Join Deke McClelland for an in-depth discussion in this video Introducing the four shape modes, part of Illustrator CC 2017 One-on-One Advanced.
- [Voiceover] In this movie, I'll show you how to work with the first four Pathfinder operations, which are also known as the shape modes. And they include Unite, Minus Front, Intersect and Exclude. So, the first thing I'll do is go up here to the window menu and choose the pathfinder command to bring up the pathfinder panel And because we are going to be working with it an awful lot over the course of this chapter, I'm going to go ahead and drag this entire panel group, and drop it above the layers panel. Now notice that the pathfinders are divided into two groups of icons, the shape modes, which include those guys I was just telling you about, Unite, Minus Front, Intersect, and Exclude.
And then we have the other six icons, beginning with Divide, down here below. All right, now notice for the most part, I'll be demonstrating how these operations work by combining a rectangle along with this green ring shape. And as you may recall from the fundamentals course, this is what's known as a compound path, because, after all, we have one sub path cutting a hole in another. And just to refresh your memory, you create a compound path by selecting the paths that you are interested in combining.
And in my case, it's these two circles right here. So, I'll just go ahead and partially marquee them with a black arrow tool. And then you go up to the object menu, drop all the way down to compound path, and choose make. And we get one path cutting a hole in the other. However, if you take a look up here, at the far left side of the control panel, in the most recent version of Illustrator, you'll see the word ellipse, and that's because Illustrator's still seeing this as a pair of live shapes. And to see what that means, you can select any one of the live shape tools, including the rectangle tool, or you can select the line segment tool.
At which point, notice I now see all of my widgets, including this guy right here, which allows me to cut the circle into a pie shape. But, because we have a compound path, we have this interesting interaction in the center of this object. Anyway, that's not what I want, so I'll press Control + Z, Command + Z on the Mac, a couple of times in order to put that shape back where it goes. And then I'll switch back to the black arrow tool which I can get by pressing the V key of course, and now I'll Shift + click on the rectangle.
So, as with all Pathfinder operations, you start by selecting the objects you want to modify and then you just click on an icon. And so when you click on the Unite icon, you end up uniting the two shapes like so, and they also adopt the fill and stroke associated with the topmost object, which was that green ring as you may recall. All right, I'm going to go ahead and zoom in here to demonstrate Minus Front, because I want you to see that it has two interesting uses. First of all, you can subtract the top shape from the bottom one, the one in back of it.
And if that top shape exists entirely inside the rear shape, then you're going to create a compound path. Notice, I'll just go ahead and select these two circles and then I'll click on Minus Front, which is the second icon in the first row and then I'll end up with what is obviously a compound path because I can see it through the center of it, but also notice that it's labeled compound path up here in the control panel. And that's because I've broken the line of shapes. So notice that if I switch to the line segment tool, I'm not seeing any of those widgets this time around.
And so that's just something to bear in mind, for better or for worse, and oftentimes it's for better, you break live shapes when you apply Pathfinder operations. All right, I'm going to go ahead and press Control + Z, or Command + Z on the Mac to move that guy back to where he was. And I'll press the V key once again to select my black arrow tool. Notice this time we have three shapes, we've got the green ring, we have this pink rectangle, and then we've got the purple square. I'm gonna partially marquee all three of them and click Minus Front.
Now the thing to know about Minus Front is that it subtracts multiple paths from the rearmost path outline. So only the rearmost path survives. So, notice when I click the second icon, I subtract both the green ring and the pink triangle from that purple rectangle. The result because we actually have two fragmented path outlines, is that Illustrator goes ahead and automatically groups the shapes as witnessed by the word group on the far left side of the control panel. If that's not what you want, then you can ungroup the shapes by going to the object menu and choosing the ungroup command, where you also have that keyboard shortcut that I'll be using in the future of Control + Shift + G here in a PC, or Command + Shift + G on the Mac.
And now we can tell, if I just go ahead and select this guy and drag him around, that we have two independent path outlines. All right, now let's move on to Intersect. This guy is pretty simple to anticipate. All it does is keep the intersecting portions of your selected shapes. So if I go ahead and partially marquee these two guys and then I click on the third icon in the first row, I will keep just the portion of the ring that was overlapping the square. And I end up with a single path outline as indicated by the word path on the far left side of the control panel.
So, pretty simple operation, Exclude is just Intersect's opposite. So, it's gonna keep everything that's not overlapping and get rid of everything that is. But, it's a little more complicated than that. I'll go ahead and marquee these three independent shapes. So instead of that compound path we now have two circles. Wherever the shapes don't intersect they'll be kept. Wherever two shapes intersect, you'll end up with a hole. And where three shapes intersect, then Illustrator will keep that portion of the path outline. So in other words, it's an even, odd thing.
Exclude gets rid of the even intersections and keeps the odd ones. You can see that happen if I go ahead and click on the Exclude icon. Notice it kept the color of the forward shape just as Intersect did. But now we've got a couple of holes here. See what that looks like. I need to ungroup the shapes. Once again we have a group. So I'll just press Control + Shift + G or Command + Shift + G on the Mac. And then I'll click off the shapes and drag them apart. So we've got a total of three path outlines, including this sort of backwards C, this path fragment here, and this former square up left.
All right, I'll just go ahead and zoom out so you can see what we have so far. And that is how you work with the first four path operations, also known as the shape modes, which include Unite, Minus Front, Intersect and Exclude.
Author
Updated
7/3/2017Released
3/9/2017- Auto-tracing in Illustrator
- Upsampling in Photoshop for better results
- Navigating complex path interactions
- Building dynamic compound shapes
- Reviewing additional Pathfinder options
- Reviewing the Layers panel
- Hiding, showing, and creating layers
- Using Appearance panel tricks
- Scaling and rotating
- Aligning and distributing
- Working with custom gradients
- Placing photographs into your artwork
- Recoloring your artwork
- Printing your document
Skill Level Advanced
Duration
Views
Q: This course was updated on 07/03/2017. What changed?
A: The following topic was updated: working with linked images. In addition, a new video was added that covers using the Mask and Crop Image buttons.
Related Courses
-
Deke's Techniques
with Deke McClelland140h 11m Intermediate -
Adobe Pen Tool: Mastery
with Deke McClelland6h 52m Advanced
-
Introduction
-
16. Tracing a Pixel-Based Image
-
Auto-tracing in Illustrator1m 26s
-
Opening an image to embed it4m 43s
-
The advanced tracing options5m 22s
-
-
17. Pathfinder Operations
-
18. Layers and Stacking Order
-
Adjusting the stacking order7m 40s
-
Naming and arranging objects2m 44s
-
19. The Appearance Panel
-
20. Scaling and Rotating
-
Introducing the Scale tool5m 20s
-
Introducing the Rotate tool6m 38s
-
Using the Reflect tool3m 44s
-
Using the Reshape tool8m 46s
-
The Transform Each command6m 16s
-
-
21. Aligning and Distributing
-
Snapping and smart guides3m 32s
-
22. Gradients and the Gradient Tool
-
The joy of custom gradients1m 41s
-
Adjusting color stops5m 50s
-
Creating a custom emoji6m 46s
-
23. Object Blends and Clipping Masks
-
Creating a clipping mask4m 10s
-
Blending between groups9m 4s
-
24. Live Paint and Interwoven Objects
-
Coloring overlapping areas1m 35s
-
Introducing Live Paint7m 13s
-
Modifying Live Paint strokes3m 53s
-
Automatic gap detection7m 52s
-
Merging Live Paint objects5m 39s
-
Sneak peek: Recolor Artwork5m 15s
-
-
25. Placing Photographs
-
Working with linked images5m 24s
-
26. The Color Guide Panel
-
27. Recoloring Your Artwork
-
28. Dynamic Effects
-
Drawing an orthogonal cube4m 25s
-
29. Saving Effects as Graphic Styles
-
Updating graphic styles4m 5s
-
Combining multiple styles6m 50s
-
30. Printing Your Document
-
Exporting color separations6m 16s
-
Conclusion
-
Until next we meet1m 29s
-
- Mark as unwatched
- Mark all as unwatched
Are you sure you want to mark all the videos in this course as unwatched?
This will not affect your course history, your reports, or your certificates of completion for this course.
CancelTake notes with your new membership!
Type in the entry box, then click Enter to save your note.
1:30Press on any video thumbnail to jump immediately to the timecode shown.
Notes are saved with you account but can also be exported as plain text, MS Word, PDF, Google Doc, or Evernote.
Share this video
Embed this video
Video: Introducing the four shape modes