- In this movie I'll share with you a fairly delightful
and undoubtedly top secret trick
that works with any of the line or shape tools
except for the Flare tool.
So anything from the star tool
all the way up to the line segment tool.
And the trick is that you can draw multiple lines
and shapes at a time, in a single drag,
by pressing and holding the tilde key.
That's that wavy character that you find
between the escape key and the tab key
in the upper-left corner of an American keyboard.
And here's how it works.
I'll go ahead and zoom quite a bit out here
so I can take in a little bit of the pasteboard
along with my artwork.
And I'll click on the stars layer to make it active,
and I'll create a new layer in front of it
by alt-clicking or option-clicking on the little page icon
at the bottom of the layers panel.
I'm going to leave the color set to yellow
and I'm going to call this layer "lines,"
and I'll click OK.
Now I'll go ahead and select the line segment tool
from the Line tool flyout menu.
And then I'll go ahead and change the fill color
up front to nothing.
And I'll change the stroke to white,
just to make sure that we're creating white lines.
Now I'll drag out from the center of this star, let's say.
Normally you would create a single line like so.
I'll go ahead and press control- or command-z
to undo that line.
Here's what happens when you press the tilde key.
Go ahead and start dragging like so
and then press and hold tilde
and start dragging around with the line tool
in order to fill your entire artwork
and much of the pasteboard, as we're seeing right here,
with this series of lines.
Now just to see what we've done
I'll go up to the select menu
and choose the Deselect command.
Or you can press control-shift-A
or command-shift-A on the Mac
in order to deselect the artwork.
Now I'll go ahead and zoom in
and you can see with just one drag of the line tool
I have created several hundred lines
emanating from this star.
And this works with the other tools as well.
For example I could get the spiral tool
if I wanted to, and I could start drawing a spiral like so
and then I could press the tilde key
in order to create a huge number of spirals!
And I'm now invoking this big auto scroll.
And after I get done making that huge mess
I'll go ahea and press control-shift-A
or command-shift-A on the Mac
in order to deselect my artwork.
And it works with varying degrees of success
with the shape tools.
You can try it out with the likes of
the rectangle and ellipse tools, but it's going to
work best with either the polygon or star tools
because they draw outward from the center,
juts like we saw with the spiral tool.
I'm going to start by creating
this dinky, tiny little star here.
And then I'll press and hold the tilde key and drag out
in order to create a bunch of stars.
And I'll press control-shift-A or command-shift-A on the Mac
in order to accept that effect.
And then I'll zoom in so that we can take in
what I've managed to do.
Obviously it's a string art masterpiece, don't you think?
Which is why, I think, before I let you go
I'm going to press control-Z or command-Z on the Mac
a couple of times in order to
get rid of the stars and the spirals
so that we have the straight lines and nothing more.
And in order to reduce the effect just a little bit
I'm going to target this lines layer
by clicking on its circle right there.
And then I'm going to go up to the opacity value
up here in the control panel
and I'm going to reduce it to 25%.
And then I'll press control-shift-A,
or command-shift-A on the Mac, to deselect the artwork.
And that, if you dare,
is how you draw multiple lines and shapes at a time
by pressing and holding the tilde key
here inside Illustrator.