Transcript:
[MUSIC] What’s up everybody? It’s Spencer From Pixel & Bracket. In this tutorial. I’m gonna show you a quick and easy way to split shapes in Adobe Illustrator. Let’s start this tutorial by splitting a triangle in half and we’ll split some other shapes in different ways. I’m gonna first create a triangle. That’s going to happen by going to the rectangle tool over here in the tool bar, going down to the polygon tool and then clicking on your canvas anywhere and it’s gonna pop up and say. Hey, how many sides do you want? I want three sides. Don’t care about the radius. We’ll expand that later, hit, OK, and there’s my triangle. Now your fill and Stroke may be different, depending on what your setting is. You can see them over here on the left or over here on the right once you have a shape created or up top if you’re not in the new 2018 properties panel. But anyway, I just changed this to fill no stroke and I can expand this up by holding shift and option or Alt and there we go. We got a big triangle on here, Okay, So what I like to do is create these little guides out of line segments, And then I’ll split my shape on those guides it’s. Basically, what’s gonna happen, so I’m gonna grab the line segment tool create a vertical line by holding shift That’s gonna lock it into like, 45 degree angles, so I can create it perfectly vertical line the as far as the stroke of it, it doesn’t matter, but if I do, go ahead and add a stroke like one point, I can actually see the line now, so that’s helpful to me, and then I can select both of these shapes and we’re going to Center that line on the middle of this triangle, so I’m gonna click on the triangle That has it highlighted as a key object. And if I find my alignment panel over here, it’s also up in window down to a line. We can pop that out if we want. I’m going to align the horizontal Center so now that line that vertical line that we created is right in the center of my triangle. So next thing I want to do is actually grab the fill color from the triangle, so I’m gonna switch to the eyedropper tool. That’s the eye key for the shortcut. It’s over here on the left in your toolbar. If you’re looking for it and I’m gonna eyedropper the triangle. Notice how my fill and Stroke changed now. So the they match the triangle. I want to do that because when I select my shape builder tool, you’ll see here in a second. Make sure you select all the objects on your artboard first and then we’re going to select a shape builder tool because that’s the fill and the stroke when I click on these, it’s going to apply that fill and Stroke when we create this shape because it’s really creating separate shapes so notice how it sees where this line segment splits our triangle, and it knows that there’s two shapes there. All I have to do is click on that shape and I can even click on this shape if I want to just for good measure. And now it’s created separate shapes. It’s split that thing in half. So if I go back to my selection tool, make sure I deselect everything I can actually click and drag these pieces out, so we have officially split our triangle in half, and now I can. I can always delete out these extra little line segment pieces. The middle part gets deleted on its own. And that’s how you split those, so let’s split something else differently. Let’s say we create a circle with the ellipse tool. I’m going to find my center here. That’s the smart guides that are helping me find that. I’d always turn those on because we’re gonna use them to help us align things always, but smart guides command. You or control you. I’m gonna find the center shift alt or shift option to create a circle out from the center boom. There it is alright now. Line segment tool again this time. I’m just gonna create some arbitrary vertical and horizontal lines. Make sure they’re big enough to cover the circle shift back to that selection. Tool shortcut key is a V. I’m gonna select both these. I’m gonna give them one point stroke, Just so I can see them. There they are, and I’m gonna select everything. Click on the circle. Remember, that’s our key object. We’re going to align everything to it. Horizontal and vertical align. That’s gonna line those line segments right to the middle now. I select well don’t. Select everything yet, remember? We need to eyedropper that circle color, So I’m gonna go ahead and hit. I an eyedropper that circle. Okay, Good, now that’s my fill and Stroke now. I’ll select everything and then go to the shape builder tool boom. We got all these quadrants Set up. All I have to do is click on each one perfect. Go back to the selection. Click off to deselect And now I have all these separate pieces. So, quarter circle, half circle, three-quarter’s circle. Whatever you want to create last one if we don’t want something so symmetrical. Well, it doesn’t really matter. Let’s go to the rectangle tool. We’re gonna create a square out here. The line segment tool is a little /e key on your keyboard, and then if we just create like a line through this guy and let’s say. I want to keep that line for later well. I’m gonna hold option or Alt and just duplicate that line up here. I’m gonna select both of those lines. Make sure I give it a little bit of a stroke, so I can see it cool next thing. I’m going to do is probably Center these up, so we’re gonna shift-click on that square to make sure we get everything selected. Click on the square. Now it’s the key object. I’m gonna horizontal align Center of those. I’m just going to make sure all the the middle points are the same. Okay, cool. I’m gonna split this square with this line segment. So once again shape builder tool. Okay, it sees them now. I forgot to select my square first. So I’m going to make sure to do that there. We go now. It’s got that fill now. We can select everything And because that was the last sort of fill that I selected. It’s going to show up here when I use my shape Builder tool. Click on each different portion that you want to split. Go back to that selection tool now. We can kind of lift that up and bring this bottom section down. Delete out these points here and let’s say you wanted to create a little minimal shape. You can bring that line segment back down. Maybe up. It’s stroke a little bit and there’s a little. I don’t know, piece of minimal split shape art. If you guys are interested in that. Anyway, that is how you split shapes up. Earth’s. Well, it’s it’s one way to split shapes. There’s lots of ways you can split shapes up, but I think this one’s really quick and easy. It’s very easy to understand. You can see the line segment. It’s like you’re creating these guides of like, yeah. I’m gonna split my shape right here. If you liked this video. Make sure you like this video. Subscribe and check out the channel. Thanks for watching and. I’ll see you next time [Music]!