Hi everyone, this is Anne for Graphic Design How To, and today we're going to talk about
the Reshape tool in Adobe Illustrator cc 2019.
And one little caveat, this tool is not really used by very many designers that I know.
It's a lot more trouble than a lot of other ways of doing the same thing.
But I do want to show you what it's all about.
And hopefully you can get it to work pretty well in your workflow.
I personally am not a huge fan of it, but maybe you will be!
There a couple different ways that you can use it.
First, we'll talk about using it on an open path like this.
This is a group and I'm just going to ungroup it with SHIFT CMD G.
So this is an open path.
It's not joined together like this shape is.
And now let's say I wanted to reshape this path, I'll go to the Reshape tool.
It's right underneath your Scale tool.
So if you just hit S on your keyboard, that'll bring you to your Scale tool, and then you
can hold and go to the Reshape tool beneath it.
So to reshape this, you need to click right on the edge of the path, and then you can
start to manipulate it.
And when you do that, it'll actually add a little anchor point there.
I'm going to click over here and move this one.
And maybe we'll just bring that one back down.
It's very easy.
All you do is just click on one point of the path and just move your mouse around to reshape
that section.
And keep in mind, it will add a point unless you're right on an already existing point.
So if I click down here, and move that you can see a point there.
Now I'm going to hit the back slash to get my line tool and I'm going to draw a straight
line.
And we'll also reshape this.
So I'm going to grab the same tool, click right on the line and drag it up, and then
click on a different space and drag it down.
Up here, maybe down over here, I'm going to hit CMD on the keyboard which toggles to the
selection tool.
Now on a PC, it'll be CTRL.
You can just hold CTRL to get your selection tool and I'm going to click this other shape.
Now this is a closed shape - it's actually grouped, I'm going to ungroup it with SHIFT
CMD G.
And now I have just the top part separated but it's a closed shape, completely enclosed,
and the shaper tool will work a little bit differently on this piece.
So if I switch to that now, and then get right on the edge, nothing happens.
It just moves it.
But it does add that point, it actually takes a few steps to be able to use it in the correct
way.
So first, I'm going to add the point by just clicking on a spot along the line.
Hold CMD or CTRL on a PC & select just that point.
And now when I let off, I'll be back on the Reshape tool.
I can click right on that spot and just drag it up and it'll change it to a curve point.
So it's a little bit tricky to use on a closed path like this.
Let's try it again.
Just click once, hold CMD, and click that poin.
Let off, CMD, and then you can click and drag.
You'll notice that you have handles on this.
But if you're still on this tool, you will not be able to move those.
So you can hit CMD again to toggle to your direct selection, and then you can grab a
handle and move it around however you want.
Now, we kind of did this, but I want to show you kind of an easier way.
Okay, I'm on the Direct Selection, I'm going to select this point, hold SHIFT, and select
this point.
And now if I go to my Reshape tool, I can just click on the edge, it'll add an anchor
point there.
And then I can move it around however I want.
So it really depends on what points are selected.
If all of them are selected, like this, and I try to use this, all it will do is add a
point and then I'll just move it just like it's the move tool.
So keep that in mind.
It's good to have some points selected and some not selected.
There's one other thing that is kind of interesting that you can do.
With this, if you go to the spiral tool, which is underneath the line segment, and then you
start drawing a spiral, you can hold CMD or CTRL while you're doing this to change how
your spiral is sort of decaying.
So just let off when you're happy with it.
And then I'm going to hit D to give this a fill a white and a black stroke.
And I'll bump that stroke a little bit.
So now if we go down to the Reshape tool, now this is a non-closed path, so it's going
to work a lot easier with this path.
I'm going to click on the Reshape tool, and then get right in the middle and click and
drag this.
And this is kind of a cool way that you can easily manipulate your spirals to get them
to look a lot different than what they started as.
So yeah, just play around with it.
You can get a lot of interesting things, or not so interesting.
All right.
That's my video for this week.
If you liked it, please click on the Like button and I'll see you next week for another
graphic design tutorial.
Thank you!!!