Lesson Info
7. Drawing Lines
Lessons
Class Introduction
05:01 2Zoom and Navigation
10:31 3Create a New Document
02:19 4Drawing Shapes
12:50 5Properties Panel
02:57 6Live Shapes and Transform Panel
07:16 7Drawing Lines
06:42 8Combine Shapes
08:32Lesson Info
Drawing Lines
We use a lot of lines here in illustrator call outs, pointers, things like that. So we have our line section in the toolbar. Zoom back out here drawing lines. Command minuses him back out. There we go and tool lines in our toolbar. So line, arc, spiral. And then our grids right here, drawing lines. Pretty simple, drawing arcs as well. And then we're gonna edit these in the stroke panel so we can see how we can change the values, the qualities, the ends of the lines here and then the awesome curvature tool to curve our lines. This is pretty awesome. So we're gonna practice some line drawing here. I've got a few lines that I have already drawn. Drawing the line tool. You grab the line tool, you draw again. If you'd like to draw a straight line, hold down your shift key so that you can use horizontal, vertical or 45 degree angle with a shift key held down in a jump back to the selection tool here. And I'm going to select one of the lines that have drawn here calling up the properties pane...
l again in the properties panel I can control the length of the line here, but I can also go into the appearance panel here, and I can adjust the color of the stroke by clicking on the color feature right here and choosing from my list of colors. Or I could go in and create my own, which we're gonna do shortly. But I can change the color of those items in here by clicking on my color palette. I've cleaned up my color palette a bit. Here, I'm gonna go ahead and click on the stroke feature, which is going to call up a whole bunch of options here. I can set the weight of the line, and I can also do caps. I call this hot dogging the ends he around the ends right there instead of having blunt end caps as well. We don't use the corner feature in this because a corner feature is when we have a shape, and so corners on this are not gonna work unless we have an actual shape. We can have a dashed line, which allows us to go in and control the length of the dash. And then, if we would like to have the length of the gap as well. We can have our dashed lines if I hot dog the ends, I get little rounded dots here and there is no drop down list of all the different style lines. And, illustrator, you have to create every line, every style that you want. It's something that I've wanted for quite some time. Illustrator doesn't have it, but I am going to show you one trick that's going to be absolutely crazy. I want to create a dotted line. Actual dots here. Now, if I go win and I create these dots, I'm gonna go into my dash here and I'm gonna reduce down the size of hot dog the ends and I'm gonna reduce this down. And I want to create a dotted line and I get down to a one point ash and it's like, Oh, that kind of looks like a dotted line. Well, here's one of the crazy features with illustrator and a dotted line. If you want to create a dotted line, you go in and you do your little hot dog end caps and you set your dash to zero. Really? What you're doing is you're taking too hot dog dens and you're putting together is a perfect circle. That's how you create a dotted line and illustrator. I know that's how it is so I can turn on and turn off that dash line. Very simply, It remembers the last settings that you did. We also have the ability to do arrow heads and tails on the line as well. There's lots of them here, some good, some pretty cheesy. I call these ding blurs because they're not just arrows, heads and tails, so I can go with it and I can do an arrowhead in the tail. Now you'll notice these little ding blurs here are huge compared to the line, and it's like, Okay, have lost my entire line underneath the arrowheads. I can now go in and I can do the scale down, and I can scale those down so that they're not absolutely huge. Here's a quick little shortcut. That's kind of cool. I could go in here and type in the number that I want or use my down arrow. I'm impatient. If you do shift down arrow, that's gonna go up or down. We're going to go down if you're using down Arrow in 10% increments. So now you can set these little ding blurs on your line here to be any size that you want As you increase and decrease the weight of the line, they will also scare scale proportionately. And inevitably, what happens is you got him on the wrong ends. Well, to the right of the arrowheads, you have your little double arrows, which swaps your shapes right there. Pretty cool. Awesome. The Ark tool right here. Withdrawn an ark. And if you draw the ark, you get kind of like this. Bet, little arc. Right here. I normally hold down my shift key, and Arc gives you a perfect quarter circle. What do I use these four? I use these for highlight noodles. Stay tuned for that. I love highlight noodles. Almost as much as I love bacon, But highlight noodles rock as well. Okay, A couple other basic shapes here. The spiral tool. This is awesome. You draw the spiral right here, and you get this really cool spiral. If you draw your spiral and you use your up arrow, you're gonna get more line segments down Arrow. It's going to give you less line segments pretty cool to do. You can also, with any of these tools, simply click once on the art board and call up your dialog box to edit any of these items. While you're doing us cool stuff. We can also go in and we have our grid. If you would like to draw a grid structure here, fly swatter, as I call it, I can draw a grid structure up. Arrow gives me more rose. Right. Arrow gives me columns down arrow and left Arrow. Take those away. Yeah, that easy again. Click with that tool and you can set all your options here in the dialog box. Problem with these dialog boxes. There is no preview button, which is why I like to draw them manually. And no, those shortcuts last one is what I call my Spidey tool. And the Spidey Tool gives me my little spider web right here. Up Arrow down. Arrow will go ahead and do the concentric circles. Right? Arrow and left era will do the dividers. What I love about this tool is that you do not need to have dividers and concentric circles. You can have one of the other. If I want dividers. I can put them in with my right arrow. I can take them all out with a left Arab if I want just dividers and no concentric circles down. Arrow will take the circles away. I create a pie shape. Or I can create a spider web. Or I can go ahead and create a stovetop burner. Whatever it is, using the radio or the polar grid tool is what it's called. I know. Polar grid. Yeah, it's actually called the Polar Grid Tool, folks. It is basic drawing lines. Okay, that's how you doing.
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Ratings and Reviews
Pattianne Pascual
This is magnificent! What a beautiful gift. I am 56 and always learning. This free class inspired me even more. I will be telling everyone about creative live,sharing and urging others to buy some of these great classes and bundles. Thank you so very much,again and again.i look forward to taking classes on a regular basis.
Sherrie Alexander
Jason was super knowledgeable, made working in illustrator fun and simplified . Love his easy to follow instructions. As we all know starting up in illustrator can be overwhelming. Thank you so much I needed this!
a Creativelive Student
Great job, several ah ha moments and throw in a few wow's. I thought I had better than a basic knowledge only to find out how little I really knew. The short cuts, shapes and highlight noodles just to name a few. Well worth it. This would have made learning AI so much easier than when I did. Thank you Jason,
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