Subtitles of the Movie

In Illustrator you'll find the need to select entire objects, groups of objects, and parts of objects. And to do this, you're going to use primarily two tools. The Selection tool and the Direct Selection tool, also known as the black and white arrows. You can access the Selection tool by pressing the keyboard shortcut V, and A for the Direct Selection tool. Let me tell you how the tool works now. With this tool, I can either click on an object to select it, I can hold down the Shift key to select other objects and skip around. I can also click and hold my mouse down and drag out a boundary like so, and let go of the mouse. Then I have the bounding handles here, and my bounding box that tells me that I have everything selected. I can also see that the points in the objects are highlighted, which tell me once again they are selected. Likewise I can use the Direct Selection tool to make more precise selections. For example, parts of objects. Let me demonstrate that down here with these boxes. I'll grab the white arrow, and I will click and hold my mouse down, and drag just to get the top portions of these boxes. Now when I let go, look what happens. You see we have two different types of points. We have white ones here which are hollow, which means they are not selected, and we have the dark ones which are selected. So what can I do with this? Well, I can click on a point, and now since the other ones are also black, or selected, I can move them around as one whole and reshape the entire group. Very handy indeed. What else can I do with this tool? I can reshape things, and I'm going to spend a great deal of time when we get to editing objects using this tool to do that. But very quickly, I will zoom in and I'll grab the Direct Selection tool, click on a point here and move it around. Now you'll notice how I did that. I moved my mouse to the outside of the star like this, and I went like this, guessing that the point for the tip of the star would be right around there. And now I can click and move my mouse. Very handy indeed to do this. You can reshape things, create your own logos, and even change the way text looks. And once again, I'll talk about how to do that more in depth in the text chapter. So once again, these tools will help you to select one object, an entire object, or entire groups of objects. Another reason you might want to do this is to organize your artwork just in case you forgot to do so while you were creating it. For example, let's say that you forgot to put things on layers. So you want to have the blue stars on one layer, you want to have the yellow stars on a layer, and you want to have these boxes on their own layer. These tools can really help you to select the objects you need so that when you want to put them on their own layer, you can do so. So I'll create a layer for this, and I'll grab this little blue box right here and drag it up. And now I've just placed those stars on their own layer. So I can hide the layer, and that's where the stars live now. I'm going to talk much more about layers as well in upcoming lessons. So the Selection tool, once again, the black arrow known as the Selection tool, and the white arrow known as the Direct Selection tool, are the tools you're gonna be coming to again and again to move objects, to select objects, and to reshape objects in Illustrator.