[ Music ]
>> Hello and welcome to the complete beginners guide
to Adobe Illustrator, brought to you by tastytuts.com.
This is a course created for beginners to Adobe Illustrator.
The topics that are going to be covered
in this course are the basics.
So whether you have the most up to date version of Illustrator
or you are using an older version, you should be able
to follow along just fine.
For this course, I will be using Adobe Illustrator CC.
In this series, we will be starting from the very beginning
and working our way across 19 episodes to learn all the basics
and create an illustration project.
To help break down the process, I have structured the course
in three main sections --
introduction, essential practice and test project.
In the introduction section, I will be introducing you
to Illustrator and bringing you up to speed with some
of the things you need to be aware of before we continue
onto the essential practice section.
In the essential practice section, we are going
to look closely at some of the creative tools
and principles in Illustrator.
Here you will have the opportunity to get hands
on with the various worksheets I have designed and prepared
for you to practice with.
When we get to the test project section, we will be using all
that we have learned in the essential practice section
to create a project from scratch.
After watching this series, you will be able
to create your very own vector artwork ready to print.
Now, if you wish to follow along with this course,
you can download the entire project folder for free.
The link is in the description.
This folder contains all the worksheets,
fonts and project files necessary to follow along.
If you wish to skip ahead or back at any point in the course,
you can find every episode link
in the descriptions of each video.
Also, I suggest you download the PDF worksheet.
You can save this to your computer
and come back at any point.
This is an interactive PDF, which has been designed
to enhance this course experience.
This contains all the relevant video
and project download links.
So I recommend you download this PDF.
And you can also find the download link
for this in the description.
So what is Adobe Illustrator?
Well Adobe Illustrator is part of the Adobe Creative Suite.
And in recent years has become industry standard
for creating vector artwork and the simple layout for print.
If you need to create logos, illustrations, posters,
infographics, T-shirt designs and flyers,
Illustrator is a program to create them in.
The tools in Illustrator make it very easy to create
and modify shapes and strokes to build your compositions
and bring your design to life.
You can also import pixel based images to add to your layouts
as part of your designs.
So what are we going to create on this course?
Now for all you artists, illustrators and designers
out there who love to draw and sketch on paper,
hopefully this course is really going to help you.
We are going to bring a hand drawn sketch,
which has been scanned and placed into Illustrator
and converted into vector artwork.
Then, we are going to use this vector artwork
in a poster and T-shirt design.
So why a T-shirt and poster design?
Well we are going to explore a scenario
where we are going to design for print.
So we are going to be working with CMYK colors for the poster.
Though, for the T-shirt design, we will need to stay
within a budget and use only Pantone colors
that the printer requires.
So we are going to explore how to incorporate pantones
and CMYK swatches into our artwork.
So let's take a look at the finished document.
So here we are in Adobe Illustrator.
And here you are looking
at the finished artwork document we are going to build up to.
So this document consists of four art boards.
The first two art boards contain the development stages
in our project.
And the last two art boards contain the finished designs.
On art board one, we have a vector drawing composition,
which was traced from a sketch drawing, which was scanned
and placed into our document.
This complex composition contains multiple shapes
and stroke vectors.
On art board two, we have the same artwork,
but this is a single flat vector.
The artwork from the first art board has been compounded
into a single vector here.
On art board three is the finished poster artwork.
Here we have lots of colors,
gradient effects, and type objects.
On the last art board is the T-shirt design.
And here we can also see our pantone references,
which we are going to use
to incorporate correct pantone colors into our artwork.
Once we have finished the poster and T-shirt design,
we are then going to export the artwork to the correct format
for a printer to print the design to specification.
Here are two PDF's we are going to finish with.
If we look carefully at the first PDF on the left,
we can see that this is just one page.
And we can see a number of marks and guides around the outside.
Now these are bleed and crop marks that the printer is going
to use to correctly trim the artwork.
Also, we have some color squares
to help the printer collaborate the colors accurately
with their printers.
All these marks and guides have been generated upon exporting
the artwork from the Illustrator document.
And we will be taking a look at how to do this
at the end of the course.
Over to the right, we have the T-shirt artwork PDF.
Now this is a little different from the poster example.
This artwork is going to be printed onto a T-shirt.
So we can see here that the artwork is set
on a white background.
And some of the color in the skull artwork is also white.
This is where the color of the T-shirt is going to come
through and fill these areas.
Notice on this example, we do not have any marks and bleeds.
Well, this design is not going to be printed on paper.
This will become a transfer that will be heat pressed
onto a T-shirt so we do not need marks and bleeds here.
So that is everything we are going build
up to on this course.
So once you have downloaded the project folder,
let's get into it.
And we are going to begin with the first video in the course.
Interface introduction to Adobe Illustrator.
So I will see you in the next video.