Urgent help required - help!

[gavin26291484f8jy]

Hi, Im having a sign made up for a new venture, my wife and I are opening her own salon and have a very basic understanding of Illustrator, I use CS3 so that tells you how much I use it. Can anyone either advise or quickly do it for me? I need an outline image of a grouped set of images. Its basically a group of flowers around a circular design that i need a main outline making, the grouped image has all the seperate elements in and I cannot use this. Please help 🙂

[Monika Gause]

You need this as a cutting path, right?

You need to duplicate the layer. And then lock the original layer just to be sure.

Then select all and apply the Pathfinder "Unite" from the pathfinder panel (might be called differently, it's the top left one)

The result will leave you with a couple of very small elements. You might need to delete those - unless you also want to offset the cutting path, so it has some distance to the original objects. In that case you can use Effect > Path > Offset path. Do the offset. Then Object > Expand appearance. Then Pathfinder Unite again.