Drawing rectangles, circles, and polygons

Geometric shapes are the basic building blocks for more complicated graphics. It is also a good point to start out drawing vector objects.

Click on one of the shape tools in the tool panel. You have several options to draw shapes. When you press certain keys while you draw, the shape tools will act differently.

To draw a shape just press down the mouse button and pull the pointer until the shape reaches the desired size, then release the mouse button. You can see that the shape starts out with a corner point or a point on the perimeter. If you want to start drawing the shape from the center point, hold down the ALT key (Windows) or the Option key (Macintosh).

If you want to constrain the shape to expand symmetrically, hold down the Shift key (Windows) while you drag. This produces squares and circles when the appropriate tools are selected.

Whenever a tool has specific tools options they appear in the tools option panel. You can enable the tool option panel by pressing in the quick launcher in the status line.

The polygon tool is the only shape that has options available. The tool options in the properties inspector allow you to choose opacity, blending mode, shape, sides, and angle:

In the shape pulldown menu, you can select between polygon and star. In the sides box enter the number of equilateral sides of the polygon, which is the number of points the star should have. When you select the star shape, you can also specify the angle of the points of the star.

It is important to note that tool settings in the properties inspector are applied before you use the tool. Objects properties, however, can be changed at any point in the course of your work when the desired object is selected.