All right. In this video, what we're gonna do is we're gonna bring in  some images and we're going to look at how  to crop them into these little thumbnails here. We'll look at both the squares and circles. All right, let's go. Okay. First of all, let's turn on our guides.

Remember it's command, uh, semicolon,  or if you're on a Mac, uh, sorry, on a pc,  it's control semicolon. We're gonna scroll down a little bit. I'm gonna zoom out a little bit,  and what I wanna do is I want  to add my little thumbnails like we did in our wire frame. Okay? So I'm gonna grab the rectangle tool  and I'm gonna draw my first one out. Okay?

So there's my first thumbnail. It's gonna span 1, 2, 3, 4 columns. And now I wanna put an image inside of it. Actually, what I might do is I might give it a fill color. It doesn't need a fill color, I'm just doing it. So it's helpful for you to see.

And I'm gonna duplicate these guys along here. Okay? So I'm gonna have 1, 2, 3. Nice. I'm holding shift, select all of these. I got my black arrow.

Okay? I am holding down my alt key. Remember two drag and copy at the same time,  or you can just go control C, control V. Okay? And what I want  to do is I want to now put in these images. Cool.

So to import an image into Illustrator, we go out  to file and we go down to something called Place. Okay? They use place instead of import,  just to confuse everyone. So go to file place, okay? And in your exercise files, I've got some images. I've downloaded them in the earlier, uh, tutorial  and other watermark versions, obviously.

So if you want to use these ones, you've gotta go off  and pay them at Adobe Stock. But, um, here's the watermark ones. So what I'm gonna do is, uh,  you can bring 'em in one by one. So I can bring in thumbnail, one place, click once,  it's gonna come through it as, as it's full size, okay? And that's fine for these little thumbnail versions  or these watermark versions,  but sometimes they can be quite big. So what you can do is go file place.

And what I prefer to do is pick the first one  and just drag it out. It'll constrain the height and width, okay? To get it to a rough size, okay? That you want it to be first, okay? You can bring in lots at a time file place, okay? And you can grab all of these guys, okay?

All the thumbnails. And you can go click you, you can click,  you can click, you click, you, you, you, you,  you, you get the idea, okay? So you can bring them in all after each other. Or if you've done what I've done  and got some thumbnails from your library,  you can just drag them out from here, okay? Um, so either way, that's how to bring in your images, okay? So I'm gonna drag in my stock library images from over here,  and we're gonna look at cropping them to this rectangle,  drag them in, okay?

Line them up and kind of half resize them, kind of  how I want to fit them in the box. 'cause now what we're gonna do is crop  them to that thumbnail. Okay? So I'm gonna hold to the shift key,  and that may makes it, uh, scale responsibly. Okay? So the height and width come along,  and I'm gonna get it roughly.

I can adjust this afterwards. And then what I need to do is I need to select him  and the box behind him, okay? And the easiest way to do is,  'cause there's nothing over here, I can kind of click hold  and drag and you can see how I can just kinda like drag, uh,  over these two, and I get both of them. Okay? Now the shortcut is command seven or Ctrl seven,  and you'll learn that one for cropping, okay? The long way is under object,  and it is under clipping mask, okay?

And make, so that's, I guess a little bit hard. You think I'm gonna crop it or I'm gonna mask it. It's called a clipping mask in Illustrator. So you can see there,  there's a shortcut command seven, okay? Um, and what will happen is, uh, it won't work  because actually this needs to be  behind our shape that we want to crop. So I'm gonna right click him and go  to arrange and send it back.

And I'm gonna pretend like I did  that on purpose, but I didn't. I just forgot. Okay? Now, command seven, ah, look at that. Smooth. Okay?

So let's do one more. Uh, let's drag him in hold down shift, scale him to get him  to be roughly the right size. Yeah, get him in there. I'm ha I'm okay with some like interesting cropping,  so I don't mind that it's not perfect in there. And remember, don't forget, it's gotta be at the back. Okay?

Select both of them and then command seven  or Ctrl seven on a pc. Now, say you don't like this crop,  and you're like, yeah, I thought it was gonna be cool,  but just looks like it's off. What you can do is let's have  nothing selected with your black arrow. Click in the background and click on 'em  once and you get the square. If you double click them,  what happens is you go into this thing called isolation  mode, and it just means that I'm inside. Think of layer one as home base.

That's back, um, back, back here. Okay? But when I double click something, I go  inside this group, okay? And it's called a clip group, and it means  that I can start working on this separate  from the square on the outside. Okay? So just gotta be careful how you drag it.

Okay? So you can see I can kind of drag the image around the  outside, or I can drag the center of this, okay? Or I can drag the edge of the rectangle, okay? So you can drag kind of both bits in this view,  which is a little confusing. So just remember if you grab the edges, okay? Or sorry, the center, you drag the image  and if you grab the edge, you  drag the square on the outside.

So it's up to you what you want to do. So I'm gonna drag this. You can resize it still in here. I'm gonna go for a big, big clip. Okay? This one's gonna be a Victor image.

So yeah, it's gonna be, anyway, to get round to the big, uh,  back to home base is you can click this arrow a couple  of times or just double click in this area, like no space  around here, this white area. Great. So we're gonna go through and do these. Okay? So we're gonna grab you. I'll zoom through it now.

Now, we're not gonna do circles for this particular one,  but I'll do it in a second. Let's, let's get this guy at the back. Let's clip maybe along there. You command seven. Nice. Let's say I want to do one for a circle or a rounded circle,  or a polygon or a start.

It doesn't matter. Let's just pretend  I'm gonna do a circle version. Okay? So I'm drawing out my nice circle. I'm giving it a fill color. It doesn't need one, okay?

It just just makes it easier for us to see. And I'm gonna drag this image, put it over top black arrow,  put 'em over top, make sure he's  underneath, select both of them. Command seven. You can see you get the exact same effect. Okay? If you're handy with the pen tool already, okay?

We're gonna look at the pen tool later on,  but you can draw any old shape and do the exact same thing. Okay? Use that as a cropping box. But if you're new to the pen tool, don't worry,  we're gonna do it in another episode. Well, another video at least. Let's do the last parts.

Which ones did I use? You? I don't like the sky anymore, but we've got  'em. Yep. Seven. You can see, you can get a bit  of flow on after a little while.

Okay? You're a bit big. Get down. Yep. Back. You, you, oh, come on.

Seven even. And last one was  that guy there probably want it to be a  What shortcuts am I using there? Just to kind of like get things behind each other. Um, we kind of looked at it earlier. It's the, um, five select something. I wanna stick it behind.

Arrange center back. Can you see there? It's command, uh, command shift,  uh, square bracket center back. You can see that square bracket, okay, on a pc,  it it'll be shift and control, square bracket. Some of those shortcuts you'll learn by heart,  by heart, some of you won't. Okay?

The last thing I do is I want to add a bit  of a stroker on the outside, just  to give them a bit of consistency. So I've, my black arrow selected all of them. Okay? And you'll notice that the stroke isn't appeared up here  because they're, they're being caler, uh,  clip group now instead of like our regular boxes. So we can open window and go down to stroke. There he is there.

Okay? And I'm gonna give it a stroke of maybe it has  to be one pixel or above. Okay? Can't be anything lower than that. Like you Canon print because we're dealing with pixels here. Great.

And what color should it be? I'm gonna do, um, what is my stroke color? I'm gonna open up window. Gonna go to color. There is down the bottom here. And my stroke color's black.

I'm probably just gonna pick. Now I wanna pick a kind of a gray color  and you'll, you probably run into this problem if  you're a seasoned illustrator. User is RG B's a hard one  to pick gray from if you have to match 'em all up. The easiest way to pick a gray is  to switch your colors from RGB to this one called hue,  saturation and brightness. This is really easy. It means just  brightness slide up and down.

Okay. And I'm gonna use a bit of a gray. Nice. Turn my guides off. How does it look? Looks beautiful except the art board needs to be extended.

Okay. And I'm gonna extend mine quite a bit down  because I've got my footer and things to stick in there. All right, that's it for our cropping and masking of images. Uh, let's go through the next video.