Shape Building Masterclass: Working with Shapes in Adobe Illustrator

1. Intro: Hey guys, my name is Kyle Aaron Parson. I am a graphic designer and illustrator based in Edmonton, Canada. In today's class, we'll take a deep dive into the shape creation tools in Adobe Illustrator. Many illustrators have come to be attached to the pen tool and rightly so. However, I want to challenge you to put aside the pen tool and explore the enormous potential of the shape building tools in Adobe Illustrator. Many times working with shape building tools, will give you cleaner lines and also speed up your workflow. This class is created for all skill levels. If you're a complete beginner, we'll walk through the fundamentals of shape creation in Adobe Illustrator and if you're an intermediate or advanced user, we'll walk through some amazing workflows to speed up your current practice. If you're ready to take your shape building in Adobe Illustrator to the next level, I'll see you in class. 2. Class Requirements: For this class, all you'll need is Adobe Illustrator, a keyboard, and a mouse. I've prepared a practice worksheet that you can use to follow along with. As we go through the class, we will cover how to work with shapes in Adobe Illustrator as well as the Pathfinder panel. Then we'll learn how to manipulate shapes using key keyboard shortcuts. So if you're ready to start building shapes, download the resources in the Project panel and I can't wait to see you in class. 3. Rectangles and Circles: [MUSIC] All right guys, so I opened up the Pathfinder menu practice sheet. In this sheet you can find the Pathfinder pizza company menu. You can also find some practice sheets. Let's just zoom into the Pathfinder pizza company menu and see what's there. In the Pathfinder pizza company menu, we have the different types of Pathfinder options. We also have the Pathfinder side dishes, which are the keyboard shortcuts to speed up your workflow, as well as some toppings. One by one through the class, we're going to dive into each of these sections. The first section that we're going to dive into is the toppings. The first set of toppings we're going to go through is the square or the rectangle, and the circle or the ellipse. The keyboard shortcuts for those is M. If you hit "M" on your keyboard, you can drag out your mouse, click and drag to create a rectangle like that and if you hit "L" on your keyboard, you can drag out an ellipse like that. Secondly, if you want to make a perfect square or a perfect circle; If I hit "M" and I drag it out and I hold "Shift", I'll create a perfect square. If I hit "L" and drag and hold "Shift" I'll make a perfect circle. Another way to do that is if I click "L" and I hit "Alt", it will actually allow me to create the circle from the center out instead of the corner. That makes it easier to work with. That's how you create a simple rectangle and a circle. Let's dive into the rectangle tool a little bit. If we drag out a rectangle, let's make just a random size rectangle here. Now, there are a few secrets of building shapes with the rectangle tool. You can build more than just a rectangle with the rectangle tool. You can actually make pretty complicated shapes using the rectangle tool. How? It's because it has something called live corners. If we select our rectangle here, it has these little widgets on the cornered points. What that allows me to do, it allows me to drag them into the center and it rounds the corners of the shape. That's pretty cool. Already we went from a straight rectangle to a little more complicated rectangle, rounded rectangle. What else can we do with that? If we hit the "A" key on our keyboard, this is the direct selection tool up here. We can select just one of these points. Let's say I wanted this one to be straight and this corner to be straight. Now I have even more complicated, I have round point, round point. That's pretty good. We can build on from there. What else can we do with these widgets? Now, to see all the options that you have control over, you can open up the Transform Menu. If you go into your Window and you go down to Transform and open that up, you can see that there are actually more options here. You can see that there's actually different types of corners you can apply to your corner points. Let's see what that does. If I change this top left corner to a inverted round, you can see what it does. Now I have an inverted round shape on one of the corners. What else do we got there? We got the chamfer corner, here. We can apply it to just that one and we can drag it in and make it a little more complicated shape like that. We went from a simple rectangle to actually a quite complicated shape with different angles, corners, roundness but it was all thanks to the live corner function in Adobe Illustrator. Actually, this used to be very difficult to create, but now it's actually very easy to create very complicated shapes with just a simple rectangle. Those are the tools that we can use for building a rectangle. What about the circle? If we have a circle, we can hold "Shift" to constrain the proportions. It also has a widget here. This widget here allows me to actually cut into the circle a certain degree so I can actually make a cut out of that pizza, a pizza slice with this circle. These are adjustable, so I can do that or that. What else can I do? If I look at here, I can actually invert the pie. I can have it a certain degrees on one side and I can also transfer it into the complete opposite on the other side. What I can do now is if I wanted to copy this, if Alt drag it, if I copy and paste, I can make a simple pie graph out of this circle. This doesn't only work with the straight circle, but also with an ellipse. Now you have more of a flattened version or maybe a isometric view or perspective view of the circle with that. If I Alt drag and I invert it, you can see that I have a pie graph going on there. That's a pretty handy tool. What I want you to do for this first class is simply play around with the rectangle tool and the ellipse tool, and figure out what you can build with it. Honestly, you can do a lot of stuff with even these two shapes. Have some fun with that. Play around with the live shapes, the corners, and the pie function of the ellipse tool. In our next class we'll dive into our polygon tool and our star tool. I'll see you in the next class. [MUSIC] 4. Polygons and Stars: Welcome to the next class where we'll dive into the Polygon tool and the Star tool. Where you can find these? If you find your Ellipse tool or it might be a Rectangle tool on your side panel here, you can click and hold that open and you can scroll down and you can see the Polygon tool and the Star Tool. What I'm going to do, is I'm just going to click this button here, it'll actually drag the menu out so I can access all these functions easily so now I can access the Polygon tool. If I drag up the Polygon tool, I can create, well, a polygon. What's cool about the Polygon tool is it can create any type of polygon. You can create a triangle, a square, a pentagon, hexagon, decagon, it can have an infinite number. I don't know about infinite, but a lot of sides to it, up until you create almost a perfect circle. How do we adjust these points? First way, we created our shape, we let go. Now, what can we do with that? You see on this corner, it actually has some widgets. It has a widget here that controlled all corners. Just like a rectangle, it allows me to round each of the corners independently, but just using this one corner, not independently, just all corners at once. That's pretty cool, it's a live shape, and it means it has function to change at any point in time. A second widget here is one that we didn't see in the Rectangle tool, it is an edge widget. What this does, it actually has a plus or minus symbol. It actually adds points or subtracts points to our polygon so it can go up to 11 sides and down to three sides. If we open that back up, straighten those corners, and we can increase the sides, make a stop sign pretty easily. We can bring it down, make it yield sign pretty easily, round those corners a little bit to make that yield sign like that. That's pretty cool. But, the same thing applies to these corners as it did with the rectangle. If I wanted to create a different type of corner, I can hold Alt and click on that widget, and it'll all change to the next corner type in the list which is the inverted round. Now I can make a very complicated shape like that, but again, this is a live shape. If I wanted to increase the corners, I can increase the size like that. Really easily, really fun. I can make it a very complicated, more of like a gear like that, that's pretty cool. That's our polygon shape. One other thing that I wanted to show you is that if you use the Polygon tool, you can actually adjust the sides as we're creating the shape. You use the keyboard up and down arrows. If I am holding onto the shape, I am going to press "Up" to increase the amount of sides and press "Down" to decrease. I can add more points or more sides than 11 points when I use the arrow keys, but it stops it with a live shape function there. Let's jump into the Star tool. The Star tool also works the same way. If I'm dragging it out, let go, it is now a shape. It's an expanded shape, it doesn't have those live corners anymore. How can we adjust this star? We want to adjust this star as we're creating it. If we click the "Star Tool" and we drag it out, we can increase the amount of points with the up and down arrows, so I can increase the amount of points. What if I think that the distance between the center points and the outer points is too far? How do I adjust that? Right now everything is scaling proportionally, but what if I only want to scale the outer points and I want to bring them back? What I can do is I can hold the Control key and at this one, it locks the center points and only allows me to adjust the outer points. I can create a circle or a star like this, so I can make it a little less. What can I do? Since this shape is expanded, I still have the ability to use live corners. If I hit the direct selection tool, the A key, now you can see that all the widgets pop up. I can select them all and I can round them all at one time like that and create a gear shape. What's really cool about this, I can create a very clean gear shape by holding Alt and changing the corner points to a flat edge, so I made a really awesome gear shape. What if I didn't want a different size? I can just make a different size, decrease the amount, hold Control, bring them in a bit, hit "A" on my keyboard, hit "Alt" to make a chamfered edge and there we go, bring them in. Again, we built a couple different types of gear shapes with this Star tool. The star isn't just for the star, but you can make many different things. Let's make a little badge there. You can make a little badge like an I'm number 1 badge, good work badge, because you guys are all doing great work. That's pretty much what I wanted to show you with the Star tool and the Polygon tool. For this class, what I want you to do, is play around with the Polygon tool and the Star tool and see what you can come up with. Definitely, there's a lot you can do with them, a lot more than what I've shown you. But as you play around with the live shapes and live corners, you can create some really interesting shapes out of these basic shapes. Something that would take you a long time with the Pen tool, actually, you can make in no time at all with basic shapes and the live shapes feature in Adobe illustrator. Play around with it. I can't wait to see you in the next class. 5. The Pathfinder Panel: Right now what we're going to do is, we're going to dive into the shape building tools in Adobe Illustrator. We did a deep dive into this shape creation tools, the rectangle tool, the ellipse tool, the polygon tool, and the star tool, and how you can create actually a lot of shapes just with those four tools in Adobe Illustrator. If you use the pen tool to create some little shapes, you could not do it effectively and efficiently. Definitely take advantage of the live shape functions in Adobe Illustrator, because it makes shape building so much easier. The next thing we're going to do is, we're going to use the shape building tool of the Pathfinder panel. In the menu, you can see that there are different types of Pathfinder tools. To access the Pathfinder menu, all you need to go is window down to Pathfinder. I have it already docked in my side panel here, and I like it to be docked where it's always visible, so that I can easily access these functions. There are four classic shape modes, which is Unite, Minus Front, Intersect, Exclude, and there are some special shape modes, which is divide, trim, merge, crop, outline, minus back. We're going to go one-by-one and see what each of them do. Some of them work very similar to others, like Minus Front and Minus Back, they're basically the opposite of each other. Unite, merge, trim and divide, all have similar characteristics. We're going to look at those. Then the other ones, like crop and intersect also have similar characteristics, but they do slightly different things and we're going to do a deep dive into these in this class. We're over on the practice sheet of the Pathfinder menu. We have our little pizzas here. We have a top row just with two pizzas over top of each other, and we have the middle section here with three pizzas. The reason why I did this is because actually, in order to see the difference between one function and another, sometimes you need more than one object to really make a clear difference, because they do similar things. The first one we're going to look at is unite. Unite, all it does is it merges all the shapes into one shape and it keeps the color of the top shape. Here we have two shapes, we have a red circle and a yellow circle. Let's zoom in a little bit so everybody can see. You have a red circle and a yellow circle and the red is below and the yellow on top. What if we drag over them and we click the "Unite" button? Now, you can see that the shapes merged and it took the color of the top shape. If we do that with three, what do you think's going to happen? It's going to merge all the shapes into one complete shape, and it's going to take the color of the top shape. The next one we're going to look at it as Minus Front. All it is is we have a front or an orange circle in front or on top in the layers panel, and we have a red circle underneath. What will happen is it's going to remove whatever is on top, and we have the red circle underneath and we have the yellow circle on top, and we hit "Minus Front". It'll keep the color of the bottom shape. Now what's going to happen if we have three shapes, we have a yellow shape, a red shape, and a yellow shape on top. Since the bottom most layer is the yellow, everything on top will be subtracted from that shape. If we select them all and do Minus Front, essentially, if you have a bottom shape and you have shapes on top, every single shape that's over top of that bottom shape, will be subtracted from the bottom shape. Even if you have 20 different shapes, the only thing that remains is the bottom shape that is actually visible. We're just going to come over all the way to the end, to the Minus Back, because Minus Front, Minus Back, they're pretty much the same thing, just do the opposite. What do you think's going to happen here? We've got a red shape in the back and we have a yellow shape in the front. Everything that's behind it will be subtracted from the top shape. You can see the edge of this bottom shape actually goes underneath and around this shape. Essentially it's going to cut that out because it's behind it. Let's see what happens. Let's hit the "Minus Back" button, and what we thought, that is correct. Now we have these three shapes here. Again, we have the front shape, that is the yellow, red, and yellow. We select them all, Minus Back. Then, it left us with the front most shape, front most color. Yeah, everything that was behind it, it would be subtracted from it. Now let's go into intersect. Basically, where two points overlap each other, that is the part that's going to remain. Wherever it doesn't overlap, it'll be basically erased. Let's go up to the menu and just hit "Intersect". Perfect, we made a little leaf there, that's pretty cool. What will happen if we have three objects? We have three pizzas here, and they all overlap at this point here in the middle. If we hit "Intersect", only that point where all three shapes overlap each other, actually will remain. It really cuts half of your shapes, if you use it in this way. Another similar function is actually the crop function. If we're over at the crop function, I want to show you how it actually works very similarly. We saw intersect, it left this tiny little piece here. What about the crop function? If we hit crop, well, it looks pretty the same, but why did it keep the red and not the orange? Well, how the crop function works, it actually works like a frame. The topmost layer is the frame containing all the other shapes underneath it. It's going to remove the color of the top most shape, because it's going to just be the width which everything else actually is contained. Unlike the Intersect, which actually got rid of all the other forms, the crop function actually still keeps this top form, because it is the frame. If there were other shapes underneath it, anything that was within this top shape would remain. Let's see what that will do when we do this. We have a red shape, and a yellow shape. The red shapes over top of this bottom yellow shape and this top shape will be used as the crop. If we drag over all of it and hit "Crop", all shapes are now contained in the top shape and they keep their colors. Now I have three different shapes, I have the frame and I have these two other shapes. If I wanted to separate them, I would have to ungroup them first, and now you can see that there's three different shapes here. We have this shape, and we have this other shape that we don't really need. But if we wanted to, we can give it a color. We can give it a red color like that. The crop, whatever shape is on top, it'll be used as a frame to blocking everything that's underneath it, similar to intersect, but it doesn't eliminate the top shape. It just creates a frame. Just as Intersect, it kept the points that overlapped each other. Exclude is the opposite. Whatever is overlapping actually will be removed from this object. Let's see how that all would work. If we go up and we hit "Exclude" this little button here, and it also took the color of the top shape. Exclude removes any points that overlap. But what happens when we have three shapes? Let's see what happens there. Let's hit "Exclude". Now, that's a little different than what we had here. Why did this happen? Number 1 characteristic of the Exclude and most of these functions is that, it'll take the color of the top shape for the most part, except for the Minus Front. You can actually build parts out of it. Let me show you just an example of what I mean. Is that if I make one circle and I copy and paste it over top of itself and make it a little smaller, I'll give it a red color. Then I'll copy the first shape over top and make it smallest. What's going to happen is that I have three layers here. I have the bottom layer, I have the middle layer, and I have a top layer. If I hit exclude wherever there is two shapes overlapping each other, that's going to eliminate themselves. But if there's a third shape on top that one will remain from. The bottom, the red will be removed, but then, since the red removed from the bottom shape, there's nothing underneath this center shape to be removed. Let's see about that. Let's go exclude. Now we need basically a target, but it's actually a target with a clear background. But if you want to make a simple target and you can use the exclude abundant. Basically where there's an even number overlapping, it'll remove it, where there is an odd number overlapping it'll remain. Now let's go over to these three. Divide, trim, and emerge. They work very similarly, but different. Let's see what I mean by that. Let's first do divide. Let's go down to the Pathfinder option and hit Divide. Visibly nothing really happened. But what we can do is we can go to right-click on it and ungroup it. Now we can select each individual point from this. What it did is wherever the parts overlapped, it split it up into sections. We have the bottom section and we have the top section and we have that center section. It divided itself into these three sections. Wherever a path actually crossed another path, it basically broke them apart. Now let's see what trim does. If we hit Trim visibly it looks the same as what divided. However, trim works a little bit differently than divide. Because if we ungroup this one, now you can see that the top layer actually remained as a whole layer. The trim layer works according to what sits on top of the next thing. Whatever's on top will remove from whatever's underneath, and then vice versa. If there's something underneath this one, this will remain, the top layer will remain and it'll cut out this section of the bottom layer. We'll see when we go into the three. Now let's see what merged us. Let's go merge. Now merge, we ungroup it. It looks exactly like trim. What's the deal here? How do these two work? Let's go through the three point. Let's hit Divide. Let's hit Trim, and let's hit Merge. Now visibly, they all look exactly the same. But if we ungroup them all, we can actually see what exactly happens. We can see that we can select all the pieces of the shape and we can separate them. Wherever the paths overlap or the paths crossed, that's where the shape divided the other shapes. It keeps the color that was visible when we created the divide. Since all this part was red, we can see that it's red, It'll remain red when we use this function. The same with trimming and merge. Now what happened when we use trim, it works according to layers. We have the topmost layer which was this circle. It cut out and it remained whole, but it cut the section from the rest of the layers. We see this second layer, it remain mostly all except for the piece that was over top of it. It got removed, and now the bottom piece. It works according to the layers, whatever's on top will basically trim out from whatever's underneath and it'll keep the same color. The merge shape is a little bit different now, so we divide it. Now we can see that there is only two shapes here compared to three shapes in trim. The reason why that is, is because the merge shaped works according to colors. Wherever the same color overlaps, it'll actually fuse those shapes together. Since the yellow shapes, even though they were separated by level in the layers panel, they're the same color, so they all merge together and whatever is red will merge together like the unite function. However, it works according to the colors, not just the shapes themselves. Wherever the similar color is, it'll be merged. We have one last tool to look at in the Pathfinder menu, that is the outline tool, and it does exactly what it says. However, let's just outline. If we hit outline, it creates an outline. If we give this stroke a weight, you can see that it basically made an outline of the shapes and it gave it the color of the visible part. Since this section over here was visibly red, it remained as a red stroke. Same with these points they were visibly yellow, so gave them a yellow stroke. But what also happened is it worked like a divide. Now it cut these sections in to their own paths. Instead of using the knife tool to cut a path, you can cut it using the outline tool. You have two paths overlapping, you can cut them and have its own path. Let's see what happens when we do three. Give it a stroke. A weight of some sort. Again, we can see that wherever there was a path, it changed into a stroke or an outline, and it gave it the visible color of that area. All of these areas were red, so it gave it a stroke of red. Seeing what these sections here, they were all yellow, so it gave yellow. If I ungroup it, now I have a bunch of different paths that I can work with and build from. If you're making some monoline logo or something like that, this might be pretty useful for you to use. Those are how the classic shape modes work and the Pathfinder work. What I encourage you to do is don't only use the three circles, or two circles, but play around with different shapes that we built in the first couple of classes, and use some of these pathfinder tools and see what you can come up with. Play around with the unite function, the minus front, exclude, divide, trim, merge, outline, and see what shapes you can actually create with them. Because truly there's infinite possibilities. What could take you so long with the pen tool? Actually is super quick and easy with the Pathfinder tool. Also the lines will be so much crisper and cleaner than if you try to control it and make it organically with the pen tool, Bezier handles. For this class, I want you to practice play around with the Pathfinder menu and see what you can come up with. I'll see you in the next class. 6. Pathfinder Secrets: In this class, we're going to talk about the secrets of the Pathfinder panel to increase your efficiency with working with the Pathfinder panel and to use it more efficiently. The four secrets are on the menu. The first one is in the classic shape modes. If you often click, actually you can create a compound path. This one is actually really good if you don't want to do destructive editing. We're going to first look at that one. We have our classic shaped modes here and we have this last slide that is Alt. What I'm going to do is I'm going to Alt Click and what that does when I hit "Alt" click the unite function, it actually creates a compound path. You can see that it all united into one shape with all the same colors. But if I hit the "A" key, this is direct selection tool, I have the ability to actually move the parts that made up the original shape. They're not united into one solid shape yet. What I can do then if I can move around the objects to where I want them to be. Maybe something like that. Then I can click on that. I can go to the Pathfinder menu and I can extend compound shape. What that'll do, that'll release it and make it into an actual united shape. That's how you can use Alt Click. What happens when we Alt click Minus Front? Remember Minus Front, it allows anything that's in front of the very last shape, the very bottom shape to be subtracted from the bottom shape. If we are to Alt Click on Minus Front, we have now created a compound path. It looks pretty similar to what we did there, but you have the ability to move the parts that make up the shape. Now if we zoom in here, we can actually maneuver or rearrange the parts that are actually cutting into the bottom shape. We can rearrange it into many different ways as we see fit. If we wanted to bring it closer together like that, we have that ability. Or if we wanted to make one side and one on the other, we can do that. We can make this one further. Maybe I wanted something like that. What I can do is I can select the shape with the V on the keyboard and then go into the Pathfinder panel and expand compound shape. Now it is no longer an editable compound shape, but I was able to maneuver the parts to where I want it. Let's see what this one is. This one is intersect. Now we can maneuver our parts if we're going to hit "Alt" Click and intersect. We have our compound shape and now we can maneuver our shapes to where ever we so desire to make that intersect. We also have the ability, as you saw, to change the path. If we click on the path, we can actually change the path itself and manipulate the paths that make up the intersection and it goes for all the other shapes as well. Then we can maneuver it like that. I like that. I'm going to expand shape or I just go expand here. You don't have to go into the drop-down menu, just hit "Expand". The last one, it is exclude. Let's see what exclude does. Alt Click, and now I have the ability to maneuver the path. Maybe I wanted something more like that. Maybe this one out further and this top one out like that. Now what I can do is select it all and hit "Expand" and we have an expanded shape. This is how you can use Alt Click to make a less destructive compound path. Now I want to show you one secret that makes the compound path really effect. Let's go and make our circle like that. Let's type some text, Alt. We have Alt. Now we're going to try, we click both of them and we do Minus Front. Actually I cannot Minus Front this one. The reason why is because this text is not an actual shape yet, what we would have to do is Control Shift O, outline the path or outline the text, and then we can do Minus Front and we can cut that text out of the bottom shape. However, we can't edit that text anymore. What happens when we do a compound path if we hit "Alt'' and Minus Front? It allows us to keep this text editable. Now we can move the text around and we can also change the text. Maybe Shift and we have the ability to resize it. Now we can maneuver that wherever we want. One of the benefits of hitting "Alt Click" is that we can actually use text when we're using the shape modes in the Pathfinder panel. That is really awesome. It's an awesome trick that I discovered and it's really useful for when you want to cut texts out of shapes. That was the first of the four tips. Let's move on to the second one. The second one is the Pathfinder option. Control four repeats the last action. This just means that if we were to have a group, let's just move down here, and we have a bunch of our pizzas here. Let's just change this color. If we have a bunch of pizzas here, and we wanted to do the same action over and over again. We could hit this, we can hit "Minus Front". Now if I just select this one, I don't have to drag my mouse all the way to the Pathfinder panel, I could just hit "Command 4" and it repeats the last action. Command 4, Command 4. Now I have my four pieces cut out. This is really useful when you have multiple objects or multiple groups that you want to apply the same Pathfinder option to, especially if they're not the same. Easily I could just do this once and then duplicate that because they're all the same shape in the end. I can maneuver this one and now I can apply Minus Front again to that and cut that out. Let's see and I want to cut it from the back. Now I can make a shape like that, really easily. I can edit these shapes in any way I want. The next Pathfinder option is remove redundant points. All that means is if there are points within the group of objects that you're merging together or your Minus Back, Minus Front, if there are points that really are irrelevant, meaning if there's a continuous straight line, it's going to remove any points in-between the two main points, the two corner points. I'll show you what I mean by that. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes you might not want to do it, and I'll show you the case why. Here, so I have these two groups and actually what it's actually made out of is multiple small little bricks. What happens if I just merge these together? If I just merge these together, use my Direct Selection Tool, you can see that all these points are still there. Now actually I have this option to move these points wherever I want like that. However, if I select all those groups and I go into my Pathfinder panel, Pathfinder options and I go remove redundant points and hit "Okay" and now I hit "Merge". What actually happens it removes all those points in the middle. I no longer have all these stray points that might affect my larger shape and it might cause a little problems. But now it's actually a very clean shape with four points, even though it was built from multiple different blocks, it's just one clean shape. That's one way you can use the remove redundant points if you want a very clean shape or you can keep your points so that you have the ability to make new shapes from that one block. That's one method you can use. Let's go on to our last option. The Pathfinder option, this one is for the divine and the outline. I use it mainly for the divine and I'll show you what it does. It is remove unpainted artwork. Let's go back to our panel over here and I have these two rings. If I were to just hit "Divide", what that would do, it would give me all these shapes. But what that also did, if I select them all and I give them one color, red, you can see that there were shapes that actually weren't there originally. If I put them back and I select everything, everything selected and I give it a color. Let's give it all red. You can see that there are parts which used to not be there. Means where it divided it actually made a shape out of these blank areas. If I were to go into the Pathfinder panel, Pathfinder options and go to divide an outline will remove unpainted artwork and hit "Okay". Now when I select these two objects and hit "Divide", and I recolor them to all red. Now you can see that, that doesn't happen anymore compared to this first option. Sometimes you might want to have that in your shape, but in my case, I really didn't. I just wanted to separate these shapes from one another like that. I don't have those extra false shapes there because those invisible shapes colored or part of my group. Those are the special features in the Pathfinder panel. There must be some way to use them. You can figure that out. Play around with them, see where you can apply it with your artwork. I'll see you in the next class. 7. Key Board Shortcut Side Dishes: The last section of this class is going through some of the Pathfinder side dishes, some keyboard shortcuts to speed up your workflow. These ones are super helpful when you're building and creating with shapes. I want to show you a few different secrets that will help use these tools effectively. First one we're going to go through is the Rotate tool. All I'm going to do is I'm going to create on this path a little circle, and I'm going to give it a red fill like that. What I want to do is I wanted to make a bunch of circles rotating around here. How do I do that? I hit the R key. What happens is this little anchor point is where this effect will happen from. Right now, it's right in the center, but what if I wanted it somewhere else? All I would have to do is I would have to hit R, and then it allows me to select where I want the anchor point to go, and I want it right in the center here. Boom. Now I have the anchor point here. Now, what can I do is I can click and I can drag this circle to wherever I want it to go. That's pretty cool. I'm going to place it back there. What if I wanted to duplicate it? If I hit R again and I place the anchor point right in the center, I can click Alt, and it brings up this double arrow. What that means it's going to duplicate as I drag it. I can duplicate and drag it. Now one of the keyboard shortcuts here is Control D or Command D on a Mac. What that allows me to do is repeat the action. I duplicate it, drag and duplicated it. Now if I hit Control D, it does that same action from this previous shape. If I continue doing that, boom, I made a bunch of circles, but it's not perfect. I'm going to hit Control Z, and I'm going to erase all those. What if I wanted to make it perfectly around this whole thing? What I can do is I'm going to hit R and then if I hold Alt and click the center, that brings up this menu. If I hit Alt and click where I want the anchor point to go, it'll bring up the Rotate menu. Now it allows me to actually punch in the amount of degrees I want. One thing that's really cool about this is you can actually do some math in the tool itself. Let's say around the entire circle, I wanted exactly 10 circles evenly spaced within the circuit. How do I do that? If I know that a circle is 360 degrees, I can go 360 divided by 10, and it'll automatically calculate how far it needs to go to create 10 circles within 360 degrees. Hit "Preview" and it moves it to where it should be. Now what I can do is I can hit the "Copy" button and it made a duplicate just like I did. I click and drag, but this one just made it for me to the perfect amount of degrees that I want. Now if I hit Control D, boom. Now I have 10 circles perfectly evenly spaced around my center point. That's a pretty cool way to use the Rotate function. You can find different ways to use it, but this is one of the ways that I love to use it. Just remember you can place the anchor point anywhere you want, and you can hit Alt to bring up the menu. Let's go to the Reflect tool. The Reflect tool is O on the keyboard. Let's make a square or rectangle. But what I want to do is I want to make a duplicate on this side. If I were to use the Rotate tool, hit R and then click and drag. It wouldn't allow me to make an opposite exactly on that side, it would be over there, but I want it right here opposite to this one, a mirrored image. Instead of using R, I'll use O. I'll click right in the center, and then I'll click and drag, holding Alt, and it makes a perfectly mirrored image just like that. That's one way I can do that, but I can do that with more than just one shape. If I had on this side, let's say a circle, a square, and a star, let's reduce the amount of points and give it some more depth. [inaudible] Now I want to make a mirrored image of all of these things on the opposite side, I'll click them all, hit O. Again, if I wanted to, I can click Alt and I can either choose for them to reflect vertically at this point or horizontally or vertically to the opposite side. If I want it to flip along this axis, I can flip it along that axis or along the Y-axis. I can flip it along the Y-axis. Then, I can also make the degrees different, but I'd like to add 90. I'm doing that and I can also hit "Copy" to make a duplicate. That's the Reflect tool, really easy to use. Let's go up to the Scale tool. Scale is S on your keyboard. How I like to use this is I like to use it when I have a rectangle, but I want a trapezoid. All I do is I hit A on my keyboard, and I select these two points here. Then, I hit S and what I can do is I can drag it in and those two points scale according to this center point here. That's how I like to use the scale function. You can use it in many different ways, but that's how I like to use the Scale function. The third one is the Free Transform tool. If I have a shape, let's see a star shape, build a star here, what we can do is we can bring this down and do some things with it. But let's say I want to give it some perspective. You can make perspective this way, but what if I want to skew it a little the other way? Let's hit E on our keyboard. Now, what comes up is we have these widgets on the sides and on the corners. It allows me to turn it, and these widgets allow me to view it wherever. If I wanted a side star like that, there's a few other tools in there. If I wanted to freely transform it, I can use this Free Distort, and I can just move one corner wherever I want and really angle this star really interestingly. Then, this Q function or the perspective distort, you can use that to create an interesting perspective. Play around with the free transform functions, and you can get some really interesting results from it and you can use it with very complicated shapes with squares, rectangles, you can get perspective pretty easily by controlling the handles, but if you have a complicated shape, you can use the Free Transform to create more of a perspective and get some interesting distortion from that. The last one I just want to show you is the Blend tool. Blend tool is really cool, and I want to show you one method when I use it. I'm going to create, let's say, a circle. I'm going to make it an ellipse, and I want to give it some depth. What I want to do is I want to drop it down while I make a cylinder. I'm going to make a copy of the top shape. Copy, Control C, Control V or Control C, Control Shift V to make a copy right on top, and I'm going to change these to yellow. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hit W on my key. I have both circles selected. Hit W on my key, and I'm going to click one and I'm going to click the other. That created a blend between the two. You see there's another shape in the middle, but it's not actually a live shape, it's part of a blend. If I wanted to control that, a lot of the times, people go into "Object", "Blend", "Blend Options", and you can do that, but a faster way is just holding Alt and click on one of your blends when you have the Blend tool activated, and it brings up the Blend menu. Now what you can do is you can hit specified steps. Now the Specified Steps right now is at one, but I want it to have a really smooth blend. I want it to maybe go up to 100 and I preview that. What that did, it made a repetition of this shape 100 times from the top shape to the bottom shape. Now, what I want to do is I want to push this behind my red cylinder. Right now, I have a red cylinder on top and the bottom, but what I want to do is I want to push this one behind, and one of my keyboard shortcuts is Control square bracket. If I hit the left bracket, it goes backwards; right bracket goes forwards. If I hit Shift, it brings it all the way to the top or all the way to the bottom. I want to move this backwards, I'm going to hit Control and left bracket. It brings it down. Now, it made a little cylinder. Really cool, simple 3D shape that has a little depth to it, and if you combine all of these tools together, you can make amazing shapes really easily. Those are my tips for using the Rotate, Reflect, Blend, Scale, and Free Transform tool. Please play around with them and find some new ways to use them because there's an infinite amount of possibilities, and you don't need to use the Pen tool to create dynamic and interesting shapes. A lot of the times, using the shape tools that are built into Illustrator will give you a much cleaner result, and it'll also speed up your workflow. Give it a try, practice these, and I'll see you in the next class. 8. Thank You!!!: Thank you so much for taking this class. Your project for the class is to create an illustration using the tool described in this class. Challenge yourself to put aside the pen tool and start creating your illustration using basic shapes and then building them up with the Pathfinder panel. You can make an original illustration or you can join me in making toppings for my pizza. I encourage you to post some of the shapes that you made while experimenting with the tools, as well as a final illustration. Afterward, if you'd like to join me, I've created a bonus video where I demonstrate some of the tools and how I apply them to creating toppings for my pizza. If you have any questions regarding any of the subjects described in this class, please feel free to leave a comment in the discussions panel and I'll get back to it as soon as I can, or you can find me on Instagram @kyle.aaron.art. Lastly, if you enjoyed the class and you've learned something, please consider leaving a short review so others can find this class in the future. Until next time. See you later. 9. Bonus Video Demonstration: Hey guys, thanks for joining me in this bonus video, where I will quickly demonstrate how I might apply the tools taught in the class to build some shapes and more specifically, toppings for my pizza. This project file is actually available in the project panel. If you want to follow along with me, you can download this and make your own toppings for your own pizza. Feel free to have fun with that. Definitely, experiment with more than one I'll demonstrate here. Definitely make your favorite type of pizza. I will not be making my favorite type of pizza, but I will demonstrate some different ways to use these tools. I'm going to go pretty quick through this, but everything that I'm doing here was explained in the class. The first thing then I am going to do is I'm going to create a pepperoni. I'm going to hit L on my keyboard and I create a simple pepperoni. I'm going to give it a fill of some brownish-red, maybe like that. Maybe I'll give it a stroke, that is, a similar color but slightly darker. I got my pepperoni. It's looking a little too red. There we go. What can I do with this? Is I can first, I'll drag it down, move it to the back and then I can give that a darker color, like that. The next thing that I'm going to do is I want to give it a little bit of texture in the center part, so, I will copy and paste the top shape and I will drag it and make a small little shape. I'm going to remove from it the outline. I'm going to give it a little bit lighter, make it a little bit lighter like that. I'm going to copy paste it and I'll drag to the left bottom and I'm going to select those two shapes, the copy shaped and copy and drag shape. We're going to hit Minus Front. Then I'm going to give this a little darker. It gives the impression of a shadow that's being cast in and dip down into the pepperoni. I'm going to select both of those shapes and group them together. I'm going to spread them out on my pepperoni. That's looking pretty good. I can group that pepperoni and I'll drag it onto my pizza. It stays there and it's pretty big pizza, I think so. We're going to put some pepperonis. There we go. What's the next one we can do? Let's do another round one, let's do a tomato. Hitting L on my keyboard, I'm going to start with a circle. I'm going to give it a red, like that, pretty bright red. Then I'm going to copy and paste, bring it in a bit and slightly, make it a little darker at first. Copy and paste and bring it in slightly again. Make this one lighter like that, to yellow. Make it red there. The next thing that I don't want to do is I want to actually hit M on my keyboard and draw out a square from the center in. I want to make an intersection of these two shapes. I'm going to hit Intersect. Now I have this. I'm going to reduce the size of it, a little bit, holding Alt and Shift, and I'm going to hit M on my keyboard and use the live corners function. Round all the corners like that. Then I'm going to hit R on my keyboard with it selected, select the center of all my circles, I'll drag it and Command D. You can see that the tomato is forming, but tomatoes sometimes have seeds. I'm going to hit L and make a little an ellipse and lighten that up a little bit like that, still a little red. We've got a little seed there and we'll drag out a few seeds and group those together. Next thing that I want to do is I want to hit R on my keyboard with them selected, hit the center, I'll drag them, hit Command D. We have our seeds there, we have our shape. Now we'll give it some perspective. Let's just bring everything down to about the same size as our example here. We're going to give it some depth. I'm going to grab the bottom shape and I will Alt drag it down. I'll just darken it a little bit and bring it to the back. It gave it a little bit of depth there. I'm going to select all of them, group them together. Let's scatter these tomatoes on the pizza. Put them there. Perfect. What's next for the pizza guys? I don't know what your favorite toppings are, but we're going to do some simple one. Let's do a very simple olive. We're going to make an ellipse. We're going to copy that ellipse, bring it in, and I'm going to exclude. We have this olive. I'm going to give it a black, slightly lighter than black. I'm going to drop it down like that and make it full black, bring it to the back like that. Next thing that I can do to make this connected, one thing I could do is use the blend tool. But since it's such a simple shape, all I need to do is from one corner to another, make a rectangle of the same color as my bottom, duplicate that rectangle, put it on the other side. Connecting to the edge, and then just merge that with my bottom shape or unite it with my bottom shape and bring everything to the back. Now you can see it is a three-dimensional form. I'm going to group everything. I'm going to drag it and place it on my pizza. That's a very large olive. I'm going to shrink it down a bit and just spread out some olives on my pizza. We've got an olive pepperoni tomato pizza. Let's bring in one olive back. Now let's do a little more complicated one. Let's do a green pepper. How am I going to make a green pepper? It's wavy on the outside and it has a hole in the middle. For the wavy part, actually, the shape I would use is probably the star tool. I'm going to start with a star tool. That was a polygon tool. My bad, I'm going to start with a star tool. I'm going to hold Control to bring it in slightly so it's not so much like that, and I'm going to hit A on my keyboard and I'm going to round all the edges. That looks like a top-down view of a paper. The next thing that I can do is I can give it color and then I can copy and paste it once and I'm going to cut this out, so I'm going to hit Minus Front. So now I have an outline. I'm going to select the outline copy and paste in front and I'm going to bring this one in, and I'm going to give this a different color, the inside part of the paper. Just like that. Next thing that I want to do is I'm going to actually make these ones, actually group this, and we're going to give it some perspective. For this one, pretty easily I can just drop it down like that and I gave it some perspective. The next thing that I want to do is I want to give it some depth. So since this has multiple colors in it, I want to make a blend of it. I'm going to copy and paste, and then I'm going to Alt, drag it down. I'm going to bring the one I just dragged down right to the bottom of it, so I have my top copied and my bottom and I'm going to hit W on my keyboard and make a blend. Now you can see they're starting to blend together. The next thing that I want to do is hit Alt and bring up my blend options and increase it to maybe 50 and let's preview that. That looks good. Now I'm going to darken it slightly because it's in shadow. I'm going to hit Edit Color and I'm just going to go edit color and just bring back the lightness of the whole thing just a little bit and now you can see that it's dark. I'm going to bring it behind the top layer. Now you can see that it has a little shadow going underneath and it is the similar colors just darkened a little bit. That's really cool. What I want to do now is I don't want it to remain a blend, so I'm going to go into Object and Expand. The next thing I want to do is I want to make it one shape. I am going to merge it. Since it has multiple colors, I don't want to unite it or else it all becomes one color. But if I merge it, all light colors will be merged together. So now you can see that it is one solid shape with two different colors. So that's looking pretty good. I'm going to group everything together and I'm going to bring it up to my pizza. Maybe shrink this pepper down a little bit, just like that, different sizes of pepper, scatter them around. We have two more sections. Let's do a pineapple. How do I want to make a pineapple? Let's start with an M tool and I'm going to hit A and select the bottom ones. I'm going to hit S for the scale and just bring them in a little bit, like a wedge. I'm going to give it a yellow because pineapples are yellow, very bright yellow, and I want to give it some lines down the center, so how do I do that? I'm just going to hit M on my keyboard and give this a slightly darker yellow and maybe make three of them like that and Control D to that. Now, I want to cut off the top parts and the bottom parts. One way I can do that as I could select everything, hit divide, enter into it by double-clicking and select the top parts and the bottom parts and just delete them. The next thing I want to do is I want to bring them into it a little bit. I'm going to select them all, hit Alt and just pull them in there. It gives it a little bit of depth and texture. I'm going to exit out by double-clicking outside the shape. Now it's one group. I want to give it some perspective, but I don't want it just straight up and down like this, I want it angled slightly, but if I try to give a perspective like that, it doesn't really work, so the way I need to do it is I'm going to hit E on my keyboard to bring up the transform tool. Now, I can actually use the side to skew it if I wanted to, like that. I can skew it however I see fit, so maybe something like that. I'm going to hit V to bring up my selection tool. Now I want to give it a little bit of depth. I want to drop it down a little bit. So again, I'm going to copy everything, Control C, Control Shift V, and I'm going to Alt, drag it down. Then I'm going to select both of them. First, I want to bring the bottom one to the bottom, select both of them, and hit the Blend tool W and blend options and specified steps. I'm going to give it 50 again, I'm going to hit Okay, so now you can see it blended all together. Next thing that I want to do is I want to recolor it, Edit Colors and just bring a little bit of darkness in there just like that. I can bring it to the back and now you can see that it is shaded. All right, afterwards, I want to merge it all together, so I'm going to select my blend, I'm going to hit Object, expand, and I'm going to merge all like colors together. Beautiful, and it gave it a little bit of texture, no problem, hardly noticeable. I'm going to group it altogether and we got our pineapple. Let's put that giant pineapple on that pizza. Well, I'll shrink it down a bit. We have some pineapples on the pizza. Perfect. Let's see, the last thing I want to do is I want to make a simple garnish, so I want to make some leaves. I'm just going to hit L on my keyboard, make it green of some sort like that, bring it over, and I'm going to want this center part, so I'm going to hit Intersect. I made a nice leaf, I'm going to copy and paste in front, and I'm going to just bring it in and make a little stem in the center. Beautiful. I'm going to group that and I'm going to select it, hit R on my keyboard, select the bottom, and rotate it along itself. Next thing that I want to, give it a little perspective, so I'll just drop it down and now I don't want them to be flat, so what I can do is I can hit A on my keyboard, and I can use the direct selection tool to change the leaf's form a little bit. I can do that. I can bring this down and warp it a little bit to where I see fit just so it's not super perfect. That looks pretty good though. The next thing that I want to do, I want a slight shadow underneath it. I'm going to select everything, Control C, Control V, and because I am only going to see one color underneath, I'm going to just merge all those shapes together and drag them down slightly and bring them to the back. Now you can see there's a little bit of a rim underneath the leaves. I'm going to select them all and group them altogether, and we have a little bit of a leaf garnish. We've got a little leaf garnish to top the pizza. Now what I want to do is I want to actually make all the shapes cast a shadow, just like we see the cheese is casting a little shadow. So how can we do that? Easy way, let's just select all our toppings. We're going to copy them and paste them in front, Control C, Control Shift V. Then what we want to do is we are going to unite all of them together, so they're all one color and one shape, so they all turn green because the topmost layer was the leaf. But if I hit I on my keyboard and I select the cheese shadow color, that'll be selected and it is now the cheese shadow color. All I need to do is I need to offset it a little bit over to the left side and bring it to the back behind all my other shapes, and look at that. We have a pizza and all the toppings look like they're settled in on top of the pizza. That is how you make toppings for your pizza in Adobe Illustrator. Thank you so much for joining me through this adventure of making a pizza in Adobe Illustrator. I can't wait to see what you guys come up with. Definitely try and experiment with different toppings or different illustrations in general. So post whatever experiments you do in the project panel and I look forward to seeing every single one of them. Thank you guys so much for taking the class. See you.