you and I both love Adobe Illustrator but how can we get the most out of this software and we're
going to start things off right here where I'm going to hide this content with this command or
control 3 just for now and the first thing that we can really make use of in today's tutorial is with
the scale tool which is s on your keyboard or of course you can come over to here in the tool panel
now with this tool selected we can press enter on your keyboard which will take us
to this very Nifty little panel and you'll soon see how much potential this single panel has
now I have a rectangle covering my entire artboard and sometimes we want to make multiple shapes
across our designs at the exact same size so for example I can press 25 for the horizontal
number and now my shape is exactly a quarter of my artboard or my design I can then just hold
down the alt option key and click and drag to duplicate this shape before pressing command or
control D to repeat it twice more and if by Magic these four shapes fit exactly onto my artboard up
to the edges there are multiple ways to do this but it's always great to know various different
workarounds in software plus the scale tool is just really great in different situations there
are a whole variety of reasons why you might want to split up your design into sections for
instance here I'm essentially giving location and space to parts of my design and that allows me to
visualize my layout just a bit differently and of course with each segment being a different
shape we can now have some fun with things such as the HSP sliders and if you ask me these HSB
sliders are pretty underrated in the design Community but here I've selected each of the
four rectangles and then holding down shift and highlighting each one as I go with a single click
but yeah just remember that scale tool does have that kind of hidden panel which can be very useful
but now let's look at something very radically different have you ever tried making shadows in
illustrator but they just end up looking miserable now I've got a few tricks that will certainly help
you make the uglier Shadow have a sense of realism attached to it and to demonstrate we have here a
golden hand and firstly we need to look at where the light is coming from on our object and to
me it seems like it's from the left side of the design where the light source would probably be
so my shadow is probably going to point and move towards the right of my design in some
kind of way get this wrong and your design will simply look unrealistic and just an
impossible fact of nature so let's press L for the ellipse tool and then create a shape like so
now we're going to add a gradient but the next few steps are very very important for one side
of your gradient make sure it's a dark kind of black and I've gone for a more charcoal
kind of black here as opposed to jet black but for the opposite side of the gradient we want
to sample the background color by pressing I on your keyboard and then just sampling
the color then heading into the color here we can copy the hex code with command or control C
now head back to the gradient and paste in the hex code into the RGB slider with command or Ctrl V
we want this side of the gradient to either be zero percent opacity or for it just to
be a low kind of percent and that's so it Blends into your design smoothly make sure
your object is to the front of the layers and then add a gaussian blur to your ellipse
now you might be thinking to yourself that's it Shadow complete but hey you'd be wrong often
when working with raster effects like this in illustrator we have unfavorable edges like you
can see at the very top Edge right here the best workaround for this is to add a feather effect
which can be found up here at the top while you're doing this click preview and have a
look at what kind of values work best for your Shadow and then when you're ready just hit OK
the great thing about this is that we can edit the shape and even the gradient after having added the
blur effect you might even want to add a second darker blur kind of closer to the hand for extra
depth now you might be wondering where did you acquire that Golden Hand from and well that is
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as usual now you can find that link in description box below but for now let's head on to more Adobe
Illustrator discoveries in today's tutorial this next section is all about some keyboard shortcuts
that few people use but which save a bunch of time now the first one is to send to the back which is
shift command bracket and then of course the PC variation now this saves just so much time and so
does the opposite of that one which is bring to the front it saves you having to come up to the
object drop down menu at the top and during long workflows this just makes heaps of sense so now
the snake is actually behind the background layer and I can actually keep editing and manipulating
it freely and here's another Nifty one when you have a pile of objects just hold down the command
or the control key until you see this icon appear and then you can just click click click until you
reach the object you want to this prevents you from moving objects around on your design to get
to one kind of object and often it is actually quicker than using the layers panel now here's
a shortcut that I only recently started using in my workflows we know that if you copy something
and then paste it with a command or control V it kind of just pastes it in an annoying location
you might want to paste the object directly exactly behind the copied version so press
command or control B for back again the more you know the more efficient you can
be when using design software and this one is a really neat addition to your knowledge
so the alternative which I've been using for ages actually is command
or control F and this will paste the copy directly over the top
when working in illustrator we want to try and be as precise as possible while saving us time
and that's exactly what these shortcuts do and speaking of being precise I bet you've
had situations where no matter how hard you try an object just won't snap to the edges of your
artboard for whatever reason one neat solution is to turn on the Align to artboard button and
then snap to the left Edge like so now if I duplicate it I can have peace of mind that
it is in fact a snap to the edges of my artboard by using this function in the Align window what
do you say let's have some fun and make a dope background right here selecting both shapes I'm
going to click make blend and then use the specify steps option with a number of four
then come here and choose blend and make that's pretty cool but let's move this across a press a
for the direct selection tool and then bring the blend left anchor into the center of my design
let's use that copy command of command control F and paste the duplicate right in place on top
then I'm just going to hold down shift so I can rotate it perfectly at a 180 degree angle and
like before instead of moving it and potentially not having it perfectly in place we can snap it to
the right Edge and Presto Chango that looks pretty cool actually I'm going to shift-click each blend
and then change the steps so that we actually get rid of these space bars between each bar
that looks pretty cool but why stop there let's uh let's do something else to it press M for the
rectangle tool and then select a dark color preferably black then we're going to add a
grain of texture to this shape just to give the background some added Intrigue and uniqueness
the final step would be to play around with the blend modes in the transparency window
and as you can see there is a slight texture to my design right now you can add as little
or as much grain to your design but just remember to stay precise and one way to
do that is to work in the Align window with the artboard button highlighted if
you think you're ready for more tips tricks and Adobe Illustrator goodness just click a
video on screen and until next time guys design your future today peace foreign