Drawing with Basic Shapes

Let's keep thinking about how we're
going to use illustrator,

to make our, basic drawings.

So when we think about drawing, it is

perfectly fine if you have zero drawing
skills.

Most people think, that you need to have,
um, this like very fluid ability to use

a pen or a pencil or charcoal to make
something hand drawn, with hand to paper.

When we're thinking of illustrator we're
gonna start with a slightly

different format.

We're going to think about the way
vectors, so here's a vector image,

the way vectors are really just made of
basic shapes.

So the first way to tackle the idea of
drawing in illustrator is to just break

apart any image, or any idea, into its
most fundamental shapes.

So this is actually a really lovely
drawing here, done in illustrator.

Uh, very nice sort of vector based
portrait, we could call this.

I want you to see what this is.

What is this made of?

At its most basic form, we could think
about this in terms of

basic, basic, basic, shapes.

So, we'll start at the bottom.

We've got this kind of, uh, black shape
here.

We've got a blue one.

Basically got a soft kind of round
triangle.

We've got some half circles, here's some
more half circles.

Y'know the mouth is some sort of a circle
with a layer of white over it.

Our hair is basically a circle that's
broken up into some wavy shapes.

Our background is just one square of pink.

So we're thinking about sort of looking at
illustrations and breaking them down

into their most basic forms.

From there, we can use our basic shapes

in illustrator to start drawing these
objects.

Now this one has some, sort of complicated
shapes that we'll get to.

We can do the same with any logo.

So think about how a logo looks.

I want you to start sort of
diagnosing it.

Here we've got a circle of, a light, kind
of mid-orange color maybe?

We've got a white circle,

and then we have these petal shapes,
with some little white yellowish oblongs.

Our straw here is basically just like a
line or rectangle, we have our leaf shape.

It's all about basic shapes layered
on top of each other, to give the illusion

of a three dimensional object.

Here, water drops, it's all about the
application of

color, shading, highlighting, but
essentially,

these are all pretty basic shapes.

So, start to look at things for what they
are, in terms of their most basic shape.

When we're in illustrator, I'm gonna go
over the basic shapes today,

how we use them.

Um, you're gonna start practicing, and I'm
gonna give you a practice file to work

with, where you end up drawing something
using just basic shapes.

But let's start looking at our tools, so

here I have a single artboard document
still.

You can zoom in or zoom out.

We're gonna do all of the work, on this
white document.

So starting at the top, of illustrators
tools, we have a selection tool,

and a direct selection tool.

These are gonna be important, we're gonna
come back to them in just a minute.

These are the tools that we will use to
edit, our shapes.

So in illustrator we're working with real
basic shapes,

we're gonna start with the given tools.

So we got a rectangle tool here.

If you click and hold, we have rectangle

ellipse, circle, polygon, star,
line segment.

So let's just start with our basic
rectangle tool.

As you use your tools for shapes, you're
simply gonna come into your document,

and click and drag.

Whatever shape you drag to will be the
shape that is drawn, now,

automatically, you see this blue bounding
box.

Might be a different color depending on
your layers, but, each shape in

illustrator is considered to be live.

Unlike photoshop, where we would have
something, and we would have to

transform it, with edit transform,
menu option.

In illustrator, they're sort of just
always live.

So they're kind of always ready to be
edited.

And we know that because we can see the
bounding box, all these blue lines,

and white boxes, indicate that we can
edit the shape, in a number of ways.

When we're thinking about, drawing a shape
and using color,

we have two opportunities.

We have the fill color, which is the
entirety of the object,

as if a paint bucket has been dumped
on it.

Or, we have the edge color, which we're
gonna call stroke.

We can edit these colors, from a few
different places,

we have our properties.