Hey everybody, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today we're going to talk about
the knife, the scissors and the eraser tools in Adobe Illustrator CC.
So if you come over here in the Tools palette, you'll be able to find these right here.
If you hit Shift E you'll be able to find it quickly.
It'll just highlight it like this.
And then you can also see the scissors tool and the knife tool under there as well.
First, we're going to start off with the eraser tool.
So to show you how this works, I'm going to go ahead and manipulate this type.
I'm going to make a copy first so I can keep my live type.
To do that I just started dragging and then hold shift and option to put it exactly right
above it.
That way I can always know what font I used in this project.
Now I'm going to outline this font with shift CMD O, that way if we hit CMD Y we can see
all the points in there and we can manipulate those.
If you have type, you can't use your eraser tools.
You have to have points and paths like this.
So I'm going to hit CMD Y again, and we'll zoom in, I'll hit z
and draw a box around it.
Now I'm going to hit shift E to get to my Erase tool.
And I think I want to make this a little bit shorter.
So I'm going to increase the size of my eraser by hitting the right bracket key.
You can decrease with the left bracket.
And now I'll just kind of erase like this.
And maybe I'll make these a little more rounded up here.
So what's actually happening here is that we're redrawing the paths.
I'm going to zoom in here.
So it's actually seeing what you've done and then it redraws it to sort of match what you
did.
If I do it right across here, it actually will make it 2 paths.
Now if I hit my G tool, which is the group selection tool...you probably won't have that
set up, but you can do that in keyboard shortcuts, which are under Edit > keyboard shortcuts.
And then you can choose that and make that the default.
So now I'm going to click with my G tool.
This lets me select part of the group, not the whole thing.
So that's what's nice about it compared to the V tool.
So with my G tool, I'll just pull this out here, you can see it's a completely separate
path.
And so if you wanted to quickly really deconstruct this letter L, I'm going to hit Shift E, and
we can just, we can just do this.
And now we have a lot of little paths.
So you can see how this will be helpful.
It's a lot like the eraser tool in Photoshop, but you're not erasing pixels, you're actually
just redrawing paths.
That's the eraser tool.
You can use it on anything that's selected.
This R is not selected right now, so it ignores what I just did.
But if I select the R, or the whole word, and then hit Shift E to erase it, it will
recognize it.
So you can come up with some really kind of interesting text effects just by erasing parts
of the letters.
Okay, now I'm going to take the same word, and I'll make another copy of it by holding
option and dragging it.
And I'm going to shift CMD O, to turn it into outlines too.
Now we'll hit C for the scissors tool.
Now the scissors tool is a little different, you can only use it on an anchor point (one
of those points) or on the edge of a path.
So I'm going to zoom in really close.
And then we'll get C for scissors.
And I'm just going to click on a few parts of this path.
And then I'll show you what it's done.
Right now it's trying to fill certain parts and then other parts it can't fill.
It's kind of hard to explain.
But I'm going to hit Shift X and turn this into a stroke.
And now we can see a little better what's going on.
So it looks like a solid piece, but if I use my G tool again--that's the group selection
tool--and pull these parts out, you can see that I've clipped that path with the scissors
tool.
So that is just another way that you can make changes and get rid of parts of your art.
If we don't click right on an anchor point, it'll create an anchor point in that spot.
So right here, if I click, it actually adds an anchor point.
And you can see what happened there.
I'm going to grab this word one more time, I'm going to make outlines out of it with
shift CMD O. And then we'll use the knife tool.
The knife tool kind of splits pieces of the shape and it's not the most accurate thing
in the world.
It loosely follows the path that you create.
And it's sort of ever changing.
You can see it kind of moving around.
But as you can see this shape just split right where we crossed it.
So that's kind of cool.
Now this will also work on a stroke.
So if we decide to do a little swirl like this, you can see that it cut that shape into
each section.
So you could... maybe you could add some color to this.
Maybe we'll make that piece green blue, light blue, you know, whatever you want to do there.
But it's kind of just an easy, fast way to cut the shape however you want.
I rarely use it though, because I need a little more precision when I'm cutting things.
And I think I'll cut this with the knife also.
And I'll choose this color with my eyedropper, the I tool, and then I'll choose this color.
So now I have a weird looking R that I was able to make really quickly using my knife
tool.
So that's my super quick tutorial on the knife, the scissors and the eraser tools.
If you liked this video, please click on the Like button.
And if you have any questions at all, please leave those in the comments section below.
Thank you!!!