 I'm gonna stop sharing and mute myself. All right, thanks Susan for that introduction. My name is Wes Hohling. I'm a senior web content developer here at TechSoup. Today we're going to be talking about Illustrator and Susan is right, this is my favorite of all the Adobe Creative Cloud apps. So hopefully it'll be yours as well. If you're absolutely brand new to it, that is no problem. What I'll be doing today is what I've done in previous Tech 30s which is kind of give you a brief run-through on creating something basically from scratch in the application. And so there's no need to try and keep up if we'll have this video archived, if you wanna check it out later, along with a lot of other tools in our TechSoup courses course. So let me go ahead and hop on over to Illustrator. And first I'll give you a little tunnel vision for just a moment while I switch over. So part of my job here at TechSoup is to create some of the images that you see in By the Cup. If you subscribe to our By the Cup newsletter, you'll see these images show up in each section of the newsletter and I try and design something that's sort of relevant to the subject that they're covering. And these are always a little hand-drawn icons, flat design sort of look, and they're a lot of fun to create. And so I'm going to show you how to create a similar illustration in Illustrator, just all completely from scratch. So I'll go ahead and start up a new document by going up to File, New. And this is where I can choose some of my settings like the size 300 pixels by 300 pixels. That sounds good. What I'll be creating today, I should probably tell you first, I'll be drawing a clock, very basic design. And it'll cover a lot of the standard tools that you'll find in Illustrator. I won't be covering the illustrious pen tool. We've got some great resources on that in TechSoup courses. I would highly encourage you to check out if you're interested in the pen tool. If you're not familiar with what that is, don't worry about it, it won't come up today, but anyway, just a word of no at the beginning there. So if I'm creating a clock, it's a circular object. So it's one, an aspect ratio one to one, just as wide as it is tall. So 300 pixels by 300 pixels seems like it's pretty good. And down here, these are default settings for a screen. I'm just going to be drawing for the screen, so that all looks good too, and I'll just go ahead and hit okay. So now I've got a square canvas on which to draw. And the first thing, of course, it's a clock, so it's gonna be around a perfect circle. So let's go ahead and draw a circle. Over here on the left, I've got my tools. You can see I've already selected the circle tool. If that's not visible to you, there might be a square in place, that's the actual default. You can click and hold on it, and you'll get a lot of options that come up, including rectangle, polygon, star, et cetera. Ellipse, even though it doesn't say circle, ellipse is what you want for drawing circles and ovals. So I'll go ahead and let go of it on that one, and now I've got an ellipse tool. On the left here, just like in other drawing programs in the Adobe Creative Cloud, I've got a fill and stroke color. Fill, of course, is when you're drawing an object, is fill is the color inside the object. So I'm gonna be drawing a white circle, and I've got a black stroke, and stroke is just another way of saying border. So I'll be creating a white circle with a black border. And I can click and drag if I want, and you can see I'll get an oval. If I, while I'm holding down my mouse key, or excuse me, mouse button, if I press the shift key, you can see it snaps into a perfect circle. I can click and drag along with that to whatever size I want. You can see there's even a tool tip on the bottom right of where I'm drawing that tells me exactly how big it is. So if I know, if I don't know exactly the size I want, I can eyeball it, let go, and now I've got a perfect circle, or if I undo, I can just click once. It'll prompt me to give exact specifications. In this case, I already know the size I want. I want a 200 by 200 pixel circle. Press okay on that. Now I've got it. It's not quite centered, which for someone who's a bit anal retentive like me is a problem, and it's also off the canvas, which if I'm going to save this, it's gonna get cut off. So I can drag it around and try and get it just right, or I can be very precise about it and align it. So one powerful set of tools that Illustrator has are it's Align and Pathfinder tools. You can find these here on the right. This is Align right here. If I click that, I get this little fly out, and what I wanna do is I wanna align this object to the art board. That's a very fancy way of saying I wanna center this circle on the canvas, and I can do that by choosing this Align to section here. There's two options, Align to Selection and Align to Artboard. The selection is the object itself, so aligning it to itself doesn't make a lot of sense. Aligning it to the board itself to the canvas is what I want. I choose that, and then I've got a couple options here. I can horizontally align the center, which means it'll snap to the center horizontally. If I click that, you'll see what happens. Now it's horizontally centered, and then right to the right of that is the vertical align option. Click that. Now I've got it right in the center and I can rest easy knowing that my circle is centered. As you can see, it's a white circle with a black stroke, and I can fix those colors if they're not quite what I want. I can choose the fill color here by clicking it once, and you can see that it snaps to the foreground. I'm also prompted to get some color options up here. I've got some colors that I already like saved to a library. I don't want to have time to get into libraries today, but Photoshop, excuse me, Illustrator gives you a lot of options for saving colors that you like, so you don't have to kind of guess and sample them later. So I'll choose that on my right side here. These are, this is a feature that's unique to Creative Cloud. You won't find in Creative Suite where you can basically save your color selections to the cloud and then get them later on another computer, and this is all of TechSoup's brand colors, so I'm staying on brand by creating this clock. So I'll go ahead and choose a, let's say, light blue for the fill, and if I click my stroke, now it's currently black, I'll go back to my libraries and choose a deep blue. It's still dark, but it's not as dark as the black. It's also kind of a thin stroke. You get a one point stroke by default. I want to change that. On the right side here, I've got a stroke option. I click that and you can see the weight here. Let's bump that way up. Let's go from one point to 10 points, and you can see now it's a lot thicker. I can even decide if I want to align the stroke to the edge of the circle on the inside of it or the outside. Right now it's on the inside. I think I want it on the center. So you can see if I click this, it looks like it's expanded a bit. You can see a thin blue line going along in the center of it, and that's what I want. Basically, you're adding five pixels or five points on top, five points on bottom, for a total of a 10 point weight stroke. That's looking pretty good to me. So I'll go and click up here in the selection tool. I'll deselect everything by clicking on the canvas, and now I've got basically my clock face. So from here, I'm going to start adding some of the notches on the clock face. So you might see a clock that has the numbers on it or just lines. I'm just going to add some simple lines. I think that'll be a little cleaner and we don't have a whole lot of time, so I can't have enough time to tell you all about creating those. So on the left here, I've got a line segment tool. This is the one that will be chosen by default, but as you can see, if I click and hold on it, there's some other options that shoot out, which none of which I have time to cover today, but lines good for now. So I'll just let go of that. I've got a line segment, and I'll just go ahead and draw a simple vertical line by clicking and dragging down. And you can see a small line begins to form there while I'm still holding down. Let's go to about 30 pixels in height. And if I let go, you can see now I've got that line. It's not where I want it though. Of course, I'm going to want this, let's say the 12 o'clock position. So I can click back over to my selection tool, and then just like with any other drawing program, I can drag it over to where I need it to be. And you can see that as I'm dragging, some lines are starting to appear. There's one, there's one. These are smart guides that will help me get the line just to where I need it. And if I drag it right here, you can see there's a line horizontally and a line vertically. This is where it intersects with the top of the circle, which is what I want. I want it to be right in the center. The more you draw things, for example, a freehand, if you're doing sketches, if you're drawing something in a program like Illustrator, the closer things to get to being right, while just being slightly off, the more distracting it becomes. So it's very important to be specific about what you're drawing when you're drawing. And this is a great way to do it. This will let you know exactly when things are centered or interacting with something else already on your canvas. So if I let go here, you can see that my line has moved right to the top of the circle and in the center of it. Of course, a lot of clocks, the line doesn't quite touch the top. It might have a little space in between. If you look at a clock near you, you might see that that the 12 doesn't butt right up against the top or the notch. So we can go ahead and move that down. You can use your arrow keys while you've got an object selected to move it left or right, up and down. And that'll move it one pixel in any of those directions. One thing you can also do, and this saves me a lot of time, if I don't want it to move just one pixel, I can make it move 10 in any direction. And that's a great way to get it from one end to the other without having to just nudge it over so many times each time. So if I hold down shift and then press an arrow key, in this case, I'm gonna press down, you can see it'll jump 10 pixels down. It doesn't seem like it's a lot, but that gave me just enough space there that I really like where that's at. That's got just enough space between the border and the rest of the clock face. Now, of course, a clock has usually 12 numbers, some more, depending on the style, you may have fewer, you may have just four. One for 12, three, six, and nine. And that's what I'm gonna go for here. I kind of like a cleaner look. Depending on how large this illustration may end up becoming, I don't want to clutter it with a lot of other things. So I'm going to draw another line. Actually, let's do this. I'm not gonna draw another line. I'm going to copy the one that I've got. It's the right height. I don't have to just carefully redraw the same object all over again. So while I've got my selection tool selected, if I pressed Alt on my keyboard, you can see that my cursor changes to a double arrow as I move over this object. That means it's, when I click and drag, it's gonna create a copy. So if I click and drag on that while I'm holding Alt, you can see I've got a second line that's moving around. And the guides are still helping me move along. So I'll move it down to this intersect point just where it was on the top. I let go and now I've got a second line. And again, I'll bump it up 10 pixels by doing Shift and Up. Now I've got those two. The trick is now, how do I get it for the three and the nine o'clock? I could draw it all over again, but again, I have to be a little precise on that. And if I wanted the eight o'clock, the seven o'clock, those aren't as easy to draw in sort of 90 degree ways. So what I can do is this. I've got this object selected here at the bottom. This is my six o'clock. I press and hold Shift and choose the 12 o'clock again. Now I've got both objects selected. From here, I can group them together. And this means that if I click on one object, I click on both of those objects. They function as a single object until I tell it not to. And the way I can group them is either by going up into the Object menu and then Group. Or you can see there, it lists the keyboard shortcut. It's Control-G on Windows or Command-G on the Mac. I can let go of that. You won't see any difference, but they are grouped. If you ever need to check and see whether something is grouped on the right side over here, there's the Layers menu. And you can expand that layer and see sure enough, here's that group. You can expand that group and see sure enough, there's two lines in it. And you can see if I click off of it and onto the canvas and then click back onto it, I've clicked that first one, but it selected both. Now it's serving as a group. And here's the real trick. This is something that, drawing certain objects like this where there's sort of repetition within the object itself that I've struggled with until I found this trick. And this is one of my favorite illustrator tricks right here. Up in the Effect menu, you've got a lot of filters. And some of them you may recognize from Photoshop. For example, Blur and Stylize, things like that. We're not gonna be using any of those. We're gonna be using some of the more geometric filters. And specifically this one here under Distort and Transform, we have one just called Transform. First thing I do whenever I choose this effect, I always click on the bottom left is Preview. I choose this, you'll see nothing has changed. And that's right, that's what we want because we haven't told it to do anything yet. What we can do with the Transform effect is change the scale. We can move an object along the canvas. We can rotate it, do all sorts of things and including make copies, which is the most important thing we're doing here today. I've got a 12 and a six and I want at least a three and a nine and I may want the others as well. So what I can do is I can say, let's rotate it, let's say 90 degrees to begin with. I've chosen 90 and when I choose another field, now you can see that they've switched. They've moved from 12 and six to three and nine. That's because I haven't specified any copies yet. If I tell it one copy, move off of that. Now we've got copies in 12 and six, three and nine, that's great. If I want the other notches filled in, I can just lower the number, the angle and this is all math and I'm sorry, I didn't promise there wouldn't be any math on this but there is a little bit of math. If you think about this as a 360 degree circle, how many notches am I making will determine the angle at which I'm going to separate them. So if I choose 30, you can see they're much closer to where they were before and I can choose more copies. Now I've got 12. I've got spots for every number on the clock but that looks a little busy for me. I'm not so into that. I could make all but those four thinner if I wanted to and go on and so but I'm just gonna keep it simple. Let's keep it going with one copy at 90 degrees and that looks like a pretty clean sort of modern design for the clock and I'll press okay and now I've gotten those selected. Now just like with the group, if I click on the three o'clock position, I've selected all of them. It's because there is a filter in place that I can go back to later and change if I really want to. I won't be doing that here but it is still an option as long as you keep that appearance filter applied. So, but for now, that's all right but we're missing of course are the hands. We need hands to tell us exactly what time it is and I'm going to draw another line just like I did before over here on my line segment tool. I'll choose that and I want it to be right in the center because of course any clock, the hands are mounted to the center of the clock itself and that's what I'm gonna be doing here as well. And just like before when I was moving that line around and it snapped to the edge of the circle, I'm gonna be doing the same thing here. If you look very closely and this might be hard to see on your screen, there's a tiny blue X right in the center of that circle. That is the center point for the circle and that's my destination and if I can't quite see it, that's okay too because once I move there, it tells me with tiny little word center. Now I know I'm in the center and whatever I draw from this position will be centered. So I can choose any, if I click and drag from this position I can choose to go in any direction I want because of course that's where the hour hand will go. I'm going to say, let's say about somewhere between 12 and one and I'll give it a shorter hand because it's the hour hand and I'm getting these options here as I go, the length of the line. It's about 50 pixels pretty close, so I'll let go there. Now I've got an hour and if I move to that center spot again, you'll see I don't get that draw hand. I get an arrow which means I can choose to pull that end of the line down. That's not what I want, I want it to keep it centered. So if I choose my selection tool again and click away from it, now nothing is selected. If I click back to the line tool, now I can revisit that spot. It even lights up that it's anchored. That means it's touching the end of that line which is fine because I know that line is also centered. And if I move this line, let's make it longer. Let's say about 75 pixels almost. That's pretty good. You know what, I'm actually not happy with that because now it just looks like one long straight line. What I can do, as I mentioned, I can grab that point and move it along. Now it looks a little bit more like an actual clock. I've got an hour hand pointing in one direction and a minute hand pointing in another. If I click that direct selection tool again and click off, that's starting to look okay. It's got the basics of a clock and I've only got a few minutes left to kind of spruce this up. So what I'm gonna do is add a second hand and kind of fill in that little gap in the center there. I'm gonna do that with the ellipse tool again, just like I drew a circle in the beginning. If I click that and then return to that center point, I can click and drag. Now it's not centered anymore. I don't really like that. I want it to be exactly centered. Here's where a couple of key commands will come in. If I hold down shift again, just like before, I get a perfect circle, so that's good. If I also hold down alt, this is where you're getting two handed, if I hold down alt, now I've got it centered and in the center of where I was before. That's what I want. Let's make it 20 pixels. That seems like a pretty good space. But I've drawn it just like I drew the clock face itself. I've got that thick blue stroke around it. I don't want that at all. So let's change the colors just like we did before. I'll choose the fill and I'll pick a color for that. Let's keep it with the dark blue. Now I've got a dark blue circle with a dark blue stroke. I want to get rid of that stroke. I click the stroke on the left. There's a little option down here on your color palette, none, that'll clear that value out. It's not white, it's not black, it's zero color value. Now I've got one there. Let me click away from that. That's a little more friendly. And what I can do is I can add another circle inside and I think you'll see where I'm going with this. Exact same spot, center. Let's do alt and shift again and I'll make it a little smaller, let's say half size. I'll choose my fill color again and let's make it orange. Now, last thing, I click away from it. I get one line coming from the center. Bring it way down, let's go about there. Now it has no color value associated. This won't show up until I give it a stroke value and I'll do that by clicking stroke, going to my colors palette, I choose orange again. Now I've got a second hand that gives the impression that there's some kind of motion. The last thing I can do because the hour and minute hands look a lot like these 12 and six markers on the clock face, I can change how these lines look. And this opens up a lot of options if you want a line to look like a pencil sketch, a charcoal, a paintbrush, it also gives you a lot of options for that. I won't be doing that today because it doesn't really apply to this but just know that lines don't have to be very blocky like this. If I choose this line by clicking on it again, this is for down here on the profile, I've got a lot of options for how the line appears. And if I choose, let's say this one, so you can see it kind of gets wide in all the center and then comes to a tapered edge on both ends, but it's going in the wrong direction. I can flip it and now it went in the right direction. I can do the same thing with this one here by choosing that same and flipping it. Now those look actually like clock hands. I can choose all sorts of other things if I want because all of these lines are still grouped together if I choose to bring the weight down on that, I can by making them, let's say six point. It's gonna be giving a little bit of a friendlier face and there's a lot of other options that I'm unfortunately running out of time to show you but that's at least the beginning of sketching out something like a clock face. The more detail you can add in terms of light and shadow, the more realistic and the more engaging your illustrations will be, but that's a great way to start with learning how to align objects, how to draw them and how to manipulate them all in the canvas. So hopefully that's a good place for you to start and I highly encourage you to check out our newest courses on Illustrator and some of our other creative cloud courses to really get from the absolute beginning stage to being able to draw some simple illustrations like this. So now that I'm out of time, I'm gonna pass it back on over to Jim Lynch for the latest roundup on what's new around TechSoup. Take it away Jim. All right. All right everybody, Jim Lynch here. I'm gonna share my screen. There we go. Jim Lynch here, I'm a senior writer here at TechSoup. I'm here to show you what's new. So I thought I'd just kick it off here with a little bit of Wes's work. We're gonna scroll slowly down here. You can see the kind of thing he does here at TechSoup. We just had Earth Day. This is Earth month of April for all of us environmentalists out there. Wes did kind of an extended infographic about our refurbished computer program here at TechSoup. It's our little online store to supply good warrantied, strong refurbished computers that are about half price of new for equivalent ones. This is the environmental benefits of that program since we started back in 2006. We've basically sold around 76,000 devices in our refurbished computer initiative and so you can see that we have some pretty strong environmental results from that. For instance, you know, it's the equivalent of, in terms of poundage of saving a space shuttle. And in terms of energy used, I don't know how many days, 23 days in Las Vegas in the hot summer, including the casinos. Water emission save and stuff like that. So this is Wes's handy work you can see going all the way down here, very nice. So because you're on this webinar, you probably want to know about our 20 days of Adobe. That's a promo campaign and it's all free stuff. So if you go to this site, and by the way, we're going to give you the links to all the things I'm showing you just now, we're going to set up every single day of this campaign. We're now on day six with free new interesting things that you can do with Adobe Creative Cloud. And it goes on and on and on every Tuesday and Thursday. We're adding new things. So that's a very, very fun thing that we're doing or just at the first quarter of that campaign. So keep checking back to this one to find more things that you can do on Adobe Creative Cloud. Here's something I've just launched and we're really happy to have this. It was a donation offer from a software company called Veritas, which is actually a Symantec company. And it's an on-premises, they call it, backup and recovery set of two kinds of software for this. This is incredibly useful for anybody who's interested in cybersecurity. So the important thing to know is we're all going to get hacked now or later or many times, that's just a fact of modern life. And backing up and being able to recover your essential information, including backing up your website pages is a super important thing. With this application, which is that you get it once and then you own it, kind of old-style application, you can store your backups on almost any platform. That's Dropbox or Box or OneDrive or you name it, any of those cloud platforms or actually a hard drive if you want to. So that's a pretty great thing. We're just delighted to have that back for you guys. Here we have some coursework that we just launched. Pretty great. So design for non-designers now has two modules. This is a set of courses that we're building. Oops, I think I'm wrong on that. But this is a set of courses we're building, designed for people who want to start working with your brand and applying design principles. And we teamed up with a design company called Elephant to supply with two courses. The first course, which is our 101 course, is just free for the getting. And the second course 201 is a nominal fee to basically cover our costs to bring this to you. So that's a brand new thing for you. And that's it. So back to Susan to wrap it up. Thanks so much, everyone. And thanks for your patience as we navigated through. We're all in the same room today, so there was a little bit of extra complexity. Thanks so much for your patience. And also a quick note that we will continue to help you view the screen more clearly. As I chatted out, you can change the quality up to 720, which is HDD. And I'll make sure I include that in our next mini webinar. And I will also put it in the platform. It's really a pleasure to have you here for 20 days of Adobe. We want you to join us next week. And we hope to see you then. A huge thanks to Wes and to Jim. And most of all to all of you. Thanks for your time. We know how valuable it is. Have a great day.