Illustrator® CS4 For Dummies®

Chapter 12. Pushing, Pulling, Poking, and Prodding

In This Chapter

• Understanding how transformations work

• Using the Scale, Rotate, Reflect, and Shear tools

• Moving and shaking (even stirring) objects and portions of objects

• Blending paths until they're confused and happy

Art that you create in Illustrator can be modified in a number of ways. Perhaps the most powerful of these ways are transformations and distortions. These enable you to bend, move, and manipulate paths and other Illustrator objects like silly putty, shaping them to your every whim. (Power mongers, rejoice!)

In this chapter, you find out how to use the many Illustrator transformation tools to alter the shape of your artwork in any way you desire. For the more extreme stuff — we're talking real distortion here – check out Bonus Chapter 1, available for download from the Web site associated with this book.

Understanding the Five Transformation Sisters

You can do five fundamental things to paths: move, scale, rotate, reflect, and shear. Each of these transformations has both a tool and a dialog box associated with it. Move actually has three tools, if you count all the arrow tools (each of which are used to move selections).

The key to using all these tools (and their control-freak dialog boxes) is to select what you want to change first and then to apply the transformation. Use the Selection tool when you want to transform an ...