From the course: Illustrator 2024 Essential Training

Drawing basic shapes - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2024 Essential Training

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Drawing basic shapes

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- [Instructor] Illustrator has a small family of shaped tools and if we tap m on our keyboard, that will get us the first member of that family, the rectangle tool. Before we draw with it, let's go ahead and long press on that in the toolbox, you can see the other family members here and if we move over to this small bar on the right-hand side and click, it gives us a handy tear off tray. Now, there are two members of this family we aren't going to be looking at, the rounded rectangle tool, that's the next one along in the view we have here because these days, the rectangle tool can do pretty much what this tool was developed for, and over on the far right, the flare tool. And I think maybe that was developed as a result of some kind of fever dream, but we'll definitely be ignoring that one. So let's go to the rectangle tool then. And first of all, look at something that all of these tools, the first five tools here have in common, is we can just tap or click to draw numerically. So if we have a specific dimension in mind, we can go ahead and enter those dimensions and then a rectangle will be created. And by the way, whatever you draw in this document, it's going to look like this. It'll have no fill and a yellow stroke. The documents have been modified to do that. So when you do want to draw, you can simply click and drag like so. I'm just going to delete each one of these in turn, if you want to hold down shift, you'll draw a constrained shape. And this is exactly the same for the ellipse tool by the way. I'll just delete this. And if you want to draw from the center outwards, sometimes you can see the center of where you want to draw, holding down the alt or option key is the way to do that. If you want to draw a constrained shape from the center outwards, then you'll need to hold down two keys. That would be alt + shift on windows and option + shift on the Mac. And you can draw a constrained shape like so. We'll tap l now to get to the ellipse tool and just quickly draw a few ellipses just here using exactly the same thing. Just dragging we'll draw an ellipse, holding down shift we'll constrain it, and if you want to draw from the center, adding in the alt or option key will do that. So pretty much exactly the same, only much harder to spot the corners. Now on that, just before we go any further into the next two shapes, if I just delete this one and return to the rectangle tool and draw. When you do draw a shape, you may notice these small widgets on the side here. And these allow us to change the corners and if you're using the direct selection tool to select one of the corner points, if I just do that very quickly and select this point here, then you can change individual corners. An optional alt clicking will change from the three corner types there like so. So that's handy to know. And also sets us up for the next shape we're going to draw, which is with the polygon tool, so if we choose that, there's no shortcut to get to that, or the star tool. Polygons are always drawn from the center outwards, so you don't need to hold down any key for that. And they're always drawn constrained, so you don't need to hold down any key for that. The only thing you might want to do is constrain their axis and you can do that by holding down shift, and it will lock it like so. Unfortunately, only does that angle for the polygon tool. Now, when you are drawing, if you want to, you can use the arrow keys to modify the shapes that you are drawing. Up and down will give you more or less sides like so. But modern Illustrator, if I just get my selection tool for a moment, allows us to do that after the fact. So just to the right-hand side here, we have this small diamond widget and if you drag this up and down, you can change the number of sides between the most commonly desired. So 11 is the maximum you have there, 3 is the minimum. And if you think about it, if you took away the third side, it would start to look suspiciously like a line. So we will just leave that as it is. Additionally, there is a corner widget just there as well. So exactly the same as we looked at in the rectangle tool like so. If you need more than 11 sides, then that's when you're going to need to go ahead and click, and you can see the option here is the radius and then you can change the number of sides there as well. More recently, the star tool, which you used to have to draw with and use the keys on your keyboard to modify, that has been changed. I can still use the up and down arrow keys here to change the number of sides if I want to. You can also hold down Command or Control to actually change the radius there. So you can see that the radius is changing like so. Stars are made of two radius. And then when we've drawn, we do have further options. So there are quite a few little widgets just here. First of all, this circular one towards the center allows us to change this radius. On the right-hand side, this allows us to change the outer radius, there like so. And then on the edge of the bounding box, we've got this to change the number of sides and that is a very exciting development and actually brings this version of Illustrator really up to date with the tools. And just as before, we've got a widget there for the corner. So if we want to change the inner corners, we have a widget for that. We also have a widget just on the other side for the outer corner. So you've got lots and lots of different options there. Again, as I showed you earlier with the polygon tool, if you want something that's sort of off menu, you can simply enter your radius values like so, and your star will be drawn.

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