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How to use the Shaper Tool to quickly scribble and manipulate shapes.

Quick reference

Shaper Tool Basics

How to use the Shaper Tool to quickly scribble and manipulate shapes.

When to use

The Shaper Tool is a bit more experimental than some of the other tools, but it can be a great way to quickly create a variety of geometric shapes just by scribbling with your mouse or a stylus.

Instructions

  • Open the 'Shaper Tool Basics - Exercise.ai' file in Illustrator.
  • Select the Shaper Tool from the toolbar (found inside of the Pencil Tool options which can be accessed by clicking and holding on the Pencil Tool.)
  • Try to draw a few rough shapes like circles, squares, triangles and so forth to see if your results will look like some of the shapes in the document.
  • Practice stacking some of the shapes on top of one another and using different gestures to either add to or subtract shapes from one another.
  • You can test yourself (and the tool) by trying to recreate a moon, a mountain, and a fish shape as shown in the video. 

Hints

  • The Shaper Tool can feel a bit clumsy at first, but it's a good tool to know about as it will most likely only improve in future versions of Illustrator.
  • You can quickly build shapes that you will still have the ability to edit or modify when using the Shaper Tool simply by grabbing your Direct Selection Tool (A) and moving some of the shapes around to create a wider variety of shapes. 
  • Your guides are your friend. When you use the Shaper Tool to overlap shapes, the guides will help you to see where certain shapes overlap and intersect.
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  • 00:04 Now the next tool that I'd like
  • 00:06 to introduce to you guys is called the shaper tool.
  • 00:08 And you'll find it by coming over here where we grabbed our pencil, and
  • 00:11 just by clicking and
  • 00:12 holding to get the expanded view of the other tools that are available.
  • 00:16 So if I come over here to pop this out for a second, you'll see that we have
  • 00:19 the pencil tool, but all the way on the left is our shaper tool.
  • 00:23 Now unlike the pencil where you just press N on the keyboard, for
  • 00:26 the shaper tool you can press shift N and on the keyboard at the same time.
  • 00:30 Now what's cool about this tool is that it is actually a fairly new development for
  • 00:34 illustrator.
  • 00:35 And it's is a gesture based tool,
  • 00:37 that will kind of tell what kind of shape we're trying to draw.
  • 00:40 And you can see that even if I'm not super clean with what I'm trying to do,
  • 00:46 that it pretty much corrects itself and
  • 00:49 will recreate the shape that it thinks I'm going for.
  • 00:54 So it's a pretty cool tool that you can use here,
  • 00:56 and one of the other nice things about it is the fact that
  • 01:00 you can actually combine shapes together or subtract them from one another.
  • 01:05 So if I draw two overlapping circles here and I just kinda scribble like this in
  • 01:09 the middle, it's actually going to knock that piece out.
  • 01:13 Or if I go across both shapes, it'll join them together.
  • 01:17 And from there if I grab my Direct Selection Tool, by pressing A on
  • 01:20 the keyboard, I can actually move these shapes around and they're still attached,
  • 01:25 so that I can produce even cooler looking or different looking results.
  • 01:34 Okay, but let's try something a little bit more Involved.
  • 01:37 If I draw a triangle here, and then maybe draw a square
  • 01:43 and then I'll select it, hold down the shift key and just rotate it 90 degrees.
  • 01:48 I can hold down alt and shift, and then drag to the right to make another copy.
  • 01:53 And if I grab the shape in the middle of my regular selection tool.
  • 01:57 I can, again, hold down alt option and shift and now drag a copy to the left.
  • 02:03 So now let's grab our shaper tool, and we'll just draw across all three of these,
  • 02:07 kinda scribbling across and we're going to try and join these shapes together.
  • 02:13 So you can see there it wasn't perfectly what I was trying to do but
  • 02:16 that time, it produced a better result.
  • 02:18 So It might not give you the exact result you're looking for right out of the gate.
  • 02:23 But it's still pretty useful.
  • 02:26 Okay, so now if I bring this shape on top of my triangle,
  • 02:30 I can click on the triangle shape here, grab my shaper tool and
  • 02:35 I can see what kind of gestures I can create here, and
  • 02:39 what kind of results we can get with two overlapping shapes like these.
  • 02:51 Okay, so just kind of scribbling outside,
  • 02:53 got rid of everything except the part that was overlapping the triangle.
  • 02:58 And if I move these around, I can still control some of the paths a little bit.
  • 03:01 And you can see that we're getting some pretty weird and strange results,
  • 03:06 but the idea that the shaper tool is just solely based on your gesture and
  • 03:10 that it can correct itself is, in of itself, pretty impressive.
  • 03:14 If I wanted to create a moon, for instance, I could just go like this and
  • 03:19 kind of scribble to knock the shape out and
  • 03:21 then get rid of the outline by doing the same thing.
  • 03:25 Right, and then if I moved my cursor over here, I can manipulate that
  • 03:30 path with my direct selection tool or I can kind of move it closer or
  • 03:34 further away from this other shape to modify our new shape.
  • 03:40 So it also allows you more control because you're not, kind of,
  • 03:43 your not stuck to the result that it produces,
  • 03:46 you can still actually move some things around and change the shape of it.
  • 03:50 But it's kind of fun just to see what kind of things it can do in
  • 03:55 combining these different shapes.
  • 03:57 Now you can some fun with it, and try a new simple stuff.
  • 04:03 I'm thinking that because this is a fairly new feature to illustrator that it's
  • 04:07 probably only going to get better as future iterations come out.
  • 04:11 You can see there I just drew a little fish or a shark or something,
  • 04:14 just out of some basic shapes.
  • 04:16 But I'd encourage you guys to experiment with this a little bit,
  • 04:20 just try drawing some gestures on your own and seeing what kind of things you can
  • 04:23 come up with, by combining shapes and kind of drawing on the outside to remove them,
  • 04:28 and then grabbing your direct selection tool and moving these shapes around.
  • 04:34 Or just by combining them and knocking out of each other.

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