Need Help Cutting Oval out of a Rectangle to create curve

[ssieber]

Hello,

I'm making a campaign brochure, and I'm having trouble. I have a blue curve that goes all across the bottom, and I would like the capitol building photo to meet up with the top edge of the blue curve.

The problem is that I made my curve using a simple blue rectangle, and a white oval that was tilted to look like a curve. Is there some way that I can cut the oval out of the blue rectangle so that the white oval won't have to overlap my capitol building photo?

So in essence where you see the white at the bottom, that'd be replaced with the rest of the capitol building photo at 30% transparency.

Thanks,

Steven

 

[ssieber]

I'm using Illustrator 9.0.2.

 

[apepp]

...window > pathfinder palette...

...select both the blue box and white oval, (white oval above blue box)...

...pathfinder palette > choose "minus front" button...

andrew

 

[ssieber]

Thanks, Andrew.

That seems a lot easier than what I was doing which was trying to use the brush tool or rectangle tool to "fill in" the overlapping area of the photo and my blue curve with dark blue.

Thanks again.

ssieber

 

[apepp]

...indeed, the pathfinder palette is key to creation of many custom shapes or compound paths...

...the other important palette is the appearance palette, whereby you can build layered fills and strokes for advanced effects, any "live effect" used on a shape will appear in this palette, live effects are editable further down the road...

...live effects are found under the "effect" menu...

...adding more fills and strokes to objects can be achieved by the flyout menu, top right arrow of the appearance palette, and re-ordered if needed 9 (strokes under fills etc)...

...effect > path > offset path is also a widely used feature, positive values expand fills, negative values will contract a paths fill...

...this is often used to build up gradient bordered text without having to convert the text to paths, it is therefore "live effect"...

...double clicking a feature listed in the appearance palette allows you to edit the effect (for example effect > stylize > drop shadow)...

andrew