Divide with/without The knife in Ai

IVAN — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:50:57 +0000

The divide action is way useful & helpful, you can create great forms from simple shapes with the help of it .

there is two ways to get this done ..

one by using the knife tool , .. the other is using the path finder option : divide..

here is the description with some examples to download in the end of the post .

- Draw a single circle .

- firstly .. click and hold on the scissor tool, a small menu well appear .. click on the knife !

how to use it ? : Click & drag, start from out of the shape .. penetrate it .. now go out & release .

the result is : two shapes (or more ) depending on the path you made through the circle .

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- show the pathfinder window ( Shift+F9) or go windows > pathfinder .

- draw a circle again

- draw a non-filled path penetrating the circle .. draw another one with a fill color.

- now select all, click the divide option .

The result is grouped paths .. you can ungroup them by (ctrl + shift + G )

Hope that was helpful :) , here are some examples done with the divide technique to download, a zipped file of the .ai source

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