 Hi, and welcome to Adobe Absolute Beginners, Adobe Illustrator CC. My name is Wes Holing, and I'm going to be showing you some of the basic tools and tips for how to use Adobe Illustrator CC. The first tool I'd like to show is the Shapes tool here on the left. You can see currently it's selected as Rectangle Tool. If I click and hold on that button, I get other options including Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse Tool, which is for creating circles and ovals, the Polygon Tool, which is for creating shapes with more than four sides like a triangle or a hexagon, the Star Tool, which is useful for creating stars, and the Flare Tool, which gives you a sort of lens flare look. Right now I'm going to keep it simple and just use the Rectangle Tool. So if I come back over to my canvas and click and drag, let go. Now I've got a rectangle. If I do it again while holding down the Shift key, that's for both Mac or PC, and let go. Now I have a square. It's one by one ratio, whereas the other one is just sort of freeform. It's wider than it is tall. I can create other shapes by coming back to the same menu and holding down, choosing from the fly out of the Ellipse Tool, creating an oval. Let me hold down the Shift key, creating a perfect circle. And last, I'll show the Polygon Tool. Instead of dragging, if I click, I get options. In this case I have a radius option, so I can specify the width. And the number of sides included, if I wanted a triangle, of course, it's three, a hexagon, six, an octagon, eight, and so on. In this case I'm going to keep it very simple. I'm just going to go with three, and I'll increase the radius to about 200 pixels, and click OK. And now I've got a triangle. So I chose three last time. There's another one with three, and another one with three. If I return to the Polygon menu by clicking on the canvas and choosing six, now I'm drawing hexagons. Next I'll show the Type Tool, which is located up here with the T. I'll go ahead and clear out my screen so I'm not cluttered up. The T, of course, is for Type. You can create text on your canvas by just clicking on the canvas itself. Illustrator will give you some dummy font in later versions of Adobe Illustrator CC. Laura Mipson in this case. I can make it say anything I want. While the cursor is still blinking, of course, I want to accept my changes. Return will just add a new line, which is not what I want. I'll go Backspace to return to my original line. You can press Escape, which seems counterintuitive, but those will accept your changes. Once I've typed my text, I can choose from the top up here. You can change the Typeface. Let's say I want Replica Pro, and I want it regular instead of bold, and I want it at 48 point in size. I can change all of my font options there, including the alignment in the paragraph, and so on. Next is, of course, the Direct Selection Tool located up here on the upper left. It is probably the tool you'll use the most, and I'm saving it for later because I wanted to, of course, show you how to make things first before we begin to move them around. In this case, I still have text on the screen. I'll also create a square just so we've got some other options to play with. I'll return to my selection tool at the upper left. Just like with most WYSIWYG editors, like you've got something in Microsoft Publisher or even in Photoshop, this works the same way as anywhere else. Moving over to the object, clicking down and dragging it, move it along the canvas just as you would in anything else. You can also use this, once you've selected an object like this square, to click and hold on the corners to change the size. If I hold down Shift, it keeps its aspect ratio one to one. If I let go of Shift, of course, I can make it wide or tall. Be careful of changing things like the size of photographs where you need to retain that same aspect ratio, either 4 to 3, 5 by 7, whatever. The same thing is true for text. If I want to shrink this by holding Shift, I can, and it will retain the same width and height if I let go, and it becomes very distorted. So you want to be careful of that when you're using the Selection Tool. There's also right next to it the Direct Selection Tool, which sounds very similar and it is, but here's the key difference. When I click an object, for example, let's go back to the square. We have the corners at the top. With the Selection Tool, I was able to change the size of the entire object. In this case, the Direct Selection Tool allows you to select just one corner of the square. So if I click it, now I have one blue corner and three hollow corners. If I click it again while dragging it, I can distort it so that now that corner goes way off into the distance. I can bring it down in. It's for getting that sort of granular control that Adobe applications are so good at. And last, I would like to show you the Paint Brush Tool. Of course Illustrator is great for illustrations and this is one of the key tools for creating something like that. If I click the Paint Brush Tool, you can see I have black selected and I'll come back to colors in a moment, but I can simply draw on my canvas. And when I let go, it becomes a very smooth line. It's turned it from a jagged hand-drawn curve into something that's a little more elegant and a little easier to manipulate if I want to. And this is of course all based on a brush type. We've got up here, 3-point round is a particular type of brush. If I get creative, I can choose all sorts of other brushes that are included with Illustrator. For example, a charcoal pencil, I can choose that and then begin drawing. And if we zoom in on that, you can see that it does have a look of a charcoal brush. It becomes jagged on the edges. It comes to a point at the end as though you're drawing with a small piece of charcoal.