Adobe Illustrator Tutorial for Beginners

Introduction

Hi there, my name is Dan Scott and in this course, you're going to learn how to make beautiful graphics in Adobe Illustrator. Now, you won't just learn to use the tools—you'll learn them while creating beautiful, real-world, portfolio-ready projects. We'll start easy and fun by learning how to draw with simple shapes. You'll finally master the Pen tool, giving us amazing creative freedom. You'll be given your own unique mini-brief for your very own Farmers Market product. You'll explore creative brushes, lines, and strokes to enhance your designs. You'll be empowered to create seemingly impossible illustrations using the latest tools, including some of the new generative AI features in Illustrator—so cool!

You'll master how to create and manipulate type like the professionals do. You'll finally learn where and how to pick great type and color combinations. Once you've mastered the tools, you'll have fun putting your new knowledge into creative action, and you'll learn how to get your designs out of Illustrator, ready for all sorts of different applications.

So if you've never opened up Illustrator, or you've opened it and struggled a bit with it, this course, my friend, is for you. We're going to start right at the beginning and work our way through step-by-step.

Hi everyone! It's time to get started. The first thing we need to do is download the exercise files. There'll be a link on this page here, so download them and unzip them; you'll be ready for the course. Inside those exercise files, there is a handy-dandy shortcut sheet. Print this off, stick it next to your desk, and be ready to circle the ones that are really important. So yeah, download exercise files, print off the shortcut sheet. What next? Oh yeah, download the software.

Go to the link here to download Adobe Illustrator. There is a free trial. If you use my link, though, Adobe gives me a small reward for sending you there, or you can go to Adobe directly. Either way, make sure that Adobe Illustrator is installed. The other thing is that I can get quite excitable and talk really fast, especially in the morning after coffee. If you find me too quick or too slow—that happens—there is a cog down in the corner.

Click on that and find the playback speed. Set me to a slower speed; I sound a little weird, but you will get used to me, or you can speed me up. It's up to you. Lastly, the software updates all the time, really fast. There might be a pop-up like this one. Okay, over here, Taylor does pop-ups if there is just a small change. If it's a big change, I'll re-record it. If it's super new, you might check out the comments—the comments are a great place to see if you know, I might have left a note, another student might have left a note.

You might have a really unique problem and one other unique person might be down there having the same problem and found a solution. Check the comments. But for now, let's get started with the course.

Hi! Hey, this video, we are going to talk about what Illustrator is great at, what it's kind of mediocre at but still gets used for, and what it's not good at and when you should maybe look at some of the other products to use. So the things that are really good at—I'm going to check my list before I get started. Wait there, okay, hopefully I've memorized them all. Okay, the big ones are things like illustration and drawing—perfect. Logo design and branding, Illustrator is perfect. Flyers, posters, stationery, stickers, icons, fashion, pattern-making... Oh, I'm gonna have to check the list. Wait there. Alright, there was posters and sign writing that I didn't say but I came close.

So you get a sense of what Illustrator is for, what it gets used for by lots of people, and you can totally do it, but it's probably not the right tool for it, just so you know, um, is, say, web design and UI design is one of them. Mainly because you can do it, and there's lots of features in here you can do for that sort of stuff, but there are products like Figma or XD or Envision Studio, or there's lots of other products that are just more focused on doing it. You can design them in Illustrator, but adding all the interactivity can't be done here, so it's better to go to those tools.

The other thing that it's probably not good at— that gets used a lot for— is, um, newsletters and magazines and books, okay? But earlier on, I said it's good for newsletters. It's great for newsletters that are really small, okay, not physical size but more two pages, four pages, maybe eight pages. The problem with it is Illustrator is designed, like under the hood, I don't know why, but it's designed to do illustration amazingly, quickly, and beautifully, and it's great. But as soon as you add lots of volume to it, like lots of pages, it starts struggling. Especially if you start throwing in lots of big, high-quality images—oh, it gets tired and slow. You can do it, but you will eventually go, "okay." And that is where something like Adobe InDesign—that's what it does. It does a little bit of what Illustrator does, okay, but it allows you to do multiple pages load. InDesign, you can say, "open a 300-page document," and then InDesign will go. Okay, now you're open. If you say that Illustrator can't curve over, dice it, and steam comes out of its ears like it just can't do it, okay, so, um, few pages fine. Illustrator, lots of pages you need to move to InDesign, um, the other big thing that's in the gang of Illustrator okay's got InDesign by its side. Often you'll be back and forth with those if you're a designer, a book publisher, or those things. Okay, um, on the other side is Photoshop. Okay, where does that go? So Photoshop is for retouching images Illustrator, you can do tiny changes, you can do tweaks and color shifts, but you can't mask anything. You can't cut anybody out. That is photoshop's job, okay? So any sort of photo manipulation masking and cutting gets done in Photoshop. Illustrator does all the illustration and creating lots of little elements, okay, icons and buttons, and titles, and drawings, and all sorts of cool stuff. And then, um, InDesign is over here for if it gets published in a larger book, um, did that help? Hopefully, it helped. Anyway, that's what Illustrator is really good at and average at and can't do it all 300 pages steam, uh, alright, that is it. I will see you in the next video. We'll actually open the program. Let's do it. Hi, everyone. Hey, in this video, we're going to do a quick tour around Illustrator and do some of the basics to get us going. Alright, first up, let's open up a file. So with Illustrator open, let's go to file. Let's go to open, and I want you to find the exercise files that you've downloaded, um, one thing.

Sometimes people try and open up the zip file that comes down. You just need to double-click that, okay, and open it. So, in this case, I doubleclick the thing I downloaded, and this file has everything I need in it, okay? If you don't know how to unzip, double-click it. If you still can't do it, just Google unzipping on my computer. You'll get there. Alright, the file that I want you to, uh, open is something called getting started. So open up that one there. It should look something like this. Everyone's is going to look slightly different. A couple of things I want us to do, just to make sure that we're all the same when we're walking through it. If yours doesn't look too different from mine is up here at the top, it says window. Once you go down to Workspace, you should be on Essentials. Give that a click, okay?

And then go back into here and say Reset Essentials, just so that everybody's is the same and looks like mine, hopefully. The next thing is that some people are centimeters and millimeters people and other people are inches. So with nothing selected, so what I've got is, I've got my Black Arrow. This is kind of like the default thing we normally go to as a tool. Um, click on the background in this gray area. Okay, so that means you've got nothing selected. And over here under the Properties tab, depending on where you are, click on the Properties tab and here. It says units—look at that—pick your unit of choice. The next thing I'm going to do for this course is I'm going to make my UI bigger. So everything's quite small; I got a lot of space, but it's not good for these videos because you need to see everything, and you might find this quite useful if you find everything's just too small to read. So go up to Illustrator, go to Preferences on a Mac if you're on a PC it's in a slightly different place, it's under Edit and down the bottom here will be Preferences. So whichever one you want, I'm on Max, so I'm going to click on Illustrator and go to Preferences, and I'm going to find this one that says, oh, where is it, the user interface, that's it, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go, do I want it small, medium, or large? I'm going mega-large just so that you can see it easy, you pick the size you like.

I'm going to have to restart. It will say you need to restart Illustrator for this to work. And I'm going to say okay, and I'll be back in a second. There you go. Giant Illustrator for your viewing pleasure, up to you. So I'm going to go back to file open, and actually, I'm going to hit cancel. I'm going to go to file open recent, there he is, getting started handy. Okay, so everything's bigger. I'm pretty sure this will work for the course. It's pretty ginormous, but hey, the other thing that's going to change depending on when you start this and what version of Illustrator you have is this toolbar changes quite a bit. They add bits to it, they move them around, and they cut it down. So let's have a look at it. So see these little dotted lines right down the bottom here, okay, I've got these currently Illustrator or Adobe have decided that these are the ones that are going to be really important and then they go, ah, then we're going to move this one off and shuffle them around. What you can do is if something's missing through this course and you're like, hey, he's got this tool I don't have it, or I have too many, what you can do is click on these little dotted lines down here, and there's all of the tools I've ever made, loads of them. So have a little look, you might be like, hey there's the one he's using, okay, the Polar Grid Tool, which I'm not going to use.

You can click on it, there you go, got the tool, click hold, drag, and you can kind of find a spot for it, there you go, now you got the pole grid tool. I'm going to drag it out, but if you do lose a Tool, it's probably in these little dots down the bottom here. The other thing about the Toolbar is that see this, depending on the size of your computer that you're using, the monitor, a small little laptop, or a big screen, it might be in single or double, okay, so see this little tiny little Chevron here if you click them two columns, one column up to you, I'm going to leave the money on the column. The next thing is the Page size. So we call it Pages, everyone calls it a page Illustrator calls them Artboards. So Pages are Artboards. I want to change the size of my Artboard aka Page, to do that, you've got a tool for it. It's this one here, okay, if I click on it, okay, I don't know how to describe that, a rectangle with little slashes off the side. It's the Artboard Tool it selects my Artboard. I didn't have to do anything over here. It gives me things like, what's the width, what's the height, and you can go down here and say, actually I want it to be like US letter, but I want it to be portrait or landscape okay, or I can just type it in up here, I need it to be I don't know 10 cm wide, now.

Okay, so that is how to change your Page sizes. I've gone and wrecked mine. I want to put mine back to that postcard size. This gives me an opportunity for this tool to go to Edit and as Undo Edit Undo Edit Undo, you can click that like a madman. You can go to Edit and see the shortcuts here, all the shortcuts are listed next to it, and I'm on a Mac, so mine's command Z, so I never go up to Edit Undo; I just hit Command Z repetitively to go back, okay, on a PC it's Control Z, there you go, Undo's forever. Another good point-mac PC, you can totally do this course with either I'll try and give you the shortcuts for both of them the whole way through. They're same same. There's no better using one or the other. I'm using Mac for this course, you can use PC no problem. Okay, a couple of the basic tools just so that we can get them out of the way. Um, there's the two arrows at the top here, there's the I call them the Black Arrow and the White Arrow because that's what they are.

But there's the Selection Tool and the Direct Selection Tool. Okay, so we're going to start with The Black Arrow, the Selection Tool, and it does what you think it does. It's the main tool that you'll use. You'll click on things, okay and move them so click it once, and then click hold and drag with your mouse. That is the Selection Tool move stuff around his best buddy that we use a lot but not as much is the Direct Selection Tool. This selects parts of parts so let's click on this part here. You'll notice that I'm going to actually we're going to jump to another shortcut and actually no, no no, hold off on the shortcut stand and the direct selection tool means instead of moving this whole thing which it kind of can you got all this other detail what means is let's click this top point once you see, it's kind of a dark blue all the rest of them are white. I can click and drag that. So Direct Selection kind of selects parts within a part, okay, like little these they're called anchor points, okay, and you can click on this one click hold and drag it over you get into the details. So I'm going to hit undo hands up who knows what the Undo key is Ah good work, Command on a Mac Control on a PC, and Z, okay, I'm going back those couple. There you go. We're going to use these two loads if in doubt be on the Black Tool be on The Black Arrow. It's like your default not sure what tool to be in, being that one.

Now the shortcut I didn't want to give you is the zooming in and out because there is a way there's a tool down here it's the magnifying glass you can click on it and then you click once to zoom in okay hold down the option key Mac all keeping and click once to zoom out. Okay, or I click twice, okay, so let go of any key zoom in option on a MAC all on a PC and click to zoom out. Nobody uses that you can though. There's no rules but the shortcut is and I'm not going to go into too many shortcuts because this is the Essentials of course just the basics is hold down command on the Mac Control on a PC and hit the plus key. Hey I go in and then the minus key, okay, so hold down command on a Mac, Control on a PC plus or minus to zoom in and out there are many other ways to zoom. If you know them you're awesome leave them in the comments so other people know the ones that you prefer. If you do get lost like this like I just did I was clicking away and I don't know where I'm at now I'm I might be over here you'll be like everything's gone. Create a file either click this button here or file new up to you. There's a bunch of preset sizes along the top here. Okay we're going to go to an easy one that we probably all know and love. We're going to use US letter. If you're a metric person just use um letter, okay, so I'm going to use letter and over here I'm going to go, uh, portrait I'm going to go landscape. Okay, okay, and get started. The other thing we're going to change is under color mode down here. Okay, we're going to change to RGB.

Okay, we'll talk about color later on in the course. RGB is kind of more of a computer screen color CYK is more for commercial printing ours is going to stay on the computer you have more colors in RGB so we're going to keep that things are brighter and nicer we're not worried about rust effects at the moment leave it whatever it is and then let's click create next up we're going to all draw from a picture that I've drawn okay like a hand drawing we're going to bring it in and trace over the top of it um just to keep everybody doing the same thing and not getting too lost so we're going to go to file and we're going to go to this one called place. Okay file place is the same as file import illustrator likes to be different like the only program ever okay so go file place and I want you to look in your exercise files okay and there's one in there that should be called sleeping fox okay and before you bring it in what I want you to do is there should be some stuff down the bottom here on a PC and a Mac I'm not actually sure if it's on a PC as well but if you can't see the stuff down the bottom there's a little options button show us the options because we want to do this template I'll show you what it does instead of just bringing in an image okay what it'll do is it'll do some fancy stuff for us let's click place. Okay, what's fancy about it, Dan? Uh, it is kind of washed out so we can draw over the top of it normally this would be solid black if we go to our layers panel over here in the top right, okay it's put it on its own layer that's this one here it's locked it so we don't wreck it. Okay and we can turn up visibility on and off so we can see it but see that little lock there it's locked it and it's made another little layer for us to draw on so it's just a tracing layer that's why it's good they're called a template thank you illustrator okay go back to properties and we'll start drawing first thing we're going to draw is we are going to draw a rectangle very exciting there it is there click on it okay if yours is somehow on something else okay any of these tools that have see the little uh shivr or the little triangle in the bottom corner that means there's if I click hold hold hold my mouse down there's stuff underneath it some of them don't have it but a lot of them do okay so if you got something other than the rectangle tool click it hold it down pick the rectangle tool okay so what we're going to do is draw the body here so I'm going to start at a point I can see click my mouse down hold it