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Adobe Illustrator CC - Essentials Training

How to find amazing colors in Illustrator using Color Theme

This lesson is exclusive to members

Course contents
SECTION: 1
Overview 12:36
SECTION: 2
Drawing 1:46:59
1. Class Project 01 - How to draw in Adobe Illustrator CC with shapes & lines (Draw your own animal shape) FREE
22:34
2. How to draw using the Shape Builder tool in Adobe Illustrator CC
7:30
3. Class Project 02 - How to draw a fox using the shape builder tool in Adobe Illustrator CC (Design a modern swan)
10:10
4. Class Project 03 - How to draw custom logo shapes easily in Adobe Illustrator CC (Color in the impossible triangle)
4:53
5. Class Project 04 - How to draw anything using the Curvature Tool in Adobe Illustrator (Redraw with the curvature tool and colour the owl)
13:09
6. Class Project 05 - How to draw using the Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator CC (Draw an owl with the pen tool)
13:19
7. Drawing with the Pencil Tool in Adobe Illustrator CC
13:12
8. Class Project 06 - How to use Brushes in Adobe Illustrator CC (Draw 5 elements on the piggy bank image)
12:56
9. Class Project 07 - How to draw lines with the Width Tool in Adobe Illustrator (LOVE design)
9:16
SECTION: 3
Type & Fonts 31:06
SECTION: 4
Color 18:36
SECTION: 5
Masking 17:49
SECTION: 6
CC Libraries 10:29
SECTION: 7
Effects & Patterns 40:34
SECTION: 8
Capture App 11:24
SECTION: 9
Free Templates 3:47
SECTION: 10
Exporting 11:22
SECTION: 11
Real World Exercises 48:41
SECTION: 12
Next Steps 2:16:52

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Course info

45 lessons / 8 hours 12 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, my name is Dan.

I’m an designer, Adobe Certified Instructor & Adobe Certified Expert.

Together we’re going to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator. During our course we won’t just learn how to use the tools... we will create real world, practical projects together.

This course is aimed at people new to Illustrator & design in general. We’ll start right at the beginning, working our way through step by step.

We’ll start with the techniques you’ll need to create just about everything in Illustrator. Including icons, logos, postcards & hand drawn illustrations.

We’ll explore lines & brushes. You’ll master how to use and manipulate type. I’ll show you the clever secrets Illustrator has which will help you to discover & use beautiful color like a pro.

You’ll learn how to push, pull, cut & repeat artwork. You'll learn how to redraw real world examples of famous logos. We'll cover the essentials like correct saving & exporting along with so, so much more.

If you’ve never opened Illustrator before, or you’ve opened it and struggled, come with me, I’ll show you the easy way to make beautiful artwork. - Dan

What are the requirements?
  • You will need a copy of Adobe Illustrator 2018 or above. A free trial of the software can be downloaded from Adobe.com.

What am I going to get from this course?
  • 39 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content.
  • Drawing with Shapes & Lines
  • Drawing with the Shape Builder
  • Creating a custom logo
  • Working with Brushes
  • Drawing with the pen, pencil & curvature tool
  • Learn how to work with type & fonts.
  • How to mask images & graphics.
  • How to distort, bend, warp & liquefy illustrations.
  • How to make your own repeating wallpaper patterns.
  • How to create stencil style images from real drawings.
  • How to use free Illustrator templates.
  • How to save, print & export for Print, web & social media.
  • Lots of real world exercises for you to practice.
  • Loads or class projects for you to complete.
  • Printable PDF Cheat sheet.
  • You will get the finished files so you never fall behind.
  • Downloadable exercise files.
  • Forum support from me.
  • Techniques used by professional graphic designers.
  • Professional workflows and shortcuts.
  • A wealth of other resources and websites to help your accelerate your career.

What is the target audience?
  • No previous Adobe Illustrator experience is necessary.
  • This course is for people completely new to Illustrator. No previous design, drawing or illustration experience is necessary.
  • This is a relaxed, well paced introduction that will enable you to produce a large range of drawing, illustration & logo work. Only basic computing skills are necessary - If you can send emails and surf the internet then you will cope well with this course.

Course duration 8 hours + your study.

Get the completed files here



Awarded the Best Illustrator Course by Learnopoly in 2023

Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files

Transcript

Hey there, in this video we're going to look at color combinations. We're going to let Adobe help us find new exciting colors that we might not normally go for. Now I'm not saying these are all beautiful, but I'm saying, it's kind of giving me, and pushing me out of my normal colors, that I normally use. So let's let Adobe show us how to do that now.

To find our lovely colors we're going to open up a file, 'Color Theme.ai'. That will be in your 'Exercise Files'. You can go up to 'Window', come down to 'Color Themes', open that up. Now yours has probably defaulted to 'Create', click on 'Explore'. It may take a little while to load, a long time to load, sometimes. Sometimes I'm using this panel, it loads very fast, as it is now, but sometimes it does take a long time. What we're looking for is-- we're going to switch ours to 'Most Popular', and, of 'All' time. This is going to give you some, five color Swatches that work well together. Just really helps people like me who end up kind of falling back on the same colors. If you're doing this tutorial you'll notice that pretty much everything is this gray and kind of green. I want to say, kind of a turquoise kind of green. Just the colors I like at the moment, and it's hard to break out of that.

So if you come to me, you want café, you're probably going to get green and gray. And if you want to be a bank, you'd probably get green and gray. So not the best move. So all you need to do is click on one of the elements and then pick one of the colors. I'm going to say, this. It's a little weird sometimes. Here we go. 'Black Arrow', click on that, I'm going to pick another color. Click on this, I'm going to leave him white. This guy here is going to be dark green, maybe the dark one here. And this guy over here, cam be the tan. Then the logo here, I'm going to switch out to the green as well. So that's how you do color options. Just kind of getting out of your comfort zone for colors.

Next thing I want to do is make a duplicate. Say you have to go to the client with a few color options. So, grab the 'Artboard Tool', it's down the bottom here. And if you click the word 'Artboard', and start dragging it, just moving it, but if I'm dragging, dragging, dragging, and I hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac, or the 'Alt' key on a PC, it makes a duplicate while I'm dragging, which is really handy. So 'Black Arrow'. Now, we've used 'Most Popular of All Time'. You can go to just this 'Month', I find, this 'Week' is a good option. If you go to 'Month', it's pretty close to the 'All Time' ones, whereas 'Week', just this week, somebody went out, these are the ones that are trending at the moment, that people are using. So I might go, okay, I'm going to do something like, here's my green. I'll give it a dark color there. Now I'm just coloring a bit. But you get the idea, right?

There's a couple of other things I want to show you. That's doing with the color option. You got to make sure you're dragging directly on that icon there. Gets a bit confused. So we'll just use 'Most Popular'. 'Most Used', it's kind of similar because there's a voting system on the backed. If you go to color.adobe.com, you can vote for colors, and upload it, but this little search option's quite handy. Say I need something for-- of the 1980s, say my guy there needs a flyer. For some reason it's a bit buggy, lots of the same colors, but if you scroll down, you can see, it starts getting into other colors. It's a bit of a weird one but there's plenty of 80s to go around, especially that first one.

Everyone's parents got a ski suit in the cupboard. A one piece ski suit that looks like this. It's a wrong image for it. Somebody's gone, "Pretty bad, Dan." But you get the idea. What you might do in more of a practical sense is let's look at one more. Instead of looking for the 80s you might look for something like 'cafe'. You can get kind of cafe style coffee looking things. You can type in 'bank', you can actually type some actual brands. So if I put in-- what's the brand that I know of by heart? Let's put in 'Google', you get the Google colors. So, big brands. Weirdly you can find lots of brands. Like, I'm from Auckland in New Zealand, it's a tiny, not tiny, but it's unlikely, but there's the Auckland Council stuff, there's Auckland city scape, there's Auckland Transport. There's all sorts of stuff that people are using, uploading, and sharing. You might find your company, or something that you're using in there.

So, that's it for the Color Theme Tool. It's just really handy to grab Swatches. To kind of bust out of your common green, gray funk that you might be in, like me. All right, that's it for the Color Theme Tool. See you in the next video.

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