Each week you will need to respond to two questions posted. Your response should be a minimum of 300 words for both questions. You should also include at least one response to your fellow students. The responses are a requirement for participation part of your grade.
Question 01 –
How can you use the Shape Builder Tool to eliminate areas you don’t want?
Question 02 –
What other Tool can work like the Shape Builder Tool?
Q1: You can use the shape builder tool to eliminate areas you don’t want in a design. Two or more shapes have to be overlapping, and you must select them with the shape builder tool. By holding the Alt key, the cursor changes to have a minus sign next to it, and clicking on parts you don’t want deletes them. If you’d want those shapes to combine, you simply click and drag on all of them to connect them with the shape builder tool. The keyboard shortcut for the shape builder tool is Shift+M, which comes in handy when you’re creating shapes and don’t want to click it from the toolbar constantly.
Q2: Something else that can work like the shape builder tool is the pathfinder panel. The divide option can split up overlapping shapes, however, you have to select parts you want to delete with the direct selection tool because dividing with the pathfinder panel groups those specific objects. The shape builder tool would be the preferred tool for this job. The minus front option instantly deletes shapes, but certain requirements have to be met, such as one shape clearly overlapping with another with no intersections. The shape builder tool wouldn’t really work here, so the pathfinder panel should be used. You can also unite shapes using this panel, which combines multiple shapes and makes them into one with the click of a button, instead of clicking and dragging with the shape builder tool. The shape builder tool or the pathfinder panel could be used here, but the pathfinder panel is faster as you can just click once. Each method has its own uses and pros and cons, but it’s up to the designer to use each one the way they want to.
Q1: I just want to say that I have learned so much with this class and I definitely feel that my skills in Adobe Illustrator are getting stronger. I never used the shape builder tool until this week’s class with the labs. I really like this tool and I think it’s a huge time saver and a good shortcut tool to use when assembling or creating an object. To eliminate the areas you do not want is by select all the shapes in the area. Once you select all the shapes you will see a grid that appears when you hover over. After that, every little piece should be its own shape. With the selection arrow tool (white arrow) on the right, you will select the pieces that you do not want and delete them. If it is more than one piece, you can hold the shift key and keep selecting the shapes you don’t want, and then delete. Holding the shifting while clicking on the shapes will allow you to select more than one shape.
Q2: A second tool that can be as useful as the shape builder tool is the pathfinder tool. The pathfinder tool allows you to overlap, divide, combine, and move your objects (plus more.) This is a great method to use when you want to overlap objects for example like the HW we did a few weeks ago when we had to create a necklace. To create a chain I used this method. so I can give it more of a 3D-dimensional look. I would create an oval/circle shape and overlap one another with the pathfinder tool and then with the selection tool (white arrow) I would select the shapes that are cut/divided and change the color so it would look like they’re overlapping.
Hello, Jennifer. I like both of your responses to the questions. I’m particularly grateful that the professor showed us how to use the shape builder and pathfinder tools, as they are both quite useful and time-saving tools for our projects. I’ve been utilizing illustrators for about two or three years, but my other professor has never demonstrated how to use them. These are the tools we’re searching for in our projects to help us come up with something unique to show our colleagues.
I agree with what you said about the shape builder tool being a huge time saver. It’s a recent addition to Illustrator and great for when you don’t feel like messing around with the pathfinder panel. However, I do still the pathfinder panel useful in certain situations, especially when creating specific shapes.