hello and welcome to the complete beginners guide to Adobe Illustrator brought to you by testitude comm this is a course created for beginners to Adobe Illustrator the topics that are going to be covered in this course of a basics so whether you have the most up-to-date version of Illustrator or you're using an older version you should be able to follow along just fine for this course I will be using Adobe Illustrator cc in this series we will be starting from the very beginning and working our way across 19 episodes to learn all the basics and create an illustration project to help break down the process I have structured the course in three main sections introduction essential practice and test project in the introduction section I will be introducing you to illustrator and bringing you up to speed with some of the things you need to be aware of before we continue on to the essential practice section in the essential practice section we are going to look closely at some of the creative tools and principles in Illustrator here you will have the opportunity to get hands-on with the various worksheets I have designed and prepared for you to practice with when we get to the test project section we will be using all that we have learned in the essential practice section to create a project from scratch after watching this series you will be able to create your very own vector artwork ready to print now if you wish to follow along with this course you can download the entire project folder for free the link is in the description this folder contains all the worksheets fonts and project files necessary to follow along if you wish to skip ahead or back at any point in the course you can find every episode link in the descriptions of each video also I suggest you download the PDF worksheet you can save this to your computer and come back at any point this is an interactive PDF which has been designed to enhance this course experience this contains all the relevant video and project download links so I recommend you download this PD and you can also find the download link for this in the description so what is Adobe Illustrator well Adobe Illustrator is part of the Adobe Creative Suite and in recent years has become industry standard for creating vector artwork and simple layouts for print if you need to create logos illustrations posters infographics t-shirt designs and flyers illustrator is a program to create them in the tools in Illustrator make it very easy to create and modify shapes and strokes to build your compositions and bring your design to life you can also import pixel-based images to add to your layouts as part of your designs so what are we going to create on this course now for all you artists illustrators and designers out there who love to draw and sketch on paper hopefully this course is really going to help you we are going to bring a hand-drawn sketch which has been scanned and placed into Illustrator and converted into vector artwork then we are going to use this vector artwork in a poster and t-shirt design so why a t-shirt and poster design well we are going to explore a scenario where we are going to design for print so we are going to be working with CMYK colors for the poster though for the t-shirt design we will need to stay with any budget and use only Pantone colors that the printer requires so we are going to explore how to incorporate Pantone's and CMYK swatches into our artwork so let's take a look at the finished document so here we are in Adobe Illustrator and here you are looking at the finished artwork document we are going to build up to so this document consists of four artboards the first two artboards contain the development stages in our project and the last who artboards contain the finished designs on artboard one we have a vector drawing composition which was traced from a sketch drawing which was scanned and placed into our document this complex composition contains multiple shapes and stroke vectors on our board - we have the same artwork but this is a single flat vector the artwork from the first artboard has been compounded into a single vector here on artboard 3 is the finished poster artwork here we have lots of colors great into facts and type objects on the last artboard is the t-shirt design and here we can also see our Pantone references which we are going to use to incorporate correct Pantone colors into our artwork once we have finished the poster and t-shirt design we are then going to export the artwork to the correct format for a printer to print the design the specification here are 2 pdfs we are going to finish with if we look carefully at the first PDF on the left we can see that this is just one page and we can see a number of marks and guides around the outside now these are bleed and crop marks that the printer is going to use to correctly trim the artwork also we have some color squares to help the printer collaborate the colors accurately with their printers all these marks and guides have been generated upon export in the artwork from the illustrator document and we will be taking a look at how to do this at the end of the course over to the right we have the t-shirt artwork PDF now this is a little different from the poster example this artwork is going to be printed onto a t-shirt so we can see here that the artwork is set on a white background and some of the color in the skull artwork is also white this is where the color of the t-shirt is going to come through and fill these areas notice on this example we do not have any marks and bleeds well this design is not going to be printed on paper this will become a transfer that will be heat pressed onto a t-shirt so we do not need marks and bleeds here so that is everything we are going to build up to on this course so once you have downloaded the project folder let's get into it and we're going to begin with the first video in the course interface introduction to adobe illustrator so i'll see you in the next video