One technique you might want to try out for getting some custom shapes which you
can then customize further is to use Photoshop and Illustrator together.
So go ahead and open up Photoshop and unless you're subscribing just to Illustrator
alone, you should have access to Photoshop if you have the entire Creative Cloud.
And so go ahead and go to File, New and then you just want a larger area to work with
So whatever screen resolution you have or you can just do, you know, some kind of preset,
whatever you want as long as it's large enough. I would say if you need a number,
you know 2000 by 2000 pixels whatever, and you get a new document here and if
you go over to the Rectangle tool on the Tools panel, if you don't see that just
go to Window then Tools. Click and hold onto that and then go down to Custom Shape tool
You can press U on the keyboard as you can see here, the keyboard shortcut as well.
And what that does is it brings up some custom shapes up here that you can see.
If you don't see all of these by default, just click right here, that little gear icon in the
upper right-hand corner and then just choose All and that will say, do you want to
replace current shapes or paths either way. Hit OK or Append and it should
bring all these in. So let's just say you were drawing a logo for some kind of
financial services company and you want to use an umbrella. Instead of drawing
one from scratch, you can start with this. Now the idea though of course is not to just
use this because that would be kind of a generic logo that many other people
could create because you're just using a custom shape already in the default set
in Photoshop. So I'll show you how to customize it. First thing you want to do is just click and
drag an area out. Before you do that though, you want to make sure it's not Pixels up here.
So if you have Path or if you have Shape, either one of those will work. So let's just start
with Path. If you've got Path there, click and drag and notice I can distort it a bit,
you know horizontally, vertically. So hold SHIFT on the keyboard if you want
to maintain the original
proportion like that and the size doesn't matter right now. You don't have
to make it super large as long as you draw it out a bit, that's fine. Then what
you want to do after drawing it is just go to Edit, then copy or CTRL C on the
PC or Command C on the MAC. Then go back into Illustrator, go to File, New to
create a new document here and then go to Edit, Paste. right. Now Compound Shape,
you can have that be fully editable or I can do Compound Path, either way for
this example will work. So I just click OK and you'll notice that we have our shape
now and it is vector. It is points and then paths in between. Straight paths and
curved paths. So what you can do, you don't want to just resize it because then
it still is that same default shape right. What you want to do is, well first we need
to add a color so you can click this Fill, double-click it add a color so we can see it here.
You'll notice if you zoom in, its not pixellating as we drew it as a
vector path back in Photoshop and pasted it in as that. so I'm going to press CTRL or Command -
to zoom out. We can just customize this. So with this one, what you would want to do,
Well there are many different ways you can customize it. You can select the anchor
points and move them around. You can select the handles and change the angle of those
curves. You can select the path and
move that around, alright. So you can see how you can start to customize it
yourself. Of course you can also combine it with other shapes. You can use shapes
either way so I've added a shape here and click and drag around both of them. Remember
you go to Window and then Pathfinder and then Unite if you want to add them as a Shape
mode there. You could then customize it. You can of course select it and use some of the Width
tool, Warp tool and so on. So it's a pretty cool technique to get custom
shapes back in Photoshop because if you look in here in Illustrator, you don't have that
option. We have Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse. Polygon, Star, Flare.
We don't have custom shapes here.
So if we go back into Photoshop, you can create one. So let's do another one real quick.
Let's just choose this rabbit here. Instead of Path, just use Shape and I click
and drag out and you can add a Fill, you know, whatever we want. It doesn't
really matter because we're going to paste it as a path. So if you're moving it around.
If you didn't go to Edit, Copy right away I'll see what happens. If you go to Edit, you
can't copy right. So what you need to do is go back to the Custom Shape tool. Make sure
that's selected then do Copy. Now go to Illustrator, see this, and then Edit Paste.
You'll notice that now we have that rabbit shape and again we can add color,
you can add a border or a Stroke. Just make that a little larger so you can see and then you can
customize it. So these paths you can really customize and so on. So if you
look at the available shapes in Photoshop, there's a lot there to work with and the
idea is, again, you're not just using this to create a logo like the dog there for a
a veterinarian clinic or you know, the Sun there for a hotel chain. The idea is
that you customize it after you paste it into Illustrator so you can use that by
moving the points and paths around. You can adjust the width and height and how
they're curved and all that. So you do want to customize it so you're not just taking a
ready-made shape and then calling it your own design, you know, just pasting it
in there. So it's just another tip to check out and thanks.