From the course: Illustrator CC 2017 One-on-One Advanced

Hiding, showing, and creating layers - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator CC 2017 One-on-One Advanced

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Hiding, showing, and creating layers

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- [Voiceover] In this movie, we will meet layers panel. Now some of this is gonna be stuff that we've reviewed in future movies, as well as the fundamentals course. And some of the stuff will be brand new information, little known information as well. Now we're looking at this piece of art that I made in the style of this guy named Dan Paladin, who among other things was the lead artist for this really great, really hilarious game called Castle Crashers. Now notice that I have just launched the program, for what it's worth. And you can see that I've got this huge colors panel going right here, I don't want it to be that big, what I want to do is make it smaller. And notice I can't drag these horizontal boundaries at all, so I don't have any control over what's going on here. And also I'm not seeing my layers here inside the layers panel. And this happens a lot when you first launch Illustrator. The culprit is that the layers panel is coming up collapsed, and if that happens to you, all you need to do is double-click on the layers tab, and then that will expand the layers panel and it'll give you control over how big you want to make these panels once again. So, just in case you run into that problem. I run into it all the time, so I imagine you might as well. Alright, so notice that we have these eyes in front of each one of the layers, and these are great for being able to hide and show layers of course. But, the reason it's so great that you can do that is because it gives you a chance to try to figure out what's going on in a specific piece of art work. Whether it was created by someone else and you're taking it over Or, it might have been created by you. I have created stuff, since 1987 I've been using this program. So I have thousands, literally thousands of documents. And so I'm often unclear in how I created a piece in the first place. And so you can either just turn an eye off in order to hide that layer or turn it back on of course. Or if you alter option click on an eye you'll turn off everything but that one layer, and then you can Alt or Option click again to turn all the other layers back on. But what's good about working this way is I typically start at the back of the stack, this isn't a particularly complex document in terms of the number of layers it possesses, although it's complex in terms of it's implementation. But let's say I decide to Alt click or Option click on the eye in front of the back layer, now I know that it contains, if I zoom out here a little bit by pressing control zero, it contains a big purple rectangle as well as this text that's been converted to path outlines. We also have this aura layer right here, and then a body layer which contains these things, and the head, and that completes the document so that gives me a sense of how it's put together. Alright, I'm going to go ahead and press Control + Plus, or Command + Plus on a Mac to zoom back in. And now let's say I want to create a new layer to contain the text so that I'm separating the text from the purple background. Well, there's a couple of different ways to create a new layer. One is to click on the layer onto which you want to put the new layer, and then go over here to the layers panel fly out menu and choose new layer and that brings the layer options dialogue box which allows you to name the layer and assign it a color and we'll come to that in a second. I'm going to cancel out here because my preferred method is to drop down to the little page icon here at the bottom of the layers panel, and not click on it because that will just create a default layer like so, and then I'd have to double click on it to modify it. Instead, press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and click on that little new layer icon, and notice that the back layer became selected there which is why I'm creating this new layer in the wrong location. So, I'll just go ahead an cancel out and I'll click on the head layer instead, and then Alt or Option click on the little page icon to bring up the layer options dialogue box, and I'll give it a name of text, and I'll change it's color to whatever I like. So you have a lot of color options available to you, and I'll tell you what that's all about in just a moment here, but I'm just going to go with light blue because I haven't used that. You can also click on custom, if you want to dial in your own custom color. I almost never do that, because we got a pretty wide array of colors to work with here. So, I'll just go ahead and click light blue, and then click OK in order to create that new layer. We'll put the text on the layer in the next movie, for now we just have it sitting here. I want you to know, one other option that's available to you, Let's say I want to put my signature on it's own independent layer as well, because it's an imported image file. And this gives me a chance to also show you a different way to create a new layer, there is a keyboard shortcut and it's Control + L or Command + L on the Mac, of course the L being for layer. But notice what it does, the body layer is selected, if I press Control + L or Command + L I create a default layer way up here at the top of the stack, so it has no reference to the layer that was formerly selected that's why you can also add the Option key or the Alt key on the Mac, but it does a weird thing. I'll go ahead and undo that change. Notice as soon as I press Control + Alt + L, or Command + Option + L, the body layer is selected Control + Alt or Command + Option + L will create a new layer, bring up the layer options dialogue box, but the new layer is occurring underneath the previously active layer right there. And that's because if you Control + Alt, or Command + Option click on the little page icon, instead of creating a layer on top of the active layer you'll create one below, and so that's the weird thing about that keyboard shortcut which is why I have not mentioned it prior to this moment, but it is an option that's available to you. And so I'll just go ahead and call this guy Sig, and then I'll change it's color to let's say tan would be lovely, and then click OK. And now the reason these colors are so useful by the way is not because they somehow colorize the objects on a layer, but rather if I were to click on this text for example once again. I'll see that its anchor points are red, and that tells me these objects are residing on the red layer, which is the back layer as I can clearly and quickly see here inside the layers panel. And so those are a few basic things you should know about the layers panel: how to expand it if it's accidentally collapsed, how you hide and show layers, and finally how you create layers both on top of and in back of existing layers here inside Illustrator.

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