Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to this video tutorial today we’re looking at an editable rotation effect in Illustrator before we begin. I have more illustrator training at Skillshare Comm. When you sign up for Skillshare you get access to thousands of classes, including over 250 of mine in the description below is a school share coupon for you, which is at least as good as the current school share offer and typically – better. I also have training at Udemy Comm and there’s a referral link for each of my illustrator courses there in the description below, please feel free to share these with family and friends. Let’s now return to illustrator and what we’re going to do here is to create an effect that is fully editable for rotating shapes around in a circle, so we’re going to start with a shape. So let me just go and get the fill and I don’t want to a stroke, but I do want to fill for this. I’m going to draw a really simple heart shape. You could draw whatever you like, but it just needs to be pretty small. Of course. You can resize it once you’ve drawn it so. I’m just clicking around here to draw a simple sort of folk art heart once. I’ve done that I’m going to size it in. I’m holding the shift key as I do to constrain it to its original proportions, Having done that I’m going to set no fill and no stroke making sure that I don’t have the heart selected when I do that. I’m going here to the pen tool and I’m going to go directly below the heart, so I’m looking for the smart guides to show me when I am directly below the heart and I’m going to click about here now. It doesn’t matter where you click, but it wants to be slightly below the heart. I’ll press the Escape key. Now we’ll go and select over everything. Now you won’t be able to see this little marker that we just created it’s there, but you won’t see it because it has no fill and no stroke. That’s pretty important for later on. I’m going to select over the heart and that little no fill no stroke Dot making sure that your selection looks about like this. If it’s much smaller than you haven’t got the pieces that you want, you want both these pieces group them together with object and then group now we’ll go to the transform effect, so its effect distort and transform and then transform. You’re going to turn preview on, and lets, for example, make twenty copies of this. Well, we want one original and nineteen copy so that we can get twenty in total so. I’m going to make it 19 I need to rotate this around. I can do that automatically in Illustrator by typing 360 which is the number of degrees in a circle, press, the forward slash and then type 20 and that will rotate it around, so they can get 20 shapes evenly around a circle. Now you can see that this has not been as successful. Perhaps as we thought it might have been and the reason is that the rotation point is in the middle of that selected thing that I had earlier well. We want to make the rotation point this one here and the bottom of these nine boxes. The bottom middle one is the one that we want. You can see that our hearts are not really showing up, particularly well right now, so we could back off the number of copies, or we could just move the hearts a little further away. So you get a choice at this point? I’m just going to click, ok? We’ll go into the layer’s palette because this is where you’re going to be working from here on in. I’m just going to make everything a little bit larger, so you can see more. Clearly, what’s happening? I’m going to open up the elements that we have in the layer’s palette. We’ve got a group. This is our little dot here. We’re not going to do anything with this. This is our heart! If you want to move the heart further out, then you’re just going to select on the heart, so it’s the only thing selected. You’ll see the little handles around it here with the selection tool selected. You can just move it, so I’m moving it upwards and that breaks it apart. So now there’s more space because the circle is larger and so the hearts are rotating nicely around the circle. At this point? You can call this good or you could continue to do other things. One of the things that you can do is to add additional elements. So what if we wanted this heart? But we wanted a smaller one as well well. I’m going to grab this heart and I’m going to duplicate it. I’m going to select the one at the top doesn’t matter whether it’s the one at the top or at the bottom, but the one that it’s going to be easier to select. I’m going to hold shift, and also I can make this a little bit smaller and then I’m going to move it down a little bit, and this creates a second lot of hearts if I choose object transform and then reflect and reflect this across the vertical, then this inside set of hearts is going to go the opposite way to the outside. Set anything that you want to rotate around? This circle needs to be inside this group, so lets. See it. What happens if we draw a little diamond, for example so? I’m going to hold the shift key down and create a square. I’m going to rotate the square holding the shift key as I do. So it becomes a sort of diamond shape. Now, right now, it’s not rotating because it’s outside the group, but I can grab it here and drop it inside the group, Of course, that breaks everything up at this point because the group that is being rotators is actually much larger and it’s not aligned as well well. I’m going to bring this down to here, but every move that I make with. This shape is going to affect the rotation so you can create quite interesting effects this way. If you want more or less of these shapes, that’s easy to go and reselect your group. You have to do that because you have to get access to the transformation. Then you’ll go to the appearance panel now. Mines disappear, so I’m going to choose window and appearance inside the appearance panel. If you’ve got the right thing, selected is going to be a transform entry. You’ll click on that once because that opens up the transform effect dialog, which is the dialogue that we’ve been working with will turn preview on and say we want a few less say we want 15 in total, so we want 14 plus 1 original and what we’ll need to do here is to divide our 360 by 15 and so this gives us a rotation, but this time with less elements. But everything is nice and evenly rotated now. I’m going back to what I had earlier, so I’m just going to press Ctrl or command Z. Because I like this a lot you can, of course, change color. So I’m going into screw up. I’m going to actually make this a different color and at this point. If you wanted something to have a stroke, you could give it a stroke. So for example, let’s put a stroke on this particular shape. When you finish working on this design, you need to be aware that this is just a rotation. These shapes don’t exist. There are not multiples of their shapes. There’s just a single set of shapes with a rotation effect applied to them. If you want to break these shapes out so that their individual shapes, you’re going to have to expand this object and you’ll have to have finished working with it before you do that. So let’s assume that we’re finished with this shape. We’re ready to break it out. We’ll select over it so that the entire group is selected and choose object and then expand appearance when we do that, you’ll see that a whole series of groups have been created. In fact, there’s one group for every set of objects and inside those groups other three objects that make up that group you’ll notice that that little dot that we created does no longer exist and that’s why we made it a no fill, no stroke dot. Because when you expand your shapes if it’s a no fill, no stroke dot, it just disappears and so we don’t have 20 loose dots. If you like in our illustration, everything is very neat and tidy. You probably won’t want to break these groups out. You’ll probably want to leave everything inside its group, but it’s up to you so. I hope that this video has helped you see some of the possibilities You have for designing circular elements in Illustrator that are fully editable. If you enjoyed the video, please give it A thumbs up, hit the subscribe button and the notification bell. So you’ll be alerted when new videos are released Until next time my name is. Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me here on my Youtube channel.