Hi, this is Anne for Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to tell you how to cut
out pieces from shapes in Adobe Illustrator CC 2019.
But this will work in every version of Illustrator that I know of.
So let's get started.
OK, so I've got a couple shapes in here, this is actually a masked image back here.
And it's just to show you what you'll see when you cut something out of this shape.
So we've got this shape here.
And I'm going to draw a few little stars, and we'll make those white.
And I'll move these over the patterns so you can see what's going on.
I want to be able to see this pattern through the star.
So basically have these white stars cut out of this green shape.
To do this, I'm going to select one of the stars and the green shape.
Now your hole, whatever is going to be the hole, it has to be on top right now.
These are on top, that's good.
And then we'll come over here to Pathfinder and we'll do the Minus Front Shape Mode.
So it just cut that star out.
And even if we move this around, you can see a different background.
Now I'm going to undo because we want to cut all three stars out.
And to do that, we have to select all three stars.
And hit CMD 8.
CMD 8 makes Illustrator see them as one piece.
Because when you're using Pathfinder, it's good to only work with two shapes.
So it sees the stars as one shape, and then it sees the green as the other shape.
So I've got the Compound Path, which we just created with CMD 8.
And I'll hold SHIFT and select the green background.
Now we'll come over to our Shape Mode, and hit Minus Front.
So now these three stars are cut out of the green shape.
I want to show you another scenario that you might be seeing.
I'm just going to create a zigzag line and we'll make this stroke quite a lot bigger.
I'm gonna make it... yeah, about like that.
We'll come up here to Effect > Distort and Transform and Zigzag.
And I'll preview and we'll increase the ridges per segment.
So we get more of a zigzag going on here.
Maybe we'll decrease the size a little bit.
So this looks good.
Now I want to cut this shape out of the green.
But before I do that, if I try to do that now I'll show you what happens.
I've selected the zigzag shape and the green, and I'll try Minus Front, and it just does
not work.
So I'll hit Undo.
And the reason that doesn't work is because this, when you move it back up here, this
is still actually just a line.
If we hit CMD Y, you can see what the actual shape is.
Hit CMD Y again.
Now to get it to read as an actual shape going along each of these edges, we have to expand
it.
And this is an appearance if we go to our Appearance palette, we can see that there's
an effect on this path.
So we need to expand this effect.
So we need to expand our appearance.
Let's go to Object > Expand Appearance.
OK.
And now it’s expanded out a little bit, but we need to get all the way to those edges.
So now hit CMD E for Expand.
And you can see it's all the way out to the edges, but it has this weird little line in
here.
So let's go to Pathfinder and click on the first Shape Mode to unite this into just one
piece.
And that gets rid of the little line.
And if we hit CMD Y, we can see we have our regular shape here.
Hit CMD Y again, and then I'm going to decrease the size of this a little bit.
And we'll put it over top of our green, maybe even a little more.
And then I’ll select the black shape and the green.
And we'll come over here to Shape Mode and go to Minus Front.
So now you can see that we've cut all these shapes out of the green piece and you can
see what's underneath.
So the two things to remember are CMD 8 will make a Compound Path of all of your objects.
And if you have something that's not all the way expanded out like this zigzag, you'll
need to expand that before this will work.
Alright, 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!!!