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As you create more and more objects on your screen, you will need to be able to select them and delete them or select them and add color to them or select them into whatever you want to do with them. Selecting is always done with the selection tool which is the very first tool in your toolbox. Go and click on that now. When a shape is selected, Illustrator shows you what is called a bounding box, which defines the boundary within which the shape is drawn.
For a rectangle, the bounding box is the rectangle itself. But for an ellipse, the bounding box is actually the rectangle within which the ellipse exist. At the perimeter of the bounding box are hollow squares, these square are handles that can be used to resize the object. Position your cursor in the middle of one of this handles, your cursor turns into a double-headed arrow indicating the two directions that you can drag. In this case, you can drag it up, to stretch it, drag it down to shrink it down. If your mouse is over one of the corner handles, you get a diagonal double-headed arrow, which you can press, and drag diagonally. When you are at a corner, you may get this cursor, sort of a curved double-headed arrow. The curved double-headed arrow is a rotation handle, which we are going to be talking about in the next lesson. For now though, we just want to focus on selecting and deleting objects. Move your cursor back into the middle of the object and you get the black selection arrow, move your cursor into another object, you get a similar black selection arrow only it has a little square box next to it. That square box appears anytime you are on a selectable object whether it is a line or a shape. Click on that object to select it and you could delete it by hitting the delete key. You could undo that by hitting CTRL+Z or CMD+Z on the Macintosh, go ahead and bring it back for now with CTRL+Z or CMD+Z.
You can select additional objects by shift clicking on them, go ahead, shift click on some other object on your screen, and then shift click on the third object. And you will notice that the bounding box always surrounds all selected objects. If we wanted to at this point, we can resize all of these objects by positioning our cursor on one of this corner handles pressing and dragging. We could also delete all of these objects by hitting the delete key and again CTRL+Z or CMD+Z to bring those back. So clicking and shift clicking is how you select your objects. You can also use the select menu, go up to the select menu now and you will see that you have four commands basically. Select all, deselect which basically gets rid of all selections that you have, does not affect the object at all. Just gets rid of the selection. Reselect which just repeats the last selection command. It does not repeat the last selection just the last command you chose from the select menu. You can also select the next object above or below the currently selected object. That is handy if you have object set up one on top of the other and there are even options down here to select based on similar properties, for example, you could select all objects that have this—
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