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In this exercise we are going to talk about modifying an illustration, and then
later we are going to take a look at how that effects the appearance of the
illustration in other application such as the Adobe Bridge, Acrobat and so on.
And I'm working on this document Living on the Heart Grunge.ai. This is not one
of our assets; this is an Adobe asset. Meaning that it's shaped along with
Adobe Illustrator CS4. So you should have it on your machine. I'm going to show
you where exactly it's located in just a few exercises when we take a look at the Bridge.
But in case you want to open it up for whatever reasons. It's found inside the
cool Extras folder and you should just be able to do a search for Living on the
Heart Grunge.ai, and search the contents of your hard drive and find it that
way. Or you could just sit back and watch, because really at this point its
better that you just see sort of what we are up to here.
Now I'm going to zoom out a little, and we are going to discuss navigation in
the next chapter. So I'm not really telling you how to get around at this
point. Let say what I want to do, I want to add a couple or artboards here, and
I also want to modify the color of one of the T-shirts. So just some general
modifications. So I'm going to go into the Artboard Mode by clicking on the
Artboard tool, the celebrated Artboard tool that we have already seen in the
previous chapter. You can also press Shift+O of course if you like.
Now I want to scale the size of this artboard, so it better fits the
skateboard. So one board better fitting another, and I could just set about
dragging a corner handle, or one of the side or top or bottom handles, but
notice that's scaling with respect to the opposite corner. If you want to scale
with respect to the center, I'll just go ahead and undo that modification. The
easier thing to do is to scale that artboard numerically, using the width and
height values up here in the Control palette, and I'm going to change the Width
to 6.5 in, and the I'm going to change the Height to 7.5 in, and then press
Tab, and you can see that goes ahead and scales with respect to the center,
which is just I want. Now I'm going to scale over here to the T-shirts,
and I'm going to zoom in a little bit. What I want to do is I want to
create artboards around each one of the individual T-shirts, as you may recall.
If you are drawing an artboard inside of an artboard, you Shift-drag like
so with the Artboard tool and then I'm going to release the Shift key in order
to draw rectangle, and this rectangular boundary isn't really centered
on the T-shirt currently. So after I get done drawing, I'll just go ahead and drag
it over, and notice, got a big problem. When you see the artwork moving along
with the artboard, its means that this guy right here is turned on. So
I'm going to undo that modification by pressing Ctrl+Z, Command+Z on the Mac,
and then I'll turn off, Move/Copy Artwork with Artboard.
Now let's try dragging that artboard again, and this looks like it's more or
less centered. You can see that we are getting a nice central intersect line
right there. Thanks to this smart card. This gives us an idea that we are
pretty well centered on the T-shirt so that's nice. Now I'm going to go ahead
and Alt+Drag or Option+Drag that artboard downward, so that we surround the
bottom T-Shirt as well, and if you are interested in constraining the movement
to exactly vertical, you would also press the Shift key as you are dragging. So
that's an Alt+Drag or Option+Drag on the Mac. So we now have five artboards all
together. And then finally I'm thinking you know what, I want to change this to
a brown T-shirt. I want to try this out on the brown T-shirt. So I'm going to
go ahead and duplicate this T-shirt to yet another artboard and make a change to it.
So here it goes, first I'm going to turn on this time this guy. Move/Copy
Artwork with Artboard. Click on four, and then I'm going to Alt+Drag it upward.
I'm pressing the Shift key as well to constrain the angle of the drag. So it's
up here. We have totally separate version of the T-shirt. Nice now let's press
the Escape key in order to escape the Artboard Mode. We are saving our changes
however, or at least applying our changes. And now let's go ahead and zoom in a
little bit here. And I'm going to get my Black Arrow tool this guy right there,
which is already active. It's a Selection tool if you prefer. I call it a Black
Arrow tool, because it is a black arrow and you can also get to that tool by
pressing the V key. That's V as in almost the last letter of move because you
can move things around with it. I am going to click on this outer path right
there that goes around the entire T-shirt, and then notice if I move my cursor
sort of into this region right there, and inside of the collar there is another
shape, and I can see a trace because of smart guides, these wonderful smart
guides in Illustrator CS4, and I'm going to Shift-click on that item to select
it as well. And then I'm going to dial in a shade of brown here from the
Color palette, and if you want to get the Color palette you can click on this little
palette right there, or you can go up to the Window menu, and choose the Color
Command, you also have F6 we will be discussing those keyboard shortcuts
later. But every single one of the palettes, or if you prefer panels, Adobe calls
them panels, I call them palettes, whatever, because that's what they
used to be called. And they are palettes after all.
You go ahead and choose Color for the Window menu. All of your palettes are
listed here in the Window menu. That was my point. So let's go ahead and dial
in some values. We definitely want 100% for yellow, for a nice, rich, chocolaty
brown, and I want to take down the black value to something like 50, and that's
not a chocolaty brown of course, that's a mustard, don't want that. So I'm
going to take the Magenta value up to something like 75, Shift+Tab back to Cyan
and I'll take Cyan up to let say 65 or something along those line. That looks
pretty good. That's pretty chocolaty, and I could take up the Magenta value if
I feel like it's not chocolaty enough. Give it a little more yummy feel there.
But anyway, case and curious, how do I know that's going to be brown. How do I
just know that dialing in those CMYK values give you brown? Stay tuned. I'll
tell you how to dial in color values, it's great stuff and you will learn and
there are all kinds of ways to add a color inside of Illustrator. Sounds very exciting.
Okay, so enough done, right now I'm going to click off the shape in order to
deselect it. Let's just go ahead and zoom out here a little bit, so that we can
take in more or less all of this illustration. So we have a total of six
artboards, one for the posture, two, for skateboard, three for the overall
T-shirts, four and five for the individual T-shirts, and six for the modified color,
and we are going to save this illustration and all of our changes in the next exercise.