The black arrow is a selection tool and so allows you to select complete shapes and move them around.
The white arrow allows you to select anchors and paths of a shape, enabling you to manipulate the shape after it has been made.
At the bottom of the options bar, there is a box with colour which is either overlapping or underneath a box outline filled with colour. The filled-in box is the fill and the box outline controls the colour of the stroke. You double-click these to open the colour picker. Underneath the fill and stroke boxes, there are three smaller boxes – one of which is a white box with a red line through it. You can press this to remove the colour and/or the stroke of a shape.
With the selection tool, you can select a shape and then hold down shift whilst selecting others to select several shapes at once. If you have multiple objects selected at once and want to deselect one, simply hold shift and click the shape to deselect it from the group selection. Use the holding down shift method to select the objects at once and then press command and ‘G’ to group the items. Using the method to select multiple objects, open the pathfinder tool in the windows tab in the menu sets and with the items selected, press the unite button to bind the shapes to become one. To split overlapping objects into different shapes, have them selected and on the pathfinder tool, press divide. After doing this, to move the separated objects, you need to use the direct selection tool as after dividing, they will be grouped.
To move around the screen in illustrator, to need to hold down spacebar and whilst moving with the mouse. To zoom in, hold down spacebar and command and click with the mouse. To zoom out, hold down spacebar, command and alt and click the mouse. Using the artboard tool, you can create an artboard and change its size in the control bar at the top in the control bar, changing the width and the height.
To cut an object, you can use the scissors tool under the eraser tool drop-down of the options bar, select one part of the shape and then select the other part of where you want it to be cut. On a stroke, you can use the add and delete anchor point tool under the pen dropdown to add and delete anchor points.
When drawing with the pen tool, you can click and pull in the direction you desire to change an anchor point from a corner into a curve. If you select an object, you can right-click it – or hold control and click on a Mac – to open up a menu where you will find a arrange tab. From here hover over it and you will get options to send an object all the way to the front or back or move it backwards and forwards a singular time.
To quickly duplicate an object, you can click and hold on it and then hold down alt before dragging it. Holding alt is what duplicates the shape. You can also hold shift at the same time if, when you drag it away, you want it to stay in line. To see your illustration in black and white lines with no colour, press command and ‘Y’. With the polygon tool, click once and a window will come up asking how many sides you want it to have and so to make a triangle, set it to three.
I believe that the detail in my buildings helps to add character and dimension to them creating an overall aesthetically pleasing image. To improve, I would’ve decreased the size of my buildings so that I could fit in the other side of the pavement to enable me to create a foreground in greater depth.
Thanks for reading ~
Jasmine Cooper 