Creating and editing shapes is essential in Illustrator CC. In this section you'll learn how to draw and edit simple shapes. To follow along open this file from the practice files you downloaded and once your document is open to make sure you can see all of the artwork choose View, Fit Artboard in Window. Now to start you'll select a shape. So, select the Selection tool in the Tools panel on the left and then click in this white triangle shape to select it. You'll learn how to draw a few types of simple shapes like this triangle and then by the end you'll be able to add shapes to create the robot on the right. Now you should see a box around the triangle. This is called the bounding box. This is important for editing shapes and it should be on by default. If you don't see a bounding box choose View, Show Bounding Box, if you see a Hide Bounding Box in the View menu you're all set. Now you'll draw your first shape, a rectangle. In the Tools panel on the left click to select the Rectangle tool, bring the pointer out into the document window and move it around. As you move it you might see these magenta lines. These are Smart Guides and they help you align content. If you don't see them, choose View, Smart Guides to turn them on. Now starting on the dash line here press and drag to create a rectangle. As you draw with the Shape tool with those Smart Guides on you'll see a small gray label appear that gives you measurements like width and height. This shows the size of the shape you are creating. Release the mouse button to create a rectangle. Now most of the shapes you draw are called live shapes which means you can resize and move them without switching tools. For instance, to resize this shape you just drew, move the pointer over one of the corners of the rectangle and when the pointer changes click and drag to reshape it making it about the size of the dotted line behind it. As you drag watch for this diagonal magenta guide. This indicates that it's a perfect square. When you see it release the mouse button to make the rectangular square. You can also press the Shift key while dragging to make a square. Now notice the small widgets in each corner of this shape. Dragging any of these with the shape selected will let you create rounded corners. So, drag any one of these corner widgets toward the center of the shape just a little to round the corners. You'll actually find that most of the shapes you draw will have options like these corner widgets. Let’s try creating another shape. To see other Shape tools press and hold on the Rectangle tool in the Tools panel on the left to show the Shape menu. Then select the Polygon tool. Starting roughly in the center of this dotted triangle click and drag to make a shape. Shapes you create with this tool are drawn from the center. When the shape is about this size press and hold the Shift key to straighten it. Release the mouse button and then the Shift key. Polygons also have shape options like rectangles. For instance, this side widget controls the number of sides on a polygon. So, drag this side widget up until the shape has three sides. To move a shape with the Drawing tool selected you can drag it from this little circle in the center and position it where you need it. Now, the last type of shape you'll create is a circle. So, press and hold on the Polygon tool in the Tools panel and select the Ellipse tool. Down here drag to create a circle and as you drag watch for these hinting crosshairs which mean a perfect circle. Release the mouse button when you see them, and the circle is roughly the size you see here. Lastly, you’ll create this triangle shape by copying and pasting a triangle you already drew. So, select the Selection tool on the Tools panel on the left and click the triangle you created. To copy it choose Edit, Copy and then Edit, Paste. Drag the new triangle down here. Now to resize this triangle drag the point on the right side to the left so that it's narrower first. Then drag the top point down to make it a little bit shorter. Finally drag the shape onto these dotted guides. Now that you have some experience with shapes in Illustrator CC you can continue to explore by creating the shapes for this robot which consists of rectangles, circles, and polygons. The dotted guides will help you to see which shapes to create where. These donut shapes are actually composed of two circles. A smaller circle on top of a larger circle. The smaller circle has a red fill color. You'll learn about changing the colors shapes in the video on changing the color of artwork. 

In this lesson you'll learn how to draw a line with the Line Segment tool. You'll also learn what a path is made of. If you want to follow along you can open this document from the practice files for this tutorial. You'll start out by adding some branches and a trunk to this tree. To draw straight lines, you'll select the Line Segment tool on the Tools panel. So, press and hold on the Shape tool you see here in the Tools panel. I see the Ellipse tool, you might see another Shape tool and select the Line Segment tool. Come out into your design. To draw a line, you press and drag in the direction you want the line to go. So, move the pointer into the tree shape press and drag down. Notice that you can move in just about any direction to create a straight line. Now, the gray box you see that shows distance and angle is a measurement label. It can be really useful when you need to be more precise. When the line looks something like this release the mouse. Now if you didn't see that gray label, choose View, Smart Guides to turn them on. In Illustrator CC, this line you drew is called a path. A path is made up of at least two anchor points, you can see them here on the ends of the line and a line segment connecting those anchor points. We can create all kinds of paths in Illustrator CC, straight paths or lines, curved paths and a whole lot more. After drawing this line, you can easily edit it without having to switch tools. To edit the direction and length of this line move the pointer over the bottom end of the line, click and drag and you'll see that you can move one of the points. As you drag press the Shift key and the line will be constrained to 45 degrees. When it's straight up and down, release the mouse button and then the key. Now to change how thick the line is you can change what's called the Stroke weight in the Properties panel to the right of the document. Change the Stroke weight to 2 pt by clicking the up arrow here. Now you create a few more lines that will become the branches of the tree. Move the pointer over the line you just drew somewhere in the tree, press and drag to create a small line like you see here. Draw one more, so you have two. Now you'll make a copy of a line and move it below the buildings. Select the Selection tool and click to select the first line you drew, the trunk of the tree. To copy it choose Edit, Copy, and then Edit, Paste. We want this line to be straight across horizontally. It's going to go right below these buildings. So, to rotate a line move the pointer just off of one end of the line and when you see a little rotate arrow appear click and drag to rotate the line. When the line is perfectly horizontal release the mouse button. Now, to move a line you've drawn you can drag it from the center point. So, drag the line down below these buildings. To make the line longer drag the right end of the line to the right, you'll see those magenta lines again called Smart Guides. They are indicating that you're making the line longer. You're extending it. Now you'll change the Stroke weight and the color of this line. With the line still selected change the Stroke weight in the Properties panel on the right to 16 pt by choosing 16 pt from the menu. To change the color of the line, click the Stroke color in the Properties panel, click the Swatches button so that you can see a bunch of colors called Swatches you can choose from and then select an orange. Now that you know how to create and edit lines you can practice creating them by adding to these buildings, maybe try to add some lines to this window, even changing the Stroke color and Stroke weight in the Properties panel to the right. 

In Illustrator CC you can use simpler shapes and paths as the building blocks of more complex artwork by combining them in different ways. In this video you're going to learn how to combine these shapes using the Shape Builder tool to create the final artwork you see on the right. To follow along open this file from the practice files. To make sure that you see everything choose View, Fit Artboard in Window. You'll start by creating this main shape. Here there is a circle and a rectangle that are overlapping. They need to be combined into a single shape to give us this shape in the final artwork. Now, to combine these shapes you first need to select them. So, with the Selection tool selected drag across these two shapes to select them. If there was other artwork underneath you could also have pressed the Shift key and clicked all of the artwork to select multiple shapes. To combine the shapes, you'll use the Shape Builder tool in the Tools panel on the left. So, select the Shape Builder tool and drag across both shapes to combine them. You can tell what's about to be combined by the cross hatching that shows. Also, the red outline you see reveals the final shape that will be created. Release the mouse button to combine the shapes. Besides combining shapes, you can also remove parts of shapes with the Shape Builder tool. These shapes need to be combined and these top and bottom parts need to be removed to create an eye shape from the overlapping area like you see over here in the final artwork. First, you’ll see select these shapes with the Selection tool. So, select the Selection tool in the Tools panel, drag across the two circles to select them. Select the Shape Builder tool on the Tools panel and to remove parts of these shapes press the Option key on Mac or the Alt key on Windows and you'll see a minus sign in the pointer. When you click whatever is highlighted will be removed. So, with the Option or Alt key held down click the top part here to remove it and then with the key still held down click the bottom part to remove it as well. You can then release the key. Now you'll move this eye shape onto the other shapes to start putting them together. So, select the Selection tool in the Tools panel again and drag the eye onto the first shape you combined. Now you create this small moon shape you see in the final artwork from these two small circles. So, select these circles by dragging across them and to zoom in a little to make it easier to see, choose View, Zoom In. Select the Shape Builder tool in the Tools panel and so that you can remove parts of these shapes press the Option key on Mac or Alt key on Windows and this time drag from the right to the left into the overlapping shape to remove those parts and leave a crescent moon shape. Release the mouse button and then the key. Now you'll assemble all of these shapes to make the final artwork. So, select the Selection tool again and with this moon shape still selected drag it onto this black circle, then drag across both of those shapes to select them and drag them onto the eye shape. To finish the artwork, drag this blue shape onto the other shapes. Now that you know how to combine shapes in different ways with the Shape Builder tool experiment with your own artwork. Begin with simpler shapes combining them to create artwork for logos, posters, whatever you need. Have fun with it. It's really amazing what you can create just by combining basic shapes. 

Adobe Illustrator CC excels at working with vector artwork which is made up of shapes and lines rather than pixels, but you can also add raster images to your designs. raster images like JPGs or PNGs consist of pixels which are aligned on a grid to form an image. When raster images are scaled up or down they can quickly lose quality and appear distorted and/or fuzzy. In Illustrator CC, if you want to scale or edit a raster image you can trace the image to create editable paths from it. When you do that you're essentially turning a raster image into vector artwork which can be easily scaled up or down without losing quality. Using this project, you'll learn about tracing raster images to create vector artwork. Then you'll see how to edit that traced or vector artwork. Finally, you'll add that artwork to an existing design on the right. If you want to follow along you can open this file from the downloadable practice files. With the Selection tool selected, click the image on the left to select it. This is a picture taken of a drawing in a sketchbook. Now, to capture just the robot sketch and add it to the birthday card design in the right you'll trace the image to convert it from raster to vector artwork using the Image Trace feature in Illustrator CC. With the image selected click the Image Trace button in the Properties panel on the right. Now when you trace an image you have a series of options you can set from the menu that appears depending on the result you want. So, choose [Default] to start. This setting can be really useful if you want to trace content and separate it from a background for instance. To try another tracing option, click the Preset option that now shows in the Properties panel on the right and choose Low Fidelity Photo from the menu. It looks more like the original image, including being in color now. Now, to get the main shapes you need choose Sketched Art from the same Preset menu. There are a host of other options for fine-tuning your tracing in the Image Trace panel you can open here but our tracing looks good, so we don't need to change any of those options. Now, even though this image is traced and converted to shapes it still isn't editable yet. When you're finished tracing you can expand the artwork, so it can be edited. Know that once you expand traced artwork you cannot try other trace settings. You are essentially committing to the tracing you already created. So, click the Expand button in the Properties panel to be able to edit the vector artwork. Now, to select just the robot artwork you're going to use the Lasso tool. So, in the Tools panel on the left press and hold down on the Direct Selection tool, this white arrow and select the Lasso tool on the menu that appears. Come out to the artwork and drag around the robot shape carefully to select just the robot head. If you select more than necessary, try dragging around again. Now, to copy this robot head so we can put a copy on the right, choose Edit, Copy. Then choose Edit, Paste to paste the copy. This robot head is actually made up of a series of smaller traced objects. To keep them together you'll group them. Click the Group button towards the bottom of the Properties panel. Now, to move the robot head into position on the right select the Selection tool and drag the robot over here. So that it fits within this blue shape, you'll resize it. So, drag a corner of the selected artwork and make it a little smaller. As you drag press the Shift key, so you don't distort the artwork. When it's about this big release the mouse button and then the Shift key, then drag it into the center of the blue shape behind it. To change the color of the robot head, click the Fill color in the Properties panel on the right. Make sure this Swatch option is selected and select this white color. You can then press the Esc key to hide the colors. So, you can more easily see the final artwork choose Select, Deselect. Now that you know how to trace images in Illustrator CC and convert them to editable vector artwork you can trace images to add additional vector artwork to your designs like tracing photo textures to add textured backgrounds or tracing hand lettering you draw and so much more.