Transcript:
[MUSIC] Hi, guys, this is Carrie! Hawkins, here with another vector made tutorial. This is actually gonna be the start of a new series called the toolbar series. I plan on putting out Probably 20 some-odd videos that focus on the default tools inside of Illustrator. And if you’re not familiar with those, that would be anything that you see here on the typically on the left side of illustrator, at least that’s where the default layout is. It may look more like this for you, but it should be somewhere over here. If everything is kind of in a default, if you’re not seeing it, it’s probably under windows tools and default. If that’s checked, then you should probably be seeing it. Of course you can move this around wherever you want. But the default again is going to be on this side so today we’re gonna just deal with these top four buttons here. The tools from selection tools from the. Select the regular selection tool all the way down here to the lasso and then also deal with a couple other ways that you can select things that aren’t necessarily part of those tools, but that go along with it. So let’s jump on in real quick and get started. The first thing we’re gonna talk about is just your regular selection tool right up here, It’s Hotkey! V and I’m just pulling out a logo. I worked on recently. That has a lot of elements to it. Actually, it’s a bit busy for my taste. But the client wanted to have all of these things in there. And so this was kind of the best way. I could think to arrange all of the items they wanted in it and still make it look somewhat decent. I also ended up making a little more simplified version in case they wanted to go a little bit smaller in scale, but anyway, we’ll work with this and what the selection tool does. It just looks like this black sort of Arrowhead. You just click and drag to select things or you click directly onto things like this, and that’s pretty much how it works. It will pick up objects or groups of objects. So this right here is a group consisting of this path over here and this path over here if I click here. This is a group consisting of these sort of fence posts and this red barn. One thing to note when you’re using the regular selection tool is that you can go into a direct selection isolation mode. I should say by double clicking on a group. So for instance, this is a group if I double click anywhere within this group on it like so, boom, I’m in isolation mode and you can tell because you’ll get this little blue line up here. And this should appear at the top as well where it says crying, isolated group. That’s exactly what we want inside of that. If you wanted to keep digging deeper, you could keep double-clicking if there are groups within the group, so for instance, this is all grouped together these pieces of the fence, And if I double click, I’m gonna go inside of this group. So now the only thing selectable is the thing that’s in the isolated group, So that’s the only thing I can select. None of this. Other stuff is selectable, that’s. Why it’s kind of lower in opacity in your view. Now it’s still there and will print a hundred percent opacity. But you just won’t let you select it while you’re in this view, It’s very helpful if you’re dealing with graphics that have a lot of parts and some of them are grouped together and you only want to focus in on certain sections. I could even click even further in here and dig down just into this side or I can dig down just into the piece. That’s here, see how helpful that can be. And if you ever want to exit out of this, you can always hit escape or double. Click outside. So if I hit escape boom, I’m out if I’m back in, I double Click in if I double click outside, I’m out two different ways to get in and out of the isolation mode. The next selection tool is the direct selection tool That’s hot ta, and with this, you can select individual objects or anchor points and it sort of ignores the group settings. So if I come in here and just click on this, I’m not going to get the full group. I’m not even going to get the group within the group because this barn is all grouped together. But all I’ve selected when I click Here Is the inside of that barn. See how that looks And if I zoom in real quick, you’ll also see that. I can click and drag over anchor points or click directly on them, – like this and just have that anchor point selected. Now, if I go to move this, it’s only gonna move that anchor point, but it’s gonna leave everything inside of the group intact, so that later on, I go back to my regular selection tool and I can still group select and move the group without altering what is grouped so direct selection tool is very handy again You can. You can select multiple anchor points. You don’t have to just select one. I could click here and then hold shift and click and drag another anchor point. So I can get these two and then move them around, however. I want to see how that works now. Obviously this looks ugly, but just to give you an idea of how you can select things and move them around within a group. If you still want to keep this all group together, but want to make some adjustments inside, so maybe. I want to close this door. I might click and drag these two points here and move that over and I might click and drag these two points over here and move them over and all of a sudden. The door is closed right now. There are two still two parts here and I could group those together, but you get the idea. It’s basically just editing within a group now. The other one. If you click and drag on direct selection tool, you will get group selection tool this one. I don’t really use very often because it ends up being very similar to going into isolation mode with the regular selection tool. But I’ll show you what it does. If you click on an object that’s grouped. It will give you that object first. And then if you click again, it’s going to give you the next group tear that it’s a part of so if I click again, it should select the entire red barn boom. There it goes if I click inside of here again, It’s going to select the Red Barn, Plus the fencing, so there were three groups in here or really just two, but it starts off selecting just this object inside of the group. I’ll do it again, so just select the object. Click again. I’m selecting the group that the the first tier group that this object is a part of which is the Red Barn. Click again and I’m selecting the other object group that it’s a part of which is this whole thing? The barn, plus the fencing on the side again. I don’t use it very often because I find that just using the selection tool and double clicking on my object’s works just as well when I’m editing, so I just don’t ever use the group selection tool, but you know whatever works for you is what’s gonna be best and depending on what you’re working on. Maybe that’s the right tool for the job. I just find that in what I do in the day in and day out stuff. It’s not useful for me, so I I don’t mess with it. The next tool is going to be the Magic Wand tool. The hotkey for that is y, and this is going to select anything that is similarly colored to whatever you click on. So if I click here, it’s gonna get all of the red boom, everything the thread is selected. If I click over here, it’s gonna get everything that’s black that is selected and let me just kind of click and drag that over so you can see it selected all the black now. Why did it not select these two things because they are probably a slightly different version of black. And if I go look up at my color palette here, This is a hundred percent black and this is 100 percent black, but it’s only set up to grayscale. It’s not set up for CMYK, so it’s gonna not select it because of that, even though technically, it’s the same color, so I’m glad that happened because that just shows you. Sometimes it’s difficult to know, especially on black if you’re selecting all the same thing, but anyway, back to the Magic Wand Tool Hotkey, why click on light colors and it’s going to. It’s going to pick those up for you. See so anyway, another way you might do, this is. I don’t use the Magic Wand Tool that often either because of this, you can with the regular selection tool. Click on something that’s colored, you know? If you want to grab all the green, let’s just grab this green over here and then come up here to select and do same and you can do all of these different settings here so either same often. I use fill color or fill and stroke if there’s a specific stroke. Color say that was green with, like a pink stroke on it or something opacity is if you’ve changed the opacity. Everything here is a hundred percent, but it’s possible you might have some things that are too lower opacity, and you only want to grab those things, so this is a very helpful selection tool. That’s not over here on the on the toolbar itself, but I find myself going in here More often because of especially for these fill and fill strokes. I find that I only want to get change or select the things that are that have a specific fill or specific stroke, and I just find it easier to click up here than it is to to change my tool on this side. So, you know, do whatever works best for you again. If you like using the magic wand, go for the Magic Wand, But if you’d prefer to come up here and do this, you know, try it and see what works better for you. And what shaves off the most time because that’s that’s what’s really important here. The last one we’re going to talk about is the lasso tool. This one is also one that I just don’t use very often. I find that this is maybe a little bit more like something You might use in Adobe Photoshop, But because illustrator is largely vector oriented, and that’s. Usually all you’re gonna have in here. I find that the lasso tool just isn’t really all that helpful unless you’re gonna deal with something that’s got a lot of points, so this graphic here of the tree has quite a lot of points to it, and if I use the lasso tool and just kind of click and drag and make a circle, you’ll see that all these little anchor points got selected, right so the ones that are white, our anchor points that exist that I did not select and the ones that are filled in with blue. Are the ones that I did. Select so if while those are selected, I click on the direct selection tool. Now I can click and drag and just move those so you can see how that could be kind of handy and useful to have this lasso tool. I just find that I can do all of that pretty easily with the direct selection tool, just kind of clicking shift and adding to my selection that way it works about the same and has a little bit higher level of precision. I just don’t use these the lasso tool because it’s all based on the study. Nosov your hand and I’m I’m honestly not that steady so but anyway, that’s how it works and that is everything I wanted to go over. As far as selections are concerned. Please, like this video. Subscribe to this channel as I’m going to be putting out more in this tool bar series. I hope to be putting out several videos. We’re gonna go over all of these in details. So you know what each one of them does, and hopefully you’re learning something. If you have any questions, leave those down below in the comment section and I will see you guys. The next video. All right, peace out.