Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

three. Group the squares into a single ornament by pressing

Ctrl+G (-G) or by choosing Object➝Group.

That’s it for the tonalpohualli for now. You’ve seen the start of what

you can do armed with only the scale tool. Save your work, grab a

snack, maybe get up and stretch—or dive right in to the next ex-

ercise, where the real magic of power transformations and series

duplication shines.

Rotate, Refl ect, and

Series Duplication

The ancient Aztec calendar still has some wisdom to impart—

namely, the use of the transformation tools to quickly recreate the

repeating ornaments around the circles of the calendar, also referred

to as series duplication. The current art contains just one of each of

these elements. In the Lesson 2 fi les, I had pre-created the bulk of

these ornaments; here, you’ll learn the secrets of how I made them.

1. Open the art in progress. If you have your artwork

from the last exercise, by all means, use it. Otherwise,

make your way to the Lesson 05 subfolder inside the

Lesson Files-AIcs5 1on1 folder, and open the fi le called

to rotate.ai. You’ll see just a smattering of ornaments; by the

end of the exercise, you’ll have recreated the full set.

2.

Tear off the rotate and refl ect tools. In this exercise, you’ll

be switching between the rotate and refl ect tools, which share

a spot in the toolbox. But there’s a better way to access them.

Click and hold the