In this lecture you're going to learn about the Pathfinder panel and this is a
really cool panel. You can use it to combine shapes, create new shapes
so let's go and get started.
Go to File, New in Adobe Illustrator. Go to Window and then Pathfinder and you'll see up here there's
Shape Modes, so there's four things there, and then there's Pathfinder, 6 things
down there and what do these do? Well, some of them you can hover over them and it
gives you an idea of what they do.
And I'll give you a couple of examples. So I'm going to draw out the Ellipse tool. Let's say we were
drawing something and we wanted it to be sort of a cloud shape,
maybe a logo and we're just clicking and dragging and combining all these
shapes here and so once we have one, the problem is, I mean you could click and
drag around that and go to Object, Group but it's really not one shape right?
So if I did Type on a Path tool and wanted to put type around it for some reason, it would not work.
It would just go around this one. So what we need to do is just click and drag
around all of them and then click this first one, it says Unite.
Pretty simple, right so now this is one shape. You've got points, anchor points
and you've got paths in between. We can still edit it with the white Direct Selection tool if you want.
Just click and drag like so and also if you wanted type to go around this. We could
copy and paste it. You know, CTRL or Command C and then CTRL or Command V and then use the
Type on a Path and then you've got some area to put some text on if this was a feature
story, and you want to do some sort of illustration and you could put it on the other one, like that.
You can use that not just for the same type of shape. So if you had a, say a circle and
then you had even a star or starburst and something like that.
Click and drag, drag around both of them, add to, and then we got a new symbol. You can also use
this for text. So if you click some text out here and I'm going to choose a different font.
Select that and go to, let's choose kind of a stronger one there.
You get this and then let's draw. Instead of using a shape, let's just draw something out here.
So let's draw kind of a wave and it's coming up like that and it goes back here.
Problem is, if I want to combine this, hit that, it's not going to work. It didn't do anything.
We've got to create outlines remember. So right click this, Create Outlines.
Now it's an actual shape and you want to make it readable, so I'll bring
this a little bit up. I'm actually going to bring the R down a little bit and this
one up. Bring the S a little bit higher. Alright. So now I'm going to select all of it
and I can change the color and there we go. So that's the first one. I'm not going to go
through every single one but I do want to show you some commonly used ones.
So the Minus Front. What that is. Just keep this simple. Two circles and this one's on top
as I drew it last. This one's on the bottom. If I click and drag around both of them,
and then click Minus Front, it's going to subtract wherever they overlap the front one
from the back. So you can create specific looks and shapes. The next one is Intersect.
Wherever they intersect will remain so you if you want to make a leaf in this
example you could do that.
And then the other one is Exclude, so wherever they intersect they won't have content.
So if you pull that out, you can see what it did. It just is cutting out in
the middle there. So I'll delete those.
And there are a couple of other ones if you want to experiment with. There's Divide, Trim, Merge,
Crop, Outline, Minus Back. So some of these, like this will get rid of the Stroke if
it had one. So if I click and drag around them. Let me just add a Stroke to these and
make it a little bit larger so you can see it. So you see the stroke there. Let me
actually make it a little bit more offset from the Fill. Alright. So if I
combine these with Unite, you know, it's just going to do that. Now if I go over here, Divide.
What it does is, kind of divides it so if you, it has this extra little leaf looking thing in here and
then this is its own shape and that's its own shape. So I'm going to go back a couple of steps.
And then Trim gets rid of that Stroke. You can see so I'm going to Undo.
Merge just merges them together and they also don't have a Stroke. You could add it back in if you
wanted to like so. Earlier we talked about Minus Front so it will subtract from the front.
The opposite of that down on the Pathfinder. There's Minus Back so it just subtracts from
the back. So this is useful when you want to create these specific shapes, say for a logo
design or an illustration and when I combine shapes for example, there's a lot of different methods
you can use. So check out the Pathfinder. It's pretty useful. A lot of people when
they're new to illustrator, they know about the shape tools and text and the
Pen tool, and the Brush tool, but they don't know the Pathfinder tool and they don't even know
about it and that we can use it to create logos and illustrations and
really customize our shapes. I'll see you in the next lesson.