Hi, this is Anne for Graphic Design How To, and today we're going to talk about three
tools in Illustrator.
And this is for beginners and intermediate.
So I'll be talking about the Line Segment tool, the Arc tool and the Spiral tool.
And I want to show you how to make all of these different things with these three tools.
We'll start out with the Line Segment tool.
The Line Segment tool can be found right here, and you can get to it also by hitting the
backslash key.
Okay, so, Line Segment tool is basically just click and drag to get a line.
If you don't have a fill or stroke on that line, you can hit the letter D to get a white
fill and a black stroke, and you'll only see the black stroke, of course.
So let's increase the stroke weight a little bit.
And I just want to kind of go over some things that you can do that will cause your lines
to do different things.
So first, we'll click and drag and then hold SHIFT.
And this makes it jump to 45, 90, 0, 180 degrees angles.
So you can get a perfectly straight up and down or straight 45-degree angle with this.
If you hold OPTION before dragging, it will drag from a center point.
Okay, so let's say you clicked and dragged, and you decided you don't like where you put
this line.
You can hold the spacebar and move it somewhere else.
And then let off the spacebar and continue clicking and dragging as you were.
So next is OPTIONS.
If you click once, you're going to get the OPTIONS.
The length is the length of the line, the angle is written there for you and you can
change that.
And you can also do fill line.
Now if you have a color over here in your fill, it will choose that color.
So I'll show you how that works.
We'll get green as the fill.
And we'll click once and do 'fill line'.
And if we say, 'okay', this actually has a green fill and a black outline.
So if we wanted to see the black of the outline, we would have to hit SHIFT X.
And now you can see it's turned green.
I mean, it's kind of dark, but we'll make it a little bit lighter.
Okay.
And the black fill, you don't really have fill showing because it's hidden behind that
outline, and even still, it would be very, very thin.
Your stroke is what's really important here.
Another cool thing is after you've drawn your line, you can switch tools by just holding
CMD.
And this will take you to your last selected Selection tool, which for me, was the black
tool.
So now I can move these around.
And when I unclick the CMD button, I am back to my Line tool, and that works through almost
every tool.
Alright, so we've got a bunch of lines.
I'm going to go ahead and delete these, and then we'll draw some new ones that look like
these.
First I'll get my Move tool and click once.
All right, and I'm going to SHIFT X so I can get black.
Now we have a green fill, which is hidden behind there, and a black outline.
And to get the rounded corners that you see here, I don't know if you can see them very
well.
You can now.
We will want to come over here to the stroke.
And on the Cap and Corner, you want to go with the middle ones.
So click both of those, and then you can zoom in and see that it's rounded your corners.
Okay, so moving on to the dotted line.
I'm going to get back on my tool and click and drag.
And then all you have to do is go to Stroke and click 'Dashed Line'.
And for this line, zero dash and 10 point gap will give you the exact line you see here,
as long as you have a five weight on your stroke.
And you can play around with this.
If you increase that gap, I'm using the arrow keys here, you can see what happens to your
dotted line and decrease it here.
And you can change your dash also by increasing or decreasing, using my up and down arrows.
Let's move on to this one.
I'm going to get my Line tool again and draw a line.
Now it's going to do whatever you did last, so just uncheck your Dash line to get a regular
line and now hit SHIFT W. This will bring you to this tool which is the Width tool.
The Width tool is pretty cool and gives you the ability to change the width on one end.
So get down on your anchor point, click and drag.
As you can see, it's really changing the width.
You can go all the way out to here.
If you want this to get smaller even to a point, you can do that here.
If we zoom in, you can see that you have two white points out here and a filled one in
the middle.
So all you have to do is grab those white points and bring them in towards the middle.
If you only want to do one side, hold OPTION and drag just the one side in.
The same thing here.
That is a very similar type of stroke.
So I'm going to get my Line tool, drag down and I will get SHIFT W and make it big like
this.
I'm going to zoom in with my Z tool and SHIFT W again and then bring this to an absolute
point.
So now you can see it really matches what we see here.
And then this one is just a regular line.
We'll get the Line tool, draw that.
It's just a normal one- point line with a butt cap and a miter join.
All right, so that is the Line segment tool.
Let's go ahead and move on to the Arc tool.
So I'm going to copy these and go to a different art board, which is right over here, and I
can show you how to make these things.
Now the Arc tool has a lot of similarities to the Line Segment tool.
First, we'll go ahead and get on our tool.
And you can click and drag.
You can see how that works.
It's just wherever you happen to drag to.
Now let's say we hold SHIFT key down.
This will keep it from wherever your point is.
It's the same here and here.
You can see what your width and height are doing.
So your width and height will be the same if you hold SHIFT.
All right now while you have that held, click F to switch the angle.
You can also hit X and that will do the same thing...switches it back and forth.
Something else you can do is when you drag, click C, and it will close it or not have
it closed.
So you can have like a pie graph shape there if you want... that's just hitting C while
you're still dragging.
And then if you let off, you will have your shape.
Alright, now I want to show you how to draw a little frame.
So I'm going to hold SHIFT and draw this.
And then I'm going to hit C.
This time, I will hold SHIFT, and draw the other way.
Hopefully it will tell me.
You can see the lines when you're exactly where you should be.
And let's hit F to switch it.
Alright, I'm going to go down here, and draw a little bit more
and we'll hit F to switch again.
And finally, right here, and hit F. So we have the four corners of our frame.
And I'm going to hold CMD to get my V tool up at the top and select these two and move
them out.
So now we can work on joining these pieces.
Okay, so go ahead and hit A. That will give you your A tool, which is this Direct Selection
tool up here.
Now draw a box around these top points, then hit CMD J. Now with your A tool, draw a box
around these two points and nothing else, and hit CMD J, and repeat for the last sets
of points.
And some of them might be a little bit off, but you can just arrow those down.
Alright, so there's a little frame.
And now let's make these little starburst things.
So I'm going to just take the Arc tool and start out with a little swish like this.
Now come over here to Profile, and this will be in Stroke.
If it's not showing up, you need to click Stroke a few times until it does.
All right.
Now go to Profile and choose this top one.
And you can't really see it because it's so small, but you can increase the weight of
your stroke.
We'll do about like this.
Okay, and now I'm going to Copy, Paste in Front, (CMD F), and then hit R, which is rotate.
Now I'm going to OPTION click the anchor point here.
And this will bring up my dialog box.
And I want to rotate 45 degrees because I want eight little spires, and I want them
to be exactly the same amount apart and 360 divided by 8 is 45.
So we'll say 'okay'.
And then once we have that, we can go CMD Copy, Paste in Front, (that's CMD F), and
then CMD D, which redoes whatever you did.
Okay, so CMD C- F- D, Command C, F, D. Just keep doing that until it fills out that spiral.
Let's go ahead and make this one.
So I'm just going to copy the shape we just did by holding OPTION and dragging it.
And now we can just do a dashed line.
And it automatically does something pretty awesome.
But we can mess with this and see what we can get it to do, I'm going to change my dash
to .5.
And we'll up the gap a little bit.
Yeah, I like that.
Okay.
So if you want a space between them, you can have a larger gap.
Or if you want it to be more like this, you can have a smaller gap.
All right, so next on the list is spirals.
And I'm going to show you how to make spirals that are like this.
So I'm going to copy these and get to a new artboard and paste those there.
All right, so let's get our Spiral tool.
First, we're going to draw a few different types of spirals.
If you click and drag, and then let off, you'll have a spiral but you can change things while
you're still dragging.
So if you click and drag, and then hit CMD or CTRL, you can change how that spiral behaves.
You can make it really tight or really loose and have the number of spirals increase.
You can also use your arrow keys while you're dragging to increase the amount of spiral
or decrease it.
You have to be holding down your mouse button while you're doing this.
Oh, and you can do your spacebar in the same way that we did with the other tool.
So now if you want to reposition this, you can just hold space and do it over there and
then keep changing it.
Okay, I'm going to delete these, and we'll grab our Spiral tool again.
I'm just going to make a spiral similar to the one up above.
And now I'm going to get my Width tool which is SHIFT W. We will make this a little bit
wider here.
All right, so we're pretty close to what we have up here.
But now I want this little swoosh.
And to do this, I'll grab my N tool.
If you hit N you'll get to this tool.
And then start right around here on the line and just kind of swoosh it out
like that.
So that's a really nice one.
I'm pretty happy with that.
But if I wanted to change it, I could still get back on my SHIFT W tool and maybe make
this part a bit bigger.
Okay, and for the dotted line one, I'll get back on my Spiral tool, and this one's really
easy.
I'm going to knock down... oops...not quite that much.
Maybe more like that.
And then release.
I'm going to put my points up to maybe 5 and then hit Dashed Line.
So we'll put the dash up to about five.
And I'm going to put the cap and corner at round cap and round join.
And then we'll get that dash down again.
It always changes things once you make it rounded.
And we'll make the gap a little bit bigger...not quite that big.
Okay, so I've got 6 on my weight, I've got 0 on dash and 11 on gap.
And you can see it matches this pretty well.
Alright guys, those are my tool tips for the day.
I hope you enjoyed this.
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Thanks, guys!!!