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Transform Shapes

Lesson 9 from: Intro to Adobe Illustrator

Jason Hoppe

Transform Shapes

Lesson 9 from: Intro to Adobe Illustrator

Jason Hoppe

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Lesson Info

9. Transform Shapes

Professional graphic designers don’t waste time painstakingly drawing complex shapes: learn how to create bursts, gears, splatters, and other shapes in a matter of seconds. Jason will teach you how to rotate, resize, duplicate, change, and group shapes together.

Lesson Info

Transform Shapes

going in and transforming shapes here, rotating them and scaling them. That's pretty easy and duplicating them as well. We kind of got a little ahead of ourselves here, but, you know, I just had to show you, but I want to show you a couple of the things we can do with Illustrator. That's absolutely gonna change how we create our shapes here. And this is going to be, like, even more awesome than what we just did here. So rotating a shape which showed you how to do that resize duplicate. But we're gonna show you the direct selection tool toe actually edit shapes here and create a couple other really cool things grouping and on grouping things as well. So we're gonna jump right over to transforming our shapes. Here they are. Now I can click on any one of these shapes with the selection tool. I get my poll handles to resize. If I don't hold down my shift key, I'm going to skew them out of proportion. And I can also rotate them by hovering over but not touching the outside corners and then ...

rotating those as well. What I'd really like to do is I'd really like to go in here, and I'd like to edit these shapes to change shape completely. So this is where the direct selection tool comes in. The direct selection tool allows me to go in and allows me to directly select a single point or a single line on an object in move those objects separately. Now, I can't do this with the selection tool. And here's one of the biggest differences. If I have this active with the selection tool, you're going to see the bounding box around there, the pull handles. And if I have a rectangle, I'm gonna have little corner widgets to be able to edit this, and I get all these extra little items. If I have my direct selection tool and I click on something, I don't see any of that now. The key to this is what I'm using. My direct selection tool is I make sure I click off the object first, very important that you click off the object first. If I would like to edit a single corner or a single line segment, I can go in and select that single corner or that line segment and simply move that independently. That's why it's called a direct selection tool. I want to directly select a line segment or a corner. I don't want to change the entire shape just by using its bounding box pull handles. I just want to do that corner. I can dynamically change these shapes on anything that I want. If I want to make this taller, I can do this as well and change these shapes. The circle. If I would like to move that up, I can move that straight up there and I can change that circle. And I can turn that into an egg, Gonna jump over to my properties panel because in this specific thing right here, what I'd like to show you is yeah, I just took that circle and I turned into an egg just by grabbing that pull handle with the direct selection tool and moving it straight up there is my egg. Okay, that's great. What? I draw one. No way. But it create one if I'd like to turn this into a water drop. But any corner that I have or any point that I have that is a corner or rounded point is gonna have pull handles. Now I can go ahead into my property panel and I can use the convert section, which allows me to take a corner or a smooth point and convert it to a corner point, creating a raindrop right from them. So smooth corner or the corner. Pretty awesome. Now, another thing of direct selection tool will allow us to do to is allow us to target the corner widgets independently. If I would like to go in and just activate two of the corner widgets, I can simply click outside my area and drag over the corners that I would like to edit. You'll notice by directly selecting just those two corners the corner widgets, which normally appear on all corners. If I had the selection tool Onley appear when I use the direct selection tool, I can then directly select those corners and edit those corner widgets an option. Click through the different styles here to go ahead and create something totally different when I have my polygon tool. We had talked about this before. When we click on it with a selection tool, I only get one corner widget that does all the corners not the case. If I go and use my direct selection tool, which, by the way, the shortcut for that is the letter A. If I would like to go when I'd like to corner widget one or two or five of these corners, I can simply select just those corners with the direct selection tool in widget. Just those corners. And then I can begin to create a whole bunch of different shapes. So to select a corner, I can just drag right over it or simply select that corner and change that shape. I can pull any handle longer or shorter. And in this case, when I'm pulling the handle here, I don't need to use my mouse. I could actually use my up arrows here. If I would like to change something like this, turn this into a tree. Whatever I want. If I would like to widget does that one corner, I can go in and widget that corner and create anything. Now the one thing is gonna blow your mind is this And I've saved this transforming shape corner widget thing because this is incredible. I'm gonna take my star. And the last one that I had drawn with was this kind of burst shape. And so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to draw my start here with multiple points. Get about 15 16 points here, and I draw the star. Now, what I had said before was that everything with a corner has corner widgets. Well, here's the deal. This doesn't have corner widgets active because there's too many of them. So when I select with the selection tool, it's like I thought he said that you only see them when you get it with the selection tool. I'm gonna turn off this hefty stroke here. I'm gonna set the stroke, wait to zero so we can see this a little bit better. And then I'm gonna click off this, and I'm going to click back on this with my direct selection tool. I'm gonna zoom into this here because this is so good. We need to make this front instead of because this requires its own stage. There's all my corner widgets. If I pull my corner widgets in slightly, you can see it can pull them in. And I can take this star and make it like this little cupcake. 10. Wow, isn't that awesome? If I go into what I call maximum widget nous, it all turned red. It means I cannot widget it any further. So if I do pull this in part way between the maximum and the minimum amount right there, I'm gonna have my little corner widget, and I get this little cool shape. Now we have three different corners that we can use. This is a rounded corner. We could have inverse rounded. And I can go over here to my transform and can't do that. Got to do it right on here because it's a star. I'm gonna go ahead and option click on those dots and it turns us into a little cold virus. Yeah, this is still the same star just with different corners. These air inverse rounded corners. Now I'm gonna go ahead and option click once again on the corner widgets and look at that. I have now turned that into a gear. Yeah, that's it. So we'll cupcake tin cold virus A gear. This is a star. This is started out as a star here. Didn't turn into a black hole. It turned out into an awesome gear. Yeah, these are the things that you can do. An illustrator. I know this is just This is just the very basic stuff, just the very basic stuff. And it's like, Wow, did I draw that, dear? Oh, now, if you ever tried to draw a gear, don't bother, because you can create one here that fast and all this is is a star with corner widgets. You pull them in and you get your normal little rounded corners like that option. Click on your corner widgets, and it cycles through rounded, inverse, rounded and flat. You can pull the length of the deer's more or less than you want. Bigger teeth, smaller teeth. Nonetheless, they're all gears. Yeah, so that is transforming shapes, not just clicking and pulling them with the selection tool. But the direct selection tool here allows you to directly select a corner or a point for multiple corners or a line segment and edit those however you'd like. It's cool, absolutely. And remember, this is just the beginning. This is just a quick overview so you can get into Illustrator and see some of the new features and understand illustrator a little bit better

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Illustrator 2019 Overview

Ratings and Reviews

Pattianne Pascual
 

This is magnificent! What a beautiful gift. I am 56 and always learning. This free class inspired me even more. I will be telling everyone about creative live,sharing and urging others to buy some of these great classes and bundles. Thank you so very much,again and again.i look forward to taking classes on a regular basis.

Sherrie Alexander
 

Jason was super knowledgeable, made working in illustrator fun and simplified . Love his easy to follow instructions. As we all know starting up in illustrator can be overwhelming. Thank you so much I needed this!

a Creativelive Student
 

Great job, several ah ha moments and throw in a few wow's. I thought I had better than a basic knowledge only to find out how little I really knew. The short cuts, shapes and highlight noodles just to name a few. Well worth it. This would have made learning AI so much easier than when I did. Thank you Jason,

Student Work

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