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[♪ Music ♪] [Adobe Creative Suite Podcast] [Design] [Learn CS5] [your host] [Terry White] Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Creative Suite Podcast. My name is Morty Golding, and my buddy Terry White asked me if I could do a couple video tutorials around using Illustrator, and I thought a lot of people, especially those maybe coming from Photoshop, sometimes struggle with drawing inside of Illustrator. Sometimes it can be a little bit standoffish because drawing in Illustrator with a pen tool, and in fact, all of the tools that you have inside of Illustrator, can sometimes be difficult. However, I wanted to share with you 5 tips for drawing with success inside of Illustrator. Now, the first thing I want to talk about, maybe we'll kind of just draw a basic shape like what we see right here, this icon, like a magnifying glass. Maybe it's a search icon for a website. Now, the first thing we want to do is we always want to try and visualize the basic shapes that make up more complex artwork. You know, right now, your brain kind of sees a magnifying glass, but if you kind of look closer, you can kind of see that there are these circles that are here, there are these rectangles and maybe some rounded rectangles here, and once you start to break down those shapes, we're actually going to use the simple drawing tools inside of Illustrator and kind of side step the whole pencil thing altogether wherever we can. Now, you'll also notice over here that this little crescent shape here, which forms kind of a highlight on the glass, that itself is not a primary shape like a circle or a rectangle. However, I can build that artwork. I can get to that type of object or that kind of shape by combining some basic elements. For example, if I take two circles and overlap them with each other, think of the way that the moon has an eclipse where you kind of see this shadow that comes across it. It's these two circles that when I combine them with each other, or I subtract them from each other, I can get it the shape that I want. So, that's the first thing. Also notice, by the way, that the artwork right now is kind of rotated on a 45 degree angle, but it's going to be a lot easier for me to draw this if I draw it kind of standing straight up on a 90 degree angle. So, we're going to do that as well. Now, I'm actually going to create a new document here. Let's actually try to create the shape just from scratch. Click okay, and by the way, practice is perfect. The more that you can draw shapes, the better off you'll be. I'm going to press Command R or Control R to show my rulers. Wherever possible, try to have Illustrator do as much work for you as possible when you're creating your artwork. Now, I don't really care exactly where my guides are when I draw them. I just want to drag out a guide right about over here, and I'll drag out one right about over here. I just kind of want to create this little point where they both intersect, which I can use as a way to start drawing all of my artwork. So, the second tip over here is use the guides inside of Illustrator to help you out. Now, that leads me to the third tip. We're actually going to use the regular, basic primary tools inside of Illustrator to draw this nice artwork. However, it's important to realize that the drawing tools have some keyboard modifier keys that allow you to help you draw those objects. So, the third tip over here is going to be to really learn what these keyboard modifier keys are so that you can use the basic shape tools in a more meaningful way. So, for example, over here, if I just take let's say the rectangle tool. Most people know you can click and drag to create a rectangle, but the trick is not to let go of the mouse yet because once you let go of the mouse, you commit that shape to the artboard. But while your mouse is down, you can actually click and drag. You can continue to change it and at the same time, I could use modifier keys. Now, most people know that the shift key on your keyboard will constrain your artwork to be perfect. Now, in this case here, since I'm using the rectangle tool, that means it will be a perfect square. If I were using the ellipse tool, for example, holding down the shift key would give me a perfect circle. Now, notice over here that as I'm drawing, I'm going to let go of the shift key here for a second, notice that when I click and I start to drag, I'm dragging down into the right to create this rectangle, meaning that the origin point or the place where this rectangle's being drawn from is the upper left hand corner. If I hold down, however, the Option key on my keyboard, or if you're on Windows that would be the Alt key, that instructs Illustrator to draw the rectangle out from its center instead of the upper left hand corner. Now, if I combine both of these keyboard shortcuts, it's both Option or Alt and the Shift key, I get a perfect square being drawn out from the center. Now, there's another keyboard shortcut also, by the way. If I press and hold down the space bar, that kind of freezes me from actually changing the shape of the object, but as I click and drag the mouse, it lets me reposition the object anywhere inside of my screen, and then as soon as I let go of the space bar, I can continue dragging that shape. Again, the key here is I'm not letting go of the mouse button until I'm ready to commit to that piece of artwork. So, I'm just going to go ahead now and delete the shape after I've created it, and we actually want to now start creating the basic elements for the magnifying glass. So, I'm going to switch over here first to the ellipse tool. Now, the ellipse tool let's me draw circles here, so again, I can get a perfect circle by holding down the shift key, but because I've created these guides over here, I want to actually have the circle drawn out from the center here. We're going to see again how important it is because as I'm drawing I can easily get everything aligned automatically as I'm creating it. So, I'm going to hold down the Option or the Alt key, if you're on Windows, and also the shift key and I'm going to click and drag outwards. That gives me a nice perfect circle, and the center of that circle is exactly where those two guides intersect. Now, as I'm drawing, you can see that right now my default object is filled with white, and it has a black stroke on it. However, when I'm drawing these shapes, I really prefer that the objects have no fill whatsoever, that the fill is set to none, because then it's easier to see. I don't have to worry about objects in the front of each other or behind each other. So, I'm just going to change my fill of this object to none. Great, now I'm going to draw out yet another circle. I'm going to again, hold down the Option and the Shift key, click and drag out from the center. That gives me now another circle. See now how I've created that double area which is going to serve as part of the magnifying glass that holds the glass itself. At the same time, you're also going to create a circle on the inside for the glass. Now, I'm going to switch over to my rectangle tool, and I'm going to click and drag right here from the center, and again, I'm holding down my Option key here because I want to drag out from the center here. And I'm actually going to create a shape just about like this. Now, I'm purposely actually having the shape go in to the circle here. As we'll see in a minute, we're going to understand why I'm doing it this way because you don't have to really worry about getting everything perfect as you're drawing the objects. When you're laying this artwork down, just get it on the artboard, get it on the screen, and then worry about it later about trying to get it to be perfect. Now, I'm going to switch to my rounded rectangle tool because the actual handle of the magnifying glass, I want it to have some rounded corners. So, once you get a minute, click over here on the actual guide here because that's going to be my center, and I'll hold down the Option key to drag out from the center, and notice here I have these rounded corners on the rectangle. Now, before I let go of the mouse, remember we discussed before about these keyboard modifier keys, right? Well, as I let go of the Option key, now I'm kind of dragging out from the upper left hand corner, I can use my up arrow to actually make the corners more rounded. You see right now the corners are really rounded on this rectangle? If I use the down arrow, it basically decreases the radius so I have smaller rounded corners. So, as I'm drawing I can kind of get just the look that I want. I'm going to go back now to the Option key, drag out from the center, and give myself a handle that looks just something like that. Great, so now I've created all the elements that I need for this artwork here. Now to the fourth tip, which is use the shape builder tool to create these final shapes. Now, let me explain what I mean by that. Some people who are experienced in Illustrator know that there are these commands called the "Pathfinder Commands." If you go to the window menu, you can choose over here to open up the pathfinder panel, and there are all these buttons here like add and subtract and intersect, exclude, and there's a whole bunch of these over here like trim and merge and crop. However, a lot of people don't know what all these buttons are supposed to do. So, the way they use it is they select their artwork and then they click on one button they see, no, that's not the result I wanted, they press undo and they click on another one, and they keep repeating that process until they get what they're actually trying to achieve. It's not really very intuitive, and on top of that, the pathfinder commands can be somewhat complex to wrap your brain around. However, the new shape builder tool that was added to Illustrator CS5 allows us to combine shapes visually. Now, the important thing to note over here, the shape builder tool only works on artwork that's selected. That's going to come to our advantage in just a short minute as we're going to see. But right now, by pressing Command A I have all my artwork now currently selected. I can now switch to my shape builder tool, which appears right here, and as I move that cursor over the artwork, you can see that it starts to highlight the different regions of that artwork. Now, here's the way that the shape builder tool works. In its default state right now you can see a little plus sign that appears next to the cursor. Well, right over here I had kind of this mistake here, right, where the rectangle went into the circle, and I didn't need that there at all. I actually want to combine these two together, so what I can do is I can click over here on this shape and then drag and touch this shape. You see how now they're both highlighted? And when I release the mouse, Illustrator combines those two shapes together into one. So, I don't really have to worry about getting everything perfect as I create the artwork. Now, I can actually take these shapes right here, and I can actually join those together as well by clicking over here and dragging across and now those shapes are combined. Now, here's a little shortcut here that you can kind of learn from. We discussed before the modifier keys. If I hold down the Shift key while I'm using the shape builder tool, it doesn't just connect the shapes itself, but it creates kind of this marquee. Notice when I click and drag I see this rectangle appear and any piece of art that falls within the boundary of that marquee area when I release the mouse gets combined down to one final shape. So, take a look at that. We started out with some basic circles and rectangles and rounded rectangles and we've got now a nice complex shape which is this magnifying glass. Now, if you remember, on the upper part here of the magnifying glass we had created some kind of a highlight over here, and I want to create that here as well, some kind of a crescent shape. I'm going to go back here to actually use my ellipse tool. Once again, position it right here in the crosshairs in the center, hold down my Option and Shift keys and draw out a perfect circle right about like this. Next, I'm going to position my cursor just off to the side, kind of offset it somewhat. Again, Option, Shift and drag, and now I'm going to create a bigger circle right over here. And you can see that with these two shapes here, just to make it a little bit easier to see let me select both of these objects here and move them off to the side. You see how I have two circles here, but the way the two circles overlap it kind of leads me visually with this little crescent shape which is really all that I want. Well, take a look at this, I'm going to press undo. It's going to go back into position here, and I'm going to use the same shape builder tool, the same one that we used to combine shapes to also remove shapes from each other. I'll press Shift M on my keyboard to access the shape builder tool, and again, by default, you kind of see that plus sign. That means that whatever I click and drag on, those parts of those shapes become combined. Now, if I hold down that Option key, however, on my keyboard, the Alt key on Windows, you can see that plus sign changes to a minus sign. That means that if I drag over objects, those parts get removed from the artwork. Now remember, the shape builder tool only works with artwork that's selected. So, right now, because I only have these two circles selected, the underlying magnifying glass shape is not going to become touched at all. It's just simply going to live there and it won't be harmed, but I'm just going to be dealing now with these two overlapping circles. I'm going to click and drag with the mouse to highlight these two parts of the circle and let go of the mouse, and all I'm left with now is that little crescent shape which I wanted to actually create to create this highlight over here inside of this shape. Great, this is perfect and I've been able to use a shape builder tool to do this all visually instead of worrying about what all these pathfinder commands mean. Now, my fifth tip that I wanted to share with you is that when it comes time to actually coloring this artwork in, we can actually use the shape builder tool not only to build the artwork, it's kind of a weird name because it's called the shape builder tool but it also allows you to apply color to your objects as well. So not only can I use the shape builder tool to build the artwork, I can also use it to paint the artwork, and that's what I'm going to do right here. So, I'm going to first hit Command A to select all my artwork. Remember, the shape builder tool only works on artwork that's selected. Next, I'm going to go over here to my actual shape builder tool inside of the tool bar, and I'm going to double click on it to bring up the options. Notice over here there's a setting here that says "Pick Color From," "Color Swatches" and there's a checkbox here that says "Cursor Swatch Preview." I'm going to click on that option here and click okay, and notice that now when I move my cursor around on the screen I see these three little boxes that appear on top of my cursor. Let's go ahead now and open up my swatches panel, and we'll have a better understanding of what those boxes actually do. Let me click on the yellow swatch over here. Notice that right now, the big box that appears on top of my cursor is filled with yellow. And just to the right of it it's green, and just to the left of it it's red. Well, if we look at our swatches panel now, I have yellow and just to the right of it is green and just to the left of it is red. What we're actually seeing right here on top of my cursor is a miniature snapshot of the swatches panel, and I can use the arrow keys on my keyboard, the right arrow will move to the right and the left arrow will move to the left to allow me to change colors. Now, remember those multi-colored pens where you click the button and it turns red, click the button and it turns green? This is the same concept, I'm just using the arrow keys on my keyboard so I can change the colors in context as I'm applying them to my artwork. So, I'm just going to hit the right arrow key a few times to kind of move over to this dark blue color and just click over here to apply color. See, just click on the object. It actually applies the color to that shape. Then move over here to the left and use this color right here and I'll jump over here to white, and let's fill this area with white. Now, you know I don't really want any stroke objects here. I don't want to have any strokes applied to this artwork, so I'm just going to switch to my regular selection tool, select the artwork here and set my stroke to the none attribute. Great, I've created this shape right now, and I'm going to go ahead now and select it and remember, this artwork was kind of at an angle before so I'm going to tap the R key on my keyboard. R activates the rotate tool. I'm going to hold down the shift key because doing so will constrain my rotations to angles of 45 degrees, and if I just do that very quickly, I get the icon just rotated to the exact position that I need. So, take a look at that. With just a few quick steps I was able to create some artwork that looks kind of complex, but I didn't have to use the pen tool. I didn't have to use any of Illustrator's really complex tools. All I did was use some basic shape tools, and I used the new shape builder tool inside of Illustrator as well. Well, I hope that you found this useful. I want you to go out and practice on some objects, try to draw some shapes on your own. If you want to find out more about using Illustrator, why don't you head over to lynda.com. They have some great tutorials by yours truly, and there's also plenty of content up on Adobe TV as well.59 Have fun using Illustrator and have a great day.
