 Hello everyone, welcome back to another Adobe Illustrator tutorial. This one, I'm going to show you how to make a very cool looking picture collage using Adobe Illustrator. I've got Adobe Illustrator 2021, but this should work in any version, at least past CS6. Alright, let's roll. The first step is you open up Illustrator, you want to click Create New. Now, my videos, I do tutorials where I show you and I also explain the technique as I go. So it's not just me hitting a bunch of buttons, I tell you what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. So, I click Create New and I'm going to create a 1920 by 1080 pixel document. Why that size? It's a 16 by 9 aspect ratio and it's also the most common size for YouTube videos. So, if you're a YouTuber and you want to make a collage for YouTube, this is how you do it. Alright, so we've got 1920 by 1080 pixels. I've gone ahead and made sure that they're correct here. I've selected this one, but if you don't have this available to you on the web, just type in the exact dimensions and hit Create. Alright, here we go. I've got it open and we're on our way. I'm going to just make a little bit of a change here and make this a little smaller. Alright, that's good enough. Okay, I want to make sure you guys can see it and I'm going to center it a bit better. Okay, guys, we're on our way. The next step is we're going to create a rectangle. So, you want to go over to the left side. We're creating a rectangle, so I'm going to left-click on the rectangle tool and then I'm going to left-click on the document anywhere on the document and it's going to create a rectangle. You're probably going to see 100 pixels by 100 pixels. I think that's the default, but don't worry about it. You just simply have to type in the exact number you want, so we want 1920 by 1080. And we're basically creating a rectangle to go on top of this document. I'm going to left-click and hit OK. Now, the fill color is white and the background color is white, so that's a little bit tricky. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a different color, fill color. So, I'm going to switch it to something like, let's go with like a dark, kind of like a dark blue, okay? Dark bluey, purple color, something like that. Yeah, let's go with that. It doesn't matter. I just want to show you the technique. Alright, we've gone ahead and double-clicked on this, changed the fill color. Now, the next step is I'm going to move this rectangle to be on top of exactly on top of the document. So, I've centered it on top of the document. If you're not sure if it's centered, you always have the option to go to the line or the align option here. So, I'm going to go ahead and open it, the align window part of me. That's a better way to put it. Align, you can always align the object center it by clicking here. This horos onto align center, horos vertical align center just in case. Alright guys, we're on our way. The next step, and this is an important one, is we're going to go to basically want to create the grid. So, the grids that the collages are going to go up against. So, you go to object, and then we're going to drop it down, and we're going to go ahead to, object path, yes, object path split into grid. Object path split into grid. Now, nothing happened, not to worry. You're going to notice here that it's showing one column, one row. This is where we can go ahead and have a little bit of fun. Now, before I start hitting buttons, I'm going to click on preview. So, you'll get an idea of what I'm doing in real time. You know, computers, you know, any is like 10 years or newer, it shouldn't have any problems processing this. So, I'm going to have the number here, and I'm going to create some rows. So, I'm going to create, let's go with, I don't know, four rows. What do you want to do? Four rows, and then let's see how many columns we should make. Let's do, let's do four rows and four columns, five columns. Four rows, four columns. That'll be fine. We're not trying to do anything fancy here. We're just learning a technique. Now, this doesn't really show you anything yet because there's no gutter, right? There's just grid, they're just basically they're little grids, but there's nothing in between them. So, what we want to do is we want to jack up the gutter on both sides. So, here on the rows, I'm going to up click, and I'm going to drag this up to about 20 pixels to show you the, again, this is just to show you the technique. And I'm going to do the same thing with columns. I'm going to go that up to about 20 pixels. Okay, so now you can really see the grid and how we can do a collage where we'll have like part of his image, my dogs, we're using my dog in this for, for this one in his picture collage. It's going to be a dog face here, dog face here, dog face here, dog face here, and the rest won't be. It'll look kind of collagy, kind of cool. You'll see. All right. Left clicking on okay, we are on our way. Now, the next step is we want to click on the layers over here. So, you might be in the properties, but you'll also should be able to see the layers. And we're going to go ahead and start making some selections. So, what you want to do is you want to make sure you press the V or the Chevron and drop it down so you can see. Now, so you can see all of the paths here, pardon me. So, you'll see all that. Now, the next step, I'm going to left click off of it so I have selected nothing. Okay. And now I want to select these middle four, let's say, and then maybe, I don't know, maybe the top six. I don't know. Well, whatever. It doesn't really matter. Now, to do that, you can want to do is you want to hold down this direct selection tool. And you want to select the squares or the rectangles part of me that you want to use for your collage. So, I want this middle one here. I'm going to hold down command. So, I'm going to shift actually. So, I'm selecting more than one at a time. I've got three selected. I've got these middle four selected. And when I let go, you'll see that. So, I held down command. And if they're adjacent to each other, you can hold down shift. Now, you know I've got these four selected. A, visually, you can tell. But also, you'll see here on the right side under layers that there's little blue rectangles by the dots here or by the little circles. That means those are the selected ones. So, we've selected these four. And you know what? I'm going to make this a little weird. So, I'm going to go ahead and select this one, this one, and then the... Okay, and you know what? Yeah, do I want to do that? Yeah, I do. One, two... Okay, maybe not. Let's just do these four. I don't want to do anything too fancy. I was going to maybe put... It's my dog has huge floppy ears. So, I was going to maybe select his ears to go with this. But no, we're just going to do these four. I don't want to get too tricky here. So, I've got these four. And now, what you want to do is you want to click on them. And you actually... I'm just going to go ahead and make sure they're selected in here as well. So, I've got those four. And now, I'm going to hit Command-G or Control-G if you're on a PC. That's going to group them. So, now we've got a group. So, these four are grouped up and we're getting a little closer. Now, we've got the shape selected. What we want to do now is before I drop the image of my puppy dog on it, we want to take this group, make it into a compound path. So, what you do is you head up here to Object. You go to... And you make sure the group is selected as it is. Go to Compound Path and then go to Make. All right, guys. The final step before we go is you want to go ahead now and make sure you click on Draw Inside. Now, left-clicking here, I'm selected on the Compound Path and you can see I'm on the Compound Path that we just made. Make sure you select Draw Inside. That's going to mean that when I put the picture on here, the picture is only going to be constrained to the inner grid that we drew. So, now that we've got that done, the final step is to go to File, Place. And now, I'm going to select my dog. This is my handsome dog, Kingston. And I'm going to select outside of it. And I'm going to go ahead and just draw a little king here. A little king is going right about here. I'm going to try and make it a little bit too far. Sorry. There we go. That's him. Now, obviously, that's not quite the right size. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure that I click on the edges here. I'm going to move him around. And then, I want to make sure that I can actually change his size. I'm going to change selection tools from the... We're going from this selection tool, which I believe is the Direct Selection Tool, and we're moving to the Actual Selection Tool to change the size. So, I'm going to just drag this in a bit and you'll see here that, okay, I'm liking that. I'm going to drag this in a little bit to make it a little tighter fit. And I don't know if I really like where his eyes are. So, I'm just going to push the up or down keys to sort of reposition it. And if you want to go faster, this goes one pixel at a time. So, it's a little slow. If you want to go a little faster, you can hold down shift, and it'll go 10 pixels at a time. And I'm going to go with something like that. Now, I'm going to click off of it. And this is a picture collage. It is not pretty, but that is the technique from front to back. In a better world, I would also select maybe one of these or both of these grids so that his little pretty handsome ears are in the picture. But that's how you make a collage in Illustrator, guys. Thank you for watching this tutorial. Be back soon.