Lessons

Lesson Info

Basic Drawing, Line Weights & Corner Styles

So we're gonna jump right into creating icons Now I've gone in. I've created a few icons here very quickly and one of the basic ways that I do My icon creation is I don't go in and I don't draw anything. All of this is very simple basic shapes that we use with corners, stroke weights, rounded ends and by trustee Pathfinder panel. So all the things that we put together here are going to be very simple basic shapes. We don't go in and draw anything whatsoever because with icons, you want a simple, easy to understand representation of anything. So what I'm gonna start off with here today is just some of the very basics of how I set up my file. I'm gonna be using all of my drawing tools. So if I click and hold on my drawing tools, I'm going to fly out the panel, move my cursor over to the right hand side and click on what's called this. It'll tear off bar, which is going to give me my floating panels for all of the items that I'm going to use on a regular basis. This just saves me a little...

bit of time having to go back and click and hold and get the fly out, Many to choose. I have these floating panels right here readily available for me. I also have my graphic styles panel up because as I begin to draw, I'm gonna wanna have consistent strokes, consistent fills. And instead of having to go back to my swatch panel every time or set my stroke, if I use common features, common themes, common weights and styles I'm gonna put that in my graphic styles panel for quick reuse so that I don't have to keep setting the attributes. So we're gonna get started here, and we're going to do everything that happens in the kitchen here. And I can tell you right now my mind just going to start running like mad. So here's some great things we're gonna start with. Well, in every kitchen there's water. So I'm going to start off with a circle and I'm going Teoh, draw this and you can see with my guides or grids. It snaps to the grid very nicely, and I'm using the main portions of my grid here. This is going to be my bounding box. If I'd like to put my icons in a bounding box. I'm gonna start with a circle. And as I drew that circle, I'm gonna start in the middle. And if I hold down my option key, this allows me to draw right from the middle of my object. And I've got my circle. So two things we find in our kitchen all the time one of them is going to be water. So I'm going to use my direct selection tool, and I'm going to click on my upper point right here, and I'm gonna drag debt straight up. So we have an egg which we find in our kitchen, and I'm gonna duplicate this Hold down my option key. Snap that over here. And we're gonna have our water droplet by going in selecting the top of our egg. And once I direct, select that with my direct selection tool, I can go into my control bar. Suck those little anchor points in now. I've got my water droplet and I've got my egg. We can reuse these. We can copy these. Awesome. Now we've got it started. So with this, I take everything that we build and we simply build on this. So when I see this, I think of a lot of things. First thing that comes to mind is a whisk there. Like, how do you get a whisk out of this? Check this out. So I'm going to copy this and I'm going to take and I'm going to switch my stroke for my fill and I'm going. Teoh put a stroke of about five points on my object here. Now here's the interesting thing when you put a stroke on an object. If I zoom in, you're going to see that the stroke of my object always occurs in the middle of my stroke. So I have a five millimeters stroke, and what this is doing is this is adding 2.5 millimeters to one side of the stroke and 2.5 millimeters to the other side of the stroke. When we go into our stroke panel here in the control bar, we have the ability to set the stroke alignment to be splitting inside and out, or having the actual shape down the middle. I can also keep my stroke completely inside my shape, which in this case is nice. Because then the outside snaps to my grid every single time. And there is Thea outer parameters of my stroke. I could also have my stroke go completely outside. I'm gonna align it to the inside here so that when I do this, all of my outside bounding box always snaps to that stroke. So with this, I would like to create a whisk out of this little egg shape. So I'm gonna copy this. And under the edit menu, I can choose paste in place, which is obviously command V is place Shift command V is paste in place. So now I have two of these right on top of each other. I'm gonna scale this in, so I'm gonna hold down my option key too alarming to scale it from the middle. And I'm going to bring that in a little bit, and then I can copy this, and I can pace that again, and I can bring that in a little bit more. And there I have my whisk right there. All I need to dio is at a handle to it. Simple and easy. No drawing. So we're gonna add handles and we start adding handles to everything else. But this is great, because we can now put that right down there. And you know what? I think a nice little orange user could make its way out of this thing to see that absolutely repurpose everything. Why not? So we have our egg. We have our water droplet, and you can see we've got everything in here in our grid structure. So here we go. Other basic things. Cups, glasses, bowls, pots and pans. It's all awesome. So check this out first thing before he gets started. You gotta have your coffee. So with coffee, of course. You have to have your coffee cup. We're gonna do a coffee cup. We're gonna do a bug. We're gonna do a big, huge one with a handle. So here's how I go in and I create a coffee cup or coffee mug. We're gonna start with a circle again, and I'm gonna use my Pathfinder tool for this. What I'm going to do is I'm going to chop off the top of my circle, so I'm gonna create a box over the top of my circle, hold down shift and select both of these objects in my Pathfinder mode. I'm gonna choose the minus front, which is going to take away the box and there's my bowl, but I'm gonna turn this into a coffee mug as well. But if I ever need a bowl, great way to do the bowl. If you want a rounded bowl, we're gonna do ones with angled size. Not a problem. This is my coffee mug. I want to chop off the bottom of this as well. So I'm gonna draw another box, and I'm going to select both of them. Cut that off and I could have an exceptionally wide coffee mug or a flat bowl. Right? They're just gonna pull that in a little bit. There's my coffee mug. If I wanted deeper not a problem, I can pull it deeper. Snap into that. How perfect is that? You can do t. You can do coffee now. I'd like to create little handle, so I'm going to hold down my option key, create a handle, snap it to my grid. I'm gonna swap my fill in my stroke, and I'm gonna keep my strokes consistent. So I usually use a five millimeter stroke and I can put this in here snapped this Teoh, My object. Now here's one of the problems with snapping things to the grid in something like this trying to snap this in in the curve. It doesn't quite fit the way we want. Teoh. So there are some cases where I just want to turn the snap to grid off because a couple cases we will need to do this because it's always gonna snap to the grid. Most of the time. That's great. But if I turn off my snap to grid shift command apostrophe So if I do that, then this allows me to move this. And I'm just using my up down left, right arrow keys for this. Great. There is one of the ways that I can create a coffee mug. If I want a coffee cup, I can go in and I'm going Teoh, create a rectangle. So there it is. Make sure I turned back on my snap to grid and I'm gonna do this, snap it to the grid. And I realized that when I'm drawing my shape right here, I need to keep going back into my align stroke and aligning it to the center. So What I've done is I've created a graphic style that says Make a five millimeters stroke and align it to the inside. And here's how you capture those settings so that I don't have to keep going back and doing the settings over and over again. I draw my shape. I apply whatever I would like to that shape. They simply drag it right into the graphic styles panel. And when I dio, it comes in there and it includes that graphic style. You double click and then you name it and in this case have done this and it's my five millimeters stroke inside. So when I draw a box or anything, that isn't what I wanted to be. I can simply click on that, and it's going to apply those attributes without having me go in and do them over and over again. So makes it quick and easy set it up to be a sufficient as possible to have that. So here is my coffee cup that I'm going to make, and with a coffee cup, I just want to kind of bring in the bottom edges right here, two different ways to do it both Nice and easy. If I use my direct selection tool, Aiken directly select that point, and I can simply drag that side in two clicks that side in Get a coffee cup, water, glass, whatever I'd like. That's one way of doing it. I'm just gonna undo that to show you another way. And that's with our free transform tool. When we use our free transform tool, get its own little toolbar right here, which allows me to go ahead and do perspective distort. In this case, that's what I did. I just brought the bottom in. So if I use the perspective distort, I could go and I can pull this in. And this allows me to pull in both sides the same way and supposed to do both sides. It was working just there we go just like that. Awesome. So there is my shape. Either way works for you. If you want to do it that way. Great. If not, you can go in. I like the direct selection tool. Click it over a couple, click it over a couple. It's like that point. So, like just that point, move it in and there you have perfect shape this could be a water glass. This could be a coffee mug. This could be a coffee cup. If I wanted to be a paper cup, I could take my object switch to fill in the stroke. And then I could run a nice little rim right across the top with my line, and I'm going Teoh, make that black stroke on top and I'm gonna beef that up. Make sure I've got that selected right there. Wronki. I want that selected, and I can bump that up. So I have a little lid. Now what? I do little lids here. I always like to do what's called the hot dog, which I want around the ends of my line because right now my line is going to be squared off. So in a stroke panel, I'm in a collect what I call the hot dog does that takes any lined and it hot dogs the end. So if you want to create a lid for a nice little rolled top on your coffee, that works great. By the way, this works awesome for lids of all sorts whatsoever. You have a potter pan, you want a lid? Awesome works great. So there we have that. If you want to do a water glass weaken, do the exact same thing we can copy this. And maybe I would like to go in round the edges of my water glass. I'm going to switch the fill for the stroke. In fact, I'm just gonna go back, use my graphic style, which just gives me that, um, stroke. I'm gonna take my direct selection tool and select just the top of my cup. And I'm going to use my corner widgets to kind of round there little bit if I want a rounded edges on the top there. So I want a little water glass or something. And if I'd like, I can go in and I could put like, a little water line, and I can go and hot dog my ends. Now, I hot dog the ends of a lot of my lines. That's just my style. And I noticed that I have to keep saying five millimeters stroke and rounding the ends. So I'm gonna use this as a graphic style as well. If I find myself repeating it, I'm gonna drag that object in here. And this is gonna be my five millimeter line with hot dog ends. There we go. Now I know exactly what it's going to be, and so we go. So as we go, you can see we can start creating lots of icons. Some of these will have strokes and fills, and it's very easy to switch them back and forth. And we're going to show you how to do that, because we're going to sit these all up as graphic styles. Works awesome pots and pans of all sorts. If I want to create a pot or a pan, I can use a rectangle. Use my direct selection tool, Select just the bottom, and I could corner widget the bottom of something to create a pot or a pan. If I'd like to create something that has no top on it, so it's open. I can create my shape. Use my direct selection tool, highlight the edge or the line segment. I'd like to take away. Take that away so that I haven't opened Potter Pan. Now we can put some water in there. That's always fun, so I can just draw line to kind of show the water level, and there it is one click too long. Here, shorten that up. And if it doesn't draw like I wanted to, I can click on my graphic styles and apply. Now you have water. And here, But of course, things need to boil. Right? So I'm gonna put in a few little circles so that we have this. I'm gonna cut these down a bit because those are a bit big. And so I have my boiling water. Just gonna take my little circles here, and I'm gonna make that smaller. I've got that as well. And then as a bubble, of course, little bubbles pop. That was another one fun thing that I dio And for a little pop bubbles, What I use is I use a little asterisk and with my type. And then I actually outlined the type, so I'm going to type, create outlines, shift command. Oh, so I get my little object, and then that gets scaled directly to it. Great little way to make bubbling water. See the bubbles Pop is you go. What fun? We could go in and we could make our little line wavy because, of course, you know, wavy lines are great for things like water, bacon, steam, things like that. So in this case, if I have a line, I can go onto the effect menu, and I'm gonna choose the distorting transform, and I'm gonna choose the zigzag effect, and the zigzag can create little serrated edges. Great for graters, knives, things like that. I'd like to smooth that out for my bacon or my water. And I'm going to go ahead and kind of smooth that out and sent that so that I get just kind of a little ripple right there. Great for steam. Wonderful. And now I'm going to use this repeatedly, so I'm gonna capture This is a stylus. Well, that way I don't have to go through that entire process every single time. So I'm gonna select that object, drag it in there, and this is gonna be my wavy bacon steam because, as you know, Bacon has to come in to every single thing that I dio. Okay, I know. So we're starting to get along and get some really interesting things here. And we can do pots, weaken, do pans. We have to do utensils. But you know what? We'll just throw some food in here to get some more fun. Simple foods? No, I'm not gonna draw an orange and just make it round, Okay? We can draw any fruits that around. I want to show you how you do bread. You want to do a slice of bread? Nice. You go in and we're going to draw a square rectangle depending on what type of bread you like. And then I'm going to go on top of my bread, and I'm going to draw a circle from the middle here and take this. Put that right there. Doesn't look much like bread, but take these two shapes. Elect them my pathfinder. I'm gonna combine them together. There's bread. Awesome. You want butter on there? Absolutely. Get your little pat of butter. Swap the stroke for the fill, or I have a little default graphic style that just says Fill it with black. Right there. There's a little butter right there. You want a little bit of drum drama here? Go ahead and rotate it. degrees. Who gets all exciting, doesn't it? I know. Well, guess what? Very close to bread is a muffin. Well, I'm gonna copy this and we're gonna bring it over here. And I realize that with this I didn't apply my style. I want the stroke in the inside. Here we go. To copy this over, I'd like to turn this into a muffin. Well, the top needs to be a little bit higher, so going in and keeping things simple. We're not going to go in and use the pen tool. What I'm going to use as I'm going to use my curvature tool. Yes. It looks like the pen tool really isn't. I'm going to take any curve that I have, and I'm just going to snap this up a little bit more Now, you see, when it snaps to the grid here how it snaps of the grand, it doesn't actually go in the middle, so it kind of moves it off. Here is the one time that I want to turn off my snap to grid so that I actually could get that right in the middle there so it doesn't kind of create an offset. Then I'd like to go and I take the bottom here and I'm going to just move the bottoms in. You have to turn my snap to grid back on so I could move that in. And this will allow Meteo move my muffin back in like that. And then I could move the bottom up if I wanted to To make my muffin look like that. Awesome. I know you want a little wavy doily thing right there. Not a problem. We're gonna go in and do this and then I can apply my little wavy bacon line right to that. There it is. Look at that. Now you have your muffin. Awesome started bread turned out as a muffin. If you want to create a fruits, it's really simple. This is an orange. I know it looks really ridiculous, but that's an orange. How do we know that's an orange? Well, you can go in and you can borrow little bits and pieces from your other stuff that you've done here and go ahead and add a few little fun highlights to there. But we need a stem and we need some leaves. Really simple way to make a leaf. You're going to go in and you're going to create a circle. It's gonna create a normal black Phil on this for my graphic style. I'm going to duplicate that option. Click and drag, Miss. Select both of these, and I'm gonna use the little resulting overlap. Right here is my leaf. So I use my Intersect. There's my leaf right there. If you want a straight stem, I can just draw my straight stem. Do my little hot dog ends right there. Move that up. Maybe just do it one line long. Right there. Take my leaf rotate. That can do something like that if I want. If I wanted to touch, bring this in. Get out of my isolation mode And I can create something fun like that If I'd like a curve stem because this is end up going to end up being a cherry. I can get rid of that line, but I can use my curved line. And I could do this. I could create a curve and move everything down If I'd like that stem to be attached or not. And I have my little leaf if you want to turn this into a pair Well, guess what? On egg isn't that far from a pair when you can put a stamp on that too. Whatever you need as you go. So one of the things that I'm doing is in keeping everything the same size. And you can you see visually, I have a consistent weight to everything. So I set up that consistent weight as I go, so it makes it a whole lot easier to not have to go back. And second guess yourself as you go through.