Illustrator Tutorial: How To Use The Eraser Tool

In the next few years we will talk about using illustrator tools that lets you erase portions of your artwork. So we'll talk about the eraser tool the scissors and the knife tool. Now what's interesting about these tools is that they allow you especially the eraser to create artwork by erasing portions of it. And I know that it sounds odd but in one of the upcoming videos I'll explain this concept in greater detail. The first erasing tool we will talk about is that you razored tool which sits right here in the Tools panel and that it has a handy shortcut which is the shift plus the key combination. So when you grab it you can see that the cursor changes into this ellipse that looks pretty much the same like the cursor for the blob brush for instance. And this is important to take a note of because later when we'll be talking about the raised two options. Well notice the similarities between this tool and the paintbrush or the blob brush tool. So what can we do with the eraser tool where we can remove portions of artwork without breaking the paths. And what do I mean by that. Let's take a look at this birthday cake we created for the pencil tool class. If we just click and drag through the cake. Notice that two things happen. First we're removing a big portion of the artwork which of course corresponds with the eraser tools tip size and shape and secondly what we are left with are all closed paths. If I just quickly switch to the outline mode you'll be able to see it better as you can see we got close to paths here. It didn't break our artwork it just erased a portion of it. There's also one extremely important thing to notice here when we drag through the artwork with the eraser tool it erases anything and everything it comes across regardless of the stacking order. But also regardless of the layers when we take a look at the layers panel we can see that some parts of the artwork are on one layer while the others are on a separate layer but the eraser tool just doesn't care. It erases everything. It comes across. Or maybe it does care but it just wants you to tell it which parts of your artwork you want to erase because if you don't it just assumes that you want to erase what you see. So how can we communicate with the eraser or tool a bit better. Well there are two ways in which we can tell it that we want to constrain the rayson process to a certain object or objects. First we can simply select the object we want to erase a part of so select candles. In this case I notice that even though I am click and drag in like a way to erase everything I'm just raised in parts of the candles and only that and nothing else. And if I select maybe this strawberry this time and started raising I'm erasing only the strawberry and nothing else. I can also select the candles along with the strawberry. So now I got multiple objects selected and if I start erasing I am erasing only parts of the selected objects. Another way of making sure that we are erasing only parts of the object we want is to isolate it. So what do I mean by that. In Illustrator we can temporarily separate one object from the others in order to work only on that object and don't affect others by accident. We can isolate an object in three different ways. So let's say that I want to isolate only the middle part of the cake to erase some parts of it. So first I can just select it right click on it or command click if you are on a Mac and choose isolate select adopted right now the object is isolated and I can start erasing parts of it without worrying that I might erase something I didn't want. So I'll hit escape to exit the isolation mode. The other way of entering the isolation mode is simply by double clicking on the object with the selection tool or the black arrow if you will. So let me see the isolation mode this time by pressing this arrow right here. You can also enter the isolation mode by selecting the object we want to isolate and hidden this symbol in the control panel. So these are the three ways we can isolate an object in order to erase only the parts of this specific object. But before we wrap this video up here's just one more thing that needs mentioning with the eraser tool. We can not just only click and drag to erase. Artwork can also Marki around the whole object or a part of it too you raise it but we have to press and hold down the Alt key or option. If you are on a Mac and if you click and start dragging now we'll be able to murky around the area. We want to erase. And if you want to constrain the selection to a square you have to hold down old and shift keys together just like so. Remember that with the eraser tool we can erase portions of art. Regardless of the stacking order or layer placement unless we tell illustrator which objects we want to be affected by the erasing process and we can do that either by simply selecting a specific object or isolate in it which is done the easiest by double clicking on it with the selection tool. So in the next video we will talk about the arrays are two options and you'll discover why I was mentioning the brash told earlier.