- In this movie I'll introduce you to what
has to be my favorite shape tool,
which is the Ellipse tool, and I love
this tool for a couple of reasons.
First of all, it allows you to draw round,
organic shapes, and secondly, even though at first
it seems to be a very basic tool,
it offers a handful of amenities which,
once you become familiar with them,
make a whole lot of sense.
So what I'd like you to do is drop down
to tools below the type tool to whatever tool
is occupying the Shape tool slot there and click
and hold on that tool to bring up a flyout menu
of six tools as we're seeing here.
If you want these tools to remain persistent,
then go ahead and release on this vertical bar
on the right side of the flyout menu and you'll
end up with this handy floating toolbar.
Then select the third tool in,
which is the Ellipse tool.
Now, like most tools inside Illustrator,
you use this tool by clicking and dragging,
in which case you'll create a regular oval,
which is known in geometry as an ellipse,
and this is the shape that a symmetrical,
both horizontally and vertically.
So for our purposes, you can think of it
as behaving like a stretched circle.
Speaking of which, how do you draw
a perfect circle with this tool.
Well, I'll go ahead and press the Backspace key
or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of that shape
and then I'll drag, so you just start dragging
and then press and hold the Shift key.
So I really want to stress this, with many tools inside
of Illustrator where these sort of functions
are concerned, you press the Shift key after you
begin dragging and then you keep that Shift key down
until you've finished dragging, because if at any point
you release the Shift key, then you're going to return
to an ellipse which is either going to be wider
than it is tall, or taller than it is wide.
So again, if you want a perfect circle,
then go ahead and press and hold the Shift key
and keep it down until after you release
the mouse button.
Now let's say you want to draw a shape from
the center outwards, so for example,
let's say you want to create an ellipse,
that is exactly centered on the artboard.
Then go ahead and position your cursor
at the intersection of those two center guides
and then begin dragging as normal,
and then, while you drag, you want to press
and hold the Alt key here on the PC or the Option
key on the Mac, and again, you have to keep
that key down.
If you release it, you're going to return
to the standard corner to corner drawing behavior,
and I'll explain more about what that means in a moment,
but for now just go ahead and press and hold the Alt key
or the option key on the Mac, and then if you want
to draw a circle from the center outward,
you go ahead and add the Shift key.
So I now have the Shift and Alt keys down,
those would be the Shift and Option keys
on the Mac, and if you keep those keys down
until after you release the mouse button,
then you'll end up with a perfectly centered circle
as you see here.
All right, now just to give myself a little bit of room,
I'm going to move this floating toolbar
over to the right-hand side of the screen.
You can even move it over your panels
if you like, even though it's pretty easy
to lose the toolbar in that case, but I'm going to leave
it there because I want to demonstrate something
else that's going on.
As I was saying, the standard behavior is
to create the shape from corner to corner.
Well, obviously an ellipse doesn't have
any corners, so what you're really doing
is defining the bounding box inside of which,
the ellipse fits, which means that it's often tough
to draw an ellipse exactly right the first time.
So for example, let's say I want to more
or less trace around my existing shape right here,
maybe I want the shape to be a little larger, let's say.
Well, the Smart Guides allow me to cheat a little bit,
I can see that, I can see where my cursor should be
if I want to exactly trace the shape and then I could
just move my cursor a little bit up and
to the left and start dragging from there.
The Smart Guides aren't always going to help you
when you're trying to position an ellipse,
and so to demonstrate what I mean, I'm going to go up
to the View menu and choose Smart Guides
to turn them off, and I encourage you to do
so as well, so that you can try your hand
at tracing things properly.
So again, I'm going to try to create an ellipse
that's bigger than the other one, and I totally goofed up,
I started dragging at the wrong location,
and so what do I do?
Well, I have a couple of different options available
to me, both of which you should remember.
The first is that you can press and hold the Spacebar
in order to move the shape on the fly and that way
you can get the shape where you need it to be
and then release the Spacebar and continue dragging
in order to finish off the shape, like so.
So just remember that you've got that Spacebar
that's available to you, and you actually have
that Spacebar available to you when using
the Line tools, as well.
And so let me show you what I mean here.
If I were to switch, for example,
to the Spiral tool, it doesn't matter
which of these tools I select,
any tool will do, it's just that spirals are pretty
much impossible to get right the first time.
Then I'll just go ahead and drag with the Spiral tool,
you can see I'm already off the screen here,
but that's not a problem because now I
can press and hold the Spacebar,
I can get this path outline more or less where I need it
to be and then I can release the Spacebar
and continue drawing.
So Spacebar is a huge technique,
very, very useful.
I'm going to press the Backspace key
to get rid of that spiral, and I'm also going
to go ahead and switch to the black arrow tool
which I can get, of course, by pressing the V key.
I'll go ahead and bar key these two paths right there
in order to select both of them,
and then I'll change their fills by clicking
on this first swatch right there,
up here on the Control Panel to None so that
we can see through the big shape
to the one inside of it.
All right, here's another way to work.
Let's say I want to trace one ellipse over another
again and this kind of tracing is pretty routine,
by the way, when you're tracing scan sketches.
So if you sketch something on a piece of paper,
bring it into Illustrator and then you want to trace it,
this is the way things work.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and switch
back to the Ellipse tool.
Let's say that you want to make sure
that you keep your cursor along the ellipse,
so in other words, normally when I'm drawing
an ellipse here, my cursor's nowhere near the shape.
If you would rather keep the shape on your cursor,
then what you do is you start along the arc
of this ellipse that you want to trace
and then, as you're tracing, press and hold the Control
key, or the Command key on the Mac, and now notice
as long as the Control or Command key is down,
that my cursor resides along the path outline,
which in many cases gives me a lot more control.
So I'm not sure if that technique is every bit as valuable
as the Spacebar technique, but you can use them in tandem.
So for example, I'll just go ahead and undo that shape.
Let's say I want to create yet another shape
that traces the other two, then I'll start dragging
right about here, let's say, and as I drag,
I'll press and hold the Control key,
or the Command key on the Mac,
and if I'm off, which I am, then I'll
just go ahead and press the Spacebar,
I still have the Control key down here on the PC,
that would be the Command key on the Mac,
and then once I feel like the Spacebar
has served its function here, I'll go ahead
and release the Spacebar to continue drawing the shape
like so, and then I may take it down just a little bit
here and a little bit to the left, as well.
Again with the Spacebar, and then I'll go ahead
and drag to this position.
I still have the control key, or the command key down
because if I didn't, if I release that key,
you can see that we have quite the kerfuffle.
This is not what I want so I'll go ahead
and press and hold the Control key,
or the Command key on the Mac,
and release in order to create that third,
more or less concentric ellipse.
And those are the many ways to use
what seems like a very basic tool,
the Ellipse tool, here inside Illustrator.