Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

Combining Simple Shapes

into Complex Ones

Primitive shapes are fi ne and all—you’d be hard-pressed to draw

any illustrations without them—but where Illustrator really shines

is in the combination of these primitives to create more complex

objects. This is the bread and butter of the work in Illustrator, and

knowing the best ways to create these complex shapes will prove

indispensable. What follows is your fi rst taste of these methods;

we’ll explore them further in later lessons.

In this exercise, I’ll demonstrate the variety of ways Illustrator

provides to cut shapes apart and join them back together. We’ll be

working with our tonalpohualli again, this time fi lling in some of

the facial details.

1.

Open the tonalpohualli. If you have your fi le from

the preceding exercise still open, great. If not, open

the fi le you saved or open the fi le Topo face time.ai

the Lesson 02 folder.

2.

Zoom in on the face. Since we’re going to be working exclusively

with details in the god’s face in this exercise, zoom in tight on

the center of the illustration, as in Figure 2-52. (I found around

800 percent to be a good amount, but your value will vary de-

pending on the room available on your screen.)

3. Select the inner circle and bring it forward. With the tool,

click the circle surrounding the face. Press Ctrl+Shift+ (or

-Shift- ) to bring the circle to the front. Fill the shape with

white by clicking the in the control panel, and selecting white

from the pop-up palette. You should now see something like

Figure 2-53.

4. Set the My Drawing layer to outline mode. The white circle is

a nice clean canvas to work on, but it’s unfortunately obscur-

ing the tracing template. Let the Calendar layer show through

by setting the My Drawing layer to outline mode. Bring up the

Layers panel, and Ctrl-click (-click on the Mac) the

next

to the My Drawing layer. The results are shown in Figure 2-54.

5.

Draw the primitive shapes that make up the nose. If you exam-

ine the nose, you’ll see that it’s comprised of three overlapping

circles. Switch to the

tool, and draw each in turn:

• Start with the center circle, dragging from the intersection

of the guides, using the Shift and Alt (or Option) keys to

constrain the shape and draw out from the center.

Figure 2-52 .

Figure 2-53 .

Figure 2-54 .

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Lesson 2: Lines, Shapes, and Color