Transcript:
[MUSIC] Hey there! So if you clicked on this video, that means you probably want to learn how to make files like this or this. My following videos will focus on specific topics and go more in depth, but this is something that interests you hit the subscribe button below and hit the little bells eternal notifications. I’m going to show you my process for creating an SVG inside of Adobe Illustrator now. I’ve just ripped a bunny that I found online, but if you want to create an actual like custom, SVG, you can rough sketch something on paper on their iPad and bring it over here. And when I say a rough sketch, it can be rough and messy. How I would start doing. This is I would grab the bunny. I’m gonna create a new layer by hitting this little post-i’t down here. I call it the post it, but I’m gonna lock my first layer, Just so nothing on it can get moved by accident, and then I’m just gonna zoom in a bit. I’m gonna hit P on my keyboard for the pen tool, which can also be found right here, and I’m just gonna start dropping some anchor points, and as you get more familiar with illustrator, You will let me turn my solo, so I can see what I’m doing. You set a stroke? I almost let me stroke to black. You will know where you want to set your anchor points and it took me a little bit of time. They like figure out where I’m gonna want them, but I promise you you’ll pick it up quick, and it comes to you and I can do a whole tutorial explaining some little tips on knowing where to place them. And then I’m just gonna select them by. I have a selected. I hit a on my keyboard, and then I just hold shift down and select a bunch of them, and I’m gonna convert them to smooth anchor points. Smooth and now. This looks awful, right, that looks nothing like the bunny ear, but I promise you it’s gonna come together, so I come up here and so all these little points let me first show you paths and anchor points that it might help. Explain it a little better. So do you have an? Svg like this. What it actually how the machine knows where to cut is paths and anchor points, right, so in here, there’s all these little dots, and every wool swears all these squares are where you’re played most in turnout. So every time there’s a little square, The blade is making a turn and then this red line is the path that it’s following then it turns and then follows turns follows, and these little circles coming off. The lines from the squares are called handles. These handles control the anchor point. I think of them as magnets pulling on the line, so as you move the magnet, the path changes, so that’s really how it works now as you can imagine when you take a raster image which raster just means it’s based off of pixels little square pixels when the auto converters are crickets. Auto converter or online auto converters that take PNG and JPEGs, which are raster and turn them into vector. They have a lot of excess anchor points that just aren’t needed and this is because its little squares around the edges and especially if its lower eyes it just it’ll never be as clean as doing it yourself or at least very rarely unless you have a super high re’s image, that’s very simple, be a minute if you have an intricate image or it’s simple, but low res, it’s never going to be clean, and that’s why you’ll see people having their vinyl or cardstock tearing up and ripping because the plate is just moving way too much. I mean, I’ve seen traced images from Auto converters That’ll have like a straight path right here, and they’ll just be covered and anchor points, like practically on top of each other, literally on top of each other. I mean, there’s no need for the blade to be turning that much, but it’s making these teensy tiny little movements one. If you enlarge the image when you cut it really big, you’ll notice that you ever see a auto converted image, and it has like a little dip or a little indent. It’s not exactly true to the original as you can see. I placed minimal anchor points and now I’m gonna take these handles, and I’m gonna start pulling them out to where I want them now. When you have something like in this an anchor point, that’s not on a corner. You want the two handles to line up Because if I move just one of them and how I would Do That is hold the Alt key and drag look. What happens that gets like a little nick and it’ll share? Is this cool tool where you can like kind of try to round it out? But I mean, and it places more anchor points for you, but I mean, it’s not still not the best right, just not the best, but it’s nice that it tries to help you, so I’m just gonna hit command Z to undo, and I’m just gonna make sure that I keep them lined up and I’m not gonna hold all and move in just one so now. I’m gonna come down here. Bring this now here. This is gonna be a 90-degree angle, So I do want the handles to not move together, so I’m gonna hold Alt and then click bring this. I’m just gonna get rid of it because I want it to be a clean 90 degree angle and again. I’m gonna hold Alt and bring this one in. And now it’s nice and clean there, but here’s a little rounded, just like I want it and then I’m gonna zoom out and I’m just gonna bring this one in. Come up here and again. I’m just gonna go around this and I’m just gonna work at it. Make my adjustments as I need. [MUSIC] And you really do start to get they. Excuse me, the hang of it takes a little time, but before you know it, you’re like a pro and you’re whizzing through it, and I’m really still not whizzing through it, but I promise it gets way better with time. I can. I’m just holding Alt and bringing those in so that they’re not connected and as you can see, I am almost finished here. Mmm, just went out. Just go and. I’d do any little tweaks. I want to here. Maybe I want this one in a little more now. I’m gonna give this a fill. I’m gonna hit V on my keyboard, which lets me select everything. There’s two little pointers. This black one is called the selection tool and you access it by hitting V on your keyboard or you can click here and that just lets you select things as a whole or you can hit a or click here for the white one and that when you select, it selects direct points like the anchor points, So I’m gonna hit V and I’m gonna come over here to my cell. I’m gonna give it. I don’t really have light pink in my palette that fell and no stroke. And you can see. That’s pretty close to what I wanted. I could go in and tweak it a bit more, but for now that’s pretty good now. I’m gonna do this flower really fast. I’m not gonna walk through it, but I just want to show you that as you get better at it. How quick it starts to go and then. I’m gonna show you the traced version and how much cleaner this is just holding shift while I select multiple points because I want to turn them all to smooth holding. Also, I can move them separately, so the handles don’t move together, and they’re really awesome thing with this is is that you can adjust anything You ever have a font, and there’s just something. That’s bugging you about it. I had the issue today where the capital letter in the beginning of the word for it was actually a name it just it didn’t have like a connector to the. Um, to the rest of the see command, Z is undo it didn’t. I didn’t connect to the rest of it, right, and I wanted it to connect, so I literally just made it connect myself. I know I was gonna come and see. I know I did, and that happened once in a while. What I did was I hit Alt after I had already hit all at once. So that does this weird thing that drives me nuts, but once you’ve hit Alt once to tell Anchor Point that you want the handles to move separately. You don’t want to hit alt again? It likes to act all weird. Oh, okay, and even. I’ve been doing this for a while, and even I have times where I make little mistakes like I just did okay in this, you can see. I mean, that’s pretty close. I can go in and tweak it a bit more, but it’s pretty close. You can work through these shapes really fast now. Why this is ideal over a trace? I’m going to go back to my. Oh, me, shadow, take out the center. I would just grab the serve. I mean, I could write with a pen tool, But the ellipse tool is a lot faster. This little tool here does multiple different kinds of shapes. The ellipse is the circle. I’m gonna hold shift to make sure it’s a perfect circle. Drag it out where I want. It hit V. Bring it up to where I want it. And then I’m gonna select this flower. Select the circle, and then I’m just gonna hit this one right here, Which is click to minus front. I call the slice. It’s like the slicing cricket and then see that was my fault, and then I had this beautiful flower. This was from when I was hitting Alt by accident earlier, and I said it was messing up. It does that. If you’ve already hit Alt on an anchor point to move one individually if you accidentally hit alt on the other handle it when you make the change in the handle, it edits to you path or working on, but it also leaves a that piece in the old way if that makes sense. So I always forget that I’ve already hit all and hit Alt again and it does that, but it’s no big deal. You just delete it at the end, so yeah, pretty great, right, Um, so if I was to go back and just trace it right like with an auto convertors, you can see, this is adorable, but it’s not super detailed, but it it’s pretty detailed, and it’s not very high-rez you can see its copy that our watermark, and when people watermark them, they’re also smart enough to make sure they’re posted in low res for their preview photos so that you cannot steal them without doing basically recreating you to yourself, so what I would do is I would come to properties, hit image, trace and six colors, and as you can see, I can edit it down here in advance, but it’s just not the best right so what I can do is I’m gonna hit expand, which just tells it that yes. I want it and I’m gonna show you. How if you add something like this? How you could fix in Illustrator? Right, so I’m gonna hit? Click one first time. Anon, group up, And then I’m gonna come in. I’m gonna ungroup again because I haven’t seen a lot of it’s grouped, huh? Okay, now we’re good. I’m gonna come in. I’m gonna hit V on my keyword. Click off, hit B. Close it there you go and as you can see while this is wonderful and what you can do is double. Click on the pencil tool and bring the smooth up, which is what? I’ve already done and you can just redraw things. So if you have something in a font or an image, you can come in and redraw to what you want. There’s also a great tool me. I’m just gonna right click. Do have my smooth tool right here called the smooth tool. Can you just draw over things? And it smoothes them out for you, which is really great. What’s something that this is really mean This isn’t even savable? Well, it is if you go in and edit the individual anchor points. But that’s not probably fantastic here, hmm? I want something! That’s like super messy like, see right here. There’s three anchor points, really. I’d want to undo that. I’d hit the pencil tool. I probably just redraw that out, right. I mean, that’s a little better, but if you I have the perfect example, what is going on here? Who needs all these paths or anchor points? We don’t so what I’m gonna do is hit this smooth tool and watch this look at that. It cleans it right up. All this excess blade movement. And this helps a lot when you’re cutting a really tiny script, font. Have you ever had a font that you really like? But you just wish it was thicker. You can just select it object path offset path, and I can office that I can hit a little preview B. What size do I want? And then I could just come in here and I mean, whatever it is. I want, right. I mean, this isn’t the spike and going with the pencil tool to smooth pulling out of it And what I would do now is select these little pieces. I drew so many more and I would have object and expand appearance and that will add the path on the outside. Because you see how there’s a missed one. You see those paths? When it was just in the center, the cricket would actually cut just that straight line. It wouldn’t be cutting around it like we want and then once. I have all these. I’m just gonna weld them. Boom, and now it’s all part of thee. It’s all part of the path but again. Look how messy this fun is. I mean, it’s a beautiful fun, but it needs to be smoothed out, and it’s so wonderful You can just do that or like. Let’s say you’re like oh. I don’t know what’s something. Somebody might want to change. Maybe they want the tail to come off more or be lower. You can do that. There’s me race tool, the brush tool, the pencil tool. You can do all that. I mean, I could come in here. Select and be and click and hit end and I could say. Hey, I want this and to be bigger right here. It bugs me and look. I just edited that. I mean, I can come up and clean that up, but there are so many wonderful things you can do in Illustrator, and you do not want all these anchor points. I mean, if I was gonna cut this. I would come in and really smooth this out and you could use the simplified tool, but it’s whenever I’ve you simplified, It totally changes the shape of everything. I don’t like it at all and again. This smooth – you can double click, and you can say if you want more accurate or more smooth. I’m gonna bump it up. I mean, I could go on and on about the wonderful things you can do in Illustrator, why I prefer illustrator over Inkscape is the smooth tool, which I just showed you in the pencil tool. Inkscape has a pencil tool, but instead of see how this draw redraws the path I already have in Inkscape. It just draws a new path so draws a new line and that’s not really useful for the point of editing. And you can do these same premises with the bunny. If you don’t want to use that pencil tool or the pen tool like with the anchor points, come in and draw it. This is really messy, but then just go in and clean it up. Some more you know, or you can do with a brush, but just remember with a brush after you draw it out. I’m just gonna close it here. Just hit V. Make sure you select it. All of it object, expand it. Expand appearance. And then oh! I don’t need to well that he thinks it’s already all. I know this one is not if you ever can’t find your well -. We’ll just go to window. Pathfinder, damn! No, It is nice and welded and I could come in with a pencil tool. Let me select it the click and be like nope. B click end and look at that. I mean, I could clean up as much as I want to. I mean, that’s not really my bunny gear, but you get the point here. Now what, I also want to show you is if you wanted us to be solid because right now the crickets literally gonna cut the outside line and there’s also an inside path. What you would do is you would hit a select one of the anchor points. Delete, delete, and now it’s solid, so when you use the brush tool and you’re trying to do something. Sal, just make sure you delete that inside what I wanted to show you. Though about live tutorials on illustrator, that aren’t for the cricket might not always be the best to learn from me. It’s great to learn how to use the tools, but just keep in mind that this is the issue when you’re doing print or web, all that matters is how it looks on the screen or how it prints out. They’re not cutting, so it’s it’s a very different kind of thing, so let me just draw this line, right, and it’s just a straight line if they’re. Cricut cut this. It would cut one single line. There would be no shape to it, But let me set the stroke to first when I set a color and then let me make it bigger now. If you saw this on screen, you’re gonna be like, Oh, it’s gonna cut me a rectangle. Great, it’s not all that matters to us. Is this path right here? Trick, it’s gonna cut this path and I’ve seen it happen to people. If they’re playing and Inkscape, they’re playing an illustrator. It looks great on screen. They go to cut it. It isn’t cutting it at all like what it looks like on screen. Always pay attention to your paths. That is what matters this path, that’s why. I like to take my stroke and turn it off because it does not matter instead. I would add a fill. There’s nothing to fill here, but that’s. What matters, hopefully that. I explained what illustrator can do for you, and if you want, I can do some tutorials that are more in depth on Pacific things and how to build your skill set up and like step by step. Because I know this was really fast and confusing well. I hope this video gave you a little more insight into Adobe Illustrator. If you liked the video, give it a thumbs up. If you’d like to see more of my videos, hit the subscribe button and hit that little bell to get notified whenever I post a new video, you can also check out my Facebook group cricut design, SVG tutorials and free files. Happy crafting.