From the course: Illustrator 2023 Essential Training

Selection tools - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2023 Essential Training

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Selection tools

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- [Instructor] Being able to select things in Illustrator is a skill that you can't afford to be without. You really do need it. And as the words say in the middle of the screen, they're on the background by the way, you've got to select it to effect it. You can't do anything with anything if it isn't actually targeted in some way. So what we're going to do here is going to look at the two main selection tools, if there were such a thing in Illustrator. Starting with the selection tool. It's the primary tool in the toolbox there. The very first one. You can access it by tapping V on your keyboard, if it's not targeted already. And to select something, all you need to do is to click on a visible attribute of that object. So if we click on the heart just there, you can see that it becomes selected. If we go into the middle of the square in the center here and click, it won't do anything, because we haven't clicked on a visible attribute. We need to go out to the stroke there to select that. You can select more than one thing, of course. Now there's a couple of different ways of doing that. You can click on any object and hold down Shift to select additional objects, but Shift also works as a toggle. So if something is already selected, Shift clicking it will deselect it. You can also select by dragging. So if I just drag from the top corner of the document. I'll make it easier for you to see where I am. And just drag across so that the marquee that I'm dragging intersects with all of those objects. In fact, do you know what? Just temporarily, I'm going to turn off the visibility for this background here, so you can see that more clearly. There you go, so that's how that works. So you can select by dragging, which is kind of useful, because let's just say I wanted to drag across those four objects, and I went too far and selected the circle. We now know that we can Shift click the circle to limit that from our actual selection. So selecting objects is pretty straightforward, and you can play with the objects on this page to sort of practice your selection skills. Although I must say you're going to be doing plenty of it throughout the course. If you tap A on your keyboard, then you'll notice anything that's already selected suddenly looks very different, because what we are using now is the direct selection tool, accessed by tapping A on your keyboard. So try that out. Tap V to get to the main selection. A to get to the direct selection. There you go. Now what we are seeing here are the anchor points that make up these vector shapes and the line segments in between those anchor points. Now, the direct selection tool can be used to select and also manipulate anchor points. Let's go to the square in the middle and click on one of the corners here. You'll notice that this anchor point looks different to the others, and that's because it's selected, and I can move that if I want to. Don't worry about the small circle next to that, by the way. It's called the corner widget, and we don't need that right now. Let's undo that. And if we go to the circle and click on that, you'll notice this one looks very different, because in addition to seeing the anchor points we're also seeing these handles, and they control curves. Now you can pull the handles around if you want to. You're not going to do any harm, because this shape is not really of any consequence, and you can always undo by Command Z or Control Z to do that. But you will find out a lot more about these a bit later on in the course. The direct selection tool will actually also select objects themselves, but it just does it in a slightly different way, visually. And sometimes it's ill-advised, by the way, to drag across things, because you can see that I've now got half of those points selected, and if I move them, something very different happens. So try and get out of the habit of selecting with the direct selection tool, until you are very comfortable with what you're doing. But there you go. Those are the two main selection tools. So the selection tool itself and the direct selection tool now covered off. Do play with them and see how they work with other files inside of this course.

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