From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

821 Positioning the tips of your arrows

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

821 Positioning the tips of your arrows

- [Instructor] All right, so far the tip of my arrow is pretty darn stubby, which is why in this movie, I'm going to show you how to make it look exactly right and then we'll go ahead and repeat the arrow and turn it into a tile pattern. And so, the first thing you want to do here inside Illustrator is grab the line segment tool and then go ahead and click at this location right here. So, the bottom right corner of the existing arrow. And that's going to bring up this dialogue box. We want the length to be two hundred points this time around and if you may recall, we were rotating all of these objects 60 degrees. So, I'll go ahead and enter 60 degrees as the angle. But I actually want the angle to be two times that because, notice this line right here is 60 degrees and so this one along this edge, the edge of the orange shape, must be twice that, so I'll enter asterisk two after the 60 and then press the Tab key. That gets us 120, at which point I'll click Okay and we get this line right here. Now, I'll press the V key in order to switch back to my black arrow tool up here at the top of the toolbox and I'll go ahead and drag this path outline by its top point and I'll press the Shift key as I drag until it snaps into alignment with the vertical guideline, at which point I will release. And notice, if your Smart Guides are turned on, you'll see a heads up display. You should see a dX value of negative 50 points and a dY value of zero points, at which point, go ahead and release. All right, now I want to turn this guy into a custom guide and so, I'll drag this purple square over here in the far right side of the Layers panel down to the guides layer so that it becomes a blue square and that will move that selected line to that layer. And now, I'll go up to the View menu, choose Guides way down here at the bottom and choose Make Guides and that will turn that guide into a snapping guideline, at which point, you want to press the A key to switch to the white arrow tool and then click on this anchor point right here and drag it until it snaps into alignment with the intersection of the vertical guide and that custom guideline that you just created and you will have the arrow of your dreams. All right, now press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool and go ahead and click on the path to select the entire path outline. And with the Fill active here inside the Swatches panel, you want to assign a color that's complimentary to both of the neighboring shapes, which happens to be this guy, color five. So, I'll go and fill the shape with that color and then I'll grab my rotate tool, which you can get by pressing the R key and I'll Alt or Option click at the intersection of those two guidelines right there. I'll make sure my angle value's set to 60 degrees and if the preview's turned on, I can actually see it occur on screen, at which point, I'll click the Copy button in order to duplicate that path outline and then I'll change the fill to color six. All right, now go ahead and rotate and duplicate that arrow again by pressing Control D or Command D on the Mac. We've run out of colors, so we need to cycle back around to color one and then I'll press Control or Command D again and select color two. Control or Command D a third time and select color three and then one more Control or Command D followed by changing the fill color to color four. All right, now we need to convert this guy to a hex pattern and I'm going to use a hex pattern because after all, the points of the arrows describe a hexagon. But first, I need to find out how big that hex is by selecting the Polygon Tool from the shape tool fly out menu and then you definitely want your Smart Guides to be turned on here under the View menu, at which point, drag from the intersection of those two guidelines straight down like so. And you'll see the size of the hexagon and by the way, if it's not a hexagon for some reason, if it's, say a pentagon instead, then use the Up and Down arrow keys to change the number of sides. Anyway, I'm looking for six sides and so I'll go ahead and snap to this location. Notice in the heads up display that the width value's 450 points, so that's pretty easy to remember. The height is 519.62. So let's go ahead and fill in this information right now. I'll switch to the type tool, which you can get by pressing the T key and I'll change the width value to 450 and I'll change the height value here to 519.62 and then, I'll go ahead and select that value by dragging over it and I'll copy it by pressing Control C or Command C on the Mac and then, I'll press the Escape key to accept my changes. All right, I don't want this big hexagon at this location, so I'll select it and I'll drag it down the list to the guides layer, once again. And then I'll convert it to a guide by going into the View menu, choosing Guides and choosing Make Guides and we end up with this custom guideline right here. All right, now you want to go ahead and turn off the guides layer for the moment and then press Control A or Command A on the Mac in order to select all the visible objects and then go to the Object menu, choose Pattern and choose Make. And that will take you into the pattern editing mode. I'll go ahead and select the name right there, just by clicking on the word Name in the Pattern Options panel and I'll go ahead and call this guy Isometric arrows, because, after all, that's what they are. And I'll change the tile type from Grid to Hex by Row, the one that's pointing at the top and the bottom. Notice that? And that's because that's how our arrows are. Now, Illustrator almost automatically sizes things properly, but it takes into consideration the thickness of the strokes. That's not what we want. We want the strokes to overlap. So, I'll take this width value down to 450 points and by the way, if these values are not available to you, then turn off this checkbox Size Tile to Art and then go ahead and select the height value and just press Control V or Command V on the Mac in order to paste that value you just copied and then press the Tab key and you'll see that everything comes together, at which point, go ahead and click the Done button in order to create that pattern and you will see a new pattern swatch here inside the Swatches panel. All right, now let's deploy the pattern by first zooming out and then I'll create a new layer by dropping down to the little page icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and Alt or Option clicking on it. That'll force the display of the Layer Options dialogue box, at which point, I'll call this guy pattern. And I don't care much about the color, I just want it to be different, so I'm going to choose lavender and I'll click Okay. And then, I'll bring up my same tool fly out menu and select the Rectangle Tool and I'll go ahead and drag from one corner of this red bleed boundary to the other corner, like so. That's going to give me a stroke. I don't want a stroke, so I'll change that to none by clicking on that second swatch over here in the far left side of the control panel. And then I'll click on the first swatch right there and I'll change it to Isometric arrows in order to fill that rectangle like so. Now, that's going to look terrible because we have all kinds of gaps going on. And to make things look better, I'll go ahead and turn off this layer right here. New arrows. So that we're not seeing it in the background and that looks a heck of a lot better. Now, it doesn't look best, by the way, because we've still got a bunch of gaps between the arrows and that, friends, is an issue that we are going to resolve next week.

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