one of my favorite tools in Adobe Illustrator is the Pathfinder to see it
go to the window menu and choose Pathfinder the basic explanation for the
Pathfinder is that it allows you to make more complex shapes out of basic shapes
now you can do more than that but that's the basic explanation we're going to
start with so that you can start playing with it so in order to demonstrate this
I'm going to grab the ellipse tool and I'm gonna draw two circles and to do
that I'm just gonna grab the selection tool and on my first circle hold alt or
option and click and drag to create a second one now what I'm looking for is
I'm gonna make this into a moon so a crescent which would be hard to do with
a pen tool very quickly unless you're really really good at the pen tool but
as you can see I can move it around so I can Kate create a moon in this shape or
up here and kind of create this one that's more like a hammock so whatever I
want to do with that then I can highlight both of these and then I can
come over here and choose one of these shape modes now unite is going to merge
them together into one shape I'll click command Z now - front will take away the
front object so that's where I get my Crescent I'll do command Z again if I
choose intersect it's gonna keep the middle part so this is a great way to do
eyes and Leafs etc and then last but not least we can do exclude and it'll
exclude that inner piece but again this becomes one object so I'm gonna go back
and choose - front and there we go now we have one crescent shape now
Pathfinder is down here are a little bit different it sort of cuts the shapes but
it doesn't really get rid of the shapes or yes but we'll just leave it at that
so we'll go ahead and do let's say we want to make Swiss cheese so I'm gonna
do a rounded rectangle and Swiss cheese obviously is not this color but just for
purposes of you know it's pretty close to white and so it'd be hard to see so
for right now just pretend this is Swiss cheese so on top of this cheese I'm
going to add some circles so I can drag that out
drag this out drag a bigger chunk out okay so it'd have been a lot easier if I
had changed a color of this but just go with me okay so if we highlight all of
these and we're gonna exclude that background shape and we're gonna make
these green just so you can see them so we can highlight all of these now and
choose divide and divide is my favorite one
sorry because it uses all these shape lines to just cut into that shape so now
with this divided it's all still grouped together so we can right click and
choose ungroup and now we can click on each of these and get rid of those
actual circles to make sure Swiss cheese where it has all those gaps in it so and
it looks like I need to take that part alright so that's the basics of using
shape and Pathfinder modes so let's see how we can use it so this particular
object right here is the Wells Fargo building in downtown Denver and it's
made out of rectangle into half circles so in order to create this we're going
to go ahead and create a basic Rick tant rectangle and then we're gonna create a
couple of ellipse half circles by making one circle holding shift and then we're
gonna grab a line segment and right down the middle and you can tell because
you'll see these pink smartguides if you can't see your smart guides go up to
view and choose smart guides or command or control you all right so that's right
down the middle and you don't even need a stroke color you just need to
highlight both objects and now hit divide in order to split those in half
they are always going to start out grouped and divide so we're gonna right
click and choose ungroup so that we can split one half away from another so then
we want to take this half circle and we want it to intersect right down the
middle of that circle and make sure it lines up so we don't get any wonky bumps
as you see here so I'll do command Z and then this one same thing but this one we
want to be a little bit bigger so it has a little bit of a lip so we're gonna do
this and that might be too darn big so we could
do the same thing here and then always make sure it intersects yeah that was
too much so we can do a little bit more with this one okay
so again making sure that intersects right on the spot so I would mess with
this a little bit more because I think it needs a higher lip but for now here
we go so these are all three different shapes so what we're gonna do is
highlight all of them and choose unite to make one shape which is a really
powerful option okay so just so you know there's a new shape builder tool in
Illustrator I think it was introduced like one or two versions ago so make
sure you play with that because it's really flexible and it gives you a lot
more how do you how do you say like right now with the Crescent when I cut
that out it's gone and so this is my Crescent what if I wanted it to be you
know more straight up and down Crescent well if I use that shape builder tool
then I should be able to to move that piece later on so okay so let's see how
we can make this and we're just gonna use a pen tool for this if you haven't
used the pen tool before we're gonna use something really basic so I'm gonna do a
light orange and I should probably move these out of the way but still so we can
see him so let's make them a little bit smaller put them at the top there we go
so again we're gonna switch the pen tool and we're gonna say no fill color oops
that's changing all of that so let's undo click off click the pen and now we
just want to have a stroke color so we're gonna click once and then click up
here to make a angled line and then we're gonna come down here and those
smart guides will tell you when your lines are matched matching now it
doesn't necessarily tell you when it's equidistant so that's kind of a bummer
so you're gonna have to eyeball this and if it doesn't look quite right then you
can change it later so I'm going to hold alt or option and click so that it stops
making that shape go back to this action tool now if for some reason yours
is off you can grab the direct selection tool click on that top anchor point and
then move that anchor point around so I'll do command Z because mine was
pretty good and go back to the selection tool and clicking on that line will now
brings up the stroke options and so we can make our stroke really thick and
weighty now shape or Pathfinder doesn't really work as well with strokes so we
are going to go up to the object menu and choose expand to turn this into just
a shape so it has a path path along the outside instead of now just one path on
the inside for our stroke so we do want to make a flat shape in order to do that
we can use our minus front so we can just put a rectangle and make sure it
covers both points at the bottom highlight all and then do minus front
okay so I might have made a bigger peak so that that's a mistake on my part but
this is gonna allow us to do overlapping so we need a copy of this so we're gonna
come over here to the rotate reflect scale shear reshape tool and what we're
gonna do is we're gonna choose the rotate tool and the rotate tool when we
double click on it will allow us to rotate it 180 degrees and we want to
copy it so there we're gonna create two exact same shapes and I'm gonna change
this to whatever color I want and what we want to do is we want to delete one
of these middle pieces so that it looks like this blue one is behind the orange
at this point so we're gonna highlight all of this and choose divide and now
we're gonna actually not well let's ungroup it first we're
actually not going to make this we're not actually not going to delete this
we're just gonna make it the exact same orange color that we were using so that
way it looks like it's part of this one so now I can grab all of those orange
pieces and go ahead and do unite so they become one piece and then all of these
blue pieces don't forget this one and hit unite so now we have one piece and
two piece so hey that could make a good logo too
but there you go that's how you can create some overlap objects okay so
let's do something a little bit more complicated made out of rectangles a
circle and a star and then we use a rectangle to cut off the edges so let's
move this one down here and I'll make it a little bit lighter so we can still see
it and we're gonna grab the rectangle tool and I'm going to make mine a
different color so it looks better on white and I'm just gonna start out with
these kind of thin rectangles and grab the selection tool and what we're gonna
do again alter option to drag it down and it's going to hold shift so that we
can't go left or right and we want a nice little gap in between there and now
before you do anything else hit command or control D and that's gonna repeat the
last step so the last step was when we copy that shape and moved it down and if
we do command D it'll do it again for you very easily so if I had hit command
D a bunch of times we're gonna keep getting a bunch of rectangles but this
also makes sure that it's perfectly equidistant from each other so that's
pretty good so we can group these if we wanted to but for right now we're just
gonna leave it actually nope let's just go ahead and group it so right clicking
group or command or control gene and now we can grab our ellipse tool and we're
gonna make that circle we don't want a too big or too small and it's hard for
us to see when it actually is in the center so what we're gonna do is
highlight both objects and we're gonna hit the alignment options appear
horizontal center and vertical center and there we go so that makes sure that
both of them are they're sitting perfectly so now we can highlight all of
these and do unite so this actually makes it one whole shape so that's why
you gotta align it first then we're going to use the star tool to create one
in the middle again hold shift because that's gonna allow it to sit perfectly
up and down and I can change the color just so you can see that and now when I
highlight all of them I can do - front this won't work if you haven't
United the the background shapes first because it doesn't know where to - this
star from should it - it from the circle or this rectangle or this rectangle so
by making them one shape it knows that it needs to - it from that one shape
okay so last but not least is we want to create this angle and we want to make it
perfect so you can use a line or you can use a rectangle so I'm gonna do a little
bit I'm gonna use a rectangle because it's a little bit easier to see in this
tutorial so I'm gonna create one rectangle and I'm gonna make it just a
color that I don't want and I'm gonna angle it a little bit and I think I'm
gonna do a sharper angle so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pull it in and I
just want the edge of this rectangle to touch the edge of the or this point and
there's a reason why because I want to make sure it looks perfect and see how
it's trying to line up with this object down here we don't want that to happen
so I want to line up perfectly with that point okay so with this perfectly lined
up and I might have done too big of a angle so with this perfectly lined up
and I can do the left arrow key on here if I wanted to but before you do
anything else we're going to reflect so let's go over here and choose reflect
and double click that and copy it so that way now when I hold shift I can
move that rectangle over come on move it and then hold shift there you go and get
that to touch right at the same point so you're gonna get the exact same angle so
we can highlight these two objects first and do - front and then these two and do
- front okay so now because this is one whole shape it's pretty cool now we can
use these different gradients because it it'll and we could have done that in
other ways but for right now this is the easiest way just to create one object
and then the gradient works on all the that object instead of the different
parts of it so last but not least let's look at how to create this kind of
shattered or shard text that we have over here
so this is an example that I a previous student created so I'm just gonna do
this very quickly because we're running out of time so I'm gonna grab a chunky
text so impact is the chunky astac so I'll type my name and I'll just do all
capitals and highlight this and turn it to impact but you should be able to find
some really good chunky fonts or I can do like Cowboys which doesn't make sense
for me because I'm not one but there you go so once you have that you need to go
up to object or type and choose create outlines and these will turn these into
shapes and then what you're gonna do is you're gonna take all these different
lines just line segments and if you want to turn the stroke on so you can
actually see where where this is happening then you should definitely do
that so with all those selected I'm gonna highlight all of them to select
all of them I can go up to divide now and it's gonna create those all into
pieces then I can go to object live paint wherever it's at Live Paint make
live paint make and then come over here and I always forget where this tool is
it's right here under the shape builder choose Live Paint Bucket and I can come
in and just start paint bucketing all these different shapes so I can grab
another color and add that there so it's just a fun
way to make a cool shard text so I definitely think that you should play
with some of that but that's the basics of how to use the Pathfinder in Adobe
Illustrator