- In this movie, we're gonna draw
a series of custom guides inside of Illustrator.
Every one of which is a rectangle as you can see here.
We're gonna draw them in a slightly different order however.
The order that we're seeing them created here
inside the diagram is useful for diagramming purposes
but not quite the best for drawing purposes.
And these guides, by the way, are gonna help us
locate other elements of the rocket
as well, as draw that custom path outline
with the pen tool.
All right, I'm gonna switch over to Illustrator once again
and of course, we're seeing our document in progress.
And then I'm gonna go ahead and scroll down
and I'm gonna click on the guides layer
to make it active so that we're isolating
these new guides from the shapes themselves.
Now, I'm gonna return to my rectangle tool,
which has a keyboard shortcut of M
after the rectangular marquee tool
that's available to us in Photoshop.
Now go ahead and click on the bottom left anchor point
that's associated with the existing rectangle
to bring up the rectangle dialog box
and a width value of 104 is just fine.
In fact, we want this shape to be a square.
Go ahead and change the height value
to 104 points as well and click okay
and we get exactly the rectangle
that we're looking for.
Now, I want to create a new rectangle right here
at this location upward and off to the left
but I can't click at this location
because it's a handle here inside of Illustrator CC.
To get rid of that, just go ahead and press
control shift A or command shift A in the Mac
to deselect the rectangle and now, you're back in business.
I'll go ahead and click at this location
and this time, I'm gonna dial in some different values.
I'm gonna change the width value to 82 points
and I'm gonna take the height value
down to 38 points and then, I'll click okay
and we end up with this pretty small rectangle.
It's not positioned at the right location however.
So, I'll go ahead and switch back
to the black arrow tool and I'd like to see
you getting the habit of using the keyboard shortcuts.
It's V, which is an upside down arrow
for the black arrow tool and it's A for arrow
for the white arrow tool.
Anyway, I'm gonna press the V key
to get the black arrow tool,
which allows me to modify whole objects
in the Illustrator and then I'll go ahead
and drag the rectangle by its bottom right anchor point.
Again, the bounding box has to be turned off
for this to work and then go ahead and snap it
into alignment at the intersection
of the vertical guideline in the bottom
of that most recent rectangle and just to confirm
everything is the way it should be,
go ahead and click in the word, Transform
up here in the Control Panel and then select
the bottom right point in the Reference Point Matrix
and you should see an X value 480 points
and a Y value of 400.
In which case, everything is the way it should be,
so just go ahead and press the enter key
or the return key on the Mac so that Illustrator
doesn't get mixed up and move your shape.
In other words, pressing the escape key
can goof things up.
All right, now, we wanna draw a new rectangle
from this location outward.
So, I'll go and switch my rectangle tool once again
and I'm gonna go ahead and click it.
Really, any old location here inside the document
and I'm gonna change the width value to 94 points
and then I'll take the height value
to 114 points this time and click okay
and now, you wanna press the V key to switch back
to the black arrow tool.
Drag the new rectangle by its upper right anchor point
and snap it into alignment with the upper left corner
of this most recently drawn square
in order to produce this effect here.
So, you should see that your new rectangle dips down
just a little bit.
Now, what I'm gonna do is take this square,
this 104 x 104 point square and I'm gonna drag it
by its lower right anchor point this time around
until it snaps into alignment with the lower left point
of the most recent rectangle, at which point,
you wanna press and hold the alt key
or the option key on the Mac and notice
that the cursor is now a double arrow,
which shows me that I'm gonna create
a copy of that square at this new location.
All right, finally, you wanna switch back
to the rectangle tool.
Notice you're gonna see a bunch of handles.
We don't want that.
So press control shift A or command shift A
in the Mac in order to deselect the shape.
And then click right there at the lower left corner
of this new square in order to bring up
the rectangle dialog box.
Set the width value to that familiar 104 points
and then change the height value to 32 points
and click okay.
All right, we need to create just one more rectangle.
I'll press the V key to switch back the black arrow tool
and I'm gonna create this rectangle right here
so that it aligns to the bottom of the ellipse
and I'm gonna do so by duplicating
my most recent rectangle.
What you wanna do is drag it by its center point like so
then drag it up so it snaps into alignment
with the bottom anchor point of the ellipse
and then press the alt key or the option key
on the Mac so that we're creating a copy
of the shape and then drop it into place.
Now, it's not located exactly where it should be.
You can go ahead and drag this guy up
by the bottom of that edge right there
so that it snaps like so.
This is ultimately where the shape wants to be
but it wants to be a little taller and so,
what I'm gonna do is click on the word, Transform
up here on the Control Panel once again.
Go ahead and select this bottom point,
the bottom middle point in the Reference Point Matrix
and confirm that your X value is 482
and that your Y value is 218.
That's exactly what we want.
We do want a width value of 104 points
so that it fills the width of the rocket
but I wanna take the height value here
up to 38 points and I'm doing that
just by pressing the up arrow key
and because this bottom point
in the Reference Point Matrix is selected,
the bottom of the shape remains stationary
and were just increasing the height of the shape upwards.
Once you get a height of 38 points,
go ahead and press the enter key
or the return key on the Mac to implement that change.
All right, now the last thing we need to do
is convert these plain, old, ordinary rectangles
into custom snap-in guides and you do that
by first selecting all of those rectangles,
which you can do by clicking on this little wedge
in the upper right corner of the layer
inside the layers panel and notice
that will select all of those rectangles
then go up to the View Menu, choose Guides
and choose Make Guides in order to convert
all of the rectangles to invisible snap-in guides
and then you can go ahead and click on the base shapes layer
because we are now done with the creation
of our custom guides here inside Illustrator.