Okay. So we're ready for some advanced path editing here in Illustrator CS3. We're going to start with a topic called compound paths. Now compound paths can be a little bit complicated to wrap your head around at first. So I'm going to start off nice and simple here. What I'll have you do is go and create a brand-new blank document. So choose File>New and accept your defaults here and then OK. There we are. I'm just going to create two very simple shapes here. I'm going to draw myself a rectangle here and also a circle here. So go ahead and do the same or if you want to use different shapes that's perfectly fine here, but just make sure that both shapes are overlapping each other in someway. Also, if you want to throw in some extra color here, that would be lovely as well here. So it doesn't really matter which colors you're using at this point. Here, the idea is to have two overlapping shapes.
Now let's take a look at compound paths here. What a compound path is, is essentially using one shape to knock a hole into another shape. I'll show you exactly what I mean here. So I'm going to take my circle here which is sitting on top of my green rectangle and I'm actually just going to make it a little bit smaller here. There we are and highlight the whole thing here. I'm just going to marquee around both by objects there, and to create your compound path, head up to your object menu and then all the way down to compound path and then choose Make. There we have the topmost object knocking a hole in our lower object, our rectangle here.
So that's the idea of a compound path, think of like creating doughnuts or cookie cutters. So, for example, dough and cookie cutters, I'll do a couple of others here for you. So this time I'll get a little bit more complex here. Here I have a star here and I have my circle as well, marquee both of them, Object, down to Compound Path and then make or of course you can use Ctrl+8 or Command+8 on the Mac and now my star has knocked a hole in my circle. So that's the idea behind compound paths.
Now we can get a little bit more complicated here. Before we get a little bit more complicated, I want to show you a couple of extra things here. If you want to use some additional shapes here, again, the shapes that you use, don't really matter at this point. The idea is to get the concept down first. So I've just drawn a new shape over top of my cookie dough here, and I select both of my shapes. You can achieve some similar results to compound paths, just by using your pathfinders.
Now, if you're not familiar with your pathfinders, the idea here is that we can use these different Shape Modes and Pathfinders to create different effects on our shapes. So you can achieve some compound path like effects, using some pathfinders. So I have my dough and my cookie cutter is selected here and I could use my Subtract Shape Mode here to knock a hole in my dough. The cool thing about using a pathfinder to create a hole like this rather than using the official compound path command is that the Shape Modes in the Pathfinder palette are temporary.
So what I could do here is switch to my white Arrow Tool, just by hitting the A key and then deselecting and then clicking back on my cookie cutter shape here and now I can move it around, maybe I'm not happy with the placement or with my cookie cutter selected here, I can hit my B key on my keyboard to switch to my black Arrow Tool or I could scale the cookie cutter, rotate it, continue moving it around and so on. But it's still a part of this overall shape here, until I click on this Expand button. Okay. So that's one advantage to using the Subtract Shape Mode inside your Pathfinders palette rather than using the actual Compound Path command.
Now there is a few others that you could do as well. Let's cover these pretty quickly here. Go ahead and draw yourself another shape here, another shape that you could use as a cookie cutter. And if you want to fill it with some color that's fine. Again we have to select both the dough and the cookie cutter and we have the last Shape Mode here which is Exclude. And that achieves the same result, but notice what it did with my color there, copied the color from the cookie cutter and applied it to the dough here. So there is a couple of different approaches here depending on what you're after.
There is one more thing I would like to show you in your Pathfinder palette before we move on here. I'm going to go and find some more dough here that has some more space and I will create one more cookie cutter here for you. There we are, something like this, fill it with some color, scale it and move it into position here, okay, very lovely. Select everything there, just marquee around, and it's actually the very first pathfinder here, Divide.
Now what divide does is, if I choose it here, it looks like it didn't actually do anything, but what happened is this little cookie cutter here, if I switch to my white Arrow Tool, I just press the A key on my keyboard, I can grab my cookie cutter and move it out of the way and sure enough, there is a hole knocked in my shape. The difference here is that the Divide Pathfinder keeps the cookie cutter, everything else that you've seen, uses the cookie cutter to knock a hole in the dough, but also delete that shape. So maybe for whatever reason I want to hang onto this cookie cutter, maybe I want to use it to go and knock more holes in shapes and this kind of thing.
Now how do I know for sure that these are actual holes here that I've knocked in these shapes, how do I know that they're not just filled with white? Well, I can always take these shapes and drag them over top of other shapes and you can see sure enough, these are actual holes that have been knocked into the shape, they're not shapes that are filled with white. I'm going to take this guy here and bring them to the front. I'm going to do that just by using Ctrl+Shift+] on my keyboard or Command+Shift+] on the Mac and you can see, sure enough, all of these shapes are also holes, they are not filled objects.
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