The Shape Builder Tool is very powerful and will speed up your workflow substantially. However, I find I can achieve many of the same effects through the magic of the Shape Builder tool. You should now be left with something that looks like this: My drawing abilities using Illustrator’s Pen and Pencil tools leave much to be desired. Delete the remaining segments that are left on the three intersecting link points. Next add a new ellipse that overlaps the outermost links, no fill with a stroke of about 15pt, and expand it’s appearance to fills.įinally use the Shape Builder tool to combine the outer rings into their overlapping segments. I added some colour to better illustrate the interlocking links. Click and drag through each segment separately (as shown above), to make the intertwined links.
#Shape builder tool illustrator plus
Then simply drag the mouse through the outermost edges of each ring to remove and expand the shape’s appearance as shown above.įor the next bit release the Alt key to enable the unite mode, this is the default and creates a red outline over the shapes and has a tiny plus sign next to the cursor. With all of the shapes selected activate the Shape Builder tool (Shift+M) and hold Alt to activate the minus front mode, you can tell you are in this mode by the blue outline that appears over your shape and the tiny minus symbol next to the cursor. Arrange them as shown above and expand their appearance to convert the strokes to fills. I will demonstrate this by making a Celtic knot using only the Shape Builder Tool.įirst create three equal sized ellipses with no fill and a stroke size of 27pt. With this new tool it becomes a breeze to make complex shapes with a few simple clicks. This tutorial is going to go through the four ways in which you can benefit from using this tool, by using basic shapes for ease of understanding what you can achieve. It combines the most widely used Pathfinder commands into one easy to use tool. The shape builder tool is great for designing illustrations or icons that can be created by using various shapes, as it allows you to combine and subtract one shape from another. Adobe obviously picked up on this and created a wonderful new tool, the Shape Builder Tool. Now don’t get me wrong, those are great commands and I still use them quite often today, but you can’t help but feel that they are a little bit clunky to use. All you had at your disposal were the Pathfinder commands: unite, minus front, intersect, exclude, etc. Until Adobe Illustrator CS5 came along, creating complex paths was a bit tedious.
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