Learn how to add a second pipe to an icon and insert a water droplet using various tools and commands in a graphic design software. This article illustrates the step-by-step process, including scaling, copying, rotating, and grouping objects, as well as working with layers and adjusting transparency.
Key Insights
- The article explains how to select an entire icon using the selection tool (shortcut 'V' on the keyboard) and then resizing, copying, and grouping it. Grouped objects can then be easily rotated or transformed.
- Aligning two objects accurately is also covered in the instructions — by moving the secondary object so that the center rectangles intersect, then dragging it to the right while holding shift. The advantage of this method is ensuring a consistent gap between the two objects.
- Lastly, the article provides guidance on how to add a water droplet to the design, including copying, pasting, resizing, and centering the droplet. It also emphasizes the importance of maintaining proportions and adjusting transparency for a more refined final image.
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In this video we'll be adding a second pipe to our pipe icon as well as adding the water droplet we've created in the previous icon. To do this let's first select our entire icon using the selection tool, shortcut V on the keyboard, and dragging the selection over our first pipe.
We'll then reduce the size slightly holding shift to maintain the appropriate ratio and release and next we want to copy the entire pipe. Before doing so let's actually group it into one pipe group. To do this we'll right click and select group and we'll name this group in our layers panel pipe 1 and hit ENTER.
Next if we deselect it we'll see that we can select it and it's all contained in one group. We'll then hit CTRL C to copy this pipe and CTRL shift v to paste the same pipe in place. This will be our secondary pipe but we'll first need to rotate it 180 degrees.
To do this we could rotate it using the same means that we have before or we can right click on it go to transform and select rotate. From here we can type 180 as our angle to rotate it by and we'll check preview to see what it will look like. In this case this is the correct angle so we'll click okay.
Next we need to move our pipe so that it lines up with the other pipe. To do this we'll first move it down and then make sure that our center rectangles intersect. Then clicking and dragging while holding shift will ensure that we drag it appropriately to the right until we have a gap between our two icons.
In this case it's a little too much gap so let's zoom in and I'll just inch it back a little bit more. This looks like a good amount of space so let's zoom out and we've completed our pipes. For the second pipe in our layers panel let's double click and name this pipe two and hit ENTER.
Finally let's move both pipes by creating the selection box and we're just going to inch them so that they're both contained within the artboard. We're now ready to add our water droplet. Let's scroll our perspective and we're simply going to select the water droplet and hit CTRL C to copy it.
We'll go back into this artboard clicking on the working layer and we'll now paste our water droplet hitting CTRL V on the keyboard. We'll then resize it holding shift as we resize it down and let's move it so that it's right beneath the pipe. We can even decrease the size a little bit more and adjust it over until we see the pink line showing that it's centered within the pipe.
I'll drag it beneath so it's right about there. However looking at this it seems that our accent line has been skewed and hasn't maintained good proportions so let's double click on our droplet group selecting only the path and we'll use the delete key to delete it. We'll then click outside and we can see that we have our two pipes with our water droplet.
Next let's group all three of these different elements the two pipes and the water droplet into one group by right clicking and selecting group and we'll rename this group within our working layer. We'll name it 12 pipes and hit ENTER. Finally we'll center it and we've completed the icon so we'll move it into our final layer.
We now have it in our final as one final step we'll want to work on transparency making sure that none of the objects here have any white fill so we'll click on the object go to our fill which is currently set to question mark because some of these have white fill and some are transparent so we'll make sure fill is on top of the stroke and select none. This image is now transparent and so let's save our work using CTRL S on the keyboard and in the next video we'll be working on a laptop. See you there!