Other Drawing Tools & Methods in Adobe Illustrator

Lesson 33 from: Adobe Illustrator Creative Cloud: Essentials for Creating Projects

Brian Wood

art & design

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33. Other Drawing Tools & Methods in Adobe Illustrator

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Other Drawing Tools & Methods in Adobe Illustrator

All right, so we're gonna kind of jump, switch tools a little bit here, and kind of 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 finish up here, so let's do this. Let's open up another file that we're gonna 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 the 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 in to 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 in 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 going to do, which is actually kind of really, really cool, is it's not gonna draw a path. What's it actually gonna draw for me, look at this, it's gonna draw a closed shape. 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 this 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 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 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 this? The Blob Brush has 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 big here. I'm gonna go, like, 50 or 60 point. And then click OK. 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, okay? 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 ton we can do with this thing, okay? Like I said, I use it a lot for trying to create different artwork we're working with. Okay, I wanna 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 these 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, 'cause 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 in the Knife tool and you're gonna see that we have the Eraser tool. This may actually change your life, 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 'cause I always want to adjust it. I wanna adjust it in and out really quickly. If you want to, you can actually, and 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 kind of near your P key. But if I hold down the right bracket or hold down the left bracket, oops, 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 it's working for everybody. Hold the key down and it'll jam. Now, the Eraser tool, it can erase just about anything, which is awesome. The key here, literally, select which one to erase. Otherwise, you're gonna erase everything. If I go out here to the farmhouse and I go wham like that, wow, we got trouble. 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 kind of attack that bush a little bit. That sounds really wrong, but just go in there and kind of work on it. And we could try and erase it a bit. 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 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 a, this is a really simple example, but just trying to get the idea across. Hopefully that kind of makes sense.

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Brian Wood

<span style="color: rgb(80, 0, 80);">Brian Wood is a web developer, the author of 14 books, including Adobe Muse CC Classroom in a Book and Adobe Illustrator CC 2018 Classroom in a Book. The author of numerous training titles including Muse, Dreamweaver, InDesign, Illustrator and more</span>.

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Ratings and Reviews

KATIE Y

I am a pretty computer literate person but an Ai beginner i.e. I am completely new to the Creative Cloud/Adobe Illustrator. (This is also the first time I've used CreativeLive.) I think this course it is fantastic. The pace is good as is the content which progressed logically and covers all the basics you'd hope it would. The course is 2 full days' worth of material but it is broken down into segments so you can revisit or skip through as you need to. The presenter is really personable and easy to watch (even for me, a Londoner!). I would also say I think it is pretty good value for money -- I am currently enrolled on a part time course, basically doing the same sort of stuff, and I have to say this is better and a bit cheaper! I definitely recommend it to you!

jackflash

A brilliantly designed course. it's almost magic. It's everything you hope for in a follow-along software class. Brian Wood has engineered it so that you start on a project that just needs basics, and then you move on to more & more complicated projects, and almost without realizing it you've learned Illustrator. This doesn't just happen -- Wood has clearly put a LOT of effort into creating this course. Here's one trivial example: he doesn't overload you with a lot of keyboard shortcuts right at the beginning -- you start with the actions themselves, using the (admittedly tedious but easy) pulldown menus, and then after you're comfortable with what you're doing, he'll throw in the shortcut. It may seem obvious, but so many instructors feel they have to give you an extensive foundation of definitions, shortcuts, interfaces, etc., before you ever do anything. Good stuff to know, but you'll never remember it. Wood has you up and working almost immediately. And he's a joy to listen to, at a perfect pace. Highly recommended.

Philippe LIENARD

Top course. Very well explained, clear, good examples, pleasant teacher. I like it and recommend it. One suggestion, it would be nice to have a detailed table of content of the course in the material. For instance, it took me quite a while to find back the part of the course where how to make a gear was explained.

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Other Drawing Tools & Methods in Adobe Illustrator

Other Drawing Tools & Methods in Adobe Illustrator

Lesson Info

33. Other Drawing Tools & Methods in Adobe Illustrator

Lessons

Class Introduction

What is Adobe Illustrator?

Explore the Interface

Create and Save New Documents

Zoom and Navigate

Working with Artboards

Introduction to Layers

Rulers and Guides

Shapes and Drawing

Aligning and Combining Shapes

Pen Tool

Manipulating Stroke and Fill

Creating and Editing with Color

Painting with Gradients

Getting Started with Patterns

Adding Text To Your Document

Formatting Text

Strokes and Variable Strokes in Adobe Illustrator

Rotating Objects in Adobe Illustrator

Effects and the Appearance Panel in Adobe Illustrator

Adding Photo Images in Adobe Illustrator

Working with Linked Content in Adobe Illustrator

Packaging your Project for Handoff in Adobe Illustrator

Best Formats to Save Your Files

Select Like a Pro: Layers, Groups, & Other Unique Tools

Edit Paths Like a Pro in Adobe Illustrator

Editing Paths: Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator

Creating & Applying Brushes to Artwork in Adobe Illustrator

Editing Paths: Knife & Scissor Tool in Adobe Illustrator

Editing Paths: Join Tool in Adobe Illustrator

Editing Paths: Isolation Mode in Adobe® Illustrator®

Pen Tool Shortcuts in Adobe Illustrator