From the course: Illustrator 2023 Essential Training

Quick Start intro - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2023 Essential Training

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Quick Start intro

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- [Instructor] If you are brand new to Illustrator and you don't know what vector graphics are, we are going to carry out a small exercise that will get you started with both of those topics. So with the application launched, hopefully, you're seeing a welcome screen alike, so, and if you are, you can click on New file, this big blue button here. If not, you can go to the File menu and choose New, and both of us will end up in exactly the same place. Now, Illustrator has a whole bunch of different presets, we're going to click on Web, only because that way the units will be set to pixels, and it doesn't matter where you are in the world, a pixel is a pixel. You can choose any one of these really, but I'm going to choose the first one here, 1366 by 768, and just double click on that and we get a new document. Now also to make sure that we're seeing exactly the same thing, what we're going to do is go to the Window menu at the top here, in the top level menu system. We're going to go to Workspace, we're going to choose Essentials Classic. Now, mine is already chosen here, so I'm going to just choose to reset Essentials classic. If you are using something else, simply selecting Essentials Classic should set it to what we're seeing right now. Okay, let's tap L on the keyboard, which gets us the ellipse tool. We're then going to simply click on the artboard. Now of course you'll be digging into these topics in much more detail later on, but for now, for this exercise, it will get us started. Okay, so width 100, height 100 is what we're going to have in here. So type 100 into each of those fields, mine is already there, but we'll do it anyway. Okay, so just 100, it will automatically add the px on the end, and hit OK. Now leave that selected as it is at the moment, and what we're going to do is zoom in on that, so hold down the Command key on a Mac, Control on Windows, and just tap the plus or equals button at the top line of your keyboard, just two or three times to zoom in like so. Then we are going to move into the center of the object, and you should see the cursor icon change to something like this. I then want you to hold down the Alt or Option key, and click and drag downwards. So, what you're doing here is you're actually making a copy. now, this line that I'm getting is called a smart guide, and if you're getting something like that, that's happy, but it doesn't matter if you're slightly to the left or right really for this exercise. Then don't release the Alt or Option key yet, just release the mouse button or track pad, okay? Then you can release the Alt or Option key, so we've made a copy. We're going to select both of those things, so that's Command + A, or Control + A, or if you're having to use the menu system, Select and All as well, okay? Then over on the big, big window on the right hand side or this panel, we're going to find our way down to Pathfinder, and we're going to click on the third of these icons, which will create a new graphic based on the intersection of the two existing shapes. There we go, okay. Now, because we still have the ellipse tool selected here in the toolbox, so you can see that tapping L is what launched that, we'll move to the center of this shape, okay? And Illustrator should help you out and show you the center. If it doesn't Command + U or Control + U will fix that, hold down Alt or Option and Shift together, and then click and drag outwards like so to create another ellipse, there we go, perfect. Now we're going to swap over the fill and stroke, so the area within a boundary is the fill, and of course the boundary is a stroke, and you can actually see that here in the toolbox. Hold down Shift on your keyboard and tap X, and that will swap over the fill and stroke. So whereas it had before a black stroke and a white fill, now the opposite is true. Okay, we're going to switch tools. We're going to tap V on the keyboard to get the selection tool. If that didn't work, just go out to the top of the toolbox, it's the first tool on the left hand side. Then starting outside the shape, click and drag like so, to select both things, and we are going to turn these into a group, so they will move together. So that's Command + G or Control + G on Windows, or if you need the menu system, Object and Group, you'll find it towards the top there. Once again, we are going to hold down the Alt or Option key, and click and drag a copy like so. So there we are, we have a copy of our entire small piece of artwork here. And leaving that selected, we'll go up to the Object menu, and we'll come down and choose Rasterize from there. So this is going to turn this into an image. Let's change the resolution to 72 ppi, so it's going to be a low resolution image anyway just to make the point here, and we'll also choose Transparent, and then just hit OK. Everything else should be just fine, even if it's slightly different to what I had in the menu there, it will be just fine. Okay, already you can see that this has lots of pixels in it, because it is actually an image that we've created from our vector graphic. Let's zoom out so we can see the whole artboard, that's Command + 0, Control + 0, then select both things, okay? So just drag across both, you don't have to go all the way around them, just anything that connects with both graphics. Once again, hold down Shift, because we are going to keep the proportions together here, and then click and drag outwards. Whenever you're using the key on your keyboard to modify, always make sure that you've finished the operation before you release the key, at least that's usually the case. Okay, so I'm going to stop drawing there and then release the Shift key. And you can see how different these two things look, because this is based on a pixel grid it starts to look fairly rubbish very, very quickly, it would do because it's low resolution, but the same would be true even if it was a higher resolution, because at the size that's created it's the best it's ever going to look in most cases. Whereas the vector graphic, on the left hand side, you could zoom in and in and in on that, and it will never change, it will always stay sharp. Just one last thing, I'm going to ask you to hold down Command or Control on your system and tap Y, and that will show you the actual vector graphic here. And what you are you're saying are just the basic attributes for this shape. In fact, even this appearance here is actually something conjured up by Illustrator. But there you go, that's what we do inside of Illustrator. one of the ways we can draw inside of here is by combining different shapes, it's called construction, and we'll deal with that later on. Okay, so Command + Y or Control + Y to return to that. There you are, you are now introduced to Illustrator at a very, very basic level, and you now know the difference between a vector graphic and an image or a raster graphic.

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