are you looking to get into Adobe Illustrator but have no clue where to
start trust me I've been there I had such a
struggle when I first started using Adobe Illustrator I'm still learning
today however I have put together these ten little top tips for beginners when
you start using Adobe Illustrator so without further ado let's get straight
into the video the first thing that I always recommend is to practice with the
pen tool the pen tool can be so daunting when you first give it a go it seems to
not be fluid it seems to be a little bit confusing trust me I've been there
however I can assure you that it gets a lot better with practice what I'd
recommend is following tutorials on YouTube having it a little play around
with the tool itself and just seeing what you can create I actually have
created a video of my own showing you how I use the pen tool so I will leave
that in the clickable I button and you can go and check that out after this video
but basically once you've got the hang of the pen tool you can create anything
you want in Illustrator so that is a must you also need to make friends with
the Pathfinder so switching over to my laptop as you can see I have an array of
random shapes on my screen and I'm going to quickly demonstrate for you how the
Pathfinder works so we have two shapes here a square and a star and I'm just
going to quickly put this star in another color so you can see and you'll
find the Pathfinder tool down here in this panel so it's the two squares
overlapping if you can't see it it's in Windows and down here make sure that is
ticked so the Pathfinder allows you to cut out shapes join shapes basically
illustrator is lots of shapes put together to make a pretty picture
effectively by doing this you can drag over the star and I don't know I want to
cut out this star from the square so I'm going to highlight both shapes and if I
click this one it will take it away and then another example if I click like
this and click this one on the left it will join them together so it's one
solid shape and then yeah you can just play around with it so
again try the other ones you can click this and it just leaves the overlap you
can kind of see where I'm going with this it's worth some experimenting with
to find how it will be useful to you however I'm going to quickly show you
how I would use it so let's draw some circles and then we need a rectangle and
then I'm gonna just curve one corner of the rectangle so now we have what looks
like a cloud however it's made up from a bunch of different circles and a
weird-looking rectangle with a rounded corner so in order to join these
together you just select them all and click this one on the left and now that
is one solid shape it's not just a bunch of different elements so that's the
Pathfinder tool I definitely recommend having a play around with that and
seeing how it can work for you alongside the Pathfinder panel is also the shape
builder tool this is a tool I always forget about but when I use it it
honestly helps so much here we have a very rubbish looking house so this house
as hopefully you can see in fact let's change the color of this we now have an
orange house this is made from a number of shapes so we've got a triangle at the
top a rectangle for the chimney and then obviously the windows and doors so with
this shape build a tool you can select the parts of the shape that you want to
join together effectively again you can play around with it there'll be loads of
different ways that you can use it so you can select all of the house you okay
why you moving bye I love it when my laptop glitches try again so here we
select all of the shapes and then the shape builder tool is here it's just two
little circles and an arrow icon that you can see that my cursor is sort of
making a grid appear over the different elements you can kind of see it better
on the white ones so basically all you do is draw over the bits you want to
join together so I'm gonna start up here I want the chimney I want the roof I
want the house but I don't want the windows and the doors because I want
them to be cut out there we go so now as you can see it's one solid shape the
windows and doors have been cut out they aren't included now and we have one
solid shape that I can move around together without
to group and ungroup things the next one high on my list and one of the reasons I
love using illustrator is the color panel tool it's probably got a different
name but I don't know it so we'll just call it that
so for me my color tools are right at the top down here I actually want the
color guide tool this time and in here you'll be able to see that it is
arranged in a bunch of different shades for me to choose from
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the color guide in here go into Windows and just click color guide and it will
appear so from here you can select shades of the color you've got selected
so obviously right now we have this like burnt orange shade and if you click the
drop-down it will come up with a bunch of different recommended colors in the
various color match options so you can go for complementary colors and then it
will let you select the different swatches so let's go with these circles
down here so let's say I want to color the circles in this color wave and I
have a ready-made color palette waiting for me right in Illustrator let's get
rid of the outline so there we go as you can see there's so many different
options you can have a play around with which one's suit your project but this
makes it so much easier because it's all in the same application the next tool
that actually always really daunted me I have only recently really made the use
of this tool and only really seen the capabilities of it is the clipping mask
tool so with the clipping mask it allows you to sort of like a cookie cutter
effectively cut out the only bit of pattern that you want to keep or the
only elements you want to keep that description probably makes zero
sense so here I have a vector illustration of these splashes and as
you can see when I move my mouse over it you can see the vectors actually go
outside the artboard so how do you do this I here
you asking I'm in such a weird mood today I apologize so this is is a clipping
mask so I'm gonna go over into another document and quickly show you how it
works so I've just got three shapes in an artboard it can be any pattern that
you want any shapes that you want this is just a simple demonstration so what
I'm gonna do is just draw a circle and all I want to do is sort of
cookie-cutter it out I'm gonna highlight everything I'm gonna click object
clipping mask and make there's also a shortcut and by doing that you can see
that it's just left the circle part showing however when I hover over it you
can still see the squares in the background this means that I can adjust
where those squares are I can adjust the pattern I can do whatever I want to the
squares themselves but it still leaves the circle intact again it'll make way
much more sense if you just give it a go I have a play around with it and don't
be afraid to experiment alright the next thing is to get familiar with the
keyboard shortcuts I'm sure you all know copy and paste I use a Mac so mine is a
command C for copy command V for paste it's shift C and shift V for a Windows
user on illustrator there are actually so many different keyboard shortcuts
that will speed up your creative process making everything a lot quicker and
smoother and less stressful which I'm sure we all need to find the shortcuts
all you need to do is hover over the different tools and in the brackets
you'll be able to see the relevant shortcut alongside it I like using the
eyedropper tool to select a color from somewhere else I also use V for the
selection tool a for the direct selection tool and a bunch of different
other things P is for the pen tool you kind of see where it's going so there'll
be a lot of shortcuts that eventually you'll pick up over time but I do highly
recommend picking a select maybe three or four and trying to use them and
implement them within your work whilst you're designing on illustrator the next
one for me I feel like is a really underrated tool but it is in the
majority of Adobe applications so it can apply to a lot of different things this
is the align tool again I'll demonstrate that's why I'm here
I just whacked myself in the face so the align tool is down here it has like a
straight line and two rectangles in it when you click on it it's got a bunch of
different options which I'm sure that's very confusing to begin with again
window and align will bring that up if you can't already see it so let's
pretend we're drawing a little picket fence or a gate or something or prison
bars I'm just gonna copy a bunch of these bars over and there we go so what
I could do I have my guides on I could sit and sort of arrange all of these as
you can see it's sort of guesses the distance for me and what I want
however the quicker way of doing this is to sort of guesstimate the size that you
want highlight them firstly this tool here will stack them all so they're
all even on the top and bottom so as you can see this one in the middle isn't in
line with the other ones so if I click this tool it will jump
them all together and align them I'll just do that again so you can see so as
you can see they're not all straight so if I click this tool it aligns them all
horizontally and then if I want these fence poles to be even what a weird
demonstration I know all I need to do is click this one and then it will
distribute everything evenly so it kind of looks at the one at the end and the
one at the beginning and spreads everything out in the middle so I'll
click that and there you go it has created an even space in the middle of
each pole this next one is for when you kind of getting the hang of things and
you want to spice things up the work you're doing is quite cool but it
doesn't look very polished and you feel like it could look better I recommend
using highlights and shadows to bring out your work and give it that
professional edge so here is something that I created earlier it's just a girl
I think originally it was gonna be me it was gonna be my icon for something I
didn't end up using it in the end but as you can see it's quite nice it's got
some cool shapes and colors in it she's very symmetrical however when
designing it I recognized that it needed something else and all I did was
add some shadows to it so to make it stand out I added the shadow around this
side I've added some highlights to her glasses and her hair her lips anything
where the light would naturally hit I've added the highlights and then the same
with the shadow if there's anything that would be in shadows so like the back of
her hair the rims of the sunglasses the inside of her lips and although the one
on the left does look pretty cool I'm still quite happy with that I think the
one on the right looks a little bit more professional it looks like something
you'd see on maybe a website and I think it just adds that little bit of pop and
makes it look a little bit cooler so they are the majority of the main things
I recommend if you are starting out on illustrator the penultimate tip is to
just observe and learn the fact that you've clicked on this video shows that
you're willing to learn so I recommend having a look on YouTube for tutorials
there's actually a really cool website as well called Skillshare where
professionals teach you how to do various things they
have courses on so many different topics I am working with Skillshare on other
videos just not this one I will leave a link in the description because I have a
two month free trial for you guys so if you want to go and try Skillshare for
free for two months just click the link it'll cost you nothing and yeah and then
my final tip which I'm sure you've been told many a times is to just practice I
like to say practice makes progress practice never really makes perfect
because no one ever is really hundred percent happy with the things they do
there's always room for improvement however if you keep practicing the
skills that you've got revisiting old designs and maybe redesigning them see
how you've sort of progressed over a period of time and you'll be able to see
the improvement that you've made over time so yeah that's it I hope this video
was helpful if I've missed anything off or if you have any tips of your own for
any budding illustrator artists let me know down in the comments below I'd love
to start a conversation with you guys thank you so much for watching the video
as always thank you so much for supporting me don't forget to press that
subscribe button so you can see future videos from little old me and I'll see
you soon for the next one bye