Transcripts
1. Graphic Design for Lunch Working with Symmetry Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of graphic design for lunch designing with symmetry in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic design for Lunch is a series of classes that teaches a range of tips and techniques for creating designs, and working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at working with symmetry in Illustrator. We're going to create shapes using symmetrical objects. You'll learn how to make half of an object and then create it as a symmetrical object. We'll also look at some reflection symmetry that we can create as a live effect. We'll look at two-way symmetry and four- way symmetry as well. By the end of this class, you should be able to create symmetrical objects with ease in Illustrator. Now as you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which asks if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class would you do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes that you would recommend this class, and secondly, write even in just a few words, why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too may enjoy and learn from. Now if you see the follow link on the screen, click it to keep up to date with new classes as they're released. Now, if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so, I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now let's get started working with symmetry in Illustrator.
2. Pt 1 Draw a symmetrical shape: We're going to start our look at creating symmetrical objects by creating a heart shape here in Illustrator. I have a document 1920 by 1080 pixels in size, but it really doesn't matter how big your document is. We're going to draw this using the pen tool and this is a really good exercise for learning to use the pen tool. Now, I want to apply a Stroke but no Fill, I'm going to target the Fill and turn that off, and all we're working with is a stroke. Now for my heart, I'm going to start in the middle of the heart. We're going to just draw out half of it, and then flip it however to create the second half. I'll click and drag because I wanted to take off in this direction here. It's best not to put points on a curve, so don't put it at the top of the curve however tempting that might be. I try better to put it at the other side of the curve. I'm going to click and drag downwards, so I can make this curve shape. Then I'll come down here to the base, and I want to give it a little bit of a twist so this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to click, and drag out a little bit. There's a little bit of a twist in the bottom of my heart. Now I've finished drawing, but the elastic band is still attached to this. I'm just going to press the ''Escape key'', and that finishes the drawing. For us to be able to flip this over and make a single symmetrical filled shape, I need to make sure that this point here and this point here are on the same vertical line. They're not. I did it deliberately so that they wouldn't be so that we could talk about how we're going to fix it. We'll go to the Direct Selection Tool, and I'll just select either these two points. You can see that they're blue fill. This one is hollow. The tool that we can use to align these two is the average tool. We'll choose Object and then Path, and then Average. We can average horizontally, vertically or both. What we want to do, is to align these two points so that they're on the same vertical line, and if you talk to yourself in those terms, I want these two points to be aligned to the same vertical line, then that tells you that you want to be selecting vertical. What's going to happen is that the vertical positioning is going to be adjusted to an average of the two. This one's going to come in this direction, this one's going to come in this direction, because that's how they're out of alignment. This one's too far to the right, this is too far to the left. I'll click ''Okay''. Now they have moved so that they're in the same vertical alignment. Now before you choose the next command, you need to make sure that you are not still in a position where you've got these two anchor points selected and this one naught, and this is the reason why. I'll choose Object, Transform and Reflect, and this is going to happen. We're reflecting the two selected points but not the one that wasn't selected, and that's not what we want to do, so I'm going to cancel out of here. I'll go to the Selection Tool, and I'll make sure that I just click away from the shapes and nothing selected, and then click over it to make sure that everything is selected. Now when I choose Object, Transform and Reflect, it behaves very differently. It's reflecting correctly. Now I want the original one that was pointing in the other direction as well as this one, so I'm just going to click ''Copy''. Now I have two shapes that when I move them apart and position them, I'm going to make a single shape. Now, I'm going to assume that it's a little bit difficult for you to get these into exact alignment. We're going to talk about how we would align them. Again with the Selection Tool, select however both the halves. We need to make sure that they're aligned horizontally, but also that these two anchor points are directly on top of each other. We'll go to the Align tools, and you can get to these also by choosing Window and then Align. We'll open the Flyout menu and choose Show Options. At this stage, I want to align them so that the middle of each shape is on the same plane. This one would be at Vertical Align Center and that just realign them so that tops and the bottoms and the centers are all imperfect alignment. Now, I think that these anchor points are over the top of each other but if they're not or if you need to double check, this is how you're going to do it. You'll click here on ''Align to Key Object'', and one or other of these half heart shapes is going to be selected, and it doesn't matter which one, and you can flip it by just selecting whichever one you want it to begin. It doesn't matter which of these in this case is selected. What we want to do, is set the Distribute Spacing value to 0 pixels. In other words, we want to space these two pieces evenly with 0 space between them. We'll click here on ''Horizontal Distribute Space''. Now the key object assess to illustrate that when you're making that adjustment, if you need to move one of these shapes, don't move the one that is the key object, the blue highlighted one. You can move this one, but not this one. In our case, it didn't really matter. In other cases, it might matter, and that's how you're going to use the Align tools. Now we have both the shapes created and aligned perfectly. We can select over them and join them to make a single shape, Object, Path, Join. If we go to the last part, we're going to say that now instead of two individual parts, we have just one part, which is this filled heart shape, and we can fill it with a color quite easily by just selecting a color from the Color Picker. We're going to select that right now. In the next video, we're going to look and see how we could edit a shape that is asymmetrical shape, maintaining the symmetrical shape as we edited.
3. Pt 2 Edit a Symmetrical shape: Now that we've drawn our basic object, we're going to have a look and say how we can edit it. Now in practical terms, at some point you might say, well, it would be better to draw this from the start. But what I want to show you here is some techniques for editing a symmetrical object that will extend your knowledge of illustrator and will help you perhaps in other projects at other times, symmetry or otherwise. Let's approach this task on that basis. What we have here on this shape is we've got a number of anchor points, we've got an anchor point here, one here, and one here, and one over here. Now if I wanted to adjust this anchor point, when I select over it, you'll say it's got two handles on it. But these handles are not joined together, so they're not going to move together. But there is a way that we could enforce handles to move together and you could do this with other points that have handles that are no longer stuck together. What you're going to do is just select this point with the direct selection tool so only it is highlighted, the others are all hollow saying that they are not highlighted. We'll go to the scale tool here and when I click on the scale tool and now adjust this hand or one of them, you can say that both the handles are adjusting together. When I pull one out, the other one is pulling out as well. We are able to adjust this point here using that technique. We could also adjust these two points and it's going to drag through there and see if I can pick up these two points here, which I can go to the scale tool and now if I adjust one of them, I'm going to adjust both of them. Using that scale tool, I can reshape my shape and it's maintaining that symmetrical behavior. Now there is another way that you could reproach reworking this symmetrical shapes. I'm going to the direct selection tool. I'm going to target this anchor point and I'm just going to reshape just this one anchor point and I'm going to reshape also this particular anchor point. Effectively, I'm destroying one side of the heart, this side is no longer valid. This side is the side that I want, but I do have my completed shape. What I'm going to do it is to just flip the fill and stroke that had no strokes and now it does have a fill and I'm going to color it. I'm just going to color it orange and now I'm going to flip it as we were flipping it previously, object transform and I'll choose reflect. I'm going to reflect it over itself vertically. I'm going to make a copy, so I'll click on Copy and I'm going to recolor the copy so I have two shapes, one is orange and one is green. Now they're off center right now they're not lined up perfectly. There is a way that we could do that very easily in Illustrator. I'm going to zoom in here and I'm going into outline view. I'll choose View and then Outline. It's just a really easy way of saying your shapes without anything else in the way. I'll go to the Selection tool. I'm just going to drag one of these shapes right over the top of the other and you'll see that the anchors for the middle at the top and the middle at the bottom now are perfectly aligned. I'll choose View and then I'll go back to preview. Now, depending what you say at this point, you can do one of two things. Let me just reverse, place two shapes. Now the orange shape on the left side here is what we like. I'm just going around here and seeing if there's any green showing at all. Now there is a little bit of green. That's telling me that I couldn't unite these shapes if I didn't see any green and all, I could say, "Okay, well this is the shape that I want and so I could select either both of these and I could unite them." Going to the Pathfinder palette, I would click Unite, and that would make one shape. But it's got a bit of green in it and that wasn't what I wanted, I'm just going to undo this. But there is a way that we can extract just the bits that we want. We want this bit of orange and we want this bit of green, but we don't want this bit. What I'm going to do is to select the over the shape and instead of using unite, I'm going to use divide and then I'm going to ungroup it because I know everything is in groups here, so I'll choose object ungroup until ungroup is no longer an option and then I'll pick the places that I don't want. I don't want this green bit here, so I'm just removing it. I want this green bit here, and I want this green bit here, but I don't want the matching piece of orange over here, so I'm going to remove that. I've got rid of the bits that were excess to the basic design that I want to. One should be green, one should be orange. Now, I've got all the places that I want and I can just go ahead and unite them into that single edited shape. If you're making your shape a whole lot bigger, if this entire side were made a whole lot bigger than you could just flip your shape over the vertical line, everything up and go and unite it. But where you've got bits that got bigger and bits that got a bit smaller then you can use the divide option, just make sure that anything you take off this side, you also removed from this side, it's going to be the opposite color. Then grab everything else and just unite them and you have a single shape and it's a symmetrical shape. It's symmetrical because that's the way we made it. Now as I said, it would probably be a whole lot easier to re-draw this heart from the beginning. But in looking at an alternative way of doing this, we've learned a whole lot of techniques that are appropriate to all projects in Illustrator.
4. Pt 3 Symmetry with a Live Effect: If all you want to do is to create something like the heart shape, a closed shape that is symmetrical, but something that's fairly simple, then there is another way of doing it. Let's save that now. I'm going to the pen tool, I'm going to again create this heart shape. I'm going to align this bottom most point this time using a smart guides, over the smart guides enabled and I'm just hovering until I see that line which is indicating that I'm immediately underneath this point and those two points should be on the same vertical and just click once, I'll press escape, now let's select the shape and you'll see that it is a filled shape right now. I don't want it to have a fill, I'm just want it to have a stroke. It's easier to put the fill on later than it is right now. It's better to just work with a single line. Now what we're going to do with this is we're going to reflect it across this axis here, and we're going to do that with a live effect, ''Effect'', ''Distort'' and ''Transform'' and then ''Transform''. I'm going to turn preview on and I want to reflect it across this point here, so out of these nine boxes I'm going to select the middle one on the right-hand side, and that's going to be my reflection point. I'm going to reflected across the X axis and that gives me my heart shape. You will see though that this side of the heart is blue and this side is black and we had black as our stroke. What that's telling us is that right now we've really only got half a heart visible because it's just going to be flipped. If we want the whole heart we're going to need an extra copy. We have one original over here plus one copy, and I'll click ''OK''. Now on the face of it, it looks like this is a heart shape and if we have a look in the last panel it also looks as if it's a heart shape, here is a path and it looks like a heart but it isn't. What it is, is half a heart that has a reflection applied to it because Y keeps us selected in the appearance panel here for this shape. I can turn the transform off and you can say that this is just an effect, it's not actually half of our heart. If we want to get our half heart out and join this together to make a completed shape, we're going to need to expand that. But of course before we do that, if we want to make any changes to this heart or always should do so. I'm using the direct selection tool and I can come in and alter the left-hand side of the heart. We can't alter the right-hand side of the heart because the right-hand side of the heart is just a reflection. It's a reflection of the left-hand side, so any alterations have to be done to the left-hand side there immediately mirrored across here to the right. Now I have a shape I'm happy with I'll select over it to create the second half of the heart, so it's more than just a transformation. We need to expand these shapes with the shapes selected object and then Expand Appearance. Now this is the point at which it was wise to have a unfilled shape, because as a result, we've just got two half hearts, otherwise we would have some filled shapes as well, so we'd have a line and a fill and it's just going to be an extremely big mess. As we are right now, we're going to start ungrouping these [inaudible] object and then ungroup and object ungroup again, so now we have paths and when we select on a path you can see that this is just a stroke line, so it's not as if we have a filled path here it's just a stroke line. We're going to select both these pieces and we want to join them up together, we'll choose object path and then join. They can now be joined and this time we have a full heart shape. It's no longer a transformed shape, there's no transformation on this shape here and the appearance panel, it's just a black stroke shape, and from here we can go ahead and apply a different color stroke to it, for example, we could adjust the stroke weight and we could apply a different fill to it too. Now here we are seeing some problems with the joins, the problems with the joins are to do with the stroke settings so let's go to the stroke and we could select a different type of cap, for example, a round cap. We could also select different types of corners which may or may not give us better result, well obviously this is giving us a much better looking result.
5. Pt 4 More complex live reflected shapes: As a Skill Share student, you might be aware of a class I launched recently called Stylish Doodles To Make & Sell. Some of the doodles that we created in this class had symmetry built into them. But we drew them as individual shapes and just lined everything up rather than actually creating them symmetrically. Let's go back to this kind of shape and let's see how we could create it as a symmetrical shape in illustrated using the techniques that we've already developed. I'm going to the "Pencil Tool" because the shapes we'd drawn with a pencil tool, I just have a regular document created here. It doesn't matter what size your document is. It does matter that your pencil tool is fairly smooth, so you want to double-click on the "Pencil Tool" and just make sure the setting is smooth. I don't want it to have a fill, so I'm going to turn off the "Fill" so that my shape just has a stroke. Let's draw a simple curly shape. I'm just drawing half of the shape because the other half can be created using the "Transform Effect". So with it selected, I'll choose "Effect" and then "Distort and Transform", and then "Transform". I'll turn "Preview" on. We already know we need one copy plus the original. We're going to reflect it over this point here. We'll select the middle of these nine boxes on the right hand side and use "Reflect X" so that the shapes are reflected across the x-axis and click "OK". Now, the shapes are live and symmetrical. If you see something that you think needs alteration, you can simply alter the left-hand side shape and the right-hand side will immediately update. Now that we've got this shape, let's have a look at drawing a heart shape. I'm going to the "Pen Tool", I'm going to locate this midpoint here just to make life a little bit easier for myself and let's go and draw this half heart shape. Now you may be a little surprised as to what's happened here because this half heart shape has reflected exactly the same way as the previous shape. Now, it may not do that on your computer, which might add some additional confusion to the matter. Let's have a look and say what is happening here. I'm just going back to the default settings here. I'm clicking on this icon here to set up the defaults. I'm going to draw out a rectangle, simple square shape and I'm going to format it with a blue stroke and I'm going to wind up the stroke quite a ways and let's give it a different color fill. Now if I go ahead and create an oval shape, you will say that it inherits the exact same appearance as the previous shape and it's the appearance that it's inheriting, not just these colors here, but anything that was in the appearance panel. That's what's happened here. This half heart shape here has inherited the transformation that this shaped got, but it's a totally separate transformation. Each one of these two shapes has been given a separate transformation that's totally removable. Let's go back having selected these shapes and draw out a circle. I'm just going to put a small circle in here. You can say that it's also inherited this transformation effect. It's just that the transformation effect this time hasn't worked anywhere near like we wanted it to. The reflection point is through the center of these two circles, not over here. It's only going to work if we move this circle somewhere over this line here. It's lined up with this line of symmetry that we were working with. Anywhere else, it's just going to break and it's not going to look right. Let's have a look and say how we could make it look right. We know that these shapes got a reflection on it and these shapes got a reflection on, and so to this one. But we know something about groups in Illustrator and we know that if you group a group of objects together, they can be treated as a single object. Let's go to all of these shapes in turn, and let's remove the transformation from them. This time let's go and select these three shaped and group them together with "Object" and then "Group". Now, we can take our group, we'll go to the last panel which I appear to have lost. Let me just get my layers panel back again. I'm going to the group here. I'm going to make sure that the group itself is selected and let's try and reflect that. "Effect", "Distort and Transform" and then "Transform". We'll turn "Preview" on, we'll reflect it across this axis here, which is the right-hand side of the combination of objects. We'll choose "Reflect X", and we'll make one copy and click "OK" and this time we have more of the reflection that we expected to get. Each of these shapes has been reflected as part of a group of shapes. Now we can alter the shapes by going to the "Group Selection Tool". I'm thinking that I want to spread these two shapes apart a little bit. Let me go and target this particular path. With it targeted, I'll now click on the "Selection Tools". I have it selected and if I now move it out of the way a little bit to the left, the corresponding element on the right is also moving out of the way. Now that's going to work up to a point and then it's just going to crash and burn. It's going to work where I move things out leaving this shape here along the line to hold that right-hand side. But if I move this shape back over here, I'm going to lose my heart. Let me just show you what's going to happen here. You can say that as I move the shape to the right, the heart is breaking up. It will work when I move the shape to the left, but it will fail when I move the shape to the right. But it is a potential solution and it is a way of getting a symmetrical style object in Illustrator and provided we don't upset this middle line here, these objects here and here are totally editable and we can add additional objects here. I'm just going to drag out a small circle here. You can see that it's going above the group, but we can put it in the group in just a minute. Let me just fill it with black. I'm going to drag it down so it's now part of the group and when it's part of the group, it gets reflected. Now I could move it into a position, for example, I might want it to be here and then I could "Alt" or "Option Drag" a duplicate away. If you watch that earlier class, you'll know that when you "Alt" or "Option Drag" a shape away from the original to create a duplicate if it's inside a group, then the duplicate is going to be inside the group. That's actually going to work really well for us here because it does allow us to make duplicates of this shape and each one of them is going to be perfectly reflected because it's sitting inside the group. If we create a shape that's outside the group, let's just go and make a small star. I'm just going to make it as an outline. You can say that because it's appeared outside the group, it's not being reflected. But we can easily put it inside the group by just dragging it in here. If you're creating this effect, you probably will want to have your layers panel visible because you will want to be able to say what it is that you're doing as you're doing it and also be aware that there is a temptation when you go and select something with the "Selection Tool" for everything to be selected. And if you really just want to select an element inside the group, you're going to need the group selection tool. Click on the "Group Selection Tool", click to de-select everything and now you can come in here and just select an object within a group. I'm going to select and delete this one. With some reservations as to positioning, in other words, you want something to hold the line between these objects and you don't want to be moving anything back across that line once you've created this one here. Then you could create objects that are symmetrical. Now once you've created those objects, you may want to extract them into individual lines and to do this, you'll need to select your group and then expand the contents with "Object Expand Appearance". Then you're going to end up with two groups, each of which contains half of the objects that go together to create this design. Having done that, having expanded your shape, you'll probably want to ungroup everything with "Object Ungroup" and continue to do that until ungroup is no longer an option and that will give you all of the expanded shapes if you want to. At this point, you could go to your two heart shapes. You can say here's one of them, and here's the other half of the half, I'll "Shift + click" on it and we could join those with "Object Path" and then "Join". The other shapes don't need to be joined cause they're just lines and dots. But you may want to join your heart shape because it is something that logically would be a closed shape.
6. Pt 5 Convert the Design to a Saleable Vector: Since I made the last video, I've gone ahead and colored these elements. I also smoothed out this line a little bit. Now we're in a position to have a look at what are we going to do with this shape? There's two ways that we could go here. The first one is if you're going to be delivering it as a bitmap image as a JPEG, for example, or a PNG image with some transparency, then right now you don't have to do anything except that if you did want to put a stroke around this heart, which ultimately I do want to do, you would do this now. Because if you're sending it as a PNG or a JPEG, then you want that stroke to be around the heart at this point because you can't add it on later on. I'm just going to make it a circular ending so it has a nice good look to it. If this were going out as a PNG or as a JPEG, you could go ahead and choose File and then Export and you do Save for Web Legacy, for example. You can send it out as a JPEG by just selecting JPEG up here, and if you wanted PNG with transparency then you would, for example, select PNG 24 and this will be saved then as a transparent image. You can see that you're not seeing any of the underlying structure of the vector file because it's going out as a bitmap. Now, if you plan to deliver it to somebody as a vector, then you can't do it in this format. This is not the format that somebody buying stock vectors, for example, would ever expect the file to be delivered in, it's way too confusing a file. What you want to do is to break out all these pieces to give them something that looks better and that is going to be easier for them to work with. Now you might have noticed right now that the rectangle that is providing the clipping masks for this side of the document has suddenly appeared at the top of the document. You might recall that we put it at the bottom. As soon as we've used it to create that clipping mask for the layer, we shot it to the bottom of the document. Well, it's just moved by itself all the way up to the top of the document. It did that because I saved the file and then re-opened it. Anytime you save and reopen this file, you're going to find that your clipping mask shape has moved to the top of the document. If you want to send it to the bottom, you're going to have to Unlock it, Select it, choose Object, Arrange, Send to Back to send it right to the back of the document where it was in the first place and just lock it down so it doesn't move. Just be aware of that being the case. If we're going to ship this out as a vector stock image, we're going to have to clean this up a lot. The first thing I suggest you do is to select everything and just expand it. So we choose Object, Expand Appearance, and what that does is it creates two halves of the document, a left-hand side and a right-hand side. Because we are going to be doing a lot of work in unpacking these, it's actually easier to get rid of the right-hand side. We're just going to turf that entirely because as soon as we get the left-hand side cleaned up, we know how to make a right-hand side out of that. We just flip it over. Let's focus on just half of the document. You can say that things are inside groups, inside layers. Well, it doesn't have to be inside a layer, so we're just going to clean that up by just moving it up. Here is a group and the process of expanding that design that we had is that everything's appeared in groups and there's clipping groups and all clipping paths and everything. Everything is multiplied by a factor of about three here. At this stage, what we're going to do is we're going to find all of these clipping groups that just have a clipping path in them. I'm just going to turn that off, you can see that it's just these two places and turning it off has no impact on the document. I'm going to just delete it. I'm just going to drag it down onto the trash can and delete that. Now I have a clipping group. Again, I'm going to just move that out of the other group so that everything's neat and tidy. Now I've got a group with a clipping group and a clipping path, this lot can go as well. I'm just doing a big cleanup. What I want to happen is I want to see all the elements here without being clipped because I'm going to crop them. I'm going to use this clipping path here to crop them. But right now it's operating as a layer clipping path, so let's just select nothing and let's go back to the very top layer here, and we're going to do the reverse of what we did when we created this clipping mask is we're going to make sure nothing is selected, we're going to target the top layer here, go to the flyout menu and you should see Release Clipping Mask. If you don't see Release Clipping Mask, it's probably because you have something selected. This is not available if anything is selected, all you can have is this layer targeted, but nothing selected over here or it won't work. Let's just release it. This, not unexpectedly, has just shown us the other part of the document that was placed over that clipping line. This is perfect. This is exactly what we want. This clipping path is now no longer underlined, it is not being used as a clipping path, but it is really useful to us because it can provide a cropping guide. I'm going to move it to the very top Object, Arrange, Bring to Front. Because when we go to use the crop tool, the shape that's at the very top is going to be the shape that's used to crop things with. Let's have a look at this, we've just got a single group here. I'm going to select everything and I'm going to use the crop tool. Let's just see what happens when we use the crop tool to use this path to crop everything beneath it. Well, we get what we want, but we don't as well. You'll see that this strike has disappeared from the heart. Now, we could get that one back later on, so that's not a deal breaker per say. But the deal breaker is we've lost our curly bits. I'm just going to undo that with Control Z, that would be Command Z on a Mac, and let's see what the cause is. Well, the reason for the line disappearing was that it was aligned, so I've just dragged it out of its group. It didn't need to be in a group all by itself. But this is a path so it's a line you can see it's stroked. As a line with anchor points along its single row, whenever you hit it with the crop tool here, it just disappears. Illustrator just can't cope with it. So it just wipes it out entirely. If we want to protect this line so it doesn't get deleted, we're going to have to turn it from a line into a filled shape. Let's go and just target it here. We'll choose Object and then Expand. Now as a line, it has a stroke but it has no fill at all, so we don't need to expand the fill because it doesn't have one we'll expand just the stroke, I'll click "Okay". Now it's expanded, so it's not going to be knocked out when we use the crop tool on it. Now we could do the same thing with this heart. If we wanted to retain this stroke, you'll see that it is actually a path. So it's going to have a set of anchor points along it. It's going to be just like this line, that's why it's disappearing. If we wanted to save that one as well, then we can target just this path and we can expand it Object, Expand exactly the same thing. It has no fill because the fill is down here. It's totally separate shape, it just has a stroke. We'll click "Okay". In doing that, we've turned that also into a filled shape. So when it's cropped, it's going to be cut off and that's just going to be perfect. It's not going to disappear as it did previously. Let's go back and try that crop again, now that we've expanded the two shapes here that were lines. I'll select everything. The cropping path is here at the very top. It has to be at the top because it's used to crop the shape. Everything that is outside this shape here will be deleted. Let's go and click "Crop", and this time we've got a much better result. The heart still has its border around it. The line has not disappeared because it's no longer a line, it's actually a filled shape and everything else is still intact. Let's have a look in this group and just see what we've got. It's very important to keep an eye on the Layers palette because it can tell you a lot about your document. It can also give you the tools that you need to put it all back together again and to delete things that you seriously just don't need. Let's have a look at this, because this is the path around the edge of the shape, and we don't need that. Let's just go and get rid of that because it's not part of our design here. This is something else we can get rid of, this is a compound path. It's a path that's around everything. We don't need that either because it has no fill and no stroke, so let's just drag that onto the trash can as well. We're just cleaning up this Layers palette to make sure that everything is neat and tidy and everything is inside a single group. When I select the group, this is what we see. Well, we know how to make this a reflected shape because we've been doing this all along, Effect, Distort and Transform, Transform, turn Preview on, we want one copy of it. We want it to be reflected over the x-axis, and we want to reflect it over this vertical line. So we're just going to click here in the middle, and I'll click "Okay". This is basically our design back again, but now we're working towards creating it in a format that would be deliverable. We need to expand this because right now this is just a reflection. You'll see that, in the appearance panel, when we select the group here, it's got a transform on it, so it's transforming the group. But we need to expand that. Let's go back to the group, and let's choose Object, Expand Appearance. Now we have two groups, one for either side of the document, and inside these groups are just the shapes that go together to make this document. What I would do at this point is just join these things together, the ones that are over the middle line here. I'm going to the group selection tool because everything is inside groups. I'm going to need to do that. I'm going to pick up this pink shape, and I'll Shift, click on this pink shapes. I've got these two pink shapes selected. I'll go to the Pathfinder and just unite those two. Then I'll go to this red shape here which was a stroke. It's now are filled shape. I'll click on it with the group selection tool, Shift, click on the other side so it's all selected, click "Unite", to make that into a single shape. I'm going to select over these two, unite those, select over these two, unite those. Now to tidy this up, you could just leave it as it is, or you may choose to ungroup it and just regroup it. you may choose to go Object, Ungroup until ungroup is no longer an option. Then with everything selected, just group it together so that you have a single group with all the objects in that group that comprise this shape. Now, this was a very simple example and you probably wouldn't go to all this trouble for something as simple as this design. But if you have a way more complex design that you want to draw with live symmetry, then this is what you would do. If it's going out as a JPEG or a PNG, just ignore all of this because you don't actually need it. If it's going out as vectors, then this is how you pull it apart and put it back together again. You got to watch out for anything that has a stroke around it and anything that is a line, because you'll want to expand those before you do this work so that you don't lose them in the process. Now I do understand that this is a little bit complex and certainly way overkill for this particular shape. But if you were working with shapes that were way more complex than this, that were symmetrical shapes, this is how you could put them back as solid vectors once you've used your symmetrical drawing setup to actually create the design.
7. Pt 6 Corner Symmetry: We're going to look now at creating a corner symmetrical element. In this case, something that is vertical will be flipped so it's horizontal. Let's see how we do that, I'm going to start with a line, I'm going to line segment Tool. I'll hold the Shift key as I drag out a line, now this has a stroke of 10 pixels, no fill, and from the stroke list here you can say that I've got round cap selected, so it's just inheriting it from some other things I've been working on in this particular document. I'm just going to place it to roughly where I want it to be. The next thing we'll create is a spiral, I'll go here to the spiral tool. If I press the letter D, then I'll reset the defaults for the shape, and that will ensure that it has just a standard defaults. Going to turn off the fill site just has a stroke. I'll click once in the document and my spiral right now will have a radius of 40 pixels, a decay of 80 percent and 10 segments, and it has this sort of style. I'll click, "Okay". Now this is a bit small, so I'll select it and just enlarge it. Going to increase the stroke width a little bit and then apply a brush profile to it, so from this drop-down list here, I'm going to select a brush profile. I'm going to select this one here, now, It's being applied heavier at the inside of the shape and lighter at the outside of the shape. Over here in the appearance panel, we can go to stroke and click this button, and that will flip the brush profile, so it's now applied differently to this shape. It's in other words, in reverse. Now I'm going to take this shape and let's go and place that where we want it to be. Now, so far we have obviously no reflection, that's fine, we're going to get reflection in just a minute. I'm going to add another one of these, and I'll just click "Okay". Now in this case, I'm going to decrease the stroke width, got a similar shape here. It's inherited the properties of the previous one, that's just fine, and I'm going to go and put it into position. I think I'll put a third one in here. I'll make it in-between size. Now I want to put some dots in here, so I'll go to the ellipse, I'll drag out a small ellipse and I'm going to flip the fill and stroke slots filled, but it has no stroke. Now I want a series of dots that I can put in either here, so I'm going to select my shape here, and make sure that the path is selected, not just the stroke. I'm going to apply a distorted transform effect with effect distort and transform, and then transform. I'll turn preview on, I want probably another four of these and I want each one of them to be smaller than the last time. Putting in here 75 percent as the scale, and we'll just start moving them in a vertical direction. Now, if you find that this doesn't work, it's probably because you've got something like the stroke selected. I've had that happened to me before, and as much as I try and make settings in this dialogue, nothing seems to happen. Well, you need to make sure that the path is selected, not the stroke that has no fill on it anyway, so I'll just click "Okay". Now, this is a distorted transform effects, so I can just drag the first shape into position and all the others will come with it. If I want to, I can Alt or Option Drag that shape into this other position, I'm going to zoom in here because I want to start it off at a smaller size. I'll just hold the Shift key as I drag it down to make the starting shape smaller. Now the spacing between these successive shapes is too much, but with the starting shape selected, I can click on the transform option here in the appearance panel that allows me to edit this transformation. In this case, I'm going to reduce the amount of movement that I put in. Seem to have lost all of that, let's just go and redo that. I'm just looking at an amount of movement that will be sort of matching this sort of a look. I'll press "Control" or "Command zero" to zoom back out, and I'll do it a third time. Same thing here, just shrink down the size of the starting object, place it in the rough position that I want it to be in. Then with it selected, go to its transform and just reduce the amount of vertical movement that we've got. Of course you want preview to be turned on, because otherwise you won't be able to see what you're doing. Just looking for something of a match here, that looks pretty good, I'll click "Okay", I'll zoom back out. Now we already know some of the basis of what we're going to do here to get our transformation, the first thing we're going to do is to put everything that we have got here in a group. Let me go and open up this in the last palette, I'm going to select all of the shapes, and I'm going to choose object and then group. Placing them inside a group, means that I can now reflect them so that I can have one upside down positioned over here. With the group selected, we're going to apply the transformation, effect, distort and transform, and then transform. I'll turn preview on, I want to rotate this through 90 degrees, so I'm going to type 90 degrees in here, then that will give me my rotation. But it's in the wrong position, and it's also facing the wrong way, so I'm going to click on reflect X, and that reflects it over. You can see that we've got the beginnings of what we need, going to increase the number of copies so that we have an original and a copy. Now I'll just start moving it horizontally, I'm going to move it over to where I think it needs to be to sort of join up here, and then we'll adjust the vertical. In this case we're going in a negative vertical direction, because that's moving back up the document. You will most likely find that the horizontal and vertical movement amounts will be the same. If you move at 140 pixels horizontally, then you'll be moving at 140 pixels vertically, but in a negative direction because you're going up. When you're happy with what you're seeing on the screen, click "Okay". You can see that the distort and transform effect is being trapped in here, so the movement is correct, everything looks just fine, and if you want to move it into a different position in the corner, you can do so. At anytime you could expand this shape, you could go to the group if you're happy with what you see here and then choose object, Expand Appearance and then you'll choose object Ungroup, until ungroup is no longer an option. Then if you so desire, you can select everything or just leave them selected and choose object group, and that will give you this corner element as a single group inside your document. That's how you can create interesting corner effects this time using a slightly different reflective process, but these shapes are still symmetrical.
8. Project and Wrapup: Your project for this class will be to create something that is symmetrical in Illustrator using one or more of the techniques that I've shown here. Now to make it a little bit easy for you, if you want to be able to break things out of the more complicated design that we created, I have created a PDF file with just a list of the instructions and some notes of things that you should be aware of. You can find that in the class project area and you can download it there. Once you've completed your project, post an image of it in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class. I hope that you've learned things about Illustrator of which you were previously unaware. Now as you're watching the class, you would have seen a prompt which asked if you would recommend this class to others, please, if you did enjoy the class, would you do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes that you would recommend it, and secondly, write even in just a few words, why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations really help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now if you see the follow link on the screen, click it and you'll be kept up to date with my new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
