Before I move on to the timeline, I promise that I would show you how to create a perfect square or
circle.
So first, I'm just going to delete these layers by selecting them here in the composition panel and
just deleting them to create a perfect square.
Take the rectangle tool and then while you have it selected, just click the shift button and you can
see that as I drag out, I create this square.
You can see that it's being created from this upper left corner.
What if I want it to be created from the center?
Well, let me delete this.
Delete this layer now with the same tool selected.
If I click and then I hold shift and then I hold command, which on a PC would be the control button.
You can see that it creates and it grows from the center from where I clicked.
Cool.
Now how about a circle?
It's basically the same thing.
So if you go to your ellipse tool and then if you click and drag, you'll see that now it's just an
oval.
But if I hold the shift button, it's that perfect circle.
And remember what we did to create the circle from the center, from where we clicked, we held the
shift button down and the command button that's on a mac.
It would be the control and shift buttons on a PC.
So now I have this shape.
I'll go back to my selection tool and I can move it around my composition.
Here's another quick tip if you want to align it to the center of your composition, so you want it
to be perfectly in the center horizontally and vertically.
Go to your align panel just by clicking, align and click vertical center alignment and Horizontal Center
Alignment.
These buttons right here allow you to adjust where your layer is according to your composition.
Now.
How do we change the colour of our shapes?
Well, there's this Phil button up here.
So with this shape layer selected, I can click the fill color right here and I can now change it.
So if I want a light blue circle, I can do that.
You also have this stroke option.
So right now the stroke, you don't see it because it's set to zero pixels.
But if we want to stroke, which is a little hard to see right here.
I said it to 15 pixels.
It now has a white stroke.
I'm going to turn off the transparency.
How do I do that?
You might have got sore me going over there is this button right here.
So let me turn off the transparency.
So now we have that black background and this is great because now we can easily see this image and
our shape with the stroke.
If I want to change the colour of the stroke, just click the colour next to the stroke and now I can
change it.
Maybe I want that sort of red and blue look super cool, right?
And now you have a red stroke.
So those are just some basic things to know about using the shape tool, how to align layers to the
centre.
And now in the next lesson, we're going to be going over more of the options down here in our timeline.