Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to go over five essential
tools that I use in Adobe Illustrator every day. And actually, these aren't necessarily
tools. They're just parts of Illustrator that I find really useful. All right, let's get started.
The first tool is the group selection tool. It's right underneath the direct selection tool. Now,
I use this one so often that I made a keyboard shortcut to it. I just type "G"
and it'll automatically bring me to this tool. Now, here's why it's so useful:
Let's say I want to make this part of the "A", which is punched out, a little wider. I can get
on my group selection tool, click right on the edge of that, and so…it's the only thing
selected. The rest of the "A" isn't selected. And then hit "E" which is my free transform tool and
make it a little bigger. I can rotate it and just do whatever I want with it. I'm going to undo.
I just wanted to show you that that's one of the very useful ways to use the group selection tool.
Now, another really useful thing that this will do:
If you use your regular selection tool to select text, it'll select everything even if they're
ungrouped. And these are grouped right now. I'm going to ungroup them with shift CMD G. But right
now I have the "N" only and it's selected all these parts. So what I'm going to do is get my
group selection tool. I'll click right on the edge of that, and that means all these other pieces are
not selected. So, I could hide this, then hit CMD Y or CTRL Y, then just select the
pieces that I don't want. I accidentally got that one, so I'm going to hold shift and deselect it,
and now delete this. Now I'll go to object > show all, and now we have the "N" without these little
punch-out areas. So, the group selection tool makes it really easy to click right on the edge of
something and be able to select that whole shape. Now, if you use your regular direct selection,
you'll actually only be selecting that piece. You won't have the whole shape selected.
Now, there is one more way to use the group selection tool,
and that's to select groups of things. So, these little dots down here are grouped. Now,
it really does matter how they're grouped, but we can find out pretty easily. So, I'll click once,
and I'll click twice on the same area, and that gets the whole group. If I click again,
I'll get the next part that's grouped, which are all these little dot areas. And then I can click
again on one of those and get the next part. So, you can select different parts of the group, so
it will keep on selecting more and more of the group as you click until you get to the final one,
which in this case was the clipping mask. Okay, that is one I use every single time
I open Illustrator. It's super useful in my workflow. The second tool I use all the time,
which is not really a tool, is outline mode. So, it's right up here under view, outline,
and this gives you the wireframe of everything. I'm going to hit CMD Y or CTRL Y to get back out.
Now, I want to select these bushes, but if I try to do that, I click the whole thing which is not
what I want. So, I'm going to do it with CMD Y or CTRL Y. Now, let's say I just wanted to select
this green area and move it over or something like that. I can hit CMD+Y or CTRL+Y. I'm going to use
my group selection again, select all these pieces, and lock them with CMD+2 or CTRL+2.
And I'll do the same up here. I don't want to select that, so I'll hold Shift and click it.
And then I'll hit CMD+2 or CTRL+2 to lock those. Okay, so now I've got all these pieces. I don't
want this, so I'll hold Shift and deselect that. And then I can move these over. Then
I'll hit CMD+Y or CTRL+Y to get back out. Maybe I'll move them down a little bit, and now this
part doesn't match up, which brings me to my next favorite tool, which is the pencil tool.
Now, you can use the pencil tool to redraw parts of the path, and that's what I'm going
to do with this dark green area back behind here. So I have it selected, I'm going to hit N
to get my pencil tool, which is right over here, and then I'm just going to kind of draw this shape
around the pieces that I want. And I have to end up going the same way on that path.
So let me undo that with CMD+Z. So I started going this way on the shape and then I varied,
I went off and did my own thing. But in order for this pencil tool to work this way, you have
to end up right back on that line going the same direction. Now, we can also hold Option to get to
the smooth tool and kind of smooth out parts if we want to do that. That will only work if you set it
up here in your preferences. So double click your pencil, and it's right here, "Option key toggles
to smooth tool." If you're on a PC, this will probably say "Alt key toggles to smooth tool."
So it's either Option or Alt. My next favorite tool is the Q tool,
that's the lasso tool, and you can just hit Q on your keyboard to get to it. And I like
this one for many of the same reasons. It makes it easier to select things. So if I want to make this
mushroom taller, I'm going to zoom in on that. I'll hit CMD+Y or CTRL+Y to get into preview mode.
With my group selection tool, I'm going to select all this grass and hide it with CMD+3,
and same over here, just kind of get rid of everything but the mushroom.
Okay, so if I hit CMD+Y or CTRL+Y, I can see that really the only thing we
have is the mushroom. Now, I'm going to hit CMD+Y or CTRL+Y to get back in here,
and then I'll hit Q to get to my lasso tool. The lasso tool will select whatever you draw around,
so I'm going to draw around the cap of the mushroom
so we have all the filled points selected. I'm going to switch over to my A tool, which is
the direct selection tool, click on one of those points, and just drag this up so it's taller. Now,
it looks like I accidentally got a piece of this I didn't want. I don't think it bothers me,
so I'm going to hit CMD+Y or CTRL+Y to get back. And then I'm going to unhide everything
with "Object > Show All," and now our little mushroom is a lot taller.
Okay, and then the fifth tool that I really love is the magic wand tool, and you
can get to it by hitting Y on your keyboard. It's right up here. Now, this tool will select
all similar colors. So if we click on this green color, it's going to get all similar
greens. I'm on my Y tool. I'm just going to hit Enter or Return to bring up the options,
and I'll change my tolerance to 20. You can see that we also have some other options in here.
I always leave this at fill color, but you can select stroke colors or weight, opacity,
blending mode, and all that. I'm going to deselect with Shift CMD A or Shift CTRL A, and then I'm
going to select the green again. Now it got all these greens, but didn't get the greens in here.
But the nice thing about doing this is you can change all these colors at once with the Recolor
Artwork tool. Maybe you want everything to be a little bit lighter. You can pull this slider and
watch it change in real-time. You can also just click in here and change the hues of the colors.
I'm going to go ahead and undo that. Now, as you probably noticed, I use these tools
all together, so I'm always flipping back and forth between CMD Y/CTRL
Y, which is the Outline mode, I'll get in there and then redraw it with my Pen tool,
then hit CMD Y or CTRL Y to get back out. So those are my five favorite tools, the ones that I really
use the most in Adobe Illustrator. All right, I hope this video is useful for you. If you want to
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