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Using and "reading" the Layers panel

Using and "reading" the Layers panel - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator CS5 Essential Training

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Using and "reading" the Layers panel

One of the most helpful things about the Layers panel is not that you can actually define layers, but that you can really reverse-engineer, or better yet, read your document. See normally, you look at Illustrator and you try to identify objects by seeing what they are and maybe selecting them. However, you don't always get the full story. For example, maybe you're looking at this document right now, and someone else created this file, and they've given it to you to work on. And your job right now is to take a look at the sun, kind of looks interesting, but you see those like zigzag rays that are coming out of the sun. Your job is to make the zigzags a little bit different. You kind of click on the object over here, but you really don't see any path here that exists for these zigzag areas. In fact, if you go to Outline mode, Command+Y, to view the actual path themselves, you don't see the zigzags at all. So how were those zigzags created? On top of that, we have some Drop Shadow…

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