Transforming Techniques in Adobe Illustrator

Lesson 34 from: Adobe Illustrator Creative Cloud: Essentials for Creating Projects

Brian Wood

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34. Transforming Techniques in Adobe Illustrator

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Transforming Techniques in Adobe Illustrator

I want to show you a little bit more of combining shapes and working with objects to be able to work with them and doing something like transforming, kind of doing things like that. What I'd like you to do is let's go up. I'm gonna go up to the upper right up here. I'm using my Hand tool to do this a little bit, and we're gonna go up to this path right up here, this collection of paths that we've got, okay? In the beginner class we took a look at being able to combine shapes, and we actually used what's called the Shape Builder tool to be able to drag through and create, you know take a bunch of shapes and pull them into one shape or create one shape out of them. We can also use something called Pathfinders, and this is something we used to do and that's all we could do before, but now I still use it. Why don't you come under Window and come to what's called Pathfinder. This is a Pathfinder panel. Now a Pathfinder panel, what it does is all these little buttons in here allow you to tak...

e shapes and do things like combine shapes, punch one shape out of the other, make outlines out of things, just do all kinds of things. These are all called Pathfinder commands. In order to use these you want to select shapes. So why don't you go to the selection tool. Go ahead and click on the selection tool, and what I'd like you to do is I'm up over here on this artboard with the red background I want you to select these two shapes right here. Just the two, the bigger circle, and the rounded rectangle. You know, select those two right there. (clears throat) If you look at the Pathfinder panel, the one thing I cannot stand about the Pathfinder panel and I think people share my pain with this. If you look at all these buttons, could you figure out exactly what each one did? I've been in here for years and there's maybe three I use all the time, but the rest of them, I have to-- If you hover over it, you'll see a tool tip. You know. Oh okay. That's what that one does. Alright. A lot of times what I do is if I don't know what something does I'll just click on the button and be like, oh yeah, that's what it does, and you'll see what it does okay? If you come to this one right here, you're gonna see what's called Unite. If you come to this one right here, you're gonna see what's called Merge. They pretty much do the same thing, okay? So, why don't you go ahead and click on Unite right here. (clicking) Now, what it just did with this Pathfinder is it made this a permanent change. Permanent selection change okay? If we wanted to get back to those two shapes, we really couldn't okay? Not easily, let's say that. So what I'd like you to do, is let's Undo. If you go under the Edit menu, and choose Undo, or Command + Z, or Control + Z, you can do that. Here's the sneaky thing, and it's not really sneaky cause it tells you how to do it. Hover over Unite. Now the shape modes here, when I first started using these I was like why did they have two of the same thing? Okay, this one does the same thing initially as this one. This shape modes are actually special. You can make them so that there aren't permanent changes. It doesn't make a permanent change. If you hover over Unite, as a matter of fact, look at the tool tip. It says you can Option + click to make it not permanent, so why don't you do that. Option + click on that button (clicking) It's kinda hard to tell, you can see that the two shapes are still kinda there right? Just watch up here for a second, I'm gonna Deselect, and look at what it did. Do you see the stroke, the black line, going around it now? It's gonna look like they're combined, but technically we could still get out the two shapes. This is awesome. This is the way I work a lot of times if you can do it. If you still have that selected, this is what you can do. This is really cool. Double-click on those shapes, somewhere in them. Go ahead and double-click on them. (clicking) Now click on the circle, like in the middle of it. You can now edit the original shape size. Remember that circle we talked about that in the beginning of class? For a shape, we can go out here and adjust the radius for instance. Okay, I can go to the rectangle and click on that. You gotta kinda click away from each object, right on top of it. I can adjust those, do things like that. When you are done, you can double-click away, or press the ESC key, so double-click away from the shapes, or press the ESC key and you're there. That's pretty awesome, isn't it? That's a way for you to work non-destructively for a little while. You're gonna find later though that what's gonna happen is there are some things that you cannot apply to a shape like this, because it's not permanent, okay? If you get to a point where you're like, I'm done with that, now what I wanna do is I wanna actually apply some other effects and things it won't let me do it otherwise. You can make it permanent by clicking on this button called Expand. The Expand button should, it should be called commit, or something like that okay? Go ahead and click on Expand, with those shapes selected, and you'll see what it does. It's the same thing as just clicking on one of these Merge or Unite, but we were able to edit them in the meantime, which is really pretty neat. Hopefully that makes sense, these types of commands usually in the Pathfinder, I want you to go in and explore these a little bit. There are tons of them. The other one that I tend to use quite a bit is what's called Minus Front. This one right here. If I have a circle like this, and this object. If this circle is on top of it, we can subtract it from the shape behind. So clicking on Minus Front for instance, will basically punch a hole through the thing, okay? So there are a lot of things you can do in here, so that's a great thing to look at. Alright, those are Pathfinders, and I thought I would throw that out there and just kinda, hopefully that makes sense as far as being able to work and keep working. Okay, and expanding.

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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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Adobe Illustrator

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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Transforming Techniques in Adobe Illustrator

Transforming Techniques in Adobe Illustrator

Lesson Info

34. Transforming Techniques 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

Rotating Objects in Adobe Illustrator

Effects and the Appearance Panel in Adobe Illustrator

Adding Photo Images in Adobe Illustrator

Working with Linked Content in Adobe Illustrator

Packaging your Project for Handoff in Adobe Illustrator

Best Formats to Save Your Files

Select Like a Pro: Layers, Groups, & Other Unique Tools

Edit Paths Like a Pro in Adobe Illustrator

Editing Paths: Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator

Creating & Applying Brushes to Artwork in Adobe Illustrator

Editing Paths: Knife & Scissor Tool in Adobe Illustrator

Editing Paths: Join Tool in Adobe Illustrator

Editing Paths: Isolation Mode in Adobe® Illustrator®

Pen Tool Shortcuts in Adobe Illustrator

Other Drawing Tools & Methods in Adobe Illustrator