Reflecting across a vertical axis

I've saved my progress as Left half complete.ai found inside the 04_line_art folder. Now what we're going to do is take this left half and flip it to create the right half, because there's no sense in redoing everything we've done. You could draw three more arcs of course and then trouble yourself with having to exactly match the one of left-hand side and then join them all together that is possible, but that would be a lot more work and you wouldn't get as good a result. So frequently inside of Illustrator, you're looking for the shortcut that produces the best results possible.

In our case, flipping is the solution. So I'm going to go ahead and click on this path outlined with a Black Arrow tool in order to select it. Again, what you want to look for when you're trying to select paths. I will click off of here again. You're looking for that little black square next to the arrow cursor. That tells you you're hovering over something that you can select. Click on it and now it's selected. Now then there is a variety of different ways to flip objects inside of Illustrator. For example, I can bring up that Transform panel once again and I could click on this itty-bitty little flyout menu icon and then I could choose Flip Horizontal.

But it'll do this number which doesn't do me any good whatsoever. Now I have a right half of the heart in the wrong location. So, I'll go and then press Ctrl+C, Command+C on a Mac to undo that modification. Instead what you want to do is something that doesn't seem like the right approach. You're going to a select a tool. There's actually a Reflection tool inside of the Illustrator, and that's really unusual. There are very few programs out there with Reflection tools and Illustrator has had one since Illustrator 1.0. You get to it by clicking and holding on the Rotate tool and then choosing the Reflect tool.

Notice it has a keyboard shortcut of O. Now, the letter O doesn't appear anywhere inside Reflect. However, you can remember it because it is the ultimate in symmetrical letters. Its right half is just like his left half and its top half is just like its bottom half. So go ahead and select it. Now what you want to do, and this sounds so weird, but this is like the way you use this tool. There are other ways to do it, but this is the way. You Alt+Click or Option+Click at the location where you want to set the mirror about which you want to reflect the object. So in other words, in our case we want to go ahead and reflect this left half of the heart over on this side so the mirror should be right down at the middle of the heart.

So you can Alt+Click or Option+Click at either this top anchor point or the bottom anchor point. Your choice, they are both located at the same guideline. So I'm going to Alt+Click here or Option+ Click at that location and notice in my case right away Illustrator goes ahead and throws the reflection on the right-hand side of that click point. Now why did I Alt+Click or Option+Click? To bring up this dialog box right here. If you just click or click and drag with the tool, you're going to have to apply the reflection manually and it's kind of bizarre, the way this tool works.

Whereas if you Alt+Click or Option+ Click to bring up the dialog box, it behaves very, very well. So I'm here to tell you as a long-time user of the software, this is what you do with this tool. You get it. You Alt+Click or Option+Click with it to bring up the Reflect dialog box and you get to work. Now you don't say I want to flip something horizontal or I want to flip something Vertical. That would be too easy. Instead, you have to select an axis. In other words, are you going to a flip across the Horizontal axis, which would be a vertical flip or are you going to flip across a Vertical axis, which would be a horizontal flip, or are you going to use an angled axis which takes some thinking in order to figure out.

So, notice that if you choose Horizontal, you're going to get this result here which is pretty obviously wrong, I think. So go with Vertical instead. Basically if you're having prompts figuring out, just try one. If it doesn't work, then try the other. Keep Preview on so you can see what you're doing. Now if you click OK, you're going to flip that half a heart. You don't want to do that. You want to click Copy in order to make a duplicate. So click the Copy button and now you have a whole heart, but notice that we are not joined, so what we're not getting is a nice point at the bottom of the heart.

So I'm going to switch back to my Black Arrow tool and I'm going to marquee these two heart shapes like so, and then I will press Ctrl+J or Command+J on the Mac and I want you to watch something. Actually, I'm going to zoom in here to the bottom of the heart, so you can see this happen. As soon as you press Ctrl+J or Command+ J on the Mac, you're going to fuse these two endpoints into one and you're going to complete the Miter Join. This is known as a Miter Join. You can just think of it as being the point that was missing at the bottom of the heart.

Now we don't have a Miter up here at the top of the heart, and that's because what would happen if you are able to get a Miter Join to draw right here, it would be so deep it would stab all the way through the heart, because of the radical incline at which these two curves are meeting. So there is no point in even trying to pull it off. We're going to leave what's known as a Bevel Join in place there, because we're going to cover it up with a different object. But now we have a beautifully rounded classic heart shape. In the next exercise, we're going to drawn a target inside of it.