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I am very new to Illustrator, in fact I am only experimenting with it in an attempt to help my friend develop a logo for a new business venture. I managed to draw out the shell of the logo using the line tool and modifying the lines with the anchor tool to get the shape I wanted.

However, I would like to somehow take all of these paths and create one object, or symbol which I can then apply a drop shadow, fill and various other effects too. Currently when I try to do this I get unwanted effects...

I'd appreciate any help on the subject.

The group of paths I want to convert to object/shape

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  • An image of your overall logo would help if you could upload one. – curious♦ Feb 20 '14 at 4:44
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    This is hard to grasp with the current screenshot but it looks like your drawing is made of multiple seperate lines. I would pick the points that you want to join with the white arrow (2 points, not more) and would use the join option <kbd>ctrl+j</kbd>. What kind of unwanted effects are you getting? – curious♦ Feb 20 '14 at 4:45
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Without an overall image to view, the best I can offer is....

  • Select all
  • Grab the Live Paint Bucket Tool
  • Click once to create a Live Paint Group
  • Choose a swatch color and click an area to color (like a bucket fill in Photoshop)

This will essentially create whole shapes out of the mish-mash of lines. When you're done coloring, you can click the EXPAND button on the control panel to expand the Live Paint Group and allow you to edit individual portions of the artwork.

In the future, you may want to shy away from the Line Tool in Illustrator to construct entire images. That's not really the proper tool. You should be using the Pen Tool to create shapes.

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You can also use the pathfinder in much the same way, I am very fond of the pathfinder tool. If you select all, and go to the pathfinder and click Unite it will combine all the paths to one, single path.

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  • I actually did that before posting the question and for some reason when I united the paths it flatten the entire image and I was left with a few lines. – Javacadabra Feb 21 '14 at 0:20
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You may want to try using the Pathfinder tool, making sure only the line art you want joined together is selected (i.e make sure no placed images you're tracing over are selected). Then use the Merge option on the Pathfinder instead of the Unite option.

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If it's just lines that you want to join together, make sure each line it touching or complete. select all of them, and go to Pathfinder and select crop. your lines will disappear but then just go to your weights and weight it up. you can now fill the shape. I had this issue for a while then figured this way out.

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