Transcript:
[MUSIC] Hey, guy’s, Kerry Hawkins, here with another vector mate Comp tutorial today is gonna be the fifth in my tool. Bar series, we’ve talked about selection tools. We’ve talked about pen tools, texts, tools and all of these line art tools here, so today we are gonna go over all of these shape tools. So let me go ahead and drag this out so that we can look at everything here and we’ll jump in right away. The first tool is the rectangle tool or hotkey. M and you can with all of these. Do the same thing you either. Click and drag to create your shape to the size. You want visually or you can click once and input your own dimensions or some of these have other options as well, but with the rectangle tool, that’s all you get if you want to keep your height and width proportional, then you would click this so that they will stay the same ratio. If not, you can just come in and put it. However, you like and make your own. Now whenever you click again, it’s going to have that last setting that you used on all of these. That’s how this works so anyway. If you click on this, you’ll see as long as you have hide. Edges is off as long as that’s off. All right, If hide edges is on, you may not see everything, but make sure that’s off. You’ll get handlers on the edges here where you can grab, grab and rotate. This is just using the regular selection tool or hotkey V. And then you can also, you know, constrain the vertical or the horizontal. Once you’ve made the shape. You can also grab these little circles and give it a rounded effect on the edge, or if you just want to grab one, you can do your direct selection tool, hotkey a which we’ve already discussed in the first video and you can just do one of them. If you need so just a quick, healthy reminder on that, the next one is the rounded rectangle tool, which, as you can imagine. Just makes a rectangle with round. This is a fairly unnecessary tool to me because you can just do that on the regular rectangle tool so. I guess if you know that the thing’s gonna be ten inches by 10 inches and it needs a corner radius of one, then you know, go ahead and grab that tool and just click. So if you click, you’ll get the option menu to come up right, but to me, it’s like, just use the rectangle tool. Make it wherever it is, and then you can come in and round these yourself. You can just do this and see that you get a little preview of how much it’s doing. I, you know, it’s hard to kind of control it to one inch, but there I just. I just dragged it manually to one inch. You can do that, so you know? I don’t use the rounded rectangle tool too often. The other thing is like even with the regular rectangle tool up here. You’ve got a rounded option so you can even change different corner types if you like so to me that a rounded rectangle tool is it’s kind of unnecessary, but you know, for speed, you may find that there’s a time that that’s better than then going through and doing everything manually like. I just did the next tool. Is the ellipse tool Hotkey? L And those are the only two of hotkeys in this group is the rectangle in the ellipse, butwe ellipse, the same way you can click and drag to make a circle now to make a perfect circle. You have to hold shift while you do this, okay. To make keep the width and height proportionate. Now, otherwise you’re making an ellipse, which is not going to be a perfect circle, but that can be, you know, whatever shape and size you need there or again you can click, and then you’ll get a dialog that will pop up here that you can. You can put in whatever width and height you need and constrain their proportions if necessary, so it kind of works the same way really simple. The next one we’re going to talk about. Is the polygon tool and the polygon tool is gonna have a few more options again. That’s just me clicking and then drawing one out by hand by by. I I should say, and I’m also holding shift to keep everything for, And otherwise it kind of, you know. Wiggles around on me like this. Now, the width and height are always going to be the same. No matter what you do, so you can’t have it when you initially draw it, You can’t have the width and height be disproportionate on this tool until you draw it, and then later you can come in and do that kind of stuff like this, but I don’t know why that is. It’s just the way they made the tool the other thing with this one is you have more options, so if you click here and you want to have a radius, you know, let’s just put it two inches right and then. How many sides do you want? You can do five, okay or you can do. If you do? Four, it’s just going to be a rectangle or a square. If you do three, you’ll get a triangle. So this is how you get a triangle with it with this shape. I mean, you can do. Lots of these out of twenty is probably going to be too much. Yeah, so there you go. You’re gonna have, like a sort of pixelated looking circle right so normally. I’m gonna be three, five six. Maybe one of the nice things about Maybe using this tool with a six-sided is that you can make a nice little honeycomb pattern. So maybe you come up like this, and you make another and another loop on what that was and another, and then maybe you, you know, click and drag that over and put it about there and then you can see you start to make a honey nice honeycomb pattern that way and boom boom boom, right, so kind of a cool option with that shape. The next one’s, the star tool, same thing. I click and drag. I’m gonna get a star, but it’s gonna be whatever my last settings we’re in this. I believe was a hundred. So this is kind of how you make a starburst or you can do a regular star. Let’s just do five points and there you go nice little sort of Super Mario star right now with this one when you are clicking and let’s just get rid of this real quick if you’re clicking to make this. So if I click and drag out, I get, you know, whatever my last settings or well, if you know about where you want that inner radius and buy inner radius, let me just make a shape, so I can show you. This would sort of be the inner radius where these inner points come together, right and these this would be the outer radius. So when you’re clicking and dragging, get it and you say, you want to create the shape to make it a little bit more like a typical star and less of this fat. Mario, Star, right. Well, you might click holding shift where your inner radius is where you like it, and then while you’re doing that, hold ctrl down and then drag some more and you’ll see that the outer radius gets pulled out. So maybe, you know, right in here would be more of like an American flag star, right, if, and now, if I do this again, I’m gonna get that setting because that was the last star that I made right or you. Can you know, click it to where you want it and keep going and sort of maybe create more of a starfish look, and with this just like all these others, you’ve got the option here of coming in and and softening these up, right, so you can take all of the angles and soften them by rounding them. Maybe even that much right, so you can get some really cool shapes out of these just just by making a shape and using the options that are available to you. Of course, if you wanted to just make one of these long, you can do that too. With the direct selection tool versus the regular selection tool, so the lots of options here now. The last one is the flare tool and this one. Hey, you know? I don’t really like using it that often, but I’ll show you kind of what you can do with it. The flare tool has a lot of transparency. So the first thing you want to do is create a background color and let’s just start with black for now. 100% black. Cmyk black, right, and I’m gonna go ahead and and click on this again. This is another one of those you can either click, or you can click and drag. I’m gonna just click and create a veracious standard Looking one. Right, here’s. The options there’s a lot more options with the flare tool than there are with any of these others. I’ll just hit, okay. That’s a standard kind of look. You usually get something like this right fits. If it’s not over a color, it kind of looks like this, and it’s very strange, but if it’s over some sort of color, you get all the transparencies that are built in now at 100% Black is kind of boring. So maybe we pull in some yellows and maybe pull in some reds or Magenta, to kind of get like a a red tone, maybe? I lower the black a little bit. Maybe go a little more image into E. So you can see how that affects the way. This flare tool looks now. I don’t normally like this because it’s just kind of cheesy, and it’s gonna show that you don’t know really what you’re doing in illustrator? If you use these everywhere every now and then you might use it on the edge of something metallic, you know, just a sort show that it’s like a faux shiny kind of look, but one cool thing that you can do with this that might be more beneficial than that and more interesting is maybe creating like using this to create a background. That’s sort of abstract. So let me show you what I would do. Let’s do, let’s get rid of it first. I’ll create another one just by clicking and dragging. I just want a single, solitary flare like this, okay, and because this has so many parts to it, I’m gonna go ahead and hide the edges so you can hit Ctrl. H or just go up there to view hide edges. So now I’m not gonna see those edges with it selected if I hover, I will, but now with the selection I want and I’m gonna go ahead and bring it down to, you know, squish it to make like some sort of more ovular looking shape and then I’m gonna come up here and go to effect and then distort and transform transform. And then let me bring this over here for my other monitor. This is where you can have some fun. Let’s do an angle of first. Let’s hit preview. Make sure you can see and 20 and then copies Maybe do 20 and already you can see that that is creating something A little interesting and Ill. Just zoom in here, so you can see what that looks like, right, That’s kind of like a nuclear looking, something or other nuclear blossom, lets. Call it all right, kind of cool. Well, you know, this is all live and editable. Still, so we could come in here and go to appearance. You’ll find your transform with a little. FX icon over here you can double click that to get back into your transform effect and mess with the settings hit preview again. What you can do is kind of change the horizontal. If you want and you can see that gets a totally different look, maybe mess with the vertical. Some to kind of get you more of a flair. You start getting a little bit of a fractal design here. Maybe if we start messing with this, ya see you sort of spirals in on itself and gets really crazy. So some fun stuff you can do there. That would create a really cool background. If you maybe could tone it down a little bit, make it a little more subtle, or you can do this and hit like a random, and you just get all sorts of interesting stuff that way, you know? I kind of like the way that looks and maybe fill that in. You know, that’s a really cool-looking lets. See what happens if we change the angle of this? Yeah, yeah, so maybe something real, fuzzy and ill-defined like this, Oh! I got a I got a notification so anyway. You know, lots of options here. This is your kind of copies, and you can even say if you want it to. Align to a certain corner of your art, which will kind of give it a slinky effect here or down here. It’s like a nice flattened. I don’t like space lens flare type type thing. It’s kind of cool, but yeah. I mess around with it. You got all sorts of options here. You can reflect that. Oh, that didn’t do any good or that, but anyway, just, you know, clicking and see what these different things do. Maybe see if there’s something cool in that If it’s not random, it’s gonna be nice uniform. Look, but as you can see. I’m getting all sorts of different. Looks just by clicking on these and and playing around with it. And then, of course you can edit this shape Once you do. You can move it around and you’ll get it a little bit different. Look again! I think it’s nice for just a an abstract background. I could see myself using this and toning it down to maybe a 25% and that could be in the background with, you know, a main photo and some text over here in a logo or something like that, and you just created that in a couple of seconds, really. So that’s how you use the basic gist of all of these tools. Of course, there’s so much more you can do. You’ve got Pathfinder options, which eventually I’ll get to in this series or in another of my videos at some point, but for today I just wanted to talk about how to use each of those shapes in their most basic format and then we’ll build from there, so Ill. See you guys in the next video.