Transcript:
Drawing symmetrical shapes is another tricky thing in Illustrator. But let me give you two quick techniques to do that. First of all, the pen tool can be very useful. You might think that this heart shape needs quite a lot of anchor points to do. I can do it in two anchor points and I’m not trying to show off. I’m just trying to tell you that. If you learn how to work with this, then you can do these things easily. So for example, here I would start by just setting up my handle point. Click and dragging the first anchor point. Hold down the Alt key. You can already set up that v-shape then go just below the other anchor point, draw one side of your heart and hold down the Alt key again to split the bottom handle, and then you click and drag on the top and look at that with two anchor points. We drew the heart and it looks quite nice as well, it’s symmetrical because I took care of making these handles symmetrical, but that’s obviously something that you don’t really have to learn to do because again This is all about using the Pen Tool, but what if you are not that good at with the Pen Tool? You can still do things perfectly symmetrical. You just have to do the following thing. This is one method that I like, but I will show you another one as well, which might be even more effective, so I will just click at the bottom point or than shifty. This is crucial you. Have you want to make sure that line is straight and holding down the shift-key? Make sure that it is now. I’m just going to change the color again. Maybe to something very different for our stroke. Maybe a bright blue will do, and I will also make sure using the appearance panel, so we can see what I’m drawing, so that’s my line and then now I do it slightly differently. I will continue this line here, and then I will just click and drag. Actually, it’s just hold and click and drag out the handle like that. Then come to the other side that looks already better. Then we can finish off and click and drag and then just just holding down the command key. I adjust it slightly. Let’s say that’s the hard shape that we wanted. Pressing shift X can swap quickly the stroke and fill color on a selected object, so I started off using for the stroke now becomes the Fill and once you have one side and you make sure that the center point is completely vertical, That’s when you use the Reflect Tool, which is O the shortcut you click in a center point. You can click anywhere on the symmetry line, and then you click and drag and hold down alt and shift or option shift and that’s going to keep it completely symmetrical and duplicate. Alt to duplicate Shift is to keep it symmetrical. Yeah, my heart is not as much nice as I did. In the beginning, with just 2 anchor points, but once you have two halves, it’s still not joined together. So what you want to do at this point? Having the two selected you use the Shape Builder. People who has been using Illustrator for a long time probably would use Pathfinder, which is great as well, but Shape Builder is even faster. That’s the tool here in the Toolbar, You select both sides and just drew over the two, and then it becomes one shape. All right, now, another technique would be if you want to see automatically while you are drawing the other side, so it’s like a simultaneous symmetrical drawing. This is slightly more tricky here. What you need to do first of all is to draw a straight line again. You can even use the line tool for this. You just draw a straight line. And once that line is placed down, you put it in a Group, that’s. When you need the layers to make sure that what you are doing is going to be set up correctly. So Cmd+G or Ctrl+G is going to make a group from that line notice. I don’t even have any colors on that line. It doesn’t need any colors. You will see why. Once it’s in the group, that’s all we needed, and then you set up an effect. Illustrator has all these effects and they can be applied as live effects, which is amazing again makes it possible to make changes to them, so they are non-destructive. So I go through the effect menu and I go to Distort and Transform and I choose Transform. It is a very powerful effect. If you learn one effect in Illustrator, this should be the one because with this, you can do so many different things what I will do here is. I want to reflect the x-axi’s so I want to reflect that way. I would like to make a copy so not just simply reflect what I’m drawing, but I want to copy it already, and then I can decide whether I want to draw on the left side or on the right side of my symmetry. I will draw on the left side, so I set up my reference point to be on the right side that makes the center of symmetry this empty line that we created, that’s. All you needed to set up. So reflect X Copy 1 and set that point up there. That’s all you need once you click, OK? This effect is set up on this group. The appearance panel tells me that the effect is here. And if I click on this, I can always make changes to it. And if I come up here, you can also see that whenever you apply an effect to an object, illustrator will fill in the circle, meaning that it has something more than just a simple. Stroke and Fill so the appearance. Remember, don’t forget. The appearance is a very important thing that we use. So once you have that ready, you go into the group itself and you start drawing. So I’m going to use the Pen Tool now and what I will do is I will set it up just so we can see it into a stronger color, something like that, and I will start drawing from the bottom holding down SHIFT. I can draw straight lines just like that. Now when I go in here, I can see already that I made a mistake because I didn’t lock that line there. That’s also something that you should do before you do anything else. You lock that one single line that doesn’t have any color at the moment so locking it makes sure that you don’t actually continue drawing that instead, you drawing a separate line and what’s important, and that’s the last steo you see? I started drawing, but I don’t see a reflection of it on the other side. The reason for that is because this path that I’m using has to be placed within the Group. So if I drag this here within the group and I zoom back, see, it’s already there, so that’s all. I needed to do and now if I continue drawing, so whatever I do here. I’m just going to continue using the Pen Tool Whenever I place down a new section. I see it immediately on the other side and I can come up here in the center point. And there you go. We have the symmetrical shape. Just to show you this in action. If I keep drawing the same line, you can see that is all happening simultaneously, and that’s a very effective thing again. If you are drawing anything that needs to be symmetrical. I’m talking about Batman logo, For example, anchors. All kinds of things which can be extremely useful and the good thing is once. You have a group set up like that. You only have to put your line into that group. So this group you do it once. Once it’s set up with the effect and with everything the way I have done it so just to show you if I delete this whole path as long as I draw a new thing and it’s pleasing to that group, I can draw straight away in symmetry.