2.3 Basic Tools

[SOUND] You hit OK! Why did you do that? No no no, I'm just kidding. Welcome to your first Illustrator document. Now, this lesson is a little longer than the previous, because we're gonna be looking at the basic tools. Specifically, that's The Tools Palette, and we're gonna take a look at them over here on the left. First, let's get in real close and start reviewing each of these tools. So you can see Illustrator has a big list of tools, and we're just gonna go down one at a time and kind of talk about what the kind of things you're seeing are. The first one I see is the Select Tool, this first one we both see, sorry, is the Select Tool. And you notice when you hover your mouse on each of these tools, it tells you what key you can press on your keyboard to activate it. Once you get really good at Illustrator you'll probably just start tapping these keys on your keyboard because you're like, oh I know. Select tool is V or the pen tool for example is P, right? Easy to remember. I know V is a little weird, but think of the little V as a mouse. Like the tip of the mouse. So, our select tool. Well what does the Select Tool do? It selects things. And next, we have the Direct-Select Tool. We're gonna worry a little bit more about that in week two. So don't worry about Direct-Select. But it is different than the Select Tool. And the way they show you that is that it's a white arrow. And you'll notice that in Illustrator your tool always looks like your mouse and that works that way and many other products. But in illustrator in particular here's our select. If we click on our direct select tool, go ahead and click that. You can see our mouse becomes white. So on and so forth and we click our magic wand illustrator users usually don't use a magic wand for everything. But, Photoshop users would be particularly fond of old mr magic wand. You can see it looks exactly like the icon here, this is the lasso, not something I use every day, but I'm sure some people find use. The Pen Tool is next. The Pen Tool helps create any shape you want and it does a lot more than that. But we're gonna talk about the pen tool later. Next is The Type Tool, for adding in words or typography to your designs. The Line Segment Tool, now I suppose that this is a line segment tool because really you can make a line with the pen tool or you can make a line with really anything, but the line tool is for straight lines in particular. Our Rectangle Tool. Now I like to think of this whole idea of the rectangle tool and what's underneath it, and we'll talk about that in a second, as your shapes. And this is a Shape tool. So, Illustrator has a number of tools, and I'm about to probably blow your mind. They have tools under tools. So, when we take our mouse and we say, select the Rectangle Tool, but we click down and hold down with our mouse we get this, oh boy, a whole new drop down menu of stuff. Well, that's why I've called this the shape tool, because when I click and hold here I can make a rectangle, I can make a rounded rectangle, I can make an ellipse or a circle for the layman. I can make a polygon which can have different sides. I can make a star. I can make a flare too, like a lens flare. Even though that's not used so much, it's still something we can make. And then we also see that these have letters that that you can tap too. So, l can do circles or ellipses and M can do rectangles. And we have this over here, called the Tearoff. Now, when we let go of our mouse on the Tearoff. The things that are normally options just are right out here. They become things that you can just tap. And you can see when I select one that on the left-hand side here it's changing the icon. So whatever you have active, whichever one you've selected from the drop-down, say it's the star, your icon here changes and that always becomes your star tool. Paintbrush, that's self-explanatory. Pencil, very similar to Paintbrush, but is different in a couple ways. Maybe we'll get to that. Then everything below that starts to get a little more advanced. This blob brush is a little bit more like paint in Photoshop. Eraser. Not again, these are things that not so common for me in Illustrator but you may find yourself using. The Rotate Tool, you're gonna see why that's not necessarily so important. The Scale Tool, you can choose to use this or not. Width Tool, that's specifically for lines and a lot of these maybe you've heard from Photoshop. Basically, all of these here are really advanced tools. I don't use these. Maybe 99% of my Illustrator documents doesn't use these, and some of them I can be quite honest in saying I've never actually used. I have used them to try them out. I know what they do but just the way I happen to work I never get around to it. I say, oh, I don't need the scale tool and why don't I need scale a rotate tool? Well, you'll find the selection tool can do a lot of that for you. So don't worry about a lot of these. Next, in this kind of third bracket, we have The Mesh Tool. Now, that's towards the end of our lesson, but that's really cool. The Gradient tool, so just like Photoshop, Illustrator can do gradients. That means one color blending into another color. The Eyedropper, that will take something and kind of suck up what it looks like, so you can apply it to something else. The blend tool. A pretty advanced tool, but kinda neat. Symbol sprayer, this is for a little bit more advanced stuff, column graph, so you can actually do pie charts and graphs in Illustrator, and even enter them in, Excel-style, or pull in existing, but that's a little bit more advanced too. The Artboard Tool, the slice tool, again from Photoshop here, and for web stuff The Hand Tool. Now this is a tool that I use all day, everyday. In fact, you saw it in my first lesson, when I was moving stuff around screen. And the reason why I don't ever really select it is because of what it does. So, I'm gonna zoom out for a second, just so you can see. When I take this hand tool, or the little grabber I call it, and click somewhere, you can see the hand becomes a fist. I can just picked something up and it's grabbing it and holding it there. And when you move around, you can see you move the entire screen around. When you're working in illustrator sometimes you just zoom in alot. Because this still looks good. And you wanna pull and look at different areas.so maybe I wanna say, just look at the top over here or just look at the bottom over here. This tool is from Photoshop but the most important tool in my arsenal. And I'll show you why I never select it. Let's pick our select tool. And now we can't scroll around anymore, right? We can't look at anything. In fact when you click and drag, really nothing happens. It just makes a box. Well if you tap and hold down spacebar with your thumb you can see it becomes the hand tool. So here we are. We can click and drag and when we let go space the hand tool goes away. So anytime you see me navigating around, I'm holding down the space bar and I'm clicking and dragging and that's me looking around the canvas, and that's just how I kind of look at stuff and get used to what I'm seeing or pay attention to a spot in my design. Finally, we have The Zoom tool. That will zoom you in and out, exactly like you think, you can, like and drag a square, or you could zoom out here. Now the zoom tool by default, only zooms in. So, how do we zoom out? Well, you're gonna learn in Illustrator too that all of these tools do one thing and then do something else. So what do you mean, Ryan? Well the zoom tool when I click over here in the corner. Zooms into this corner. Click it and it keeps zooming in and it's hard to tell that it's getting bigger because we don't have any frame of reference. Well, what if i want zoom out? How do I do it? There is no zoom out tool there is only a zoom tool, well, this is a little trick you're gonna learn really quick. It's a pretty important, too. When you hold down the ALT key on Windows, or the Option key on a Mac, you get a different variation of the tool that you're using. So you can see here this little plus in my magnifying glass, when I hold down option becomes a minus. And that's huge, add zoom out. So while I'm holding down option I'll click with my mouse and now here I am I'm zooming out. And I'm zooming way out the square keeps getting smaller and smaller. So there's zoom out, and you can even say look at this, this is the entire Illustrator document. You can make something of almost unlimited size. You don't have to work, inside the bounds that you set up. Clicking. Does one thing. Option or alt clicking does something else. That is a very important concept to learn and one that is going to carry you through all of your Illustrator creations. Because guess what? When I use the circle tool. And I click or if I use it, and I often click it does two different things and we're going to get into that in our next lesson all about creating objects, so it's been blank until now. Let's fill this document with something.