Chapter 5: Work with Shapes

Overview

Many complex illustrations start out with, and are built on, basic shapes. Experienced Illustrator artists stretch, fill, and add effects to simple shapes such as ovals, rectangles, and stars to create projects. This chapter will show you how to create and combine shapes.

In this chapter, you ll also explore Illustrator s powerful set of Pathfinder tools . These tools allow you to create any possible interaction between overlapping shapes. You ll see how you can combine, split apart, merge, or break up shapes using these tools.

How useful are the modest shape tools? The illustration in Figure 5-1 is 95 percent shapes, altered in some cases with rotating tools (covered in Chapter 7), and tweaked with just a bit of gradient fill (covered in Chapter 17).

Figure 5-1: Look closely ”the bulk of this illustration is composed of stars and other shapes.