Hi everyone. We're gonna get nerdy with compound shapes. We've made them, before you select something,  use your shortcut, cut a hole in stuff, okay? It's called a compound shape and we've done the basics,  but we're gonna get into the, uh, advanced stuff here. Compound shapes can be tricky. Hopefully we'll demystify them here  and give you a few little shortcuts to be the boss  of compound shapes.

Alright, you ready? Let's go. Alright, phase one,  open up the compound shapes from your exercise file. You don't actually have to open it. I just made a interesting document  with a totally unrelated uh, image in the background. Just so we're not staring at a blank page.

Uh, all we really need is a rectangle. I'm gonna click off, I'm gonna grab the circle tool. We're gonna create a simple compound shape to start with. So I'm just gonna hold shift and create an ellipse. I'm gonna make it a different color  for no reason other than you can see it easier. Black arrow, stick it in the middle.

I'm gonna hold shift, click both my circle and the square. Okay, so they're both selected. I'm gonna go command eight on a Mac, a CTR eight on a PC  to make a compound shape. All it does is take whatever's on the top  and cut a hole in the background, the long ways under object  and down here under compound path  and go to make, okay, so  that's command eight on a Mac control, eight on a pc. Okay, so cut a hole in it. Now often you'll get stuff like this or you've made it  and now you wanna adjust it.

And what people tend to do,  and where I left it in the uh,  centrals course is you went and released it. So you can right click and say Release compound path. Okay, I've got my shape back and I can move it  and do stuff to it and then make it again. Ah, but you came for shortcuts. So lemme give you the shortcut. So, um, instead of releasing it, what you can do is  with the black arrow, click on the object  and double click it to go into isolation mode.

So I've gone inside this compound path  and it means that I can click on just the circle  and work on this individually. Okay? It can hold shift and grab it  and resize it and move it around. Okay? And same with the outside. I can work on them independently.

To get outta isolation mode,  you can mash away at the arrow, up the top here. Just double click the background. The other thing you can do without going into isolation mode  is use the direct selection tool  and maybe let's click on this A over here. Okay? And I can work on these parts without having  to go into isolation mode. I can work on the individual anchor points,  I can hold shift, grab them all  and move it around just like inside of uh, isolation mode.

Up to you. One thing I wanna show you is, we kind  of hinted at it earlier as well,  is there's two kind of compound shapes. So what do I mean by that? Let's make another uh, rectangle. Let's make two of them. So you and you,  and we're gonna have two circles.

Circle. Yep. Alright. Circle sitting over top of this. If I make this a compound path using my shortcut, so command  or control eight. And this one here, remember we did the pathfinder earlier.

So I'm in my properties panel Pathfinder. Actually I might just open it up for us all  window pathfinder. Okay. And remember if we held down, if we use minus front,  we get the same thing. Okay? But if we hold down our option key on a Mac O key on a  pc, we get the same thing.

But remember that it is still editable  and the big difference is in  The layers panel. Let's have  a look. So I've got this shape here. I'm gonna select with my black arrow. So I'm on layer two in my case. This is, you can kind of see which one's highlighted by.

Can you see down the edge here? If I click on it kind of highlights over here. So there's this one compound path. That's it. I can't see much inside of it. It's called a compound path.

This one here is a compound shape. This is the one that I used with a sweet trick here. Okay. It means that I can still edit it afterwards. I can kind of do the same for these two,  but it means in here. Can you see it's this one here.

This is the one I made using  the uh, Pathfinder shortcut. Can you see? It's actually the lips  and the angular separate. I can work on them separately  by clicking this little target option at the end here. Can you see the little dot there? So  I've got the ellipse selected.

Okay. And I can work on it. Okay. And I can do stuff and it's editable. It's just sometimes easier working in the layers panel. Okay.

And that's why sometimes you'll find stuff  that is like, oh, I can get inside this compound path. That's why sometimes you can get inside a compound shape  and sometimes you can't. Okay? It's just the way that the created,  there's no real better way. It's more just now we're getting advanced. And like sometimes you're like, why does it work one way  sometimes and then another way, another time.

It's because they're kind of created two different ways, one  by the pathfinder and one using the compound shortcut. Anyway, compound shapes can be a little bit mysterious,  hopefully a little less mysterious after this video. And yeah, that's why there is ferns in the background trying  to make this thing visually more appealing. It's kind of nerdy stuff, but it's the good quality advanced  stuff that will really help lift your illustrator game. There you go. Alright, uh, I will see you in the next video.