From the course: Illustrator 2021 Essential Training

Drawing basic shapes - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2021 Essential Training

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Drawing basic shapes

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- [Instructor] One of the most common methods of drawing in Illustrator is something called drawing by construction. Putting things together and creating new things from them, which we cover later on in the course in some detail. In order to do that, however, we need to first know how to use the basic shape tools in Illustrator. Now, in case you're seeing a different toolbar from mine, what you could do is go to the Window menu, come down to Toolbars and then choose the Advanced toolbar, which gives you the whole set of Illustrator tools. Then what I'd like you to do is tap M on your keyboard, which gets you the rectangle tool and so we can keep these tools available for the next few movies if you're doing them all sequentially. Long press on that tool in the toolbox. It will then open up like so, so you can see all of the family in here. Let's not talk about Flare Tool ever. But we can see everything else in the toolbar here and then go over to the right-hand side to this right-hand edge and when that lights up, click on it and then we can drag that tray of tools out so we can get to them quickly. Okay, so let's take our cursor up to the top here of any one of these shapes here, these red shapes and then click and drag across to the diagonally opposite shape. And you'll see that you've drawn a square. Surprise, surprise. Now, it might not be truly square. As it happens, mine is. I can see here inside of the Properties panel that it is exactly the same in both dimensions. And if I just delete that and draw again, what you might notice is this line, this diagonal line that's popping up and that is a smart guide helping me out and telling me that I have drawn a constrained or regular shape. Now, one way you can do that without the smart guide or even to make it a certainty because it is possible for you to move just at the last moment that you release from there is to hold down the Shift key. So if I go up to the top again, hold down Shift, click and drag across. Then make sure I release the mouse or track pad at that point before releasing the Shift key. Then I've got a constrained regular shape. I can also draw from the center outwards. If I take my cursor to the crosshairs in the middle of this target, hold down Shift and Alt or Option, you'll see that I can then draw a regular shape from the center outwards. Of course, if I didn't want a regular shape, all I'd need to do would be to hold down Alt or Option and I can draw like so. Now, the ellipse tool, if we tap L on our keyboard to get that, or click it in our little tool tray just here, works pretty much exactly the same. The main difference being there aren't so many corners on this one, of course, at all. Now, you might notice also, there is a rounded rectangle tool in this tool set, which is largely redundant but kept in there for a number of different reasons. And the only difference with that tool is that when you click and drag with it, you can use your arrow keys up and down to change the amount of roundness but there are so many other ways to actually achieve that. In fact, when I release here, you can see these corner widgets and if you're not seeing them, they are available inside of the View menu just here. These corner widgets allow us to dynamically change the corners like so.

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