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- In this movie I'll share
with you a fairly delightful

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and undoubtedly top secret trick

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that works with any of
the line or shape tools

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except for the Flare tool.

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So anything from the star tool

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all the way up to the line segment tool.

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And the trick is that you
can draw multiple lines

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and shapes at a time, in a single drag,

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by pressing and holding the tilde key.

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That's that wavy character that you find

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between the escape key and the tab key

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in the upper-left corner
of an American keyboard.

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And here's how it works.

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I'll go ahead and zoom
quite a bit out here

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so I can take in a little
bit of the pasteboard

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along with my artwork.

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And I'll click on the stars
layer to make it active,

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and I'll create a new layer in front of it

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by alt-clicking or option-clicking
on the little page icon

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at the bottom of the layers panel.

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I'm going to leave the color set to yellow

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and I'm going to call this layer "lines,"

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and I'll click OK.

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Now I'll go ahead and
select the line segment tool

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from the Line tool flyout menu.

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And then I'll go ahead
and change the fill color

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up front to nothing.

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And I'll change the stroke to white,

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just to make sure that
we're creating white lines.

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Now I'll drag out from the
center of this star, let's say.

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Normally you would create
a single line like so.

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I'll go ahead and press
control- or command-z

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to undo that line.

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Here's what happens when
you press the tilde key.

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Go ahead and start dragging like so

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and then press and hold tilde

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and start dragging
around with the line tool

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in order to fill your entire artwork

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and much of the pasteboard,
as we're seeing right here,

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with this series of lines.

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Now just to see what we've done

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I'll go up to the select menu

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and choose the Deselect command.

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Or you can press control-shift-A

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or command-shift-A on the Mac

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in order to deselect the artwork.

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Now I'll go ahead and zoom in

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and you can see with just
one drag of the line tool

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I have created several hundred lines

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emanating from this star.

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And this works with the
other tools as well.

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For example I could get the spiral tool

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if I wanted to, and I could
start drawing a spiral like so

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and then I could press the tilde key

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in order to create a
huge number of spirals!

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And I'm now invoking this big auto scroll.

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And after I get done making that huge mess

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I'll go ahea and press control-shift-A

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or command-shift-A on the Mac

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in order to deselect my artwork.

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And it works with varying
degrees of success

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with the shape tools.

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You can try it out with the likes of

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the rectangle and ellipse
tools, but it's going to

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work best with either
the polygon or star tools

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because they draw outward from the center,

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juts like we saw with the spiral tool.

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I'm going to start by creating

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this dinky, tiny little star here.

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And then I'll press and hold
the tilde key and drag out

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in order to create a bunch of stars.

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And I'll press control-shift-A
or command-shift-A on the Mac

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in order to accept that effect.

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And then I'll zoom in
so that we can take in

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what I've managed to do.

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Obviously it's a string art
masterpiece, don't you think?

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Which is why, I think, before I let you go

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I'm going to press control-Z
or command-Z on the Mac

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a couple of times in order to

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get rid of the stars and the spirals

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so that we have the straight
lines and nothing more.

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And in order to reduce the
effect just a little bit

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I'm going to target this lines layer

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by clicking on its circle right there.

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And then I'm going to go
up to the opacity value

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up here in the control panel

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and I'm going to reduce it to 25%.

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And then I'll press control-shift-A,

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or command-shift-A on the
Mac, to deselect the artwork.

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And that, if you dare,

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is how you draw multiple
lines and shapes at a time

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by pressing and holding the tilde key

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here inside Illustrator.