The basis of images you create in Illustrator are paths and their connected anchor points. Use the Pencil, Pen, Ellipse, Polygon, and Rectangle tools for drawing such paths.
Necessary
Illustrator program
Instructions
Step 1
Press Ctrl + N to open the settings window for a new document created in Illustrator, and specify its dimensions, color mode, and orientation.
Step 2
If you need to draw a rectangle, turn on the Rectangle tool and hold down the left mouse button and drag the shape to the desired size. As in Photoshop, holding down the Shift key while drawing will give you the option to draw a square.
Step 3
Similarly, you can draw an ellipse, polygon, rounded rectangle, and star. To create a rectangle with rounded corners, turn on the Rounded Rectangle tool ("Rectangle with rounded corners"), the ellipse is drawn with the Ellipse tool. Use the Polygon tool to get the polygon and the Star tool to draw the star.
Step 4
To create freeform paths, turn on the Pencil or Pen tool. With a pencil, you can draw the lines you want. If you prefer to create a shape based on points, select the Pen tool and draw points by clicking on the desired places on the canvas. The points will be connected to a path.
Step 5
If in the process of drawing you did not get exactly the path you wanted to depict, you can edit it by moving one or more of its anchor points. Turn on the Direct Selection tool for this, select the desired point by clicking on it and drag it. Using the Add Anchor Point tool from the Pen group, you can add a new point to the contour, and with the Delete Anchor Point tool, remove the excess from it.
Step 6
Paths created with drawing tools can be painted with fill and stroke. To do this, select the desired path in the layers palette and select a fill color for it by clicking on the sample in the Fill field in the panel under the main menu. If the path to which you are applying this style is not closed, the fill will be limited to an imaginary line connecting the first and last points of the path.
Step 7
To customize the stroke, click on the swatch in the Stroke field ("Stroke") and choose a suitable color. You can adjust the weight of the stroke in the box to the right of the color swatch.
Step 8
Illustrator allows you to create a color with gradual transitions from one color to another using the Gradient Mesh tool ("Mesh"). To get this effect, click the tool inside the path where you want to create spots of color. Select the anchor point of the mesh that appears and specify the color in which the area around it will be painted by clicking on the appropriate swatch. Adjust the color for the rest of the anchor points in the same way.
Step 9
The colored spots created by the gradient mesh can be shifted. To do this, select the anchor point in the center of the filled area and drag it.
Step 10
To save the picture in ai, pdf or eps format, use the Save option on the File menu. If you want to end up with a.jpg"
