There are many ways to resize shapes in Illustrator but sometimes you want to
use a tool that can resize a shape to a very specific number or percentage. For those
instances, we want to use the Scale tool and you'll learn about that in this lesson.
To start just go ahead and select the Rectangle tool, click and drag out. I'm going to
hold SHIFT for a perfect square and then you can set the Fill and the Stroke to
whatever color and then just make it a little bit thicker so we can see it up here.
I have mine set to 12 point.
And to resize, we could take for example, the Selection tool and click and drag
the edge there, the bounding box, and hold shift to maintain the original prop[ortion.
We can also, for example use the Free Transform tool but the Scale tool
can also work in certain instances where we want it to scale a certain percentage.
So to use this, if I choose the Scale tool on the Tools panel and just click
and drag to edge, you'll notice it's almost as if we're holding ALT on the PC
or OPTION on the MAC while using the Selection tool and if I hold SHIFT, it'll maintain
that original proportion so it just resizes it not just from one edge or one side.
So if I click and drag this over here, it can also, you can resize it left and right,
top and bottom depending on where your mouse is.
Experiment with the Scale tool and see what kind of effects it can do but
if you have aspecific number how can we do that?
See the little Center here? That's the center point. So if I click and drag that over
here and then click and drag, notice that it's in relation to that center point resizing.
for perspective. So if you move that back to the middle
and you hold ALT on the PC or OPTION on the MAC, and click, and then just click again, just
making sure to be in the middle.
It'll bring up this menu. Another way to do that without having to worry about
making sure the center point. If it's already in the middle, you can actually,
just make sure this is selected, which ever shape we want to resize. And then double click
the Scale tool in the Tools panel. That'll bring up the same menu and
from here we can say, Uniform, let's say, 200%.
What that will do is it'll scale at 200% compared to the
original so it'll double in size. And if you don't want it Uniform or if you just
want, say, Horizontal, a different number so its wider or skinnier and then vertical,
taller or shorter than the original, you can do that as well.
Scale, Stroke and Effects. So if I had that checked, let's just make this, OK,
200% is good. Right now it's 12 point for the Stroke and if I hit
Preview, notice that the stroke gets larger as well. So if I click, actually
Copy instead of OK, it will make two of them and you'll see the difference. So here's the
original and then here's the new one. This one has 24 points. That's because
that's 200% of the 12 point so if you want the stroke to be in
relation to the size and to expand or get smaller in relation to the original scaling,
then you can have that checked. There are a couple of other tools under here like
Shear. What that does is it shears it a little bit. You can make more of a unique look,
kind of free form or you can hold SHIFT if you want it to be level like that, and the
third tool under this Scale submenu is the Reshape tool. What that is is if you just
select the Line Segment tool, just create a line out here and then go back to the
Reshape tool and you can click and drag and you're just moving it around. Well, how is
that any different from for example the Direct Selection Tool? Well, you can
actually click and drag the middle of it
and it makes it curve. So if I use the white arrow and tried that, it just
moves it, right. I can still move the ending here but if I just move that around,
it's not going to curve it at all. So the Reshape tool, make sure that it's selected and you can
move it around and the other cool thing is if you hold down ALT on the PC or OPTION on the MAC,
you can click and drag and duplicate out some more shapes so you can make some
custom shapes here pretty easily using the Reshape tool.
Hopefully you've learned a lot about the Scale tools and other related tools.
I will see you in the next lesson.