And to see what that means, you can select any one of the live shape tools, including the rectangle tool, or you can select the line segment tool.

However, if you take a look up here, at the far left side of the control panel, in the most recent version of Illustrator, you'll see the word ellipse, and that's because Illustrator's still seeing this as a pair of live shapes. And we get one path cutting a hole in the other. And then you go up to the object menu, drop all the way down to compound path, and choose make. So, I'll just go ahead and partially marquee them with a black arrow tool. And in my case, it's these two circles right here.

And just to refresh your memory, you create a compound path by selecting the paths that you are interested in combining. And as you may recall from the fundamentals course, this is what's known as a compound path, because, after all, we have one sub path cutting a hole in another. All right, now notice for the most part, I'll be demonstrating how these operations work by combining a rectangle along with this green ring shape. And then we have the other six icons, beginning with Divide, down here below. Now notice that the pathfinders are divided into two groups of icons, the shape modes, which include those guys I was just telling you about, Unite, Minus Front, Intersect, and Exclude. So, the first thing I'll do is go up here to the window menu and choose the pathfinder command to bring up the pathfinder panel And because we are going to be working with it an awful lot over the course of this chapter, I'm going to go ahead and drag this entire panel group, and drop it above the layers panel.

And they include Unite, Minus Front, Intersect and Exclude. In this movie, I'll show you how to work with the first four Pathfinder operations, which are also known as the shape modes.

Shape modes in illustrator