Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

with the tracing pattern underneath—as long as it’s

fairly close, you should achieve the same effect. One

detail that does need to match however, is the align-

ment of the spiral with the arc you drew in the pre-

ceding step. The endpoint of the spiral should snap

to the endpoint of the arc, as shown in Figure 2-9.

P E A R L O F W I S D O M

Many of these keyboard shortcuts work regardless of which

drawing tool you’re using, while some are specifi c to certain

drawing tools. The spacebar always allows you to move whatever

you’re drawing, be it line, arc, spiral, or shape; likewise, Shift

always constrains the tool to 45-degree increments. You’ll see

more of these keyboard shortcuts in the next few exercises.

Now that you have an introduction to the basic line-

drawing tools, it’s time to move to the next exercise.

Your results so far should look like the illustration shown

in Figure 2-10. Choose File➝Save to save your work.

Give it a name like “Horus in progress.ai,” and save it

to the Lesson 02 folder. We’ll be revisiting this fi le

in the next exercise.

Splitting, Joining, and Aligning

So far we’ve seen a few of the basic line tools. But if

you look at the Horus drawing just to the left, you’ll

see some elements that can’t be drawn or perfected

with the tools you’ve learned thus far. Sure, the line

on the bottom left is made up of arcs, but they’re

not the nice, symmetrical arcs the

tool lets you

draw. Likewise, the arc and spiral on the right may

look like a single continuous line, but they’re two dis-

crete paths, and should they end up misaligned, you

may see a break in your fi nal art. I’ll show you how to

tackle these issues in this exercise.

1.

Open an illustration. If you have your

fi le open from the previous exercise, just

continue along with that fi le. Otherwise,

open the fi le Horus slice & join.ai, located in the

Lesson 02 folder.

2. Draw the fi rst arc. The line just to the left of the

vertical line is made up of two arcs; they need to

Figure 2-9 .

Figure 2-10 .

44

Lesson 2: Lines, Shapes, and Color