Hi everyone, this is Anne for Graphic Design How To, and today we're going to talk about
the polygon tool, the star tool and the flare tool.
And you can find these right under the rectangle tool.
After you click and hold, you'll see some tools.
And we're going to be talking about these three right down here.
So let's start off with the polygon tool.
So I just opened a new document with CMD N or you can also go to File > New, and then
just hit Return, then you can just place your mouse and drag like this.
And as you're dragging, one cool thing about the polygon tool is you can use your up and
down arrows.
So you can't let off while you're dragging, but you can use your up and down arrows on
the keyboard to adjust how many sides that polygon is going to get.
Once you decide how many you want, you can just let off and now you have your polygon.
If you have your Control pulled up (if you don't, go to Window and go to Control here,
and it'll give you a kind of bar of information and things you can change about whatever you're
working on)...so as you can see this polygon is selected.
If it's not, you can just highlight it with your V or selection tool.
And then you can come over here to Shape and click that.
And here's where you can adjust how many sides manually.
If you know exactly how many sides you want, you can change that here.
You can change rotation, you can change corners to round them.
So this changes the radius of your shape.
And this changes how long one side of your shape is.
So there are different ways to increase or decrease the size of your shape.
On one of the sides, there will be this little square, and if you click right on that and
drag, you can adjust the sides that way too.
So that's just another option.
So that is Polygon.
Pretty simple, really.
Okay, let's move on to the Star tool.
So click and hold and get that tool up.
And this Star tool, you can click and drag and do the same thing.
You can use your up and down arrows to adjust the number of points.
Another cool thing about the Star tool is as you're drawing you can hold OPT to get
a different type of star.
We'll draw one more so I can show you something else.
As you're drawing, you can also hold and release, CMD (or CTRL on a PC) to get really long ends
of your star.
Once you find the ones that you like, you can let off the CMD or CTRL key.
And if you decide that you don't like the long ones, you can just hold OPT and it will
bounce back to your regular star.
Now, if you are in Illustrator CC, you can adjust the star points one way.
You can hit A and then click on one endpoint.
You see this little circle right here, you can just drag that down.
You can do this with any sharp point of any path in Illustrator if you have anything newer
than CS6, so any version of CC.
But you can do all of that at the same time by hitting A which is your Direct Selection
tool.
And then getting on that little circle and pulling them all in.
So it's a pretty quick way to round your corners.
Alright, now let's talk a little bit about the flare.
Flare is something that you know, I really honestly do not use that often, but it can
be pretty cool if you know some cool ways to use it.
So I'm going to just draw a box.
I did that with my rectangle tool, and I'm going to come over here and get a dark blue
fill color.
And just make sure that this one is on top, not the stroke, otherwise you'll have a blue
stroke instead.
Now we'll grab
the Flare tool.