Explore the process of creating a keyhole for a digital lock using the ellipse tool, stroke and fill changes, and the polygon tool. The steps include drawing a circle, changing its fill color, creating a triangle, and merging the two shapes to form one cohesive object.
Key Insights
- The tutorial describes how to use the ellipse tool from the toolbar to create a circle that will form the basis of the keyhole.
- It also explains how to create a triangle using the polygon tool, adjusting the number of sides and the radius to fit the design needs.
- Lastly, it details how to merge the circle and triangle together using the shape builder, creating one coherent keyhole shape for the lock.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video, we'll be completing our lock. To create the keyhole, we’re going to use the Ellipse Tool from our toolbar.
We’ll click and hold, then simply find the center and draw a circle by holding ALT and Shift. We’ll release, and rather than having a stroke on the outside, we’re going to change it from a stroke to a fill.
To do this, we’ll go to our toolbar. We’ll swap the fill and stroke so that the inside is black, and for the stroke, it’s currently set to white. We’ll click on it, then click 'None' so it has no stroke and only the black fill.
Next, we’ll create our triangle. To do this, we’ll go to our toolbar and select the Polygon Tool. From here, we can click, and to create a polygon, we simply have to tell it the number of sides needed.
In this case, we’ll type three for three sides, creating a triangle. For the radius, we want it to be relatively small since our artboard is only 30 pixels wide.
So, we’ll just take a guess and say four pixels, then hit ENTER. Even though this triangle is too large, we can scale it down by clicking on one of the corners and resizing it while holding Shift.
We’ll drag it to about here, then use V to select our object and move it up so it intersects with the circle.
As a final step, we’ll select both objects and use the Shape Builder Tool to combine them into one object.
We’ll click and drag across all three, and we’ll see that we now have one keyhole shape.
We’ll then hit V, and in the case of my lock, I simply want to move it down a little bit.
To move it down and avoid getting too far off to the side, I can use the purple guides, or I can hold Shift as I drag to stay aligned.
I’ll release it right about here when it looks natural, and we now have a nice-looking lock.
Let’s now center our lock by dragging the selection box over all the elements, right-clicking to select 'Group, ' and then horizontally and vertically aligning it.
Well done! We’ve completed our lock. Let’s go into our working layer, double-click to title it 'Seven Lock, ' hit ENTER, and finally, we’ll select it from the Layers panel, clicking to the right of 'Lock' and dragging it into 'Final.'
We can now hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our work, and in the next video, we’ll be working on a gear icon.
See you there!