 Hi everyone! After the overwhelming response to my Pokemon videos I thought it'd be fun to create some illustrator tutorials to help other artists figure out how to use vector programs. Please if you enjoy this drop a like, drop a follow. You can find me on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn. Today we're going to be drawing with an iPad Pro. This is my iPad. It's a third generation. I think refurbished because it's a little bit cheaper and it works perfectly. I use an Apple Pen here. And this is my case. It's a unicorn beetle taste. It's got a nice little kickstand which is helpful for drawing on the go. And it's pretty drop-proof because I'm clumsy. Today we're going to be learning via the illustrator app right here. And that's what I'm going to be drawing for you today. The app came out in October of 2020 so it's relatively new. Illustrator is a vector program which means that you're drawing in mathematics equations versus raster images which are pixel-based. So you can actually take a vector drawing and upscale it as much as you want. It'll still retain that same crispness. So it's just great especially if we're doing things for print or stickers or anything really. Quick note, if you want to fast forward to watch me actually do the art and learn that way, there's a link in the comments so that you can skip forward to that exact part. If you want to know all the little details and what the tools are stay tuned because that's what I'm going to go over first. Okay, so something I really like about Illustrator and any real vector program is that you have your canvas but you can also draw outside of your canvas. Look at the space that you have to draw. What? You can go absolutely nuts and just draw wherever, whatever. That's what makes it fun. I'm just gonna start with the tools that I used to draw. So if you come over here this is that pencil tool that I've used in a lot of my videos. So if I select this pencil tool, this is my fill color right now. I could make this an outline color by switching these arrows so you have your fill up here in your outline right here. I'm just gonna focus on fills for today but I'll show you an example of the outline. So now that I have the pencil tool I can draw a circle and as soon as I get to that or close enough to that original spot it's actually gonna connect it for me which is nice. If you hold down in this little arrow here you'll see the other drawing tool. This is what we would call the blob brush tool and these are also in the full Illustrator version on your PC as well or PC, whatever computer you use. It's the full computer version. They give you a few different brushes in here that you can use. I always go to basic round. Okay and then make sure this is in a fill right here. I personally like size one. I get enough variance and some in a small canvas but you can go to whatever size you want. Let me show you an example of like size four. Okay come over here. This is your smoothing tool. Apparently I have it set to one but the higher you get it the more it's gonna smooth out your lines for you. Did you see that as I'm drawing? It's calculating it and then it smooth it out. So the higher I have that on it makes it a straight line but you don't always want the computer to calculate that much. I guess that's why I have it set to all the way to one because I have a pretty fast handle already and I don't want it to change my art too much. I love drawing in vector but I also love my own fluid lines. But if you're having problems with jitteriness I suggest turning up the smoothness and you won't have that. Okay so I'm gonna set mine to one and then you come in here to the brush settings. I have my roundness all the way up. You can see what happens when you turn it down becomes more of a tapered angled stroke. My angle's at 90 and leave that alone. My pressure dynamics I think when you start it's at 40. I put mine all the way up because I want let's say I'll show you what happens when it's at 22. I have size four line. There's not much of a pressure difference when you press down. It gets a little bit thicker but if I have the pressure set to 100% I have a full beautiful variation and that's what I want. That's what helps me create these beautiful lines here. Now see even just size four is a little bit much for me. That's why I prefer size one or two. Not more variance but control in my lines. Those are my basic drawing tools. Let's go in. We have an eraser here so they're still coming out with features in Illustrator. Actually the Rotate if you to finger and turn this just came out this feature and I know it's in their other apps but it was very exciting to be able to do this finally on the iPad in Illustrator. But unfortunately one of the things I learned from Procreate was double tapping on the pencil to switch to the eraser tool. Well not quite in Illustrator yet. They haven't added that. If you double tap in it it automatically goes to the Pen tool right here which I don't often use yet. So I've just been having to manually move to the eraser. It was annoying at first but I'm so used to it now I'm in care. You have your color rule here. You have your hex code here which is nice for web. You have swatches and color book options which is great for when you're designing for printing. Let me show you how that outline is beneficial with the pencil tool. So we have our fill right. Let's write some script. I'm gonna select each object that I just made and now it's an outline. You might notice that I'm dragging using the selection tool and when I drag this little bar comes up here which is nice because you can set the transparency of an object right here. That comes in handy when you're coloring. I can also change the stroke width. This changes the stacking order of the layers so as you can see if I turn this into outlines. Actually let me turn that into fill just so you can see. Okay so right now this purple is over the orange. I can change the stacking order so that the purple is now under the orange. Very important later on when you're coloring. This is just the position. This locks that so now I can't touch it and it even tells you this layer is locked here. This one's not so I can continue editing this one. Yep I can click that to unlock it which is very nice. This means you can duplicate it so now I've got two. Super easy and this gets rid of it. If I select both of these I can use this tool which merges them together so now they're neither one or I can emerge them. Another two again. I'm gonna select this segment tool that's gonna help me move segments along so if I using this tool you can see all the the nodes in this vector that I can move around and reshape to help me to help me mold this object a little bit more. Now if I press this circle here I can move just one instead of both of them because before right I'm moving both and now I select this and it's just one so it helps you kind of get a little bit more movement in here. So you notice this little bar down here when I select this it makes an angle out of that node. If I click on this one it rounds it out again and then this one gets rid of it but still keeps it connected. This one gets rid of it completely which leaves me with an open hole so if I select my pen tool I can continue to fill this. Alright you've also got the shapes tool here. Delete these so I can make a square hold it down. You got all the other fun shapes so if you hold down this little circle here it transforms it uniformly. You've got your text tool, you've got your artboard presets and you can import things here. Okay so now let's go to this other side over here. I'm gonna move this back down. You have your undo, redo. This is your profile. This is how you export things so you can quick export as a PNG or you can export it as Illustrator, PDF, all these other file types. You can even do a Photoshop layered file which is awesome for some of my clients that don't quite use vectors yet but they open things in Photoshop so it works. They have some tutorials and gestures you can set up in here. These are your settings. You can rename your file here which I will leave it now. You could change your units from pixels to inches, centimeters, millimeters, etc. I don't believe you can change your color mode quite yet. Let's find out. Oh not quite yet. Oh something I do want to tell you to turn on is palm rejection. Otherwise drawing with either of your hands is going to leave you with stray marks and that drove me crazy. I touched on the double tap functions really quick but as you can see you can switch it from your color picker, deselect an object, switch to the pen tool or zoom but you can't switch to eraser yet. Come on Adobe give me the eraser. A few more shortcuts in here. In general my tool bars on the left, my color scheme is light. You could change it to dark if you wanted to but I'm gonna keep it on light. I always have scale strokes and effects on so that means when you are scaling things all of the strokes that you have are going to scale with it so it's not gonna remain a one point stroke it's gonna scale up to two or three based on how big you make it which is very useful especially if you're setting files out and have to resize because if that doesn't scale with the image you're gonna have this one point tiny line on things that you made huge so make sure you have this selected. Yes so view mode preview or outlines. Outlines help you see so this is the outline of an object if I switch back to preview you could see that it has an actual outline in a fill but on the outlines you just see the vector object as it's stacked together so it kind of gives you a general view of all the items that you have in here versus the preview so you could see what's if something's hiding underneath something it's useful. Okay let's switch back to preview. You'll notice something a little different when you're working in vectors that almost every object is sort of on its own layer so I have a circle here and I'm gonna create a triangle and these shapes are independent of each other so I can move this behind here. Separate from the layers we have our properties which don't have anything in here now but if I drew a circle you can see now my properties I can transform it I can lock the width and height if I want to transform it I can rotate it I can also use this right here to rotate it which is nice and fill and stroke is also over here so we got it in two spots right here and right here I can lower the opacity I could switch it to multiply screen overlay etc and I can add my own stroke down here to connect strokes in many places and strokes in many spots you could turn a grid on if you wanted to over here this is the shapes combining shapes right here which I feel like is a whole thing on its own we'll get to that you can cut and paste objects in here this is your aligning more objective facts here grouping them here's your text effects your different paths that also came on that drop down earlier and this is a really cool radial thing that I haven't played much with but we're gonna fast-forward and draw one of my favorite little blue kitten characters that I created and this is how I learn through watching other people create and if that's how you learn great let's do it a lot of artists including me will mirror their artwork to make sure that everything is looking okay facing the other direction and something looks weird you usually mirror it to see what is off and what you need to fix so if you come over here this will help you align it to different parts of the artboard but we're gonna go into the flip over here that's your mirror cool so I can flip it both ways that's a quick tool just so you know how to mirror your artwork that was pretty important for me I think we're ready so I've got my sketch right I'm gonna go into my layers get everything selected I either do is click I'm gonna turn the opacity down and actually I like to set it to multiply you don't have to you can I'm gonna make a new layer and I'm gonna move that new layer it'll probably help if I name these layers but you get a sketch layer double click above my new layer it's locked it's set to multiply I'm gonna change to my pencil tool make my fill whatever color your character so mine is blue so I know based on just animating and creating vectors in the past that I'm gonna actually start with the back objects just so I don't have to move things around it doesn't matter because you can move these around later so just have freedom when you're drawing but for instance I know these ears are gonna be behind his head and I'm probably not gonna draw them all together because I want the gradients to fill in differently so I'm gonna draw her ears first that shape up that shape up and I'm going to draw her head oh my gosh okay see even with palm rejection on going to adjust the nodes a little bit I guess this is what you would call cleaning up your vectors if you don't want to do this don't do it it helps me control my lines a lot more when I do this I'm determining which ones I need based on how they're reacting to the line like for instance so I really need this one because these are probably gonna create a nice curve by themselves and if I get rid of it really didn't change anything but now I have more control over here I probably don't need these two I could probably just have one in the middle but believe it for now the reason I didn't do this tough of hair with the rest of this is because I'm probably gonna have a different gradient attached to this one and you'll see what I mean later but I'm just gonna quickly do that one on its own we work for our purposes okay and the app just quit on me so not without bugs let's try that again it's okay it happens let's see it saved everything automatically that's the best like I'm not even mad now you have such a high functioning program that they've created an app against so there there are bugs but just to be able to do this on an iPad Pro is actually pretty incredible so we're gonna draw right this is what I want my eye to be I'm not gonna actually do the black part so I want these inside that white portion I'm gonna go to my layers and see remember this little circle here I'll move it over here just so you can see it more if I select this I could select multiple items at once well I'm gonna create a clipping mask out of this white area portion right I'm gonna duplicate it which it did it in here I'm gonna drag it to the top because this is now going to be my clipping mask for these eyepieces so if I select the yellow and this is gonna let me select multiple objects I'm gonna select the yellow in the white I'm gonna come over here make a clipping mask and now that is in that white portion only so I have this clip group right here I can now drag this black object in here and it is clipped with the rest of it and this eyelash I'm gonna bring all the way up and now I've got my cute little eye and I could have made these shapes with the circle tool as well if I wanted an exact circle but I find that using exact shapes gives my characters less life I don't know I like not everything is a perfect circle so I like to make them my own there we go we got one eye so now we could do the same thing on the other eye so if you select a previous shape it's going to load that color in here so that you can continue drawing with that color lock that draw my other eye over here select black gonna duplicate this object maybe there we go move it all the way up select these two pretty clipping mask and move this guy in there as well that eyelash all the way up and we've got our eyes yay so I'm going I want to make this a little larger but I'm gonna scale it proportionally so I'm gonna select here and scale a little bit bigger there we go alright I'm gonna go ahead and fill up the rest of these shapes and you can catch up once I'm done with that and we'll go into a little bit of shading just a little touch of shading so now we're gonna work with gradients to add some simple shading to this so it's not exactly gonna be cell shading but you'll see how gradients just give this much more of a dynamic popping off because there's some shapes in here that you can't tell on front of others like this little tuft here tuft of hair until I add a gradient you're not gonna see that this is in front of the head here same thing with this little tuft of fur so I'm gonna keep my sketch on just so that you're clear of where the layers fall that we know that this is in front okay so going into gradients first I'm going to select my shape select the color select gradient and I'm gonna select the linear sorry I'm gonna select the linear gradient tool so you'll see it picked a color for me I'm not sure what the if this is a previous color I used or what kind of the reason it picks these colors but I actually tend to like the colors that it picks like that's a pretty little gradient here so I'm gonna do that on both sides as you can see it automatically picked this gradient for this ear and now I can adjust it to where I like and it's just a nice little hint of extra color and I'm gonna do that with the blue shape too go to gradient click linear and as you can see it chose a different color I don't know how or why but I absolutely love it and I tend to just go with the colors that it chooses for me unless they're totally horrible see look at that go choose the body do the same thing I always date these tutorials as I figure out what I'm doing be like oh it does this because of that so if you know drop me a comment I love it I'm gonna do both ears individually as well since I made these their own objects you'll notice they're in the back just like I was saying the gradients are gonna set that apart so I didn't want it a part of the head because now I can have different shading effects so now this little touch of hair in the front I'm gonna go ahead and do the same gradient oh look it's not in the front let's move it make sure I'll use this to move it now it's in the front that was easy alright I don't actually want this to go to this dark blue because this is the lightest part of my face so I'm gonna change the gradient so that this color which is the basic fur color is gonna be down here and this color I'm gonna change to maybe I'll usually do yellow let's see what yellow does it's not so bad so it's got some highlights but now you can identify the tuft from the rest of the hair and it looks like if I turn the sketch layer off you kind of see how I'm layering things I'm gonna leave that sketch layer off for now just to be kind of figure out where we're going here now white it just created black so I'd never like to use black as my shading color I'm gonna switch this to pretty little purple and you'll notice there's a little half line here so you can adjust how far the gradient goes and make it just down here now this tuft is probably gonna have the same gradient oh okay so it's gonna automatically go to this black color as the gradient if you want to use the same color what I've been doing is I'll select the gradient I will make a swatch out of it right here so I'll go add swatch and now I have that gradient to choose from so if I choose this right here okay this is a slight I don't know if they're gonna fix this in the future but applying these just applies it to one node of the gradient I'm calling these nodes to one shade of the gradient so it doesn't quite work when I choose a gradient color so what I've been doing is I go into solid color fill it with a solid color fill it with a gradient now I can select this gradient probably gonna yeah that's a little better now this fur kind of blends into that what you can also do with gradients which is really cool let's say it probably won't work on this one but let's say instead of filling this with a gradient so that it disappeared I just wanted to make it white right so now this is a whole white gradient I'm gonna make this a lower opacity so that it blends into nothing and as you can see it kind of worked up here too but if I adjust it down here same outcome so sometimes I'll work with opacity sometimes I'll work with color but really I get a good enough effect of color by itself so I can go ahead and select any of my white areas and apply that gradient oh it's gone okay let me draw it real quick this is a lot I'm gonna unlock it choose my yellow let's see what gradient it gives me green eh not my bag let's change it there we go that looks nice gonna add that swatch here so that I can color this one with the same one alright I like to add some color to my pupils too so they're not completely black so it automatically filled it in with white but I want it mostly black and I'm going to use a purple or a blue probably blue for this one yeah I'll use blue you'll notice I can change the transparency here too of each color if I wanted to so that's pretty helpful how does it choose these colors? I just don't sometimes it's awesome sometimes I just see I'll take that that works it seems to be a theme though with pink it chooses yellow yellow it chooses a green alright so here's our kitty so far she's shabby so apart from here what I'll normally do is I'll create a few clipping masks like we do with the eyes and I'll add shading here so I'm probably not going to go into detail on this I'm going to wait for another video but I just want to give you a little example I have a gradient actually selected right now so this will be fun to see just to kind of show you I would add some shading here right there okay I'm going to duplicate this all the way down here I'm going to drag it up now I'm going to select both these objects create a clipping mask and now I'm going to change this gradient you can see here like this I actually tend to when I'm doing shading I tend to blend it into reds so I tend to blend these into reds as gradients because it's so pretty a little bit and I might even lower the opacity of this one just so that it blends in like 50% although I don't see this little tuft I'm going to the shading is on top of that so I'm actually going to drag the shading down eventually there we go I adjust these nodes because it's not quite where I like it so if you continue to add shading you add a whole another dynamic to your character and because it's in vector I can zoom in as far as I want to and it just looks beautiful it's gorgeous and I can zoom out until she's a little teeny tiny and I have all this artboard to continue drawing in I love it and just a quick tip if you want to resize your artboard you can actually you can rename it by double clicking that I believe you can go into your artboard here yep you click right here you can resize it right here and it'll tell you on the side here what width you're choosing so that is pretty awesome and it counts for exporting things if you need to export it smaller as a PNG or a larger high res version you definitely want to resize your artboard so I'm going to end this intro to Illustrator here we kind of dove into a lot of the little tips and tricks that I use on every single one of my drawings I love seeing the videos that you all create out of my tips and tricks so I'd love to see your content drop me an email share it on Instagram just let's draw together don't forget to drop a like and a follow I'll create a lot more tutorials if I get a good response and thank you for watching