- [Instructor] In this movie I'll introduce you
to a tool that allows you to
both draw and combine shapes inside Illustrator
and it goes by the name Shaper Tool.
Now, as you can see here in this slide,
the Shaper Tool allows you to draw
simple, geometric shapes including
rectangles, ellipses,
equilateral triangles, and hexagons
as well as straight lines.
It's pretty great at making out these shapes
even if you do a relatively horrible job of drawing them.
Let me show you how that works.
I'll go up to the File menu and choose New from Template,
then I'll go ahead and locate
that RGB with center guides.ait file
and double click on it.
I'll select the Shaper Tool, which by the way,
appears below the Paintbrush Tool
in the same fly out menu as the Pencil Tool
and these other guys.
Also notice that it has a keyboard shortcut
of Shift+N, which just happens to be
a shortcut that was previously unused.
If this is the first time you're selecting
the Shaper Tool, you may get a little help screen
that tells you how to work with it,
but obviously I'm going to be demonstrating
things in greater detail including the fact
that you can draw a rectangle.
Notice here that I am doing a terrible job
of drawing this rectangle and yet it comes out
absolutely perfect like so.
You also have the option of drawing
a rectangle at a 45 degree angle, if you like.
Notice that your two options are 45 degrees and 135 degrees.
You cannot draw rectangles at other angles,
but you can draw a square as well as a 45 degree square.
To see what that looks like,
I'll go ahead and switch back over
to my document and I will draw a perfect square,
like so, and even though my square is looking
just horrible, it ends up looking great
when I release the mouse button.
I'm going to get rid of those guys by pressing
Control+A, or Command+A on a Mac
and then I'll press the backspace key,
or the delete key on the Mac to get rid of them.
Your other option is to draw an ellipse,
either a horizontal one or a vertical one,
or, in our case, one at a 45 degree angle.
Even though my shape looks like a bad potato,
it ends up coming out as a perfect ellipse
and of course you can also draw a perfect circle, like so.
I don't want those shapes so I'll press
Control+A, Command+A on the Mac, backspace
to get rid of them, that's delete on the Mac.
The other shapes that you can draw are
a triangle, an equilateral triangle, by the way,
meaning that each of its sides is exactly the same length.
That's going to happen, even in my case,
what I'm going to do is draw an upside down triangle,
even if you draw it very skinny or very wide,
it's going to come out with all sides equal.
Let's get rid of those guys.
Next, we'll draw a hexagon.
Notice I'll draw this pretty terrible hexagon
right here, and assuming that I haven't done
too bad of a job, Illustrator will go ahead
and give me a hexagon like so.
What's interesting about the hexagon,
I'll go ahead and press Control+Z,
or Command+Z on the Mac, to get rid of it.
You even get a hexagon if you draw a pentagon.
Notice I've drawn five sides, but I end up
getting a six sided shape instead.
If I want a five sided shape,
then I can just go ahead and click on it
in order to select that shape, and by the way,
I'm clicking with the Shaper Tool
and my Bounding Box is turned on
at which point I can go ahead
and drag on this little plus/minus widget
in order to reduce the number of sides
to five, for example.
I can increase the number of sides all the way up to ten,
which is interesting because you can't really draw
a ten sided shape.
Notice that even if I draw, let's say,
a seven sided shape, like this right here,
then Illustrator is going to turn it into a hexagon
or if I try to give it even more sides,
let's see if I can draw, let's say, eight sides,
then it's very possible that Illustrator
is going to turn it into a circle.
Finally, you can draw a line at any angle
that you like just by dragging
and if you draw a more or less horizontal line,
like so, it's going to turn into an absolutely horizontal line
and the same goes if you do a vertical drag.
You will get a vertical line.
It is possible that Illustrator is not going to recognize
what you're doing so, for example,
I'll just go ahead and get rid of all these guys once again.
Let's say I draw a letter "Z".
In that case, Illustrator is either
going to tell me that it didn't recognize the shape,
so you may see an alert message,
or it may do nothing at all as it did in my case.
That goes for anything you draw
where you end up creating a kind of zigzag
or crossing the lines.
You're not going to end up with anything.
Also, if you don't draw that last side long enough,
then you may not get anything, so what you need to do,
for example, when drawing a rectangle,
is make sure you get it more or less back to the beginning,
in which case you should end up with
the shape you're looking for.
Finally, notice that the tool always creates shapes
with light gray fills.
If you want to change that, just go ahead an click
on the shape to select it and then go to the Fill icon
on the far left side of the control panel
and change it to whatever color you like.
The same, of course, goes for the stroke.
For example, I'm going to take the line weight
up to 12 points and then press the Enter key
to achieve this effect right here.
Then if you want to deselect the shape,
all you have to do is click off of it.
That is how you draw shapes with the new Shaper Tool
here inside Illustrator.
I'll show you how to combine shapes
with the Shaper Tool in the very next movie.