10 Adobe Illustrator CC Layer Tips - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. 10 Adobe Illustrator Layer Tips: Hello and welcome to this class on 10 Illustrator Layer Tips, a graphic design for lunch class. My name is Helen Bradley and I'm a Skillshare top teacher. I have over 260 courses here on Skillshare and overall 160,000 student enrollments. In this class, we're going to look at 10 Illustrator layer tips that will get you working and understanding better the layers palette in Illustrator. I also for good measure, have a couple of extra bonus tips. By the time that you've completed this course, you're going to have a better knowledge of using the layers palette in Illustrator and perhaps solving some of the problems that you might have had with it in the past. Without further ado, let's get started. 2. Before we begin - Layer basics: Before we get into the actual tips, there are a few things that I'm assuming that you already know about layers. The first one is that there is a layers palette in Illustrator. You get to it by choosing Window and then Layers or you could press function key F7. Now inside Illustrator, every object has to be inside a layer. It can't be floating all by itself. Layers can contain multiple objects. That's unlike Photoshop, for example, but here in Illustrator, a single layer here can contain multiple objects. Now there's a stacking order in Illustrator, and that means that anything at the top is above everything else further down in the layer stack. The thing at the very bottom here is this word shapes. It's underneath absolutely everything. It's covered up in part by this rectangle, which is higher up in the layer stack and obviously positioned over it here in the document. Now you can select things inside the Layers panel. You can select them either in the document and then they're selected in the Layers panel but you can also, and sometimes it's easier to actually locate the object inside the layers panel and click on this little icon here, and that will select it. Now it's possible to have multiple layers in a document and quite often this will make sense. Here we have a layer that's got the colorful shapes and the word shapes on it. Then there's another layer at the top here that has all the gray objects on it. You can collapse and expand a layer's content by clicking on this little triangle and that expands or contracts its contents. Sometimes it's more handy to be able to just see the layer itself. Sometimes you want to see the layer and its contents. 3. Tip 1 - Understand and resolve bring to the front issues: The first of our tips involves a problem with bring to the front. I have the text's shape here and it's at the very bottom of the document. I'm going to select it by clicking on this icon here. I want to bring it to the front of the document, so you may think that by selecting object and arrange and bring to the front, that is going to bring it to the front of the document. Unfortunately, it doesn't. What it does is it brings it to the front of the current layer, but not the current document. Let's undo that. There is a fairly simple solution to the problem and it involves cut and paste. I'm going to use Edit and then Cut, but you could use Control X on the PC, command X on the Mac. I've cut it from the document. Now I'm going to select the layer where I want to put it. I'm going to choose Edit and then Paste in front. Because what that does is to paste this object now at the very top of the currently selected layer, but it also makes sure that goes in exactly the same place as it was when it was in the bottom most layer. It hasn't moved vertically or horizontally in the document. It's just moved forward in the layer stack. 4. Tip 2 - Move objects from layer to layer: Let's look now at moving objects to a brand new layer. I'm going to add a new layer to this document. I'm just clicking on the topmost layer and clicking here on the plus symbol that ads, and names, and new layer. Now I previously put my text back down here, so it is possible to grab this shapes element and simply drag and drop it up on the top here. It's been added to my new layer but you can also do this using the menu. Let's come back down here and let's select both the polygon and the star. I'm going to click here on the polygon to select it. Hold down the Shift key and click here to select the star. Both these objects are selected. I want to move them up to my new layer. I'm going to click on my new layer. I'm not actually going to select it and that's an important distinction. I'm just going to tap on the layer itself so that the layer is highlighted, but this button is not selected. Now I'm coming across here and I'm choosing, object, arrange, and send to current layer. What that's going to do is send my selection, which is these two shapes here, to the current layer. When they arrive there, you will see that they arrive underneath anything that's already in that layer. 5. Tip 3 - Color a layer: Every layer in Illustrator has by default a color associated with it. Up here, layer 3 has a sort color associated with it and layer 2 has this red color. Layer 1 has this blue color. This is significant because if we select an object on a layer, for example this green circle, the surrounding border around it is the color of that layer. So in that case it's blue. If I was to select this shape down here, then it's going to have a red border because this is red, that's layer color is red. Now you can change that color and you do it by just double-clicking on the layer that opens this layer options dialog where you can see not only the name of the layer, but also its color and you can change it. If you wanted to change this layer's color because it might be easier to see the surrounds of the objects on this layer if they were a different color, we can choose a different color for them. Let's choose dark blue. I'll click "Okay", and so this layers objects will now be colored dark blue. Let's go and select the ellipse here. You can see that it's dark blue, even though right now it's still showing red here. At anytime you can update the display in the layers palette by closing this icon here and then opening it again. 6. Tip 4 - Understanding Appearances and layers: For this next tip, we're going to have a look at the impact of using the appearance panel when we're working with layers. I have a series of shapes here and what I want to do is I want to surround the outside of the collection of shapes with a stroke. So one way that you might consider doing this is by selecting the shapes themselves coming across here and adding a stroke. In this case, I'm going to add a five-point stroke and what I've ended up doing is simply outlining each one of the individual objects with a stroke but not actually giving the entire group of objects the outside stroke that I want. So that's obviously not working here, let's have a look at another alternative and that involves selecting the entire layer instead of just the objects on the layer. So let's come here and select the entire layer and try that again, adding a stroke and then making sure that it's large enough for us to see a five-point stroke. Again, we've just ended up with the exact same result, not what we were looking for. Now there is a way of doing this and it involves the appearance panel. So let me just open up the appearance panel here, I'm going to select the layer, I'm going to click on here on the layer and through the appearance panel I'm going to attempt to add my stroke. I'm going to click here on add new stroke. It's black and we're going to add a five-point stroke as we've been doing so far. Now at first glance, it might appear that we've gone backwards really fast because we've ended up with an even worse result but let's go back and select our layer. Here in the appearance panel we can move things around. So what I'm going to do is take this stroke and move it underneath the contents, just pick it up and pull it underneath the contents and that gives us what we want. We might need to thicken up the stroke a little bit because it's not really the full five points that we want because of the location around the objects but we now do have what we set out to achieve. Which is a stroke that surrounds the collection of objects rather than bang around each individual object and we do that using the appearance panel. 7. Tip 5 - Layer Clipping Mask: We're going to look next at what's called a layer clipping mask, which is a little bit different to a regular clipping mask in Illustrator, and they're incredibly powerful. I've got a lot of brush strokes here to lay down these dots. I want to fill a star with them, so I'm going to the star shape here and within the layer that I'm working on, I'm just going to drag out a star. Now, it hasn't gone exactly in the right position, so I'm just holding the space bar down as I move it into position, where I want it in the document. Now I want this star filled with my dots and I don't want any dots outside. Well, we can do this using what's called a layer clipping mask. What we need is to have our shape that we want to clip to at the very top of the layer, but nothing is to be selected. I can't have my shape selected and I can't have any of my brushstrokes selected. I'm just going to make sure that nothing is selected, so there's no little dots down here. I do have the layer itself targeted but not selected. I don't have this button clicked, but I do have this blue highlight telling me that the layer is targeted. Now that everything's set in place, I've got the layer targeted and the shape I want to use at the very top of the layer, I'm going to this fly-out menu and I'm going to choose Make Clipping Mask. What Illustrator assumes is that I want the topmost shape in that layer to be the clipping shape. That's what it's done, it's created a clipping path around that star shape. The star shape at the moment is at the top of the layer, but it doesn't have to stay there. You can just pick it up and put it anywhere. A handy place to put it is at the very bottom of everything so it's tucked well out of the way. I'm just going to put mine at the very bottom of this layer. Okay, so now it's the last most thing in the layer. I can come back here and go back to my brush and I continue to paint these little dots inside this shape because the entire layer is being clipped to that shape, which now is positioned at the very bottom of the layer where it's out of the way. So I can continue just to draw in my little dots and everything is being clipped to that clipping shape. That's a layer clipping mask here in Illustrator. It's a bit different to a regular clipping mask, and I think sometimes, more useful. 8. Tip 6 - Alt/Option and the Layer panel: Our next tip involves using shortcut keys with the Layers panel. You may already be familiar with the fact that you can turn a layer's visibility on or off by clicking on this icon here. You can also lock the layer by clicking in this area here to lock just this layer, turn it off by clicking on it again. But if you repeat these commands with a shortcut key, the behavior changes quite significantly, and quite helpfully. I'm going to use the ''Alt key on a PC. That would be the ''Option'' key on a Mac and click again on this eyeball icon. What happens this time is that this layer stays visible, but every other layer in the document is hidden. Again, ''Alt'' click on it to bring everything back, ''Alt'' click to make this layer visible, every other layer invisible. It works the same way with the lock process. I'm going to ''Alt'' click here and when I ''Alt'' click here, what happens is I'm locking every other layer except the one that I'm targeting. So, every other layer is locked, it can't be selected, it can't be moved, it can't be deleted, and the only layer that's accessible to me is the one that I clicked on. Again, ''Alt'' click to turn the lock off on all the layers. ''Alt'' click again to lock every other layer, leave this one unlocked. On the Mac, you'll just be using the ''Option'' key with exactly the same command. 9. Tip 7 - Create a template layer: The next tip involves using template layers in Illustrator. What I've got here is an image that's been imported into this document. I want to use this image as a guide so that I can create my vector artwork on top of it and then just get rid of this template. I can very easily turn this image layer into a template layer and I do that by double-clicking on the layer itself. It's important to double-click on the layer, not the image. Let's double-click here. I get an option to make this a template layer. When it's set as a template layer, I get the option to dim the image. By default it's dimmed to 50 percent. That's a pretty good value. I'll click "Okay". You'll see here that not only is the image dimmed, but the layer is also locked so it can't be used. All we need to do now is to add a new layer to the document. This is going to be where we do the work and when we're finished, we can just hide or discard our template layer. 10. Tip 8 - Find an object in the Layer palette: For this next tip, we're going to look at how you can find objects inside the Layers panel, particularly when you have a really complex object you're working with. I have a Mandala here from my real-time Mandala class and I've got the group selection tool selected. I'm going to click on one of the objects in this document. It's just this little circle here. I want to find out where in the "Layers" panel that is located. I'm going to open my layers panel, but you can also get to it by choosing "Window" and then "Layers". If I go here to the fly-out menu and choose "Locate Object", I'll be taken immediately in the Layers panel to the location of that object inside the document. It's just a very quick and easy way to navigate, particularly a Layers panel that has a lot of objects in it. 11. Tip 9 - Move layers and turn a layer into a sublayer: For this next tip, we're going to have a look at the concept of moving layers and also making sub-layers. I have a layer down here which is just these two shapes, the red and the green. I want to move this above everything else in the document so I can just click on the layer to target it and then drag it. Provided I drag it above the topmost layer before I let go, it'll be added as a new layer at the very top of the document. Now let me just undo that, because I may not want it to be on top of everything. I may want it to be a sub-layer of another layer. In this case, I'm going to take my layer and I'm going to make it as a sub-layer of this layer. To do it again, I'm just targeting the layer and I do that by just clicking on the area just to the right of the layer name and then drag it. This time to make it a sub-layer, I'm going to drop it on top of Layer 3, not above it. I'm just going to drop it in here and it becomes immediately a sub-layer of Layer 3. 12. Tip 10 - Pasting layers into another document: For the next tip, we're going to look at something a little strange that happens when we copy and paste things from one document to another. I'm going to take this layer that we just created that has a sub-layer in it. I'm going to select on this layer and I'm going to copy it. I'm choosing Edit and then Copy. But you could use the shortcut keys. I've got a brand new document over here already created. I'm going to paste those objects in with Edit and then Paste. You may notice something that's happened over here in the Layers palette that is somewhat unexpected. These two objects, the pink and the green started off in the previous document being in a sub layer inside this layer, and that's been lost in the copy and paste process. What's been lost in the paste process, not so much in the copy process. Let's just undo that. I'm just pressing Control or Command Z to undo that step. Let's go to the flyout menu in the last pallet. There's an option here that is paste remembers layers. It does just what it suggests is that when you paste things into the document, it will remember their position inside layers in the original document. Let's choose Edit and then Paste. We could use the shortcut key. This time in the pasting process, the layers have been kept. The pasting process has remembered the layer structure and that entire layer structure has been brought into this new document. Now, when you're working with a complex document and a whole series of layers, being able to copy and paste and keep those layers structures intact can be really important. 13. Bonus tip 1 - Resize layer thumbnails: I have a bonus tip for you. You may have noticed that in some of the other documents we've been working on, the look of the layers palette is very different to this brand new document that I just created. The thumbnails in the previous document were much larger. Well, you can set your thumbnail size for any document by clicking on the fly-out menu and choose Panel Options. Here are the row sizes. You'll just click here on "Other" and I suggest that you use something like about 50 pixels to start off with, and I'll click "Okay". Now, the thumbnails for every single object inside this document are much larger and I find them a lot easier to see and you'll probably find the same thing. 14. Bonus tip 2 - Reorganize Objects within a layer : For my second bonus tip, I have an option called Reverse Order. Here in the Layers palette, you'll see that it's grayed out and it's reverse order. What it is is a way that you can reverse the order of objects within a layer. So in this case, we would reverse the order of these objects so the pink box would be on top. The problem is being able to ungray out this option, because whatever you try that logically would seem to make sense, doesn't work. The option just never appears. Well, it will appear if you know the trick. Well, the trick is when you select the object, you don't select it using this icon here, you're just going to target it here in the Layers palette. Hold the Shift key down as you target every single other one of the objects within the layer that you want to reverse the order of. Now when I click on this Flyout menu, you will see that Reverse Order is available. When I click on it, the objects are reversed in order. So you can see here this was the original order, this is the reverse order. 15. Project and Wrapup 10 Layer tips: We've now finished the video portion of this course, so it's over to you. Your class project is to tell me in the project area which of these tips you think is going to be the most useful tip for you in your day-to-day workflow in Illustrator. Now as you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others. Please if you enjoy the class and learn things from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend this class and secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed it. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they might enjoy and learn from. If you see the follow link on the screen, click it and you'll be notified when my new classes are released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. I hope that you enjoy this course and that you learn things about Illustrator of which you were previously unaware. I look forward to seeing you in another graphic design for lunch class here on Skillshare in the future.