- In this movie, we'll create the central element
of the magnifying glass, which is these two circles,
one inset inside of the other, and along the way,
I will pass along some new tips
for working with any shade tool inside Illustrator.
Alright, so we'll go ahead and switch over
to my document so far, and I'm not really interested
in anything that I'm drawing, so I'll go up
to the Select menu and choose All in order
to select everything, or you can press Control+A,
or Command+A on the Mac, and then I'll delete
the shapes by pressing the Backspace key,
or the Delete key on the Mac.
Alright, now I want to create a couple of additional guides,
so I need to unlock the current guides by going
to the View menu, choosing Guides and then,
in the most recent version of the software,
if you see Lock Guides with the check mark
in front of it, go ahead and choose it instead.
And now I'll marquee this vertical guide
with my black arrow tool.
That's the easiest way to select it.
And then, I'll press the Enter key, or the
Return key on the Mac, to bring up the Move dialogue box,
and I'm looking for a horizontal value of negative 30
and a vertical value of zero, and if you have
the preview checkbox turned on,
you will see that guide move on screen.
I don't really want to move it, I want to copy it,
which I can do by clicking the Copy button,
but you also have a keyboard shortcut,
so just as you can press Enter or Return
to evoke the Okay button, you can press
Alt+Enter or Option+Return to invoke the Copy button.
But for now, since my cursor's right there,
I'll just go ahead and click on the button
in order to create a copy of that guide.
Alright, now I wanna create another copy
way over here, and so I'm gonna once again
press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac,
and again, if you have the Preview checkbox on,
you'll see that last movement replayed,
but this time I want to change the horizontal value
to 310 points, and then I'll press the Tab key.
I don't really want to move it, I want to copy it,
so I'll press Alt+Enter here on the PC,
or Option+Return on the Mac.
Alright, now I want to lock the guide down again,
and you can go all the way to the View menu,
choose Guides, and then choose Lock Guides,
or nowadays, you can just right-click
inside the document window, and choose Lock Guides.
Incidentally, if the guide still appears to be selected,
just click off of it, and you'll find that
none of the guides can be selected from this point forward.
Alright, now I'm gonna zoom out a little bit
by pressing Control+Zero, or Command+Zero on the Mac,
and I'm gonna go ahead and drag my mini tool box here
to the upper left-hand corner of the screen,
and I'll select the Ellipse tool
in order to create a new shade.
Of course, I can drag with the tool as we've seen
in the past, but let's say I know exactly
how big I want my ellipse to be.
In fact, I know I want to create a circle
with a 422-point diameter.
In that case, you can just click,
and this works with other shade tools as well.
In order, in this case to bring up the
Ellipse Tool dialogue box, and for starters,
I'll just change the width value to 300 points
and I'll change the height value to 200 points.
And the reason I'm doing this is I want to demonstrate
this feature right here, the Constrain icon.
Notice if I turn it on so that the icon becomes a chain,
and then I change the width value to let's say,
600 points, that doesn't change
the height value to 600-points as well.
Instead, it scales the height value proportionally.
So where it was 200 points before, now it's 400 points.
So at this point, if I want to create a perfect circle,
ironically I have to unconstrain the values
by turning that chain off, and then I will dial in
422 for the width value as well as 422 for the height value.
And then I'll press the Enter key or the Return key
on the Mac to evoke that change.
Alright, now let's say I want to move my circle,
so that it's exactly centered at the intersection
of these two guides right here.
Why then, assuming the bounding box is turned on,
you can drag this center point, not the perimeter
of the circle, by the way.
If you do that, you'll just create a new circle,
which is not what we want, and it looks like
we've lost the old circle.
That's just because, in my case, I have neither
a fill nor a stroke applied so far.
But if you do make a mistake like this,
obviously, all you have to do press Control+Z
or Command+Z on the Mac, to undo that change.
And then, instead of dragging the circle itself,
drag it's center-point.
Now I'm not getting a snap, and that's because
my smart guides are turned off.
But that's actually not really a problem because
I'm gonna show you a better way to work.
So I'll just go ahead and press the Backspace key,
or the Delete key on a Mac, to get rid of that shape.
And then let's say, not only do you know
the exact measurements of your shape, but you want
to center it at a specific location,
but instead of clicking, you want to press and hold
the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac.
And notice that changes the cursor from a plain cross
to a cross with a circle around it,
and then I'll make sure that my cursor
is exactly aligned at the intersection
of those two guidelines, and I'll go ahead
and Alt+click or Option+click on a Mac,
in order to bring up the Ellipse dialogue box,
which, for whatever reason, isn't showing me
the size of my last created ellipse,
so I'll just go ahead and dial in those values again.
420 by 420, and actually I've made a mistake.
I'm gonna turn my link icon on here
so that both of these values change together,
and I"m going to enter Plus 2 after the width that value.
I want it to be 422 points, after all,
and because I started with this circle.
The height value grows in kind as well,
and now, I'll click OK, at which point,
I'm creating a circle from the inside out
so that's exactly centered at the click point.
Alright, now I'll go ahead and zoom in
by Control+Spacebar, or Command+Spacebar clicking.
And at this point, I no longer need this bounding box,
so I'm gonna return to the View menu
and choose Hide Bounding Box.
Alright, now notice that both
my Fill and my Stroke are set to None.
I want to give this guy a 1-point stroke,
so I'll just go ahead and click this
down-pointing arrowhead right there
and choose one point for the line weight.
For now on we can see our shape, even when it's deselected.
Alright, now I want to create a perfectly inset circle
that's just 12 points smaller,
that is six points smaller on all sides.
And I could do that just by, once again,
Alt or Option clicking with the Ellipse tool.
But I wanna show you another way to work
that involves scaling a duplicate of the shape.
Anytime you wanna duplicate a shape,
it's a two-part operation in Illustrator.
You go up to the Edit menu and choose the Copy command,
or you've got that standard keyboard short cut,
of Control+C or Command+C on a Mac, that goes ahead
and copies the ellipse to the clipboard.
Then you return to the Edit menu, and choose
Paste in Front, or you can press
Control+F or Command+F on a Mac.
And that goes ahead and pastes a copy of the ellipse
directly in front of the previous one.
You can't really tell that's the case because they're
aligned with each other, but if I were to press
the Control key or the Command key on a Mac,
to temporarily get my black arrow tool,
and drag this ellipse to a different location,
you can now see that we have two ellipses,
one directly on top of the other.
Alright, I'm gonna undo that movement there,
and I'll go up to this option, Transform,
up here in the control panel.
If you can't see the word transform, that means
that you're screen's wider than mine.
Instead, you're gonna see X, Y, W, and H values.
You can click on the X, Y, W, or H.
Any of those will bring the Transform panel like so.
Next, you wanna make sure that the center point
inside this tiny reference point matrix
is active so that we're scaling with respect to that
center, and then go ahead and make sure the width
and height values are linked together.
If they're not, go ahead and click on this Chain icon.
In my case, they already were, so I'll click
on that icon again, and then you can change either value
by clicking after it like so, and entering minus 12,
then, pressing the Tab key, and that should change
both values to 410 points, like so.
After which, you'll go ahead and press the Enter key
or the Return key on the Mac, to hide that panel.
And that's how you create two precisely scaled
and perfectly aligned ellipses, one inset
with respect to another here inside Illustrator.