Hi everyone. In this video we are going to master the Shape Builder tool. If you're like, I already know how  to use the Shape Builder tool, ah, there's going  to be seven here you're going to love, okay,  I use the Shape Builder tool probably the most in  Illustrator and we're going  to supercharge our superpowers in it. So let's jump in. That's a donut by the way. Ugh.

Ah, it was meant to be a donut. Now it's kind of green and anyway, uh, let's jump in  and start making donuts. Gross gross donuts. Alright, uh, first up, open up from your exercise file,  something called Shape builder Advanced. Okay, we've got a, it's meant to be a donut. First thing we're gonna do is just to make sure  for this tutorial, click on any of the circles here.

Go to your properties panel under transform. There's this like little three dots,  little advanced kind of little option. Say scale stroke and effects is turned off  and the scale corners is turned on. Just means when we shrink things up  and down, the uh, stroker on the  outside is gonna stay the same thickness  and don't get smaller anyway. Alright? First thing we're gonna do is  select everything we're using.

My black arrow, I'm gonna go to my sheet builder tool, okay? Shift M is the shortcuts. This one here, okay? And what I'm gonna do, just so if you haven't done it  before, you click across them, just drag across them  and they all join up, which is cool. You want to delete this kind  of like it's meant to be a teeth mark. Okay?

So we're gonna hold down the option key on a Mac alt  key on a pc, okay? And you'll see my little cursor changes to a minus  and then I can just click through  and kind of zigzag my way through them all. You might not get them all, you might have to do  that same thing again, hold the same key down,  which is option on a Mac, alt on a pc  and just drag through them all until we get  our bite mark, right? Let's look at some advanced stuff. Let's grab the pencil tool. You might have to hold down the shape builder tool,  grab the pencil tool or use the N on your keyboard.

I'm gonna double click mine to make sure the smoothing is  right up just to kind of make it look nice and smooth. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna  exaggerate a gap at the top. Yours might work, it might not. I'm gonna try and make my own work. So I'm gonna kind of leave a gap and try and draw my icing  and I'm gonna try and draw some sort of like blobby. Ah, did that work?

And then I'm gonna come back over here. Oh, it's like a skirt on it. I'm gonna undo that. Okay, that was nicer. Um, so I've left a gap at the top. I can kind of check the gap.

Command Y  or control Y on a PC goes to outline mode. Can you see the gap at the top there? I'll zoom in that gap there. That's what I'm looking for. If you don't have it, grab the Y arrow  and you can just kind of like nudge it around. Don't want it overlapping because that's the kind  of the idea of this advanced feature is  to fill in those big gaps.

So back to normal views, command y, control Y on a pc. Grab my black arrow, I'm gonna select it all. I'm gonna grab my shape builder tool  and I'm gonna say I want great uh, to add this to there. Perfect. I'm gonna get rid of this like little tab here. Can you see it?

Um, so I'm gonna hold down my option. Counter mac alt. Can a PC get rid of that? Okay. And now I wanna fill this bit in,  but you can see I can't drag across this. Okay?

It's 'cause there's a gap in there  and by default the gap detection is off. So what you can do is uh,  double click the uh, shape of the tool. Okay? Remember all tools can be double clicked. This where you find all the good stuff, okay? And  We can go, uh, gap detection is on, you might have to mess  around with uh, small, medium  and large depending on how big you made it.

You can kind of see small will try fill gaps of three points  and see how big mine is. Still doesn't do it. I don't know why I just go straight  to large to see if I can fill it. That's 12 point gaps might not be big enough. Is it still not? Okay.

So if you've done yours massively big like me, okay,  you can double click it and say I want custom  and I'm just gonna, I don't know, put it up to 40. Okay? And I'm gonna say you can fill this all in. So you watch this, I can click  and drag across them now that we'll join them. So if there are gaps, you're like, oh, it's really close  but not quite overlapping,  you can force the shape builder tool to kind of fix it. Now for me at the top here, I wanna try  and fix, there's kind of a little bit  of a gittery jiggly thing at the top here.

You're probably gonna have the same thing. What we can do is grab the option key al key  on the PC and just click on it. Once get rid of that, grab my direct selection tool  and tidy this up a little bit. Just moving these anchor points around  to kind of make it more smoother. There you go. So if you have got gaps,  especially if you've kind of drawn some, I don't know,  hand drawn illustrations, you can fill those gaps  if they don't really want to.

And just play around with the gap size. The next thing I wanna look at is let's select it all. Let's go to our shape builder tool  and let's look at where it gets its  color from at the moment. Mine has got no fill in this purple stroker on the sides  'cause that's what my last thing I was doing. Yours might be white with a black stroke. Okay?

'cause that's where it gets it from your stroke panel. You can see pick the color from your color swatches. And the currently I have uh, a fill  of none and a purple stroke. What you can do is be a bit more intentional about it. Okay, so let's cancel that  and let's open up, we're gonna have nothing selected. So black arrow deselect the background, turn that off, go  to window and open up your swatches panel.

Okay, so when you're coloring in a drawing that you've done  or done a live trace, we've got it from somebody else. Okay? What we're gonna do is we're gonna add all  of these swatches over here. Can you see I've got this chunk. So select them all. I'm gonna go in my swatches panel.

I'm gonna say you are all and all select the colors. Awesome. Okay, there they all are my swatches panel. Now if I select on this, okay,  and I grab my shape builder tool shift MI can say I want  this pink color. Where is it there? That one there,  the darker one to be in the top.

And I want this, I don't know,  biscuity dony color at the bottom. So you can work your way through your illustration, kind  of picking the colors that way. Let's add a little extra. So I'm gonna grab my, uh, what I'm gonna do,  I'm gonna click hold down my lip still grab the rounded  rectangle tool and I'm gonna draw something,  some sort of sprinkles. Okay? If you are finding hard to draw sprinkles  with rounded corners, what you might do is in your  properties panel under rectangle, you see an option  that says scale corners.

We turned that on earlier on. We do want to scale it. And I'm gonna grab the white arrow  and I'm gonna zoom in a little bit. And I'm gonna say you drag all the way in. So I've got this kinda like lozenge thing, okay? And I'm going to use my black arrow.

I'm gonna rotate it  and I'm going to actually copy, paste, paste, paste, paste. So I've got a few of them. And then I am gonna  Go in fast forward mode. I'm just gonna move these in. All right, those are my stingy sprinkles. I've got a couple of them.

So select them all  and let's supercharge this kind of color swatches things. Great. When you're coloring in big  illustrations, select it all. Shift M for my um, shape builder tool. It's double click on it. And let's say this one here.

So we're gonna pick up from color swatches,  but we're gonna turn the swatch preview on, which is handy. Let's click. Okay. And can you see above my cursor? Okay, it's telling me where I'm at, okay? Which is the middle one I'm at No fill,  but a little bit to the left.

Can you see there's dark pink  and a little bit to the right, a little white square. So what you can do is use your arrow. Watch this. If I use my arrow keys on my keyboard left  and right, these ones down here, can you see it's kind  of moving if I go right, right, right, right, right. Can you see it corresponds with what's going over here? So I'll move it there.

You watch if I hit right? Can you see it's going through my swatches. Okay, so what you can do is I'm gonna go down  one down, one row across. A little bit tricky to, there we go here down one  and it actually jumps to that next row down there. So I'm gonna go up one. So I'm going to go back, back, back.

Can you see my little uh,  highlight now is on those switches that I made. So just using left and right. Once you find them, what you can do is you can say,  all right, blue, bam blue. I can go right one, I can go right one  to my kind of more meant to be chocolate color  and drag both across these. I'm gonna go the next one along, which is um,  I think it's an off white that I made. Okay?

And I'm gonna go back to blue using my left arrow key. Can you see it takes a little while to get used to,  but you can start toggling through, you know, um, colors  that you've added to your swatches and start coloring in. Let's go to this purple color. Let's go u lemme go  for the darker color down the bottom here. That's kind of how I imagined it. Now we're using swatches to color it.

Okay, I've got my, let's um,  pick our own kind of just custom colors. Let's select it all. Okay, go to my shape builder tool  and you can just double click on the full swatch  and say, actually I want,  I want a really darker pink for this little bit. Okay? And then click and fill that. It's not a swatch, you can't kind of toggle between them,  but you can go and pick them.

That's kind of what I'm looking for. Kind of a couple of other tricks  with this shape builder tool is,  let's say I just wanna make this one big flat icon, okay? I don't want anything in it. So  what we're gonna do is I'm gonna  go to my shape builder tool. I'm gonna actually double click shape builder tool. I'm gonna go to reset everything.

I just wanna smoosh everything together, kind  of like the Pathfinder. So what you can do is shape builder  tool, just hold down shift. What ends up happening is instead of like drawing a line,  okay like this and trying to join a little bit up,  you can just hold shift down  and drag it across, joins them all up in one go. That's a handy trick. I'm gonna hit undo another trick  that is might be handy for you, I don't use it. Um, but it might be handy  for somebody else doing illustrations.

If you double click on the tool is this one here that says,  um, in merge mode, clicking stroke splits the path. It's not clear what it does, but let me show you. So let's turn it on, click okay,  I'm gonna deselect everything. So command shift A on a Mac control shift, A on a pc  and I'm gonna just do it with some basic shapes. I'm gonna  Grab, grab an ellipse and just overlap two of these guys,  you and you. So I've got two of them.

If I select them both,  grab my shape builder tool, make sure  that setting is turned on. It's this one here in merge mode,  clicking strokes and path click. Okay. And what you'll notice is when you hover above a path,  it's got a different icon. Can you see that kind of like weird little  cross in the middle of the line? You click on it and you're like it didn't do anything.

Kind of does watch this. If I grab my black arrow now,  can I click off on the background and say you and you can. You see what it did kind of slices them where they were kind  of like using the scissors tool, but a little bit easier. I don't use it very much, but you might be like,  oh that's super helpful. So there you go. Some advanced shape builder techniques.

I love the gap detection  and coloring in with the swatches from your swatches panel. Before you leave, you might want to just double check,  double click on the shape builder tool  and you might wanna hit reset  and maybe turn gap detection on  and everything's kind of back to the way it was. We click okay, it'll remember it  next time you're using the tool. There you go. Alright, I will see you in the next video.