The tools we will be discussing are the very basic shape creation and manipulation tools as well as the colorizing and symbol tools.

The most basic shape creation tools are illustrators own shape tools. These include the rectangle tool (hold shift to make a perfect square), the rounded rectangle tool, the ellipse tool, the polygon tool, and the star tool.

With all these tool holding shift while dragging out these shapes will create equal widths and heights. This means rectangles will be squares and ellipses will be circles, etc. On the polygon and star tool, once you’ve clicked and dragged out a shape (assuming you haven’t let go of the mouse button) you can increase or decrease sides (polygon) or points (star) by pressing the up and down arrows. There is a special trick you can do with the star tool. Drag out the basic shape, set the number of points, then, while still holding the mouse button in, press and hold the command (control on windows) key on the keyboard and drag the mouse outward. Pretty neat huh?

Next we see the line segment tool panel. I brought this up because of the tool inside this panel. The spiral tool. This is a very useful tool and I wanted you to be aware of it as we will no doubt be using it in the future.

The next panel is the Pen tool and its associates. The pen tool is one of the most important tools in illustrator in my humble opinion. I use it to create most of the shapes that start off my graphics.

You can choose the pen tool by pressing P on the keyboard. You can create a shape with 90 degree angle corners simply by clicking the mouse where you want the corners to appear. You can create a rounded shape by clicking and dragging the mouse. This creates an anchor point with handles that bends the line. If you want to bend a line to one side of the anchor point and not the other you can Alt click the anchor point after you’ve clicked and dragged out the desired handle.

Next to the pen tool we have the add and delete anchor point tool. Pretty basic here, these tools do exactly what they sound like. If you need to edit a path that has already been drawn simply add an anchor point and manipulate as necessary. The next tool in the panel is very important. This is called the convert anchor point tool. This will eliminate the handles by clicking the anchor point assuming it has handles, or it will create handles from an anchor point with no handles by clicking the anchor point and dragging. You can click a handle to make that particular handle disappear, or you can click and drag the handle to break the bond between that handle and the handle on the other side of the anchor point. A very useful tool.

Next we have our symbol sprayer, scrunched, shifter, spinner, etc. These tools put symbols that we create on our art board, move them around, grow or shrink them and spin them.

More basic, but important tools to know apart. Our selection tool and our direct selection tool. The selection tool, hot key V, selects entire shapes, paths, groups, etc for us to move resize etc. Our direction selection tool, hot key A, allows us to select certain anchor points, handles, paths, etc. and manipulate / adjust them to meet our needs.

I be remiss if I didn’t mention the blog brush tool. This brush differs from the paint brush tool because unlike the paint brush, which makes paths, the blob brush makes shapes which can be filled. The blob brush is very intuitive. I encourage you to pay around with it. It’s great for under coloring your artwork.

Lastly, two other tools I’d like to mention are the gradient mesh tool and the blend tool. The gradient mesh tool is a great tool for creating complex gradients, such as fruit surfaces or skin tones like faces where you have multiple colors and blending going on. The blend tool can create fantastic artwork and is used all over for various projects. You can create flash animations as well as interesting gradient effects with the blend tool. I used the blend tool on my about me page as well as my contact box.

Well i hope I didn’t bore you too much with the basics of these tools, but I thought it best to introduce them before we got going creating our graphics.