In order to edit artwork in Illustrator CC, you first need to be able to select it.
Now there are a lot of methods for selecting and in this video, you'll explore a number of them, including Outline Mode, Select Similar and more.
With the latest version of Illustrator CC open, you can open this file from the practice files for this tutorial if you want to follow along.
And to make sure that you can see everything in your document, Choose View, Fit All in Window.
Now to start, you'll select some artwork and change its color.
The circles and stripes you see on this cake need to be a different color so to select them, with the Selection Tool selected, click one of the circles.
In order to select the other circles that are the same fill color, this burgundy, you can use something called the Select Same commands.
To do that, choose Select, Same, and you can see a series of options for selecting similar artwork.
Choose Fill Color, and all the objects with that same fill color are now selected, even these shapes.
Now, these shapes don't need to be selected, so you can remove them from the selection.
To do that, press the Shift key and click each of these confetti shapes.
And also shift click this shape too to remove it from the selection as well.
Now to change the color of the selected shapes, click Fill in the Properties Panel in the panel that appears, make sure that Swatches are selected.
These are default colors that come with each document and choose a red.
There, that looks a little better.
Press the Escape key to hide the swatches then.
Now next, the cake icing right here needs to be reshaped a little bit.
To do that, you'll select a part of the shape and reshape it.
To start, double click the icing shape.
This enters in Isolation Mode so you can focus on just that artwork without selecting other content.
Now, to select part of the shape, select the Direct Selection Tool in the Tools Panel, and you should now see all of these points that make up the shape.
These are called anchor points and they're used to control the shape of the path.
To select a few of the anchor points so you can reshape the artwork, you can draw a selection around those points with a tool called the Lasso Tool.
So, press and hold on the Direct Selection Tool and select the Lasso Tool.
Come out to the artwork, press and drag around just these anchor points to select them.
Now to move those anchor points, you're going to switch back to the Direct Selection Tool.
So, press and hold down the Lasso Tool and select the Direct Selection Tool.
Move the pointer over one of the points and drag it down to move them all.
To stop editing the shape and exit this Isolation Mode, press the Escape key.
Another method of selecting which can make life easier is to work in Outline Mode.
Now, to enter Outline Mode, choose View, Outline.
You can now only see the outlines of the artwork.
This can make it easier to select content behind other content or even to drag across artwork to make a selection for instance.
These circles down here need to be selected so they can be resized.
So, select the Selection Tool and starting in a blank area over here, drag across the circles to select them and you'll probably also select this larger shape here.
To deselect this shape, press the Shift key and click its edge.
So that you can see the color fills again in the shapes, choose View, Preview or GPU Preview if you see that.
Now to resize the circles, press the Shift key to resize them proportionally and drag a corner to make them a little bit larger to fill this space better.
When they look right, release the mouse button and then the key.
So, that they're no longer selected, click in a blank area to deselect everything.
There really are a lot of tools and methods for selecting artwork in Illustrator CC.
The more ways to select that you know, the easier it will be to edit artwork later on.
