Page 50 - CS6_AI_Look_Inside.pdf

rotate drawing oBjects
Very few projects are entirely horizontal, making rotating objects a foundational
Illustrator skill. In this exercise, you use several rotation techniques to create the rest of
the snowflake artwork.

1. With icons.ai open, make sure the grouped object is selected.

2. Activate the Rotate tool in the Tools panel.
When you select the Rotate tool, an origin point appears by default at the center of the
selected object. This origin point is the point around which rotation occurs. If you want
to rotate an object around some other point, you can single-click anywhere to define a
different origin point. Note:
The Illustrator
transformation tools all
use this same origin point
concept as the basis for
transformations. You can
click without dragging
Rotate tool to reposition the origin
point before applying the
Origin point for rotation
transformation.
3. Click near the top of the vertical line, hold down the mouse button, and then
drag left and down until the line appears over the next branch in the snowflake.
Note the angle in the cursor feedback, and then release the mouse button.
As you can see, the rotation moved the selected objects around the origin point.
Unfortunately, the vertical line is no longer there because you just rotated it.

When you drag with the
Rotate tool, the cursor When you release the
feedback shows the mouse button, the
angle of rotation. original object rotates.

Note:
You can Option/Alt-click
and drag to clone an
4. Press Command/Control-Z to undo the rotation. object while you trans -
form it. In other words,
5. With the group still selected, double-click the Rotate tool to open the if you press Option/Alt
Rotate dialog box. while dragging with the
This dialog box is the same one you would see by choosing Object>Transform>Rotate. Rotate tool, you can
Transformation dialog boxes, which default to the last-used settings for that transforma- create a rotated copy.
tion, make it easy to apply very specific numeric transformations to selected objects.

58 Project 1: International Symbols