Transcript:
Hello. I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Youtube video tutorial today. We’re going to look at drawing stars in Illustrator, But before we do that, let’s have a quick look at some other things. I want to show you. I’m also teaching classes over at Skillshare. So in the description below, you’ll see that there’s a link for my Skillshare classes, which will give you at the very least whatever the current deal is at Skillshare and quite often. My link will give you an even better deal. So if you’re interested in signing up for Skillshare, that’s where you’ll find me. You’ll also find me at Udemy and I have four classes at the moment at Udemy, which are running at between 4.8 and 5 star ratings. So I do invite you over to you to me and again In the description below, you’re going to find a special coupon, which will give you at least as good a deal as you can currently get on udemy, and sometimes I can give you an even better deal than what it’s current at udemy, so let’s go to illustrator, and I’ve a new document here. We’re going to draw stars, so we’re going to start off, Which, of course, shares a toolbar position with the rectangle tool. When you just click on your artboard, you’ll draw a star With the current settings now. Mine has radius 1 of 50 pixels, radius, 225 and 5 points. So I’ll just click here and this is a five-pointed star With those radius values. It’s also possible to draw a star by simply clicking and dragging with the star tool selected now. I’m being very careful not to let go of the left mouse button. I’m going to hold the spacebar. Because that will allow me to move my star when I let go of the spacebar. I go back to drawing the star. Now if I want more points, I can press the up arrow key at this stage again. I’m not letting go of this left mouse button. The up arrow key increases number of points that down arrow key decreases the number of points. And if I hold the ctrl key on a PC command on a Mac, then I can adjust the value of the second radius and what that’s doing is it’s giving us a sort of flatter shape or a more pointed shape just again holding down the ctrl or command key as you drag the shapes not changing in size. It’s just that the internal dimensions are changing, so you pull these spikes in or drag them out. It’s also possible to take them the other way, so you’re effectively turning your start inside out and that’s going to have an effect on radius 1 and radius 2 in just a minute. I’m going to let go the left mouse button. So I can just settle my star, lets. Click again on the artboard. You can see here. That radius 1 is around 200 pixels. Let’s make it 200 pixels and radius to around 120 so let’s set it to 120 I have 7 points. I’ll click OK. So that’s the star that we created using that set of dialogue values. If I click again in reverse these, so the radius 1 is 120 and radius 2 This time is 200 and click. OK, well, I get the same star, but it’s just upside down, so it doesn’t really matter. If radius 1 or radius 2 is the larger value, you’re still going to get a star? So what can you do with the star tool? Well, one of the things that you can do is to increase the number of points quite a lot and flatten the distance between the two points by holding the ctrl or command key, and then you get the kind of shape that you would traditionally use on an award banner, for example, so I’m just going to hold the alt and shift keys as I just scaled that up and you can see that we’ve got this circular shape effectively with lots of little points on the edge. It doesn’t look quite like a star, but it is using the star tool and, of course you can create anything even a four pointed star. Well, you can actually create a three-pointed star, but let’s just do a four, so I’m just pressing a down arrow key to reduce the number of points and then press the ctrl or command key. This is my 3 pointed star and let’s go up 1 for a four pointed star. I’m just making sure that I’m not letting go the left mouse button until I’ve got my star looking the way. I want it to look now. The only other thing we need to talk about with stars is the new live corner, so let’s go back and let’s draw just a standard sort of star. Let’s make it 75 35 and it’s going to have 5 points. Let’s zoom in up here when I go to the direct selection tool. You’ll see that there are these little widgets here. They the live corner widgets and dragging on those is going to adjust the corners of the shapes that’s going to make them rounded corners or not so rounded corners. Now, if you want to adjust just the rounding on a single corner with the direct selection tool, select over that single corner and then just the widget for that corner becomes accessible to you and so you can adjust just individual corners now. Of course, this is only true of the live corners in the most recent versions of Illustrator. If you using an earlier version of illustrator, you probably won’t have those tools available to you. But, of course you will have the star tools, so I’m hoping that makes it clear as to how you can draw stars in Illustrator. If you enjoyed the video tutorial, give it a thumbs up. Click the subscribe button and hit the notification bell so that you’ll be alerted when new videos are released until next time, my names. Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me here on my Youtube channel.