Chapter 7: Scale, Skew, and Rotate


Much of the power of Illustrator is expressed in the ability to stretch, shrink, skew, and rotate objects without losing any image quality. Since Illustrator is such a powerful tool for distorting objects, there are many tool options for resizing and reshaping. Just as people living in snowbound areas of the planet have developed a vocabulary to cover every shade of white, Illustrator offers multiple options for sizing, reshaping, rotating, and flipping objects or groups of objects.

You can transform a simple drawing in an infinite number of ways by using Illustrator s escalating set of transforming tools. You can apply these tools to single objects, sets of selected objects, or grouped objects.

Get Ready to Size , Scale, and Rotate

You can elect to display bounding boxes on your artboard , which provide convenient anchor points around selected objects for sizing, mirroring, or rotation. For basic resizing or rotating, the Free Transform tool usually does the trick. For more precise sizing or rotation, the Scale and Rotate tools allow you to assign exact size changes and rotation angles. Further, they allow you to select anchor points that stay in one place as you interactively resize or rotate an object.

The more esoteric Reflect, Shear, and Reshape tools provide more options for distorting selected objects. In this chapter, you ll examine and learn to use each of these resizing and reshaping tools.

Group Objects First

Before you begin to modify objects, it will be helpful to understand how objects can be grouped together and then moved or transformed together. To group objects, first select them using a selection tool (such as the  Selection tool or the Lasso tool). Then choose Object Group, as shown in Figure 7-1.

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Figure 7-1: Grouping selected objects

Once objects are grouped, you can select the entire group by clicking within it with the Selection tool. With the entire set of grouped objects selected, you apply fill or stroke changes to the entire group. In a similar way, the transforming tools covered in the rest of this chapter (such as those that resize or rotate an object) generally apply to the whole selected group of objects.

Select Within a Group

If you want to change just one object within a group, you can ungroup the objects and then select an individual object within the group. That can get tedious , however, especially if you re frequently switching back and forth between changes to a bunch of grouped objects and changes to a single object (or a few objects) within the group.

The solution to this problem is to use the Group Selection tool found in the Direct Selection tool tearoff. The Group Selection tool allows you to select any object(s) within a group. So, for example, if you wanted to change the fill color of just the spots on a lemon, you could use the Group Selection tool, hold down SHIFT , and click on the spots, as shown in Figure 7-2. Holding down the SHIFT key allows you to use the tool to select several objects.


Figure 7-2: Selecting within a group with the Group Selection tool

To more or less permanently ungroup a set of objects, select the group and choose Object Ungroup (or use the shortcut keys COMMAND-SHIFT-G [ CTRL-SHIFT-G ]). Groups can themselves be grouped again.

Note  

The keyboard shortcut for grouping is command-g ( ctrl-g ).

Tip  

If you're going to get into multiple levels of grouping, you'll probably be better served by organizing collections of objects into more powerful layers . You will learn to do that in Chapter 20.

An alternative way to select several objects is to hold down SHIFT while clicking with the Selection tool. Be aware that each level of grouping has to be ungrouped in turn . So if you ve grouped a group within a group, you ll have to choose Object Ungroup more than once to ungroup all the objects.




How to Do Everything with Illustrator CS
How to Do Everything with Adobe Illustrator CS
ISBN: 0072230924
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 175
Authors: David Karlins

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