Rotating Objects in Adobe Illustrator

Lesson 19 from: Adobe Illustrator Creative Cloud: Essentials for Creating Projects

Brian Wood

art & design

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19. Rotating Objects in Adobe Illustrator

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Rotating Objects in Adobe Illustrator

Come under view and choose fit artboard and window. Now we need to make copies of this thing, okay? So what we're gonna do is, we're gonna use a little bit of rotation and a little bit of copying at the same time, all right? So we already rotated a little bit earlier, but we're gonna throw a little spin on it for ya. What I want you to do is go to the selection tool, and let's take this object, and we're gonna drag it down and just kinda get it into the circle down there a little bit, just so it's kinda, you know what I mean, just kinda tucked in the circle a little bit. In Illustrator what you can do, too, is, you can use your arrow keys if you want, up, right, down, left, all those arrows, and bump objects around if you wanna do that to make it a little bit easier on yourself. I wanna center that on the artboard so that it's centered with the circle. Am I testing you again? Maybe. So we're gonna come up top. We're gonna go to align our artboard, make sure that that is selected. Usual...

ly you'll see the align to option somewhere up here, and then I'm just gonna do the horizontal align center and sure it's center with the wheel. We're gonna go in and rotate this thing a bit around the center point. Trying to think of the easiest way to do this with you guys. All right, we'll do it this way, I think. There are so many ways to get this done. All right, come over to the left-hand side over here, and you're gonna see that we have the rotate tool. Go ahead and click on the rotate tool. Come on here. Now if you remember early early on, we said that there was a little rotate around point, right? So that little, you know, aqua thing, we could take that, and if we wanna make this and copy it around the circle, where do you think we wanna put that little aqua thing, right? In the center of the circle. Center of the circle, you got it. So what I want you to do is take that little aqua thing, and you can drag it down here, and do we have our Smart Guides turned on? I don't think we do, do we? You guys, this is actually, I'm glad this is happening. I didn't plan it, but Smart Guides are good for certain things. Sometimes you turn them on, sometimes you turn them off. In this case, I want them on, 'cause it's gonna show us the center of the circle, okay? So what I want you to do is come under view, and you're gonna see Smart Guides down here. Go ahead and turn those on. Now you should see if you move your cursor around the center of the circle now, it'll say the word center. So what you could do is, you could actually now is take that little aqua and drag it down until you see the word center and you've got that thing perfectly centered on the circle, okay? All right, now what we could do if we wanted to is we could go out and we can rotate this thing now, okay? Now, here's gonna be the problem. If we go to rotate this thing, we're gonna drag it. How are we gonna know that we have the exact angle down to get the right spacing and the right number out here? It's gonna be kinda tricky, okay? I wanna show you guys a little bit of a trick here, because you're gonna use this a lot. I guarantee it, okay? What I wanna do is, I wanna rotate around this, and I wanna go and say, let's put them every 45 degrees and copy them, too, okay? If you come to the center out here, what I want you to do is, I want you to... Okay, it's already there. Sorry, you guys. Tell you what, why don't you do this for me? I've got it in the center. Take that center point, that little aqua thing, and drag it off the center just a little bit. It's not gonna work if we put it there already. Come to the center of the circle. Hold down the option key. Now what we're gonna do here, and it's not gonna let me do this, so you can. Okay, tell you what, here's what we're gonna do. Go back to the selection tool real quick. If you wanna reset what you're doing with these tools, I just messed up. I don't want that center point to be moved. You can go back to a tool. Go back to the selection tool. It's still selected. Go back to the rotate tool, okay? You guys are gonna see, did that center point move? There you go. Now you should be able to do this. Come to the center of the circle, and if you see the word center, okay, hold down the option key. You guys, with any kind of transforming, if we use this key, this one key, we can do things in one step. We can do like 15 things in one step. Go ahead and click right now. Hold down option and click in the center there. You see the dialogue open up there? Okay, so here's the thing. What we did by doing that is we said, this gets really kinda tricky, 'cause if we didn't take that little aqua thing and we stick it down there and we rotate, it's gonna keep resetting, and we're not gonna know how to do it, okay? By holding down the option key, it's saying, stick there; aqua thing, stay there, the rotate-around point, and open up the dialogue. That's basically what it just did. So now what we can do is we can go in here and say, let's pick how far we need to move it, and we can also use that copy button we saw earlier when we were doing the other kind of transformation. So let's do this. Let's go with a, what shall we do here, 45, will 45 work? Preview on and off. Let's go with minus 45. A lot of times what I wind up doing is I'm just trying to figure out how many I want. It's 360 degrees, right? The circle, so you just kinda do, I know it's a little math, I know, but you can kinda toggle preview on and off, and you can see where it's gonna go next, okay? So we only want a few of these. So I'm gonna have a minus 45 degrees, all right? Go ahead and click copy. I'm hoping this working for everybody. Did I give you a copy out there? Yes. Okay, all right. Well, we got one. (laughs) Do we wanna do this 15 more times? No, we don't, okay? If you manage to get one copied like that, what we can now do is we can use the power of Illustrator to say, just do it again, okay? There's a command in here that we use all the time and that you will learn. Come up to object. Early on we learned about transform and a little bit around arrange, but if you come to transform, you're gonna see probably my favorite command in Illustrator. It's called transform again. The shortcut is to the right there, and I use that a lot, and, you guys, you're gonna find out that when we place images in here, if you use, how many of you use Ensign? Okay, if you use Ensign to place images, the shortcut is command D, okay, to place an image. Well, they use that for transform again in here, okay? So you're not gonna have the same shortcut if you place an image. This is staying; this is a good shortcut you're gonna learn. Go ahead and choose transform again and watch what happens. It's like just to the same angle, same amount of angle, I should say, and copy it again. It's doing the exact same thing in the dialogue box. So what do we need to do now? We need like, yeah, we need like, what, one, two, three, four, five more, okay? So let's go do that some more. That's why we lose the shortcut, by the way, but if you don't wanna learn it or use it, you can just go to object transform, transform again. Keep trying that, and it should get it out there for ya. You know what? I gotta use the shortcut; it's killing me. Object transform, transform again is a beautiful thing. All right, we've got ourselves our ship wheel out here. I think it looks pretty good, not too bad. What I wanna do is, I wanna take all these objects that we have and I wanna group them together, okay? So let's do that. So let's go to the selection tool. And I like to go in, and I like to select all the objects out there. You're gonna find, I wanna show you a command that can be really good, really actually beneficial for you. If you have an artboard and you like to select everything on that artboard, and just that artboard, without having to drag across to do things like that, you'll gonna see, go under select up in the menus, a command called all on active artboard. I use this one all the time. Go ahead and choose that. If you were to choose select all, it would select everything in every artboard, okay? So obviously this is being a little picky. Let's go ahead and group this together. So go to object, group.

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Brian Wood

<span style="color: rgb(80, 0, 80);">Brian Wood is a web developer, the author of 14 books, including Adobe Muse CC Classroom in a Book and Adobe Illustrator CC 2018 Classroom in a Book. The author of numerous training titles including Muse, Dreamweaver, InDesign, Illustrator and more</span>.

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Ratings and Reviews

KATIE Y

I am a pretty computer literate person but an Ai beginner i.e. I am completely new to the Creative Cloud/Adobe Illustrator. (This is also the first time I've used CreativeLive.) I think this course it is fantastic. The pace is good as is the content which progressed logically and covers all the basics you'd hope it would. The course is 2 full days' worth of material but it is broken down into segments so you can revisit or skip through as you need to. The presenter is really personable and easy to watch (even for me, a Londoner!). I would also say I think it is pretty good value for money -- I am currently enrolled on a part time course, basically doing the same sort of stuff, and I have to say this is better and a bit cheaper! I definitely recommend it to you!

jackflash

A brilliantly designed course. it's almost magic. It's everything you hope for in a follow-along software class. Brian Wood has engineered it so that you start on a project that just needs basics, and then you move on to more & more complicated projects, and almost without realizing it you've learned Illustrator. This doesn't just happen -- Wood has clearly put a LOT of effort into creating this course. Here's one trivial example: he doesn't overload you with a lot of keyboard shortcuts right at the beginning -- you start with the actions themselves, using the (admittedly tedious but easy) pulldown menus, and then after you're comfortable with what you're doing, he'll throw in the shortcut. It may seem obvious, but so many instructors feel they have to give you an extensive foundation of definitions, shortcuts, interfaces, etc., before you ever do anything. Good stuff to know, but you'll never remember it. Wood has you up and working almost immediately. And he's a joy to listen to, at a perfect pace. Highly recommended.

Philippe LIENARD

Top course. Very well explained, clear, good examples, pleasant teacher. I like it and recommend it. One suggestion, it would be nice to have a detailed table of content of the course in the material. For instance, it took me quite a while to find back the part of the course where how to make a gear was explained.

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Rotating Objects in Adobe Illustrator

Rotating Objects in Adobe Illustrator

Lesson Info

19. Rotating Objects in Adobe Illustrator

Lessons

Class Introduction

What is Adobe Illustrator?

Explore the Interface

Create and Save New Documents

Zoom and Navigate

Working with Artboards

Introduction to Layers

Rulers and Guides

Shapes and Drawing

Aligning and Combining Shapes

Pen Tool

Manipulating Stroke and Fill

Creating and Editing with Color

Painting with Gradients

Getting Started with Patterns

Adding Text To Your Document

Formatting Text

Strokes and Variable Strokes in Adobe Illustrator