- In this movie I'll show you the simplest way
to build more complex paths inside Illustrator
and that's using the "Join" command.
Along the way I'll show you how to create this linear spiral
or coil, if you prefer, and it's actually easier
than drawing with a standard spiral tool.
Assuming that you created that "Center guides" template,
a few chapters back, go up to the "File" menu and choose
"New From Template" or press the keyboard shortcut of
"ctrl + shift + n" or "cmd + shift + n" on the Mac.
Then go ahead and locate your template and click
on the "New" button in order to load it up.
Now what you want to do is go to the "Line" tool, here,
and select the the "Polar Grid Tool"
from the fly-out menu, and then I want you to position
your cursor, right there, at the intersection of
those two guides and then press the "alt" key,
or the "opt" key on the Mac and click.
And by virtue of the fact that you have
the "Alter option" key down, you'll create
your shapes from the center outward.
And by virtue of the fact that you clicked,
you'll have brought up this dialogue box.
I just happen to know the size that I'm looking for,
which is "616 pt" wide as well as "616 pt" tall
and then we're looking for 25 concentric dividers,
you want to make sure you're skew value is 0%,
and then go ahead and take the number of radial dividers
down to zero as well, and then click "Okay"
and you'll end up with a bunch
of concentric circles as we're seeing here.
The "Polar Grid Tool" always results in a group,
as we can see over here
on the far left side of the control panel.
That group is just going to get in our way,
so go up to the "Object" menu and choose
the "Ungroup" command to break all the circles apart.
Now you want to make sure your guides are locked down,
so go up to the "View" menu, choose "Guides"
and then, if the command does not have a check mark
in front of it, as it doesn't in my case, go ahead
and choose that command.
Now you want to switch to the white arrow tool which,
of course, you can get by pushing the "a" key,
and then just go ahead and marqee all of the top points.
Then go up to the "Edit" menu and choose the "Cut" command,
or you can press "ctrl + x" or "cmd + x" on the Mac,
and now cut away the top halves of those circles.
Now, return to the "Edit" menu and choose
the "Paste in Front" command, or you can just press
"crtl + f" or "cmd + f" on the Mac.
Now what you want to do, is drag this point, right here,
over one; just like that, that's as far as you go
and it will just snap into alignment. as we've seen.
Now you want to press "ctrl + a" or "cmd + a" on the Mac
to select everything, then go up to the "Object" menu,
choose "Path" and choose "Join"
or you can just press "ctrl + j" or "cmd + j" on the Mac.
And that will go ahead and join all these half circles
into a single, larger open path.
Now go ahead and click off the paths to deselect them.
Click on this little path, right there, do you see that?
If you go ahead and press "ctrl + plus sign(+)"
a bunch of times in order to zoom in, you'll see that
we have this straight edge in the center of the document.
Click on it with your white arrow and then press
the "Backspace" key or the "Delete" key on the Mac
to get rid of it, then press "ctrl + 0",
or "cmd + 0" on theMac to zoom back out.
I'm going to take the line wave up to, let's say "6 pt",
just so we can better see what we're doing,
and I'm going to click on the word "Stroke"
and select the round "Cap" so that we
have round caps at either end of our spirals.
And I say "spirals" because we actually do have two.
I'm going to press the "v" key to switch
to my black arrow tool, and I'll click off the paths
to deselect them and then I'll click on this guy,
right there, to select it.
I'll change the color of that stroke to,
let's say, blue, so that we can see that we've actually
ended up with two spirals; I just want one
so I'm going to click on that blue spiral again
and press the "Backspace" key or
the "Delete" key on the Mac to get rid of it.
Now let's dress up our spiral by adding a few strokes.
I'll click on it to select it and then I'll go up to the
"Line Wave" option and raise it to "20 pt" for starters,
then I'll go to the "Window" menu choose
the "Appearance" command to bring up the appearance panel
and I'll drop down to the "Add New Stroke" icon
in the lower left corner of the panel,
and I'll click on it to add a new stroke.
I'm going to change the line wave this time
to "10 pts" and I'm going to click on its swatch
and then I'm going to select this shade of red, right here,
which is "R=237 G=28 B=36", in order to add this
nice bright red stroke, and now with that stroke selected,
there inside the appearance panel go up to the "Effect" menu
choose "Distort & Transform" and then choose
the "Transform" command; then I'm going
to change both of my "Move" values to "-2 pt",
like so, and then turn on the "Preview" check box
and you can see that that stroke moves up and to the left,
at which point I'll go ahead and click "Okay".
Now let's make a copy of that stroke by clicking on it,
the red stroke that is, then you want to click on
the little "Page" icon, at the bottom of
the "Appearance" panel, and this time we're going
to take the line way down to "6 pt"and I'm going
to change the color of this stroke to this shade of orange,
right there, "R=241 G=90 B=36" and then I'll twirl
the stroke open by clicking on this little "twirly" triangle
and I'll click on the word "Transform" and I will take both
these values down to "-3pt" this time around
and as soon as I click "Okay" you can see the stroke move
just a little bit up and to the left
then I'll click on this stroke, click on the "Page" icon at
the bottom of the panel to make another copy of it, change
its color this time to this, kind of, yellowish orange,
which is "R=247 G=147 B=30" and then I'll take the line
way down to "2 pt" this time around, I'll click on
the word "Transform" and I will take both of these values
down to "-4 pt" and click "Okay", at which point we now
have all the strokes we need.
Now I'm going to zoom out a little bit
by pressing "ctrl + minus sign (-)"
or "cmd + minus sign (-)" on the Mac
and I'm going to get the rectangle tool
from the "Shape Tool" fly-out menu
and I'll draw from one corner of'
that bleed-guide to the other, like so,
and then I'm going to get rid of the stroke for this shape.
Now I'll change the fill to this second to darkest shade
of gray, which is all values at 26, now I'll press
the "Escape" key to dismiss that panel
and I'll "Right click" inside of that shape,
choose a range and then choose "Send to Back"
in order to send it in back of that spiral.
Then I'm going to switch back here to "Layers" panel,
I'm going to turn off that "Guides" layer,
I'm going to press the "v" key in order to switch back
to my black arrow tool, I'll click off the shape
to deselect it and then I'll zoom back in.
That's how you create a linear spiral,
that in our case, looks like a hot burner,
using a combination of the "Polar Grid Tool"
along with the "Join" command.