From the course: Illustrator 2023 Essential Training

Drawing basic shapes - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2023 Essential Training

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Drawing basic shapes

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- [Instructor] Welcome to Shape School, yes, the place where we are going to throw some shapes without embarrassing ourselves on the dance floor. Okay, what we're going to do is tap M on our keyboards, make your way over to the toolbox and long press there to see the shape tools that we're going to be working with, well most of, anyway. Move your cursor out to the right-hand side and notice that the bar there goes dark, when you click, it becomes a detachable tray that you can use to pick up tools from. Okay, so with the Rectangle Tool selected, you don't need to worry about anything else other than coming into this document and drawing. Don't worry about the Smart Guides lines, they're not too distracting, they should be just fine. Choose a point, one of these brackets on either the left or right, and then click and drag diagonally to any other bracket. There you go. You've drawn your first shape. Excellent, well done. You can delete that now, however, by hitting Delete or Backspace on your keyboard. Now go ahead and come over to another angle. Start to draw, but then hold down and keep held down Shift, and notice that you are drawing a regular constrained shape. Make sure you release the mouse button or trackpad or wherever before you release the Shift key to do that. So there you go. You may also have noticed, I'm just going to draw this one again, that you do get a Smart Guide there telling you when your proportions are regular. So if you follow that, you could draw one with just one hand like so, which is very, very useful. You can also draw from the center outwards, move to the target in the middle here. It will say center when you are over the top of it, hold down Alt or Option, depending on your operating system, and Shift together, and click and draw outwards and notice that you draw a regular shape. If you remove your finger from the Shift key, you can draw any other non constrained shape from the center outwards, it's a useful skill to have. Okay, delete that and then tap L on your keyboard. And we are just going to draw one shape here basically, because it's very much the same as the rectangle, although much, much harder to spot the corners. There you go. Okay, so everything there still applies, Shift to constrain, Option to draw from the center. Now we're going to go for the Polygon tool, okay? So choose that, it doesn't have a shortcut to access it. Go to the center because polygons are always drawn from the center, and start to draw outwards, but don't stop drawing, keep drawing. Notice that by default, you're drawing a hexagon. If you use the up and down arrow keys, you can actually change the number of sides, although don't worry too much if you are not able to do that. Just draw any shape here for the moment because you'll notice that there is a small widget on the bounding box here, and so you can go ahead and change the number of sides interactively like so up to a maximum of 11, anyway. If you need more than that, there's another way to do it. In fact, we'll look at that right now. If we delete that shape, go to the target in the center there and click, because all of these shapes have the option to draw with numbers. So if you enter a radius into here, okay, sort of the half way of the circle, I'm sure you know that, and the number of sides you require and hit OK, you can see that shape will be drawn. Exactly the same with the Rectangle tool, if I just click with that, you can see there like so. All right, let's go to the next tool here, the Star tool. Choose this one, and this one's a little bit more interesting. Start to draw outwards, like so. This one is something you can't change interactively afterwards. Once you've drawn it, you've drawn it. So I'm going to draw outwards again. I can change the number of sides by using the up and down arrows, but the relationship between the outer radius and the inner radius is controlled by the Command key or the Control key on your keyboard. So I'm now pushing down on the Command key on my Mac and pulling outwards, and you can see that's making a greater outer radius than the inner radius. And if I then want to change the size, I can just release the Command key and carry on drawing. Now that one's going to take a little bit of practice, so I do urge you to explore that tool a bit more. If everything goes wrong with that, and you can't seem to get it right, my advice to you is to just click with the tool and set the radius one to be maybe 100, for example, and radius two to be smaller than that, say halfway, like 50, something like that, and hit that and then you'll get something approaching that. Unfortunately, no percentage is in there, but there you go. Welcome to Shape School, but what you must do now is practice and explore.

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