[Music Playing]
We have got a little more concept work to do before we actually start creating anything in Illustrator and one of the key things is to understand four basic concepts: points, paths, fields and strokes. The best way to understand this is just to see them in action. What I am going to do is move our yellow stone map off to the side, I am actually working now in what is called the art board which is the area outside of the boundary of the page. I am going to zoom in a little bit so that we can see a little bit more detail what I am going to be doing here so we are back to 100% as indicated at the top of the document window.
To illustrate points, paths, fields and strokes, I am going to use the pen tool, which we are going to be discussing in more detail in our later lesson. Click one time on the pen tool and then click one time and one time only in the middle of my document window. This creates a point, a point by itself does not do anything but if I create another point, Illustrator draws a line connecting the two points so I have now create a path between two points. I can click again to create a third point and then I can go back to my original starting point and click and that finishes up the object. So, I have three points, I have three lines connecting those three points and this three lines actually create an object which can be filled with colors, textures, patterns, all sort of different things. I am moving over to the selection tool, which is the tool you want to use whenever you want to add colors or textures to an object, whenever you want to manipulate an object, move it around. By pressing drag, I can move this object around and we are going to be doing all that sort of stuff a little bit.
What I want to do now is I want to fill this object with the different color, I am going up in to the control pallet and I am picking a color. I am also going to change the color of what is called the stroke. And the stroke is just the outline of the path so it will make this blue and I am going to change the thickness of that stroke so it is a little easier for us to see, I am going to make that 10 point. I will click on my selection tool and I deselect, I will just click anywhere in my document to deselect. We saw the three points that made this object. We saw the paths that connected those three points. We have applied a fill to that object which is whatever you put in the middle of the object and we have modified the stroke of the object. What we have just seen is the most rudimentary example of points, paths, fields and strokes.
What were going to do now is we are going to move over and we will do that with the hand tool. Click on the hand tool, press and drag to get our illustration back. And let us find some object here that we can zoom it on and as you can see, points, paths, fields and strokes in an actual real world example. And I am using what is called the direct selection tool to select that this time. The direct selection tool is used when you want to select an object that is part of a larger group of objects. I am going to click on this and we can see that this is created with a far more complex path that what we had before, all around the perimeter, you can see many, many points but it is the same basic concepts. A whole bunch of points that are connected to form a path, the interior of the path is filled with the color and in this case is a light blue and the stroke of that path is a slightly darker blue. I am going to deselect and I am going to use the keyboard shortcut. A handy one to remember CTRL+SHIFT+A. On the Macintosh, it is CMD+SHIFT+A and that just deselects everything so you do not have to look through the points in order to see the path itself. And that is a quick look at points, paths, fields and strokes which really are the fundamental building blocks of every single thing you are going to create in Illustrator.
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