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Now let's take a look at a few practical applications of pathfinder operations
inside Illustrator. I would like you to go ahead and open Ghost robot.ai, found
inside the 13_pathfinder_ops folder and for those of you who were with me in
the Illustrator CS3 One-on-One series, you may be looking at this and thinking,
"hey, that's that exact same Ghost robot.ai file that I have seen in the past."
No it's not. I have modified the color scheme inside of this illustration. I have
changed some of the text around as well but ultimately at it's core, we still
have the very same Ghost robot illustration, all be it differently colored,
as I said, and here remains this amazing work of pathfinder operation madness.
Much of what we are seeing here is hinging on the icons and the options that are
available to us here inside the Pathfinder palette.
So what we have is a magazine cover from the year 2174 and of course, that's
fairly hilarious because the very idea that there will be print publications in
the 2174, I think is absolutely preposterous but still. And it's a combination
of all kinds of live type effects and some transparency effects as well,
all kinds of stuff that we'll seeing in later chapters but the core drawing, as I say,
the objects that make up the robots, are a function ultimately of some of
the geometric shape tools and the pathfinder operations working together.
Notice over here in the Layers palette we have a sequence of layers. I'm going
to go and turn off the Type layer, which contains all those type elements.
Then I'll turn off Pathfinders and I'll turn off Frames in order to reveal this
image layer that I created inside Photoshop and then places inside of my
illustration. If I turn that off, this Backdrop layer right there, you will see
in the background that we have these Ghost vectors right here, which are my
primitive objects that I'll be using in order to build-up the final Ghost robot
and then in back of that is the Ghost template rendered in orange and I'm going
to show you how I created that template in the next exercise, just so that you
have sense of how you can use Photoshop in order to clean up and colorize your
templates and make them as easy as possible to trace here inside of Illustrator.
But if I were to turn Ghost vectors back on for a moment and turn Ghost
template off, like so and then I'm going to go ahead and zoom in on some of
these primitive objects here, notice that most of them were draw with
the Ellipse tool. So we have a ton of rotated ellipses and a few circles going on
inside of this illustration. We also have a few items that I drew with the Pen tool,
the most complex of which is probably this valentine heart right here.
And in case you are thinking well gosh, this must have been hard to draw these
fingers right here so that both outlines of the fingers, both the left and
right sides are exactly parallel with each other. Well that's really a function
of that Outline Stroke command that we saw earlier in this series. Let me show
you what I mean. I'm going to go ahead and grab my Pen tool right there and
I'll just draw a very simple path on the right layer. Go ahead and switch over
to the Ghost vectors layer here so that I can draw and I'll go ahead and
click-and-drag here and click-and-drag here and I'm showing you how to draw a
finger incidentally. And I don't like the location of that point so I'm going
to press and hold the Spacebar as I move it into a better location like so.
Then release the Spacebar and drag that control handle into a better position.
Notice this. We have got a white fill and a transparent stroke. So I'm going to
go ahead and switch it my Black Arrow tool, click on a path to select the whole thing
so that I get the right options up here in the Control palette and
I'll change my Fill from white to None and then I'll go ahead and change my Stroke
to Black if I like and I'll increase that stroke value to about 6 points and
then I also want to go ahead and create a round cap.
So I'll go to the Stroke palette right there and I'll turn on the Round Cap
option. The Join option doesn't really matter at this point because we don't
have any corner points inside of this little line and then I'm going to go up
to the Object menu. I'll choose the Path command and I'll choose this guy right there,
Outline Stroke, and now we have a nicely outlined stroke. I can go ahead
and switch my Fill and Stroke icons right there so that I have a black stroke,
along with no fill and we end up getting the results that we are seeing down
here inside of the robot's finger. So that's all that went on there, not very
hard to do. My big point though here is that all of these primitive objects that
I created so far, very easy to throw together, just the function of drawing
some geometric shapes, the occasional path with the Pen tool. If
you take a look at him, most of these paths don't have more than a couple of points a
piece, I think. Like this guy right there. It's just two points as you can see with control
handles coming out of them. That's the extent of it. So very, very simple
stuff here and yet we can assemble these primitives into a complex illustration
using pathfinder operations as I'll explain in upcoming exercises.