Making a complex shape in Adobe Illustrator

10 years ago

File this one under “I’m gonna need this again one day, m’kay?”

So the other day I was trying to make a cloud shape like all the big boys use to represent their tech cloud. Piece of cake, I thought. I’ll start off with a landscape rectangle, add a couple of circles at the end of the rectangle, and then add one larger circle and one smaller circle. Here’s the initial look in Illustrator.

Yes, as you can see I turn on the grid and I snap to it to help position these shapes more accurately.

I then used the scissors tool (it’s available in the submenu for the eraser tool) to cut away the bits of the shapes I didn’t want, starting off with the top and sides of the rectangle. (Just click on the bottom left and bottom right of the rectangle with the scissors cursor. This will cut the rectangle into two parts: select and delete the top part.)

Let’s do the right hand circle now. Cut out its left side and delete it.

You’d think then it was a small matter of lather-rinse-repeat, but try as I might I kept running into this error dialog with the scissors tool:

No matter what I tried – zooming to 1000% even – I’d get this error. I was going nuts; after all it had just worked before.

For Illustrator gurus, I’m sure you have the answer already, but I was stumped. I started out on a fruitless quest on Google to try and understand the situation. I didn’t find the reason (see below for the answer), but I did find references to this remarkable tool in Illustrator that I hadn’t used before: the Shape Builder tool.

OK, this is much easier. Start out with the same beginning look: the collection of circles and rectangle. Select them all. Now click on the Shape Builder tool and hover inside the left-most circle, say. It turns into a hatched pattern:

If I now click and drag the cursor to another part of the selection the hatched area grows.

And if I release the mouse button, Illustrator will merge the paths to produce a new path that encloses the hatched area and remove all the interior paths I didn’t need. You can see the new path in red, above, as I was dragging.

Now I can repeat a couple more times to merge all the interior shapes and paths to produce this:

Yay! A cloud! At this point I basically colored the edge of the cloud in cyan and filled it with a gradient.

And the reason for my weird error with the scissors tool? Well, I gave you the relevant data: I had snap to grid enabled. When I clicked with the scissors tool on a point in a path that wasn’t on the grid, Illustrator would conveniently choose the nearest grid junction. Which of course wasn’t on the path and hence the error. I could have just turned off Snap to Grid, used the scissors tool and then joined all the path segments to make the same shape. The Shape Builder tool was just so much more convenient.

At this juncture, I could just launch into a clever moral of the story bit about reading the documentation and/or watching tutorials on how to use the app, but – you know – I’m just happy I found this nifty tool in Illustrator. I’ll take that, thank you very much.