Adobe Illustrator Tools
Illustrator drawing tools
Line Segment tool
With the line segment tool you can draw straight lines by dragging with
the mouse or by clicking and entering the length and angle of the line.
Holding down the shift key, whilst dragging with the mouse, snaps the
angle to 45 degree increments. Holding down the alt key whilst
dragging changes the origin of the line from being at the end to the
centre of the line.
There are 4 options other than line segment in the flyout for this tool.
These are:
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Arc
Spiral
Rectangular grid
Polar Grid
See if you can draw lines similar to each of the illustrations below using
these tools with various stroke weights and brush styles. You can
achieve these results by selecting the tool and clicking instead of
dragging, then changing the settings in the dialogue box:
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Adobe Illustrator Tools
Geometric Shape Tools
The shape tools are:
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Rectangle
rounded rectangle
ellipse
polygon
star
flare
Each of these shapes can be created by dragging or by clicking and
setting the parameters in the dialogue boxes. The radius of the corners
in the rounded rectangle can be increased or decreased by clicking
the up or down arrows whilst dragging, as can the number of sides on
the polygon, the number of points on the star and the number of rays
in the flare.
Question: What effect does holding down the shift key whilst dragging
have?
Try and reproduce the illustrations below using the settings available:
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Adobe Illustrator Tools
Warp Effects
The warp tools are:
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Warp
Twirl
Pucker
Bloat
Scallop
Crystallise
Wrinkle
These tools are used by clicking and dragging over existing artwork to
apply them to the underlying shapes. Here are some examples of their
use on a rectangular grid. See what you can do:
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Adobe Illustrator Tools
Brushes
There are more than the default brushes available. They are
accessible from the context sub-menu within the Brush drop down
menu as shown below. Choose Open Brush Library to see what is
available and try a few out.
You can also create and save your own brushes based on selected
drawn objects. The one illustrated is made from a warped rectangular
grid:
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