From the course: Illustrator 2020 One-on-One: Fundamentals

Moving and duplicating objects - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2020 One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Moving and duplicating objects

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- [Instructor] All right, now we need to create these additional lines. These diagonal lines right here. And because they exist at the exact same angles as the lines we've drawn so far, I want to create them by duplicating those lines. Which is something you can do on the fly, using either the black or white arrow tool, or the Move command. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch to the artwork so far. And because I have my white arrow active, I'll just go ahead and click on this line right here, in order to select its segment. And so notice, if I were to turn off the guides layer, that both of the end points are hollow. And that's because neither of them is technically selected at this point in time. If I were to click on this end point right here, it would become solid, thereby indicating that it's selected. All right, now I'll switch the the guides layer. And I want you to note, if I were to just drag this guide to this guide intersection right here, let's say, then I would just go ahead and move that point as we saw before. And I'll press Control Z, or Command Z on the Mac, to undo that change. If I wanted to duplicate this end point, then midway into the drag, I would press and hold the Alt key. And I would keep that key down. That's going to be the Option key on the Mac. Notice that I'm seeing this double arrowhead cursor. It's either going to be black and white, if we have no snapping. If we do have a snap, then both of the arrowheads will be white. At which point, as soon as I release, I duplicate that end point. And any time you duplicate and anchor point inside of Illustrator, you duplicate the neighboring segments as well, which is why I've gone ahead and duplicated the entire line. All right, I'm going to undo that change because I want to show you how the behavior shifts if I switch back to the black arrow tool. Which by the way, I could get by pressing the V key. And so notice my keyboard shortcuts. It's A for arrow, for the white arrow tool, and it's V, which looks like an upside down arrow for the black arrow tool. I'll go ahead and select this guy, and I'll click on the line once again to select the entire thing. And now notice if I drag this end point to this location right here, and I press and hold the Alt key, or the Option key on Mac, I get a double arrowhead cursor. Both are white, because I'm snapping to the guide intersection. And so if I release, this time I've duplicated and moved the entire line as we're seeing here. Now, I want to call your attention to that once again, because I forgot to point out one thing that's very important to this project. I'm going to go ahead and drag that guy all the way over, so that it snaps into alignment with a guide intersection. And I want you to see that dx value. Negative 434. It's negative because I'm moving the line to the left. If I were moving it to the right, it would be positive instead. I'm just going to go ahead and duplicate that line. And now I'm going to get rid of it. Which sounds weird, but you'll see why in just a moment. By pressing the backspace key, or the Delete key on the Mac. You don't want to undo, you just want to get rid of it. We duplicated the line, and we deleted it. And now I'm going to select this guy again, and I'm going to move and duplicate the line by the numbers, by going up to the object menu, choosing transform, and then choosing move. Which has a keyboard shortcut, but I'm not recommending you memorize it because you don't need it, as I'll show you in just a moment. Anyway, I'll go ahead and choose that command and it brings up the move dialogue box as we're seeing right here. And notice it recorded my last move. If I had undid that last move, then I would see a different value here. But because I just got rid of the line after duplicating it, I'm seeing a record of that last movement. And so here's the trick. What I want to do, is actually create five lines all together, moving my way over to this position. I'm going to click after this horizontal value, and I'm going to enter "slash", which means divide, "5". So, -434 divided by 5. Then when I press the Tab key, Illustrator's going to do the math for me. I don't have to worry about it. I don't care that it's -86.8 it just happens to be that way. Now if I were to click "OK", I would just go ahead and move that line. I want to duplicate it, however. So I'll go ahead and click on the "Copy" button. And we now have a second version of that line. All right why is it that I don't think you need to memorize that keyboard shortcut? Because you can get to the move tool anytime the black or white arrow tool is selected. Either by double-clicking on a tools icon. Just like-so. Or, when the tool is active you can just press the enter key here on a PC or the return key on the Mac. And it will not only bring up the move dialogue box, but it records your last movement as well. As which point, I'll just go ahead and click "Copy" again, in order to create another copy of that line. But it gets better. Notice another way to repeat that last transformation, which is what this is, is to go up to the Object menu, choose "Transform", notice there are five varieties of transformation in all, Move, Rotate, Reflect, which is flipping, Scale and Shear, which is skewing, and then we also have this guy right here. Transform again, which has a keyboard shortcut that I do recommend you memorize, of Control D, here on a PC, or Command D on the Mac. What in the world is D doing there? It stands for duplicate. And we're duplicating not only the line, but also the most recent transformation. And notice that creates another copy, 86.8 points to the left. All right, I want to do that again a couple of times, actually, so I'll press Control or Command D two times in a row. Again, Control or Command D for duplicate. All right, now I want to do the same thing for this line, So I want to duplicate it to the right, and I'll go ahead and click on it, to select it with a black arrow tool, and then I'll press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac to bring up the move dialogue box. Obviously, I'm moving this guy in the wrong direction and that's because my horizontal value is negative. If I change it to positive, just by getting rid of the minus sign, then I'm moving the line to the right. A negative horizontal value moves things to the left, a positive horizontal value moves things to the right. Now you may then wonder what's up with the vertical value. Surely a positive value such as 50, is going to move the line upward. In fact, it moves the line downward. And that's because we're moving away from the zero-zero point, which you have to remember, is by default in the top left corner of an art board. It's a little different than it is in other software. If you want to move something up, then you enter a negative vertical value. It's a little confusing, but you'll get used to it. Anyway, I'm going to change the vertical value to zero, like so. We want the same horizontal value that we've been using so far. Actually, let's get rid of that 001 nonsense. And just stick with 86.8, at which point I'll click the "Copy" button in order to create a copy of the line, and then I'll press Control D, or Command D on the Mac, a total of four times, in order to create four more duplicates of that line. And that's how you move and duplicate any object inside Illustrator, using either the black or white arrow tool, or the Move command. Which you can get when one of the arrow tools is selected, just by tapping the Enter key on the PC, or the Return key on the Mac.

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