Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Showing how you can erase shapes or parts of shapes.
Quick reference
Easy Erasing
Showing how you can erase shapes or parts of shapes.
When to use
Anytime you want to erase a mistake or remove a piece of an object in Illustrator.
Instructions
- Begin by opening the exercise solution file containing the peppers from the 'Following the Path' lesson.
- Change the first pepper from a stroke to a solid black fill by first selecting the shape, then pressing Shift+X to swap the fill and stroke.
- Grab the Eraser Tool (Shift+E) from the toolbar.
- Draw into the pepper shape from the edge or from the center and notice how the shape smooths itself out, similar to what we saw happen when using the Pencil Tool.
- Now try the eraser on one of the peppers while keeping it an outline.
- You will notice that the outline also changes once you have erased a portion of the contour.
Hints
- You can change the size and shape of your eraser from the toolbar using the Eraser Tool Options.
- The Eraser Tool (Shift+E) can be used on shapes, outlined text, or any other object consisting of points in Illustrator.
- 00:04 The next tool that I'd like to show you guys is the eraser tool.
- 00:07 And to do that, I'm actually going to come back to one of our previous files here.
- 00:11 Which is the file that has the contour lines of the peppers.
- 00:15 So to demonstrate this, I'm just gonna grab one of these peppers, and
- 00:19 change it from a black stroke to a black fill.
- 00:22 And then from there I'm going to come over here and
- 00:24 the eraser tool which you can also get by pressing Shift + E on the keyboard.
- 00:28 Now once I have the eraser tool I just wanted to show you guys really quick that
- 00:32 you can use the left and right brackets to increase or decrease the size of the tool.
- 00:38 If I enlarge the eraser tool a bit I can now just kind of cut into the shape and
- 00:41 eraser a chunk.
- 00:42 So it looks like somebody just took a big bite out of the pepper.
- 00:46 And it doesn't really matter where you come in.
- 00:48 You can even come in from the center.
- 00:49 And it's basically just going to, then, kind of put holes into the pepper here.
- 00:53 So it kind of looks like it's rotting away, or something.
- 00:56 But if I were to do this instead of a fill on an outline,
- 01:02 it's going to do the same thing, except, now you'll see that it looks a little bit
- 01:06 different because it's still got that outline appearance.
- 01:09 But it's basically has the same effect where we're taking a piece out of a shape.
- 01:15 So the eraser tool is great if you mess up, or
- 01:18 if you just are drawing a shape and you want to take a piece out of it.
- 01:21 You can do that pretty easily and pretty quickly with this tool.
- 01:26 And so, it's great.
- 01:27 If you're drawing something and you wanted to take out a part like that, or
- 01:30 if you're just kind of free-handing it.
- 01:33 And you can see how it kind of smoothed itself out a little bit, too,
- 01:36 similar to when we were using the pencil tool, except, sometimes,
- 01:40 you could end up with a lot of extraneous points when you do this.
- 01:44 But one of the other really nice options that you have with the eraser tool is,
- 01:48 if you double click it, you actually get some of these additional options here that
- 01:52 you can mess around with.
- 01:53 Which are things like the angle, the roundness, and
- 01:57 the size of the eraser tool.
- 02:00 So you can choose whether you want it to be random, fixed, or
- 02:03 maybe even use pressure if you're using a stylus or a graphics tablet.
- 02:06 But most of the time, I usually just leave this set to fixed.
- 02:09 But as just another way that you guys can have some more control over the eraser,
- 02:13 say you wanted to erase something that was a little bit more narrow and
- 02:17 you didn't wanna have to stay a circular shape that you were kind of cutting out or
- 02:21 anything like that.
- 02:23 But it's kind of cool to play around with and
- 02:25 sometimes you can actually get some pretty cool and unexpected result.
- 02:28 So it's a very handy tool that allows you to basically cut in to any shapes,
- 02:33 logos or text just as easily
- 02:36 as if you were using the eraser tool to erase pixels in Photoshop.
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