From the course: Illustrator 2025 Essential Training

Drawing with the Line tools - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2025 Essential Training

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Drawing with the Line tools

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- [Instructor] In addition to the shape tools, illustrator also gives us a bunch of line tools. I'm going to begin this by tapping backslash on my keyboard and then going to the line segment tool. If I long press on this, just as I did in the last movie, I'm just going to drag over to the side here and release on that bar to get us a tray. So these are all of the tools we're working with. Now, with each of these by the way, the modifiers of holding down option and shift work exactly the same way. So if you're drawing a line and you want to constrain it, holding down shift will constrain it like so, and the angle is something you can actually change in the preferences, so you can explore that separately. Command + K or control + K is the quick way to get to your preferences. If you want to draw a line segment from the center outwards just as well, just hold down the option key just to cement that knowledge there also. As with the shape tools, each tool has a dialogue. You can simply click and enter values into the dialogue if you want to, and that of course gives you great precision. The arc tool, talking of precision, is the most used when you are using it with the dialogue because there are so many other ways to draw arcs. While you're drawing though, you can use the up and down arrow keys to modify the way that the arc is drawn and you can also flip the arc over by just tapping on the F key. If I go ahead and go for the dialogue here, so if I just click for example, it will give us the last units that I drew in here. We've got an option here for open or closed. If I go ahead and choose that, you can see that it will then close that path. I'll just undo that from there. And if I click again, set this back to open and you can determine the slope here as well and whether or not it's going to be filled. You also have a reference point for drawing, so plenty for you to explore in there, there we go. The next tool is the spiral tool, and this behaves in a way very similar to the star tool in which it has an outer radius, but it has a decay rate instead of an inner radius, and you can modify that by holding down the command key or the control key to change the decay rate like so. And if I just release that and carry on drawing, it's important you do it by the way while you're drawing, not afterwards, and you can use the up and down arrow keys to add more or less line segments if you desire from there. If you want it to go in the other direction while you're drawing just tap R and it will swap over like so. So you could think, reflect maybe for that. And there you go. That's how you can draw it. If we take a look at the dialogue, you can see that it has basically an outer radius here, then a decay rate on the inside. The default is normally 80%, number of line segments, and it expresses style here in two different ways, so in one direction or the other, if I go ahead and do that and hit okay, you can see how that works. It's basically flipped over. Then we have two grid tools. We have the rectangular grid tool, so if I go ahead and start drawing with this, we can use the arrow keys to modify the number of lines up and down. So the up arrow introduces more horizontal lines. The down arrow reduces that, and the left arrow reduces the number of vertical lines and the right arrow increases them. Hold down shift just as before to draw as well. Now this does have one other thing that can be controlled by the keyboard, and that's skewing, and you can use the X and C keys to skew horizontally, and you can use the F and V keys to skew vertically. If you've done that and you can't get it to go back to where you wanted it to be, the quickest way to deal with it is to go into the dialogue. So one simple click like so, and then you can set the skew values back to zero. Okay, finally, we have the polar grid tool. I find this tool very useful indeed. I use this a lot in my work. Now here it's showing in the way that I last drew with it, which was actually something else I was drawing yesterday, but if I go ahead and use the right arrow key, you can see I'm introducing some dividers as well. Up and down changes the number of concentric circles, there, and left and right changes the number of lines. Just as before, if I simply click with this, you can see this also has dividers skew as well and radial skew also. So you can change that by using the keys I mentioned before if you want to, and this is also how you can reset them. That's it. Those are the line tools that we have. All of them in their own way, very useful, but I find the last two especially useful.

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