Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

Using the Divide Operation

Now that you’ve mastered the basic pathfi nder operations, we’ll

continue with one of the more advanced functions, Divide. In this

exercise, we’ll be focusing on the robot’s mouth and fi ngers, and

the cartoon speech bubble.

1. Open the ghost artwork in progress. If you still have

the artwork open from the last exercise, great. Other-

wise, open the fi le you saved from the previous exer-

cise, or the Unite and divide.ai fi le in the Lesson 06

inside the Lesson Files-AIcs5 1on1 folder.

2.

Select the paths that make up the mouth. First, we need to

clean up the robot’s mouth—the outer shapes are in the way.

Using the black arrow tool, click to select one of the paths that

makes up the mouth, and then Shift-click to select the other

two, as in Figure 6-22.

3. Divide the paths. Once you have the paths selected, click the

icon. Illustrator splits the three paths into all their overlap-

ping components—in this case, a total of six paths. Deselect

everything by pressing Ctrl+Shift+A (-Shift-A).

4. Delete the extraneous paths. Press the A key to switch to the

white arrow tool, and then Alt-click (or Option-click) the top

rectangle path, as in Figure 6-23. Press Backspace or Delete

to delete it. Repeat the process for the lower rectangular path.

It’s worth noting that the Divide command creates a group of paths

rather than a compound path. Divide ...