Cutting paths and shapes apart in Vectornation by Zaweba
How the Path cutter, Free cut, Rectangle cut and Mirror cut in Vectornation by Zaweba split paths and closed shapes for illustration and print work.
Sooner or later every drawing needs something split. A circle becomes two halves in different colours, a long line needs a gap, a badge needs a band cut across it. Vectornation by Zaweba has a family of cutting tools for these jobs, from a simple Path cutter to a freehand knife.
They do slightly different things, and choosing the right one saves a lot of tidying afterwards.
The Path cutter
The Path cutter cuts a path at the point where you click. Click once on an outline and the path is split there, giving you two ends to work with. This is the scissors idea: precise and local. Use it when you want to open a closed shape, separate one stretch of a line from the rest, or create an end point to join to something else.
The Free cut
The Free cut is the knife. You draw a freehand line through closed shapes, and it cuts them along that line. It can cut the selection or everything under the line, so you decide whether it acts on chosen shapes only or slices through whatever it crosses.
Hold Alt while drawing and the cut is a straight line instead of a freehand one. Hold Alt and Shift together and the straight line snaps to 45 degree steps, which is ideal for diagonal bands and neat horizontal or vertical splits.
Typical jobs include splitting a shape into two colours, cutting a fruit in half for an illustration, slicing a background into panels or carving a lettering shape into pieces for a stencil look.
Rectangle cut and Mirror cut
Version 0.9.15 added two more: Rectangle cut and Mirror cut. As the names suggest, they extend the cutting family with a rectangular cut and a mirrored one. They suit work that needs regular or symmetrical divisions, where a freehand cut would be hard to keep even.
Choosing between them
If you want to split an outline at a single point, use the Path cutter. If you want to cut a filled shape into pieces along a line, use the Free cut, straightened with Alt when the line should be straight. For a regular or symmetrical cut, look to the Rectangle cut and Mirror cut.
For combining shapes rather than splitting them, the shape builder and Pathfinder are the right tools, and the Shape sketcher can merge shapes with a scribble. For removing a stretch of a line between crossings, the Line trimmer is often simpler than cutting twice.
Getting clean results
Decide on the selection before you cut. If you only want to cut one shape, select it and make sure the Free cut is set to the selection, or the line may slice through artwork underneath that you meant to leave whole.
Zoom out enough to see the whole cut before you start a freehand line. A cut that stops short of the edge of a shape may not divide it the way you expect. Draw past the edges on both sides.
After a cut, select the new pieces with the Pointer and check them. Colour them differently for a moment if you are unsure where the split fell. It is much easier to fix a cut straight away than after the pieces have been styled.
A small example
Say you are making a two colour circular badge. Draw a circle, select it, take the Free cut and hold Alt and Shift to draw a straight horizontal line across the middle. You now have two halves. Fill the top in one colour and the bottom in another, add type on top, and the badge is done in Vectornation by Zaweba in a matter of moments.
