Learn How to Use Adobe Illustrator for Beginners [Part -1]

1. How to Draw in Illustrator

Now this course is for beginners, there is no need to have any previous knowledge in Adobe Illustrator, or design or drawing or illustration. Okay, we’re gonna start right at the beginning and work our way through, step by step. During this course we’re gonna work through practical real-world projects together. Learning the tips and techniques necessary to make each of those projects happen. We’ll start with the techniques that you’ll need to create just about anything in Illustrator, including custom shapes, the wonderful shape builder and the simple to us curvature tool.

We’ll explore lines and brushes. You’ll master how to use and manipulate type. We’ll use our new type skills to make our print flyer. We’ll work through how to create your own custom logos and icons. I’ll show you the sneaky secrets Illustrator has to discover and use beautiful colors and gradients. You’ll learn how to push, pull, cut and manipulate artwork like this. We’ll take our drawings and make repeatable patterns like this. And I’ll easily show you how to redraw these images in this vector style. Last but not least, we’ll make sure that you can save and export your print and web documents like a professional. Also throughout the course I set lots of class exercises so that you can practice all the tips and tricks and techniques you are learning as you move through the course.

1.1 Setting Up Our Document

So if you’ve never opened up Illustrator, or you have and you struggled a little bit with it. Follow me and I will show you how to make beautiful artwork in Adobe Illustrator. So let’s go to File and let’s go to Open. Now what you wanna to do is you wanna find the Exercise Files you’ve downloaded. Here they are here, Exercise Files Illustrator. And in here I want you to find the file called Getting Started, and then click the Open button. All right, so the first thing we need to do is we need to reset our workspace, just so that we’re all looking the same. And we can do it along the top here. There’s this little app bar, okay, and yours might say something different in here. But drop this down, and what you want to do is you want to click on Essentials. You want to see if there’s a tick next to it, so click on it.

Essentials

And the second thing you want to do is come down to that exact same menu and go to Reset Essentials. And that will just put it back to kind of a default setting. Now if yours still looks different, it might be that you’re using an earlier version of Illustrator. And what that’s going to mean for you is that you can continue along with this course, say, 90% of the course is going to be still fine for you. What you are going to have a little bit of trouble with is finding out where some of these menus are, because they have moved around just a tiny bit. What I mean by that, if I grab my Type tool and I click and I start typing. You can see over here it automatically says, here’s my Character panel, and there’s my Font and Font Sizes.

Properties Panel

This Properties panel did not exist in earlier versions of Illustrator. Super handy, I love it. But in earlier versions what you’re gonna have to do is when looking at this Character panel or things in this appearance. What you’re gonna have to do is go up to Window, and open them separately. This is how older versions worked. If I go down to Type, there’s Character, okay? So it’s the same panel, can you see? He matches him, but he’s just in a separate little window. So that’s going to be a fun game if you’re using, say, CS6 or CS5. But don’t worry, you can continue on with most of this course. So just make sure you have it set to Essentials and that you’ve reset them. Next thing, let’s look at the units and increments. Let’s change the units you’re using. What you need to do is have nothing selected. The best way to have nothing selected is grab your black arrow, the Selection tool here. And just click off in this grey area here, just so that nothing is selected. Watch when I select on something, this Properties panel changes. But when I click on the background here, into kinda no-man’s-land, it gives me kind of general overall settings for the document. In this case, it’s currently set to centimeters, okay? I’m gonna change mine, and work in inches in this course.

But let’s say we’re working, say, with some web or a UI design work in Illustrator. You can click on pixels, it doesn’t really matter, but this is the place to change it. It’s in a slightly different place than say, a lot of the other Adobe products like Photoshop or InDesign where it’s kind of done in the Preferences. So that’s just something to note here, we’re gonna pick inches. One last thing we’d do before we move onto start making things is just some basic navigation. We’ll cover a lot more during the course, but zooming in and out and moving around is quite important.

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Zoom Tool

So there is a long way, you can use this, see this little magnifying glass here? The zoom tool, click on that. And you click once, click twice, okay, and it just keeps zooming in. To zoom out, you can hold down the Option key on a Mac, or the Alt key on a PC. So look down at your keyboard. If you’re using a Mac, it’s the Option key. If you’re a PC, it’s the Alt key, and you can see the little icon changes from a plus to a minus. And then I just click again with my left mouse button, okay, and it just zooms out. So that’s the long way. What you’ll find is I’m not gonna cover too many shortcuts really early on. But the one everyone uses to zoom in and out is, on a Mac, hold down your Cmd key and tap plus. If you’re on a PC, hold down the Ctrl key and tap plus. Okay, so plus is just up in your numbers, kinda along the top of your keyboard, there’s a plus and a minus. So minus zooms out, plus zooms in.

Navigation

One last little bit of navigation is to move around, say I want to see kinda down a bit further. See these little sliders on the side here, okay, it’ll look a little different on a PC. But there’ll be a little kind of a slider bar that you can go up and down. Same with down at the bottom here, you can go left and right. Okay, that is the long painful way. That is fine when you’re new, you can do that way. But let’s do one last little shortcut, is if you hold down the space bar. Can you see at the moment I’m on my selection tool? Okay but if I hold space bar down, look at the icon that changes. It becomes a little hand. Okay so space bar down, becomes a little hand, and that just means click, hold, and drag. Okay, so space bar down, clicking the mouse, and just dragging it around. All right, that’s it for the boring navigation stuff in Illustrator.

We’re gonna create a new document, show you how to bring in and use layers to lock this pencil drawing in the background so that we can redraw over the top of it. All right, let’s get started. All right, first thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna create a new document to draw our penguin on. Let’s go to File, let’s go to New. Now in here we’ve got a bunch of pre-sets, okay. Along the top here you’ve got like if you wanted to design a mobile phone, kind of a website. We’re gonna start with print, okay. And in here we’re gonna pick letter, and along here we’re gonna change our units to inches. We’re gonna make it landscape, and what you’ll find is yours is probably twirled up down at the bottom here. See where it says advanced options, click on that word and this little extra option opens up, okay? And we’ll change our color mode to RGB.

And we’re not gonna cover the full differences between RGB and CMYK. But, just so you know, if you’re new, RGB gives you a bigger color field, okay? More richer colors. CMYK is a little bit more washed out. But if you’re gonna eventually become a commercial illustrator or commercial designer using illustrator. You probably need to research a little bit more the differences between the two. But the short version is just use IGB, even if you go into commercial print, printers have some amazing software to convert it to IGB, which they need and often it can give you a better result. So RGB, perfect for pretty much all circumstances these days. Let’s click create, all right.

Next thing we gotta do is save our document. So next up let’s go to File and let’s Save our document. What I’m gonna do is be very organize and click on New Folder. And I’m gonna put it into files. Okay, I’m gonna put a folder coolest one, my penguin. I’m not sure if that’s how you spell penguin, looks good enough for me. If you’re on a PC it’s slightly different, I think there’s just an icon along the top here, that says New Folder, hover above them. Create a new folder called class files, name our document penguin, and let’s click Save.

Okay, these Illustrator options, just leave them all by default and click OK. So, to get started, what we’ve got is, I’ve drawn, hand drawn a penguin, and we’re gonna redraw over the top of it, and that’s a really common way that I work, and a lot of illustrators work. Is that it’s easier to draw in my notebook, take a photo of it or rescan. And actually just draw on top of it in illustrator. So how everyone works? You can go straight into illustrator but it’s gonna give us at least template to draw over the top of, just to make it a bit easier for us now. So to make that happen, let’s go to File and let’s go to Place. Place is the word, it’s interchangeable with import. Illustrator likes to call it Place, though, so File, Place, we’ll bring in our image. Let’s find the exercise files that you’ve downloaded, and in there should be one called penguin.jpg.

Now, before you click Place, what we’re gonna do is click on this word Template. I’ll show you what it does. Let’s make sure a template is clicked, let’s cut and place, and what ends up happening is, with my black arrow, if I click off in the background. Can you see? I can’t move this image. So what it does is, it brings it in, it puts it on its own layer. It locks that layer and dims it down a little bit, so it’s easier to draw over the top of. And mines put in the middle of this document. Yours is probably off to the side here a little bit. So, let’s look at unlocking that layer and moving it around. So, up here in your layers panel. Layer one is where we’re gonna do our drawing. This layer, here, called Template, you can kinda see Template Penguin. What it’s done is, it’s created a layer, and has locked it, okay? So it means I can’t move it around, which is super handy. But let’s say I wanna move it over a little bit, let’s click on the locking icon.

Click on this now, and now, okay. Just using my black arrow. Just clicking and dragging the center anywhere, okay? Now it’s unlocked, okay? So I hope you can see the benefits of using the template. I can lock it again now, we’re back to my layer one, okay? Make sure it is highlighted, and I can do my drawing on that layer. And this helpful little liar is just underneath dimmed down a little bit. The capacity is down a little bit and it’s locked making it easier to draw. All right, that’s it for setting up our document, just getting ready for drawing over the top of. What we’ll do in the next article is that we’ll start drawing with our shapes, okay. Lines and rectangles to make our cute little penguin. That, for some unknown reason, is a sheriff.

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1.2 Drawing With Shapes and Lines

Mainly because I needed to show you how to draw a star. Hi there, in this article we’re going to redraw this pencil penguin, okay? Over the top, using shapes and lines, using illustrator, we’ll turn them off and yeah. Short little squat penguin. Look at how happy he is. All right to get started, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna grab. Our rectangle tool over here in my toolbar.

If you can’t see the rectangle tool, it might be that if you click and hold this kind of where this option might be, it might be set to something like the ellipse tool. And to change that back to the rectangle tool, all you do is click, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, until these options appear, and then just click on the rectangle tool. Also to get started, just make sure you’re on your layers panel, and make sure you’re on layer one. In your Properties panel, I wanna make sure we’re gonna change our fill and stroke. The fill is the center color of our rectangle and the stroke is the line around the outside. So what you do is you click on this first little icon. Doesn’t matter what color it is currently. Pick a random color.

Okay, cause we’re gonna change it in a second but I just wanted you to get used to it. Then you can click back on this icon to close it back up. And then the stroke, click on this. And just make sure it’s set to black. Then you don’t actually have to click back on this, you can just click anywhere and it closes back down. And I wanna make sure that the stroke is set to one point okay? It’s just a nice thin line that goes around the outside. So let’s draw a random rectangle, don’t worry if it doesn’t kinda line up, we’re gonna use it for the body of our penguin. So you can see the fill is the center color, and the stroke is the line around the outside. What you might see is kinda like faint blue line or red line, depending on your computer. But it means, it just means it’s got selected. So if we go back black arrow, this is your kind of like safety tool. Always go back to your black arrow if you’re not too sure what to do. You got all this selection. Just go back to the black arrow.

It’s the one you’re gonna use the most. And what you can do is click in the background here. So I just clicked once and it deselected our rectangle. You can see the stroker on the outside a lot clearer. So it just goes blue when we have it selected. So what I like to do is, I like to keep the black line but not the fill. To do it, you have to have it selected, so black arrow, click it in the middle, anywhere. And over here, click on fill, and to have none, see this little red line here? If you hover above it, it tells you, but that means I want nothing in there, please. And I’m just gonna click in the background to close that little fill panel. Great, so I’ve got a line around the outside but no fill. And what you’ll notice is it’s a little bit different to select. So I click in the background now. What happens is if I try to click the center, you can see it just doesn’t work like it did when it was filled with green, cause there is not center now. So if I want to select this rectangle now, I have to click the edge ones.

So black arrow, click the edge and it should be selected. Now what I’d like to do is using these white squares, okay? I just want you to resize it, okay, so that it kinda matches the edges of our little penguin here. All right, not very exciting. Let’s get into the slightly more exciting when we start looking at the corners. So black arrow, make sure the edge of it’s selected, you see these little targets in the corners, these are called corner options. And all they do is click, hold, and drag it with your mouse, just drag it towards the center of the rectangle. So it’s making all the corners not surrounded. Okay, so that’s kind of what I want. It’s got the top and not the bottom. Okay, so what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna use this thing called Edit, we’re gonna use Undo. It just goes back one step, okay, undo it, undo what you did. And it keeps going back. You can Keep hitting Undo right back to the beginning of the document. You can also Redo it. Now, I’m gonna use the shortcuts throughout this course, because it’s a really common thing to do, go to Undo. And on my Mac it’s Cmd+Z, on a PC it should be Ctrl+Z, and we can just got to the long way, it’s fine.

What I’d like to do is I would like to have just one of the corners selected. So look at this little icon here, take note of the color. I’ll click it once, you can see it’s kinda changed, it’s inverted. So it’s kinda selected when the other ones are not. What I mean by that is if you click and drag that one now, okay? So you click it once and then click and drag it. You can see just to fix that one. I can do the same here, click it once, it goes to the alternate color. Now, click and drag and them, okay.

I can kinda just work with these individual corners. Now, my radius is a little bit different on both sides, so what I’d like to do is go to Edit > Undo, Edit > Undo again. So it’s back to being a square, and I’m gonna show you how to click both of them. So you click the first one, like we did before, just click it once with a black arrow. But if you hold your Shift key down on your keyboard, Shift key is gonna play a pretty big part in Illustrator, okay? So hold down Shift, click on the second one, and it means that I can select more than one at a time. So these at the bottom aren’t selected, these guys at the top.

If I click one of them, click hold, drag it. They both come off the right, now I know they match. And a last minute change to my design, I’m gonna click this bottom one once, and just tuck it up. I want it to have like a little penguin belly. He was a bit stumpy before, he’s still stumpy. But anyway, you don’t have to follow exactly. So we learned what fill in stroke is. Stroke is around the outside, fill is in the middle, and we looked at these corner options. Let’s start building some other parts. Let’s draw the circle for his kind of eye there. So I click, hold, keeping holding down your mouse, and then release on this Ellipse tool. So with the Ellipse tool, what we’re gonna do is click and drag over here.

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And what you’ll notice is, I can click and drag any sort of size. So that’s fine, cut any sort of weed size. Gonna undo a few times, what I’d like to do is I want it to be a perfect circle, ok, shift is a, really kind of usable tool. So if I start dragging out, if I hold on to the shift key while I’m doing it, you can see it locks in the height and width, and that’s true with rectangles or stars, polygons, circles, okay? So I’m gonna get it to roughly the right size. I’m gonna grab my black arrow. I’m gonna click either the edge, or if you can see this dot here, grab the dot, okay, that will center. If you got it the wrong size, okay, say it’s just still too big, and you try to line it up and you’re like, it’s kinda close.

But what you can do is you can resize it. Just like we did before is that I can grab any of these little guys in the corner. The trouble with resizing it this way is, you can see I’m kinda distorting the shape. So what I wanna do is, before I do it, so I’ve undone a couple of times, is if I hold the Shift key and grab any of the corners, doesn’t matter which corner it is, okay. It will lock the height and width like we did when we created the circle, okay? So holding Shift just kinda locks the height and width until I get to the right size and my circle is not perfect, okay? So don’t worry too much about it.

Another thing you can do here is if you’re finding that you’re trying to line it out and it’s like jumping all around, okay. Get a close where you want it and then with your keyboard, start with my black arrow. Look down on the keyboard, you’ve got your up down and left right. Your cases. I’m just using my case hierarchies just to kind of tap it around the little bit. Okay, little bit left, little bit up. That often can be a nicer way to just kind of do fine adjustment in illustrator. All right, let’s do this little upside down curve and makes him the happy content penguin. Anybody seen Penghu? Anyway, he’s my inspiration for this one.

So what we wanna do is, I could draw a curve. There’s lots of ways of doing curves. This is really easy way, though, is if you click and hold down. So hold down the Line Segment tool, there’s an Octal, okay. So with the Octal, just draw anywhere out here. Doesn’t really matter too much which way it goes cuz we can rotate it. So do it so it’s kind of a nice curve-ish. What I’d like to do is go back to my black arrow. Remember, this is our default go back to it tool. And it does so many things. We use it to resize the circle a second ago. We can also use it to rotate. Now, what we need to do is, we need to zoom in a little bit. So who remembers what the shortcut was? You remember, right? It’s Cmd+ on a Mac, or Ctrl+ on a PC. So let’s zoom in a little bit. I’m going to show you why in a second. And to rotate this thing, we need to be in a kind of special zone. So when we’re resizing it before remember we held Shift, and we drag this up and down to make it kinda bigger and smaller. The rotation is very close, so clicking in the corner and dragging resizes it but just as we figure out, and then this kind of like, so too close, no, perfect, too far. Perfect. This is kind of like every corner has this kind of like rotation zone in it. You wiggle with your mouse around and hopefully find it.

You’re looking for that kind of bent arrow. And if you click hold and drag there, just click hold, drag your mouse, it’ll stop moving it around, okay. And just kind of find it again, drag it around and so it’s kind of, a curve that you could use for an eye. Now, I wanna move down a little bit. I could use these little sliders, they’re fine. What’s the shortcut? You remember, spacebar, click, hold, and drag, okay? And just move it down, and mine’s way to big, so I’m holding Shift, just kind of rotating it around a bit. Don’t worry if it’s not the right, perfect curve, we’re gonna show you different ways of doing it in a second but eh, that’s close enough. Drag it down in the corner using my arrow keys just to line it up perfectly. So to join nice, good-looking curves, you can use the actle. You can rotate it by that little special area, kinda just outside the scaling part.

Just out a bit further, that’s rotation. Next thing, we’ll look at is, we’ll look at the stroke. This stroke, if I click off in the background, it’s pretty thin, I want to kinda be nice and thick in the inside here, cuz it’s a bit more of a design feature. So I’m gonna select once with black arrow, and over here, okay, where it says stroke, I’m going to use this little up arrow. You can drop this down and pick one, or you can just use the up arrow, just a click and pick a size. I’m gonna pick 4 point, for no good reason, just looks thick enough, and that looks fine. I’m gonna click off in the background. And I’ve got this kind of like rainbow kind of shaped thing. What I’d like it to do is I’m gonna eventually round all these corners. Just the thing I’m going for. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna show you a little trick. You click on the stroke here, we’re gonna look at what’s called capping. Capping is the end here.

Can you see that it’s a straight line? I would like it to be like a little bulbous end, okay? So I’m gonna click on it once. Over here, our stroke, we don’t have many options, right? We have color and we have the size of it, but if you click on the word, Stroke, ta da. There’s all sorts of nerdy stuff in there, okay. So what we’re gonna do in this case is, it’s called the capping, the unfortunately named butt cap, and then there’s a second one the, round cap. Click on that, you’ll keep straight face, right? Okay, the second one, round cap, is kind of what we want, right? It’s kind of this nice, more gentle end on it, okay? This one here, the last one, I don’t use projecting cap, I kind of just, the butt cap, there’s a projecting cap. You can kinda see what it does, it puts it like a square on the outside. I can use the round cap. That can really help your later on when you’re working with Illustrator, you’ve got some really, like ugly edges or ends of strokes. Just switch into rounded cap can like finish them off nicely. We’ll look at stroke a little bit more in another article, but that’s it for now, let’s click off in the background, click off. Happy, smiley, content penguin. All right, next up, we’ll do some triangles. So I wanna do the beak, I wanna do the flipper. Is it wing? I don’t know, penguins, and his tail. So they’re all kind of triangles with rounded edges.

So to do a triangle, is you hold down the Ellipse Tool, the Rectangle Tool, and you gotta move to this one called the Polygon Tool. So a triangle is essentially a polygon, just a three-sided one. By default, you’re gonna get a pentagon? I don’t know. I’m not sure what that one is, but I’m gonna delete it using my Delete key on my keyboard. What I wanna do is just click once instead of dragging out, and it gives you the polygon options. So I’ve got the polygon tool selected, and I just click once on my screen. It gives you some options before you start drawing, and I’m gonna pick three sides, please. Not gonna worry about the radius for the moment, I’m gonna resize it once I’m done. So three sides, click OK, and I get this kind of giant triangle. So first up, let’s resize it and rotate it, so I’m gonna use my black arrow, make sure it’s selected by clicking the edge of it.

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I’m gonna make sure it has no fill, make sure it has a black stroke, and I’m not too worried about the size of it just yet. So to resize it and rotate it, resizing, remember is just grabbing this corner a bit here and just getting it down to a size. Rotating it is that magical area around the outside. Now, what you might wanna do is, at the moment, when you’re rotating, it just kinda goes around in random degrees. If you hold Shift, remember that magical tool? Okay, hold down the Shift key on your keyboard, and you start rotating it, okay, you see it does it in 45 degree increments. You might want your nose to be that sort of shape. So clicking either the center or the edge, move it around, get into position, resize it, rotate it around until you’ve got a nose. It doesn’t have to be the same as my nose. I wanted mine to be flat on the bottom, so I’m gonna try and rotate it using the magical rotation.

Make sure it’s big enough. Get it to overlap quite a bit in the back here, okay. I’ll show you one in a second. Arrow keys just to have it down, triangle’s overlapped a bit more. Why? Because I wanna change the kind of the roundness on the end, okay. So I’m gonna grab this little corner option, a little tug it in and drag it in. Make it a little bit bigger, drag that corner in, and you can see that done it to all sides. You could do our secret trick, remember, when you click on it once, and just do it individually, but it’s a little bit easier just to hide these in here. We’re gonna make both the nose black and and his little body black. So we wanna reuse this, I’m gonna have it selected, okay.

Hold my beak there, I’m gonna edit, Copy, Edit, Paste, okay, and I’m gonna put this down here. Missing about that, looks like a good flipper to me. Copy and Paste it again. I am going to rotate it around. I just used Command + C and Command + V on a Mac. You can use Control + C and Control + V on a PC. There we go. Now, you’ll notice, I’m trying to line it up in the bottom here. It does some clever stuff where it tries to like automatically line up. If yours is not doing that, it’s called Smart Guides. Go on View, and you can see my Smart Guides is turned on.

It’s got a check next to it, okay. It just means it tries to align things up automatically for you, and it’s super handy. It can also be a bit of a pain, as well. So you can go to View and to uncheck it, if you’re not liking, like jumping around, lining up stuff. Some people don’t. All right, the last thing I’m gonna do is his body. Should’ve done that earlier, okay. When we had the Rectangle Tool, and I grab the Rectangle Tool, I’m gonna hover, you can kinda see it says Path, that just means I’m just going to start bang on the edge of his body here. It’s really handy, it’s one of those Smart Guides, okay. I’m gonna say, click, hold, and drag.

I’ve got my rectangle. Don’t worry to much about the stroke around the outside. Remember black arrow, I’m gonna grab this, click once, drag him down to match. And same with this one, I’m going to click him and drag him up to match my, that’s probably why it didn’t do the little belly earlier on. I’m just adding more, kind of things that could go wrong for us. So I’m gonna try to line it up. Actually, I’m gonna bring it, yeah, here you go, perfect. That’s why it didn’t do it. So we’ve got the body, let’s do the feet as well. So I’m gonna do the foot with the Rectangle Tool, grab just that corner with my black arrow. I don’t actually have to go with my black arrow, it’s just a good habit to get into. Click on it once, drag it down, what I’m gonna do is copy and paste them, so Command + C and Command + V, two of them. And I try to them line them up.

It’s pretty good at lining, I’m not depending in which corner you grab it. So notice that if I grab the center here, it intersects, very good, nice. He’s got two little feet at the bottom. All right, let’s look at the couple the other drawing tools. We’re gonna use just the regular, old straight line, okay, the Line Segment Tool. It had some fancy word for just drawing a line. And all you do is click, hold, and drag, okay. Click, hold, and drag. Those are two little, I’m not even sure what they are, little feathers out the back of his head? But what I’d like to do as well is change the width of this, okay? I’m gonna match, maybe, this. Remember it was four point, I think, that we used for that? And we changed the capping, okay. So what I wanna do is do both at the same time. So what I’m gonna do is go to edit undo. It was kind of back to the same shape it was. So like we did with the corner options, we can select more than one at a time and it’s that same key.

So I have my black arrow, I have the first one selected, then I hold down shift and click in the middle of the second one. So I have both of them selected at the same time. Now over here in stroke I’m gonna say I’d like you to be four point, and under stroke I’d like to change from that one to that one. All right let’s look at the last, well last kind of new thing that I want to show you. We’ll draw the rectangles and stuff for the water and the weeds, but this one here where he get a sheriff badge is only purely so I could show you how to draw a star and a polygon. And you know how to draw a polygon probably. Okay, click hold, the rectangle tool, we saw it before, polygon. And it remembers the last setting, so the last time we used it, we said be three sides, so it’s kinda defaulting to that now. So what we’re gonna do is, remember, just click once out here, put it back to what it was, which was five sides. Click okay, and we get our pentagon, I think. Octagon, no, pentagon. I wanna lock in pentagon, okay? And I magically got mine the right size. If you don’t remember, grab the edges here, hold down Shift while you’re dragging those edges, it will lock the height and width. And just kinda move it in by grabbing the edges.

Okay here we go, if it’s the wrong fill and the wrong stroke, with it selected you can go and change the fill to none, and the stroke there. Let’s do our star, so the star is there, is an actual star tool, so click and hold down this little kind of shape group, and grab the star tool. And if you click, hold and drag out, you’ll get just a regular star. To adjust the star, you’re gonna undo it, click once, and you can decide on how many points it has and how pointy they are. Just to mess around with the radiuses to experiment with it, it’s hard to describe. But my one’s fine the way it was I’m gonna leave everything by itself. I’m gonna cancel, and just draw the star. Now to lock it into a perfect kind of horizontal and vertical, hold Shift, remember that magical tool. When in doubt, probably hold down Shift.

Grab the black arrow. Click, hold, and drag. Get it close. Hold down Shift grab on to the corners, drag it out. We’re getting good at this, alright. What I’d like to do is make sure all the, it will try its very best to align these perfectly. Okay if you’re like I know it’s not aligned perfectly, so what you can do is select both of them. Remember our trick, have the star selected? Which key do you hold down? That’s right, Shift key, click the center of this pentagon, and what you’ll see over the side here is that you’ve got your align option. So I wanna make sure they’re aligned horizontally center, and vertically center, and they are perfect already.

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I’m gonna move mine off hold Shift grab both of them just to show you what it actually does. Now the r perfectly centered so I’m just gonna mine way off so it makes it more clear of what we’re doing. So I’m gonna make sure it’s horizontally center and vertically center. Can never remember which is which so I just click both. All right so what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna drag it I’ve got them both selected. And I’ll hold down Shift key, I want them to be a lot smaller. So Space bar to move her along, grab one of the edges, hold down Shift, to get it to a kind of I don’t know, sheriff badge size. All right, the last couple of things we’re gonna do is I’m gonna zoom out a little bit so I can put in. That is meant to be the ground and that is meant to be the water, if you weren’t sure. I’m going to grab my rectangle tool. I’m gonna click, hold, and drag, and I’m gonna get close to this edge.

Where you kind of just get close to it, and Illustrator kind of you get lost this way. So I’ve got this giant rectangle. To get back, okay, we can go to View and just go to the one that says Fit All in Window. It kind of gets you back to home base. Command zero on your keyboard, okay. On a MAC, or control zero on your keyboard is a really common shortcut, to do the same thing. Otherwise, let’s go to View and go to one that says Fit outward to window or fit all to window. Okay, we’ll get back to here. I’m gonna delete with my keyboard. We’ll go to undo to get rid of the giant rectangle. I’m gonna draw one that kind of goes just here. Other one.

And I’m gonna draw in my circles. And I’m gonna cheat a little bit with the circles. I’m gonna draw a circle. Zoom in a little bit. I’m gonna copy and paste it instead of drawing lots of them. And resize them That’s not even cheating. It takes just as long. Maybe even just easier drawing them. Holding Shift maybe to get a perfect circle. Yeah okay that first way is easier. All right, next thing I’m gonna do is I’m gonna add some color, well actually, forgot the tuft of grass. I’m just gonna use my above the Act tool, there you go Act tool. There’s gonna be a bit of rotation going on so, maybe not.

That’ll do. Beautiful. All right, we’re gonna come back and look at strokes in a bit more detail to maybe give these a little bit more prettiness but for the moment that’s gonna do for me. What I’d like to do is add some fill colors cuz at the moment you use I don’t know, weird shapes and sizes, so I’m gonna fill work our way through, adding fills, messing with strokes, resizing strokes, grouping, arranging and we’ll do all of that in the next content. All right I’ll see you then.