Hi, this is Anne for Graphic Design How To and today I want to talk to you about the
first four tools up here in Adobe Illustrator, the Selection and Move tools.
These are the first four tools in the toolbar and what they do.
So I hope this isn't too boring for you, because this is one of the more boring topics for
me when I was learning - all of these tools that don't seem to do anything fun, but actually,
they're super important.
So let's get started.
I downloaded this picture from Freepik.com and there's a link in the description.
So you can download this too to follow along.
When you use the V tool, which is the Move tool,
that assumes that you have some objects to move so that's why I downloaded this file.
That way, we can just click on things and I can show you what each tool does.
If you don't want to download this picture, you can just draw your own objects.
So to do that, you can hit M and click and drag to draw a square and L to click and draw
a circle.
And you can use these objects instead of this downloaded object.
First I'm going to talk about this Selection tool, that's the V tool and you hit V on your
keyboard to get to it.
Just V...not Command V, or shift V, just the letter V.
So hit V now and you'll get to that tool.
Okay, so I've got my V tool, and I'm just going to click and drag, and you can see I
moved the grouped shape.
So I'm going to undo that.
And these things are grouped and that will change how they behave.
If you want to ungroup them to see how the move tool can work in that way, do shift CMD
G, and that groups them one level, so it looks like they are grouped even more.
So do it one more time: shift Command G.
And now we just have one piece.
So this move tool will just move this wherever you want.
As you can see, I just moved this around with my move tool.
So let's back up.
If you hold SHIFT and click a few items, you can move all of those things together.
These inner triangles are also grouped.
So let's shift Command G with those.
And now we should all have separated pieces.
Okay, so if you click the first piece, and then the second and the third, you have all
three together.
And now you can move them separately.
Let's group these, Command G.
And that just means if you click and drag, you're clicking all the whole group together,
and they're grouped in a way that makes a little more sense than the way this vector
came in.
One thing we could do is take this piece, and let's say we don't want that space, and
we'll just move it over to the other one.
And we can do that with this to.
Be careful that you don't click on a corner because then you're going to resize it.
Illustrator really is particular about clicking on the edges of things, it'll either resize
or it'll move points.
That might not be something that you want.
So as you can see, this is pretty basic, you just move the pieces around as you would want
them.
And that is the Move tool or the V tool.
Let's move on to the A tool.
When you hit A on your keyboard, it brings you to this direct selection tool.
And this one really behaves the same as the Move tool, IF you click in the middle.
You can just move this piece.
It completely ignores grouping.
So if this piece is grouped, it doesn't matter, it will only choose that section.
So that can be helpful if you just want to move a piece of it.
If you click on the edge, you start seeing handles and you start seeing white dots, and
those are your points.
So if you click on the edge and drag, you can get some weird things going on.
If you're on a point, it will take that whole section.
It will drag those points in and our around & that kind of thing.
So you'd have to be pretty careful because a lot of times you'll find that you're doing
this by accident.
I usually only use the a tool if I want to move a point out like this, or up, say like
this.
But usually I don't use this tool very often.
I like the group selection tool, which is the G tool.
If you hit G, it will bring you to this hollow pointer +, which is the Group Selection tool.
And you can also click on these and hold down and choose in that way.
But I find it a lot faster to just use G.
So G, the G tool, you can click once to get the
first piece just like the A tool.
If you click again on that, it will give you the next section of that group.
And if you click one more time, you can see if another part has been added to that group.
It all depends on how the group was already grouped in the first place.
So I'm going to ungroup this entire piece by shift Command G, all the way out.
So keep hitting shift Command G until you have just separate pieces like this.
And now I'm going to group the first two, Command G, and then we'll group that other
one, Command G on top of it.
Now when I click with my G tool, I click once and I've got the first piece, I click twice.
And I've got the next two pieces that are grouped together.
So it can be pretty nice when you're trying to select different pieces.
I'll show you down here with this light bulb.
If we click once, on this piece, we got one.
Click twice and we've got almost everything else.
And then click a third time--you have to click in the same section--you can see if this fire
down here got selected too.
And let's see if there's anything else grouped to this.
Yes, these little clouds down here.
So this has been grouped four times, at some point.
Whoever made this graphic grouped this four times.
So now we can take that whole piece and move it however we like.
I want to tell you too about the V, the A and the G tools - if you hit return while
you're on one of them...So I'll just hit return right now, you'll get this move dialog box.
And this is really handy.
If you want to work on this, and let's say you've got other pieces around it that you
don't want to work on, you can just move this, let's say 100 millimeters to the right, and
zero vertically, and then say okay.
As you can see and moved it over here.
Let's move it a little further.
I'll hit return again and say okay, and now it's 200 millimeters from where it used to
be.
Now we can make changes with our A tool.
Maybe we want to move this down a little bit and do that kind of thing.
Okay, so now I'm going to use my G tool, select, select again and again and again.
And now I have the whole thing.
And now I'll hit return and send it back to where it was, which is minus 200, and zero
vertically.
And you can see it went right exactly back to where it was.
I actually use this a lot because I work with really complex graphics that have a lot of
layers.
And so I want to just move it away from everything and work on it and then send it back.
So that's one way you can do that.
Okay, let's move on to the magic wand tool, which is Y-the Y tool.
This will select all similarly colored items.
So if I click here, it's going to get all of the light blue and since my tolerance is
what it is, it also got the white stuff.
So it all depends on what your tolerance is set at.
And to check your tolerance, you can just hit return and it will bring up this magic
wand dialog box.
Right now I got it set to fill color.
I've never used these other ones, but there are different ways that you can select different
parts of your graphic.
And my tolerance is set at 32.
And I don't really mess with this either.
I find it easy to select the things I need with this tolerance, which is probably the
default.
Okay, so if we wanted to see how this works on the blue, we'll just click the blue.
It capture these blues down here, but not this one, and these darker blues.
So that's the range that that 32 tolerance is giving us.
And that is just a different way of selecting something.
I'll select this here, and now we can see we've got these two kind of greenish colors
and the blue above it, but not these darker blues or these blues.
So it all depends on your settings in the magic wand but I find it really helpful to
use magic wand when I need to select colors.
Okay, let's move on to the lasso.
The lasso is just a way of drawing around what you want.
So I want to get this red shape in the sample text, for example.
I'll just draw around...be careful what you touch in here though, because if you touch
other things, you're going to select those too.
And you can see that some of the edges are white, and some are filled in, the points.
Now, if I take this and use my A tool, I'll switch to my A. If I take this now with my
A tool and click on one of the points and drag, this is what's going to happen.
And that's not actually what I want to do.
So let's undo that.
I only want the red stuff and I don't even want this.
So I'm going to use G which is my group selection, and hold shift and unclick this background,
you might have to click it twice.
Make sure you have shift held the whole time.
And then I either have to hold SHIFT and click each one of these white dots, or I can just
lock it, which is command 2, and then unlock it, which is option command 2 (option CTRL
2, and CTRL 2 if you're on a PC).
And as you can see, now I've got everything that I want, they're all filled in, which
is the best case scenario.
Now I can either use my group selection, which is G, or my V tool to move these and move
them wherever I want to.
So it's just another way of selection.
I'll select this cloud down here.
Q is your lasso tool.
And I've got just the cloud this time, which is nice.
Sometimes it'll pick up that background color, and sometimes it won't.
Alright, so those are the first four tools in Adobe Illustrator for all you beginners
out there.
I hope this has been helpful.
I know it's kind confusing sometimes why you would want to use some tools and when you
wouldn't want to use them, but just let me know if this has been helpful for you.
And if you liked this video, just click the like button.
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Thank you!!!