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Out of context: Reply #11
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- detritus0
Christ, I haven't Ctrl-C'd anything new on this machine since 1pm?
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I'm barely through my first cup of tea of the day, so I'll spare you my usual tract of irrelevancy.
I take it you're trying to make a whole new shape, rather than create a form, wherein later on you can go edit the original constituent components?
See, the mask is useful if "you're not quite sure" about how something might ultimately be set, or if you're using complex background patterns or bitmap elements which may need to be edited later.
I think what you're after is the 'Pathfinder' tool (Window/Pathfinder, if it's not already visible on-screen), which employs different 'boolean arguments' between two or more shapes, to make new ones.
May I suggest you open up a new file, and within it create a filled circle and square, one on top of 'tother?
Then, taking note of which element is on top of the other in the Layers window stack, and with both objects selected, click on the little icons in the top row of the Pathfinder menu, under 'Shape Modes'.
The top four icons are kind of self explanatory, but try each one, then Undo and try the next. The first merges two objects, the second cuts one obect from another, the third merges the two objects, but only keeps the area of the intersection, the last merges the two objects but removes the intersection. You *may* have to click 'Expand' after each of these operations - they've changed the behaviour recently so automatically expand the object (this is hard to explain - I'll just skip it for the moment, 'cos I don't really understand Adobe's logic here).