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Shapes and Free Transform Panel

Lesson 5 from: Adobe Illustrator CC Starter Kit

Erica Gamet

Shapes and Free Transform Panel

Lesson 5 from: Adobe Illustrator CC Starter Kit

Erica Gamet

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Lesson Info

5. Shapes and Free Transform Panel

Lesson Info

Shapes and Free Transform Panel

everything is created by shape. So we talked about this being, you know, looking like it was freehand or line shapes or logos. When we looked at all the samples, They all have something in common, and they have these shapes, whether their lines or their curves, or they're built in shapes like rectangles and stars and polygons and things like that, their shapes that are created by the tools in illustrator, and they have a bunch of them built in, and then a lot of them we create on the fly. So I'm gonna start with some of the built in tools. And the great thing is, the tools are different for creating them. But what they're making are exactly the same. They're still made up of the same components of lines and points is just that some of them have built like they built in shapes already. So I've got a few shapes here. I'm gonna click and hold on this. We've got a rectangle gotta rounded rectangle, which I'm really excited to say that the new version has so many improvements to it. But one...

thing that's really annoying. As soon as we do the rectangle tool and I draw a rectangle, the transform panel pops up, so I'm kind of annoyed without already. But that's all right. Hopefully there's a way to turn that off at some point, but I'll show you why that is. But just so you know that's gonna pop up if you're in the newest version of the Virgin. So I've got some built in shapes and there's a list here and there's a list right next door, right? So I'm gonna zoom in a little bit so you can see that where the line segment tool is. There's a bunch here as well, and these were built in and the difference being These are closed shapes. So when I create something from this list over here, I'm gonna have something like a rectangle rounded rectangle, lips. They all have something in common. They're closed right. I create the shape there, this closed shape, including the polygon and start tool and the Flare Tool. Or as I like to call it, the J. J. Abrams Tool, because there's a lot of flair. I never put flair on there anyway, so I'm gonna take my rectangle tool and start with that And when I create a tool, or when I create a shape and decide to draw the shape, it's pretty easy. I click and drag now. I always say, everybody knows that. But I hate saying that because maybe that person doesn't know that, you know, I just think everybody knows that. Is that the worst thing when some of those already knows how to do that? So simple. And you're like, I'm an idiot. I didn't ought to do that. You're not an idiot. Because if no one's ever told you, how are you supposed to know? So to draw a shape, I'm gonna click and drag right, and it's gonna click and drag from that point that I started at unless I hold down the option or the all key. So I'm still holding down with my mouse. You know the option are all key. And now where I clicked becomes the center of the shape. So sometimes that you know where the center of an item needs to be, not where to the upper left hand corner needs to be, so that's really handy to use if I hold down either way, either with the option key or not pulled on the shift key. I get a nice, proportionate item. So I get a square instead of some oddly shaped rectangle. But I'm gonna hold that down and let go. When I get to the point, I needed to be up. Now, one thing you could do if you don't know what size it needs to be, is you could double click. I'm sorry. Choose the tool and click on the page once, and then it brings up the rectangle tool and you could put in the actual size. So if you're doing something like technical drawing and you know you're working on a 1 to 1 or whatever you know, one inches, one foot or whatever, will you know exactly how wide that piece needs to be? It's three feet by two feet, so we're gonna work with inches onto three by to see. Okay, Now, when I clicked there, it automatically drew it from the upper left hand corner again unless I hold down the option of the Elke. So where that comes in handy? Let's say I had a ruler here 5.5 inches. I can find it. It's not exact. I'm just kind of throwing them on the page really quickly. Let's do that for 1/4. So that's the center of my page. And I'm also gonna lock. The rulers are the guides because I like them locked. And then I'm gonna go ahead and grab that same rectangle tool, and I'm gonna hold on the option key so it draws from the center and hold down the shift key. So it makes a nice square, right? So I'm gonna go ahead and do that and let go. But maybe I didn't know exactly. I don't want to drop by hand. I knew exactly what size I wanted to be. I would hold down the option key and click once, and now it's going to draw it from that center. Let's make it four by four. All right, so I'm gonna get that perfect square. Now, if you're looking at this and you're working on an older version, you might not see all these crazy little doodads on the corners here. So this is new. This is something they just added in the January release. These little circles here we don't talk about those later, and now we've got this crazy little handles that are on the side as well. So I like to joke. And I've been joking about this and in design that keep adding colored squares around it by, you know, 2018. It's gonna look like Christmas lights all the way around. So pretty soon we won't be able to see our shapes from all the tools that air here. But I love that they're there because it means I can work with shapes a lot easier and we'll see what that's all about. Somebody that I'm going to delete those guides So I'm going to go ahead and unlock the guides and select them and delete them. There's actually keyboard shortcut for that, but I can never remember what it is. And actually, I actually something about keyboard shortcuts, so we'll put that back in a swell. If you're someone like me likes to use the keyboard shortcuts, you can customize them. We'll grab that in a while, so let's draw a couple more shapes again. We're drawing closed shapes. We've got the rounded rectangle tool when coming here and draw a rounded rectangle. So when I d select that, I can let's actually make it so we can see a shape here when I d selected, I can see that I have rounded corners as well. We're gonna talk about that. The tool, how we fix those, how we work with those in just a little while. I think that will be in segment three when we start manipulating the shapes. Right now, we're just using the tools to create the basic shapes. We've got an ellipse tool pretty, you know, pretty self explanatory. It's an ellipse. Makes a circle Hold down the shift key. I get a perfect circle hold down the option key. It draws it from the spot that I started at again. Just like the rectangle tool. The star tool are probably gone Tools. A pretty cool polygon tool. If I start drawing and I use my up arrow keys, I can add sides to that polygon. So I'm using the down arrow keys to get rid of them. So there's my Pentagon, got a triangle. Gotta square, right, So I can use that. And I can hold on the shift key, which keeps them, uh uh sitting. I don't how to say it sitting straight and announced of me being able to turn this, however I want, I hit the shift key. It suddenly centers it right. So those are the closed tools. A couple other ones start tool. We can add sides to our stars by using the up or down arrow keys. So if I hold those down, I can get a nice Starburst. Hold the shift key down later to make sure it's nice and proportionate. So there's our starburst and, of course, the flare tool that I have never used in my life because that's what it looks like. That's basically what it looks like now. So I'm sure there's people out there. I think I use the floor tool all the time. Let us know, Then maybe I'll actually learn to use a little more. That's a flare tool. I'm gonna set this back toe the rectangle here, so I have that. The other set of tools are open tools. So those were closed, right? So we had a beginning point which ended at the same place. So when I created that, I had a nice solid rectangle and I can fill it with color and changed the stroke. And again, we're going to that in a little while. But the open tools means that they just kind of end. They don't actually come back and wrap around. This is the line segment Tool is probably the easiest one. And the one I use probably a little bit on Lee slightly more frequently than the flare tool. So what it does is I just click and drag and let go. And I've created a line they think of great. This is how I would, you know, create those crazy shapes. But I don't want to pick up and drop from here somewhere else because I've actually created two separate lines and by zoom in on those we can see that those are two separate lines and they don't exactly line up together very well, do they? I mean, I would never be able to get this to fit right inside where I need it to be, So we're going to use a different tool for that. But the line tool, we make single lines. I just don't use it very often at all. But if I want to draw from the centre outwards, I hold down that option are all key again. So now it's drawing from the center. And if I hold down the shift key, even if I'm not drawing with the option key. But holding down the shift key when using the line tools creates our constraints, it to 45 degree angles. This is great. If you know you need a nice vertical line, hold on the shift because if not, you could be ever so slightly off. This looks vertical to me, but I can see that there's actually a little bit of, ah, break in the middle of that. Hold down the shift key. It snaps it toe 45 degree angles. And I use that even when I'm drawing with the pen tool, because it again constrains it to those nice 45 degree angles. The Ark tool. I don't use very often, either. I basically can draw an arc. I don't really have any control over the ark itself. It's just a nice way of getting a nice art image that's there. I can also do the same thing with the pen tool and have a little bit more control over it, but I will go over each of the ones that are in your just kind of see the spiral. Tuell is kind of cool. There's not really any way to adjust the spirals very much. I could make it deeper, so I'm using the up and down arrow keys to make them longer or shorter. But I can't really complain with the gap between the spirals themselves occasionally have use that puts him text on it, swirl the text around. But again, I don't have a lot of control over it until I go and manipulate it. Leader Rectangular Grid Tool basically makes a grid pretty easy, pretty self explanatory. And here's another one that I said I would never use. And then somebody told me what they used before. I don't remember what it was. The polar grid tool. I would use that if I were making a technical drawing of an old Weber Grill or something like that, you know, and we'll put some hot dogs and hamburgers on that. That's what it looks like to me or radar. That's it. That's the only two things I think I would ever use that for. The nice thing is, though, those elements that I can come in here and you notice as I roll over it. It says path. This is the thing we turn outwards, his path and anchor. So there's a point and a path, and that's what everything is made up of. Two points and the segment of the line segment in between them. So the nice thing is, it created them. So even if I didn't need this, I could come in here and grab certain things and break them apart and just grab what I need and then de select the parts I didn't or delete them or whatever. So sometimes you might think I'm never going to use this. But if I didn't need to do a radar, I've been coming here and remove some of these the lines, the diagonal lines and just have the one that the radar point and I would have had to draw all those concentric circles. So again, sometimes knowing that those tools air there, you might not ever use them. If you wanted that flare thing, I mean, I'm not going to think any less of you if you decide to use the flare tool. In fact, I think that should be a challenge that we should have people put on the thing. Good use of the player tool. And then I will know other places that you can use the flare tool. So I would love to jump in America and mention that we do have this really cool new feature on the credit five website, which is our student galleries. Yes, our student work. So indeed, you go to the course page for today's course and click on the thing that says shows student work, or just scroll all the way down in the bottom of the page and post your images that have the flare solar tool that we can rape them out. And then I will be like, Okay, I feel good about the flare tool now. I'm glad it's their pizza actually using the new galleries and for more info, evenly search for galleries on our blawg, and we have full details on that. But it's been really cool seeing what people are creating. So not just the flare tools feel free to post what you're working on. An illustrator and I will be taking a look. I have to say that after the last class I did, it was great to go and see what people were creating with the stuff that they learned. And it just blows me away that, you know, people like I have never used illustrator. And then I did this, and I just I almost cry and shame that I've never I won't be able to create that, ever. It's just they have got the drawing talent they just didn't know the tools to use. And they were able to make the tools do what they wanted to. And I thought it was great looking at the galleries afterwards. So I'm looking forward to what everybody comes up with. You do not need to use the flare tool, but bonus points if you do. All right, so those are the open and close one. So I'm gonna, you know, talk about that. We start drawing with pen till we're gonna actually create some paths, and then we're gonna close them and just show you the difference in how that works with the open versus closed. So let's talk a little bit about the shapes and we talked about I filled them with color and I put a stroke on them. So fill in stroke. You'll hear this All the time. So when you're working with vector images, they're all composed of a Phil and a stroke. Even if that Fillon stroke is none, there's the first things I drew. I couldn't even see them on the page because they had a Phil, No Phil and no stroke, and that's okay. But what happens when we draw an image is it says Okay, you've got to fill and a stroke, and I can see those in a couple different places. One homes here in the tool panel. This is the the stroke, and this is the Phil. And what gets people confused is that your only affecting the one that's in front. So right now the stroke is in front, I need to click the fill, and it brings it to the front. Now, when I do anything with color, I'm affecting the fill color itself. Things you see down below are the last used color, the last year's Grady Int, and also none so I can select the stroke and click none. And now it has no stroke whatsoever. If I were to de select that, so I'm using the selection tool click off of that I can't see anything at all knows that I could see it here is because I haven't selected. And so it needs to show me again that skeleton, that base that's there. So you come back here and say, Let's go toe the stroke and I could even choose it up here in my swatches panel. We're gonna talk about color and swatches in a while, but I just want you to know that you can actually see Fillon stroke. And here is, Well, that's Onley recently that they've added that. So if you have an older version, the only place you'll see your two icons are over here in your tool panel. It's, I can tell it I have a stroke of a color and I'm going to use the swatches panel. And like I said, we're not going to get into the different all the ins and outs of it until later in the day. But I just want to show you that normally you have a bunch of colors to choose from. These years watches that air here. So right now we're just gonna pick what's here, and I'm just it's, I think, pretty self explanatory again. If you didn't know it. That's OK. I'm going to click on it and just give it. Ah, color. Right. So now I can see my panel over here that I gave it this red stroke. I could do the same thing for a Phil I'm going to fill. So it's in the front, and I'm gonna go over here and I can choose my swatches, and it was gonna go ahead and click and give it a fill. So now when I d select that excuse me and I zoom in, I can see that I have a green Phil and that red stroke right now With that stroke, it automatically gave it a stroke to a certain size. And I want to make that stroke bigger. So I'm gonna go to the strokes panel, which is over here, three little lines. Open that up and I'm just gonna go ahead and click the up arrow key and make it a little bigger. So I'm just giving it a bigger stroke. And the other thing we want to do is look at this menu because Adobe likes to hide everything. It's a show options. There's a whole bunch of stuff that isn't even showing in the Strokes panel looking all that good stuff, it was hiding right. That's one thing with the adobe applications. Try and remember to always say Show more, Show me my options. Show me everything that's there because by default, a lot of that is hidden. So again, I just wanted to beef that up a little bit and a couple of things to know in stroke and whether it's a stroke on a circle or stroke that we make with the pen or pencil tool, which we're going to use in just a few minutes is that by default, you notice. Here's that again. There's the outline. So if I went back into outlined view mode, there's the edge of my circle. If you notice that edge of my circle it's right, this is that bounding box, that rectangular box that it sits in. So when I select that, it sits right in right inside. If I go back to the preview mode and I put on that appearance again, now you notice part of my stroke is sitting outside of that bounding box and what happens by default when you make a stroke, you've got that skeleton that it's sitting on, which really isn't taking up any room. But then I just said It's 15 points wide. Well, it's putting 7.5 points on this site and 7.5 points on this side of the skeleton. So basically the appearance goes from that skeleton outwards like that. So keep that in mind if you've lined things up with guides and you had, let's say no points when you started in no point line and you took the bounding box and you butted up against the guide in Snap to and now I give that stroke some thickness. Half of that thickness is now gonna lay outside of that. I can fix that, but that's the default behavior, and that's over here in the Align Strokes panel. So if I choose instead of a line stroked to center, I want a line it to the inside when I click that the entire 15 point with is now sitting inside that particular skeleton that we had, that makes sense. So keep in mind that if you've already lined things up and you only had, let's say you had even a one point line and 1/2 point either side of that, and then you make the thickness bigger. It's not gonna move the thing the shape in you're gonna have to size it down. Or remember to tell it to a line to the inside. You might want to align it to the outside as well. So now the entire appearance of that stroke is sitting on the outside of the base of that image, right? Does that make sense? OK, so that's something to keep in mind. That's a big thing there. I also might have a stroke on a particular line like a pen line that's here. Let's actually just go with the line segment tool or let's do the Ark Tool. Here's a point. Well, actually used the article. Just you can see it. So you noticed what it did. It automatically drew it with a 15 point red stroke. It automatically picks up the last thing that you did. I said automatically picks that up and says, Okay, I want to go ahead and put that in there. I can also it could still have the same Phil. If I did the Phil, it would actually fill it, but because It's an open path. It doesn't really. It doesn't look like a feel like the closed one does. What it does is it just says, Okay, well, I'm gonna take it from the center of this line to that line and just fill it in. It doesn't know what to do with the shape here, because there is no shape. It just sort of filled it in as it needed. And this will happen to you a lot through that I point this out as a lot of times you'll start drawing and you forgot that you had a fill. Or even worse, it's a fill of white, and so you don't know it's there until it sits on top of something else. You think that looks great? Then you move that here and suddenly there's that white shape that just cut into that. So just keep that in mind that you might need to come over and tell it. Phil is none. So it clicked. The little none, but so it goes away. There's actually a new setting on the pencil tool that tells you whether or not you want to fill new strokes so you can turn that off, so you don't accidentally get that because, like I said, it automatically wants to pick up the last thing that you did. So it automatically wants to put that green fill in there. But that's stroke and fill in. The nice thing is, if I had this and I decided I really wanted to be filled with the red and stroke with the green, I can come back over to this panel, click this little icon, appear swap filling stroke and do it that way. And that's actually handy because I'm often doing the wrong thing. Im actually grabbing. You know, I meant to do the stroke, and I meant to do the Phil and the Strokers of the front. And so I'm looking at the Green thing. Why does it not change the green thing? Well, because I had the fill in the stroke in the front, so I do that all the time. The thing I like about illustrators that I can actually move on item from one to the other. So if I decide I want to also fill it with the red, I could just grab the stroke and drag it and drop it onto the film, so I really like that as well. The other things you can do is you can grab from your icons. You can grab the color and drag and drop on top as well. So I come in here and it's changing the stroke. You notice because the stroke is in front over here. But I could changes to the Phil and now everything I dragged over here. I could just drag and drop until I find a color that I like a swell question, yet real quick, Um, so you can control the width of this stroke. Is there a way you could blend the stroke to match the felt like, say, you gather stroke, the outside would be black, right? And then blend that or tapering or like a greedy int into the color that selected because Phil do ingredient. But the way that works on the strokes is a little different. You wouldn't be able you could. You could do a great it would have to actually put it behind if you wanted to blend in and then put that you have to put a separate item on top of it so that it blends in exactly the right spot, and that's, I think, in a little little advance. But yeah, but yeah, you can definitely do it. But us faras just setting a Grady in on there. We're gonna set some great. It's on strokes later, but you'll see that the the way strokes can take Radiance doesn't work the way I think what you want. We're blends in at the last moment, just another quick question from Indigo when you were showing us the different tools. The spiral tool is their way to reset tools because into goes, viral tool was acting up. It was acting up to reset it. Well, that's a good question. You can delete your preferences if you wanted to be. Lose all your preferences if you're on a Mac. If you re set your max preferences that oftentimes gets those like I have panels that open up in her blank, sometimes for no reason whatsoever, there's just nothing in him resetting the Max preferences work. I don't know if there's a PC equivalent to resetting your preferences, but yeah, just some weird bugs sometimes happens. It does. It does. That's when you just walk away and go get a drink and crack and drink of your choice. All right, Thanks. Sure. All right. So, anyway, uh, that's kind of strokes and feel. So everything has a stroke. And, Phil, even if the stroke and Phil is not so, if I tell it, this is none, which looks like white, but it's not. If I put something else behind it, let's actually throw a color back behind. I'm gonna take this rectangle, will fill it with color and actually want to send it back behind. So that's a part of the object menu object arrange. And then I want to send that to the back so I can see that that Phil is actually none as opposed to a white because I can actually see through it. Obviously, if I filled it with white, that sort of look like So again, um, everything has a stroke and a Phil, even if you don't have any attributes assigned to it because the actual core, that skeleton is a stroke. And then there's something inside. There is well, all right. This just whether or not you've assigned any attributes to it or in this case, color circuit film makes sense. All right, Let's work with selecting objects a little bit. I'm going to open up my butterflies again and close the transform panel, the new magically appearing transform panel. Every time I create a rectangle or rounded rectangle, it's going to pop up. So just keep that in mind if you've upgraded. So when I select an item, I've got a couple different options I'm gonna use. I've got to selection tools and this king be kind of confusion. You've got confusing. You've got selection tool and your direct selection tool, and the difference is being is that selection tool. It's sort of when you're working with the whole either group or a container, right? So if you've got an image, we start putting images in frames and masking them. We can move the frame. So if you're coming from the photography world, it's kind of like you've got your photo. If you're putting a matted image mounting a matted image, you've got your photo that you could move around and size and you've got your mat that you can size. I was. You can size it for easily, but you can choose the size of the map that you want to start with and you could move it around. Try and seek. Either have the photo. Word is move your mat to fit or you can keep your mat. Word is on the object or the photo could move around. So it's the same kind of thing I've got with my selection tool. I'm selecting sort of the frame, the whole thing. So when I move it, everything goes together. Even though these air individual objects that I can see by rolling over him when I click on one and move it, they all go together, and that's because I've grouped them together. They're still individual objects, but I've kind of group them into this container. So when I'm using the selection tool, the solid tool or the Black Arrow tool, all the names air appropriate. When I grabbed them, it moves everything together. I'm gonna zoom in a little bit. When I used the direct selection tool. This is what I'm working with. What makes up that group, whether or not it's the individual lines. When I select this individual line now, I could like just that, and I'm gonna hit. Delete didn't work for me at all when he used my direct selection tool and select on it. And I can actually move that individual item, which was just the kind of the reflection. Let's grab this piece and move it. So I'm not moving the whole thing together. I'm moving just that image. I'm grabbing these individual pieces and pulling them apart. In that case, I actually grabbed a point, moved it right. So I'm actually was in the direct selection tool to kind of get into the elements of that. I would use the direct selection tool for working with the photo inside the mask and moving that around as well. So just keep that in mind that if I want to work with something, I have to be able to select it. In this case, if I want to work with this his body here and click on this and then I could say, OK, I've got that selected. But now I want to actually select that. I'm gonna click the selection tool and now I've got a bounding box just around that one particular item I hit delete wouldn't kind of see that's what I actually selected I so I can actually drill in that way. So the direct selection Tulis for selecting very specifically the elements that make up an item that's there and it also is for working with the points and those anchor points. So we're saying that it shows up every time I roll over it. It says That's a path or that's a point When I click on that, I now I'm actually working with that actual point that's there, all right, so we don't talk about again drawing with that. But I just want to show you that when we were working with the individual items, we need to use the direct selection tool or the hollow tool. Other ways to select items is we can still clicking on one. Like I said, we can click on an item, move it, do whatever we need to with it. I can also use the lasso tool, which I don't use very often, simply because I have to make sure I get everything in there right. So let's say I didn't have those group together, but I wanted to make sure I grabbed everything. I would use this the lasso tool and why it's not showing me that it's actually selected is beyond me. Let's see if I have my show. Edges are not turned on. That would be why I want the show edges turned on. So when I actually select something, I can come around here and say, Okay, I have selected that entire item. Or maybe I want to select these two and move those around right? Which is great. That's great. If I didn't have these as individual groups, this is a lot quicker. Select an item shift, select the other item. But maybe these if these werent grouped together, But I want to make sure I got everything that made up both of those I would use that last tool who sees the magic wand tool, which I'm not gonna go into a whole lot. But you can pick things by attributes. So if you want to pick everything that's blue or within 20% of that blue, you can use the magic wand. Tulis. Well, so the lasso tool I used now and then but what I don't like is if we come across here accidentally, it might not select everything. I'm a hit, delete and only deleted. You see, I just severed my butterfly because that that's exactly what that lasso tool did it on. Lee grab anything that it completely encompassed, so that's a little different, like dragging across. If I want to select this, I can either click on it or I could click and drag. And it selects both of those groups because I selected part of it with the lasso tool. It has to be completely encompassed in it. So that's why when I lassoed it through the middle of that butterfly it on, Lee grabbed the things that I completely encompassed. And then if I delete that again, that's that's all. It goes away. So the last hotel, it takes a little bit more of a steady hand. But it's great if you haven't group these all together. And if you've just built them and forgot to group this butterfly into one thing, you might need the lasso tool to make sure you get everything selected represents. The great thing is, even if I select that it wasn't an item, I can always go to the selection tool and go ahead and say, save selection. So now I can give it a name. I could even select these two butterflies and say, Save selection and I'll call these, you know, to analysts say there the monarch ones, they're not really the Monarchs. But you know, I can say that. And so next time I won't select those two, instead having two shifts. Like both of those I go appear and just to select monarchs so I can save those. That's really great when you've got overlapping items and you're tired of trying Teoh get underneath and only select the ones you want, not the other ones. Once you get them selected and save it as a selection, I'll do that when I'm building things. Actually, I'll build a couple of things and I'll say, save selection and do it. And then as I start building on top of it, I know I won't have to dig back down underneath in some sense. All right, let's get rid of our poor little butterflies that we've just sort of tourney up there. Close that as well. And let's talk a little bit about that transform panel that keeps popping up and again. This is new. The transform panel has been there. They made a lot of improvements to it, and now it pops up automatically when I create like the rectangle or rounded rectangle. So when I do that, it's gonna pop up, assumes I draw this rounded rectangle, and the reason that it's there now is because we've got some new items that have to do with the corners because I shows a rounded rectangle. Now I've got a lot more control over my corners. But what the transform panel does up here, we're going to talk about this for right now. That upper part is it shows me what my measurements are. It shows me how wide and how high it is also the X and y axis that tells me how far it is from the left and the top of my document. Now I've told it, do it by the middle, so it's telling me where my middle, the middle of my object is sitting. But I want to click this little reference point and say, Let's do it from the upper left so that I know now that the upper left of my rectangle is sitting 1.8 and 1.2 inches from the left and the top, respectively. And also these are my the size of my the object itself. I can also look at the rotation and this year. So here, if I decided I want to rotated some I could and rotated negative 30 degrees and you notice it rotated it from the upper left hand corner. Because that's where I've told the transformation point. Gonna and do that and I could instead click the center. And now let's actually rotate it from the center around the center so I can tell it where that rotation is happening from. And that's really important because sometimes you don't want it to rotate right on this axis. You wanted it to rotate from a corner and flip over sideways. So we've got that and that's the transform. So if I decide I drew it by hand, but I don't really like it. I can tell it why, like we're sitting in the upper left, so I'm gonna click The upper left is the reference point, and I'm gonna tell it I would like it to be 4.5 inches wide. Now I can constrain the width and the height proportions if I want by clicking that a lot of times I don't have that. Because I might only want to be changing the wit than not behind. So it's gonna hit return, and it's gonna go ahead and constrain. I'm sorry. Change that. Get out of my zoom here. It's gonna go ahead and make that with 4.5 inches. Now, what if I knew that that needed to be smaller, but I don't know what size I needed to be. Well, the thing is, I could do instead of before I said we could use other units of measurement e two inches or millimeters or whatever. I can also use percentages, which is great. So I said, Great, it's for enough inches. I'd like it to be 10% smaller. Great. Let's make it 90% And was gonna hit tab. So goes to the next item. So it moves it down that much so we can work with percentages as well. I didn't know what 90% of 4.5 waas so I could go ahead and use it that way. That makes sense. We're gonna work with again. The corners will work with that segment three. We're going to do that. Start working with actually changing this right now. I just wanted to show you that you could either draw things manually. You know, I could use rulers and guides like we did. Maybe. I know it needs to go from eight inches, tow four inches, and so I can grab this item and I could grab these new awesome little handles that air here. It kind of always been there, but not quite like this. I'm gonna drag this down and drag this up. And if you noticed it changed a little bit here, right? So we can It didn't kept the same. I'm sorry it kept the same angle, but it looks different because they're smaller. And so at some point, when you get those, see how much I can zoom in here When I bring this in, you see, the angle is the same, but it gets it looks a little different. When I was it smaller, they looked too close together. And at some point, it's going to tell you that's a sfar in as we can go. So they turn red. So you know that you have no more radius to play with their But one of the options in the transform panel is whether or not to scale the rectangle corners with it, so I can bring that in. And as I do it, you know, it's the angles changing ever so slightly, so that looks pretty big there. As I bring this in, it makes them smaller, and we can actually see the radius changing over here. It's 0. and when I bring it back out and let go, it changed 2.24 because it's just doing it in relation to the item itself, so I could turn that on or off. The other thing is, if I look at that stroke again, let's make this. Let's make this a three or four point stroke. Five point whatever have their If I tell it scale, strokes and effects when I make that item smaller, it's going to change the stroke. You know, it's the stroke now is 2.378 right, so it scaled it down and made the items smaller, so it's scaled the strokes as well. Gonna undo that. Let's turn that back off if they don't scale that down. Now, when I make this smaller, let's actually make it smaller here. When I do that, my stroke is still exactly five points because I've told it don't scale. So it just depends on what you're trying to come up with. You made a design really big, and you want to make it small. You probably want everything to scale together all your strokes and all your effects, but you might not want it to. But if you made it big and hadn't even a two point stroke, you come down here and you slice it down to this little thing. You've still got really thick two point strokes on a little teaming design that might not work. Well, like I said, that's the one thing that kind of trips people up. You can set that in your preferences, but the nice thing is, you can set it individually in your transform. Panelas. Well, that makes sense. Okay, we'll talk about corners more to the corner, affects weaken, doing just a little bit. But that's what the transformer panel allows us to do is take this item and then make changes to it afterwards. So we didn't have to draw perfect item, which comes in handy when we're using the closed path tools that are there

Class Materials

bonus material with enrollment

Adobe Creative Apps Starter Kit.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

~user-1398875186002363
 

Erica Gamet is a wonderful teacher, her course is clear and never annoying. She knows how to make the subject seem less intimidating !

Russ Wilson
 

The most painless way to get up and running on Illustrator (or any software package for that matter) I have ever experienced.

Student Work

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