- In this movie I'll show you how to create
what's known as a compound path,
which is when you combine multiple path outlines into one.
And most simply this is used in order to carve holes,
so for example, if you take a look at the rim
of the magnifying glass, we have the inner circle
cutting a hole in the outer circle.
And the same thing is occurring with
this black shadow right here.
And let me show you what that looks like.
Go ahead and switch over to this document
and it appears I've made a mistake,
I went ahead and created these two circles
on this Guides layer,
but that's great because it gives me the chance
to show you a very fundamental technique.
I'm going to go ahead and partially Marquee
those two circles with my black arrow tool.
And notice I now see a little blue square
over here in the Layers Panel.
That square represents this selection.
And so if I drag it and drop it onto the Drawing layer,
it now becomes Red to indicate that the selection
has moved to that layer.
And you can also see that the anchor points
and the segments are turning Red, as well.
All right, so the most common example
of a compound path is the letter O.
So let's say I decide to draw an O myself.
I'll go ahead and switch to the Ellipse Tool
and then I'll go ahead and drag
from the intersection of these two guidelines,
and I'll press the Alt key,
or the Option key, as I drag
to create this path from the center out.
And then I'll press the Alt key,
or Option key on the Mac,
while creating a smaller ellipse.
All right, now I'm going to press the V key
to switch back to the black arrow tool,
and I'll go ahead and Marquee both these paths.
And let's say I want to change the Fill
to something like Red, just so that we have
a different color going on screen.
Notice that I am filling both path outlines.
If I want the inner path to cut a hole in the outer path,
then I need to combine the two paths
into a compound path.
And you do that by going up to the Object menu,
choosing Compound Path, way down here at the bottom,
and then choosing the Make command.
And that goes ahead and combines those two path outlines
into one.
And notice if I go ahead and drag this O
out here so that it's partially over the paste board,
we can see that its interior is indeed transparent.
And the only reason we're seeing a vertical line through
the character, by the way, is because Illustrator
is showing us the edge of the artboard.
But otherwise this shape is entirely intact.
All right, I'm going to get rid of that O
because I don't want it,
and what I want to do instead
is create that little bit of a shadow ledge
that I was showing you in the final graphic.
And I want to make sure this time
that I can exactly align this new circle that
I'm about to draw with the old one.
And so I'm going to add a custom guide
by clicking on the Guides layer to make it active,
and then I'll go ahead and select
the Line Segment Tool, from the Line Tool flyout menu.
And I'll drag from the intersection of these
two guidelines right there, down into the right
while pressing the Shift key
until I reach the bleed, as I've done right here.
And I'm pressing the Shift key, by the way,
so I can constrain the angle of this line
to exactly 45 degrees.
And if you're not clear on where I'm going with this,
I'll reveal the method behind my madness
in just a moment.
All right, now I want to convert that line to a guide
by going up to the View menu, choosing Guides,
and then choosing Make Guides.
And I now have a custom guide at 45 degrees.
All right, now I'm going to click
on the Drawing layer to make it active once again,
and I'll select the Ellipse Tool
and I'm going to drag from the intersection
of this inner circle,
and this diagonal guideline.
So this point right there,
and I'm going to drag up and out,
and because the standard behavior
is to create the ellipse inside of a
rectangular bounding box,
I am not getting any sort of alignment at all.
But if I press and hold the Control key,
or the Command key on the Mac,
during my drag, not before,
because that would give you the black arrow tool,
then I'll go ahead and create the ellipse
from that exact point.
The problem is I can't see the size of my ellipse
as I'm drawing it,
I don't have that heads up display,
and that's because I turned off Smart Guides.
So I'll go ahead and undo the
creation of that ellipse and go up to the View menu
and turn Smart Guides back on.
And now I'll reattempt that maneuver
by dragging from the intersection of that inner circle
and the diagonal guideline,
and then pressing and holding the Control key,
or the Command key on the Mac,
in order to align that edge right there to that circle.
And then also press the Shift key as I drag
so that I'm drawing a perfect circle, like so.
And I want it to be as close to 402 points as possible.
Looks like 401.58 points
is about the best I'm going to do,
at which point I'll go ahead and release
in order to create that circle, like so.
And be sure if you're following along with me
to release the mouse button
before you release the Control and Shift,
or Command and Shift keys.
All right, now what you want to do
is switch back to the black arrow tool,
which of course you can get by pressing the V key,
and I want you to click on this circle right there,
the inner circle, because we're going to be using it twice.
And so anytime you want to use the shape twice
you need to copy it before you put it in play.
And so with that shape selected,
I'll go up to the Edit menu
and choose the Copy command.
Or you can press Control C,
or Command C on the Mac.
All right, now I'm going to Shift click on the circle I just
created, and I'm going to fill both these circles with Black
by clicking on this first swatch
on the left hand side of the Control Panel,
and choosing Black.
And now of course I want the inner circle
to cut a hole in the relatively outer circle.
And so I'll go up to the Object menu,
choose Compound Path, and choose Make,
and the deed is done.
The thing is I also want this outer circle,
this guy right here,
to have its inner circle cut out of it.
So I'm going to go ahead and press Control Z,
or Command Z to undo that absurd move,
and i'll paste that shape that I just copied
by going to the Edit menu and choosing Paste in Front,
it's very important you choose Paste in Front,
by the way, as opposed to Paste,
because Paste is just going to paste
the shape any old place.
Whereas Paste in Front is going to put it
right back where Illustrator found it.
And of course you can also execute that command by
pressing Control F, or Command F on the Mac.
All right, now go ahead and Shift click
on that outermost circle, go up to the Fill swatch,
on the far left side of the Control Panel,
change the Fill to White this time,
which isn't going to cover up anything, by the way,
because we pasted the shape in front
of the outermost one, so this Black ring right here
is still at the front of the stack.
And so now I'll go up to the Object menu,
choose Compound Path, and choose Make,
in order to combine those two shapes together.
And just to confirm that we have
what I said we would have,
I'll go ahead and drag these paths out into the paste board,
and you can see that we now have a White ring
with the innermost circle
cutting a hole in the outermost one.
And having proven that I'll just go ahead
and press Control Z, or Command Z on the Mac
in order to put those shapes back where they belong.
And that's how you create compound paths
which allow one path to cut a hole through another
here inside Illustrator.