- In this movie, I'll show you how
to use the Polygon and Star tools,
and the reason I'm pairing them
together is because they work very similarly,
as you're about to see.
All right, I want to create a new layer to play on here,
so I'm going to go ahead and turn off the angled layer,
then I'll click on a drawing layer,
and the reason I'm doing this is because
the next layer I create will appear
in front of that layer,
and I want everything to appear
in back of the angled layer,
so that we're seeing through the magnifying glass.
All right. Now I'm going to drop down
to the little-page icon at the bottom
of the layers panel,
and I'll alt + option click on it
to force the display of the layer-option style log box.
I'll call this new layer stars,
and I'll change its color to dark blue,
which will show up well against
our ongoing artwork,
and now I'll click OK in order to create that layer.
For the sake of reference, I'm also going
to turn on the guides layer.
All right, now the interesting thing
about the Polygon and Star tools
is unlike the rectangle and ellipse tools,
which are designed to create shapes
from corner to corner,
these tools always create their shapes
from the center outward,
and to show you what I mean,
I'll go ahead and select the Polygon tool,
and then I'll position my cursor
at the intersection of those two
center guides right there,
and I will drag out, and sure enough
I'm creating the polygon from the
center outward, no need to press
the alt key or the option key on the Mac.
In fact, your keyboard options are pretty sparse.
You can press the shift key if you
want to constrain the angle of your shape,
generally rendering it upright
as we're seeing here,
and then if you release the shift key
you'll return to your free-form orientation.
If you want to move the shape on the fly
then you can press and hold the spacebar
just as you can with any of the line or shape tools.
And then, finally, if you want to
increase the number of sides,
you press the up-arrow key,
and I'm doing this on the fly by the way.
I still have my mouse button down.
If you want to reduce the number of sides,
then you press the down-arrow key
all the way down to a triangle,
making the Polygon tool the best tool
for creating an equilateral triangle
that there is inside of Illustrator.
And now go ahead and press the shift key,
to constrain that triangle to upright,
and I'll use the spacebar in order
to move it to, more or less, the center of my art board,
and then I'll release like so.
The other thing you can do with
the Polygon tool is click with it.
In which case you'll bring up the
Polygon dialogue box,
and I'll just go ahead and change the radius
this time around to, let's say,
250 points, and I'll change the number of sides,
not to four because that would
give us a plane old square,
but rather to five in order to create a pentagon,
and then I'll click OK to create that new shape,
and it's a little high, so I'll go ahead
and drag it down and over to the right like so.
All right, so that's all that's
going on with the Polygon tool.
It's pretty basic, but it does
let you create things like triangles,
pentagons, hexagons, and so forth.
All right, I'm going to press ctrl + a
or cmd + a on a Mac in order to
select both shapes, and I'll press
the backspace key or the delete key
on Mac to get rid of them.
All right, now I'm going to switch over
to the Star tool, which has a lot more going on.
All right, I'll start by dragging
from the intersection of those
two center guides, and sure enough
once again, I create the star from the center outward.
If you press and hold the shift key
as you're dragging, then you will
make the shape upright as we're seeing here.
If you release shift, then you'll
return to the free-form orientation.
You can also press the spacebar
in order to move that shape on the fly.
If you want to add more points to your star,
then you press the up-arrow key.
If you want to reduce the number of points,
then you can press the down-arrow key
all the way down to a kind of misshapen triangle.
All right, I'm going to go ahead
and press the up-arrow key a couple of times
until we get back to the five-pointed star.
You can change how pointy the points are
by pressing and holding the control key,
so notice if I make the shape nice and big,
and then I press the control key,
or the command key on the Mac, and drag inward,
then I'm going to make the points less pointy,
and finally I'm going to move them inward,
so they're no long points at all.
They're the inside edges of that shape.
Or I can go ahead and drag way out here like so,
and now go ahead and make the star smaller,
and then I'll press and hold the control key,
or the command key on the Mac again,
and drag out in order to make
the shape very spiky indeed.
And your final option is to press
and hold the alt key.
Whenever you press the alt key
or the option key on a Mac, you're going to
align the opposite sides.
So in the case of a five-pointed star
you're going to get the classic American Flag star.
If we're working with a six-pointed star,
which I achieve just by pressing the up-arrow key,
and that went ahead and reset the star as well.
If I now press the alt key or the option key on a Mac,
I get a Star of David.
And so that's how it works regardless
of how many points your star may have,
and to keep those opposite sides aligned
just make sure that you keep the
alt or option key down until the end of your drag.
And then, finally, you can click with
the Star tool in order to bring up
the Star dialogue box.
This one's a little harder to envision,
but we basically have an outside radius
and an inside radius of points,
and sadly we don't have a preview,
so you're just going to have to wing it,
but notice that you can set the
values to anything you want.
Right now radius 1 is larger than radius 2,
but I can change that if I want to.
I can set radius 1 to 100 points,
and I can set radius 2 to 200 points,
and I might take the number of
star points down to 5, and then I'll click OK
in order to create that star.
And now I'll press the control key
or the command key on a Mac to access
my black-arrow tool on the fly,
and I'll drag that shape a little bit over
so that we can see both of the stars
at the same time, and that's how you work
with the Polygon and Star tools
here inside Illustrator.
In the next movie we'll see a practical
application for the more interesting
of the two, the Star tool.