Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Draw in Adobe Illustrator CC with Shapes & Lines

Hi there. Welcome to this video. We are going to draw this lovely little fox. We're using just basic shapes. Okay. Lines and rectangles and stars. Just really simple stuff. Okay. We're going to start with a template to draw over the top and end up with this. Alright, let's go and look at that now. Okay, in this tutorial, we're going to draw from this drawing that I've made. Okay. Just to make it simple and so we can all kind of follow along. Okay. So what I'd like to do is an illustrator is we're gonna go to file new. Okay. And pick a document size. I'm gonna start with prints. I'm gonna use you as letter. I'm going to use landscape. Okay. And I'm not going to change anything else. I'm just gonna click create. I'm gonna save it. Okay. So I'm going to go to file save. And what we'll do for this class is I'll put everything on my desktop. You do the same. I'm gonna make a new folder on my desktop. I'm going to call this one illustrator class. Files. Okay. And that's why we're going to st...

ick everything from this class. Let's call this one Sleeping Fox. And let's click safe. Let's leave everything as the default And click. Ok? Alright. So we're drawing from the drawing and drawing in my notebook. Right? And I want to kind of just redraw an illustrator. So a nice trick to do that is I've done a scan of it. Okay. We can take a photo of it. And I'm gonna go to file and I'm going to go to place now. Places import. Okay. For illustrator illustrator likes to call it place click on that. I want you to find your exercise files and there's one in there called Sleeping Fox dot jpeg. Now before you click place, click on this one, it says template. What it does for us. Let's have a look. Let's click place, what it does for us is it brings it in and I'm going to click in the background here and it puts it on a layer. Okay? And locks it so we can draw over the top of it easily. Okay, where I click on my layers panel here, you can see it created a template layer and then a layer that I can draw on. You don't have to do this. Okay. It just makes it a little easy when we're redrawing. For some reason it likes to bring it in and kind of has a little bit over here to the left so I'm gonna unlock it. Can you see that's the locking icon? I'm going to click on it, drag it across a little bit more in the middle, something like that. And then lock it again And to continue drawing. I'm going to make sure I'm on layer one. Let's jump back to properties. Now we'll start with this body here, we're gonna grab the rectangle tool here he is here and I'm going to click hold and drag out kind of a rough rectangle. If you don't get it quite right, jump back to the black arrow and use any of these white boxes here just to kind of resize it and get it kind of close to that size there. It's a bit of a guess. Don't worry too much. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to pick a fill color and a stroke color. Now yours might be different. Yours might have a black line around the outside and a white fill. Let's look at changing those. So over here, in my appearance panel there's one called Phil and one called stroke. Okay, so I'm going to click on fill and I'm going to pick a fox kind of color. Now. We're going to use the swatches here. So you've got two options here, kind of with the rainbow colors and the swatches. Let's just pick just for this class. Let's keep it simple and just pick something in here. You can have a green fox. That's okay. I'm just going to have an orange box and in terms of the stroke, the stroke is the line around the outside. Yours might already be black and you might see, click off over here, you can see there's a black line if I select on this and click on stroke color. Now I want to use this little red line here. This little red line indicates. No stroke, that little red crossed out, nothing there, that's what I want. If nothing is changing. Okay, what you need to do with your black arrow, just make sure this box is selected then make your changes. Okay, so that's a rectangle exciting and that says fill color. Let's get into something a little more exciting to see these little dots in the corner here. These are corner options, watch this, I can click and drag these corners. Okay, the last spots there and you can notice that all of the corners come and change. Okay, so it's kind of what I want. I'm going to go to edit undo. Okay, I'm gonna use my shortcut for the rest of this course. So it's command Z on a Mac or control Z on a Pc. I'm going to undo a couple of times until it's back. Now, what I would like to do is you can see underneath here the drawing, I've just got a corner there in a corner there. So what I'd like to do is use my white arrow. Remember the black arrow is great for doing kind of like big things moving the whole object. The white arrow is good for doing little bits within that object and what I'm gonna do is in this top right hand corner, I'm going to click it once you'll notice that this guy is blue and these guys are white indicating that this one is selected and you can see here just one little target appears. Okay, I can click on this guy now and go something like that. Same with the bottom left, click on that one, drag it up. Don't worry too much about being perfect. But if you are, if you really do want it to be perfect, what you can do is I'm going to undo a couple of times is you can have these guys select at the same time. So click this guy once hold shift, click this guy once and you've got two dots and when you drag one they're both update. Cool. So that's my little thing for his body. Let's look at doing the head now. So I'm going to go back to my black. I remember that's the default kind of tool to go to click off in the background. Got nothing selected. And the next tool I want is the polygon tool because I want to triangle for his head and that's considered a polygon in here. So I'm going to find the rectangle tool, click hold, hold, hold with your mouse key. Okay, hold it down and eventually these pop out and I'm looking for this one called polygon, click on that. Now if I just do nothing, it'll drag out whatever I last drew yours is probably gonna draw an actual pentagon or hexagon. It's gonna draw something. Okay, so I'm gonna undo to get rid of that if you want to. Just how many sides this polygon has, All you need to do is just click once with your mouse, click once and you get these polygon options. Okay And yours is probably set to five and you're probably getting something like that. Okay, so I'm gonna undo again, click once, pick three sides. Don't worry too much about the radius, we can change that afterwards. So I've got a triangle. So next thing I want to do is do some rotation and scaling and it's best to do that when we're back on our safety tool. The black arrow, I'm gonna click hold and drag the center. Okay so it's kind of a more usable place now to scale and rotate. Let's look at rotating first. So black arrow. Have this guy selected just once Now what you'll notice is when I'm in the corner I get this little stretching arrow, that's my scale. But if I come just a bit further out I get this little double arrow. Okay, so there's kind of like no man's land here too far. Doesn't work just in. Okay, you'll get used to it. Okay? So if I click and hold here I can drag it around. Okay clicking and holding now. What I can also do is undo. I want it to be kind of like I want to flip it in like degrees. I think it's 90° and I want to while I'm dragging. Watch this if I hit down and hold down the shift key on my keyboard. Okay watch this, can you see it Drags in like Nice Big Chunks. Okay, it's 45° And then 90. That's what I want now in terms of scaling the same tool. Okay, black arrow. And if I grab the corner here and just drag it, I can resize any sort of shape I want clicking holding and dragging. Now. I would like to kind of constrain the proportions. So it's like this perfect triangle cause I kind of scale it down here. It gets a bit long and thin. So what I'm gonna do is hold down the shift key. Okay. Like I did when I was rotating, if I hold shift while I'm scaling in any of the corners, you can see if I drag it down, it kind of wants to be the same heightened with kind of locks that ratio. So I'm just gonna drag it kind of in there and drag it up a little bit. Something like that. Okay, so getting close now, the only trouble with what I've got here is I can't really see through it to some some of the other parts that I'm drawing. So what it might be nice now is just while I'm working, I'm going to switch down the stroke and I'm going to make a black stroke and the fill, I'm going to change to none. Okay, so filled with the royal red line and the stroke with black. Now I can see through it All right. Like we did with the shape down here. We can play with the corner options. So I've got this selected with my black arrow, you'll notice that I can't click in the center anymore. Okay, I could on this because it's like the whole thing. But in the middle of this I can't it doesn't you've got to select the edge now because it has no Phil and like before I can grab any, I can grab this like little target here and it does all the corners. That's not what I want. So, I'm gonna undo. I'm gonna grab my white arrow and click on just this guy here and then I'm gonna drag him up to roughly the same size that I want. Awesome triangles and rectangles. Let's do the nose now. So I'm gonna grab my polygon tool, click once three sides click. Ok, it's way too big, grab my black arrow, holding shift and scale it down and then just in this no man's land, I'm going to try and rotate it around now. I'm gonna drag it down, gonna get roughly the right size there. Now, what I can do when I'm dragging this thing around often you just drag this little dot in the center. Okay, that moves it around and I kind of want to get it perfect in there. Okay, so there's a couple of things we need to do when we're working. Is that you'll notice that by default. This thing kind of like you see these like little marks, it appears you can see this intersect and tries to line up with things all over here. So a couple of things we need to do is make sure are smart guides on because they're really helpful. So go to view and come down here and make sure smart guides are ticked on. Next thing to do is just to zoom in. Okay, when you're working this far out on things, this delicate, it's just really hard. It snaps to everything. So remember command plus or control plus on a pc. Get this in nice and close and watch this. If I have my black arrow and just click off in the background and so so I don't have it selected, I got nothing selected. And if I click and you can see I can move my little cursor around, it says anchor, an anchor is considered like a corner point. Okay, So if I click on and drag this anchor, okay, And I drag it close to here, you'll see eventually it'll snap in there. Okay? And it just kind of like wants to line up and intersect so you can find that's a nice easy way. It's got to be zoomed in a little closer and then kind of just drag the corner and try and line it up where you want it to go. And if smart guides are on, it's it's really good at kind of snapping in there. The next thing I want to do is I want to have this with Philip black and I want to have no line around the outside. The red line. Okay, next thing we're going to use is I want to put in these whiskers so I'm gonna select on this guy and even though I just put the color in, I'm gonna move it back to having no Phil I'm gonna give it a stroke around the outside. Okay, so I can see it now, let's do the whiskers. Okay, And we're just gonna use the line segment tool. Just a nice simple tool, click hold, drag, click, hold, drag the cold track. Ok. Just so I've got three little lines. One thing you might find is if you try and draw something kind of like straight out of you can see I if I draw something and then I draw another one, I want to come out that little point there, it actually starts moving it. So if you do want to kind of get them to come out of the same point is once you've drawn one, grab the black arrow, click in the background, go back to the line tool and then you'll be able to kind of like start again. Black arrow click in the background back to the line to start again. Okay, I've kind of kept mine separate down here just to avoid that. Alright, next thing I want to do is this little closed. I now we could if we hold down the polygon tool, find their lips tool and I could draw like an open eye. Okay but my guy is sleeping so I'm gonna delete him and underneath the line segment tool is an arc tool. Okay so click on him and what I'm going to draw is just something, it's a bit brand um the way it draws. Okay I want to kind of to be this way but let's just click it down and kind of get something Archie. Okay and then we'll rotate it. So I've got something like that, grab my black arrow, remember just hovering out here, I can drag it around, move it down, scale it up. Just kind of work with it until you find something that you like. Okay and in terms of the strokes a width Okay it's a bit thin for me, I'm going to increase it up. Probably the same for all of these guys that are all a bit thin for me at the moment so I can do them individually and just over here with it selected, this is the stroke width, how thick the line is, you can see and get really big. Okay I'm gonna go to something like five points. Now I don't want to have to do this individually so I'm going to click on this guy with my black arrow, Hold shift, grab him, grab him so I've got all three of them selected and I'd like them all to be five. There you go. Cool. So now we can go through and add my colors again. I'm going to zoom out a little bit so this body here, it had no stroke. So I'm gonna go back to the little cross that red line and the fill here, I'm going to pick my color was going to be, I think it was this one. Okay. And the head, I'm going to do the same sort of thing. I'm going to have no stroke and I'm going to pick a fill color of that orange. That's the kind of basics to get started. Let's look at a couple of things, let's look at this air here. So what I'd like to do is I'm gonna grab my polygon tool again and because it remembers what I drew last time, I can just draw something out rather than clicking once and making sure it's got three sides. I know it does now so I can click and drag out now while I'm dragging out. I can hold shift to get it to go perfect. That's kind of what I want. Okay, so something like that and it just needs to be big enough because what I'm gonna do is with a black arrow, grab the center, I'm going to kind of turn it into this air so it probably needs to be a bit bigger. Okay, just so it kind of sits back there a little bit. So what I'd like to do for this one is I'd like to have a really thick stroke and a fill of white. So the Phil I'm gonna change the white and I'm gonna have the stroke and I'm going to pick maybe just the darker color of that and I'm gonna increase it to match the font size of the stroke size are using five everywhere else for these guys and my as well. Use five for the air. I'm just going to pop it there. Now, this brings me to the next point of arranging. Okay, because basically the last thing you draw is on top, all I need to do is move it to the back and there's a couple of ways and whether it's selected with the black arrow. Okay, over here there's one called a range and I can go see him to back there. It goes there or often what I do is I just right click it and there's a range send to back either way. It doesn't matter. Let's look at doing these stars. Okay, so there is an actual tool for it called the star tool. Okay, grab on him, click once, decide how many points you want and by default it's going to give you a pretty nice looking star, You can change the radius. The radius is the inner which is the outside part and then the inner radius radius to is this inside part. Okay, so I'm gonna click OK give me a star. I can click and drag it out so what I'd like you to do is I'm going to undo and just kind of drag out a start start from the center. There we go roughly, roughly. Don't worry too much about it. You can have more stars, you can have less stars, something like that, badly drawn star. Little stars read more, go nuts. Okay, we're going to add a bit more detail this tale and we'll add kind of the grass on the bottom. Now, basically we've covered the tools that we're going to be using so you can skip ahead. There's a couple little things that we'll do in here, so let's do this tail first. Okay, so I might grab my rectangle tool. Can't find him. There he is. Okay, draw something roughly close to it. You'll notice the smart guides here is locked into the bottom. Super helpful. You can turn them off the remember under view. Smart guides, if you're finding them troublesome, there's a shortcut, it's really often to turn it on and off while you're building. Okay, So they've given it a really good shortcut in this case on a Mac. It's command you will control you on a Pc. Okay, so first thing I want to do is I'm going to give it no Phil so I can see through it. Okay, And I'm gonna grab my white arrow, click on just this corner. Actually I'm gonna click on that one. Hold shift, grab that one and let's draw something mentioning this. Okay, same thing again, I'm going to draw a rectangle over this guy. Okay, I'm gonna grab my white arrow, Cook on this one. Hold shift, grab this guy, grab that corner point and we're doing some stuff. Okay. And what I want to do is I'm going to pick a field color. So at the moment the stroke is orange. I'd like to have, the stroke is none. The color is the orange and I'm going to have this full color. So a stroke of none and a fill color of white. Exciting. I was lying down. I feel like now that I've drawn it, I want to grab this guy. So I selected both of them, clicked on this, hold shift, grab this guy and I'm gonna rotate it around holding shift while you're rotating. Remember like the head locks it into kind of 45. Did he look like he's sleeping there? You decide because it can't tell. Yeah, he looks no, he looks like he's sleeping alright. And next thing I'd like to do is underneath here is some grass. So all I'm gonna do is actually just gonna move that other way for the moment, grab the polygon tool which is still set to triangle. Okay draw something triangle E. And then grab the black arrow and just kind of shrink it in there and I'm just gonna build this, can you zoom in a little bit copy and paste it. So with that selected, I'm going to edit copy, edit paste. Okay. And I'm just gonna use my shortcuts to speed it up and I'm gonna draw it, resize it. This is where you can just build your own grass. It's a little bit hard, grab that dot in the middle to make sure you move it. Mm hmm. Now I'm just doodling. There is one of the things to hang around. I'll show you in a sec. Okay, copy paste? Move it around. Okay. So I'm not too worried about these being kind of down here because I'm gonna show you a technique to kind of trim them up. So I'm going to stick to all these copy and paste it. I've got another version. Okay, and with them all selected, I can scale them all in one go. So it's going to look something like that. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to select them all. Okay. And I'm going to grow you and I'm going to give it a feel of this kind of like dark gray color. I'll show you what I'm gonna do in a second. You saw it at the beginning, Right? So, and move him back in. Nice. Cool. So we've used my drawing now and it's kind of done. It's dash. Okay, we've got our kind of full drawing. Now, I want to go into my layers panel and let's just turn the visibility of it off. So this eyeball layer here, if you click on that, you'll notice it disappears, you can leave it there, okay? It doesn't really matter, but I'm just turning it off so I can't see it. It kind of brings me to my next point. I don't know why I need to resize this. My next point is when you're scaling things. Well what happened by default? So if I select everything, so black arrow drag a box around all of it under properties there's an important thing here. Okay. Actually, you know, before you select anything there's this one here. Scale strokes and effects. Okay, So there's gonna be times when you need this on and sometimes when you need it off, so and if if it's off, look what happens if I select this and I scale it down, so I just need a smaller version of them. So I've selected all, I'm going to scale it down and like we did when we're drawing lots of shapes. If we hold down, shift while we're scaling it, it locks the height and width, otherwise it gets all kind of stretchy. Okay, so shift down and look what happens when I get down quite small. Okay, it's remembered that this is five points. Okay. And it just does some weird stuff when it gets down to here, right because it's it's trying to kind of remember the actual radius is that we used okay around here and it's, it's doing some strange things. So sometimes you want that, okay, you want to scale it down a bit and retain the stroke width. But I'm gonna go to edit undo and with nothing selected, I'm going to turn it on and it's going to scale those strokes now. Okay, proportionately to the size that I've got now when I scale it down, hold down, shift and scale it down. You can see these guys, these stars here, they come down and there are smaller size. There are like three points now. Okay, so that's just kind of something you need to kind of be aware of when you're scaling things is that sometimes you want them to scale with, you know appropriately and sometimes you want them to get actually smaller so you'll turn that on and off. Okay. Last little thing is I'm just going to, I don't know, make this look a little nicer with some rectangles. I'm going to use and draw a rectangle that covers kind of the bottom here. I'm just going to match the same color as my grass Actually I might use the black arrow and get it to snap to the bottom of my fox. I'm gonna use the same color as that. So Phil and which one is it lucky first guess I'm saying with the sky here. Okay, I'm going to grab the rectangle tool and space bar, drag up a little bit and let's have a nice starry sky snaps in fill color. I'm gonna use another one of the darker grays that dark. Okay with it. Selected a range in the back and I might make these stars just white even though we spent ages talking about the strokes of these guys goodbye stroke and the film might be upped. I don't know nothing about now. Alright, so that is my or our fox drawn out of just really basic shapes and there's so much you can do just with those shapes now. Like I said at the beginning often it's a combination of I've kind of kept this design to specific shapes just to kind of like I guess work through some of the tools, but often you'll find you'll be using things like the shape, builder tool and the pen tool which we'll do in. Yeah, the next tutorials. Also my process like um you saw how we kind of started with a drawing first. I do that really often. Right? I'll, I'll kind of draw in my notebook because I find that just, it's just easier and quicker and then often I don't even do a scan. Okay to redraw in illustrator. I just get a general sense of it in my notebook. Now my drawing here look really good. Right, well look really good. It's perfect. You know, it's kind of like follows the lines. It's never that good. I'll show you. I'll cut from this shot here, jump across. So here it is. I just took a photo of my notebook here. That is the glorious Fox. I just kind of drew a little bit and kind of got it close and I wouldn't scan that and redraw. I just used it as a kind of a visual and then just started drawing an illustrator kind of perfected. I guess it look to get a nicer shape. Yeah, that's kind of more of a true sense of my process. I will just do a really kind of basic drawing and then draw straight into illustrator. Okay, so that's the end of how to draw the basic shapes and what I'd like to do now is challenge you to a challenge and it's to take kind of the same techniques. So you're gonna have to use rectangles stars, lines those types of things and create your own animal. It can be sleeping like mine. It doesn't have to be okay. Just something simple, pick some different colors. It can it can still be a memo. Okay, so you can use the Whiskers can still be sleeping, it can use stars, but just pick a different animal, dog, cat, some sort of animal. And I'd love to see it as part of your project. So give it a go. I'd love to see what you have done. So when you've done it doesn't matter how good you think it is or bad it is, Please post it as a project. I'd love to see it. Alright, let's get on to the next video.