Original subtitles

Things that you're not really going to see

as a beginner, I would say that.

We're going to go into four different sections.

And the first section, we're going to take

a look at more of just different techniques

and kind of working with, selecting, different things

like that.

So, yeah, we've got a lot of ground

to cover and a lot of projects to

work on, so we should probably get started.

Great.

Okay, so we're going to go through and

we're going to take a look at drawing

and editing advanced techniques.

Now, the word advanced, I don't want to

freak people out or scare people.

These are just techniques that are something you're

going to have to learn, I think, to

be very productive in Illustrator.

And these are things that I tend to

do a lot, and I just want to

be able to share those with you.

So we're going to talk more about making

selections.

We're going to talk about how to edit

paths and some do's and some don'ts.

Let's just say that.

We'll talk about pen tool.

We're going to go a little further into

the pen tool.

In the beginning class, we went through and

said, well, let's just kind of take a

look at a cursory pen tool overview.

Now we're going to dive in.

All right, we're going to look at some

of the shortcuts and things that you need

to know.

I'm not going to cover every single shortcut

there is, because there are, I don't know,

there's a million of them.

We're also going to talk about some more

drawing tools.

I want to get you into the blob

tool.

The blob tool is awesome, even the name.

I just, I heard it, I was like,

that's cool.

But it's a great way to do, you'll

see, it's cool.

And we got a lot of things to

do as well beyond that.

So that's what we're going to dive into

right now.

So let's get started.

Hopefully everybody has Illustrator launched.

Let me make sure that I do as

well.

And yesterday, like I said, we went through

and we created a lot of different features,

a lot of different projects to get started

as a beginner.

Now we're going to open up a project

and just start, I guess you could say,

working with selections and working a little bit

further.

So come up under File, and let's go

to Open.

And go out to your desktop, and wherever

you happen to have it, you should see

the Day 2 folder.

And we have the Segment 1 or Seg1

folder in there.

I've got some things in here that we're

going to use.

We're going to be opening up the pen

practice and working a little bit with that.

But right now I want to open up,

this is going to seem a little counterintuitive,

but we're going to open up Scene Final.

So let's open scenefinal.ai. I've got some

things going on in there.

And a bunch of different artboards, as you

can see here, with a lot of different

artwork happening.

And what we're going to do is we're

going to use this as a way, kind

of a jumping off point.

I actually find in Illustrator that when I

do work in here, I kind of split

how I work.

There are times where I develop or create

an entire piece, like a poster, or a

newsletter, or a logo, or something like that.

But a lot of times I actually find

myself creating just pieces of things.

You know, like if you're working on a

website, I want to create an icon, or

a button, or this, or that.

So we're going to kind of do that

in the beginning here.

That's what we're going to focus on a

bit.

What I want to do is I want

to go down.

There's actually an artboard further down.

So let's look at all the artboards first.

So if you come under the view menu,

you can see we've got a lot of

the zoom commands and working that way.

I want to choose fit all in window,

so we can see them all.

And you can see that we've got this

barn down here, lower left.

I'm going to zoom into that one.

So using just about any method you want,

you can do that.

What I tend to do is I tend

to click on something on the artboard or

click in the artboard, and then use view

fit artboard in window.

I'm going to show you a nice little

tip here.

If you don't like keyboard commands, you can

actually go to the hand tool.

This is kind of neat, and double click

the hand tool.

That's view fit artboard in window.

So some people don't like to hit command

zero or control zero because that's the shortcut

for view fit artboard in window.

Okay, now you got to be careful because

when you double click the hand tool, you're

now on the hand tool.

You have it selected, so we've got to

watch that.

Why don't you go to the selection tool

and select that one?

First thing we're going to do is we're

going to start to look at some different

ways to make selections because honestly, selections in

Illustrator can be a bit of a pain,

all right?

And you're going to work at it.

You're going to want to select artwork based

on things like color, size, parts of group,

depending on what you're working on.

Why don't you do this for me?

Go ahead and click on one of the

green bushes out there.

So you can see that I've actually got,

I think there are like four different shapes

or five different shapes out there happening.

And what if I wanted to do this?

What if I decided, you know what, we

needed to select all those green bushes right

there just to either change all the color

or add a stroke or maybe group them

together so that they stay together as one

unit.

There's 50 ways to do this, right?

And I could go out and try and

shift click and select each one.

We can also do things like this.

I can go up and select based on

a color, for instance.

Okay, this is called select similar.

If you look up, let's just do it

in the menus first.

There is something in the control panel we

can use.

Come onto the select menu and you're going

to see select same.

I use this practically every day because if

you have something you're working on and you

need to select something that has the same

stroke, same stroke weight, same color fill, same

appearance properties, you can do it right here.

So you're going to look and you're going

to see, okay, select the same appearance.

Now, what does that mean?

That means if you look in the appearance

panel and you see everything is listed, strokes,

effects, all that, it means go find the

object that has all the same stuff applied

to it.

That's actually pretty amazing.

What I want to do right now is

just say, let's select the same fill color.

So go ahead and choose fill color and

you should see what it selects.

Now, the interesting thing about this is it's

going to select, if you have 50 artboards

out here in this one document, it's going

to go everywhere.

It's not just going to focus on the

one artboard, okay?

So sometimes what I wind up doing is

doing the old lock, unlock, and we'll talk

about that too.

Now, you can use this a little bit

faster.

The menu items are awesome, but if you

look up in the control panel, somewhere up

there, depending on your screen resolution, you're also

going to see a select similar objects button

up there.

Now, be careful of this, because if you

click on it, it's going to use the

last thing you selected, which was fill.

That's fine, that's great.

But what if I want to select something

with the same stroke?

If you click on that little arrow to

the right, hopefully everybody sees that up there,

you can choose what you want to base

it on, okay, fill, fill and stroke, color,

et cetera, and it will do it right

then.

It'll select it there.

So you have two main options.

There's a couple of other ways to do

it, but this is a good kind of

starting point, I guess you could say.

So, all right, let me click off of

that.

Whoops, I wanted to keep them selected, so

let me do that.

All right, so we now have them all

selected.

What I'd like to do is I'd like

to group them together, just so, you know,

we keep them together as a group.

So come under object, you'll see group.

A lot of us are going to learn

these keyboard commands as you go, Command G,

Control G, that type of thing.

They're the same in most of the Adobe

applications, which is good.

Now, you're going to notice a problem that

we have here, okay?

When we group things, this is something that

always happens, okay?

Based on selections, based on what we're working

on, it's going to pull it basically to

the same level.

Now, when a group is created, this is

kind of wacky.

Why don't you come over to the right

and come to your layers panel.

Hopefully everybody sees the layers panel over there.

We have that selected.

I want to be able to locate that

in the layers panel because I want to

see what's going on with it.

So if you come down to the bottom

of the layers panel, you're going to see

the locate object button, that little eyeglass.

So you go ahead and click on that

and it should show you where it is.

Now, this is kind of interesting.

I'm going to drag the left edge of

the layers panel open so we can see

it a little bit more.

Just on the left edge right over there

and drag it left.

You'll see that groups are sub layers essentially.

So you're going to see the word group

right there.

A group is a sub layer, which essentially

means it's sitting on a layer.

When you group things together, it's actually collecting

them together in a sub layer it's called,

okay?

It's kind of weird.

I couldn't wrap my head around it in

the beginning.

I was like sub layer, layer, I didn't

quite understand, but that's one of the reasons

why it pulled them all to the same

level, if you will, arrangement, okay?

So that's why it's in front.

So we've got to be careful about how

we group things.

I'm going to leave them in front there.

If we wanted to, we could basically undo.

You can say edit, undo group, and then

you could group individual bushes together or do

things like that, but you got to be

careful.

Another thing that I might actually do is

put the barn in between the two and

just keep it there on its own separate

layer.

Okay, so selecting things based on an appearance,

sort of like a color, a stroke fill

is actually a really easy way to select

things.

There are other methods that I want to

show you.

So what I'd like to do is I'd

like to actually select, let's say like the

barn and the window right here.

So the barn and the window, okay?

We can easily do that by shift clicking

to select objects, right?

But what I want to do is I

want to introduce you to a mode in

here that is going to be so helpful

for selecting things.

It's called outline mode.

Come up under view, up in the menus,

and we actually have, I haven't mentioned this,

but we have a lot of different ways

to view artwork in here.

It's kind of interesting.

You actually have what's called overprint preview.

Anybody work with overprinting at all?

I didn't think so.

If you are a, let's say you're working

with a printer and you want to be

able to make sure that this prints properly,

because after all, when we print, let's say

we print this on a press or on

a printer, what's going to happen is these

inks that it's going to use, CMYK, are

actually transparent.

So it's going to try and print them

on top of each other.

And if you print certain colors on top

of other colors, they might affect each other

and look a little wacky, okay?

So what you can do is you can

actually preview what it's going to look like

when the inks print over each other, overprint

each other.

Now, it's probably not going to do much

right now.

You won't see much if you turn it

on.

That's fine.

It's more for printing.

Pixel preview, I love.

When you do work, let's say for web,

UI, onscreen presentations, things like that, why don't

you go ahead and choose pixel preview?

It's going to take your work and it's

actually going to try and rasterize it.

Now, it might not look very different right

now, but if you were to zoom into

that, you would actually see that it's got

rasterized edges, okay, because it's actually showing you

a pixel preview.

It's really great, like I said, if you're

trying to work on web, UI, things like

that, and see how things are going to

alias, it's called, or how the edge is

going to look, essentially, okay?

All right, why don't you go ahead and

turn that off, come under view.

What I'm trying to get to here is

I'm actually trying to get to outline mode,

which is at the very top up here.

The shortcut for that, which is Command-Y

or Control-Y, is an excellent one to

learn if you want to do selections really

easily.

You can toggle in and out of this.

Go ahead and choose outline and look at

your artwork.

Essentially, what it's going to do is it's

going to remove all fills and essentially all

strokes.

It's going to remove the appearance properties.

So we're just looking at kind of like

line art.

It's just sitting out there as black and

white.

Now, the crazy thing about the artwork right

now, there's no fills in anything.

Why don't you try and click on something

like out here in the barn, for instance,

try and click in the middle.

You won't be able to do it.

There's no fill.

First time I saw this, I was like,

well, what am I going to do with

this?

You know what I mean?

I can't see what I'm doing, blah.

Think about selections.

Right now, if we did not, just watch

me for one second, I'm going to turn

outline mode off.

I'm using that shortcut, Command-Y.

If I wanted to select the barn in

this thing right here, if I try and

drag across, I'm going to probably drag something

else because there's a lot of artwork going

on here, right?

If we have outline mode turned on, Command

-Y, we can actually just drag across and

because there's no fills, you can select things.

So give that a try.

Just try selecting some things.

You can see it can actually make selection

a little bit easier for you.

I love this.

I love outline mode.

I wind up toggling between outline and just

regular old mode, okay, to be able to

see the artwork.

So once you have something selected, you can

go back out.

Now, it gets a little tricky if you

really want to select a small shape, for

instance, and it's maybe bunched in with other

things.

You have to actually click on the outline

of the object.

So for instance, the stroke, or you have

to drag across to select it.

So even in here, it can be a

little rough, all right?

So I actually wind up using a lot

of zooming techniques, really quick, really quick in

and out type thing.

Matter of fact, when you work with the

zoom tool, I use the zoom tool a

lot.

I'll do a lot of zooming in and

out.

I use a lot of shortcuts for the

zoom tool as well.

If you want to, you can get a

little bit faster with these.

If you look at all the tools on

the left-hand side over here, you're gonna

see as you hover over a tool, it's

gonna show you the keyboard command to get

to that tool.

So I learned these kind of early on.

We've talked about these a little bit, but

we have V and A for the arrows.

We have Z for zoom tool.

So if you want to do a little

zooming, you can press the Z tool, or

the Z key, I could say, go to

the actual zoom tool, zoom in, zoom out

a little bit.

The one thing about working with the zoom

tool in here, you don't get this dynamic

zooming.

Illustrator now has dynamic zooming, which means it's

gonna kind of gradually come in and gradually

go out.

It will not work in preview mode, okay?

It's a little jarring, actually, to kind of

think that, but all right, so once you

select things, like I said, this is kind

of another way to be able to select

objects.

Let's go out of outline mode to come

up under view, and you're gonna look up

top here.

I gotta mention this, because in later versions

of Illustrator, we actually have what's called GPU

preview.

If your machine supports it, you're gonna be

able to select that.

That's all this dynamic zooming and all these

really cool things.

It's using your GPU, basically, your processor, to

get a lot of this done.

If you don't have a machine that supports

that, you can preview on CPU, okay?

But go ahead and choose GPU preview if

you can, and it should get us back

where we should be.

And you can see, obviously, that that content

is still selected now.

All right, go ahead and click off to

deselect that.

Now, another thing I wanna do here is

I wanna talk to you about being able

to save a selection, because when you take

the time to select things in here, you

don't wanna have to reselect later on if

you're doing something really critical, okay?

A lot of times what I'm doing is

I wanna select all the red objects, or

I wanna select all the objects in a

certain area, okay?

If I select them, we can actually save

selections in Illustrator.

This is one of the things that I

use a lot, quite a bit.

What I'd like you to do is we're

gonna go up to the artboard up here

and get to this little bird right here.

So what I want you to do is

you can use your hand tool to go

up there.

We have the hand tool over here.

This space bar is how you temporarily get

to the hand tool.

If you hold the space bar down, you

can click and drag, let go of the

space bar, and you're back on whatever tool

you had selected.

It's just a temporary way to get there.

Then we got this little bird, okay?

And this is really simple.

I thought about getting a really complex piece

of art and things like that and kind

of trying to show you how to do

this, but it just, it gets too much.

So we're gonna try it on some simple

artwork.

What I'd like you to do is we're

gonna select the eye of the bird.

Right now, it's really simple.

Later on, if we have a ton of

artwork out here, it's gonna get a lot

harder to do.

So to select the eye, we've got a

bunch of pieces in there.

Just click and drag across, and you can

select the content there.

Now, what we're gonna do is we're gonna

actually save this for later.

Like I said, I do this for a

lot of things that I'm working on.

If you go out and you draw, let's

say, a bunch of hair or blades of

grass, and you actually go out and draw

those things, and you have like 50 of

them sitting out there, you don't wanna have

to go select them again later on.

So with content selected, if you come under

Select up here, you're gonna see Save Selection.

Go ahead and choose that.

And your job is to give this a

name that actually makes sense.

I fail miserably at this.

I'm gonna call it Eye.

I'm gonna tell you right now, don't name

your selections based on appearance.

I used to do like brown circle and

stuff like that.

What happens if later you change the circle

to green?

Well, your selection doesn't make any sense anymore

then.

So you gotta think about this stuff ahead

of time, and I don't.

So go ahead and click OK.

Deselect by clicking somewhere.

Now, we're working.

We decide we're gonna put a bunch of

more artwork out there.

We're gonna take the bird and move it

and put it over here.

Even if you happen to move the artwork

or do different things to it, you can

always get that selection back.

So come back under Select, and you'll now

see all the selections you've saved are listed

there forever.

They're not saved with this one document, okay?

But it makes sense that they are useful

for this document because they won't work in

other documents, okay?

So go ahead and choose Eye, and you

should see the selection come back.

Now, in this case, it's kind of set.

You're like, well, that's great.

I could have just clicked on it again,

right?

But in the case of a lot of

artwork, a lot going on, this is gonna

save you a ton of time.

The other thing that I think is really,

really useful about this is there are times

where I've had to adjust a certain shape

like five million times.

I get somebody that says, hey, the beak's

not quite right.

Let's adjust that again.

We can actually select points in a path

and save that selection as well.

Why don't you go to the Direct Selection

tool, the white arrow, and what I'd like

to do is I'm gonna zoom in just

a bit here so you can see this.

I wanna select one of the points on

the end of the beak right here, like

maybe the orangish kind of corner point right

here.

You guys, we're gonna talk more about selections

and different things like that, but an easy

way to make a selection on a point

that's sitting there like that, how many try

and click on it?

I do, okay, I do too.

And when you hover over a point, you

can see that it gets bigger and tells

you, hey, you're gonna click on something, but

what if there were two points on either

side and there was no point on the

corner or something?

How do you know where the points are?

Well, what you can do is I just

tend to click and drag across and kinda

nip the end of that thing.

If you know that there are certain points

right there, you can do that.

Another method for selecting points, which I think

is so helpful, is this.

Click to deselect.

What you wanna do is you wanna sneak

up on the shape and you wanna click

on the edge of it.

Okay, so once you sneak up on the

shape here and click on the edge of

it, you're gonna see a little black square.

I can't even remember what that is.

Squares show up, and if you click, it's

gonna show you all the points out there.

You can now go and select the points

you wanna work on.

If I'm working on somebody else's artwork, it's

hard, because you didn't draw the thing.

You didn't create this artwork or create the

shapes, so they may have used 50 points

where you might have used four or the

other way around, okay?

So it's really kind of interesting.

Why don't you go ahead and select that

shape on the end or the point, rather,

on the end?

I can drag across.

And if we wanna save that as a

selection, we can now do that.

So same process.

If I come under Select and choose Save

Selection, I can just call it, what would,

okay, what would you call this?

My naming prowess is not, Lower Beak, there

you go.

Lower Beak, there it is.

Lower Beak, we'll call it that, and click

OK.

You can sort of have, you can have

a bunch, bunch of these selections out there,

and I tend to, I wind up with

a more complex document.

I wind up with a lot of selections

saved.

So it's, like I said, it's just a

matter of trying to make sure that you

name them properly and they work.

Now, one of the things, too, is that

over time, I'll have selections and I'll realize,

you know what?

The eye, we need to incorporate these things,

these feathers right here, so that needs to

be part of the selection, too, okay?

Sometimes you can actually go and you can,

if you want to, what's called edit a

selection, which makes sense, all right?

We're not gonna go through that because we've

got a lot of stuff to cover, but

you can always edit one of these selections.

You can also just delete it and start

over again.

It's your call, okay?

But selections saved are awesome.

All right, go to the Selection tool and

go ahead and click to deselect.

I wanna show you a couple other methods

for selecting.

So I'm gonna zoom out a little bit

here and just kind of fit this in

the artboard.

Why don't you go ahead and fit the

artboard in the window?

So View, Fit Artboard in Window.

And what I wanna do is I wanna

be able to select some objects out here.

And I wanna show you a couple selection

tools that are, I'm gonna say unique, okay?

I don't use them all the time, but

I do sometimes.

If you look over in the Tools panel,

you're gonna see that we have what's called

a Magic Wand tool and we also have

a Lasso tool.

Anybody use those in Photoshop at all?

Okay, I mean, yeah, I have, I definitely

have.

It's interesting in here because they work kind

of the same way, but different, all right?

That didn't make any sense, but.

So why don't you go ahead and choose

the Magic Wand tool.

The Magic Wand in Photoshop, it's kind of

meant to select color in different areas and

things like that and select pixels, right?

In here, it's actually gonna select shapes.

If you come out, so let's come to

one of the legs here, the bird, you're

gonna see I've got a lighter brown leg

right there.

If you hover over it, let me zoom

in just a hair so you can see

this.

If you hover over it, you can click

on it and it's gonna select not only

that leg, but look what else it selects.

It selects part of the eye up there.

What it's doing, the Magic Wand by default

is doing something similar to the Select Similar

Fill Color.

It's selecting the same fill-colored objects out

there.

Now, the kind of interesting thing I like

about the Magic Wand is if you double

-click on the Magic Wand tool, go ahead

and double-click on it, you can tell

it what you wanna set.

Now, this is pretty sneaky stuff and I

love this because if you look here, you're

gonna see Fill Color and I saw Tolerance.

When I first started using this, I was

like, what does that even mean?

Tolerance is basically how many different shades of

color, is it different from the one you

clicked on, that it's gonna select.

If you wanna make sure that you get

just that brown in another object or at

least really close to it, you're gonna take

that tolerance and set it lower, okay?

If you wanna be able to select a

whole bunch of shades of brown, for instance,

you can go and crank that tolerance up

and it's gonna go grab more different types

of brown out there or different similar colors,

I should say, okay?

You can, if you want to, set different

opacities.

I love the Blending Mode one.

When I work with a designer, she's awesome.

She uses tons of Blending Modes and I

wanna be able to select the same kind

of Blending Mode across objects to change them,

maybe.

That's a good way to do it.

So, that's the Magic Wand.

Just a quick, you know, here's something you

can use.

I wanna go and deselect, so go to

Select, Deselect.

All right, come to the, what's called the

Lasso Tool.

This one's kind of, I love this tool.

Come to the Lasso Tool.

There are gonna be times where you want

to select a series of anchor points, okay?

The Lasso Tool lets you select anchor points.

Now, I just showed you how we could

come to the beak and maybe sneak up

and click and select and do that kind

of thing.

What if you had, like, six points you

had to select?

Instead of clicking on each point with, like,

the Shift key, which you could do to

select them, you can use the Lasso Tool.

Watch up here for one second.

I can go do this.

I can actually click and drag and create

a little selection around content, and it will

only select the anchor points within that selection.

So, for instance, if I wanna take both

legs and make them taller, just the top

portion, I can click-drag around the top

here to try and select those anchor points.

I could then maybe go to the direct

selection, the white arrow, and if I go

and click-drag, you can see what I

can do here, okay?

Let's give that a try.

Go ahead and select the Lasso Tool.

Just drag around, make a little selection around

things, and it will select anything you encompass

or that's in that selection.

Once you select them, you can do whatever

you want.

You could, you know, I wouldn't delete them,

but you could delete them if you wanted

to.

If you then switch to the direct selection

tool, the white arrow, if you, and this

gets a little more into it, but, and

this is why we're doing a lot of

zooming in and out, by the way.

You can hover over one of the points

and click-and-drag or do something different

like that to be able to change the

appearance.

All right, so there are a lot of

ways to make selections, and these are just

a few of the things that I tend

to use quite a bit.

Another thing that I wanna show you, and

this one I use all the time, I

use this in conjunction with outline mode, okay?

What if you had an object that was

behind something else and you need to select

it?

You just drew something and suddenly covered things

up.

You suddenly now need to select the other

object.

Well, why don't you come down here?

We're gonna use the hand tool again and

move our way down back to the farmhouse.

You can also, there are scroll bars in

here that you can drag and do that

kind of thing.

And here's a little tip for you.

If you have, let's say, a Mac laptop

or a laptop that has a touch-enabled

pad, whatever you call that thing right there,

right?

You can use two fingers to scroll in

Illustrator, okay, if your machine supports it.

So I do that a lot.

I'm actually using two fingers to move around

within here.

So it kinda helps a little bit to

be able to do that.

I use this if I wanna kinda nudge

little bits back and forth.

I use the hand tool if I wanna

move big distances or things like that, okay?

So anyway, so you can use that.

All right, what we're gonna do is I

want you to click on, we're gonna select

the window right there.

So go ahead and click on the window

shape so we can select it.

And you're probably gonna find that if you

click in the black area, you're gonna select

the red, right?

So go ahead and click on the yellow.

This is the magic of working with Illustrator.

That's actually a mask, and I'm gonna talk

to you about masks in a later section

that we do.

All right, once I select, click on the

yellow, you'll select the window.

I wanna put that behind the red, okay?

We're gonna put that behind the actual farmhouse

here.

So we're gonna come to Object, Arrange.

Now, I'm a big fan of just saying,

forget about it, let's just send it to

the back, all the way to the back,

which is great.

But we could use Send Backward.

The problem with Send Backward, I find, is

that if you have 5,000 pieces of

artwork and you say Send Backward, it's gonna

send it backward one piece of artwork at

a time behind that one.

So just choose Send to Back, and put

it behind, right?

All right, I'm trying to mess this up

purposely so we can see how this works.

Now, we still have the selection, which is

great.

Why don't you click to deselect somewhere?

We just lost the window now.

So how do we get it back?

What's a couple ways, do you think?

We could go in and use what we

just learned about Outline Mode.

Let's go switch to Outline Mode.

Come to View and choose Outline.

Once again, that shortcut's gonna be really useful.

There's the window.

I could then go sneak up on it,

click on it, and I've got it.

Then I bring it to the front, right,

when I'm done.

That's pretty cool.

Come back out of Outline Mode.

Let's go back to Preview Mode.

So View, GPU, Preview.

There's another way to do this.

And here's the key.

If you know where this thing is, behind

the red farmhouse, for instance, you can actually

select through objects, okay?

Now, if you come out here, if you

actually Command, hold down the Command key, the

key is you have to click where the

window is, where they overlap.

You can't, like, if the window is here,

you can't start clicking way over here and

expect to select it.

You have to be on top of it.

Does that make sense?

Okay, so if you hold down Command and

you start clicking, as you click through, notice

what's gonna happen.

It's gonna start selecting the content out there.

It's gonna select through everything that it finds

in its path, and you can eventually get

to it if you want to.

You can then take that, and if you

want to arrange it to the front or

do something like that.

I'm hoping we got the actual, let me

try this, Arrange, Bring to Front.

Yeah, it didn't grab the actual mask, which

is just great.

It's grabbing that point right there.

There we go.

Yeah, it's grabbing the anchor point.

In this case, you guys, there's so much

going on here that it's not letting us

do it because it's selecting the anchor point.

So we can't bring it to the front.

So what I would do is just take

the farmhouse and crank it to the back

and then bring both up.

There's a lot of ways to get around

this, and you're gonna find that this stuff

just happens, but.

All right, so we can select through content,

which is kind of interesting.

I, you guys, I tend to use outline

mode.

I gotta be honest.

The select through thing is useful at times,

but you gotta be perfect right on.

And as you can see, it's trying to

select like an anchor point or something different,

so.

Why don't you go back into outline mode?

So go to View Outline.

Go ahead and select the window, if you

can get it.

And select the window.

Now you're gonna find that it's actually behind

the other object right there.

Are you clicking on the big rectangle?

Is it selecting that?

Okay, so because we sent this window all

the way to the back, it's gonna be

behind that big rectangle.

So a couple things we could do here.

We could take what we have selected now

and send that to the back, because we're

okay with that.

So go to Object Arrange, send to back.

You should then be able to click on

the window to select it.

There's a lot of ways to get around

in here to be able to try and

do this stuff.

Once you select the window, come to GPU

Preview to go back to Preview.

And you can arrange it to the front

if you wanna do that.

We could also use the layers panel.

There's a lot of ways to get this

done.

I'll say bring the front, and we should

have it.

Okay.

I'm glad when things break, I gotta be

honest, because you try these things and they're

not always gonna work with some of the

things you're trying to accomplish.

So that's why they give us a bunch

of ways to do everything.

All right, so here's another thing that I

wanna show you.

When we're working on shapes, for instance, and

what I'd like to do is maybe the

farmhouse, I wanna go in and start to

adjust it, maybe make it a little taller

or something like that.

You're gonna find that we have artwork covering

up the bottom of it.

So what I'd like to do is I

kinda wanna get the farmhouse by itself, just

the red shape.

An easy way to do that, in most

cases, this works for most shapes, is come

over the red shape, kinda somewhere in the

middle here.

And if you click on it, you're just

gonna select it.

But if you actually double-click on the

red shape right there, you're gonna enter something

called isolation mode.

Now, way back in the day, this used

to only work for groups and a couple

other little things that we could work on.

But now, I kinda discovered this a few

years back.

I was like, I accidentally double-clicked on

something and it did this weird thing.

This is called isolation mode.

So when you work with either groups or

you work with individual objects or other things,

you can go in and double-click.

It's gonna look, if you look right here,

it's gonna hide everything else out here.

It's basically gonna dim it, it's called.

You cannot select it, so you can only

select the object at hand.

And if you look at the gray bar

right up here, you're gonna see, what do

you think this information right here is?

It's telling me, yeah, it's telling me that

it's on a barn layer and it's the

object called path, which is not helpful at

all, but there it is.

And you get these little pieces and things

that kinda give you an idea.

Now, if we wanna get out of this,

let's suppose we go in and we do

a little adjustment.

I'm like, hey, let's make the bottom a

little shorter or let me make the bottom

a little taller or do something like that.

Once we're done with this, bunch of ways

to get out of here.

You can actually double-click away if you

wanna do that.

That basically exits isolation mode, it's called.

So you can try that one if you

want.

If I'm in isolation mode by double-clicking

again, I can actually, in most cases, press

the escape key.

That's one of my favorites because double-clicking

somewhere else, you might click on something, you

know what I mean?

You might do something else and move something.

So if I double-click to enter, pressing

the escape key will get out of it.

The other way that Adobe has handed you,

I should say, is if I double-click,

there is an arrow up here that you

can click on to get out of this

mode.

That's another way to do it.

And that can actually be very useful, that

little arrow up there, because later on when

you get further into working with grouped objects,

we can double-click on a group and

start to edit each shape independently now.

It goes into an isolation mode.

If you start hitting the arrow up here,

if there were groups and groups and groups,

and I'm getting a little crazy, it'll start

working its way out of each group, which

could be really useful.

I'm gonna press the escape key.

We are out.

We now have the shape or the object

selected.

So another thing that is very useful, something

we are gonna do quite a bit, is

we're gonna talk about show, hide, lock, unlock,

because I can't live without this.

I seriously cannot.

If I wanna go in and be able

to select objects or work on objects without

tripping over other content, I'm using lock, unlock

quite a bit.

For instance, why don't we do this?

I wanna take this shape in the back,

and you're gonna see these are like little

cloud shapes, and then this brown thing right

here.

I wanna take those and I wanna lock

them in place so we don't accidentally move

them.

These are maybe for things that I'm done

with, okay?

I wanna select all those.

So easy way to select is to start

somewhere where there's nothing, click and drag across,

and just touch on those objects, right?

And we can select them.

Now, I think I missed one of the

cloud shapes over here.

So a great thing is we can use

the shift key to add to the selection

if we want to.

Another thing that's really cool is if you

have a bunch of things selected and you

wanna deselect something, the shift key works in

reverse.

So if I hold the shift key down

and click on something, it'll actually remove it

from the selection as well.

So you can do that too.

You're gonna find, with selections, find the fastest

way that works.

If it's a method, a combination of things,

you do it.

Okay, now with those selected, come under object.

You'll see that we have lock right here.

I wanna talk just a few seconds about

this.

We have what's called lock selection.

If you are gonna do a lot of

selecting in Illustrator, you wanna try, I know

there's a lot of keyboard commands to learn,

but you wanna try and learn some of

these commands.

Command two actually will allow you to toggle

between lock, unlock, okay?

There's also hide right here, and that's command

three.

So that's a good way.

It's something that is good to learn as

you start working more and more in Illustrator.

Now you'll also notice, I love this, lock

all artwork above or other layers.

That's actually pretty cool, because if we're working

on this barn and I've got the window

on top of it, the green bushes, the

door, all that stuff, and all I wanna

do is focus on the actual red shape,

I can click on the red shape and

select all artwork above.

Everything above it, the green bushes, the window,

the this, the that, are gonna be locked.

So I can then focus on the actual

barn.

So that's kind of a good one.

Go ahead and choose lock selection.

Now with a lock, the interesting thing about

that is it's actually locking it in the

layers panel, which is kind of interesting.

So it's locking it over there.

If we decide later on that we want

to unlock all, for instance, now this is

something that I struggle with and I kinda

hate, I gotta be honest.

If you go to, let's say you have

five different artboards, and on each artboard, you

lock specific content, okay?

If I go in and use this, I

say lock selection, lock selection, I keep doing

that across all my artboards.

You come up here, there's only one command

for unlocking.

You can't unlock a specific object.

It's just unlock all, okay?

So sometimes that gets annoying.

Sometimes it's fine, sometimes it's annoying.

But in that case, if you need to

unlock specific things, you go to the layers

panel, and you can lock and unlock in

there by clicking on the little lock icon

or the blank space.

All right, so we're gonna leave that alone.

We can kinda then start to work.

If we go in and we decide to

select something like the green bush here, you

can actually now drag across without selecting or

fear of selecting anything behind it because all

of that content is locked, which is great.

Okay, so we've kinda talked a little bit

about working with selections.

I now wanna get into editing paths.

There's a lot to talk about with editing

paths, and we're gonna hit a few things

here that are just kinda the big things

that you need to know that make it

a little bit easier.

So what I'd like to do is we're

gonna go up to an artboard up top.

So you can use the hand tool if

you want to, and you can scroll up

a bit here to this artboard.

It actually has this funky half shape on

it.

Now, what I'm doing right now, we're doing

a little bit more further in technique, let's

say that.

So I'm hoping that we're kinda getting used

to trying to zoom, fit artboards in window,

doing things like that.

It just takes practice, but you can get

that.

I've got a path here, and what I'd

like to do is I'd like to start

editing, okay?

We're gonna get to drawing.

We're gonna draw a little bit more with

the pen tool, but what I wanna do

is I wanna go in and do this.

If we want to, let's say I've got

this curve right here, and I'd like to

make it a little curvier, okay?

I don't know if that's actually a word,

but we could dive in with drawing tools

and do different things, but when you're going

to edit paths, one of the tools that

I use a lot is the direct selection

tool.

So why don't you come over here to

the direct selection tool, and go ahead and

select that, and come out to the path.

Now, like I said before, if we're gonna

edit a path, a lot of times, let

me zoom in so you can see this

a little bit easier here.

We're gonna wanna select anchor points, because all

of these paths are made with anchor points

and paths, right?

And we're gonna wanna select the actual path

between out there and do different things.

To me, one of the easiest ways to

edit a path visually, make it more curved,

less curved, on a curved path, come up

to this top path here, and just sneak

up to it, okay?

Sneak up on it, and you're gonna see

a little black box show, just click, and

you're gonna select the path itself.

Now, what I thought was kinda weird about

this is, do y'all see the direction

handle coming down, the one?

Now, there are more direction handles out here,

because there's a lot more curves in this

thing, okay?

By default, when you click on a path,

the anchor points on both sides will show

the direction handles, but they won't show any

more that are on the path.

If you'll take a look up here in

the control panel, you're gonna see there's a

lot of commands that we should be using

when we edit paths.

And one of the ones that I use

all the time here is show handles for

multiple anchor points.

It's this teeny little button right there, okay?

Why don't you go ahead and click on

that one?

Now, when we start to edit paths, if

I click on, why don't you come up

to one of the anchor points, like let's

say that one right there on the corner,

and go ahead and click on that.

You can tell you're gonna click on it

because it gets bigger, right?

Look what it's gonna do here.

It's gonna start to show me a lot

more direction handles out here.

By default, Illustrator focuses on the anchor point

you're on, basically.

But by turning that on, we can see

more.

That way, if you're visually trying to go

in and adjust the handles on this thing,

you can do more.

You can actually get more.

Now, we can, if I want to, like

I said, go in and adjust this.

One easy way to adjust a path is

if you select it with the direct selection

tool, come up to the curve of the

path, okay?

Now, this really isn't gonna work on a

straight line, for instance, okay?

But if you come up to a curve

of a path, something that's newer in Illustrator

in the past few versions, if your cursor

changes to this weird thing with the curvy

U thing, I don't even know what that's

called, that thing, you can now just click

and drag, okay?

Now, we could kind of do this before,

but now, what's even better, is it's not

constrained.

So a while back, when we could do

this, it would actually only make it so

it was almost like holding the shift key

down.

Each would move the same way, okay?

Now, you can kind of just do whatever

you want to do here, which is pretty

cool.

So this is a good way, if you're

just, instead of battling the direction handles, these

guys here, that we can also go in,

and I can select these and start to

work with them.

Instead of battling those, you can just click

and drag and kind of reshape, okay?

That can make it so much easier.

Now, the other thing we can do with

this, as far as editing is concerned, we

can throw the shift key in the mix

if we want to.

And this, you guys, this is actually really

important, because what if I have this curve,

and I decide all I wanna do is

I wanna take the entire curve, and instead

of messing with it, transforming it up and

down, I just wanna make it a little

bit bigger or a little bit smaller.

Hold the shift key down, and you can

click and drag the path.

So hold the shift key down, click and

drag the path.

There we go, can you guys see that

happening?

And it's gonna constrain it.

So it's gonna keep it so it's pretty

much constrained and will only move left or

right or whatever direction you're actually moving in.

So it's kind of interesting there.

Now, the one thing you need to do

is you need to let go of the

key, or sorry, let go of the mouse

and then let go of the key when

you do that.

You guys may find that you need to

hold the, the shift key should work.

Is it working for you guys?

Okay, it gets a little touchy.

Sometimes you actually need to go in and

you can start moving it and hold the

shift key down as you move as well.

So you can start moving it first, then

hold the shift key down.

There's a couple ways to kind of get

that to work.

So it's kind of interesting.

There's a lot of ways to be able

to change these handles.

Now, as we draw as well, we're gonna

be able to do that.

So I'm gonna show you with the pen

tool that we can do this too.

But this is a good way to be

able to do quick, easy edits.

All right, now, another thing that we can

do here, and I'm totally messing up the

path, that's fine, is we can go out

and we can start to actually edit these

points a little differently.

If you come to a shape that somebody

drew or you drew, for instance, why don't

you come up to this point right here

and go ahead and click on that anchor

point.

Once again, if you want to, you can

come up to it and you're gonna see

that it's really subtle, but these boxes do

get bigger.

You can see it.

A lot of times, I'll just click and

drag across to select an anchor point.

I just get, I don't wanna have to

sit there and focus right on the point,

so you can get that.

Now, of course, with the direct selection tool,

we can actually move these around if we

want to.

I can click and drag and kind of,

you know, do some different things with this.

If we decide that we wanna edit this

point and do something different with it, for

instance, right now, it's actually what's called a

corner point, okay?

What I'd like to do is I'd like

to convert it to what's called a smooth

point.

Let me do this real quick.

I'm gonna open something up and just show

you something I've got.

I wanna point this out, because this hopefully

will make sense and help out understanding if

you're trying to get a little further in

here.

A corner point in Illustrator is actually a

point that usually doesn't have any of those

direction handles flying out of there.

It can, but it usually doesn't, and it's

kind of a, it's a corner, okay?

A smooth point is going to have these

little direction handles, which are kind of like

magnets attracting the path, and a smooth point's

gonna, like I said, just kind of be

a little bit smoother.

Now, a path altogether, let me show you

this.

A path altogether, we actually have, and you're

gonna hear these terms.

We have the anchor points, which we've been

talking about a little bit here.

You can see them out there.

We also have the path.

Now, I've been calling this a path the

entire time.

Technically, this is actually a segment.

That's the technical name for it, if you

will, or one of those.

So, a segment is between two anchor points.

It's something we can control.

We actually have the entire direction handle right

here, which is kind of like that little

magnet we're working with, and we have the

end of the direction handle right here.

They call it the direction point, and we

have this guy right here.

It's called the direction line.

Who cares?

You don't need to know that, all right?

I just figured I'd throw that out there,

but.

So, when we're dealing with paths, the idea

here is that we've gotta go in, and

we gotta kind of try and work with

these a little bit, so let me close

these up.

All right, so if we have a point

selected, rather, if you can come up to

the control point, or control panel right up

here, we have a couple things we can

work with that are super important when editing

paths.

You'll see right here, we have two selections

here.

We have convert point to corner, and convert

point to smooth.

Now, there are a lot of ways to

do this stuff, okay?

As you're drawing, you can do this.

While you're editing or finished drawing, you can

do this as well.

Why don't you come up here and do

this?

Choose convert, select, and anchor to corner.

Click on that little button right there, and

you guys can take a look at it.

It's not gonna change, because technically it is

a corner point, okay?

Why don't you go ahead and choose convert

to smooth, the next one over, and you

can see what it does, right?

So this is a way for us, if

we decide, hey, I don't need that to

be this, I need it to be a

little smoother, I wanna do something with it,

you can then go out there, if you

take a look, because it's smooth right there,

I can start to edit each one of

these little direction lines, these direction handles, independently.

You can see right there, okay?

So we've got some options for working with

the path itself.

That's one of the easier ways to be

able to convert.

There are tools I'm gonna show you in

just a few minutes here that allow us

to convert, but that's pretty simple.

We have a lot of tools that we

can work with, right?

And today we're gonna focus a little bit

more on the pen tool, we're gonna dive

into that in just a few minutes here.

But what I'd like you to do is

come to the pen tool and click and

hold down on the pen tool, and you're

gonna see that we've got a series of

tools under here.

If we're trying to edit paths, these can

be really useful, okay?

We have the pen tool itself, which is

used for drawing and editing.

We have the add anchor point and the

delete anchor point.

Now these are exactly what they sound like.

If you have a point in a path

and you wanna get rid of it, select

it.

The delete anchor point path tool right there.

Hover over the point, click, and you're done.

It's gone, okay?

So it's kind of easy to use.

Add anchor point allows us to go out

and add anchor points.

This anchor point tool is, I use this

thing all the time, okay?

The anchor point tool allows you to go

to an anchor point and do the same

thing as those buttons up there by converting

it from a corner to a smooth, okay?

Tell you what, why don't you go to

the pen tool here, select the pen tool.

When we edit with the direct selection, the

white arrow, you're basically kind of messing with

the points that are already there.

That's one of the ideas with that tool,

okay?

So we can edit the points that are

there.

What if we decide, I need some more

or I need to get rid of some,

I need to clean this up a little

bit, for instance.

If you take the pen tool out here

with the path that you select, that's what

it's gotta be, hover over the path and

you're gonna see we get a little plus.

That means we can add an anchor point

somewhere.

So if, for instance, if I decide that

I wanna put a point right here so

I can reshape the path, I can click

to add an anchor point.

The issue or the thing with the pen

tool is once you do that, my first

instinct, I just put a new point out

there, I'm like, oh great, I wanna go

move it, right?

Well, I got the pen tool selected, I

hover over it, what's it gonna make me

do?

What's it gonna have me do right now?

It's gonna wanna delete it.

You see a minus sign, right?

So as we're working right now without holding

any keys down, this is all it's gonna

do.

This is the combination of things that we're

gonna use a lot, okay?

I'm gonna use the pen tool to edit

paths if I want to.

Why don't you go ahead and hold the

command key down?

Now, it's control on Windows, okay?

So if you hold the command key down,

you are temporarily getting to the last selection

tool you selected.

Everybody tells me that if you hold that

key down, you go right to the white

arrow.

I hear that.

That's not true.

It's gonna, if I had the black arrow

selected, the selection tool, it would go to

the selection tool.

So it's whatever was last selected.

So if we have the pen tool and

we add a point and we're like, oh,

I wanna edit it now, hold down the

command key.

You can click, drag.

You can adjust the handles if you want

to.

You can do different things like that.

I can then let go of the command

key and I'm still on the pen tool.

I can then start to edit further.

So if I want to, I'm like, oh,

I don't want this point right here.

I can hover over it, see a minus,

click, and I've got it gone.

Once again, command key, go back, start to

edit, adjust the curves, kind of work with

it a little bit, start to work with

this thing and see what it looks like.

Let go of the command and I've got

my shape.

People always ask me, they're like, why don't

you show me how to draw first?

One of the things that I do more

of, I think, is editing.

I do a lot of editing.

I create shapes, but I spend tons of

time editing.

So understanding these different techniques is super important.

It really, really is.

Now we do have other tools we can

work with.

Like I said before, when we go through

the pen tool, I'm gonna introduce more of

these tools and more techniques and more shortcuts

for working, okay?

Okay, so now what we're gonna do is

we're gonna talk a little bit about working

with some other features out here.

I wanna talk about, in particular, working with

brushes.

Brushes are something that I use.

Mine are a little more mechanical, but with

brushes, you can create artistic effects, do all

kinds of things.

It's like painting with a brush, okay?

You can do calligraphy with it.

You can paint almost watercolor effects, do different

things like that.

The thing that I wanna remind everybody is

that when we do this, we're actually creating

vector artwork.

It's gonna look like it's paint, but it's

actually paths we're creating, okay?

When we do this kind of thing.

Make sure that your artboard is fit into

the window.

Mine's got a little wonky, so I'm gonna

choose view fit artboard and window.

And I'm gonna hide my swatches panel for

one second.

All right, come over here and come to

the blob brush tool.

Come to the blob brush tool and choose

or select the paintbrush tool.

You might still see the paintbrush tool out

there.

I don't know.

There we go.

Go ahead and select the paintbrush tool.

Now, we're about to work with brushes.

Brushes are, like I already said, they're kind

of a way to be artistic, but you

don't have to paint with them.

You can take a brush and apply it

to anything.

I can apply it to a square that

I created.

I can apply a brush to that backpack.

It doesn't really matter.

Using the paintbrush, using a brush kind of

seems to fit, but you don't have to

do this, okay?

You don't have to create these this way.

You'll see in a second what I mean.

With the paintbrush tool selected, what we're gonna

do first is we're gonna select a brush.

Come over to the right.

There's a couple of places to find this,

but one of the big places is the

brushes panel on the right-hand side over

here.

So click on the brushes panel icon and

you'll open it up.

I'm gonna zoom in a bit.

Now, the brushes panel, if you wanna make

it a little taller, you can.

Grab the bottom down here, little gripper, pull

it down.

You're gonna see, this is actually kind of

big, but you're gonna see that we have

a lot of different types of brushes to

work with.

There are about, I think it's, let me

just double-check here real quick.

One, two, three, four, five, yep.

There are five different kinds of brushes we

can create in Illustrator.

We can create a calligraphy brush.

We can create a scatter brush.

We can create an art brush.

We can create a pattern brush, and we

can create a bristle brush, it's called.

If you look right up at the top,

these are calligraphy brushes.

So it's like working with pen, ink, that

kind of thing, calligraphy, et cetera.

As a matter of fact, why don't you

choose five-point oval?

Just click on the brush to select it.

Come out here to your artwork, out to

the art board a little bit, and just

make a little path.

Just draw a little swooshy-swoo thing.

And take a look, that's a brush.

That's painting, okay?

Now, I tried this before.

I was like, you know what, I'm gonna

take my brush, and I'm gonna fill in

an area of color, okay?

Brush, you're painting, right?

So what I could do, what you could

do too, is if you come up to

stroke, the stroke also affects the size of

the brush that you're working on, okay?

So if I come up here to stroke,

what I can do is choose a stroke,

let's say maybe 10-point or something like

that.

And if I go out here, I can

click and drag, and you guys can see

how it affects the actual path, right?

So we've got that right there.

Now, as I go out and I start

to do this, watch up here for one

second, I'm just gonna kind of paint in

a little bit.

I'm like, I'm painting, I'm painting, I'm painting,

okay?

I'm gonna go to outline mode for just

one second and show you what it's actually

doing.

They're paths.

It's paths with a brush applied to them.

So just, we gotta keep that in mind,

okay?

All right.

All right, so you can delete them just

by hitting delete.

You can do all kinds of things.

Now, we have these calligraphy brushes we can

work with, which are really great.

You can also select a shape like a

square, a circle, and you could stroke it

with a brush just by selecting a brush

to apply it to it.

You don't have to paint, like I said,

with the paintbrush.

We also have what are called art brushes.

I love these things.

If you look in the brushes panel, you're

gonna see this little sail banner.

You're gonna see this little banner thing.

You're gonna see this.

You can take artwork that you draw or

create or find, and you can say, let's

make a brush out of it.

Once you make a brush out of it,

it's called an art brush, you can take

that brush, and you can actually, if you

just watch for one second here, I can

apply it to a path.

Let me get rid of these.

I can apply it to that path, and

it's gonna stretch it along the path to

fit.

There's some really cool things we can do

with this.

If you guys did draw something with the

paintbrush, you can go to the selection tool

and select that path you created, and just

click on one of these other brushes to

apply it.

Take a look at what it does.

So we've got a lot of different types.

You're also gonna see that the other kind

of brush that I do wanna just mention,

there's some weirdness here, but do you see

this little fan brush, and it says 6

.00?

Does everybody see that one?

This is called a bristle brush.

If you ever see a brush that has

this little fan to the left there, why

don't you go ahead and click on it

to apply it.

You're gonna see that this is painting, actually

a little bit more realistic painting, sort of

like a watercolor.

This is called a bristle brush.

These were introduced several, lots of versions back.

They've been adding, they had added a bunch

of different kinds of brushes.

The last kind of brush we can work

with that I'm gonna mention is a pattern

brush, and these are my favorite.

If you scroll all the way down in

the brushes panel, you're gonna see the zipper

down there.

Why don't you go ahead and click on

that.

If you have a path selected, click on

that to apply it, and take a look.

These are awesome.

You can take artwork that you create, and

you can stretch it along, and you can

decide or determine what you wanna repeat, what's

gonna be on the ends of the path,

how it's gonna work.

You can do everything you want with it.

So what I did was I drew these

little shapes, and I just said, hey, let's

make a pattern out of it, pattern brush,

and it kinda did it for me.

It's pretty cool.

I know a lot of people that work

in garment industries, fashion, all that kind of

thing, when they're trying to mock up different

things like store placards and all that kind

of thing, they'll create these types of things,

because if you wanna create a series of

buttons, for instance, I'm not gonna draw every

button by itself.

So we can create a pattern like this

and simply draw a line and have the

buttons show up on the line, or a

zipper, or anything we want.

So these are pretty great.

We are actually gonna go and create that

zipper brush.

I'm gonna show you how this works.

Take that path that you created, and just

go ahead and delete it, get rid of

it.

Just hit delete.

And what I wanna do is I just

wanna create a straight line.

We're gonna create a line straight across.

Come over to the line segment tool over

here, and go ahead and select it.

And what I want you to do is

we're gonna just create a straight line right

down here towards the bottom.

Press the shift key so we can draw

a straight line.

Click and drag, and just make it about

yay big.

I'll let go, let go of your mouse,

and then the shift key, don't forget.

Just make it about this big.

It doesn't matter, we can change the size.

All right, go ahead and deselect it, view

in mine.

I'm gonna go to my selection tool.

Now in order for us to make a

brush, if we wanna make ourselves a pattern

brush or an art brush, either one of

those two, we have to have something created.

You have to have some artwork to use,

okay?

So I've actually got this zipper artwork that

we're gonna use.

We need to open this file to get

at it though.

So let's go to file, open, and we're

gonna open up the zipper parts, this little

bit of artwork that we have here.

So come into the day two, segment three

folder, and you'll see zipper.ai. Open that

up.

All right, you might wanna fit that in

the window if you can see the whole

thing.

Put the artboard in the window.

Now in here, I've already created the brush

and kind of set it up just so

we can see it.

What happens when you create brushes is they

only live in that document that you're in

at that moment, okay?

We can move them to other documents, but

it's a little harder.

You're gonna see the pieces right down here

for the zipper.

What I wanna do is I wanna select

these pieces and copy them into our document

so we can use them.

So go ahead and drag across these pieces,

select them.

Go ahead and copy them.

Go back over to the backpack, start.

We've got a lot of files open now,

I know.

Kind of getting hard to find.

And why don't you just paste?

Go ahead and paste.

I'm gonna tell you right now that when

you paste in Illustrator like other programs, it

pastes in the center of the document window.

So if you decide that you wanted that

zipper content to be pasted down here, for

instance, you could use maybe the hand tool.

And if you put that towards the center

of the document window and you paste, it

will go down there.

That's one of the only ways I know

how to do it.

All right, so we've got the shapes out

there.

Now we're gonna create a pattern.

So what I wanna do is this.

We're gonna take each one of these and

we're gonna use them as part of the

pattern brush.

So why don't you do this?

Take these little, I know it's hard to

see, I'm sorry.

Let me zoom in.

You're gonna see these two little weird things

here.

These are the teeth of the zipper, okay?

Why don't you select those?

If you need to zoom in, go ahead,

but I'm gonna select those.

Now when we create a pattern brush, we

wanna have some artwork selected.

It's gonna say we're gonna make the pattern

out of that.

Come over to the brushes panel and you're

gonna see down at the bottom, we can

create a new brush by clicking on new

brush.

So with the artwork selected, click new brush

down there.

Now it's gonna say what kind you wanna

make.

And this is where we could go a

little crazy.

I just wanna simply say we're gonna make

a pattern brush.

So we're gonna repeat this thing along a

path or along a shape, along a stroke.

Click okay, pattern brush.

Now, this dialog box is a little bit

of an animal, okay?

There's a lot going on.

We're not gonna have to touch most of

the stuff in here.

I will be perfectly honest with you.

It's very specific to things you wanna do.

Look down here.

Can you guys see the preview down here?

I mean, we're pretty much done.

We've just created a run of a zipper.

All I wanna do right now is we're

gonna go up to name and call it

like my zipper or something.

That's like the lamest name ever, but you

can call it that.

Click okay.

Take a look in your brushes panel and

you'll see that it's now there.

And you'll notice that there are these little

lines in there depending on how you're looking

at it.

Each one of these represents part of the

pattern, okay, or the brush.

And I'll talk about that in a second.

So what I wanna do now is go

ahead and select your path.

Just click on your path up there and

we're gonna apply that brush.

So come to the brushes panel and just

click on it and you should see it

happen.

We've got our pattern.

I just, I mean, the thing I love

about this is there are so many things

you can do with it, so many things

you can do with pattern brushes.

I mean, I can't even tell you.

There've been so many times where I create

something, even a matter of like three objects,

and I'll just make some kind of brush

out of it really quickly, because you don't

wanna have to create all these different objects

out there and keep them in line and

figure out the distance and all that kind

of thing.

There's a lot of ways we can work

with these.

Now, if we had a path or a

shape like this, and let's suppose that I

went, just watch for a second.

I went to my curvature tool here and

I'm like, oh, let's create a curve.

It's gonna do exactly the same thing if

I applied it.

It's just gonna follow the curve for me.

So now what I wanna do is I

wanna go in and we need to add

the beginning and the end of the zipper.

Okay, so we gotta have the little pull

thing.

And then, does anyone know what this thing's

called?

I don't even, this is, I'll just call

it the end.

Okay, that's the other end of the zipper.

So we're gonna use these two now.

Now, we've already created the brush.

To get these two in there, we're actually

gonna take those little shapes and we're gonna

turn them into swatches.

We're gonna save them as a little pattern

swatch.

It's kinda weird.

It's really easy.

It's harder than it sounds.

So do this for me.

If you wanna create a pattern that has

more than one artwork, a piece of artwork

in it, you're gonna wind up saving some

of the artwork as swatches.

Just watch for one second, okay?

I'm gonna select, let's say, the zipper end

here, the pull, and I'm gonna drag that

in to the swatches and let go.

I'm gonna do the same thing to the

other end.

Select it, drag it in.

You guys, this is actually another way to

make a pattern swatch.

That's pretty easy.

So why don't you try that?

So go ahead and select this artwork, drag

it right in there.

Now, it doesn't, if you drag it in

to the middle of the colors, it'll stick

it in the middle.

I'm trying to drag it towards the bottom

of the colors.

You'll see a little blue line show up

and it'll show you where it's going.

All right, now, once it gets in there,

we're gonna apply it to the actual brush.

Hopefully, everybody, you got those in there.

Go back over to the brushes panel, once

you drag them in, and now we need

to edit that pattern brush.

So come to that new, the My Zipper

brush right there, and double-click on it.

So any brush you create, for the most

part, you can come in here and double

-click to edit it.

So double-click the brush, and you should

see the pattern brush options.

Now, I just did something that I told

myself I would never do again in my

life.

I've done this a billion times.

Move the dialog out of the way, this

big box out of the way, you can

grab it by the title.

Look at my zipper end out here.

Because I still had the artwork selected by

double-clicking a pattern brush, I applied it

to the artwork that was there.

That stinks, I do that all the time.

Anyway, should be a rookie mistake, but I

do it every day.

So, okay, so if you look in here,

forget that, you're gonna see right in here,

the big things that we wanna look at,

we wanna look at what's called the beginning

or the start tile.

These little tiles just tell it where the

artwork is gonna go when it creates a

pattern.

You have the start tile, and you have

the end tile.

So it's basically the start of the line

and the end of the line in our

case.

So come to the start tile here and

just click on the arrow.

And what we do, this is really cool,

it actually shows the swatches panel, but only

the pattern swatches in there.

So if you take a look in there

and scroll down, you're gonna see there's some,

there it is right there.

There's the, would this be the pull end

or the, who cares, I'm not, I don't

work in fashion.

All right, go ahead and choose new patterns,

choose your pattern swatch, it looks like the

zipper pull, let's do that.

And then let's go to the other end.

And let's pull, pick on the other one.

And look at the preview down there, you'll

see what it does.

You could take this so far, you could

really kind of create some different things.

If you applied this zipper to a box,

like a rectangle, you can even decide what

goes on the corner, inside and outside.

Right now, take a look right here, you're

gonna see this is called the outside corner

right here, the outer corner.

If you click on that arrow, what Illustrator

does is it actually generates the corners for

you automatically.

It's done this for a bunch of versions

now, but it creates one.

If you don't like what it did, like,

these are kind of funky, but I'll just

do auto overlap.

I like that one best, it's simple, okay?

And that's what it's gonna look like.

So if you look at the corners, yeah,

whatever.

We can even make our own artwork if

we want to and make it and put

it in swatches panel and choose it from

there if we wanna do it that way

too.

But this is kind of a simpler way

to get it done.

There's a lot of things you can do

in here, a lot of things.

If you decide that you think your zipper's

too small, instead of making the artwork bigger,

for instance, I already made the zippers, you

can come right here and go to what's

called scale, right up here.

You can make it smaller, or you can

make it bigger if you want to and

scale it based on, now it's not showing

it down there, but it's gonna scale it

on the path and make a big zipper

or a small zipper, a lot of run,

let's say.

You can even change the spacing here if

you want to.

So I can go in and change the

spacing between.

Now, this is actually gonna show you this.

You can take a look.

So I can, the spacing affects usually the

run or the side.

Okay, so I can adjust the spacing.

What I'm doing here is I'm clicking on

the word spacing and I'm actually using my

arrow keys and my shift arrow to be

able to change that.

So yeah, that's fine.

All right, that's pretty good.

There are tons of settings in here.

I don't want to go nuts.

Your mind goes numb after a while, but

let's just click okay.

Go ahead and click okay.

This is the kicker right here.

It's telling you right now that that brush

is applied to something out there.

Do you want to apply the new brush

to the path that you already have or

to the object you have?

Click apply to strokes and it will.

There we go.

We have our zipper.

That's cool.

Yeah, pattern brushes are amazing.

There's tons of stuff you can do with

these.

So tell you what, why don't we do

this?

I'm gonna zoom out again so we can

see everything.

Let's take our zipper and we're gonna drag

it onto the backpack.

So drag it up here on the backpack.

We can take the line if we want

to and make it a little bit shorter

to fit.

Now the other thing about these patterns and

the brushes and everything you're working with as

far as brushes, they are tied to the

stroke weight of the object that they're applied

to.

So look up at stroke up there.

If you want to, you can make that

stroke weight smaller and the brush, the zipper

will get smaller.

So I go to like 0.5, zipper

will get smaller.

So if I go to like a stroke

weight of like six, look up.

All right, so go to 0.5 and

we got it.

That's a good zipper.

Nice.

And of course, you know, there are ways

to be able to go in and kind

of color it.

If you color the original artwork before you

make the brush or after, you can do

that too.

So I could have made it maybe blue

or something to match or whatever I wanted,

you know, but we now have that zipper

brush.

Why don't you take the original artwork?

We do not need this anymore, what we

pasted in.

Go ahead and select it and just delete

it.

And we got a rush, cool.

Go ahead and save the file, come to

file, save.

So we've got that there.

We're gonna go through and talk just a

little bit about working with some of the

other options here.

We're gonna talk about the knife tool and

the scissors tool real quick.

These are very useful for editing paths.

What I'd like you to do is I

want to go down.

I'm using my hand tool here, holding the

space bar or going to the hand tool.

Come down to the bird down here, this

wacky little bird thing.

And what I'd like you to do is

I'd like you to zoom in a bit

on the bird beak, so on the beak

out there.

I'm using a shortcut to get to the

zoom tool is command space bar, control space

bar.

If you hold them down, you get the

zoom tool and I can zoom in.

Try not to throw too many key commands

out there just because they get overwhelming, but

there are a lot.

All right, what I want to do now

is I want to take this bird beak

and go ahead and click on it with

the selection tool.

Make sure you have the selection tool selected.

And you're gonna see that it's basically just

a couple of paths, a couple of shapes

rather, and they are grouped together.

You can see group up here, okay?

What I'd like to do is I want

to take the beak and I want to

color it.

I want to have different colors of segments,

kind of like a toucan or something like

that, right?

Just on the beak.

Now to do that, we'd probably have to

take this orangish shape and cut it up

or do something to it.

So what we can do is we can

actually use something like the knife tool or

the scissors tool to do this.

Come over here to the left and you're

gonna see that we have the eraser tool.

The eraser tool, by the way, is probably

my favorite tool ever.

We're gonna use it a little bit maybe.

We'll see.

Go ahead and hold down on the eraser

tool over here in the tools panel.

And you're gonna see we have the scissors

and the knife.

Now I confused these for a long time.

I didn't quite understand what these were meant

to do.

The scissors tool is meant for you to

go to a point on a path, like

an anchor point, click on it, and what

it's gonna do is it's gonna, like with

scissors, it's gonna cut the path there.

You can then basically take this path and

do something like this.

Open it up.

There's gonna be two end points now on

the path.

Now why don't you come to the knife

tool here.

We're gonna use the knife tool instead.

So click on the knife tool.

And what I wanna do is I'm gonna

come out here and we're just gonna draw

across the beak here.

Now what the knife tool does that's different

is as you drag across a shape, it's

actually gonna close that shape.

So it's gonna basically connect the ends of

the paths.

So this is a good thing.

So come up here somewhere, click and drag

across the beak, just all the way across

to pretend you're cutting right through it, like

knife through butter kind of thing.

Drag all the way across, let go, and

you've just cut it into pieces, which is

kind of neat.

Now did you notice that it was not

even close to a straight line, okay?

Now in order to make a straight line,

we actually have to use the option and

the shift keys or just the option key,

you guys.

The option key held down will let you

draw a straight line across.

The option shift will make it perfectly horizontal

or vertical, okay?

So it'll constrain it, let's just say that.

So you can do that pretty easily.

I wanna talk to you a little bit

more about editing paths by doing what's called

the join command and talk about joining.

I wanna talk to you a little bit

also about scissors and working with the knife

tool.

These are super important for doing edits and

kind of working as well.

What I did purposely was I created these

paths here and I actually did not purposely

join the ends here just so we can

kind of see.

If you ever have different paths, and there

are two different kinds of paths in Illustrator.

There's an open path, like a letter C

for instance, and there are closed paths, like

a square or a rectangle, okay?

If we have open paths, like a couple

little things that we drew, like lines like

this, we can actually connect or join them

really easily using the join command.

How many of you have used the join

command before?

Okay, two ways to do this actually.

In the newer versions of Illustrator, we actually

have something called the join tool.

This thing is gonna blow your mind, okay?

First of all, we're gonna use the join

command.

If you want to join parts of a

path, what we're gonna do is this.

We're gonna select the anchor points, the ends

of the paths that we wanna join, and

we're gonna tell it to join them with

a path.

It's gonna basically connect them together.

So what I want you to do is

go to the direct selection tool here, and

I wanna join these two points right here,

okay?

How do your points look?

Are they looking okay?

Do they look a little funky?

Okay, that's fine, whatever.

What I want you to do is click

and drag across to select them, kind of

one of the easier ways.

And by the way, when we edit paths

as well, a lot of times I will

bounce into outline mode, like we saw earlier,

to be able to select points and do

things like that as well.

Now that I have these anchor points selected,

if we need to right now, you're gonna

see we have these little direction handles.

I can go out and do some edits

real quick and then reselect if I need

to do that.

With these anchor points selected, we're gonna join

them.

So if you come under object, you're gonna

see path, and right here, this is the

big one.

I use this a lot.

We're gonna use what's called join.

The shortcut right there is great.

It's Command J or Control J, but go

ahead and choose join and take a look

at what it does.

It's exactly what it sounds like.

All it does, if you had these two

paths 50 feet apart, it would make a

humongous line between the two, that's it.

It makes a straight line between the two.

Now, I actually now refer to this as

a dumb join, because all it's doing is

literally, bink, doing that, closing the path.

Now, watch this for one second here.

If you actually have a path that is

a single path, maybe think of a letter

C, and what I'd like to do is

I'd like to close the letter C and

make it a letter D, for instance.

Or I have this single path, and what

I wanna do is I wanna join this

point and this point.

If you select a path, I want you

guys to do this too.

Go to the selection tool.

Now, here's something I want you to do.

We just had some anchor points selected.

I want you to click away from the

shape and then select it again by dragging

across or clicking on it.

You're gonna find sometimes that if you just

select the selection tool, it's still gonna have

those last anchor points selected and funky things

can happen, okay?

With that shape selected, we're gonna go join

it.

So, go ahead and join.

So, object, path, join, okay?

You guys are gonna see right here, it's

gonna say that we actually have to go

in and say what we wanna join, essentially,

okay?

Now, that means selecting the anchor points if

we wanna do something like that.

If we just had a regular old shape,

like a letter C, as a matter of

fact, why don't we do this, you guys?

Why don't you come over here?

That shape we just had selected was called

a compound path.

It's a little fancy, so it's not gonna

work.

Why don't you come over here to the

curvature tool?

Come to the curvature tool over here on

the left in the tools panel, and what

I'd like you to do is we're just

gonna draw a quick letter C.

So, just watch up here for one second

and you guys can do it.

I'm gonna go click, click, click.

I know it's backwards.

I know how to do my letters in

my alphabet.

We're gonna do a backwards letter C.

I should have said that, okay.

Okay, so we've got a path right here.

Now, what I'd like to do is I'd

actually like to join or make this a

closed path, so we're gonna connect the two

anchor points on the end here.

Go back to the selection tool, the black

arrow.

That kinda stops it.

We're gonna go join now, so go to

object, path, join.

Object, path, join.

And you should see what it does.

This path over here, you guys, the reason

why it didn't work, it's actually a special

path called a compound path.

We're gonna get to those, but it's a

little more tricky, so it won't work with

that.

But if you guys have a regular old

path you drew, something that you're working on,

you don't have to select the end points

of the path to connect itself together.

Hopefully that makes sense, okay.

We just had to select two end points

there on this shape over here because I

didn't want Illustrator to connect that anchor point

and that anchor point or do something weird,

so we just told it exactly which ones

we wanted to join, okay.

But in this case, we did not have

to do that.

All right, go ahead and delete that path.

Now, what we're gonna do here is we're

gonna go in and we're gonna start to

work with this a little bit more.

So let's go back into this joins path

right here.

I wanna unjoin them now.

I wanna make it so we have two

paths again and they're not connected together.

So to do that, why don't you go

to the direct selection tool because this is

probably one of my favorite things to do

in Illustrator when I'm working on something.

If you want to, you can actually come

to a path that you've created.

Maybe it's a little complex.

It's got a lot of anchor points and

stuff going on.

If you use the direct selection tool and

you come up to the path like I

said before, just click on the line between

where we connected, where we said join.

Click on that right there.

This is pretty amazing.

So why don't you do this?

Go to edit, copy, edit, paste, or use

your shortcuts, however you do it.

Look what you get.

I learned that the hard way.

I was like, I copied, so I was

like, why didn't it grab the whole shape?

Well, because when you click on a path

with the direct selection tool, it thinks you

wanna mess with the points, not the whole

path.

So it's only selecting that line segment.

This can actually be really beneficial.

I've done this before.

You guys can delete that if you want.

Just hit the delete or backspace.

What if I'm working on this shape and

what I'd like to do is I'd like

to make a curve that's the same curve

inside here.

Or maybe I wanna take this curve and

I wanna copy it over here, do something

with it, right?

But I don't want the whole path.

I just want that curve.

Come up to the curve here and just

click on it.

Now, if you're lucky, it's only got a

couple points hanging out, one point on here

and one point here.

Go ahead and copy paste right now.

So edit, copy, edit, paste.

You now have that exact curve.

So if we need to take that curve,

now you gotta be careful here.

If I try and drag it, in this

case, it'll let me do it.

I actually have that same curve.

I can make it larger if I want

to and put it inside.

There's a lot of things I can do

with it.

I do this a lot when I'm trying

to make mirror parts of artwork or doing

things like that.

So it's a great way to be able

to grab a line segment.

All right, you can delete that if you

want to.

All right, what we're trying to do, what

I'm trying to get to here is why

don't you come back up to that little

join segment we made?

We told to join right there.

Click on it and just hit delete to

get rid of it.

And we're back to two separate paths now.

I wanna throw this out there.

When you're working on paths, one of the

things that I did a lot as a

rookie was I wanted to get rid of

an anchor point and I went up here

and I was like, oh, I know how

to select an anchor point.

So I clicked on the point and what

did I do?

I hit delete.

What does that do?

Right, that's not what we wanna do, right?

So don't do that.

That's all I'm trying to say, don't do

that.

So if we wanna delete anchor points, we

wanna be able to use the pen tool

or something like that.

Okay, we're gonna use now the smart join

to join these together.

The dumb join is just bam, straight across.

But what if I'm creating something and if

you see this curve up here, I love

how it continues, it kinda keeps going.

I would like the same thing to happen

here.

I want them to continue and kinda join

together at the end where they meet.

Well, we can use what's called a join

tool to do this.

Why don't you come over to the left

and you're gonna see that we have what's

called the shaper tool over there.

Click and hold down on the shaper tool.

Now, if it's the first time you're selecting

the shaper tool or holding down on the

shaper tool, a big dialogue is probably gonna

open saying, hey, look what the shaper tool

can do.

You can close that.

Then go back and hold down on the

shaper tool.

You're gonna see something called the join tool.

Go ahead and select the join tool.

Now, this has only been in Illustrator.

This has only been in Illustrator for a

few versions.

Watch up here for one second.

What you're gonna do is you're just gonna

rub across the paths.

So I'm gonna go like this.

I'm gonna go swipe across and look what

it does.

It's gonna take the points and the paths.

It's gonna look at their trajectory, where they're

gonna go.

It's gonna continue the paths until they intersect

and it's gonna put a point right there

and stop it.

Look at mine.

Mine looks a little bit funky because I've

got a direction handle on one end that

was going off like this, going off a

little crazy.

So if I undo that, Command, Edit, Undo,

if you click on the anchor points before

you do this and you take a look

at some of the direction handles, you can

kind of try to make them a little

straighter, a little smoother, something like this maybe,

or even bring the anchor point back.

If I join these then, it's gonna look

a little bit better, just rub across it.

The direction handles on each anchor point are

telling it which way to go and it's

gonna kind of try to come back to

meet.

So that can be a little confusing, a

little rough to work with.

Now the other thing with the Join tool,

let me just show you this real quick.

This is pretty neat.

If you have, I have this all the

time, but suppose that I have intersecting or

overlapping paths like this.

Sometimes what I'll do is I'll either get

lazy or I'll take two shapes that I've

created and I wanna combine them.

So I'll bring them over the top, but

when you have those two parts that meet,

you don't wanna have to sit there and

like pull them together and do all this

crazy stuff.

So watch what I can do here.

With the Join tool, I can come right

here to the Join tool, come back out

and if I scrub across the parts that

I don't want, look what it does.

That's pretty awesome.

So you're basically just, it's doing pretty much

two things.

It's saying, let's actually cap it, let's take

those two paths, let's connect them together, make

one anchor point right there at the end

and let's get rid of the trim.

So it's doing this, getting rid of the

trim stuff on the outside.

That's pretty awesome.

So if you ever have different paths you're

trying to join together, you can do that

really easily to do.

All right, let me get rid of that.

I just wanted to show you that because

it's kind of interesting.

All right, so here's something we can do

as well.

We now have these all cut up, right?

What I, here's what I want you to

do.

Go to the Selection tool and you're gonna

see that this is a group of objects.

If you try now and click on one

of these shapes, you're not gonna be able

to because it's part of the group.

That's actually kind of neat.

So if I click away and then click

on the shape, I've got it.

I'm gonna throw a little tip out here

for working with groups, okay?

If you have grouped artwork, there's a couple

of ways we can enter this and work

with this.

Why don't you go ahead and double click

right on the beak, right on those shapes.

Just double click with the Selection tool.

We just entered group isolation mode.

Now try and click on one of those

shapes.

I know it's kind of hard to tell

where they are, but just go ahead and

click.

This temporarily ungroups the group and lets you

dig in and start to work with each

piece.

This is awesome, okay?

Now, if you want to, you can click

on one of those shapes right there and

we can change the fill, for instance.

So I'll change the fill color up here

maybe.

Just try something a little different.

I've never seen that happen in my life.

That is a little crazy.

Why are you down here anyway?

And then we can do the same.

We can keep going if we want to

and keep editing and pass and do different

things.

Once we're done with this isolation, you can

either press the Escape key or double click

anywhere outside the shapes, so away from the

shapes.

And you're outside of the group.

It's now grouped again and we're outside of

isolation mode.

Here's a little tip for you real quick.

Sometimes diving into isolation mode by double clicking

is great, but sometimes I just need to

quickly change the fill of something.

Why don't you go ahead and deselect by

clicking somewhere.

Select the Direct Selection tool.

Now I know this artwork, pretend.

Pretend that I know that that's a group.

Go ahead and select the Direct Selection tool.

If you come up to a shape, let's

say like the orange one here, whatever you

did, and you just click, you've just selected

a part of the group without having to

ungroup or go into isolation mode.

Now there's some things I can do here.

I can now go change the fill, the

stroke, whatever I need.

This is just a quick way to kind

of jump into something in a group.

Now what we're gonna do here is we're

gonna switch gears a little bit and start

talking a little bit more about the Pen

tool and drawing and talk about some other

drawing tools as well, kind of get in

there.

So what I'd like to do is we're

gonna open up another file.

So why don't you come to File and

come to Open.

And let's get in here.

If you go into the Day 2 folder,

you're gonna see Segment 1.

I've got a file called penpractice.ai. Now

what I wanna do is I wanna show

you some key shortcuts for working with the

Pen tool.

This is not all of them, but it's

the big ones we need to know.

Go ahead and click Open and open it

up.

And what we're gonna see is we're gonna

see a couple different artboards in here, okay?

I wanna focus on the first one on

the left over here.

So why don't you go ahead and fit

that artboard in the window?

All right.

Now we're gonna start to draw a little

bit, and I'm gonna show you some different

key commands that we can use for drawing.

You guys, you get these.

Obviously, these are part of the lesson files.

And what I did was I pretty much

put an explanation in here of what you

need to do as you work with this

to create this shape.

But this is kind of a nice little

practice you can work with, okay?

Why don't you do this for me?

Go ahead and select the Pen tool over

there.

Here's a few key shortcuts that you are

gonna wanna learn when you draw with the

Pen tool or work with artwork in general.

I like to draw with a black color

on the stroke when I draw with the

Pen tool.

So I can see it easily, that type

of thing.

Sometimes you can't, sometimes you're drawing with color,

whatever.

But if you do this for me, press

the letter D right now.

You guys, that letter D is gonna be

magic.

It's something you're gonna use a lot.

If you ever have, just watch up here

for a second.

If you ever have a shape or something

you're working with and you're like, hey, I've

got a stroke and a fill on there,

something like that.

And what I'd like to do is I'd

like to get that back to black and

white, just a white fill with a black.

Pressing the letter D with a shape or

an object selected will automatically put the white

fill in there and a black stroke on

it.

It'll kind of wipe off some of the

formatting.

If I'm drawing with the Pen tool, it's

gonna make sure I have a black stroke

to start with at one point usually, okay?

Now, I do not wanna fill to start

with with the Pen tool because for me,

when I draw with the Pen tool, you

guys watch this.

If I go out and I'm drawing a

particular path, maybe I'm tracing something, for instance.

If I draw with this, look what it's

doing.

It's actually covering up the thing I'm trying

to trace.

Can you guys see the white fill in

there?

Okay, so you gotta be mindful of what

you're working with.

So come up to Fill up here and

let's go ahead and remove the fill.

Here's a couple other keyboard commands.

If you wanna learn these, you can.

I use these all the time.

If you wanna affect the stroke or the

fill on a selected object or when you're

about to draw, for instance, go ahead and

press the X key right now.

Look down at the lower left of the

Tools panel down here.

As you press the key, press it a

couple times, X, X, X, X.

You're gonna basically say, hey, we're gonna focus

on the fill or the stroke, whichever one's

up front.

You guys, there are three commands that I

use a lot.

If you use the question mark or the

forward slash, whichever key, and it's on the

same key, what that does is it actually

removes the stroke or fill, whichever one's selected.

It says Apply None.

That's actually a good one.

I love that.

So here's what I do.

Here's my magic command list when I start

drawing with the Pen Tool.

This is just my own personal preference.

I will select the Pen Tool.

I'll press the letter D.

I'll go right to Black Stroke, White Fill.

I'm looking down there in the lower left.

I will press the X key until the

fill comes forward.

I don't wanna fill white.

I will now press the question mark or

the forward slash to remove the fill.

And I've got myself it all set up.

So I'm all, one point, black stroke, let's

start drawing.

I know those are a lot of keyboard

commands I've thrown out there at you, but

there are a few that I use a

lot, okay?

All right, let's, you guys ready to go

to the Pen Tool?

All right, we're gonna learn some shortcuts here,

some key commands that we're gonna use.

So what I'd like you to do is

come up to Stroke up here, and we're

gonna change the stroke weight a little bit

before we draw, just so it kind of

covers up the paths that we're gonna trace.

So change the stroke weight to maybe like

five point or something like that.

That way we can see it out here

as we draw it.

Come to start, I'm gonna zoom in here

a little bit.

Come to start right there.

And what we're gonna do is we're gonna

start to draw this gray curve right here.

So just do this for me.

Come to that point right there, click and

drag, drag up.

We are always a lot of times looking

behind as we draw.

In the case of the first point, you're

looking forward.

You're trying to see which direction is the

anchor gonna go or the path gonna go.

So that's usually the way we're gonna drag.

Come up to that red point and let

go.

And we've got our first anchor point.

Come down over here, and what I'd like

to do is we're gonna make that gray

path right there, the gray curve.

So I'm gonna click and drag.

I'm making a curve, so I'm gonna drag

away, right?

I'm looking backwards thinking, okay, well, that looks

not too bad.

Now I'm gonna show you a command here

that I think is really, really useful.

If you're drawing a path and you need

to be exact, maybe you're tracing something, for

instance.

How many, if you've ever drawn with the

pen tool, you've put the anchor point in

the wrong place at times.

Go ahead and let go, just let go.

You've got yourself the path to start.

I just messed up.

So what you can actually do right now

is you can go to Edit, Undo, if

you want to, Command Z, and it'll undo

the last point you just created and let

you try it again.

So Command Z, if you don't know that

shortcut, you gotta learn that one, Undo, Undo.

But if I choose Edit, Undo Pen right

now, what's cool is instead of deleting that

point, I can just keep going.

So now I'm trying it again.

I'm like, oh, okay, I can keep going,

so I can try it again.

So why don't you do that?

Just get the point out there, make sure

you've got it looking something like that.

Now don't let go yet as you're drawing.

If you did, go ahead and choose Edit,

Undo, start drawing it again.

Watch me up here for one second.

I know I'm asking you to do a

lot right now.

If you drag a point out and you

realize the point's in the wrong place, it

needs to be further over, you can actually

hold down the space bar and drag the

point where you want it, let go of

the space bar, and then keep drawing.

I did not let go of my mouse

once while I was doing that.

You hold the mouse button down, hold it

down.

This is a circus, it's a little juggle,

okay?

So I can use space bar, drag, let

go of the space bar, keep drawing.

Now once you get the path to look

something like you want it, go ahead and

let go.

When you finally let go, your finger's gonna

go numb.

Okay, now what we need to do is

I want the curve, the next curve, to

go straight up and over.

We're gonna kinda come up over like this.

The problem is if you look at the

rubber band right there, if I come over

here, it's gonna go down, right?

So here's what we need to do.

We need to take the little direction handles,

these guys right here, and we need to

do what's called split them.

If you ever wanna curve to just suddenly

bounce in a different direction, instead of going

straight curve like this, we wanna make something

like this maybe, go a different direction, you're

gonna have to take the direction handles that

are coming off of that anchor point and

split them and move them independently, okay?

What you can do right now if you

want to is if you come back up

to that point right there, hover over the

anchor point.

You're gonna see on the pen tool there's

a little carrot showing up, a little V.

You can now do this.

You can actually drag out the direction line

again.

You can redraw it.

So we can take this, the one that's

going away from the point, just watch if

you want, I can click and drag away

and actually create it like this.

I can kind of drag and pull it

away and actually pull it out again, okay?

Now here's the magic, you guys.

Let me put this back where it was.

You'll notice that it's not actually split.

They're still kind of moving in tandem, right?

If you want to, you can actually come

to the anchor point down here.

This is the way I do this a

lot.

If you come to the end of it,

the direction line right down there, hold on

the option key for one second.

You're gonna see this little V show up,

okay?

This is the anchor point tool.

What you can do now is you can

actually split them by dragging.

I can grab the end of that little

handle and split it and move it up

here if I want.

You guys, what I'm doing right now is

I'm taking this handle because it's going for

the next curve and I'm saying the next

curve's going up.

So I want to point this thing up.

I can then let go of my mouse

and let go of the key.

Did that work?

Okay.

Now why don't you try that over here.

Come over here.

You can click.

Now, I'll do it again if you want

to watch me and then you can do

it.

I click drag.

I'm looking at the path.

I'm like, eh, that looks pretty good.

You guys, these red circles are just a

guide.

I can let go.

I can hold down the option key.

Come back right here to the end of

the anchor point, the actual direction line.

Drag it up.

Sometimes you're gonna miss it.

There we go, drag it up.

Put it where I want it.

Let go of the mouse, let go of

the key, and I'll keep drawing, okay?

This is called splitting the direction handles.

Is that, how's that working?

Is that doing okay?

Okay.

Yeah, I'm not gonna, you're not gonna be

a pen tool master in three minutes, okay?

This takes a lot of practice.

This is one of the reasons why I

actually wrote the instructions down there, so you

can tell what to do.

Yes, Jim.

Brian, how long does it take to master

the pen tool?

What was that number?

Do I have to say that?

Since the beginning of my career, I've heard

people that are really good at the pen

tool say that it's 10,000 hours.

Okay, tell you what, let's do this.

I'm gonna move over.

I'm using the hand tool to move over.

Does everybody have another point free that they

can use, one of these points to draw?

Okay, I'm gonna show you the faster way

to do this, okay?

I know it's baby steps, but we're gonna

get to the final.

This is the way you draw in the

pen tool.

Just watch me up here for a second.

I'm gonna click, drag, and do the same

thing.

Whoops, hey, you guys watch this.

If you ever click, drag, if you have

not, if you've finished drawing the previous path,

you can actually go back and click on

it.

You're gonna see a little line show up,

and say, hey, I wanna keep drawing, okay?

I can click on that path right there

and keep drawing.

Otherwise, it's gonna continue another path.

I just messed up and deselected, that's why.

Watch up here.

I'm gonna drag down.

I'm looking at the path.

I'm like, hey, that looks pretty good.

Now what I need to do is I

need to take that direction handle and split

it and swing it up, because the next

path, the curve, is gonna go up without

letting go.

It's the same thing we've been doing, but

without letting go of my mouse, I can

hold down the Option key, drag up, put

it where I need it, let go of

the mouse, let go of the key, and

I keep going.

The only difference between what we were doing

is we didn't let go and go back

to it and hold the key down.

Get the curve, the previous curve looking good,

hold down the Option key, drag to split,

put it where you want it, let go

of the mouse, let go of the key,

and then keep drawing.

And you can just kind of start to

master this method of creating these kind of

curves.

You guys, that is one of the big

shortcuts that we use a lot of, a

big shortcut, okay?

Here's another one that I wanna show you.

Excuse me.

Is everybody done?

You all got the path at least further

over?

Okay, now what if I wanna go somewhere

else and I wanna start drawing somewhere?

Move your pen tool somewhere else, move the

pointer somewhere else.

You notice that it's gonna keep drawing, right?

There are 50 ways to say, Illustrator, stop

drawing, let me draw another one.

Here's one way.

Press the letter P right now, and move

your cursor, move your pointer.

That's how you can stop drawing a path,

okay?

To me, that's the fastest way to do

it.

What you're actually doing, the letter shortcut for

the pen tool is P.

You're basically just saying, hey, let's reselect it,

and it kind of tricks Illustrator into saying,

oh, okay, we're gonna draw another path.

We're gonna draw a path, so.

There's a lot of ways to do that.

Some people don't like that, but that's one

way.

Now, here's something cool that I love with

the pen tool.

Take your pointer and put it over the

path that's already there.

It should still be selected, which is great.

You'll notice that we can now, like we

said before, we can add anchor points, delete

anchor points, switch to the direct selection tool,

try to edit it, but watch this.

With the pen tool selected, I could do

this while I was drawing, too.

If you come out here and hold down

the Option key right now, the Option key

with the pen tool, this is kind of

new, actually, newish.

You can then go to one of the

paths and just click and drag it, like

we did before with the direct selection tool.

Drag it anywhere.

You can actually go down.

This is, you guys, this is so cool.

Look at this.

I mean, I can actually just go straight

down if I wanted to, and just change

the curve directly.

That way, I don't have to mess with

the direction handles all the time.

Sometimes this works really well, okay?

So that gives you the option.

If I need to give a little bit

more curve to this or do something to

it, it's not quite there, I can kind

of fix it and say, eh, we're good.

Let go of the mouse, let go of

the key, and you've got it.

All right, let's go over to the next

artboard over.

I got one more artboard over there.

I'm gonna use my hand tool and kind

of move over.

I'm gonna zoom out just a hair so

you can see this.

I just wanna show you another keyboard command

for using this.

Why don't you come over here?

And what we're gonna do is we're gonna

draw the same kind of curve we did

before, okay?

So I'm gonna start right here by clicking

and dragging.

Now, we're starting with a direction line.

We're pulling away because we need to start

with a bigger curve.

That's why I'm doing this.

I'm gonna come over here, and I'm gonna

click-drag.

I'm always looking back and saying, eh, does

that look good?

Yeah, that looks pretty good.

Why don't you go ahead and do that?

Go ahead and draw your first arch.

Now, what we're gonna do next is we're

gonna go from a curve to a straight

line.

This is actually one of the easiest things

to do, but it seems a little tricky,

okay?

If you have these two direction handles shown

out here, right, on the last anchor point,

if I were to go and move my

pointer away, you're gonna see exactly what the

next curve is gonna do.

It's gonna be a curve pointing down because

the direction handle's going down.

So what I can do is if I

wanna go from a curve with a pen

tool to a straight line, all I gotta

do is I gotta get rid of that

direction handle because that's like a magnet pulling

the line away, okay?

So what you can do right now, I'm

not gonna hold any keys down.

All we have to do is go back

to the point that we had, the last

anchor point.

When you see the little V, click.

What that does is it takes that leading

direction handle and sucks it back into the

point, basically gets rid of it.

You can now go across and draw a

straight line.

Just move the pen tool anywhere.

Now, if you want it perfectly straight while

you're drawing with the pen tool, hold the

shift key down.

So shift, click, and I can draw a

perfectly straight constrained line, I should say.

Now, the same thing works in the opposite.

I just, let's pretend I'm drawing straight lines

with the pen tool.

Click, click, click, click, click, not dragging.

Now I need a curve.

If you come back to the last anchor

point you had and there's no line, no

direction handles coming out of that thing, you

can hover over it, same thing, nothing held

down, click and drag away, and you can

pull out a direction handle.

Then I can just keep going on.

I can say, yeah, that looks pretty good.

If I don't want the direction handle here,

I come back to the point, anchor point,

I click, pulls it back in, I can

then keep going.

Shift, click, pull it out, click, drag, and

create my curves.

These are definitely some of the key techniques

that we're gonna wanna learn, okay, that we

work with when we work with the pen

tool.

I know you guys, do you wanna practice,

practice?

I know, this becomes addictive, it really does.

The pen tool takes a lot of time

and it's something that we have to do

quite a bit, okay?

All right, so we're gonna keep going here.

I just wanna show you one other shortcut

that I think is really, really super-duper

important.

As you're drawing with the pen tool, what

you can do is you can actually hold

down the command key and the last selected

selection tool, the black arrow or the white

arrow, is selected.

Why don't you go down, hold down the

command key.

What tool gets selected, what does it look

like?

It's the black arrow, isn't it?

Okay, so what I always do when I

start with the pen tool is I'd switch

to the white arrow first and then start

drawing with the pen tool.

I forgot to do it in this case.

The command key goes to that selection tool.

The reason why that's so important, here, watch

one second.

I'm gonna hit the letter P and stop

drawing.

I'm gonna draw another path real quick, but

first, what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna select

the direct selection tool, select the pen tool,

and if I click drag, watch what happens

when I hold the command key down now.

I can actually go to the direct selection

tool and start editing the path.

Let go and I'm back on the pen.

I think that confuses people a lot and

it confused me in the beginning.

All right, so we're gonna kinda jump, switch

tools a little bit here and kinda jump

into some other methods for working with paths.

I wanna show you a couple other things

that we can do when we draw or

work with objects.

We're gonna kinda finish up here, so let's

do this.

Let's open up another file that we're gonna

kinda finish with, do some different things to.

So why don't you come to file, and

go ahead and choose open.

And we've got the scene start out there

and what I wanna do is open that

one up and we're gonna do just a

couple other things in there to show you

that.

Go ahead and scroll down a bit and

first thing I wanna do is we're gonna

talk about working a little bit with drawing

with what's called the blob tool.

The blob tool is pretty cool.

Why don't you come to the farmhouse down

here and what I'd like you to do

is we're gonna zoom into that, we're gonna

fit that in the window.

So come back over to the selection tool

and you guys can fit that in the

window, however you do it, I just use

the keyboard command, you can use view, fit

and window, whatever, doesn't matter.

Now one of the tools that we're gonna

use, I use quite a bit, it's called

the blob tool.

This is a great tool to work with.

The blob tool, let me just show you

this thing real quick.

The blob tool allows you to go out

and to draw all kinds of different shapes

that we can work with, okay?

If you look at the paintbrush tool over

here, why don't you do this too?

Come over to the paintbrush tool, click and

hold down, you're gonna see that we have

under there the blob brush.

Now the paintbrush is great, we're gonna talk

about brushes in another later section, but select

the blob brush tool and what we can

do with this tool, if you just watch

for a second, is we can go out

and we can draw with this thing but

what it's gonna do, which is actually kind

of really, really cool, is it's not gonna

draw a path.

What it's actually gonna draw for me, look

at this, it's gonna draw a closed shape.

Now you might be sitting there thinking, well,

so what does that mean?

If we use a lot of these tools

like the pen tool, the paintbrush, the this,

the that, and we go and we just

scribble across like this, you're gonna actually see

a path that does this.

With the blob, you can actually just create

a closed path, which is amazing.

It's really pretty cool.

What I use this a lot for is

to make clouds.

I'm kidding.

We do use this to make clouds, okay?

We can use it to make anything that

has an organic shape but let me just

show you this real quick.

If you look over here, I've got this

traced, this drawing that I had kind of

done in my sketchbook real quick.

If we wanted to do something like finish

this out, instead of tracing it, we can

go in and I can actually use the

blob brush and start to fill this out

for myself and create shapes with the blob

brush tool.

Why don't we try this?

Come over to the farmhouse.

You're gonna see, do you guys see, is

the blob brush, there's a little circle on

the end of it?

It's really, really small right now.

You can come to the blob brush tool

and double click on it and you're gonna

see that we have a size down here.

So some of these, you can actually change

the sizings and different things for that.

So take the size and make it bigger.

We're gonna go kind of big here.

I'm gonna go like 50 or 60 point

and then click okay.

Now what's gonna happen with the blob brush

is it's gonna use the stroke color set.

It's kind of weird but it's gonna use

the color of the stroke set.

If there's no stroke color set, meaning if

you look up at stroke up there and

there's a slash through it, it's gonna use

the fill color for it.

So why don't you do this?

Come up to the stroke, the stroke color

and just choose a green.

I don't care, whatever kind of green we

want.

Come out with the blob brush and let's

make ourselves a little bush.

You'll notice that as you, this is a

big brush by the way.

We're using a humongous brush.

As you draw with it, you can continually

draw and continually add to it.

What I love about this thing, watch up

here for one second.

If I'm gonna make it a little bit

bigger, draw a little bit more, I can

actually take two objects, two things, two shapes

that have the same fill in them.

They have to have the same fill and

I can actually use the blob brush and

connect them together and they become one single

path, one single object I should say.

So the blob brush, there's tons we can

do with this thing.

Like I said, I use it a lot

for trying to create different artwork we're working

with.

Okay, I wanna kind of finish up.

We've got a few things here to do.

Last tool here I wanna show you is

called the eraser tool.

This tool we use all the time.

If you've created one of these bushes and

you think that they look horrendous, kind of

like I do, my bushes are looking a

little bit blobby.

Let me cover up some of this here.

That looks pretty good.

What we can do is we can actually

use the eraser tool as well.

Now the eraser tool is used for all

kinds of artwork, all kinds of vector artwork.

I use it a lot in connection or

in hand with the blob brush tool because

I'll screw up.

I'll be like, I don't want that.

If you look over here in the tools

panel, you're gonna see that we have the

knife tool.

Go ahead and click down and hold down

on the knife tool and you're gonna see

that we have the eraser tool.

This may actually change your life.

Okay, this tool.

So we'll see.

Go ahead and select the eraser tool.

Now the eraser tool has a size as

well.

You can double click on the eraser tool

if you wanna set the size.

You can do that.

I hate doing that because I always wanna

adjust it.

I wanna adjust it in and out really

quickly.

If you want to, you can actually, it's

not doing it showing you out here, but

you can actually use the left bracket and

the right bracket to change the size of

it.

This is very Photoshop, by the way.

So it's kinda near your P key.

But if I hold down the right bracket

or hold down the left bracket, whoops, I

just switched tools.

Hold down the left bracket, you can change

the size of it.

That circle is telling you how much you're

gonna erase, basically.

Hopefully that's working for everybody.

Hold the key down, okay, and it'll jam.

Now the eraser tool, it can erase just

about anything, which is awesome.

The key here, literally, select what you wanna

erase.

Otherwise you're gonna erase everything.

If I go out here to the farmhouse

and go wham like that, wow, we got

trouble, okay?

So what I want you to do is

go to the selection tool, select the green

bush, select the eraser tool, and we're just

gonna kinda attack that bush a little bit.

That sounds really wrong, but just go in

there and kinda work on it, and we

can try and erase it a bit.

Now the thing about the eraser tool is

that we can actually use it to smooth

out paths as well.

If you double-click on the tool, there

are a ton of settings you can get

to in there, and they allow you to

do things like let's smooth things out a

little bit, make it a little bit less

rough.

I use this a lot because with the

blob brush, you wind up getting, well, it

just looks blobby, you know what I mean?

Unless you adjust the size of the blob

brush, it tends to look very circular and

this and that, but using these tools in

conjunction is a good way to be able

to go out and draw, and we're using

it, this is a really simple example, but

just trying to get the idea across.

Hopefully that kinda makes sense.

Couple other little things we're gonna hit here.

Kinda going a little bit beyond, but that's

okay.

We'll take a few more minutes to do

this.

I want to show you a little bit

more of combining shapes and working with objects

to be able to work with them, and

doing something like transforming and kinda doing things

like that.

What I'd like you to do is let's

go up.

I'm gonna go up to the upper right

up here.

I'm using my hand tool to do this

a little bit, and we're gonna go up

to this path right up here, this collection

of paths that we've got, okay?

Now, in the beginner class, we took a

look at being able to combine shapes and

we actually used what's called the shape builder

tool to be able to drag through and

take a bunch of shapes and pull them

into one shape or create one shape out

of them.

We can also use something called pathfinders, and

this is something we used to do, and

that's all we could do before, but now

I still use it.

Why don't you come under window and come

to what's called pathfinder.

This is a pathfinder panel.

Now, a pathfinder panel, what it does is

all these little buttons in here allow you

to take shapes and do things like combine

shapes, punch one shape out of the other,

make outlines out of things, just do all

kinds of things.

These are all called pathfinder commands.

In order to use these, you want to

select shapes.

So why don't you go to the selection

tool.

Go ahead and click on the selection tool.

And what I'd like you to do is

I'm up over here on this artboard with

the red background.

I want you to select these two shapes

right here, just the two, the bigger circle

and the rounded rectangle.

Select those two right there.

If you look at the pathfinder panel, the

one thing I cannot stand about the pathfinder

panel, and I think people share my pain

with this, if you look at all these

buttons, could you figure out exactly what each

one did?

I've been in here for years, and there's

maybe three I use all the time, but

the rest of them, I have to, if

you hover over it, you'll see a tool

tip, and you'll be like, oh, okay, that's

what that one does, all right?

A lot of times what I do is

if I don't know what something does, I'll

just click on the button and be like,

oh yeah, that's what it does, and you'll

see what it does, okay?

If you come to this one right here,

you're gonna see what's called unite.

If you come to this one right here,

you're gonna see what's called merge.

They pretty much do the same thing, okay?

So why don't you go ahead and click

on unite right here.

Now, what it just did with this Pathfinder

is it made this a permanent change, permanent

selection change, okay?

If we wanted to get back to those

two shapes, we really couldn't, okay?

Not easily, let's say that.

So what I'd like you to do is

let's undo.

If you go under the Edit menu and

choose Undo or Command Z or Control Z,

you can do that.

Here's the sneaky thing, and it's not really

sneaky because it tells you how to do

it.

Hover over Unite.

Now, the shape modes here, when I first

started using these, I was like, why do

they have two of the same thing, okay?

This one does the same thing initially as

this one.

The shape modes are actually special.

You can make them so that they aren't

permanent changes.

It doesn't make a permanent change.

If you hover over Unite, as a matter

of fact, look at the tool tip.

It says you can option click to make

it not permanent.

So why don't you do that?

Option click on that button.

Now, it's kind of hard to tell.

You can see that the two shapes are

still kind of there, right?

Just watch up here for a second.

I'm gonna deselect and look what it did.

Do you see the stroke, the black line

going around it now?

It's gonna look like they're combined, but technically

we can still get at the two shapes.

This is awesome.

This is the way I work a lot

of times if you can do it.

Now, if you still have that selected, this

is what you can do.

This is really cool.

Double click on those shapes, somewhere in them.

Go ahead and double click on them.

Now click on the circle, like in the

middle of it.

You can now edit the original shape size.

Remember that circle?

We talked about that in the beginning class.

For a shape, we can go out here

and adjust the radius, for instance.

Okay, I can go to the rectangle and

click on that.

You gotta kind of click away from each

object right on top of it.

I can adjust those, do things like that.

When you are done, you can double click

away or press the Escape key.

Double click away from the shapes or press

the Escape key and you're there.

That's pretty awesome, isn't it?

That's a way for you to work non

-destructively for a little while.

You're gonna find later, though, that what's gonna

happen is there are some things that you

cannot apply to a shape like this because

it's not permanent, okay?

If you get to a point where you're

like, I'm done with that, now what I

wanna do is I wanna actually apply some

other effects and things that won't let me

do it otherwise, you can make it permanent

by clicking on this button called Expand.

The Expand button, it should be called Commit

or something like that, okay?

Go ahead and click on Expand with those

shapes selected and you'll see what it does.

It's the same thing as just clicking on

one of these, Merge or Unite, but we

were able to edit them in the meantime,

which is really pretty neat.

Hopefully that makes sense.

These types of commands, using the Pathfinder, I

want you to go in and explore these

a little bit.

There are tons of them.

The other one that I tend to use

quite a bit is what's called Minus Front.

This one right here.

If I have a circle like this and

this object, if this circle is on top

of it, we can subtract it from the

shape behind.

So clicking on Minus Front, for instance, will

basically punch a hole through the thing, okay?

So there are a lot of things you

can do in here, so that's a great

thing to look at.

All right, those are Pathfinders and I thought

I would throw that out there and just

kind of, hopefully that makes sense as far

as being able to work and keep working,

okay, and expanding.

I want to show you my favorite way

to be able to take artwork and basically

what's called Reflect It.

If we're drawing artwork and we draw half

of an object and we want to be

able to go in and just basically copy

it and flip it, in the beginning class,

we kind of talked about how to do

that, to show that.

I want to show you the fast way

to do this, and this works for a

lot of tools, okay?

Move over to the left, and you should

see we have that kind of wackiest shape

right there.

What I'd like you to do is go

in here and just go ahead and click

on it, and you should see that it's

not quite joined, but it's all one object.

That's totally fine.

We're going to work with this.

What I'd like to do is we're going

to take that, we are going to copy

it, we're going to reflect it across, and

we're going to do it right on an

anchor point so we don't have to move

it at all, okay, in one step.

This is pretty cool.

Now we got to make sure that Smart

Guides are turned on.

Come under View and come to Smart Guides

and turn them on.

If you see a check mark, you're good.

If you don't, hit it.

You should turn them on.

This, what I'm about to show you guys,

works for just about every one of these

transform commands.

Come over to the left and you can

see Rotate.

Go ahead and click and hold down, and

you'll see Reflect.

Select the Reflection tool.

Now this is the key.

This is the thing that works for a

lot of these and lets you do it

in one step.

If I hold down, you guys are going

to notice that little aqua reflect around point.

If I hold down the Option key right

now, like I said, this works for rotating,

reflecting, a lot of things.

What we can do is we can come

to an anchor point, and if you hover

over it, like one of the ends here,

you're going to see the word Anchor.

That's because of Smart Guides.

If I click right now, it's going to

open a dialog.

It's going to set the reflect around point

right there and let me copy and reflect

it in one step.

So Option click on the anchor point.

You'll see the reflect dialog.

Select Preview.

It should automatically be vertical, which is good.

And click Copy.

And there we go.

A lot of times we're working with symmetrical

objects.

We don't want to reinvent the wheel.

We don't want to draw both halves.

We don't want to do that kind of

thing.

This is a nice, easy way.

There are a lot of other ways to

get that done using effects and things like

that, but this is actually pretty cool.