Illustrator: Shapes 101

This is a very simple thing to make in Illustrator and should definitely help you guys get your feet wet if you are a novice and Illustrator is still intimidating to you. During this tutorial you will deal with shapes: how to make them, lock them, and merge them. Let's get right to it, shall we?

Make the shapes. On the left of the screen you will see the toolbox containing your selection tools, type tools, and pretty much everything else. Click and hold down on the rounded rectangle tool. The menu will expand giving you more shape options. Select the ellipse (circle) tool and make a circle on your artboard about 100 x 100 pixels in size.

Select the hexigon tool and click the artboard. A window will pop up giving you the option to specify sides. Choose 3 sides and click OK. Shrink and stretch it accordingly and drag it down to the bottom left corner of the circle. Alt click and drag the triangle to make fangs. Repeat this by making and duplicating a rectangle half the size of the fangs and drag them to make front teeth. Use the ellipse tool for the eyes and set the fill to black, along with the stroke.

Lock the shapes. Select an eye and go to object/lock/selection to disable selection, and repeat with the other eye. Unfortunately, once you lock a bunch of stuff you can't unlock one without unlocking them all, but grouping your objects will help keep them sorted for you. To group objects select them and go to object/group. You can ungroup them at any time.

Merge the shapes. Click and drag across your artboard to select all unlocked objects, which includes the teeth and circle. Go to window/pathfinder and select "Add to shape area", which is a button top-left in the window. With this new multi-shape selected, click the color palette in your tool box and the color window will pop up. At the bottom right of the color window there is a hexidecimal field (six digits) thatlet's you input a color code to specify a very specific color. You will be entering F7F2DA into this field. Click OK.

Well there you have it: your very own cartoony vampire skull. My next installment would probably be on stylizing and texturing to create a truly horrific little vamp skull. Keep your eyes peeled, because you'll be seeing this little bugger again.