if you've opened Adobe Illustrator not been sure where to begin then fear not my name's Matt I'm a graphic designer with 20 years of experience here to guide you through this crash course in this video I'll be covering everything a beginner needs to know from understanding the interface and the purpose of Illustrator to the essential tools you need to master in just a few minutes we'll be ready to start making something together so download the X Tax files now so you can follow along and let's get started Adobe Illustrator is primarily used for creating illustrations
logos in graphic design print things like packaging and also creating graphics for the web and even video it's used widely in the fields of graphic and web design also in fashion and different Industries like that anything that needs to use this kind of Illustrated Graphics really and one of the primarily reasons to use it is that it is a vector graphics program and what that means is that the shapes and the paths that are created are created by mathematical equations as opposed to individual pixels let me just illustrate that we've got two circles here they
both appear alike in dignity but if we actually zoom in we can see that the black circle is comprised of individual pixels here so each square has a different color value and all those together is what makes up the image whereas if we however much we zoom into this purple circle we still see a smooth line and that's because this is created by mathematics where each point you see it says Anchor Point between these points the path of that line is generated by a mathematical equation so no matter how large we scale that image it
will always have the same quality and that's why illustrator is a great choice or vector graphics in general not just illustrator for creating things like logos that are always going to need to be resized and it also keeps a quality when something's printed and things don't come out with that pixelated kind of look where you can see the individual pixels and it degrades the quality so let's jump in to a demo where we can follow along so we want to get our screens looking the same so when you fire a pulp illustrator it probably won't
look like this you'll probably have like a splash screen a welcome screen and we want to create a new file so we're going to go to file new now that's just the same as in lots of software we have a menu bar along the top on the file you can do new open close save print all the kind of things you could do if you were in word for example now you might not have that that might be grayed out and if it is there's probably going to be a big blue new button on the
side here of the splash screen a bit like this create button that's in the bottom right here so it says create or new click on that and we have all these options along the top do you want to create a print file something for film and video something for the web well let's do web so we can work together on screen in pixels and in RGB color so any of these are fine but let's select this 1920x1080 color mode RGB and Screen 72 DPI and then click create and we'll have a new file then you
want to go file save and save this somewhere on your computer so you can work through okay so let's have a look around and get some familiarity when you first go into these design software if you view something like Photoshop you might be familiar with this you can skip to the next chapter but if you're used to using things like PowerPoint and just word processing software web browsers spreadsheets it can look a bit unfamiliar but it's nothing to be scared of it's just getting that familiarity with it so along the top here we have all
the files we're working with our file names we can just click on each of these tabs to go to the individual file and it tells us how zoomed in we are we're at 50 here then on the left we have the toolbar now yours you might not have that there so if your screen doesn't look the same as mine what we need to do is we need to go to window workspace and illustrator set up all these different layouts for us so for example if I change this to topography it's going to move these panels
around we don't want that we want to go to window workspace Essentials and if yours doesn't look the same maybe if you've got something over here like this just go to window workspace and then reset Essentials and it will bring it back to your screen should look pretty much like mine right now okay so on the left we've got the toolbar and this is a mini version of it if we click on the dots at the bottom we can see all the tools here either in a list or in this grid I'm going to click
on the dots again to just hide this and you can change how this looks but it'll start off with something like this and if you just hover over each one of these it will tell you what it does and even give you a little animation a little demo of it the selection tool the direct selection tool the pen tool the curvature tool what we're going to go through these in a minute so your toolbar should be on the left and then you'll have these panels on the right and these are really helpful I want you
to pay attention to this one the properties panel because this changes depending on the tool we're on so for example if we change to the shape tool you see we have different options here transform and appearance if we go back to the selection tool the options have changed again and that can be a really helpful thing for you to to keep an eye and make quick changes as you move through and just think about these tools like any tools let's say you're a visual artist you might reach for a paintbrush you might want to make
that paintbrush you know have a thicker paint brush or a thinner paintbrush you might want to reach for a scalpel you might want to reach for charcoal or pencils different types of paint a different color from your palette so just the same you can reach for these tools here and they will help you create the graphics within your design okay so that's the basic interface if there's something you can't see that you want to see if you've got a window most of the windows are are here so say you want to create a gradient there
is a window here that gives you the options you know that are within the gradient tool now this often comes up in the properties panel but you can leave these open yourself if you like to okay so let's we've created a new file we've had a quick look around the interface here in the middle here is our artboard so this black outlined on this rectangle is our artboard and this is where we would create our design now in illustrator you can create outside the bounds of that if I just go to the pencil tool which
just draws like a pencil just draws lines so I can just do a squiggle like this I can do it on my artboard but I can draw up here so this is something that you can't do like in a word processing software in a presentation software you can move things off and move things on so it's kind of like that but this area here is what you would export and and what you would see what is within the the artboard and you can create lots of these artboards you know within your workspace so let's jump
into some tools and start seeing something and start making something so we're going to start with the type tool the shortcut for that is T so you can just press T once on your keyboard but you can always go over here to your toolbar and just click on a tool and it will be there for you so with the type tool if we click once you see it's already pasted in some placeholder text there two words and then the properties panel has changed to that of the type tool so let's just make this larger you
can see here we've got the point size option so just click on this drop down again this is just like any other software you'll be familiar with let's maybe write something a little bit more meaningful and we have the options here now you might have noticed that I just went and clicked on the selection tool again and that's just like a habit that is like your home base if you're in the middle of a tool and you're not sure what's going on just go back to that you can either use the shortcut V or just
click on that now the reason I didn't press V is because I was in the tap tool if I press V it would have just entered a v type so I've gone over and clicked on that so let's use a font that we can all have access to so Source Sans is a variable is a Google font so we can use that and then here we you can change the weight or the emphasis so this this is very very familiar to anybody who uses any sort of computer software here before which I presume you've you've
used some sort of software if you hear learning illustrator and let's say we want to zoom in a little bit now what we can do is press command hold down command and then press the plus key we'll zoom in you can see that it's got a 66 percent press again 100 obviously command minus zoom out command plus zoom in you can also you see this magnifying glass is the zoom tool you can click on that I'll press the shortcut Z and then click and hold if you drag to the left it will zoom out if
you drag to the right it will zoom in and you will get used to this sort of technique now if you want to then move around if you on this tool or if you're on back to your selection tool if you hold down the spacebar key the cursor will change to a hand if you click and hold your mouse button down and then move your mouse around and drag this is the move tool which allows you to just move around there so let's zoom out again and we have really powerful type tools that are quicker
and easier to handle and manipulate time then it would be in basic software like if you're making a spreadsheet or something so if you've got a carriage return in here and we see these two lines we can adjust here the leading which you might know is line high in your word processing software so if we increase this something cues like 300 we're going to have a huge Space Between the Lines let's make that 72 which is a hundred percent the same as the point size and you can adjust the kerning the space between the individual
letters and the tracking the space between all of the letters like this kind of thing and I'm going to put that back to zero so back to our type tool with t we clicked and then we were able to write on one line but what I want to do is if we have the tab tool selected again if you click and drag you see it creates a rectangle and this will give you some area time it'll fill this whole rectangle with type so if we wanted to make this body copy like our paragraphs under this
headline we'd want that to be much smaller so let's say maybe it's 18 point we'll change the leading to 21 point and I'm just going to select here we want to actually fill this whole thing with text so if you've got to type in the top menu and then click fill with placeholder text actually just we've got Lauren Epsom twice we'll just delete it like that and you might want to you know throw in some Carriage returns for paragraph spacings It's not the proper way to do it but I'll do for now and you can
quickly see how you can create something and with this selection tool where you can just click on something and then click and hold your mouse button down and dragging around it's very easy to manipulate things compared to if you've ever tried to make a poster on word processing software it's nasty so this is a lot easier and we have other options for aligning things so if I select both of these things there's a few way to do it I can click once on this and then hold down shift hover over here I've got these blue
lines under and click here now both are selected if I want to deselect I just click in some free space over here once and then now deselected another way is if I click hold the mouse button down and just drag over the both of them they're both selected now different options always come up in this properties panel so pay attention to it and the Align menus come up and if you can't see that you can just go to window align and it will pop up and I can line these objects to the right to the
top maybe I'm just going to undo that which is command Z or control Z just as it is in most programs but I'm going to align these to the left and I'll just close that because I can run over there and you can already see here how kind of a layout could appear maybe we have an image next to it I'm just going to use the shape tool for that the rectangle tool shortcuts M I've just clicked on it there so I'll just do it roughly I'm getting some smart guides here if you're not seeing
this kind of thing when you hover over you can turn that on in View and then smart guides or command U so I'm just going to draw a rectangle and you can imagine this being I'll select it or drag it around this can be like part of a layout with the type tool if we want to do an area as well as clicking and dragging we can also use one of these shapes so let's say this was another column of text I just hover over the edge it says path there and if I click once
it's now turned this into some area type so this is beginning to look kind of like a magazine layout type setup so quickly else with the type tool where we can do more powerful things that are harder to do if we're doing something like a keynote or PowerPoint so I'm just going to use the pencil tool for this now very basically I will click here we can draw and edit paths so when you have this selected it's just like using a physical pencil if we just click hold the mouse button down as you're doing it
and just drag out like a little wave something like that we can then go to type and I'm clicking and holding here if you see this little red triangle sorry at the corner of a tool you can hold and there are more tools that are related underneath again I said if we go to the menu we can see all of them here but just here I'm going to turn this toolbar off I'm going to click and hold on the T and go down to type on a path and then release my mouse button and I'm
just going to click on this path and you can see automatically it's added type on a path so if I wanted that same headline for example I have that here and again I can have all the same controls to increase the point size to change the weight to increase the tracking even click on this more options here I can make it all caps and obviously we've been able to just drag this around and whatnot it gives me a lot of options and you can begin to see the power of Illustrator so let's get into some
illustration let's rattle through a few more of these tools we looked at the shape tools the rectangle so let's just have a look at some of those here again so we click on this and I'm just going to move this artboard over to the side so we can click hold the mouse button down and drag and create a rectangle here of any size that we like you can also hold shift as you drag out and that will create a regular shape so in case of the rectangle tool it's going to create a square you can
actually see up in these properties that the width and the high are exactly the same you can also double click and then it will give you the option to input the width and height of the rectangle so let's say we wanted one that was 100 pixels wide and 200 high and click OK and it will give us that exact domain tensions there again if we click and hold we have the options of these other tools here the ellipse tool click and drag hold shift as we click and drag the regular shape is a circle similar
with all of these with the polygon tool if you click and drag you can press up to increase the number of vertices and down to decrease so if we go all the way down to three we have a triangle hold shift and it makes it a regular equilateral triangle and let go shift we can kind of mess around with this and then increase it and we we have these different options here and so you can play around with this there's a star tool as well which again you can do to a triangle or to these
these different kind of stars just by pressing up and down on the down arrows now what we have in illustrator is the ability to manipulate layers which makes this again a lot more powerful than basic programs whereas in we overlay these things now they're both black so let's change the color of this you can see under appearance we have fill and stroke so fill means the color and the inside of the shape so if you click on this once you've probably got some little options like this these swatches or you can click on this color
mixer palette to drag these sliders how much of red green and blue you want so I'm just going to drag that up to red or you can select any of these just so it's a different color so we can see this red star on top of this black Square and we can just send this further back so there are you can do this here within the menus but you can also go to sorry it's in the um it's in the object menu object and then arrange and then you can go Center back but I tend
to use these shortcuts which is why it took me a minute to find it shift command and the left square bracket so now that is underneath now you can do that kind of thing in word but what you have here is layers so if we just click on that panel and then on this little arrow here it expands it and you can see all these different things here so this path the red star I can actually click on this circle afterwards to Target it you see that and we can also click on this layer hold
it and drag so I could move it back up to the top this way and these can all be nested in different ways and it gives us a lot more options of how we layer things on top of one another a really useful thing to be aware of is this fill and stroke so Phil is the color inside stroke is the line around the outside let's maybe do it with this circle here so if we change the color of this stroke to say blue now we can't really see that it's very small so if we
change the size of this stroke to say 40 point now you can see this outline around the edge and it's actually updated here the fill and stroke that always appears here at the bottom of the toolbar so it's easy to get to you can also double click on these little squares with the color to bring up this Color Picker menu where you can if you click next to these different options this is shoe saturation brightness or RGB it'll bring up these different options here so you can drag this around and select different colors just by
clicking within here you can also when this is selected if we double click again on the fill color use use the eyedropper so you just um sorry when we select the object you press I and this allows you to pick a color from somewhere else let's say we wanted to pick this red we want to pick and it's changed that so the fill and the stroke it's changed the appearance or we can even click on the background and it'll change it to Y I'm just pressing command Z to undo what we've done here and with
these Strokes you can align these to the center of the path so you see it's an equal distribution it's a line on the center of that path but if we click here for the inside it'll move the stroke to the inside of the path or outside it will move it to the outside of the path there we're going to do something useful with this in a minute I just want some familiarity so another useful thing with the shape tools as well is as well as these actual uh tools that are built in here a quick
way often is to use the shaper tool which you can find if we expand our tools out here and it looks like a circle with kind of a pencil next to it the shortcut is shift n so if we still select that and then click over here now this automatically creates the shape from a rough sketch so for example if we try and draw a rectangle you see that looks really rough doesn't it but if I let go of my mouse button it's created me a perfect rectangle let's try and do a square does it
know it's a square does it try and do a rectangle no it thinks that's vaguely Square you can see the dimensions are perfect there and it figures it out you can just bring that back in shift n do a circle that's done that as an ellipse because it was a bit around like that but if I try and do a circle there we go I get a circle you can do a triangle whatever shape so that's a a useful tool as well the shaper tool to quickly quickly create shapes of the kind of size that
you want and it will automatically make these into ones with perfect geometry we can see this in the outline mode if we press command y you can also do this in the view menu this is outline mode so we can see just the paths that I created I'm going to press command a which selects all we can see the blue dots of these anchor points you can see how this what we drew with the shaper tool very roughly but it's got just three anchor points at each vertices to create a perfect geometric triangle okay let's
throw something useful and a bit more exciting if you're still in outline mode press command y to go back into preview mode and we're going to use the exercise files now so go to file place and then navigate to where your exercise file is and import this sketch now before you press ok there is a little option here at the bottom that says template I want you to click and select that and then click place and what that does is if we go into our layers property it's actually placed the template on a new this
imported file on a new layer named template it's locked it and it's made it slightly opaque it not as contrasted as it normally is so it's ready there to be sketched over now because we've got all this nonsense in here I'm actually just going to tidy this up so if we click on this padlock icon to unlock this we can then move this sketch if we just click in the middle of it and drag and we'll move it out the way of everything else then we can lock it again we've got this layer with all
this uh nonsense on it so you might want to make a new layer here but this is fine for our art let's maybe just call it art actually and we'll use this one okay so I'm just going to zoom into this and I've drawn some of the tools here and let's work on this more difficult one perhaps the pen tool now I want to show you my skin actually so I'm going to make another version of this so I'm just going to unlock it again and then I'm gonna hold down the option key while clicking
and dragging and what that does is you can see is make a copy keep alt and your mouse button press down and then release your mouse button first when you are ready now I'm just going to zoom in here and I'm going to go back with our rectangle tool I'm going to draw a rectangle around this fountain pen drawing then I'm going to go back to my selection tool click and drag to select both the sketch and this rectangle then you can either press command and seven or go to object clipping mask make and it
just creates a little crop of this so you can imagine using that if you had something like a photograph that was part of your layout and then this is tied up a little bit so I'm just going to lock this again and then go back to our art layer and make sure that's selected because that's where we want to do our our drawings now if you want to see these layers you see there's a little eye toggle visibility so you can hide that and show what whatever's on the top which we'll do now so let's
try and illustrate this with a few different tools and see what works well so we're going to start with the pen tool and here it is you can click on it I'll press the shortcut p and this is probably the most important tool to get to grips with to really understand illustrator and I'm going to give you a really quick version of it now but I'll put a link here and in the description as well to the full length video I did on how to master the pen tool which is definitely worth getting to grips
with but the basic idea is that with the pen tool you click on a point so I'm going to roughly follow this illustration here and it creates what's called an anchor point and as I move away you see this blue line where the next part of our drawing is going to go so if I click again it creates a line between these two points and that was a straight line but now I want to do a curved line so what I'm going to do is not click once to create a curved line so I'm just
going to undo that but you would click and hold your mouse button down and drag the mouse to create a curve now as you move your mouse around it will create a curve that moves in different directions so you want to move it till the path sort of follows where you want it to be now this isn't the best sort of method of drawing with a pencil so I'm just going to delete this I'm just pressing backspace to do this so I want to show you some best practices really quickly but I do recommend checking
out the video so I'm going to press p and I'm going to first of all make sure we can see what we're doing so let's go about the properties panel I'm going to have no fill now if the fill is selected like it is here you can just press the slash button and that does it but you can also click in here and click on this white square with the red line through and then for the stroke I want something I can see clearly so maybe like red and I'm going to increase this stroke size
to three point and depending on how zoomed in you are you'll just have to uh you can change that yourself so we're still on the pencil so let's try again with this so I'm going to click once and then click once again and I've got a bit of a thicker red line now and then I'm going to click and drag now to curate the neatest and the cleanest geometry and that's always our goal within illustrator a tip with a pen tool is that you want to get these anchor points going vertically or horizontally when they're
kind of all over the place at weird angles and you just start doing this kind of thing it just creates a mess so what we're going to do is we're going to click and drag and we're going to hold down the shift key so that we have this moving horizontally and I'm just going to do this roughly now this is pointing in the wrong direction here so what do we do about that well we hold down the option key and then we have this move tool and then you see it says the handle on the
end I can now click hold my mouse button down and move this in the direction that I want it to point where the direction the path's going to go and then let go of my mouse button and now you see the path is moving down in this direction so I can click and drag again I'm going to hold shift again to do this and again here I'm going to hold down the option key move it over here my smart guide has made that horizontal for me okay I'll go with that click once because I just
want a straight line then again I'm going to click and drag hold shift down as I do it I'm going to hold option I'm going to move this handle this way now this handle isn't technically straight going the other way so it's not perfect there's a better way to do it but I just want to quickly show you what the pen tool kind of does and sort of the limitations and how we work with it press once press once see and it really struggles with this kind of thing but I'm just going to click and
drag click and drag just very quickly just so you can see the kind of thing that is created so if I just drag this over to the side you see it's not very attractive is it to begin with so you can improve that with greater Precision than the pen tool but I want to show some some other ways of maybe doing it so we've got that copy there I'm going to delete this one by showing you some of these other tools so we have here the curvature tool now this is similar to the pen tool
but it automatically creates curved lines with good geometry it wants to create curves automatically so if I click here for example now you don't just want to click once here because it it's not going to understand where you're going what you need to do is Click somewhere where the direction is changing of your line it's like halfway along there and then click again and you see it's automatically creating that curve so now here why is it going around like that because this is actually a corner where it moves in a completely different direction so we
click once for a curve twice for a corner so I'm just going to delete this whole thing press backspace twice so let's double click for a corner click once for a curve double click for a corner once for a curve double click for a corner double click for a corner once for a curve now we can always edit this so don't worry about this double click for a corner once for a curve double click for a corner double click for a corner double click for a corner once for a curve one's for a curve one's
for a curve double click for a corner double click for a corner double click and oh that was already a corner so it's changed it to a curve I'm double click so I'm just going to click undo and it has that there so there's this one here so if I double click on that it'll change it whichever one you want to change it from a curve to a core corner to a curve or back just double click on that point so this again looks kind of rough but it's better than what we had before because
it's automatically doing these things and it doesn't allow us to be it doesn't require us to be expert with the pen tool I tried to show you like a beginner's version of the pen tool but check the other version for a video for some Mastery okay so we're improving here but this still looks like a very sort of hand-drawn kind of style so what we can do to give ourselves a better chance of success is we can use grids and guidelines to create some uniformity if we wanted this to look you could use this kind
of style but if you wanted it to look more like a uniforms of Icon grids and guides would really help with that if you have the selection tool selected under the properties panel you see some of these options here to show the rulers so let's click on that to show the grid let's click on that and then here to show guides uh hide them they're already shown to lock the guides smart guides this kind of thing so let's make sure rules are on grids on guides are visible and smart guides are visible as well you
can also do all this in The View panel as well it's mainly down here under guides and then show and hide different things okay so this grid here that I've got let's make sure we're all on the same grid so if you've got to illustrator then preferences then guides and grid and I've done a grid line every 100 pixels with a subdivision every 10 10 subdivisions which means there's 10 pixels for each one of these little squares here you can change the color of these things have the grids in the back let's turn that off
so they're not okay and then we have that here so what I want to do is create a bit of a grid to create some guidelines that helps me draw this shape in a very uniform way so I'm going to go back to the layers panel and I'm going to unlock this layer because everything on that is locked so now I can select this sketch and I'm going to just rotate it a little bit so it's a little bit more vertical to help us uniformly so the rotate tool is here the shortcut is r so
if you press R and then you change this cross here and then just click and drag and I'm just going to get these lines going vaguely vertical something like that it doesn't need to be exact this is a very rough sketch and the whole point of this demo is to show you what you can do with a rough sketch you don't have to have a grid book and take time inking your sketches you can you know do something rough and throw it into illustrator and do it that way if you like to so what I'm
going to do is create some guidelines now so if you are in the hover over the ruler and then click there holding the mouse button down and then drag out it will sorry I need to be on this layer sorry not my template layer but my art layer and then click and drag and you can see a little dotted vertical line here and it will create a line there you see that guideline now I'm just going to undo that one because what I want to do go back to properties is snap these to this grid
that I've got here so here we can check put this option snap to grid is off snap to grid is on okay so I'm going to click and drag and you see I can't go in the middle of these grid lines anymore it won't let me it snaps it to the nearest grid line just going to zoom in a little bit more so I'm just going to approximate using this sort of grid you know it's a one grid space in the in the middle here in this fountain pen nib and then maybe this part of
the nib on itself wants to be wider so I'll do that two across and I'll just make this symmetrical too and then the same here from the horizontal we just click and drag down and I can create these horizontal grid lines I want one for where these points this widest point comes out I'll do it roughly like that one here at this extremity so that's one two three four five away from that line so I'll do the same on the other side I'm here and I'm one two three four five to the edge so it's
roughly right I need one at the bottom here and I also need some lines for where this shape sort of starts to move from one direction to the other the Curve on both the top and the bottom let's do some for the little shape underneath as well which we haven't done yet let's just do a space of one so maybe three here so I'm just dragging these out now if I hide the grid so I just look at these guidelines that was a shortcut of command apostrophe but you can also do it if you have
the selection tool via the properties panel and now we've got this grid which is going to help us draw out using the tools we've got so let's try with the curvature tool again but this time because we and we're already got a snap to grid arm when I click on each of these points and we'll actually yeah I'll start here I've clicked once I'm going to double click because that's a corner I should have done that on the first one but I can always click on it again to change it and then I'm going to
click here at this point where it begins to diverge needs to be a long one doesn't it so I'll just take that as a horizontal line and I'll go a long one there and then I'll click at this corner here sorry that should have been a corner not a curve double click then click hmm once here so I'm outside by one there double click here double click one over one click double click one over single click double click double click and I'm just going to make a a rectangle here and we'll do that Circle in
a minute double click double click double click okay we we didn't have our stroke on there which didn't help us so I'll color that in again there we go and we've already got something in I'm actually just going to use a shape tool at the bottom to create this and I'm going to select these two paths holding alt again click and drag now I'm going to hold shift down which means it'll drag it on the horizontal here at a straight um a straight line either straight down or straight across so I can use these guidelines
still and you can see already if I just use a shortcut shift X to swap the fill and stroke you can also click on this swap from stroke Arrow here how much more regular this is than what we had before by using these guidelines and the curvature tool has been our friend now and if we press command y to the outlines really clean geometry we don't have wonky lines going on now I want to create the circle as well so I'm going to go to the shape tool here because this is going to be a
better way to create a perfect circle use your lips and I'm just going to click and drag over this space make this wire use the eyedrop tool shortcut I click on white I mean and that's vaguely right and what I can do so you had it over here you can just push the arrows and because we snap into the grid this is a three by three grid shape and you can just drag it around until you think it's where it needs to be and that basically is the the look that we were going for in
the first place now this to get this working with the geometry because that looks right but obviously this is white so actually this shape hasn't been created properly and we can illustrate that more if we maybe change the color double click on the fill and just select anything like a cyan color click ok how do we fix this well we can use something called the shape Builder tool now you might notice I keep dragging these copies out now vectors are free we can create as many of these as we like and that's good to do
so we can see the iterations and we don't make destructive changes but we can always go back and Branch off think of like a tree all these different versions that you make sort of Branch off so with everything selected holding the option or ALT key and shift I'm gonna sorry option key I'm going to start click and start dragging then hold shift so it's on the same line and I've got a copy of it here and then I'm going to use a tool called the shape Builder tool which is over here in the menu you
can also use a shortcut shift M and what this does is it allows us to combine shapes it's a similar to how these Pathfinder tool works but it's a much more intuitive way of doing it so if we for example here you can see we can see this rectangle sort of cutting into our Circle but we've got a little plus icon next to our Arrow if I click on this circle and then drag across with this line it's now built a shape it's created this one Circle so it's added them together but if I want
to take it away because I want to take this from the the red shape so this part is cut out like the ink fill you hold down the option key and you get at the minus sign next to your arrow and if I click there or drag you can either click or drag it's remove that now so if I press command y you can see with the outlines it's compared to what we had before it's now created the perfect geometry on this shape and that shape build is really powerful in fact we could have actually
used it if I just move this path over to the side here and you can do things by like drawing uh you know rectangles to create part of the shape or like a rectangle here and then maybe say right I want an ellipse to be removed from this shape here to create this curve you know that goes into the pen so if I'm just swap the film stroke again shift emphas shape Builder and sort of delete that out and you can see I've done this roughly but how you can build up paths using this tool
as we have done here and then if we want this to look more like our pen tool let's just hold alt again click and drag shift and then we can click on the rotate tool and if your whole shift as you click the rotate tool it'll actually do it in 45 degree increments so we've got something a bit similar to that we might have one of our other tools like the add Anchor Point tool we've got a little plus next to it so we can again go into the rectangle tool let's turn the grid back
on and maybe draw a little plus sign kind of thing there's little things you can do like you can copy and then you can paste in place uh paste in front paste in place if you paste in front it'll place it on top it looks like nothing's changed we maybe change the color of this to a darker red and then if we click R for rotate again hold shift click and drag 45 degree angles so we have this little sort of plus symbol and we can add these together with our shape Builder tool or again
this Pathfinder does the same thing unite if it's pretty easy to see in outline mode what we have before and then we unite the shape here and you could drag this down so it's sort of similar how it's very close on the add Anchor Point tool maybe if we make both of these black we'll click on the fill so you see how from this very rough sketch we've created something here with perfect geometry in not too long now illustrator is super powerful but I don't want to overwhelm you I think this is a pretty good
start what I want you to do is go back to these two other sketches here the one of the pencil tool and the paragraph tool and try with a few different techniques use the pen tool use the curvature tool maybe use the pencil tool use shapes and the shape Builders tool and see if you can replicate these things and create Vector illustrations of them with these stroked outlines with these filled sections and see how you get on trying to create something just as we did with this at Anchor Point pencil illustration if you've just been
watching and not following along in illustrator then download the exercise files for a link in the description and have a go this will help your learning to stick subscribe to see more of our videos and check out flux Academy's programs if you're interested in becoming in a professional designer until next time happy designing [Music]
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