Lessons

Lesson Info

Basic Shape Editing

Alright, folks, we're back and we're going to show you the next step in the Siris of Illustrator CC 2019. We're gonna show you shape editing. We're gonna work with the properties panel on the transform panel, show you how we can edit and transform these shapes and show you a lot more hidden features that are in transforming the properties panel show how to do precise editing and sizing, and we're gonna get going. So I've got several shapes here that we've drawn from. The last lesson that we did on every time we click on one of these are properties panel is going to come up and it's going to show us our transform and our appearance sections where we could go in. We can do some basic editing in the transformed section. We can control the location of the object on the art board as well as the width and the height, the rotation and flipping the object. And then we have our little dot, dot, dot with more options. This more options section is where we can do a lot of editing with these parti...

cular shapes. Now, the one thing I don't like about the properties panel is that every time you want the more options, you have to click on this little dot, dot dot. So I'm actually going to go into the window menu and I'm gonna bring up the transformed panel. It's a separate panel all by itself that's going to show me everything, along with the options for each and every item that we have created. This to me is a whole lot more efficient than clicking on the little dot dot dot for more items here, Properties panel is great to have, but for now, the transformed panel is what I'd like. One thing that I want to dio, because I use the transformed panel all the time when I'm going in and creating and editing shapes under the cheese grater in the transformed panel. One of the things that I have is an option is show on shape creation, which means when I draw a shape, my transformed panel, if I have this checked, automatically pop up forming, so we'll show you if I take shape and I draw it all of a sudden, my transformed panel comes up, which is nice. This was set of the default at some point in illustrator I can remember back and people are like, Why does it come up every single time? Well, that was because it was a default setting. I actually like that setting because I use this. So we're gonna start off with our basic shape. We have a rectangle or square right here. I click on the shape with the selection tool and here in my transformed panel, Aiken set numerous things. My location on my art board right here and then the width and the height of my object, the angle of rotation and also the skew of my object If I would like to skew this one direction or another Now I can also go in and control the width and the height here, the rotation. It's a duplicate of this, but I can also go in and I can begin to set the corners. Now we have three different kinds of corners on our shapes here. Anything that has not a circle. Basically, we can go ahead and we can create, edit our corners on. I can change the size those corners by going in and choosing from my three different corner sections here round, inverse, rounded and bevel or champ for as they call it. Now it's the inverted round, and I could set this independently on each and every individual corner. Or if I link the values together, then when I go in, I can choose the different corner sizes and make them all linked together. Now what's interesting with this is that I can go in even with these linked together. This is just linking the actual corner sizes together so that they will be adjusted together. I can still go with it, and I can still adjust the corners style separately from all the other ones. So if I want to go in and I wanna edit this shape, I certainly can. If I want to remove all the corners, I just simply go and set all of my corner values. Zero. So this is something that's quite nice, easy to do, right there in the transformed panel. Now, one other thing I want to mention here is going in and using our reference point here. And the reason why I mention this is because I may go in and I may rotate an object, and by default it rotates or scales or sizes excused from the middle. Well, that may not be where I wanted to scale or rotate from. I'm a wanted to sit in a specific location in scale from that location and that reference point, or that anchor point is, I tend to call. It could be set in the transform by clicking on the dot, which basically anchors that position of your selected object. And this is where it sizes and it scales from. So if I click on the reference point and I rotate and I've got my reference point in the bottom, you'll see that I could go in and I can rotate around that particular point right there. So maybe I want to keep it in that location. Well, that reference point also works for sizing as well. If I go on, I make it wider or taller right here. It's going to scale From that reference point. I may have this in the exact location. I don't want to move the baseline. It's lined up with whatever artwork I've got here. I don't want to move. I set the reference point toe anchor. That reference point is also where this measures from the upper left hand corner of my art board over so the excess the distance over from the left, the why is the distance down from the top of my art board? Reference points are quite useful as you get tow line things up and getting things in your layout. Then you may want to go ahead and use that reference point. Once you know about that, that's cool. I use it all the time because I find it to be perfect, especially when I want to skew or scale or rotate something. I may want to rotate this a 45 degree angle from the lower left hand side, and I can rotate that It stays anchored right there if I jump over to my rounded rectangle tool, as we talked about in the last lesson here. Using the rounded rectangle tool really isn't necessary because rounded rectangle is nothing more than a rectangle that just has rounded corners on it. And you can set it that fast near transformed panel by creating a rectangle or square and then just simply rounding the corners from here. Nothing special. We're gonna jump over to the trying or the polygon tool here for a second and go back to our lips with the polygon tool Once we've created are polygon here. We do have the ability to change the number of sides after we've created it, which is not something we could do with a star tool. We're gonna find out about that shortly with a polygon tool in my transformed panel. Aiken, do the side count by scaling the little bar back and forth here or using my up and down arrows here to scale the number of sides. After I'm done, I can also go. We ended. I can control the size or the radius of this. So I'm measuring from the center to the out most part, or Aiken set this so that my line length is a certain distance. Now, what's interesting here, where the polygon is that Because this always draws from the middle, we can set the radius, but we can also set the overall width and height with this as well. Here's an interesting thing. If I set the width and the height and say I want it to inches wide and two inches high right here and I do this and I say Okay, two inches wide, two inches high. It's like, Wow, that's kind of weird. Okay, you know, that looks really squishy and squatty, and what I've done is I've just rescued this all off. Well, if I do squish this out of proportion, I could go and click on the make sides equal box, and that's going to return it so that all the line segments are going to be equal length right there. So while it's cool to be able to do the width and the height right here, it can skew this off. I can set the sides, and I can also go in. And I can choose the corner types because anything that comes to a corner can have rounded, inverted or tampered sides right there. And they can set that very easily as we go now. One other trick with a polygon tool as well is this. When I select the polygon tool in the upper right hand segment, there is a little diamond that when I click on it will give me a little plus and minus. I can slide this up and down, and this allows me to go from three sides a triangle all the way up to 11 sides. That's basically my range here by doing it directly on the object. So unless I need to go in and do in the future editing here, I couldn't do most of my transformation right here on the polygon tool. So that's pretty slick. This is a fairly new feature that they added a couple generations ago, and I like that because I can just draw a polygon, change the number of sides right on the object. I'm going to jump over to my circle here in the circles. Quite interesting, because this is fun. If you ever tried to do pie charts or do a little open little as I call it little walk a walk of people, um, we could go and we can take this circle and we can actually split it up into a pie. When you select the circle or the Ellipse, you'll notice a little pull handle to the right hand side. When you click on this, you'll get your little moon, and I can click on this handle and I can actually open up my circle. With this, I can create kind of a pie chart or a nice little video game character and in my control panel or my transformed panel here I can actually go in. And I can set these handles to be a certain distance or a certain size, a certain angle right there. How do I actually go in and make a pie chart so that it's a pie chart that's actually relevant to my data? Because if I wanted to show a pie chart here that showed, like, 65% and 35% how doe I know where I actually put this. I'd have to go ahead and figure out math and do this whole thing. Well, this is where the transformed panel actually transcends. Just being able to go in here and set your values. I want to show you this because I do pie charts. I do info, graphics and data all the time. So I want this pie chart to be have a 65% section in a 35% section and going in here. What I want to do is I want to set this so I can get my little opening here to be like 65%. So here we're dealing with degrees. We have 360 degrees in a circle. And of course, we're talking about percentages. We have 100%. So if I go in here and I have 65% what I'm going to do is I'm going to take 65 which is my percentage that I want. And for each percentage is 3.6 degrees of a circle 100% 360 degrees. So if I take 65% and I multiply that by 36 and I hit return, what this does is this is just open this up 65% and giving me the remaining 35% of my pie, which is great underneath my little rotation angle handles. I have my little flip my pie, which allows me to go ahead and invert my pie. So I get my 35% and I get my 65% right there just by flipping it back and forth. This is great because now I show 65% of the pie 35% of the pie. But I want both. I want to show the entire pie segment so I could go in and Copy and Paste, which I won't dio. But I was just simply option click and drag here. And then I'm going to flip this the other side to get these two pieces, and you're like, Wow, that's great. Okay, And now, unfortunately, trying to get those to snap together and line right up and making them line up perfectly, which it isn't quite perfect. It's like, Okay, there's my piece of pie And now I've got my two segments right there that I could go ahead and I could color differently. But you wanna line them up because if you don't line them up and it looks kind of weird, but there's a faster way to do this. Remember, in the other video that you've seen so far, if you hold down your option key and you option click and drag, that's how we duplicate things. Well, the option key also comes in handy as well. I'm going to show you this. I'm not going to duplicate this. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select my portion of the pie chart that's showing the 65% I go to my little invert here and I clicked back and forth. Well, what happens if I hold down my option key while I click the invert that's going to invert it and it's going to copy it as well just by holding down the option key when I do that. And now what does it give me? It gives me to perfect pie shapes right there together, nested perfectly together. And now I can go in and I can change the fill color to be something different. And I can show you the different values of the pie. 65%. 35% is completely accurate because I did my math. Yes. You could do math here in the transformed panel and we're going to because there are certain things that weaken dio scaling things. Something needs to be made 25% larger. Yeah, you could do that. You have to guess or bring out a calculator. We're gonna show you how to do the calculations right here in the transformed panel. So there's my pie shape. I could select those, and I could rotate this around so that I get my pie lining up where it needs to be heightened with right there make it all look really good. That's my pie chart. Looks completely awesome right there. And make sure that's the exact same height, too, because we don't want an oval pie. There we go. And there's a really simple pie chart. It's that easy. It's amazing what the transformed panel could do. So we've done our rectangle. We've done our rounded rectangle. We've done our circle. We've done our polygon here and I'm gonna jump over to my star tool here, my star that I've drawn, I click on the star and guess what? The transformed panel gives you? Nothing. The star is all by itself. When you go ahead and you do a star and you don't like it, you're just gonna have to redraw the transformed panel. For some reason, Illustrator gives you know, support for the star whatsoever does with the polygon. But a star. It's like Sorry, that's it. You can control the size and that's it. And you're like bummer, a couple other things that air here with the transformed panel, and this has to deal with the stroke, weights and the corners of your objects. Right now, with my rectangle selected, I have a stroke of six points around the object. Now in my transformed panel, I have the scale, corners and the scale stroke and effects boxes. Well, here's what happens if I make this box larger or smaller by clicking and dragging on it here. Do I want that stroke way to remain six points, no matter what size they make this shape? Or as I scale this larger or smaller? Do I want the stroke way to scale with it? If I were to take this and I were to scale this simply selected with the selection tool, grab anyone of the poll handles on the corners or the mid sanctions, and I scale this down. This allows me to scale that shape now because the scale stroke and effects button is not checked. Whenever I scale this up or down, it will not scale the stroke. Wait. It will always remain six point if I turn that scale, stroke and effects on and I scale this up or down, the smaller I make it, the lower the stroke. Wait. If I scale this way up, the stroke weight is then going to scale up. The larger I make it do I want that. Well, sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't. If I'm trying to be consistent in my document and have all the stroke weight be the same, this is probably not something I wanna have checked. But if I'm doing something where I've got complex artwork and I'd like to stroke, wait to scale larger and smaller, then that's going to make a whole lot of difference. So here, if I don't scale the stroke and effects on my pie chart and I make this much smaller, you'll see that the stroke weight really starts to infringe on the artwork. And if I make this much larger than those lines will also remain the same way here. If I scale the stroke and effects and I make this pie chart smaller, those stroke weights we're going to scale with the size and not infringe again. This is something that you could do object by object once it's on. Anything that you do with scale will not affect anything else unless you scale it with this on. Turn this off and basically this is going to be a per object situation. So if its offer one object and on for another use. You have to select that object and then turn it on. It doesn't remember that if you click this object that this option is selected, it's an on and off switch, just like a light. When you turn it on, it's on for everything that you touch. Turn it off. Anything else that you manipulate won't be touched. So what do you want to have done with that stroke? Of course. Once you scale it with the scale, stroke and effects on, you're going to get some odd stroke. Wait here. And this is how you can tell if something's been scaled That way, the next thing is going to you scale the corners of something. Now, the corners are only an issue when you have either the rounded or the inverted to the champ for corners. If I scale the corners with this, I'm gonna show you with and without So I'm gonna turn, have no scale corners turned on. And when I go when I make this larger here, whatever size the corners on in fact, these air quarter inch radius corners no matter what shape I make this those corners will always remain one quarter of an inch, no matter what. Okay, How big or how small? That's it. They remain a quarter of an inch. If I scale my corners and I do this and I make this smaller here, the corners, we're going to get smaller as I go. If I go ahead and make them larger, make this larger than the corners. We're going to get much larger based on the size. If you're trying to have consistent corners, I probably wouldn't turn on the scale corners. But there is a problem with this, too. Without the scale corners on, I may have a shape like this, where the corners air scaled, and because these air quarter inch corners this whole thing is about a half an inch high. So if I tried to go ahead and I tried to make this any flatter, you'll see that I can't make this any flatter. I've got quarter inch corners, and so my shape is limited to a half inch high because one quarter and one quarter will not let me go ahead and flatten that anymore. And it's like this is really frustrating. Yes, I can make it wider, but I can't make it any shorter simply because I do not have the scale corners on. If I turn on the scale corners and now I want to make this smaller, it will scale the corners together. This is something that I learned right when they came out with live corners or corner widgets here. It was really frustrating. It's like, Why can't I scale this well, turning the scale corners? And now you can scale the corners down here and be able to get past that corner radius again. It's your choice on what it is that you want to dio with normal square corners. It really doesn't matter that the scale corners air turned on. It only matters. If you've gone in, you've actually applied any one of your corner types or radius thio an object so scale corners on or off. That's what you can go ahead and keep in mind when you're doing your artwork. So pretty cool coming down to our transformed panel regarding our lines. If I have a normal line here with my transformed panel, I have basic properties where I could go when I can set the length of the rotation with my arc here the art doesn't give you any special properties. And then when you get into your polar grid in your spiral, there's no properties. So really, the transformed panel is all about your shapes, but the transformed panel is gonna be very useful. And we're also going to show you the appearance panel because the appearance panel is now going to come in. And there's other things we could do with the appearance panel that are gonna be quite beneficial when it comes to the lines and the strokes and such. So we do have in our properties panel the appearance section right here. And this is where our fill and our stroke in our capacity and are attributes and any of our special effects are going to be. And if you click on the little dot dot dot this doesn't give you mawr of the appearance. This actually opens the appearance panel. It's funny, because in the transform here, it just shows you the stuff that's hidden. Where here it actually opens the appearance panel. You can also go under the window menu. Open up the appearance panel this way. So in the appearance panel here, there's a lot more than I conduce you than just what the transformed panel can do. And I actually use the appearance panel for just about everything. I'm gonna nest thes together, so takes up less space. So in the appearance panel, this is where I could go in and work with my shapes or my lines. Either one and I can simply select on any shape or line. And I can control my stroke. I've got my stroke color. I've got my stroke weight on my presets right here. If I have a shape, there is my fill. Color can click on the fill color. Call that up. Change my fill color as well. I can turn on the Phil turn off the stroke here without actually going and setting the stroke down to zero. I may wanna have the stroke on, but I may just want to see what it looks like. Turned off. I could just poke in the eye here, which is a whole lot nicer than going over here and saying, Oh, I want no stroke. Oh, there's no zero here. I've got to go in and either set the color to non here a lot of work. Just turn the stroke off, okay? You can always turn it back on