Pasting one shape inside another

In this movie we're going to take these concentric rings, and we're going to paste them inside the heart shape. I've saved my progress as The target.ai, and I'm going to switch to the Black Arrow tool, which I can get by pressing the V key, and then I'll go ahead and click on any of the rings to select all of them. Now let's go up to the Edit menu and choose the Cut command, or you can press Ctrl+X, or Command+X on the Mac. Now I'll go ahead and click on the heart to select it. What we're going to be creating here is a mask, so in another words, the heart will be masking the rings, and we do that by forcing the rings inside the heart.

So if you drop down to the bottom of the toolbox, you'll notice these icons that say draw Something. So we've got Draw Normal, which is the way things are setup normally inside of the software, and the idea is you just go ahead and draw one shape on top of the one before, so each path is stacked on the next one. If you want to change that so you draw a shape behind the active shape, then you turn on Draw Behind, and then if you want to put one shape inside of another, you switch to Draw Inside, and you can draw shapes directly inside each other if you want to, or you can paste them.

Notice that you can switch between these modes by pressing Shift+D, the D being for Draw of course, but I'm just going to go ahead and click on Drawn Inside in order to make it active, and you can see that now we have these dashed corners rounding the shape. Now all you need to do is go up to the Edit menu and choose Paste in Place and that goes ahead and puts the rings inside the heart. Now I want to show you what's going on over here inside the Layers panel and if you can't see the Layers panel, you go up to the Window menu and choose the layers Command, you also have keyboard shortcut of F7.

Notice that each one of these layers here has a little triangle in front of it and if you click on that triangle, you'll expand the contents of the layer, because the angle of the triangle changes, some folks say that you're twirling open the layer. I'm going to expand my Layers panel a little bit. Directly below you can see that we have this thing called a clip group, which is actually short for clipping group, for what that's worth, and you can twirl it open as well, and it contains the path outline, which is the mask, by the way, and the target inside of it, which is a group.

And we can go ahead and twirl that item open as well if we want to see the contents of the group. Actually, we don't really need a group for single item like this so you can just drag the item out of the group, like so, by dragging it upward just a little bit of housekeeping, you don't have to do, because the group is not hurting anything. But the point I'm kind of trying to make here is that the Layers panel inside of Illustrator is amazingly powerful, you can see every single item in your entire Illustration, and you can name the items too, like if I were to double-click on the existing name.

Notice it doesn't bring up a dialog box like it has in the past, we have direct access to the name, and I'm going go ahead and call this guy target, and then I'll double-click at the name of the heart above, and I'll go ahead and call it outline, and then I'll double-click on clip group here, and I'll just call it heart, and so you have this amazing level of controls if you want to organize your artwork. Now you may look at this and think, well, that's for people who have a great time organizing their sock drawer or something like that, but it actually can be very useful, especially if you're sharing files with other people, if the files are sufficiently complicated, they'll really be glad that you took the time to name a few things, and it's often times very helpful for your own purposes.

If you find yourself working in an Illustration you created a couple of years ago, you too will be grateful that you took the time to name a few things. All right, now I'm just going to click off the object in order to deselect it, and I'll switch back to the Draw Normal mode and the result is a target successfully pasted inside the heart. In the next movie, we're going to begin work on the arrow.