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In this exercise I'm going to show you how to add a subpath to an existing
Compound Shape. And in case you're wondering what in the world this
gobbledygook that I'm spewing means, well, if you look here inside the Layers
palette, we have now this Compound Shape item that's here inside the Up above
layer and it contains two subpaths, Ringo and Submarine. We are going to add
another subpath, which is going to be this guy right there Fin, and you'll see
how in just a moment. Now I've gone ahead and saved my progress
so far as The walrus played bass.ai. So called by the way because the walrus did
indeed play bass for this band here, the guitarist said so. And in case you're
wondering, what in the world I'm talking about? Ask somebody 20 years older
than you, and they will know. What I want to do is I want to take this Fin
right here, this Fin item inside the Layers palette, also represented by this
object here inside the illustration window. I want to grab it and
I want to use it cut a swath between this sort of steering apparatus, whatever
it's called, I don't really know the names of submarine elements, from the larger
submarine itself so that the group Ringo and the Walrus and everybody else inside
the submarine can maneuver their ship around. So the first thing I'm going to do is bring
it to front by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Right Bracket or Command+ Shift+Right
Bracket on a Mac and then I'm going to go ahead and Shift-click in the submarine
to add it to the selection. So both Fin and Submarine are selected. I
want you to notice the name of this item right there is Fin. So I have named that
object in advance. Now I'm going to go over to the Pathfinder
palette. We want the Fin item, this Fin path right there to cut a hole in the
larger submarine shape. So I'll click on this icon, Minus Front, because we are
subtracting the front item from the back item. And when I click it, nothing happens.
We see a refresh in the Layers palette. And I also notice up here in the Edit menu
that the first command is now called Undo Subtract. So something happened, but
it wasn't anything that made in any difference in terms of the fundamental appearance
of my illustration. The only thing I succeeded in doing here was to change
the name Fin to Path. So I just eradicated its name. That's all I managed
to do. So let's press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z on the
Mac to undo that operation. Here is the deal. If you want to combine one path
with an existing Compound Shape, you have to keep things dynamic. So you have to
stick with Compound Shape operations, which means you have to have the
Alt or Option key down. So check this out. If I press the Alt key or the Option
key on the Mac and then click on Minus Front, then I'll go ahead and successfully
subtract this fin shape from the other paths inside of this larger Compound
Shape. Now notice over here in the Layers palette,
I want you to see something. If I twirl open Compound Shape I see Fin right
there at the top of the stack, but then I see a nested Compound Shape, so we
have a Compound Shape inside of another Compound Shape and that one contains
Ringo and Submarine. So that's a perfectly acceptable way to work,
if you want. However, there is a more elegant solution in my mind and that's
to actually insert the subpath into the existing Compound Shape, and I'll show
you two different ways to do that in the next exercise.