Many of the basic Illustrator tools have a palette of options allowing you to tweak a number of variables within the tool.  Using these settings gives you much greater control of the way objects and effects appear.

To pull up the tool options for a given tool simply select the tool and hit Return (Mac) or Enter (PC).

Example ~ the options for the Warp tool is shown below:
 

Transparency is a quick and easy way to give visual interest and depth to your artwork.  Let’s create a very simple 3 minute peacock to illustrate this.

Create an ellipse and  fill it with a multicolored gradient.  Use the Convert Anchor Point Tool  to remove the curve from the anchor point on either end of the ellipse, as seen below.  This will create the feather shape for our peacocks tail feathers.

Now use your Rotate Tool  to fan out the feathers in a half circle like below.  For more info on how to do this see the tutorial, Quick and Easy Flowers in Illustrator.

Apply a thin stroke to the feathers to distinguish them from each other.

You will see that the fan of feather still looks a bit one dimensional.  Let’s use our transparency palette to change that!  Select all of your feathers and set them to 50% transparency.
You will see that instantly our feathers seem to have much more layering and depth.  Now play a bit with your transparency blend modes and check out all the cool ways the transparency palette can change the look of your feathers.  You can see a few examples below.





Now with the use of some very simple shapes, we can create the body of our peacock.

Now choose your favorite blend mode for your fan of feathers, color up your body to match and put them together for your 3 minute peacock.
   

Sometimes you might find that you want to have text cut out of a shape, rather than placed on top of it.  This allows for the colors and/or patterns on the layer behind the shape to show through the letters.  You have a two options for doing this in Illustrator…both of which are quick and easy.

First, create you shape.  I am using a plain black rectangle as seen below.

 Next, place your text on top of your shape.  

Once you have it positioned where you want to cut it out, with the text selected, create outlines of the text by going to the Type menu and choosing Create Outlines.  The text will no longer be editable once you do this - so be sure it reads correctly.

 Now you have two options on how to proceed in cutting or knocking the text out.

OPTION ONE

With both the outlined text and the shape selected, go to your Pathfinder palette and click on the Divide icon.  This will divide the overlapping areas into separate shapes.  Then select any of the letter shapes and delete.  this will remove the overlapping area and leave a “hole” through the shape.

Delete all of the divided letter shapes, and you are left with your orginal shape with “holes” where all of the letters used to be.

 OPTION TWO

 With both the outlined text and the shape selected, go to your Shape menu and make a Compound Path.  This will make the two shapes into a single shape, leaving any overlapping areas as negative space. 

Now you can take your shape with cutouts and place it on top of other layers and what is behind it will show through!