Interface / The Tools Panel
Subtitles of the Movie
The Tools panel is where you're going to access the tools that you'll be working with while you're creating your artwork in Illustrator. And the tools are broken off into distinct little chunks, or groups, and as you see up here we have these little boxes. And they are distinguishable because you see at the end they have a divider before the next set begins. Now let's start off with this section here. This is our Selection Tools group, and we're able to select objects with it, move objects with these tools, and decide what objects we want to effect. For example, if I want to change the color of this elf's cloak, I have to click on the cloak first. And using one of the selection tools to do that, then I can change the color. If you don't select things, you won't be able to tell the computer what it is you're trying to change. Now we also have some other tools in the Tools group, and by the way I will cover many of these tools in upcoming lessons. But I just want to let you know what these groups will do for you. We have the next set down from the selection tools, and these are going to be our drawing tools. So we have our Pen, we have our Type tool, we have our Line Segment tool, we also have Shapes, and our Pencil and Brush. Down from this section of course we have our Type tools which, even though they're in the same group as the drawing tool, if you hold the mouse down you see that we have some tools in here. So this guy is a secret group that is living in another group under cover. We also have a section of Painting tools, which once again is still attached to this same group here. So we have our Paint Brush tool, and it also jumps down a little bit to this section here where we have our Mesh tool and our Gradient tool. Also our Eye Dropper tool so we can choose colors. And other tools as well, such as the Live Paint Bucket which you'll see right here. Very cool tool. Now of course I did mention that we have these dividers, but hey there are no rules even in the structure of this thing. So there are some distinct groups, and then there are groups that are all over the place. We also have some tools known as reshaping tools. And we have our Rotation tool, we have our Scaling tools, we also have other tools that will allow us to reflect things, to sheer things, and to also reshape things as well. So that's what the reshaping group will do for you, as well as give you access to the Warp tool. And when you hold your mouse down you see that we have the Twirl tool, Pucker, and all kinds of other cool tools that help you to reshape your objects. We also have tools that will allow you to create symbols which is located right here with this little paint can or spray can. We have all kinds of shape tools, and there are simple tools available. We also have tools that will allow you to create graphs. Now I know that doesn't sound like an Illustrator kind of thing to do. It sounds more like a Microsoft Office kind of thing. But still, graphs are able to be created in Illustrator quite easily using the graph tools, and you can create everything from a regular stacked column all the way to pie charts. We also have tools that allow you to slice, cut, and crop, and they're located right here. And last but not least, we have tools that allow you to erase things, which you see with the Eraser tool. We have scissors and the Knife tool. I guess we could call this section the surgery section. And last but not least, the moving tools, so we can move things with the Hand tool, and we can zoom in and out with the Zoom tool. So that covers, in a nutshell, the Tools panel and the tools that you'll be using in Adobe Illustrator CS3.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Illustrator CS3 |
| Author: | Dwayne Ferguson |
| SKU: | 33792 |
| ISBN: | 1-934743-06-2 |
| Release Date: | 2007-09-19 |
| Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 126 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | For Online University members only |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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