Hi, this is Anne for Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to talk to you about how
to use the Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle and Ellipse tools in Illustrator.
I'm going to try to make most of this graphic with those tools.
And of course, we can't make all of that with just the tools that I'm going to show you.
But I'm going to show you how to make most of this computer graphic, especially the laptop
part.
So let's grab the Rectangle tool, that's the M tool, so you can just hit M on your keyboard
and it will go straight to that tool.
And I'm just going to click and drag to make a shape similar to the interior shape here.
If you want a perfect square, you can hold SHIFT and then drag and you get a perfect
square.
As you see you can also hold SHIFT and OPT and draw and it will resize from the center
and that will also give you a perfect square.
But for now we're just going to use the rectangle that we drew up here, hit V to get your selection
tool and then just draw a box around these like that, and delete.
Now we're going to make this outer shape with the Rounded Rectangle tool.
So click your Rectangle tool and then come down here to Rounded.
And we'll start drawing.
And it looks like we need this to be a little higher radius.
So as you're dragging, don't let go yet, and just hit your up and down arrows, you can
see what that does to your radius.
So I think about right there, it looks good.
So I'm going to go ahead and let off.
Since I had already clicked over there, it's going to remember the fill and stroke of this
image.
But I'll show you if you have no stroke, how to make one.
So bring your fill to the front, you can click on it like this, you can also hit X, just
the letter X to flip back and forth.
You want the one that has no center square.
So double click that and that'll bring up your color picker.
And then you can just click around here until you find the one you want.
That's pretty close.
And we'll also want a stroke on this, so click X to bring that to the front.
And then you can double click that and get a darker gray for that.
If you don't have stroke open, go to your Window and go down to Stroke and open that
palette, which is right here.
We'll go, maybe 3 for the outline of that shape.
Now I want this to go backwards.
So hit CMD, left bracket ([) or CTRL left bracket.
If you're on a PC, it should send it just behind that other shape you made.
The shape that you made before might not have a fill or stroke.
So to do that, you can do the same process where you double click the fill and choose
something and also bring the stroke to the front and choose something there.
Okay, to draw this piece down here, let's get another rectangle.
We need the bottom areas to be rounded, but the top to not be.
So hit A, that'll give you your Direct Selection tool, and then click off outside here and
then click here.
Just exactly right on that corner point, hold SHIFT and select the other corner point.
So you have two that are blue and two that are white now.
And then you should see, if you have Creative Cloud, you should see a little dot here and
you can just bring that in...about there...and it will round those two corners only with
your V tool, your selection tool.
I'm going to draw a box around everything on this side.
So I selected all the pieces.
And now go to your Align palette or Window > Align, which is right here and align these
by the center and that way it'll center everything up.
You can also change your alignment here to just a selection.
I aligned it to the artboard, but we'll go to Selection and then it won't move it around
your artboard like that.
Okay, and now let's click off.
Now click the bottom and then hold SHIFT and click that piece that you just made.
Alright, so you have two pieces selected.
Now go to your Pathfinder.
And we want to do the shape mode called Minus Front.
It'll delete the top shape out of the bottom shape of whatever you have selected.
So let's click that.
And as you can see, I'm going to zoom in with my Z tool.
You can see we have a little cutout now and I'm going to move this up so that we have
our little computer.
Now I'm not going to draw this whole entire shape.
But as you can see, there's a circle there.
So we'd definitely start out with that.
We can go that far at least.
So I'm going to get my circle tool, which is the Ellipse tool, it's under L. So if you
hit the letter L, you will get to that tool.
And now in the middle, hold SHIFT and OPT and it will resize from the middle and make
a new shape.
Now let's change the color of that shape.
Hit X to get the fill color in front and then double click and we'll make it like this.
I'll move it down a little.
We can do that alignment trick again and select everything and align in the middle.
As you can see, we've already got a start on the creation of this graphic.
To finish this off, I would use another little rectangle here.
And then I would use the Pen tool to do everything else from this point on.
But as you can see, just using the Rectangle, the Rounded Rectangle, and the Ellipse tool
can get you pretty far when you're creating graphics.
So now I want to go over how to change the options of those three tools.
If you click the Rectangle Tool and click once on your artboard, you can manually enter
in how wide and tall you want your rectangle to be.
So that's a good option to know.
If you go into your rounded rectangle and click once you have one extra option, which
is this corner radius.
And you can make that change based on whatever you need.
And then the same with the Ellipse tool - you can click once and you get the width and height.
And those are really the only options available for these.
These are really basic tools and I use them all the time.
And once you start really creating with illustrator you'll find that you use them quite often,
or at least you should be.
They make everything much faster instead of drawing things out with the Pencil or the
Pen tool.
OK, if you liked this video, please click the Like button and I will see you guys next
week.
Thank you so much!!!