- [Voiceover] Alright, in this movie we're gonna return
to the task of creating our star logo,
and specifically, we're gonna match the tops
of these two shapes right here to this angled purple J,
and we're gonna be doing so by skewing the tops
of the shapes using the shear tool.
And so the first thing we need to do is move the tops
of these two shapes upward, so that they snap
into alignment with this purple guy right here,
and just so that I can describe things a little better,
I'm gonna change his color by clicking on him
in order to select him, and then I'll change the fill,
up here in the control panel, to let's say,
this shade of orange.
Alright, so I'm gonna zoom in a little farther
so that we can take in our scene,
and what I need to do is grab my white arrow tool,
which of course, you can get
by pressing the A key, for arrow,
and then I'll marquee the tops of these shapes
all the way across the top,
so I select all four of these points.
That ends up partially selecting the orange shape as well.
To deselect it, just go ahead and press the Shift key,
and click inside of it twice.
The first time you shift click,
you'll select the entire shape,
the second time you shift click, you'll deselect it.
Now what I wanna do is drag this guy upward,
this left hand anchor point,
and notice I'm pressing the Shift key
to constrain the angle of my drag to vertical,
and I want to snap into alignment with that shape,
but even though I have smart guides turned on,
I'm not getting a snap.
And what that means is I'm gonna have to resort
to a custom guide, and so I'll go ahead and press
Control Z, or Command Z on a Mac, to undo that change.
And I'll go ahead and click inside the orange shape
to select the entire thing, and so when you click
inside of a filled shape with the white arrow tool,
you select the entire path.
And then, I'll go over to the Layers panel,
and notice this red square here,
I'll alt or option drag it
on to the guides layer like so.
And that will create a copy of that orange shape
on the guides layer as you can see right here.
Now, to turn it into a guide, I'll right click
anywhere inside the document window,
and choose 'Make Guides'.
Alright, now I want you to notice here,
that I could grab this anchor point,
and I'm going to select it independently of the other ones,
just by clicking on it,
and now I'll shift drag it upward until I get a snap.
You can see that white snap cursor right there.
But, I still get the cursor even when I move back and forth,
and so what happens is I'm moving that anchor point
down and up as I drag to the right and to the left.
And that's just no good.
I need an exact snap at this location,
which means I need to add another guideline.
And so I'll press Control Z, or Command Z on a Mac,
to undo that change.
I'll click off the path to deselect it,
and then I'll go ahead
and select my guides layer once again,
so that I can keep all the guides on that one layer.
And then I'll press Control R, or Command R on a Mac,
to bring up the rulers
and I'll drag a vertical guide out
from the left hand ruler until it snaps
into exact alignment with the left side
of that purple shape, at which point I'll release,
and then I'll hide my rulers
by pressing Control R, or Command R again.
Alright, now we want to marquee the tops
of these shapes once again to select these
top four anchor points.
Shift click on the orange shape twice
to deselect it, and now notice,
if I drag this guy up, while pressing the Shift key,
I'm going to snap into alignment.
I can see a little cross inside my white cursor,
which tells me that I'm snapping to the inner sanction
of a couple of guides,
and if you're working along with me,
notice your heads up display.
It should read dX: 0 pt,
because we're dragging the point directly upward,
and your dY value will be negative 8.72,
if you can make that out,
and that just happens to be the way things work.
Alright, now we want to skew these edges downward,
and we're gonna do that using the Shear tool.
So once again, the Shear tool shares a fly-out menu
with the Scale tool, so we'll go ahead and select it,
and then, you want to click right there
on that left hand point in order to position
the transformation origin, right there.
Then, move your cursor all the way to the right hand point,
and drag down on it.
Now if you drag without any constraint,
you're gonna modify both the skew angle,
which is that S value on top in the heads up display,
as well as the angle of the axis,
which is the second value.
We want the axis to be exactly vertical,
so go ahead and move your cursor over a little bit,
and then press and hold the Shift key,
at which point that second value will change
to negative 90 degrees.
Now go ahead and drag this guy down
until it snaps into alignment with that custom guide,
at which point you should see a skew value,
the top value, of negative 162 degrees.
Now you may wonder where that comes from,
and I want to explain things so you just understand
how this works.
And so to make this clear, I'll undo that skew,
by pressing Control Z, or Command Z on a Mac,
and instead of clicking on this left hand point,
I will alt or option click in order
to bring up the shear dialogue box.
Now if you've been working along with me,
then you'll probably see these settings right here,
which aren't gonna produce any changes at all,
and that's because the axis is set to Horizontal.
We want it set to Vertical,
so go ahead and select this option.
And because I have a negative Shear angle value,
I'm skewing the edges of these shapes upward.
What I wanna do is skew em downward,
and so I'm gonna enter a value of 90 degrees,
by the way, just to start off with,
because that's up and down, after all.
And then I'm going to subtract 72 degrees,
which is the angle of this yellow shape.
You may recall that we've been rotating these
shapes 360 divided by five, which is 72.
And so if I press the Tab key now to let Illustrator
do the math, it's gonna come up with 18 degrees,
which is an exact match.
This is exactly the effect we want.
So why in the world is 18 degrees the same
as negative 162 degrees?
Well, the reason lies in the fact that
when you are skewing, you're starting with 180 degrees.
That's the most skewing you can do,
from one extreme to the other, is 180 degrees,
and so if you take 180
and subtract 162,
you get 18.
And this information, by the way,
even though it may seem really techy,
is gonna come in very helpful in a future movie.
And so having entered the proper values,
I'll just go ahead and click OK in order
to accept that change.
Alright, now I'm just go ahead and press Control zero,
or Command zero on the Mac to zoom out.
And I'll press the V key to switch
to the black arrow tool
and I will click off my path outlines to deselect them.
And that, friends, is how you use the Shear tool
to skew the tops of a couple of path outlines
to exactly match the angle of another one
here inside Illustrator.