do the Shape Builder a bit more advanced in the next video, but again, I want to show you how often I do things like this
46:15I'll grab my pencil tool, okay, and I'm going to draw a line
46:21The nice thing about it is, I like spending time drawing the line, okay, rather than, like, I got quite lucky with the Eraser tool here, kind of came out all right, but if I want to adjust it and play around with it, it's kind of done, right? Same with the knife tool
46:33What I tend to do is go, I just use the pencil tool there, okay, but I'll grab the pen tool, go click
46:40Hold and drag, and maybe over here, I'll go click, hold, and drag, okay? And I can spend some time with my direct selection tool, click on this first anchor point, kind of drag this around, I got to change the color of the stroke, there you go, okay? So I'll spend time doing this, okay? I like this time kind of going on, a bit like this, bit like this, looking at all my kind of reference material, and then selecting them both with my black arrow, selecting you, and saying shape builder, which is this tool here, okay, and going, you can delete stuff, so I can hold on my option key on my Mac, or ALT key on a PC, and just delete stuff, but if you want
47:14To keep them both, what you can do is you can say, "Actually, I'd like to fill it with just a random color." I'm going to pick dark red and say you just click on one of them, then go back to my Black Arrow, and now they're actually two different chunks, so it depends if you want to be doing freehand stuff
47:22Okay, with a knife tool, it's great
47:30The scissor tool works with shapes, but often gets used for paths only
47:38The Eraser tool can be good for more illustrative purposes where you're trying to like drag things and rub them out, but you might find you're working a little bit more like me, where you spend some time creating that stroke
47:49Okay, with the pen tool, then once you're happy using the Shape Builder tool to kind of like slice it into pieces, the one thing you'll have to do with the Shape Builder tool, let's hit command Y on your keyboard, or control Y on a PC, is there's some chunks left over
47:54Okay, I'm going to hit delete on that, delete on that
47:58Okay, so sometimes it can be bits left over
48:03I'm going to undo, undo
48:07Okay, if I've got them all selected, like I've just used the Shape Builder tool, I can go back to my Shape Builder tool, there it is, there
48:11I can hold on the option key, like we did before, when we deleted a chunk, you can actually draw lines through the
48:14Bits you want to get rid of, okay, so there you go
48:20All right, so that, my friend, is the Eraser tool, the Knife tool, the Scissor tool, and a little bit of a recap of what the Shape Builder tool does, and the kind of different ways that I work
48:26And again, the reason I wanted to show you all the different ways is that everyone works a slightly different way, their brain's like, "Oh, Scissor tool looks like scissors, works kind of like scissors, that's the one I want to use," go do that one, there's no problems with it
48:38I just know people are using Illustrator in lots of different ways than I do, and those are all the ways you're a master
48:41Of the ways
48:44All right, that is it
48:48I will see you in the next video
48:54Hi everyone, in this video we are going to master the Shape Builder tool
49:01If you're like, "I already know how to use the Shape Builder tool," ah, there's going to be stuff in here you're going to love, okay? I use the Shape Builder tool probably the most in Illustrator, and we're going to supercharge our superpowers in it, so let's jump in
49:06That's a doughnut, by the way
49:11It was meant to be a donut, now it's kind of green, and anyway, uh, let's jump in and start making donuts, gross, gross donuts
49:15All right, uh, first up, open up from your exercise file something called shape
49:23Builder Advanced, okay, we got it
49:31It's me to be a donut
49:38First thing we're going to do is, is just to make sure for this tutorial, click on any of the circles here, go to your properties panel, under transform, there's this like little three dots, little advanced kind of little option, say scale stroke and effects is turned off and the scale corners is turned on, just means when we shrink things up and down, the uh, stroke on the outside is going to stay the same thickness and don't get smaller
49:46Anyway, all right, first thing we're going to do is select everything, we're using my Black Arrow, I'm going to go to my Shape Builder
49:52Tool, okay, shift M is the shortcut, this one here, okay? And what I'm going to do, just so if you haven't done it before, you click across them, just drag across them, and they all join up, which is cool
49:57We want to delete this, kind of like it's meant to be a teeth mark, okay? So we're going to hold down the option key on a Mac, ALT key on a PC, okay? And you'll see my little cursor changes to a minus, and then I can just click through and kind of zigzag my way through them all
50:10You might not get them all, you might have to do that same thing again, hold the same key down, which is option on a Mac, ALT on a PC, and just drag through them all until we
50:14Get our bite mark right
50:18Let's look at some advanced stuff
50:22Let's grab the pencil tool
50:25You might have to hold down the Shape Builder tool, grab the pencil tool, or use the N on your keyboard
50:29I'm going to double click mine to make sure the smoothing is right up, just to kind of make it look nice and smooth, and what we're going to do is we're going to exaggerate a gap at the top
50:32Yours might work, it might not
50:39I'm going to try and make mine work, so I'm going to kind of leave a gap and try and draw my icing, and I'm going to try and draw some sort of like blobby
50:44A, did that work? Then I'm going to come back over here
50:49Oh, it's like a skirt on
50:53It, I'm going to undo that, okay, that was nicer
50:56And so I've left a gap at the top
50:58I can kind of check the gap
51:01Command Y, or control Y on a PC, goes to outline mode
51:03Can you see the gap at the top there? I'll zoom in
51:05That gap there, that's what I'm looking for
51:07If you don't have it, grab the white arrow and you can just kind of like nudge it around
51:09You don't want it overlapping, because that's the kind of the idea of this advanced feature, is to fill in those big gaps
51:16So back to normal view, command Y, control Y on a PC, grab my black arrow, I'm going to select it all, I'm going to grab my shape builder tool, and I'm going to say I want gra- great, uh, to add
51:22This to there, perfect
51:28I'm going to get rid of this like little tab here, can you see it? Um, so I'm going to hold down my option counter Mac, all C, a PC, get rid of that, okay? And now I want to fill this bit in, but you can see I can't drag across this, okay? It's 'cause there's a gap in there, and by default, the gap detection is off
51:39So what you can do is, uh, double click the, uh, shape with the tool, okay? Remember, all tools can be double clicked, as where we find all the good stuff, okay? And we can go, uh, gap detection is on
51:46You might have to mess around with, uh, small, medium, and large, depending on how big you made it
51:53You can kind of see small will chim- Fi gaps of three points, let's see how big mine is
52:01Store doesn't do it, I don't know why
52:10I just go straight to large to see if I can fill it, that's 12 point gaps, might not be big enough, is it still not okay? So if you have done yours massively big like me, okay, you can double click it and say I want custom, and I'm just going to, I don't know, put it up to 40, okay, and I'm going to say you can fill this all in
52:17So you watch this, I can click and drag across them now that we'll join them
52:24So if there are gaps, you're like, oh, it's really close but not quite overlapping, you can force the shape builder tool to kind of fix it now for me at the top
52:32Here, I want to try and fix, there's a kind of a little bit of a jutty, jiggly thing up the top here, you're probably going to have the same thing
52:38What we can do is grab the option key, ALT key on the PC, and just click on it once, get rid of that, grab my direct selection tool, and tidy this up a little bit, just moving these anchor points around to kind of make it more smoother
52:44There you go
52:49So if you have got gaps, especially if you've kind of drawn some, I don't know, hand-drawn illustrations, you can fill those gaps if they don't really want to, and just play around with a gap size
52:55The next thing I want to look at is, let's select it of
52:59All right, let's go to our Shape Builder tool, and let's look at where it gets its color from
53:03At the moment, mine has got no fill in this purple stroke on the sides, because that's what my last thing I was doing
53:06Yours might be white with a black stroke, okay, because that's where it gets it from your stroke panel
53:12You can see, pick the color from your color swatches, and currently I have a fill of none and a purple stroke
53:19What you can do is be a bit more intentional about it, okay? So let's cancel that, that, and let's open up
53:25I'm going to have nothing selected, so Black Arrow, deselect the background, turn that off, go to window, and open up your Swatches panel, okay, so when you're coloring in a drawing that you've done, or done a live trace, or got it from somebody else, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to add all of these swatches over here
53:37Can you see I've got this chunk? So select them all
53:41I'm going to go in my swatches panel
53:46I'm going to say, "You are all, add all selected colors," awesome
53:52Okay, there they all are in my swatches panel
53:58Now, if I select on this, okay, and I grab my shape builder tool, shift M, I can say I want this pink color, where is it, there, that one there, the darker one to be in the top, and I want this, I don't know, biscuity color at the bottom, so you can
54:04Work your way through your illustration, kind of picking the colors that way
54:10Let's add a little extra, so I'm going to grab my, what I'm going to do, I'm going to click, hold down my lips tool, grab the rounded rectangle tool, and I'm going to draw something, some sort of sprinkles
54:15Okay, if you are finding it hard to draw sprinkles with rounded corners, what you might do is, on your properties handle, under rectangle, you see there an option that says scale corners
54:28We turned that on earlier on, we do want to scale it, and I'm going to grab the white arrow, and I'm going to zoom in a little bit, and I'm going to say you drag all the
54:35way in, so I got this kind of like lozengy thing, okay? And I'm going to use my Black Arrow, I'm going to rotate it, and I'm going to actually copy, paste, paste, paste, paste, so I got a few of them, and then I'm going to go in Fast Forward mode, I'm just going to move these in, all right, those are my stingy sprinkles, I've got a couple of them, so select them all, and let's supercharge this kind of color swatches things, great when you're coloring in big illustrations, select it all, shift M for my, um, shape Builder tool, let's double click on it, and let's say this one here, so we're going to pick it from color swatches, but we're going to Turn the swatch preview on, which is handy
55:12Let's click okay, and can you see above my cursor? Okay, it's telling me where I'm at, okay, which is the middle one
55:18I'm at no fill, but a little bit to the left, can you see there's dark pink, and a little bit to the right, a little white square
55:24So what you can do is use your arrow, watch this, if I use my arrow keys on my keyboard, left and right, these ones down here, can you see it's kind of moving? If I go right, right, right, right, right, can you see it corresponds with what's going over here? So I'll move it there, you watch, if I hit right, can you see it's going through my swatches, okay, so what you What I can do is, I'm going to go down one, down one row, cross a little bit tricky to work with, there we go, go down one, and it actually jumps to that next row down there, so I'm going to go up one, so I'm going to go back, back, back
55:38Can you see my little uh highlight now is on those swatches that I made? So just using left and right, once you find them, what you can do is you can say, all right, blue, bam, blue
55:52I can go right one, I go right one to my kind of more me to be chocolate color, and drag both across these
56:06I'm going to go the next one along, which is um, I think it's an off-white that I made, okay, and I'm going to go back to blue using my left arrow
56:12Key, can you see it? It takes a little while to get used to, but you can start toggling through, you know, um, colors that you've added to your swatches and start coloring in
56:24Let's go to this purple color, let's go, you're going to go for the darker color down the bottom here
56:27It's kind of how I imagined it
56:29Now we're using swatches to color it
56:32Okay, I've got my, let's um, pick our own kind of just custom colors
56:35Let's select it all, okay, go to my shape builder tool, and you can just double click on the fill swatch and say, actually, I want, I want a really darker pink for this middle bit, okay, and then click and fill that
56:40It's not a swatch, you
56:46Can't kind of toggle between them, but you can go and pick them
56:51It's kind of what I'm looking for
56:55Kind of a couple of other tricks with the shape builder tool is, let's say I just want to make this one big flat icon, okay? You don't want anything in it, so what we're going to do is, I'm going to go to my shape builder tool
56:59I'm going to actually double click shape of the tool
57:02I'm going to go to reset everything
57:05I just want to smoosh everything together, kind of like the Pathfinder
57:08So what you can do is shape of the tool, just hold down shift
57:11What ends up happening is instead of like drawing a line, okay, like this and trying to join, Little bits up, you can just hold shift down and drag it across, joins them all up in one go, that's a handy trick
57:17I'm going to undo it
57:23Another trick that might be handy for you, I don't use it, um, but it might be handy for somebody else doing illustrations
57:28If you double click on the tool, there's this one here that says, in merge mode, clicking strokes splits the path
57:32It's not clear what it does, but let me show you
57:37So let's turn it on and click okay
57:42I'm going to deselect everything, so command shift A on a Mac, control shift A on a PC, and I'm going to just do it with some basic shapes
57:46I'm going to grab an ellipse and just
57:51Overlap two of these guys, you and you
57:56So I got two of them
58:01If I select them both, go to my Shape Builder tool, make sure that setting is turned on, it's this one here in merge mode, clicking strokes and path, click okay, and what you'll notice is when you hover above a path, it's got a different icon, can you see that kind of like weird little cross in the middle of the line? You click on it and you're like, it didn't do anything
58:06Kind of does, watch this
58:11If I grab my Black Arrow now, kind of click off on the background and say you and you, can you see what it did? Kind of slices them where they were, kind of like using the scissors tool
58:16But a little bit easier, I don't use it very much, but you might be like, "Oh, that is super helpful." So there you go, some advanced shape builder techniques
58:22I love the gap detection and coloring in with the swatches from your swatches panel
58:28Before you leave, you might want to just double check, double click on the shape builder tool, and you might want to reset and maybe turn gap detection on
58:33Then everything's kind of back to the way it was
58:36We click okay, it'll remember it next time you're using the tool
58:39There you go
58:42All right, I will see you in the next video
58:45Hey everyone, it's class project time, we're going to use
58:48The Shape Builder tool, let me quickly go through what the requirements are, and then I'll kind of backtrack and give you slightly more information on them
58:51Think of an object that complements your business
58:54It might be something that you've done earlier on, might be something else
58:57Obviously, I pick donut, because I'm doing a donut shop, but coffee might be perfect for me, something different for you
59:01Okay, uh, I want you to draw a simple graphic of this, don't get too hung up on it
59:05I want you to pick some color swatches, okay, some different colors to use, and I want you to practice using the Shape Builder tool, so draw something
59:09And the two things I want you to practice with is the gap detection, so draw some lines that don't quite overlap, just play around with it, and coloring it in using that cursor Swatch preview
59:22Remember when we had a bunch of different colors, we can use our left and right arrow, okay, to color in our graphic, just practice around with it, then upload it
59:28So let me dive back in a little bit more
59:33So obviously, the object pick it in, don't get hung up too much on what kind of, you know, are you a good drawer, is it not a good drawer, whenever I'm kind of stuck with something like this
59:37I've never drawn a, in my life, I went to Google
59:41Images, and I went, donut icon gives me something simple to kind of try and redraw
59:45You can use the pencil tool, you can use the ellipse tool, any tools you know how to use, pin tool, it's fine
59:50Sometimes I go out to Dribbble, okay, with three B's, and I just typed in donut to get some other ideas
59:54Often in here can be a bit more, I don't know, designery and beautiful
59:58Sometimes I'm just looking for simple
01:00:01So once you've got it, again, don't worry about how good it is or how good your drawing is, it's about practice
01:00:05I want you to pick a few swatches, you can totally randomly pick swatches
01:00:08Often what I'll do is I'll go to Adobe Color
01:00:11Okay, so it's color.adobe.com
01:00:14Okay, and I go to this one called explore, and then I typed in donut
01:00:17Okay, and there's colors kind of related to a donut
01:00:22Now, there's two ways of bringing in, uh, I'm kind of going through about this again
01:00:28We've done a lot of this in, uh, the Illustrator Essentials, but I want everybody to kind of be ready in case you jumped in here, uh, straight to the advanced, and it's a good recap
01:00:33Okay, say you do like, uh, I don't know, you like these colors here
01:00:36You've got two options
01:00:38I can click on just the colors, okay, and I go into this big version of it
01:00:41This might change, they mess around with the UI in here all the
01:00:43Time, and every time I make a video, it's like, "Hey, it's not there anymore," so you might have to find your way around a tiny bit, but what I'm going to do is, can you see if I can hover above the copy and see those, um, they're called hexad numbers, so I've copied them
01:00:55I'm going to jump into Illustrator, okay? I'm going to open up my swatches panel, which is under window
01:01:01I'm going to go to swatches, uh, there you go
01:01:07I'm going to add a swatch, okay, and I'm going to type it in down here, okay? I'll just paste it in, and you can see there's my first swatch, okay? The other way of doing it is, I'm going to come out of this, so I'm in color.adobe.com
01:01:11I've logged in, you can see my little face there
01:01:15Okay, so I've logged in, and what I'm going to do is, I'm going to create for this course a new creative cloud library that I can share
01:01:19So I can hit plus, and I'm going to say, "Make a new library." I already created mine called "Illustrator Advanced," okay, and I've just got it selected here, and what that means is, I can go in here and say, okay, I'm going to click on this
01:01:31Actually, I don't have to go in there, do I? Uh, I can hover above this, and you see, "Add to library." It'll add to whatever you've got selected at the top here, okay, so just make sure you got the one you really want it to go to
01:01:37I'm Going to say, add the library
01:01:43Let's jump into Illustrator and give it a second
01:01:45Boop, there it appeared
01:01:48Add your own sound effect
01:01:50What I can do is that feature
01:01:53Let's have a look
01:01:55Both of these, let's go into my Shape Builder tool, and if I want to turn this on, it's only going to pick swatches from not my library, but from my swatches panel
01:01:59Okay, so it doesn't quite work the way I want it
01:02:04So what you can do is just hover above it, right click it, and say add all of these colors, actually add the theme to swatches
01:02:08Okay, this group is called a color theme
01:02:16You could do it individually
01:02:24There they all are
01:02:32So now look, can you see I'm Using my left and right arrow, and I can say I want you to be that color, that color, I want you to be that color, okay? So practice that, do a little drawing, don't sweat it too much about what it looks like, if it's meant to look like the thing it's meant to, use a bit of the pencil tool to add a bit of gaps, so you can see if you can fill them and problems you might run into, color it in, and then share it with me
01:02:40This was a long class project explanation, I know, I figured I wanted to just get everyone's skills up on some of these ones and remind people, if you haven't done it before, how to use libraries and swatches, what I really want to do
01:02:51Is see what you draw, good or bad, to make sure you share it with me in the assignments, but also on social media
01:02:57You'll see the tags here in the class projects, okay? And yeah, let us know how you feel about your drawing
01:03:02If you feel really bad about your drawing, that's the perfect time to share it, okay, cuz it'll make others that also have bad drawings feel good
01:03:09That's all right, we'll get better as the course goes along, but there you go, be brave, share your drawings, and I will see you in the next video
01:03:16Happy shape building! Hello, hey, it's Pathfinder Secrets time, okay? In this course, I often use the Shape Builder tool
01:03:22To kind of combine in shapes like this, and it works great, but it is very destructive
01:03:29Uh, we're going to look at the Pathfinder tool and show you that it has a super secret feature where we can make things non-destructive
01:03:32It has pros and cons, but watch this
01:03:35I've got this kind of like amius, blobby bacteria looking thing
01:03:38Okay, watch this
01:03:41I can go into it and watch, I can move it around
01:03:45Ooh, it's not kind of fixed in time forever, it has adjustability
01:03:48All right, let's jump in and reveal the secrets of the Pathfinder
01:03:51All right, uh, open up the Pathfinder file from your exercise files, okay, and we're going to open up the
01:03:54Pathfinder window as well, so go window, go down to Pathfinder, there it is
01:04:02It is in your properties panel, but it's kind of cut down, and we want to look at this on purpose, nice and big
01:04:07So a lot of my courses I do a lot in the shape builder tool, okay? So I select it all, grab the shape builder tool, and I kind of just, I want to join these up to make them kind of like one atomy blob thing
01:04:13The only problem with that is, it's very destructive, okay? If I want to move the circle around, I can't, so I'm going to go to undo till I got all it back, and this is where the Pathfinder is really helpful
01:04:25So if I go my Black Arrow, and what you'll notice is, watch
01:04:31This, if I click on this first one called "Unite," okay, does anybody use Pathfinder the same way I do? You go undo, click, undo, click, undo, do you find the one you want? Okay, we want the first one, luckily in this case
01:04:38Okay, I want to join them up, so it's kind of just a quicker way than using the shape builder tool, so if you prefer it this way, you end up at the exact same point
01:04:45The perk with a Pathfinder, though, is it has a super secret trick
01:04:51Let go to undo, is instead of just clicking "Unite," if you hold down the Option key, a Mac Alt key on a PC, and click the same thing, you're like, does the same thing, kind of, but can you see if I have it? Selected, can you see? Ooh, the circles are still in there
01:05:03How do I get to those? Just double click on any of the lines, okay? And inside of here, look, oh, it's hard to see against the background, but you get the idea
01:05:09This is what they call nondestructive, okay? It's still doing the exact same result, because you're not too sure what you need to do
01:05:16You're like, okay, it needs to be a little bit wider, a little bit bigger, and it keeps all of those dimensions in there
01:05:23It's doing something sneaky with something called a compound shape, and you can do it with any of these options here
01:05:29Now, let's go back, back, back, and so you can edit it by Double clicking on it, the other couple of things you can do is you can select on it, and you can say, "I want it." Actually, let's go
01:05:34I want to break it apart again
01:05:40You might get somebody else's artwork, you just want to like smash it to pieces, as in get all your bits back
01:05:46Okay, so with a Pathfinder with the selected, we can go to this options here, and you can say release these compound shapes, bam, we're back to where we started
01:05:53The other option you might do, so I'm going to select it all, make sure I hold down the option key on a Mac, ALT key on a PC, to use the non-destructive version of unite, you can expand it, and that is basically
01:05:59The exact same way as clicking this first option, okay, without holding down that special key, so it depends what you want
01:06:07You're like, why don't we just use that for everything? Is that it's really good for simple shapes, but when you start doing complex things like our donut, it starts running into problems, okay, because it's mixing compound shapes with shape builder tool, and it gets a little messy
01:06:18So if it's not compound shapes, my advice is to use the shape builder tool
01:06:24So let's do a little circles, so I'm going to do bits of this, right? So I'm going to do just these shapes to start with, okay, so I've got my bite marks and my
01:06:31Outside oval, and I'm going to go, remember what key do we hold down? Okay, I want to unite them
01:06:35Actually, I don't want to unite them, I want to minus front
01:06:39Okay, but what key do I hold down? That's right, option on a Mac, on a PC, click it once, so we get our bite marks, great
01:06:43I've given you the little drawing of this squiggly thing, so I want to fill that in
01:06:49Okay, so I'm going to go, all right, going to click you, hold shift, click on this one, and I'm going to go joins the line, does this thinges? Okay, we can't get the Pathfinder to do what I want
01:07:00It's a shape builder trick, 'cause it's got to kind of join this and it doesn't know which bits you got to
01:07:04Join these two up, so I grab my Shape Builder tool
01:07:07I'm going to double click the Shape Builder tool and go to reset, just to make sure everything's kind of back to how it was, and watch this
01:07:11Yeah, it kind of doesn't work, it's because it's trying to do too much, it's trying to do this compound shape, okay? It's trying to do some Shape Builder stuff, so if you're drawing it, it might start off and be nice and simple, perfect
01:07:22Get your adjustments done, but eventually you might have to go, you with all this complex compounding going on, I'm going to expand it, then shift click both of them, shift M for my Shape Builder tool
01:07:40And I'm going to join them up now, okay? So you might end up kind of starting one way with all the non-destructive goodness and having to kind of expand it eventually, pretty soon
01:07:47That's what I find, everyone's doing different stuff, okay? So you might find that you can stay in the lovely Pathfinder world with compound shapes for a lot longer
01:07:55There you go, that is the secret trick of the Pathfinder, it retains some of that editability
01:08:03We can expand it, release them, it's non-destructive, but you might find that you will quickly have to be destructive and expand it if you want to do anything else with it
01:08:07There you go
01:08:11Pathfinder secrets
01:08:16On to the next video
01:08:19Hi everyone, in this video we're going to look at something called the Join tool, super handy
01:08:22Look at this, these kind of overlap, watch this, I can kind of scribble over them and I join them
01:08:27Do the bottom as well, join them
01:08:32Lots of joining using the Join tool, super easy to use, a really good complement to using the Shape Builder and the Pathfinder, building up our skills
01:08:36Let's jump in
01:08:40All right, so first up in your exercise files, open up the Join tool, okay? And I've got the, it's meant to be a flame, okay? I drew it with a pencil tool and a bit of the pen tool
01:08:44Now they're all individual
01:08:50Shapes, okay, this is where the Join tool shines
01:08:57The Shape Builder is perfect as long as they overlap, okay? But when there's these like big gaps, we can use the, um, Gap feature in, uh, Shape Builder tool, but often it's not exactly what we want
01:09:02You may know, or you may not know, the simplified version of this
01:09:07So I've got these two separate paths
01:09:12If I grab my white arrow, okay, and select both of these end points and say I want to join you two up, you can go command J, or control J on a PC, and it just joins them
01:09:15The only trouble is, look, it's kind of just a straight line
01:09:19You're like, I guess it's joint, and at the top here, watch this, if I do
01:09:23It to this one
01:09:26I go U and go, so I've selected these two anchor points at the top and go command J, or control J on a PC
01:09:31You're like, that's not what we want
01:09:37So the join tool, where is the join tool? Holding, where is the join tool hiding? It is hiding underneath all of the pencil tool, shaper tool, right down the bottom here
01:09:41Grab that one
01:09:45Now, I don't think you have to have anything selected first
01:09:49I think we can just go scribble, scribble, scribble, go away, and it hasn't just kind of like cut them off, it's actually joined them up
01:09:53Can you see it's actually a joint bit now? Cool, huh? Okay, same thing, let's grab the uh, Joiner tool
01:09:56I'm Going scrubble across here, and I've kind of set us up for a success
01:10:00Sometimes it gives us a less than happy ending
01:10:04Okay, okay
01:10:08Sometimes, let's try this one
01:10:12It's done pretty good, and this one here, okay, it's done pretty good
01:10:16Okay, so sometimes it's kind of not perfect, and you're going to have to go in and grab the white direct selection tools, the A key, and you're going to go, can you see that's a bit murky in there? So how am I going to get rid of that? Like, there's two anchor points in here
01:10:20I'm probably just going to end up grabbing my P for my pin tool, hovering above the anchor point, getting rid of him, getting rid of him
01:10:25Zooming out a little bit, that's probably all I need
01:10:31Okay, I'm going to go back to my A tool for the direct selection, and I'm going to go and mess around with this
01:10:37Okay, so there you go, the joint tool, super handy, kind of like the shape builder tool, which is a bit suited for things that overlap
01:10:41Joint tool is great when there is a gap, often you'll need a mixture of the two
01:10:45I'm going to pick a couple of nice colors for this now, and redo the intro with the good looking flame
01:10:49While I do that, you can move on to the next video, I'll see you there
01:10:55Hi everyone, welcome to advanced pen tool tips and tricks, the pen tool can be a tricky one to
01:11:01Learn, if you've got some basic skills
01:11:07Okay, I'm going to show you how to take them to the next level, to kind of get uh smoother lines, loads of shortcuts, kind of stop you having to go through a whole bunch of tools
01:11:12Basically, we just use the pen tool for everything, hold a few shortcuts down, and we can get very far in our design
01:11:16All right, let's get in there, let's do some advanced pen tool tips and tricks
01:11:19All right, first up, I've created a document
01:11:22Uh, I've just made mine a 1,000 by 1,000 pixels, it doesn't matter what size
01:11:25Uh, I want you to bring in an image, let's go to file, let's go to place, and then your exercise files, okay
01:11:32There should be one called "Pentil," there it is, there, "Pentil 01." What we're going to do is we are going to set it as a template, okay? All that does is bring in the image, but puts it on a background layer that is locked, okay? See, check out my layers panel, see, it's on this template player, it's locked
01:11:43You can unlock it to mess around with it, but it's kind of faded it out as well
01:11:47This is something I drew on my notebook
01:11:51Let's have a little look, and let's get advanced pen tooling
01:11:54The first tip is, often when you are starting with the pen tool, you can go to view and turn smart guides off
01:12:01I often turn that off when I'm working with the Pen tool, the shortcut on a Mac is command, you on a PC it's control, you, so I'm going to turn that off
01:12:08The next tip is to change the anchor points, make them a bit bigger, they can be quite small on some displays, so on my Mac, I go up to the word Illustrator at the top, go to settings, and down to this one, selection and anchor display
01:12:21If you're on a PC, go to edit, general, or edit settings, um, and go to the same thing, section and anchor display, and let's crank this one up
01:12:27Okay, anchor points are massive, let's see what we got
01:12:34So when I grab my pen tool, which is the P key on my keyboard, watch this boom, look how big these guys are, giant
01:12:38Handles, you might find something in between
01:12:42I'm going to see if we can work with the giant handles just to make it easier for the video, you find the size that works for you
01:12:46All right, so I've got the pen tool, and just note, if you haven't got much experience with the pen tool, none at all, you might want to check out the essential course version of the pen tool
01:12:53Um, but if you got some basic skills, you should be all right
01:12:58We're going to kind of supercharge pen tool here, just so you know, it does take a lot of practice
01:13:03Okay, so if you did watch the essentials version, the way I teach it to kind of get used to it and a lot of Self-taught people, I'll click once for a corner
01:13:09I'll get to this curve here, and they go, okay, drag out, click and drag for a curve, click once for a corner, click and drag, and that is fine
01:13:12It kind of works
01:13:16What you'll find is you've got extra anchor points that you don't need
01:13:20I've got one, two, and three defining this curve down the bottom here, and that works fine, but you'll find the more anchor points you have, the less smooth things are, especially for something like this where it's really small
01:13:25We got one, two, and three defining this curve, so the trick is, I'm going to undo, undo, undo, undo
01:13:31Uh, I'm going to start down the
01:13:35Bottom here, and the weird thing is, instead of putting the curve in the middle, I'm going to put it at this corner point here
01:13:39I'll show you what I mean
01:13:41This first one's a bit of a Hail Mary, and you don't really know what it does without a bit of practice
01:13:43Watch this
01:13:46I'm going to click, hold, and drag
01:13:48You're like, I've got an anchor point with some handles coming out
01:13:50I've dragged it this way, 'cause it's the way the line's going
01:13:52Can you see? You can see what it's doing to the line here
01:13:55So over here as well, I'm going to click, hold, and drag it out, okay? And you can see I can do the exact same thing, the same curve, but only two anchor
01:14:00Points and the handles on both ends are doing all the work
01:14:06The trick is this bit down the bottom here, okay? What is happening to this? So what I can do is, I can hold down my option key down here, and I can break this
01:14:11Watch, hold down my option and it jumps to, you see my cursor changes from the pin tool to the convert Anchor Point tool, and I can click, hold, and drag this and kind of just break it over here, okay? Get at the top head, I want to drag it out again, even though it's not perfect, I do need both the top and the bottom handles, just doing the bottom one will kind of work
01:14:22I like to have them out of both the top and the bottom, or at
01:14:29least the first and second anchor point, okay, roughly, we can fix this up afterwards
01:14:34So again, I need to break this one, so hold down my option key on my Mac, ALT key on a PC, and I can kind of break it to get it to go where I want
01:14:41Same over here, I'm going to click, hold, and drag to get the curve going to hold down my option key to break it to get it to go where I want, and it takes a little bit of time, but forget about the Apex, go to the top here, drag it out, out, hold down my optional R key, okay, and break it off
01:14:57You got to kind of know that the anchor point will drag the line this way, and that's the bit of experience that it takes a little while
01:15:01Now that might be advanced enough, but if you want to go super advanced, what happens is, watch this
01:15:05I'm going to drag this line out of here, instead of letting go, then holding the option key and breaking it
01:15:09What you can do is, you can say drag, and before you even let go of the mouse, hold the option key on a Mac, ALT key on a PC, and it breaks it in one go, okay? So, just removes one little step
01:15:17It's how I've got fast uh drawing things with a pen tool, but yes, it is quite complicated
01:15:25This one here, this line, there's too many curves going on
01:15:33I got two handles, so I can bend the line two different ways, like up and down, or in this case, both the
01:15:39Same sort of way, this one is one curve, another curve, another curve, another curve, there's too many going on, so I've got this first one going, but I'm going to need one here, okay? Sometimes you just can't control it all with just two anchor points, you need one, two, and I'm going to need this third one down here
01:15:51Again, hold the option key or the Alt key before I let go
01:15:55I'm just getting it roughly in
01:15:59I can get it pretty close, but even if you're a pro, it does take a bit of time afterwards to tidy everything up, and you see where you've dragged the handle in too far
01:16:03I find it's actually easier being quite zoomed in, okay, when you
01:16:09Are doing these, you see that one's too far out
01:16:16This is going to lead me into my next little super duper shortcut, okay? Is I can do this and keep going and come back and fix it, but I can fix it while I'm working
01:16:21Yes, you can, okay? So it is the command key on a Mac, the control key on a PC
01:16:27So we've done two, we've done the option alt, okay, which allows us to break the line, and now we're doing the command or control key, depending if your Mac or PC, and what it is is we can drag this anchor point, look at that, whilst we're working
01:16:33So I just held down that key, command on a Mac, control on PC, just dragged it back home a bit, just so it's not
01:16:40Wrecking my drawing so much, so I can actually do pretty close to finished using those tricks
01:16:44Again, drag this one out, you holding the option and ALT, can drag it to about there
01:16:49Drag this last one out, the last one's always a pain in the butt, it's like, hey, do you want this to be a curve? Like, no, no, I don't
01:16:54So before I let go, I'm going to hold down the option key, break that one, grab this one, hold down my option, counter Mac, all cter PC, get you back to where you started
01:17:07The first and last joint is always a bit tricky, kind of doesn't know what you mean, so it jumps around a bit
01:17:13So now I can stay on my pen tool here, okay, and hold down
01:17:19Those keys, remember, command basically just switches it to the direct selection tool, and the option key drags it to, or changes it to, the convert to Anchor Point tool
01:17:26So I never, we go back to the direct selection tool, I can just going to go around and go, you, I want this to do a lot of the work there
01:17:29This is a hand drawing, so it's never going to line up perfectly
01:17:33See this one here, I want to be mostly straight and let this curve do all the work
01:17:36I could put another Anchor Point in here, but you end up with this like little kind of like kink in your PIN line, which is also called The Stroke pin line, okay, and the same here, okay, I
01:17:41Can work my way around
01:17:46I still got the pen tool selected
01:17:50Okay, I'm just clicking on anchor points, finishing these up, click on this anchor point, move the handles, the little moons
01:17:55Okay, and this one here, what I want to do, yeah, we go
01:17:59This one here is trickier
01:18:03If I use those same techniques, you know, we got to the end here and it went, "Oh, you're going to be a curve," and it kind of had to fix it afterwards
01:18:08We went all the way around
01:18:13This one here, if I click and drag for the first one, okay, click and drag for this one, haven't quite got it, that's right, hold option to break it, go down this way
01:18:17Okay, come this one, you can see what it's done
01:18:21It has done what we did when we got to this edge of the flipper here, and it's kind of turned into a curve, but that's okay
01:18:25We can hold down our option key on a Mac, or the Alt key in a PC, just to kind of force it to go around
01:18:31Sometimes here, can you see it's got this uh handle selected, but not this bottom one? It didn't disappear, but it doesn't know you've meant to select these ones, so sometimes you go to hold your command or control key, click on that once to highlight the Anchor Point to get all these things to spill back out
01:18:43Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't
01:18:48All right, all right, what do you think? Do you like the tricks I got? Couple of other ones, let's have a look at this one here
01:18:55Okay, another little tip is, we've looked at the optional rock key, okay, the command or control key, depending if you make a PC, and the last one is space bar, which is the same for all of them
01:19:02So let's say I start down the bottom here, start getting my curve, go up the top here, and I just kind of miss it, just way off, okay, and I start dragging, you're like, gee, okay, if you hold space bar before you let go, you see you can move the anchor point, let go of space bar, and then keep dragging
01:19:19It has to be all in one motion, so your mouse has to be down the whole time, so click, hold, and drag, click
01:19:23Hold and you get it wrong, click, hold, and drag, but before I let go with my mouse, hold space bar
01:19:26You're like, yeah, you go there, you go, look at us, pin tool masters
01:19:30Another trick is, we go back to the command key on a Mac, control key on a PC, we used a second ago for selecting back to the direct selection tool
01:19:36Remember, we could use it to kind of like adjust this, and we can use it while we're drawing
01:19:42So earlier in the video, I showed you how to like start doing it, and then let go, and then hold the command or control key and adjust it
01:19:48You can do it while you're drawing, watch this
01:19:56I can say, say I want a point, actually I'm going to break
01:20:05This one, holding my Alt option, okay, then I'm going to start dragging here, okay? And sometimes you need the moon on the other side, the little handle, to be shorter on one side than the other, and you're like, "Why are they the same length?" Okay, before you stop dragging, okay, so we get here, you hold the Command key down, they're still connected, but you can see one can get shorter, one can get longer
01:20:13Ooh, I don't do that very often, but you can, this is the advanced shortcut stuff, okay? There we go
01:20:19Now we've got smart guides off
01:20:25Sometimes smart guides need to be on, okay? It's the Command, you okay? And sometimes it just snaps way
01:20:31Too big, and again, the tip for this, we kind of looked at it earlier, is if you like, don't just get close, just zoom in, okay? And you'll get lots more screen real estate, and you can get a lot closer to a line without actually joining it up, okay? You want it to start close without it actually connecting, just zoom in a bit
01:20:43Last but not least, say that you do want these things to line up, okay? So, um, it might be that you've already, already got some existing, actually, I'm going to draw something real quick
01:20:54All right, I'm going to turn off on my layers panel, this one here, I want these to line up down the bottom here, and I don't want to just Kind of like snap them
01:20:59I want these paths to line up
01:21:05I could turn on my smart guides, and I could just line these things up and try and snap them, okay, and that kind of works
01:21:11What I want to do, okay, but what I want to do is actually leave the top part of this alone, and I just want these anchor points to line up
01:21:15So I'm going to go into outline mode, command Y on a Mac, control Y on a PC
01:21:19I'm going to go to my direct selection tool, which is the A key, okay, and I'm going to go to both of you guys
01:21:23I don't want to move them around, I just want you two to go to object, let's go to path, let's go to this one called average, and let's average them both
01:21:35And watch what happens, bam, kind of lines them up, cool, huh? So sometimes you kind of line things up and you're like, "Oh, it's close enough, nobody can see," but you can actually technically get them bang in the same place by selecting just the anchor points you want, and then going up to object, path, and average, but you got to have something selected first, otherwise if it's grayed out, there you go
01:21:53It's a good tip, make sure if it's grayed out, you got to have them selected first with a direct selection tool
01:21:59All right, my friends, that is all the tips and tricks that I have got for the pen tool to make you just better with your pen
01:22:05Tool faster with it, loads of shortcuts
01:22:12I know it does require lots of practice, but while there are lots of cool tools in Illustrator, often the pen tool is the kind of core one that a lot of designers and illustrators use
01:22:19So here you go, bit of practice, give it a try, try some of the shortcuts, maybe only a couple will sync in the beginning
01:22:23You can come back to this video once you got the hang of it, just pick one, pick them all, it's totally up to you
01:22:26All right, that is it, I will see you in the next video
01:22:30Hello, we are going to use the width tool, advanced width tool, we're going to combine it with our sweet new pen tool
01:22:36Skills, we introduce a little bit of curvature tool for those who haven't done much of it, and we're going to make this
01:22:41We're going to go from a little drawing here, okay, that I did, and we're going to add all of the kind of like whips and curls and stuff, and I'll show you to make these bits at the end here
01:22:47It's all very fun, let's jump in
01:22:53Okay, first up, open up the width tool exercise for your exercise files, and I wanted to show you how I got to this drawing here, okay? So basically, I picked a font that I like to start with
01:22:59I'm not a good type designer, but I found something I quite liked
01:23:04It's called Lust, if you've opened up the Font, it might say, "Hey, you don't have the font." You can sync it to have it, you can ignore that as well, because I've outlined a version of the font
01:23:09This is just shapes that represent the font
01:23:12Over here, if you did want the font, okay, it's called Lust
01:23:16There it is, there
01:23:19You can sync it through Adobe fonts
01:23:21So there's my font
01:23:24I printed it off
01:23:27I'll show you what I did to get all my curls, is I printed it off onto a sheet
01:23:30Where is it? There it is, there
01:23:33I just printed it off a few times onto a sheet, laid a bit of paper over the top, stapled at the top, and kind of like lift the paper up, could kind of see through it, and drew my little curls on
01:23:36There and was happy enough for this exercise
01:23:39I was like, "Yeah, looks kind of cool," and we moved on
01:23:42So that's how I got to this point
01:23:45For those like little drawings, can you see I just kind of like flipped it up and down? That's how I got here
01:23:48And so what we're going to do now is draw the curls on and get them to do the in and outy bit that you saw at the beginning
01:23:54What I'm going to do is, I'm going to make sure I find it easy to use the pen tool when you're doing this custom stuff, to have the smart guides off, command U on a Mac, control U on a PC, turn smart guides off
01:23:59Up to you, you can use the pen tool or the curvature tool
01:24:05I'm going to Start with the pen tool and then switch over to the curvature tool, cuz we haven't done much of that in the advanced course yet
01:24:11So, we'll start with a pen tool, cuz we've been practicing that over here
01:24:17I'm going to make sure I've got a black stroke, or a stroke and no fill
01:24:23I don't want a fill for this at the moment, and what I find with when I'm trying to connect existing vectors to new drawings, I find it's easier not to start from the vector, cuz it wants to snap and create anchor points on this thing
01:24:30I don't want that, so I'm going to zoom in, grab my pencil, and I'm going to start with, start with an easy one, that's not the Easy one, we'll start with this one
01:24:34Okay, it's going to kind of come up over here and around
01:24:37H, so I find it's easy to start from this end
01:24:41I'm going to click, hold, and drag for a kind of a corner, so I've got my little handles
01:24:44Now, when you're doing curves like this, I find it's easy
01:24:48You want as least amount of anchor points as you can, but often you need them in all of the, like, down the bottom here, on the side here, up the top here
01:24:55Can you see, kind of like one on each of the 360, because I'm coming back around as a circle, I kind of need it
01:25:02If I show you on a circle, if I draw a circle and grab the white, um, arrow, okay, and click on this, can you see? To get a perfect circle, the minimum to get a perfect circle is four, and I kind of used that when I'm doing these things as well
01:25:08It's kind of, need four of them to get the shape right
01:25:14You can try with three and you get mostly there, and there's just something awkward about it
01:25:19Okay, I'm going to undo that, because I'm going to show you another trick
01:25:25So, pen tool, um, I'm going to click out and drag this one
01:25:31What I find useful, um, and this is like a bonus extra pen tool trick, is when I'm clicking and dragging down here, it's nice if this thing's completely flat, not, you know, you can drag, you're like, kind of, that's kind of flat, it's not so
01:25:36What you do is you click, hold, and drag, and if you watch this, if I hold shift, it just kind of like snaps it into, like, I don't know, 90° increments, so it means that I can kind of drag it out here, okay? Let go, shift, click, drag, hold shift, can you see it snaps it into the straight up and down? I find that useful, so let go, shift
01:25:55Actually, I think you can hold shift the whole time, okay, get the top one, and then down here, okay? I don't actually want it to attach, I'll show you why in a second
01:26:02I'm going to get it to kind of like be inside of here
01:26:08I'm going to drag it out, out, out, out, out, then going to use my uh sweet shortcut by going to the command
01:26:15Key on a Mac, control key in a PC, click on these anchor points, okay? Or you can go to the direct selection tool, start dragging these out, if you hold shift while you're dragging them out, okay, they kind of snap horizontally, and then you spend the next 30 minutes kind of going back and forth, going, "Is that kind of good?" I might switch to the direct selection tool now, the A key, okay? And sometimes you got to move this around, you, you, you kind of get it looking okay, don't spend too long, 'cause when you add the width tool, it kind of changes it a bit
01:26:40So now the tricks for the little Blobby in bit, that's what you came for, right? Okay, so let's Grab the width tool, okay? I'm going to click on this once, and I'm going to click, hold, and drag
01:26:43I want something at the end here
01:26:47Here, so I'm going to click, hold, and drag, because I want some thickness here
01:26:51How much? Just guess
01:26:54I'm beginning with, do it at the end and drag it out
01:26:57Over here, I want some thickness at the end here as well
01:26:59You're like, that doesn't quite work
01:27:02Zoom in a little bit
01:27:05Okay, what I want to do is, I've got this n one, I'll just show you again
01:27:08So I clicked, hold with the width tool, and dragged it out, and you're like, huh? What you do is, you come back just a tiny bit and click out another one
01:27:11You can see you can kind of like say be Thick, but then get skinny again
01:27:16Okay, so I just kind of like dragged it here and just made it thin, and you're like, how do you get the ball at the end? Go to your properties, go to stroke, and switch it from the butt cap, great name, to the round cap
01:27:21Okay, and it doesn't work
01:27:26Okay, you've got to click on, select it with the Black Arrow
01:27:31Okay, so click off the width tool, click on this, then go to stroke, and then go to round cap, and there's our little blob at the end
01:27:36Okay, now I got to spend some time with the direct selection tool, the A key
01:27:42Okay, direct selection tool, and I'm going to spend a little bit of time kind of going, I'm not trying Don't follow my pencil drawing, my pencil drawing is not submit, cool
01:27:54Forget the pencil drawing, even if you want to turn it off, in the layers panel, turn the eyeball off, okay, so that you can come back and go, all right, forget about that drawing, 'cause that might not be, you know, there's a lot of sketchy pencil marks there that you don't need to particularly follow
01:28:05Well, that'll do, and what I probably want to do is, I'm going to go to the width tool, we're going to do this a lot, so shift W is the shortcut for both Mac and PC, okay, and I'm going to go, you actually just be a bit smaller, you might, did, did, did anybody end up with this? Like monster, um, blob bit at the end
01:28:11Okay, you can just drag that down a little bit
01:28:18You might decide, actually, this is a bit thinner here
01:28:24Okay, do some adjustments and then spend ages with the white direct selection tool trying to make it look nice
01:28:31Oh, it's too thick, I'm going to fix it up at the end
01:28:35Let's keep going
01:28:39I'm going to turn back on my layer, okay, and I'm going to go, let's do another one
01:28:43Let's do, should we do that one? No, I'll show you this one here, because the rest is just step and repeat, right? Draw the exact same things
01:28:47And so this one here, we're going to use some of our earlier techniques
01:28:51I want to get rid of this, can't
01:28:54Remember the name of it, or is it in my head? We're calling it the "Big Dangly Bit" for the moment
01:28:57We're going to grab the Eraser tool, okay, which is over here
01:29:00Okay, remember the Eraser tool was kind of handy, because you can kind of just lower the brush size using my square brackets, okay, and just kind of drag it over and go about there
01:29:05Let's use the curvature tool, okay, so we did the Pen tool for that one
01:29:09I'm a Pen tool person, because I'm good at it
01:29:14You might be from the essentials course and be digging the Curvature tool
01:29:17If you've never heard of it, let's give a quick demo
01:29:21Basically, the Curvature tool works like this, and cl- instead of clicking and Dragging to get a curve, you just click once
01:29:23Watch this, click once
01:29:25Actually, I said don't start on the object
01:29:28I'm going to start here, click once, click once, click kind of where I feel like the apex there is, click once
01:29:30Uh, I'm going to switch these around, so it's a stroke with no fill, going to click once about here, and then get to about there, and that didn't work
01:29:36Okay, so it tries to connect, it's like, "Oh, do you mean this?" I'm like, "Nope," I'm going to undo, so it's still connected, and I'm going to go past there
01:29:43No, still going to do it
01:29:47I'm going to go up there, don't connect, please
01:29:52I could lock the layer, I could do lots of stuff
01:29:56I'm Just going to force it out here, go back to my direct selection tool, and now line it up, and it won't snap, so I'm going to spend a little bit of time going, see the cage tool
01:30:00I don't know, you digging it? I dig it
01:30:04I love showing new people it, because the pen tool is hard to learn, you can use the curv tool forever
01:30:07All right, let's do one more, ah, one of the tricks, okay, this is a good trick
01:30:14So at the moment, this stroke width here, that is the smallest it can be, okay, so it's, uh, what is it, uh, stroke of one point
01:30:21I find, especially if you want little pointy ends, we don't, we got a little blobby end
01:30:26I find starting with a 0.25, okay, really thin line is Just a default go-to for all of width tool stuff
01:30:30Okay, now we're going to use shift W to go to the width tool
01:30:34I want this to be nice and thin here, so I'm going to leave that end
01:30:38I'm going to find this end, drag it out, okay, way too big, then zoom in a little bit, okay, and I'm going to make this one nice and small, then I'm going to go to this one, okay, I'm going to forget you need to select it as a path and say fill, actually that worked fine, and let's have a look, we've got nice and thin there, it gets thick here
01:30:57Sometimes the width tool adds its own points, so back to my width tool, if I hover along, can you see there's one there, if I hover
01:31:03Along, there's one there, you're like, "I don't want you." I can click on it and hit delete on my keyboard, okay? So it starts there and gets thinner and thinner
01:31:09I'm going to have to get this end and just make it a little bit bigger, trying to match where that G came out of
01:31:15I could do something cool down here and go, "You okay," make it a bit thicker, but I don't know
01:31:22I practiced this before this video, and I didn't really dig it
01:31:28One of the other little advanced tricks with the width tool as well is, say I did drag this out, but I don't want it to be equal, okay? Can you see it's equal size, so I'm going to drag it out a little bit and then hold down
01:31:35My option key on a Mac, ALT key on a PC, and just drag one side, you see it dips the bottom side more than the top side, okay? Otherwise, it's equal, up to you
01:31:41I messed around with that, and I didn't really like it, so I ended up going, yep, actually, I'm going to delete that one, select it, delete it, zoom out a bit, squint my eyes, and go, "Oh, it's kind of alright, it probably needs to be a little bit thicker," but again, uh, we, it's been ages making this nice, we've got the idea, right, how to put the blobs on, width tool, we kind of use the curvature tool in there as well instead of the pin tool
01:31:52I'm going to continue, there's going to be no more
01:32:03Bonuses in here, I'm just going to do it, you can watch if you like, kick back, watch
01:32:09Mine is a, uh, grenaded donuts
01:32:15Okay, so I'm going to get you to do your own one in a second, so practice with me, watch me, up to you
01:32:21And I'm just going to continue on
01:32:26What I found as well is this drippy thing is kind of cool, but I think I needed to, when I was practicing, I'll show you, this is my practice version, okay, that I did just before this, um, video started, and I found it looked nicer going around that way and kind of like balancing out this side
01:32:32It's still not perfect, but, um, better than that drippy thing, so pen tool, I'm going to remember start
01:32:44Kind of where I want it to go
01:32:55I'm using the pen tool in this case, and I'm going to go one, two, and then get up into here, okay? And I'm just going to keep talking while I do it, get it roughly good, don't spend too long getting the line good, because instantly when you add the curvature or the width stuff, everything changes
01:33:07Another tip is that often if things are looking really quirky or weird, it's often that these two handles are really different lengths
01:33:14This one's kind of fighting a little bit, but this one's overpowering it, so often when they are the same kind of distance, it tends to give you a bit of curve, and don't be Afraid to move the anchor point, okay? If you find the pin tool and all this really tricky, it takes ages to get good at it, and there's a little bit I can kind of pass on the techniques, but the experience part is the stuff that you kind of end up having to just learn by doing, doing it badly for a long time
01:33:40All right, again, remember stroke .25, grab the width tool, shift W
01:33:49I want this bit to be nice and bulbous
01:33:55Uh, I'm going to grab that end, go like that
01:34:02This end probably needs a little bit of width on it, not much, okay? And it needs to line up, and we're not going to get like properly perfect, okay? We're going to get it to look Okay, okay, we could merge this together using the Pathfinder and start doing that, but for the moment, that is good enough
01:34:09Oh, it just looks a bit weird, huh? There's a little weirdness down here, it needs to flow better, flowing better
01:34:15Oh, that, oh, still not quite right
01:34:21I show you this because you're going to do the same thing, you're like, man, this takes forever, and it does
01:34:28Really good example to go and have a look at for ideas is, uh, letters with flourishes, curls, SCCOT, that's what I typed into Google, and I went to Google images, and this is where I ended up, kind of really small
01:34:39You can probably do a better search, but I like SC
01:34:45Scott, he kind of, I don't know, he did all this really cool stuff early on and I copied it
01:34:47I love it
01:34:49Um, so that's how I got here
01:34:51Let's go back into it
01:34:52Let's finish the last ones off
01:34:54Um, what I want to do is this one here, pen tool, start at the end
01:34:56How many does this need in terms of anchor points? Probably more than two
01:35:04Oh, does it? Maybe I can just do two
01:35:12I reckon three is the way to go for this one, pen tool, only because I fought with trying to like do it with, you know, so little of them in the past and eventually given it up and added another one that I kind of find the happy medium
01:35:17Oh, I nailed that one
01:35:22Um, could you just use a circle down you? Could totally use the side of a circle, just slice it up
01:35:27Okay, I'm going to go, you 25
01:35:32I'm going to go width tool, shift W, grab the end, tuck it in a little bit, probably still too thick
01:35:37I'll probably just drag the end, zoom in, Dan, zoom in
01:35:44Okay, anybody still around, you still here? Remember, there's this hidden one over here that it added, it's kind of messing with my width
01:35:57What do we think? Um, I like as well to add like the circle tool, which is clearly the L key for circle, circle
01:36:01Okay, and I'm going to draw a circle
01:36:05The moment the fill and the stroke are the wrong way around, you can hit shift X, okay, and we'll toggle them or switch them
01:36:09I'm Going to do, you back to my move tool
01:36:15I'm going to say, you go over there, and maybe another, oh, and maybe another one
01:36:22So I'm holding down the option key on a Mac, or a PC, and kind of doing some sort of like blobby, splattery thing
01:36:26There you go
01:36:29All right, the next one, I'm probably not going to draw it again
01:36:33I'm just going to go copy it and rotate it a little bit to kind of get it to where I want it, just the roughs
01:36:36Well, come on, rotate and go over there, grab my direct selection tool and go, you, you, you kind of want it going in there
01:36:50I find it is easier to draw it first, 'cause I can be a little more fluid, and like, I don't know, I find I ended up a bit
01:36:56It's easier to override it with the pen tool, but I find it so much easier to draw stuff and then scribble over the top
01:37:02I might add another one of these, and then that's going to be it
01:37:08This is what you see at the beginning for this video sometimes
01:37:14Can you see with the move tool, you can't actually get in there, got to zoom in and see, because I made the anchor points really big, it's kind of working against me right now
01:37:19All right, that is going to be me
01:37:23What else? I want to do, this guy's too chunky
01:37:26All right, I'm going to stop you, you don't have to watch anymore
01:37:29Okay, I'm going to go through and tidy this up a little bit for the intro
01:37:32And just play around with making it thinner, I think, and that'll be it
01:37:37Um, uh, there we go, text with a bit of flourish using the width tool
01:37:41We use the pen tool and the curvature tool
01:37:45High five for those who hang around for the whole thing, watch me mumble to myself as I, uh, make a little blobs
01:37:49All right, uh, that's it
01:37:52I'll see you in the next video
01:37:56All right, it's time, time for another class project
01:38:00Uh, unsurprisingly, I'm going to get you to do the exact same thing we did in the last tutorial, okay, but instead of using GD, okay, for my, uh, Granada Donuts, use your business, okay, figure out what the two initials are, hopefully you get
01:38:02Better letters than me
01:38:05I don't like the word letter
01:38:07D for doing those things, for it's just a tricky letter to make anything happen with
01:38:10Y is good, Q's are great, okay, depends on one you get, but I got GG, there you go
01:38:16So use yours, um, make your own custom flourish, okay? Now you can start with letters like I did from Illustrator, so I used, uh, U lust, okay, that was the font that I used
01:38:23You can start from a font that you like, go find something that you want to start with, okay, or you can totally hand draw it, custom, it's up to you
01:38:29Um, I don't mind which, uh, have a look at other people's work
01:38:35I made a bit of search, I changed my kind of search
01:38:41Parameters inside of Google to add the word calligraphy, that really helped get me some really good examples for you
01:38:45I've left the link in the exercise file, so go through, get some ideas about how you might do it
01:38:49Some of them are like just really simple, okay, and some of them are really, really complex, okay? It's up to you and what you're, you know, oh, that's cool
01:38:53All right, so I want you to go and do it
01:38:57Um, you can start from a hand drawing like I did, okay, to draw over the top of
01:39:02I like it that way
01:39:07You can start straight in Illustrator, I don't mind
01:39:13And when you have done it though, if you did do the hand drawing version, make sure You send us a like, a before and after, or like the hand-drawn version and the finished version, and you don't have to be limited by just the initials
01:39:18If you want to go a bit further with this one, I'll just show you some of the stuff that I did a while ago
01:39:23And so yeah, went mad and kind of made this thing for, um, something I was working on
01:39:28Okay, but that took me forever
01:39:32That's not the purpose of this kind of class project, but I don't want to limit you by just doing the initials as well
01:39:34You can go bananas
01:39:37It's another one that I did
01:39:39You don't have to do exactly what I did here as well
01:39:42Okay, I did something different for another
01:39:44Project, okay
01:39:46Living Spre is kind of the brand thing that I do, pseudonym that I kind of design under, and I did this thing as well, okay
01:39:48So, so there you go, width tool, curly bits, and try and add these little blobs in here, because that's what we were working on, but it's more about practicing how to use the width tool than anything
01:40:01So have some fun, something simple, something complex, totally up to you, and make sure you share it with me
01:40:07I'd love to see kind of before and after, especially if you did a drawing, and one thing I'm going to introduce here is the critique sandwich, and when you are sharing your work, okay, both in the assignment section, and on social media, I'm kind of, I find it tricky to keep up with everything I did at the beginning, and it's just, I can't do it anymore and reply to everybody, so we kind of do it as a team
01:40:24So if you're joining up, and what we do is, if you've uploaded something and looking for a little bit of feedback, you've got to give feedback to other people, okay, pay it forward, okay, and it's the only way we can all get some feedback, and I find that if you are giving feedback to other people, you will help become a better designer, being able to articulate yourself to others through social media, which is kind of
01:40:45Like low risk, easy to do, you can kind of do it badly and nobody really cares, because you know, it's not a client meeting
01:40:51It just helps when you do get to that client meeting, or you're trying to describe your ideas to teammates or colleagues or investors
01:40:55Okay, uh, yeah, there you go
01:40:58So go through and, um, if you see somebody else's work, okay, make sure you go through to two other people, and what I find is really useful is the critique sandwich
01:41:02And what I mean by that is, if you've never given feedback before, often what comes across, well, is easy to deliver, is the sandwich, so you have positive on either side of something that is Critical, okay? And when it's critical, it's not like that's crap, it's like something that you would do differently or something they might try
01:41:21So in case of this one, I might say, "I really like the flourish around the L and the V, it's really good
01:41:27I'm unsure about what happens at the E here, okay, at the end
01:41:33I reckon it, you know, needs a bit of work, or it might need to wrap around again, or it's a bit thicker than everything else, but overall, I love it
01:41:38I love the colors you've picked and the way that the two words connect together, uh, really, you know, is really inspiring." So can you see that that's the critique sandwich? There's Stuff to do hidden amongst positivity, and it just comes off well
01:41:50It's delivered well, received well, and gets what you need across in terms of, you know, the critique
01:41:57So make sure there is not just, "That's bad," you know, it's something that you don't like, but you might try this
01:42:03I find that is a really clever way to get your idea across to people without insulting them or making them feel bad
01:42:06There you go, just critiqued my own work, need to go fix this now
01:42:10Uh, there you go
01:42:13So make sure post stuff, love to see what you're doing
01:42:17I try and chip in when I can, so do the TAS around bringing a laptop and can't get to everything, so we do
01:42:22It teamwork wise, you help out two other people, we'll pay it forward, and we'll all get some cool results, and it works for both the deliverer of the critique and the receiver
01:42:28That is a long video, I know, but there you go
01:42:31I'm going to say it once, uh, on to the next video, can't wait to see what you do
01:42:34It's awesome
01:42:37I love this tutorial, makes really good social media stuff that I get to see, so make sure you share it
01:42:40All right, that is it, on to the next video
01:42:46Hello, are you ready to master corner widgets? That's these little targets in the corners
01:42:52Okay, we're going to learn all sorts of cool shortcuts, we're going to impress your Friends and colleagues, kind of
01:42:56We'll learn about live shapes and the pros and cons for them
01:43:00This is totally not a boring video, it's full of good, illustrated, juicy goodness all about corners
01:43:03Let's jump on in
01:43:06All right, I've just created an empty document
01:43:11I've got the rectangle tool, I've got a fill, no stroke, that doesn't really matter
01:43:16I'm going to draw out a rectangle using the rectangle tool, okay? And if you can't see, this is the things we're going to be working with, okay? These little corner widgets, okay, all these little targets
01:43:21If you can't see them, go to view, go down to show corner widgets, okay? You should
01:43:26See them, if you can't see them, uh, best is probably jump to the Black Arrow selection tool and have your object selected
01:43:31Now, everybody's probably done this where you just got my black arrow and then just grab one of the corners and they all come along for the ride, okay? Because this is a rectangle of equal sides, it's doing it for all of them
01:43:43If you have another shape, I'm going to grab the pen tool and I'm going to create just an interesting shape, okay, all the way around
01:43:47Go back to my black arrow, click off, click back on
01:43:51What you'll notice is that this one here with a Black Arrow, I can see all the targets, cuz it's kind of
01:43:55What's called a live shape, it's, uh, it knows it's a rectangle
01:44:00This thing doesn't know it's a rectangle, it's rectangular, okay, but not a true rectangle
01:44:04So my black arrow doesn't show the targets
01:44:08If you don't see them, switch to the direct selection tool, which is the white arrow, or the A key, and there you go
01:44:13Now I can drag this in, and they all come from the right
01:44:18If you want to do just one corner, okay, you can just drag a box around where the corner would be, okay, and you have access to just that one corner, okay? So you've got to just be mindful about where you're selecting, and you should be able to grab it
01:44:23Uh, a couple of other Differences is another advanced feature, is the corners don't have to be round, or they don't have to be outy round
01:44:28Let's work on this one here
01:44:34I've got it selected
01:44:39You can hold down the option key on a Mac, Alt key on a PC, and uh, click the corners, okay, and you can work your way through from an Ali to an any to a flat one, okay, it's up to you
01:44:45I've never used any other than round, okay
01:44:50What I did do for a long time there is, did everybody do this? I feel like every, like, I don't know, features box on a website and on a brochure had this, like, I don't know, pull out kind of like facto thing in one of these, like, teardrop shaped boxes
01:44:56I love Them, I still love them
01:45:02That was a creepy voice
01:45:09Uh, so the other differences between these live shapes and kind of regular, irregular shapes that you've drawn is, if I select them both, I've got my direct selection tool, so the A key, and I can see the targets
01:45:15Watch this, this one here, if I hold down my command key on a Mac, uh, control key on a PC, the little corner target disappear
01:45:20With this shape here, if I hold the same key down and double click it, you go into the transform panel
01:45:24You can jump straight to it
01:45:28Go window and go to transform, okay? And let's look at the difference
01:45:34We've got these rectangle properties, this one
01:45:39Here has no rectangle properties, and this thing here has some special stuff, okay? It knows, like, what kind of corners does it have? Can you see I've got my corner here? I want this to be an inner, but I want it to be bigger, okay? It needs to be bigger
01:45:44I can unlink them so I can work on the corners separately, so you could be a bit more deliberate, okay? I'm going to hold shift and use my arrow, so there's my four corners
01:45:50I can decide what goes in the corners, okay? What shape they are? Are they inners? Are they flat ones? What size are they? You get a bit more control, whereas some shapes don't, there's just none of this, that's why sometimes
01:46:03You're like, "Oh, it was working before, but now it's not working." Live shape, another one that has a live shape, is the star tool
01:46:09Okay, so I'm going to grab the star tool, drag something out, and you'll notice that the star tool has star properties
01:46:15I can go, you look at all my sweet stars, I can play around with the inner and outer radius in this transform panel, or like over here, I can grab this middle one, okay? I can grab this outer one
01:46:21Live shapes are quite cool, cool, huh? It's draggable
01:46:25See this? I can move it up and down for how many points that I want
01:46:30Oh, to a degree, only 20 is allowed, okay, but you can type them in as many as you like
01:46:34Over here, the point is that I can mess around with these corner options here
01:46:40I can decide, are they pointy, okay, or are they rounded? I'm going to say rounded, but I need them to be not zero, because you can't have a rounded zero points
01:46:45I'm going to make them, I don't know, 10, uh, 10 points and rounded
01:46:49Can you see what I'm doing over here? You can actually drag them over here
01:46:53See, the star only has, instead of having a million little, uh, corner widgets, it's only got two, so I can kind of go, uh, where we go, let's grab this one
01:46:59Can you see I can go, yep, nice, look like a biscuit, okay, so there you go, rounded corners, more than meets the eye
01:47:05One last thing I want to show you is, uh, it's kind of a subtle change and it's hard, let me demo it
01:47:12So I'm going to go pointy, I'm going to make this really kind of like, um, sharp-edged box, okay? I'm going to grab my corner widget, I'm going to go, I'm going to select them all, grab them in, okay? And what I skipped over earlier is, I'm going to double click the edge, okay? I've got them all selected, double click the edge, is this one here rounding, okay? Actually, I haven't got them all selected, okay? I'm going to select them all, now I've got this one here, if I go through and double click this, it's only going to work with that one there
01:47:38So I'm going to cancel, I'm going to hold shift and grab all the corners I want to mess with, okay? Double click any of them now, and rounding, this is the default absolute rounding, the relative light rounding, can you see what it does? Sometimes you just don't want it to do this, kind of like a perfect round the corner, you want something that kind of like follows the line out and around, okay? And you'll notice that sometimes these ones here, you can't even notice the difference, the top and the bottom, but the left and right, because I've drawn it this way, is a very big exaggeration, so if you're drawing something, you're like Ah, it's just doing this like weird geometric end, and you want something a little bit more, I don't know, relative to the angle of the lines, then you can mess around with those as well
01:48:18All right, my friends, you are now the master of corner widgets in Adobe Illustrator, go forth and impress your colleagues, and I will see you in the next video
01:48:23Hi everyone, we're going to get nerdy with compound shapes
01:48:31We've made them before, you select something, use your shortcut, cut a hole and stuff
01:48:39Okay, it's called a compound shape, and we've done the basics, but we're going to get into the advanced stuff here, compound shapes can Be tricky, hopefully we'll demystify them here and give you a few little shortcuts to be the boss of compound shapes
01:48:47All right, you ready? Let's go! All right, Phase One, open up the compound shapes from your exercise file
01:48:53You don't actually have to open it, I just made an interesting document with a totally unrelated uh image in the background, just so we're not steering at a blank page
01:48:58Uh, all we really need is a rectangle
01:49:04I'm going to click off, I'm going to grab the circle tool, we're going to create a simple compound shape to start with, so I'm just going to hold shift and create an ellipse, I'm going to make it a Different color for no reason other than you can see it easier
01:49:09Black arrow, stick it in the middle
01:49:15I'm going to hold shift, click both my circle and the square, okay, so they're both selected
01:49:21I'm going to go command eight on a Mac, a control 8 on a PC to make a compound shape
01:49:28All it does is take whatever is on the top and cut a hole in the background the long ways, under object, and down here under compound path, and go to make, okay, so that's command 8 on a Mac, control 8 on a PC, okay, so cut a hole in it
01:49:34Now, often you'll get stuff like this, or you've made it and now you want to adjust it, what people tend to do, and where I left it in the uh Central's course is, you went and released it, so you can right-click and say, "Release compound path." Okay, I've got my shape back, and I can move it and do stuff to it, and then make it again
01:49:42Ah, but you came for shortcuts, so let me give you the shortcut
01:49:50So, um, instead of releasing it, what you can do is, with the black arrow, click on the object and double-click it to go into isolation mode
01:49:58So, I've got one inside this compound path, and it means that I can click on just the circle and work on this individually
01:50:10Okay, I can hold shift and grab it and resize it and move it around, okay, and same with the outside, I can work on them
01:50:16Independently, to get out of isolation mode, you can mesh away the arrow at the top here, or just double click the background
01:50:21The other thing you can do without going into isolation mode is use the direct selection tool, and maybe let's click on this A over here, okay? And I can work on these parts without having to go into isolation mode
01:50:26I can work on the individual anchor points
01:50:32I can hold shift, grab them all, and move it around just like inside of, uh, isolation mode, up to you
01:50:37One thing I want to show you is, we kind of hinted at it earlier as well, is there's two kind of compound shapes, so what do I mean by that? Let's Make another uh rectangle, let's make two of them, so you and you, and we're going to have two circle circle, yep, all right
01:50:49Circle sitting over top of this, if I make this a compound path using my shortcut, so command or control 8, and this one here, remember we did the Pathfinder earlier, so I'm in my properties panel, Pathfinder, actually I might just open it up for us all, window Pathfinder, okay
01:51:12And remember if we held down, if we use minus front, we get the same thing, okay, but if we hold down our option key on a Mac, ALT key on a PC, we get the same thing, but remember that is still editable and the big difference is in the layers
01:51:15Panel, let's have a look
01:51:19So I've got this shape here
01:51:23I'm going to select with my Black Arrow, so I'm on Layer Two
01:51:27In my case, this is, you can kind of see which one's highlighted by, can you see down the edge here? If I click on it, it kind of highlights over here
01:51:31So there's this one, compound path, that's it
01:51:34I can't see much inside of it
01:51:36It's called a compound path
01:51:38This one here is a compound shape
01:51:41This is the one that I used with a sweet trick here, okay? It means that I can still edit it afterwards
01:51:43I can kind of do the same for these two, but it means in here, can you see it's this one here? This is the one I made using the Pathfinder
01:51:48Shortcut, can you see it? It's actually the ellipse and the triangle are separate
01:51:55I can work on them separately by clicking this little target option at the end here, you see the little dot there, so I've got the ellipse selected, okay, and I can work on it, okay, and I can do stuff and it's editable
01:52:07It's just sometimes easier working in the layers panel, okay, and that's why sometimes you'll find stuff that is like, oh, I can get inside this compound path
01:52:13That's why sometimes you can get inside a compound shape and sometimes you can't, okay? It's just the way that they're created, there's no real better way, it's more just
01:52:19Now getting advanced, and like sometimes you're like, why does it work one way sometimes, and then another way another time? It's because they're kind of created two different ways, one by the Pathfinder, and one using the compound shortcut
01:52:30Anyway, compound shapes can be a little bit mysterious, hopefully a little less mysterious after this video
01:52:37And yeah, that's why there is phones in the background, trying to make this thing visually more appealing
01:52:42It's kind of nerdy stuff, but it's the good quality advanced stuff that will really help lift your Illustrator game
01:52:46There you go
01:52:50All right, uh, I will see you in the Next video, all right, you made it to the end of the video
01:52:55It's a long one, good work
01:53:01Um, I make a lot of these long format videos that I give away free here on YouTube, um, on various different bits of creative software, so make sure you subscribe to the channel, uh, so that you're notified when another one comes out, otherwise you might miss out
01:53:06Uh, also, uh, leave a comment, and it's my kind of guilty pleasure to go through and doom scroll the comments
01:53:13Uh, let me know what you thought of the video, maybe a tip that you liked that you'll be forever changed in Illustrator, the one that you dug the most, and most importantly, let's Not let this be the end, remember this is like the first chunk of my larger Illustrator Advanced course, okay? There's like 100 plus videos that we go through
01:53:21Look at all the cool stuff we continue on with
01:53:29We end up building out your small business brief with loads of interesting portfolio ready projects
01:53:37There's also design challenges, there's a quiz, and the all important certificate at the end
01:53:43Basically, when you sign up for the course, you just pick up from where we've left off here
01:53:47We continue on with the awesome learning
01:53:51Uh, there's also an Illustrator Essentials course if that's kind of more where you're at
01:53:55Right now also, though, there are loads of other courses, uh, Photoshop, uh, InDesign, After Effects, Premier Pro, Webflow, Figma, Lightroom, there are a load of different courses in there, all for the same low, low price
01:54:01Uh, check out the link in the description for that
01:54:07All right, I hopefully see you in the full course, that's it
01:54:13[Music] Bye for
