Transcript:
Hello. I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial today we’re looking at drawing triangles here in Illustrator. Now I have a series of triangles shown here and we’re going to draw each of these triangles and one we’re going to start off with is an equilateral triangle. In this instance, all the sides are the same length and all these angles are the same dimensions, and that makes them all 60 degrees because the inside angles of a triangle are always going to add up to 180 degrees to draw this triangle, select the polygon tool. Click once in your document and set the number of sides to 3 I’ll set the radius to 200 but it doesn’t really matter what radius you said. I’ll click OK and let’s just flip the fill and Stroke and this is an equilateral triangle. It is as easy as that to draw an equilateral triangle in Illustrator. If you want to scale it, hold the shift key as you drag in from any of the corners and it will maintain itself as an equilateral triangle. The next triangle is a right angled isosceles triangle. Two of these sides are the same length. These two here, there’s a right angle between them. And these two angles are also the same as each other that makes some 45 degrees each. Now the hint in drawing this triangle is in this that these two sides are equal And there’s a right angle in between them. If we were to extend this line across and this line across, we would have a square and we’re going to draw it using a square. I’ll select the rectangle tool. Hold the shift key as I drag out a square. It needs to be a perfect square. I need to remove this point here, so I’ll do that using the pen tool because that maintains this as a closed path, so I’ll click here once on this anchor point, and that removes that anchor point leaving behind a right angled isosceles triangle. This is a right angle because we draw a square. These two sides are the same because we drew the rectangle, holding the shift key. That means that the two sides are even and because of that. These angles are 45 degrees. This is a right angle, Scalene triangle, one angle. This one here is 90 degrees as for the rest of the shape. It’s just any old how, but again we’ve got some hint as to how to draw it because we know that if we were to extrapolate these lines, we would have just a regular rectangle, so let’s grab the rectangle tool and let’s drag out a rectangle with the sides not being even and we’ll go back to the delete. Anchor Point tool and just delete the corner anchor point and then we’re left with a right angled scalene triangle with our right angle in here because it was a rectangle that has to be a right angle. If you want to scale it, either of these triangles could be scaled by selecting it and dragging in on a corner handle holding the shift key as you do to constrain it and again here, we want to hold the shift key to constrain its size now. An acute triangle has no sides of the same length. None of these sides need to be the same length. None of the angles need to be equal, but all angles are under 90 degrees. Because that’s an acute triangle. Each one of these angles is less than 90 degrees total them. They add up to 180 degrees, so we’re going to draw 160 degrees, 40 degrees and 80 degrees. We’ll start with a line segment or click on the line segment tool. Click once and I’ll draw a line that is at 0 degrees and I’m going to make it just a known length. I’ll make it 350 and click OK so this is going to be the base of the triangle. We’ll, next draw the 60 degree angle, so I’ll go to the line segment tool and click once in the document and I want an angle of 60 degrees and I’m going to look at this here and I’m looking at this line here and thinking that I want this one to be that line, so I’m looking at that angle. I’ll click OK, and now I’ll just move it into position, and it doesn’t really matter where it is. Because wherever I put it on this line, It’s always going to make a 60 degree angle to the line, so you can place it anywhere. I’m going to give it a little bit of an overlap and I’m going to tell you why in just a minute, so there’s one of our sides next. I’m going to look at the 80 degree side this one over here, so I’ll go to the line segment tool. Click once in the document. Let’s have a look and see what happens if we do 80 Well, you can see from this dialogue. The line is going to be sort of like this, so it’s going to be heading off in totally the wrong direction. What we want is for the 80 degrees to be in here so we can make illustrator. Do the calculation for us. We’re going to say that a line is 180 degrees, so we’re going to say 180 degrees minus 80 and when I tap away, Illustrator said, that’s a hundred degrees, so this outside angle here is going to be a hundred degrees, making this 180 degrees because the angle on a straight line is a hundred and eighty degrees. So it’s just mathematics here. I’ll click OK now. I ended up with two of them. I just want one, so lets. Just take this one and what I’ll do is just place it in position because it doesn’t matter again where this goes on these lines because we’re drawing a triangle by the number of degrees, not by the length of its side, and we can scale it up or down later on so again. I’m going to place it, so it’s slightly overlapped here. This angle is 80 This is 60 that makes this one has to be 40 because they all have to add up to 180 but right now we’ve got three lines, not a triangle, so I’ll select over all of these three lines and in Illustrator CS5 and later we’ll use these shape builder tools, so I’ll select the shape builder tool and I’ll just click and drag in here to say I want this as a shape, but because I don’t want these lines, Ill Alt drag over these lines and that just deletes every single one of these lines, leaving me with a triangle. If we check in the last pallet, that’s what we’ll see. We’ve got a triangle here. We could flip Its fill and Stroke. You can see that’s no longer lines. It is actually a closed shape, so let’s just make this two pixels. Two now choose triangles going to be drawn exactly the same way. We’re going to look at this angle here. We know that the angle on a straight line is 180 We know this has got to be 120 so this has to be 180 minus 120 so this is a 60-degree angle. This is a 120 degree angle. Just being sure as to what our angles art makes it easy to draw click. Once in the document, we’ll make a line at 0 to be a sort of base line here. Next, we’ll draw this one now. This can be at 120 because if we do it at 120 you can see the lines going in the correct direction. Click okay, doesn’t matter where it appears over. This line doesn’t matter where it crosses it. It’s always going to cross it with this angle being 60 degrees, this angle being 120 degrees next. We’ll draw this one, So this angle here is going to be the 35 degree angle. It’s going to be a little bit difficult to draw because illustrator wants us to give it this angle to actually draw the line looking like this well. 180 minus 35 is going to give us our angle. I’ll click here click. Once in the document will type 180 minus 35 and tab away well. The angle of this line has to be a hundred and forty-five degrees. So this angle here is 145 That makes this 35 I’ll click OK again. It doesn’t matter where this line is positioned, but I’m going to make sure that it’s securely positioned over both these other lines because that lets me use the shape builder tool to make it a triangle. Go to the shape builder drag in here to say yes. I want this shape and then alt or option drag over the external lines to get rid of those leaving Just our triangle behind. If you want to scale this triangle, just hold the shift key and drag from one of its corners to scale it up. So there you have an easy way to create a whole range of different triangles here in Illustrator. I hope you’ve enjoyed this video. I hope that you’ve learnt things about illustrator of which you were previously unaware. If you did enjoy the video, please give it a thumbs up. Click that subscription button and hit the notification bell. If you hit the notification bell, you’ll be alerted when new videos are released until next time. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me here on my Youtube channel.