Using the Shape tools

To help us get more familiar with the tools in Illustrator, we'll be creating a simple landscape scene using the shape tools. It will include a sun, a little boat on a pond, and a sky that appears to fade to white in the distance. It will look something like the following illustration:

An important part of working with Illustrator is understanding how to use the shape tools. Basic shapes, such as rectangles, ellipses, and polygons, are available as shape tools — however, almost any shape we need can be made by combining and altering these basic shapes. As we work on the landscape drawing, we'll get comfortable with the Illustrator interface and become more familiar with how the different shape tools work.

Before we go much further, let's learn more about the anatomy of a shape.

Exploring the elements of a shape

Knowing the individual parts of a shape — and the terms used to refer to those parts — is important when working with shapes in Illustrator.

Every object in Illustrator is defined by a path, which is made up of one or more line segments connected by anchor points. It might help to think of paths and anchor points like a "connect the dots" puzzle — the anchor points are the individual dots we want to connect, and the path is the line connecting those dots. This concept is illustrated in the following image:

As we can see, the rectangle in the image has four anchor points — one at each corner — and a single path that connects the four anchor points together.

Right now, the rectangle in the previous example is only visible because it is selected. If we deselect it, the rectangle will seem to disappear. To make a path visible, we need to add color to either the outline of the path, known as the stroke, the inside of the path, known as the fill, or to both the stroke and the fill. Following is the same rectangle we saw previously, this time with a green stroke and blue fill color applied to it:

Now that we know more about the building blocks of shapes in Illustrator, let's create a shape and add color to it.

Creating a rectangle with the Rectangle tool

To start the landscape drawing, we'll add a rectangle that will serve as the ground in our image. To create a rectangle, all we need to do is activate the Rectangle tool, then press and drag on the artboard to create a rectangle of any size we need.

When pressing and dragging to draw a shape, you'll see a tooltip appear next to your cursor, like we see in the following image:

This tooltip indicates the width and height of the object being drawn, and can be helpful when trying to make a shape of a specific size.. The values displayed will change as you move your mouse.

Let's draw a rectangle now. We'll make use of the rulers to help us position our rectangle.

We now have a rectangle on our artboard. Let's move on to changing the rectangle's color.

Adding color to a shape's fill and stroke

As you might remember from the example landscape image, the rectangle representing the ground is green to represent grass. However, the rectangle we just drew is white with a black border. We'll need to adjust the shape's stroke and fill colors to fix this. The Swatches panel will help us with this task:

In the Swatches panel, we have a number of predefined color swatches to choose from that we can use in our artwork. We can also add our own colors to the Swatches panel, and save them for later use.

The Fill and Stroke swatches are visible in the upper left corner of the Swatches panel — these swatches are also present in the Tools panel, and allow us to modify the colors applied to the border and inside of our shape. We can also indicate that we don't want to use any color for the stroke or fill by choosing the None swatch, which looks like a white square with a red slash through it. This removes the color from the fill or stroke entirely.

In order to change a shape's stroke and fill, we first need to make sure the shape is selected. Once selected, we can alter the colors of a shape by working with the Fill and Stroke swatches. Whichever swatch is in front indicates what part of the shape we're working with. It's a good idea to check which part of the shape you're working with before applying color to the shape.

NOTE: If a shape has no fill color, Illustrator treats the shape as if there's nothing inside of it, which can make selecting or moving the shape tricky. In order to select or move a shape that has no fill color, you'll need to click on the shape's stroke.

Let's select the rectangle, then change the fill color to green and remove the stroke color.

NOTE: Depending on what version of Illustrator you're using, the Contextual Task Bar may have appeared after selecting the rectangle in step 1. To stop the task bar from appearing when selecting objects, if desired, on the right side of the bar, Click , Click .

The rectangle should now be a shade of green with no outside border, similar to the following image:

We can also set the fill and stroke colors for a shape before creating it — we'll see how to do this as we create the pond.

Using the Ellipse tool to create a pond

The Ellipse tool allows us to make simple circular or oval shapes. We'll use this tool to create a pond in our landscape scene.

Holding down the Shift key will keep the ellipse perfectly proportional while drawing. This will result in a perfect circle. This technique works for other shape tools that we will work with throughout the workshop, and we'll use this keyboard modifier a number of times as we work on our artwork today.

We might not want our pond to be a perfect circle, however. To help create a more realistic pond, we will create several overlapping ovals and circles to make a more natural looking pond.

Before we start making the pond, let's change the fill color to a shade of blue — after setting the fill color, any new shapes we make will automatically be filled with the color we've selected. Once we've done that, we'll build our pond by drawing ovals and circles on the green rectangle.

At this point, our landscape drawing should look similar to the following:

Before we move on, let's save the file.