When creating or editing artwork, you have to select things and selecting can be challenging at times from maybe selecting specific content in a sea of shapes to having to select the same things over and over.
Because of this, there are a lot of methods and tools for selecting.
In this tutorial you'll explore some of them, including Outline mode, Select Similar and Isolation mode.
Each has a purpose, and each has its reason for being.
You'll do so by making some changes to this cake artwork.
Let's start by making these burgundy circles and these stripes in this cake a little different color.
So to select them, click one of the circles with the Selection Tool selected.
Now you could Shift click all the circles to select them, but you want to work smarter in Illustrator.
To select the other circles that are the same fill color, the burgundy, you can use this Select Same commands.
To do that with one sample circle selected, choose Select, Same and you can see a whole bunch of options for selecting similar artwork, choose Fill Color, because I know they all have the same fill.
All of the objects with that same fill color are now selected even these shapes which we didn't want to be selected.
So to deselect them, press the Shift key and click each of these confetti shapes.
Shift click this shape as well to remove it from the selection.
Now, with them all selected, you can change the color.
So go click the fill color in the Properties panel and choose some other color, like this.
Press the Escape key to hide the swatches.
That's done.
Now, the white cake icing up here, I want it to be reshaped a little bit.
I want it to drip down a little more.
To do that, you'll select just part of the shape and reshape it.
So that you can focus specifically on this shape and not accidentally move something else, you can enter Isolation mode.
Double click the icing shape.
This enters Isolation mode where you can focus on just that artwork without selecting anything else.
So you can reshape the icing, you can draw a selection around part of the path with a tool called the Lasso Tool.
To select the Lasso Tool press and hold on the Direct Selection Tool and then select it.
You should now see all the points in this path.
These make up the shape.
These are called anchor points, and they're used to control the shape of the path.
To reshape this icing, you're only going to move a few of these.
So come out to the artwork and press and drag around these points.
You're going to like draw around them to select them.
Now, to move them, you're going to switch to a tool called the Direct Selection Tool.
It's under the Lasso Tool.
The Direct Selection Tool is all about selecting and editing these kind of points.
So move the pointer over one of the points and drag it down to move them all.
To exit this Isolation mode and select something else, you can press the Escape key.
Another method of selecting that can make your life so much easier is to work in Outline mode.
Remember when I mentioned selecting something in a crowd of other artwork at the beginning?
Outline mode would help you do that.
I'll show you what I mean.
To enter Outline mode, choose View, Outline.
All of the artwork only shows a black outline and no fill.
This can make it easier to select content behind or even drag across artwork to make a selection.
For instance, these circles need to be selected so they can be resized.
With the Selection Tool, go ahead and drag across them, to select them.
Now you might also select this larger shape.
So to do select it, press the Shift key and click its edge.
With them selected, let's show the fill colors in the shapes again.
So choose View, Preview or GPU Preview.
Now to resize these press this Shift key to constrain them, so they're resized proportionally and then drag a corner to make them a little larger, to fill the space a little better.
When they look right, release the mouse button and then the key.
Now, you worked hard to select those circles.
You can actually save that selection forever to easily select them later with one click.
To do that, choose Select, Save Selection..., give it a name that makes sense and click OK.
Click in an empty area to deselect everything.
If you needed to select those circles, you could simply choose Select, I called mine Cake base circles, and they're selected.
That's it.
Like I said earlier, there are a lot of ways and tools and methods for selecting artwork in Illustrator.
Each has a reason, and the more ways you learn, the easier it's going to be to create later on.
Get some practice in here.
Maybe try reshaping some of the other white frosting or select some of the same color confetti and change it.
