[Music] [Tony Harmer] We have a lot to get through, so let's get cracking. So, being advanced actually starts with some good strong fundamentals. And we're going to look at something that is often overlooked and actually helps you on your path to being advanced. What we're going to do is we're going to look at the bottom part of the Toolbox where I'm swirling around my cursor at the moment, where the Fill and Stroke live. And then we're going to target this star in the middle here and tap D. And that applies the default fill and stroke, which by default is actually a white fill with a one point black stroke. Although it is possible to change that. See me later. Let's have a look at what is going on here. We've got the fill in front and the stroke in back. If you tap X, you can swap the focus over for those. So, it's attribute focus, attribute focus on the stroke, attribute focus on the fill, just there. We can in fact, with a selected object change those two things over. hold down Shift and tap X, and then your selected object will be transposed like so. While we have this particular state what I'm going to do is tap the Period key - hello Brits, Full Stop. You'll see that we have a gradient applied to whichever attribute has a focus. If I just go ahead and tap X, and then also tap the Period key, you can see now that has a gradient too. Oh, twinsies! I'm going to tap D to go back to the default. So, tapping X to bring the fill to the front again. This time I'm going to tap the Slash key. And that clears the attribute that has focus, sets it to none. For example, now if I tap the Comma key on my keyboard, I get a solid fill, Period key, then I get a gradient fill, and the Slash key none. And that's really, really useful stuff to know. It can get you quite well ahead. If you needed, for example, to draw any particular shape, and immediately you wanted it to be white fill, black stroke, like so, or let's say just a black fill on its own, you can tap Slash to get rid of the fill, Shift X to bring that. And there you go. Job done. Let's move on then.
Here's another one from the land of the much overlooked, the Draw modes. Do you know where they are? They're down here at the bottom of the Toolbox, just underneath all the fill and stroke stuff. Just down there. There's Draw Normal, which is the normal way Illustrator works, Draw Behind, and currently grayed out because there's no active selection, Draw Inside. If you've never seen them before, here's how they work. I'm going to draw an ellipse. And what I'm going to do here is give it a nice bright yellow color. It should be easy to see against this. And then I'm simply going to draw, like so, on top of that magenta circle. And that's the normal behavior of Illustrator. I'm going to go across. And what I'm going to do is work next on this blue circle. And I'm going to hold down Shift and tap D because that's the way you toggle through the three different modes or two, if you don't have a selection active. I'm going to go ahead then, and with Draw Behind, I'm going to go and get my Ellipse Tool, once again, I will choose yellow just here, and then I'm going to draw. And you can see there it is, poking out from behind, like so. And if I drew something else behind that, and if I just change the color here to super, super luminous green, you can see that at the back of the stack. And that's what Draw Behind does. Now if I select this last circle on the side here, Draw Inside. And what I'm going to do is then toggle Shift D because there's a selection, Draw Inside become selected, and you can see these markers that tell you that that's the active Draw Inside object. I'm going to get the Ellipse Tool and let's go for yellow again. It's popular this week. And there we go. And at first if I start drawing, you might think, well absolutely nothing has happened there. But when I release, you can see it's actually inside that object. And until I stop drawing, everything will be in that object, like so. Shift D, to go back to Draw Normal, or double-click outside of it and you're back out. But what you have here is a Clip Group. If I select it, you can see Clip Group. There it is up at the top. And if you use the control strip, it's also just over there as well. Okay, then.
Which is actually this logo file, just here. I'm going to place an image into a layer, just to show you, by the way, if I go to my Layers panel here, if I use Draw Behind, so Shift D, as we did a moment or two ago, when I create a new layer, so Command L or Control L to do that, you can see that it's drawn underneath the current layer. There are other ways you can do that, but that one's really handy. Shift D to return back to Draw Normal. If nothing is selected, you can just switch between those two nice and easily. I'm going to use the Place command here. And I've got a sketch here for a logo that I'm working on just here, A very simple logo, like so. There's my scanned sketch. Perfect. And what I'm going to do is just double-click this layer and turn it into a Template and hit OK. And then make the layer above that active. Your temptation here might be to reach for the regular Pen Tool and make your way around all of the different parts of this to do it. I'm actually not going to do that. Not that there's anything wrong with that approach, it totally isn't. It's absolutely a definite, valid approach there. I'm going to hold down the Shift key and tap the Tilde key on my keyboard to get this tool, the Curvature Pen Tool, or as I like to call it, the CPT. And I'm going to come down here to around about this point, I think is a good starting point. I'm going to click here and then I'm going to click towards the middle of that curve there, like so, and then come up to the top of the curve there. Now at the moment I'm filling with white and a black stroke. I'm just going to tap the Slash key because the fill is in front, as you remember from earlier on, and then I'm just watching the curve and clicking when I think the curve is about to start deviating from where I want it to go. At this point here, I want a straight line. So, I'm going to double-click just there and then move down. I can even hold Shift if I want to constrain it and double-click at the bottom and then make my way around this shape. I'm aiming for the middle between these two lines, like so. The great thing is here with this tool, if you find you need to add another point, you just click on it and then just move that to where it wants to be. It's very much like molding pieces of wire here. So, if you've ever bent a coat hanger or something like that, you'll get where I'm coming from, no doubt. Let's go ahead and click around those points just there. This one I'm just going to drag into place, pretty much there is good, and then just bend these around. I don't have to switch out to another tool, like I said before, if I need another point to get that to conform. That actually looks fairly solid to me. I'm just going to hit Escape to stop drawing, and then I'm going to scroll over the stroke field here just to increase the stroke quite. Yes, I think that's pretty good. Maybe an area just around this point here could do with a little bit of work. We'll have a look at that in a moment. But first of all, I'm going to tap K on my keyboard to get the Live Paint Bucket. I didn't even make it a Live Paint Group. That's how crazy I actually am. Then I'm going to go for my Swatches panel. Let's get that here. The layout is slightly different on this machine, to the one I normally work with. And I'm just going to choose a couple of colors here. I think I'm going to go for magenta on the inside. Let's do something like orange on the outside. No, that's a disastrous choice. What I can do is I could always go back to the magenta here. So, if I get that and fill that, like so, there's always my Color Guide panel, and if I set that to something like a pentagram there, then I've got other choices. So, down the middle there, of course, my color is set based on that root color there. And I think maybe this sort of color here is going to work really well on the outside. Maybe not quite so much that one. But anyway, I digress. We've got these things that have effectively formed a Live Paint Group for us. Now, what's the advantage there apart from very fast coloring in? Well, here it is. Because these sectors are defined in a Live Paint Group, they will be preserved provided the actual shapes stay there in some form or another. So, the sectors need to be preserved. I'm going to go back to the Curvature Pen Tool because I can manipulate points with this one, and then I'm going to shape this one up. See it's coming, isn't it? It's almost like I planned it this way. Spoiler, I did. Anyway, there we go. Now we've got that. Perfect. I think that's great. I'm going to hit Expand there. Now that's an actual thing. I also want to go to my Object menu. And I'm going to come down and Outline that stroke just there. So, that should all be good. Then to my Pathfinder. And I'm going to choose this command here, Merge, which will merge things of a common color. And so, now everything works out. Going good so far? I think so.
I've got this Live Text just here. This is working out pretty well. However, I want to just do a little bit of tweaking on it. Let's zoom in on it for your own viewing comfort. What I want to do is nudge this X across. Of course, I could go into here, select it, and then kern that away to the side. I'm not going to do that, I'm hitting Escape. I'm going to hold down the Shift key and tap T to get the Touch Type Tool. No, it's not going to help you with your typing. This allows me to change things such as moving this character across in a very, very visual way, like so. I also want to move the A just slightly over there, which of course, will have an impact on the X, so I can now nudge that back in just a little bit. I'd like them to connect but not fully. That's great stuff. I think that's working pretty, pretty well. Touch Type Tool really handy. You can do things such as scaling the type as well. You can do that with individual characters just there. You can also rotate them. If you would need your M at a jaunty angle, then that's your tool. And so, one more to explore. Anyway, for now, that's not the purpose of what we're doing here. The purpose is we're going to make some stickers and use some effects. We're going to use a blend and some appearances. So, I've been told that you can't apply a gradient to Live Text in Illustrator. I'm here to tell you that that is completely wrong. Let's go and have a look at the Appearance panel just here. There it is, lovely, lovely Appearance panel. You can see we've got some Type and some Characters. If I double-click on the Characters, you can see there is that Fill, cheeky Fill in there. And now, I'm going to go back to Type. Now Appearance, I'm going to remove that Fill secret shortcut, hit the Slash key. That Fill goes away. Oh, where's it going? Don't worry, Shift. No, I'm just joking. Command Slash, that would be Control Slash, adds a new Fill but it's above the character level. So, that's good. Think of these attributes here as an attribute stack. They are not layers. They are attributes. But here's the thing. I'm going to tap the Period key. Remember that from earlier on? Yes, brought to you by amazing stuff just here. We're just going to do some interesting things. We'll use the swatches here. We'll make some crazy color combos. Not quite that crazy. And then we'll go ahead and add something in there. Lovely, super sweet. There we go. We've got our gradient on our Live Text. It's still text. You can see I can select. There you go. So, that myth - debunked. Perfect, right? I've got that like so. I think I'll also go to my Appearance panel here. Let's add a stroke to this as well. So, we had Command Slash that's undocumented by the way. To add a fill, we're going to use Option Command, that would be Alt Control Slash to add a stroke. There inside, look at that, cool. We've got a stroke going around the whole thing there. Now what I could do is even drag that down beneath the characters, so it's drawn around the outside.
There we go. So, now we've got that groovy thing going on there, I like that. That's really nice. Perfect. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to drag using the Selection Tool here, holding down the Option key, I'm going to drag one of these down. Let's send it to the back. I could have used Draw Behind, couldn't I? I know. Let's go to the Fill here. And so, we'll get the Gradient Tool here, let's change that gradient. I need to tap X to bring my fill to the front. Because I had a focus on the stroke. And this one here, let's change that to a sort of a lighter green there on the right-hand side and on the left-hand side rather. And on the other side. That's all good, we've got those two things together, brilliant. Let's go ahead then and select them both. And then we're going to blend them, so Option Command B, Alt Control B. There's our blend. Tap W on the keyboard. That's for the Blend Tool, hit Return on your keyboard, and then just immediately hit the down arrow. And then you can hit the up arrow to increase the number of steps. See, all this stuff without clicking, just doing that great stuff, there we are. That's kind of nice, I like that, which means we've got that groovy stuff going along there, it could be groovier. So, let's go to the Effect. Let's choose Warp, and let's choose something like Flag... That's crazy, but that's way too crazy. We'll go ahead and do that, we'll bring that down, like so. Something in that region is just fine for the purposes of this demonstration. There we go. Now we've got that, that's cool. That looks vaguely stickerish. Let's make it stickerish. What I'm going to do is group that, so now that's a group, and then I'm going to add a new fill, remember that Command or Control Slash. We've got that fill going on just there. Let's go to our Appearance panel. And we're going to change. Actually, let's leave that a blank just for the moment. What we're going to do is we're going to add an effect to that. We're going to add an Offset Path, so Path, Offset Path... And then let's just dole this out by a little bit, just there. Normally things are better when it's round. On the outside 11mm might be a bit much, but we'll find out in a moment. I'm going to change this one to white, like so. And then drag that down beneath the Contents of the group. Then I'm going to target that attribute and duplicate it using the arrow here. Go to the bottom most one, change the color of that to black. Then I'm going to click on the Offset Path effect applied to this attribute, and we'll dole that out there by maybe just 13. Much too enthusiastic there, Tony. There we are, a sticker in just a moment and it's still all Live Text. [Music]
