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How to Cut Holes in Shapes Using Compound Shapes in Illustrator CC

Hi there in this video, we're going to cut holes and things. They're called compound paths. I'm gonna zoom in. You can see I can see through this owl to the page underneath. And also going to do this. Everyone loves a bit of abstract compound path making. We're going to do that in this tutorial. Okay. So first up open up the file. Compound path from your exercise files. And what I want to do is I'm going to bring in an image. Okay. And I'm going to bring in an image called old paper. There you are. You know, drag it out So it kind of covers the background. It's a little bit big. It's okay. All right. So I want this now. I'm going to arrange it. Send it to the back because what I'd like to do is at the moment there's let's say these two eyes, these outer eyes here with the green because I want them to be holes because if they're white, okay. Which is what we've done in the past and obviously we can't see through to the background. So what we want to do is we want to punch holes in it. S...

o I'm going to select the two eyes. Can just drag them off because I want these to selected some holding shift, click both of them. Then I also might as well do it in one big go. I want to cut that out as well. The nose and all from the sky in the background. It comes down to layer order. Whoever is at the back gets everything cut out of them. Okay. So make sure that the owl's body is at the back which it is for us go up to object come down to compound path and go to make and it slices it all out and we can see through. Let's get the eyes will move them back in and we're going to select everything. De select the background. I'm going to fill it with white. Just imagine what we had there at the beginning. Ok. So that's how to make a compound path. I want to add a drop shadow to it just because I might as well show you that while we're here. Let's go to effect and let's go to stylist and you'll notice when you add things like drop shadows. Watch this. But I'm gonna turn on preview to show you the default. He said a little bit weird. Like it's kind of late and stuff. So what you need to do first is have it all selected and then group it. So object group. And then if I go to effects and go to stylist, I can go to job shadow and because they're all one group, they will kind of act how you imagine they would act. Okay. And I'm just going to drop this down to something not totally massive. Still pretty big dan. Let's go one down here. All right. That's what I want. Let's click. Ok. So that's my first compound path. Next thing I'd like to do is I'm going to open up a new document and we're going to do that when we saw at the beginning with all the squiggles, same sort of principle. And so I'm going to open up a document. I'm gonna make sure it's RGB. Okay, so 12 in advance? Why? Because it's just a better color escape. Look at the earlier video for RGB. About why? Okay. And what I'm going to do is I am going to grab my pencil tool, pencil tool. He's underneath my shaper tool, grab the pencil tool. If you double click it, make sure the smoothing is right up and they keep selected is until it's just going to help us with our lines look smoother and I'm going to draw a few different schools. So what I'll do is I'm going to draw one initial, one kind of around the outside and just kind of doing blobby moving around and watch when I let go come back to the beginning because you see right back to the beginning and it kind of makes it one shape which is cool. I'm making another one. How many of these do I want? I think I want five. Can never remember. It doesn't really matter. This one's gonna have like extra blob in there. All right, and maybe one more that's going to it's going to go underneath there, yep. I like what I'm doing here um exciting myself and so I've got all my shapes here now. Okay, so what I'm going to do to make this easier for everybody to understand. It's easier probably just to go, you're the beginning shape, you're the next shape. Just keeping a nice bit of space between them all to make it easy while we're working. Okay, so I've got all these shapes and I would like some rectangles. Okay, so I'm going to draw a rectangle that covers the page, it doesn't really matter how big these are really. Um and I'm going to grab it and I'm going to stick this, What have I got? I got no Phil I'm going to pick a color. Okay? And I'm going to give, grab it and slipped underneath. Come and these need to be at the back, right? Okay, so we need to go arrange, send it back and I'm going to have one, two molding all while I'm dragging. That's how I'm getting the copy we did earlier on, but you can just hold down the option key on a Mac or the old key on a pc. You go there's all my shapes. Now, I'm gonna pick some colors because I want to, it's got a window, we use color things. Okay? And we use this earlier on in the tutorial, I'm using the expo and I'm going to pick some colors. Alright, so I will pick this color here. Let's start with this one, it's gonna be my base color. Actually, we need one other color. That's what we need. Okay we need five segments. This bottom one is going to be this color. Green Click on this one. You're going to be this yellowy colour. You peach say running out of names. Um All right. So now we need to make them compound path just like we did before. Okay, so we're going to start with this bottom one here. Okay, select both things and then get an object compound path. Make select object compound path. Make you see the shortcut there. It's command eight on Mac or control eight on a pc. I use it all the time. Okay I got them all. Next thing I want to do is just select them all and give them no stroke. Goodbye stroke. I'm going to stick them up. You were at the bottom your next there's gonna be some layer order issues. Not I happen to do them in the right order, nope. Okay so that guy's behind that guy. So I just need to make sure with him selected arrange bring to front. Now I'm gonna have my lay orders. It was um arrange bring to front just so you know, it's not really a kind of intro class for shortcuts but command shift and the outer square rectangle. It's up near your peaky. Okay it's command shift and outer or the second square bracket. It's control shift. If you're on a pc. So I've got all my colors. Okay, they're all lined up and what you saw at the beginning though, there's like a nice little effect applied to them. So kind of like, well it is the drop shadow makes this look a little nicer. So I am going to select at all. I am going to close down my color themes and I am going to go to effect. I'm gonna go to drop shadow under stylist, drop shadow and we're gonna play around with this, make sure previews on And I guess this will come down to the size of your page. What kind of squiggles you did? So by default? Yeah, it's a bit small. That 1111 I am going to go to um I'm gonna pretend like I'm just flicking this but I practiced this before the video to try and make it look awesome. Seven seven And this one here looks good at 20. Okay, the offset is just like left and right. So it's kind of like the shines, the sun shining up there. The blur as you watch the it'll change from this kind of really hard edge to a really kind of soft edge. Does it look great? It looks okay. Let's click ok on this. Now. One thing before we move on is that you might find your machine is running super slow. Okay. The reason for that is because um the what's called the rustic setting. So if you're finding like it's just impossible to work. You can go up to here, go to effects Document Raster settings and change it from 300 pp. I to this 72 pp. I the only problem with that is going to it's going to change the resolution for when you output this so when you go to print it's not going to look as good, but while you're working it actually just speeds things up. So now I'm working and I'm going to resize stuff, it's super quick. Whereas back at even just clicking the OK button takes forever. Don't don't go. So now when I drag it out it goes recalculating and then like I got a pretty fast mac and it's still pretty slow. So what you need to do is you can change it to 72 just before you go to print or when you're finished doing your adjustments go back to 300 look nicer. Okay, so I've got this, I've done better ones but let's say that I like this like it looks good as a kind of abstract kind of slice rather than the whole thing. So what I might do is I'm gonna grab the rectangle tool and grab like a chunk of maybe this. Yeah, maybe just that bit, I don't know, maybe that bit so I've drawn a rectangle on the top of selecting everything and then I'm going to go to can't do it over here with the quick actions because I've got too many things selected But it still works. Its under object clipping mask, McM or command seven and now it looks kind of cooler, right? Kind of sliced down into a little piece. Okay, so one last thing we'll do with compound passed before we leave is let's open a file in our exercise files. It's called smartphone dot ai here it is here. Now this has been downloaded from adobe market, it's free to use and I'll show you a w market in a video coming up. But basically um it's a, you know, it's cool it's got a hole cut in it but say you want to kind of pull it apart and I go to objects and I go to one group network. So the button is kind of not part of it now but then I go to object and go to Canton Group it anymore but it's still stuck together. Okay. It's because it's a compound path, there's a hole cut in the middle of it. Actually there's lots of holes. Okay, all of these guys here, you can kind of see through the page there, they're all compound paths. So we need to pull it to pieces and now that we know what a compound path is. No problem object compound path instead of make we're going to release it, I'm going to click off in the background now it's all, it's kind of constituent parts and you can go and adjust it change colors, You might want to go back, you know, just the edges of this and then make it a compound path. Again it's up to you. But now, you know, there are lots of instances of this where you get given an image you've downloaded from the Net or a stock library site and it's just really hard to work with. The magic potion is to go to object and go to release compound path. Alright, my friends, you are now a master of compound past, go forth, cut holes and things. And I will see you in the very next video.