Master Masks in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch™ - Masks and Transparency Masks - IntroductionIntro: Hello and welcome to this graphic design class. Today we're looking at clipping masks, transparency mask effects, and also layer clipping masks in Adobe Illustrator. We're going to start with a text effect that's going to use a transparency mask. Then we're going on to look at clipping masks. Then we'll look at clipping a bitmap image using a transparency mask. Finally, we're going to look at something that not very many people even know exist in Illustrator and that is layer clipping masks. We're going to explore those two. Now, as you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. This really helps others to identify this as a class that they too might want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment either in the community section or along with your thumbs up, please do. I read all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. Now, let's get started on working with clipping masks, transparency masks, and layer clipping masks in Illustrator. 2. Masks and Transparency - Part 1: The first effect that we're going to create is a reflected text effect. So I'm going to choose File and New. It doesn't really matter what size document you're using, I'm using RGB color mode though. I'll click "OK". I'm going to type some text and I'm just going to click here and type the word in uppercase. I'm going to select it, and I'm going to make the type a little bit larger by clicking in the font size area and pressing shift and up arrow just to increase it's size. I want to choose a different font to use as well, and I'm going to use a font called Rivanna. I'll give you the download link for it just in case you like it. I think it's a pretty interesting font to use for this effect. This is the font that we're using. I'm just going to move the type down the document here. Now, we're going to reflect it and we're going to do it in a way that the text remains editable. To do that, I'm going to choose Effect, Distort & Transform, and then Transform. I'm going to click the preview on because I want to see how this looks, and I'm going to click here on Reflect Y, and that reflects the text. Now if I want to make a copy of it as I reflected, I'm just going to increase the copies to one and tab away. This is giving me this effect. The text and the reflection are on top of each other. At this point, what I need to do is to increase the vertical value to move the reflection away from the original text. Now this slider here goes all the way to 100 pixels. If that's not far enough, then just click in this box and press the up arrow key or shift up arrow, and you can go a whole lot further. How far you need to go, it's really going to depend on the font that you're using. I'm going to leave a pixel or two space between the font and the reflection. Once I've got this, I'll press "OK". Now I have the font and its reflection and I'm going to use a transparency mask to just fade the reflection away. To do this, I'm going to select on the original text. You can't select on the reflected text because it's actually not on anything, everything is controlled by the original text. Select it and then go to the transparency panel. If you don't see it over here, this is its indicator, you can go to window transparency to display it. Inside the transparency panel, I'm just going to drag it over here so we can see it, you will see the text in this panel here, and you'll click here on "Make Mask". Now in earlier versions of Illustrator, you might have to go through this flyout menu to choose something like Make Opacity Mask. But in later versions, you have the option to just click here and say "Make Mask". This mask is being clicked. So the clip check-mark is here, I don't want it to be clips, so I'm just going to let go. Now, so that I can edit this mask and fade out this text, I need to click on the mask because at the moment, you can see that there's a surround around the text area while we need to click over here to make the surround around the mask. That tells me I'm now working with my mask. To do the reflection effect, I'm going to add a rectangle. So I'm going to click on the rectangle tool, and I'm just going to drag over the reflected text. Now, I can make this rectangle larger than the reflected text. Certainly can't be any smaller because we need to fade this out with a gradient, but it doesn't matter if you make it a little bit bigger. Next up, we need to fill this with a gradient. I'm going to the fill color here and I'm going to click on "Gradient". The default is a black to white gradient. It's just a linear gradient that's going in the wrong direction right now. Well, I'm going to the gradient tool here, and I'm just going to drag my gradient into position. I'm going to hold the shift key as I do this so that the gradient is vertical. It's come in the correct way. If it didn't come in the correct way with you, if it was light or at the top and darker at the bottom, well, you can just click here to invert your gradient. But this is the way it should look. It's just that the gradient itself is not perfect yet. I want to edit it a little bit, so I'm going to click on the gradient tool. Now, I'm not saying my gradient annotator. If that happens to you, you'll just need to go and display it, and you do that by choosing View and then go down to Show Gradient Annotator. Now, this displays on the document, and I can just size this back up so that now we're seeing white up here, black down here, and the whole thing is pattering out towards the end. That should actually disappear entirely because this should be white to black gradient. It's just that this is not true black. So let's go and click on the gradient slider, let's double-click here to open the color panel, I'm going back to the color option here, and I'm going to select from here, I want C, M, Y, K. I want this to be 100C, 100Y, 100M, and 100K, and the see difference in the gradient. This time we've got white to true black, and we're saying the text totally disappear. You may need to edit your gradient a little bit. Now, I can just drag on this a little bit because I want it to just disappear, not totally disappear at the end. You can also control the midpoint for this gradient by dragging here. Dragging in this direction towards white will make the gradient taper off more quickly because it's only white for a little bit, and then it goes into black really quickly and black is hiding the effect. If you go the other way, then it's going to taper off more slowly but faster towards the end. So you can just adjust it to get the effect that you want. Now, there's a trick to getting out of working in this mode because we've finished with the gradient and we're finished with the mask, but right now, we're not able to continue working with the document because we still have the mask selected here. To continue to work with our document, we must come back here and click on the text, and that takes us out of mask editing mode and just takes us back to working in the document. Now, we can go ahead and do other things with our document. If you ever need to get rid of your mask, you'll re-select your text, you'll got back into the transparency panel, and you would just click here to release the mask. When you do that, you release the mask, and we're left with the text and also a gradient filled rectangle. So we can just move the gradient fill rectangle out of the way or we can go ahead and delete it if it's no longer required. 3. Masks and Transparency - Part 2: We're now going to look at using clipping masks in Illustrator. I'm going to start off with a just regular sized document, this is 900 by 500 or 600 pixels, just a regular size RGB document. I'm going to add a rectangle tool. I'm just going to drag out a rectangle and I'm going to fill this with a pattern, some going to the Swatches palette here, the pattern I want is not available, but it is ship with Illustrator. I'm going to click this drop down menu here and choose "Open Swatch Library" and then "Patterns" and then I want the Nature patterns and I want Nature foliage so I'm going to click on that and that will open a small panel that has patterns in it, and this is the pattern that I want. Now, this pattern is a little bit intense for me, so I'm going to dial down its opacity by opening up the "Appearance" panel here, which of course you can also get to by choosing "Window" and then "Appearance". Now for this shape, I can dial down the opacity by clicking on the "Opacity" button here and just winding it back, and that just makes the pattern a little opaque so it softens a little bit. Next up we're going to draw a heart and I'm going to use the Pen Tool for this, but before I do so, I'm going to lock down this rectangle so it doesn't move, so I'm going to Layers palette, It's going to locate this rectangle and lock it, just makes them a little bit easier for drawing things with the Pen Tool when you are going to select things by accident. For the heart, we're going to click and drag in a upward direction towards the top left of the image. Then we're going to click and drag about this position and head down to the bottom of the image, just dragging around to create a nice shape here. I'm going to click at the bottom here, just click once, not click and drag, then I'm coming up here and I'm going to click and drag, and I'm coming back to the starting point where I'm going to click. Now, I'm going to select the "Direct Selection Tool", I'm going to select over this point here because I want to give it two handles. So I'll click here to convert the selected anchor points to smooth, and that will give it two handles. I'm going to put one of these handles back where it came from and then hold the Alt or Option key and just look out to make sure that I have a white filled arrow with a plus sign next to it. If you've got two pointing arrows, then let go and start again because you're not in the right mode. Now I have my heart shape. I'm going to fill the heart with a solid color, so I have the Fill Color selected here. I'm going to go up here and I'm going to select a dark red for this, something like this. I don't want any stroke at all, so I'm going to deselect the stroke. Now I want to see some of the patterns through the heart, so with the heart selected, I'm going back to the Appearance panel, and I'm going to open up this Opacity option here, and I'm going to blend this using Multiply blend mode, and what that will do is blend this heart in with the pattern underneath, but I'm also going to decrease the opacity a little bit, so I'm just going to wind down the opacity so that I can see the pattern through the heart, and it's going to be a darker color because we have multiply blend mode selected. Next up I'm going to add my text, so I'll click here on the "Type Tool" and I'm going to type the word love and I'm doing that in lower case, I'm selecting the text and I'm going to enlarge the font by clicking in the "Font Size" box, and I'm pressing Shift and Up-arrow to make the text quite a bit larger. Going to move it into position, and then again goes the "Type Tool" again, select over the text and I'm going to choose a font to use. Now, the font I'm going to use is called simply glamorous, and I'll give you a download link for that font if you want to go and get it from online. This is what the font looks like, and I'm going to color this again with a dark red, so I'm going to make sure fill is selected. I'm going to select a really dark red for this. It's not dark enough, so I'm going to double-click on the color here and I'm going to make it darker still. I'm going to blend, it in with the layers below tool, I'm going to open up the Appearance panel, I'm going to select its opacity, and in this case I'm going to use a blend mode and I'm going to choose "Overlay". That's a contrast blend mode. What overlay does is it treats, white and lighter colors differently to darker colors, so you can see that we're again seeing some of the pattern through this text. It's probably just that this color is not dark enough yet, so I'm going to double-click on it and I'm going to make it even darker. I like that effect. Now we've got three objects here, we've got a heart, we've got some text and we've got a pattern filled rectangle here. I'm going to the last palette and I'm going to unlock the pattern filled rectangle. What I want to do is to add a clipping mask over the top of this, and the clipping mask is going to hide areas of this that we don't want. I'm going to do that using a rectangle, so I'm just going to click on the rectangle and I'm going to draw out what I think is the crop that I want, if you like, for this image, but it's not going to be a real crop, it's going to be a clipping mask crop. Now the clipping mask when I make it is going to have no fill and no stroke, but for now so we can see it a little more clearly, I'm actually going to give it a stroke, but no, fill, I'm just going to position it where I think I wanted on this image. Inside is the area of the image that I want to keep. Now, I'm going to select everything in this document, so going to the Selection Tool I'm going to select either all the bits. That was why it was important for me to unlock this pattern filled rectangle before I do this, and because the rectangle is at the top, this little rectangle here, it's going to be the object that all the other objects are clipped too, so choose Object, Clipping Mask, Make. You can see that this object now has no stroke at all, even though the clipping mask shape had a deep red stroke, there is no stroke apparent here and everything has been cut to the shape of the rectangle that we made. In the last palette, this is what we've got, I'm just going to enlarge everything so you can see it all a little bit more clearly. In the last palette we have a clipping group, and inside the clipping group is the rectangle, the text, the shape, and the pattern filled rectangle at the bottom. Now, we can edit this, if we want to edit the text, we would select the text inside the clipping group, and here is the text, so we could move it, for example, or we could change its color, but we need to find it first to do that. I'm going to make it a different color, let's make it a blue color. You can see that we can change the text, but we have to locate it. This is the heart, so if we select on the heart, we would be able to say re-size it within the clipping group, and this is the pattern-filled rectangle, and this is the rectangle that is used to crop everything, and if we wanted to change it by selecting it, we could then just change the shape of that rectangle. Let's go and select it again, and I'm just going to bring it in from the side here, and it's clipping the shapes. So whenever you use a clipping mask, you're going to end up with a clipping group, in that clipping group is going to be the shape that you are clipping to an everything else that is clipped to that shape. If you ever want to get rid of your clipping mask, you'll just select your clipping group and go back to Object, Clipping Mask, Release and that will just release the contents. What it does is to give you back all of your objects and the rectangles that you used as a clipping mask, but you can say that this rectangle shape doesn't have any stroke or fill, you've lost the stroke and that will always happen with a clipping mask, if you really wanted that back with its stroke you would have to go and put it back. But I want my shape back again, so I'm going to press Control or Command Z to undo that, so I've got my clipped shape back again. 4. Masks and Transparency - Part 3: For my next effect, I'm just going to create a new document. It's 960 by 560 pixels, but you can make one of the size that you want to use, RGB color. I'll click Okay. We're going to crop a bitmap image to a shape. First of all, I'm going to go and get my bitmap image, by choosing File and then place. I've downloaded a number of images from unsplash.com. I'm going to give you the link to that site. These are images that you're free to download and to use, and you don't have to attribute them to anybody and you can use them for commercial purposes. I looked up the word tropics as a keyword, and I found this image which I'm going to use. I'm going to click on the image. I'm making sure the link is not selected because I want to embed this image in my file, and I'll just click place. I'm just going to drag to place this image into my document. I'm going to lock it down for now so it doesn't move by opening up the last palette and just locking its icon here. It's still in the document, but I can't move it. Right now what I want to do is go ahead and to create a cloud shape that I'm going to cut the image to. For this I'm going to make sure that I have black selected as my foreground color, but I'm going to make sure that I have a true black. I'm just going to double-click on this, and I'm going to make sure that the C, M, Y, and K values are all 100 percent, which they're not. I'm just going to make them 100 percent, so I'll click, okay. This means when I cut out this image, the saturation of the image is not going to be affected. Now I'm going to create a shape. It's going to be a cloud shape, and for this, I'm going to drag out four circles, a very large circle, then a smaller one, then a smaller one again, and then a little one. I'm going to use the Selection tool to move these into position. The second to largest circle goes here, the next smaller one goes here, and the smallest one just goes in here. That's a fairly easy to create typical cloud shape, and you can just adjust the sizes of the circles if you want to. Once I've got them created, I'm going to select all of them by clicking on one Shift, clicking on all of the others to select it. I'm going to unite them into a single shape using a Pathfinder. I'm going here to the Pathfinder palette, and I'll click unite. If you're not seeing the Pathfinder palette, choose Window and then Pathfinder to get access to it. Unite as the option that you want. That makes a single shape out of all of these smaller shapes. I'm going to size it to a good size. Then I'm going to cut this to the Windows or to the Mac clipboard, and to do this, I'm just going to choose Edit, Cut. It's cut to the clipboard. Now I'm going to Layers palette, and I'm going to free up this bitmap layer so I'm just going to deselect the lock icon there just to turn it off. Now I'm going to transparency panel. It's up here. Again, if you don't have it, choose window and then transparency. I'm going to select this photo, and it should appear here in the transparency panel. We want to add a mask here, so I'm going to click Make Mask. If you're using a version of Illustrator that does not have a Make Mask button here, then click this fly-out menu and choose make opacity mask. It's the same thing. Now we're at the moment looking at the photos, so the photo has this little border around it. We want to switch, and we want to edit the mask. I have the mask now selected. It's got a border around it. I'm going to choose edit, paste in place to paste that cloud shape back into the document. Here it is. Now I'm going to invert my mask, so what is black will become white and what was white will become black. That's showing me my photo inside this cloud shape. We want to have clips selected because otherwise the photo won't be clipped to the shapes. It's really important that you select clip. Now if we were finished with creating this mask and if we wanted to go back to working with the entire document, we would click here on the image to stop editing the opacity mask. Now we can go back to working with the image, and the last pallet's going to look as it does regularly, except that there's going to be a little dashed line under the image here, to tell you that there is a transparency mask on that image. But I want to go back to working with this mask so I'm going to re-select the image, and I'm going to re-select the mask here in the transparency panel. What I want to do is, I want to fill this with a gradient. I'm going to go here and get the gradient tool. I'm also going to fill it with a gradient to start off with, by clicking here on the gradient option and that fills this shape with a gradient. You can see it's a linear gradient going from white to black. Because we've got the mask inverted, we're going from not seeing the image on this side to it being more fully opaque on this side. Well, I want to use, instead, a radial gradient, so I'm going to switch to radial. Now we've got white in the center, and black on the outside. Well I'm going to invert that. Now black is in the center and white is on the outside. We've got the impression of this image underneath being cropped to a cloud shape, but it's disappearing as it gets closer to the edges of the cloud. Now we can edit the gradient here so we can stretch it out to cover the whole of the shape. We can also edit where the transition is between black and white. If we take it back in this direction, you can see that only part of the image is visible. Let's take it the other direction. Now it's just softening around the edges here. But of course we want to make sure that we're working with true black here so I'm just going to double-click on this to open it up, and from this panel here, I'm going to select CMYK. Again, we can say that these values are not 100 percent for all of them. If we set them all to a 100 percent, then we're working with a true or black, and we're getting a slightly different result with our gradient. Having done that, we may want to wind this back a little bit just to soften the edges a little bit. Now, if we're finished working with the transparency mask and we want to go back to working in the document, we would click here to stop editing the opacity mask. Then we have our shape here in the document and we're ready to go back and work just regularly in Illustrator, again, opening the Layers palette. The image layer which is here has this dashed underline underneath it, indicating that it has a transparency mask associated with it. 5. Layer Clipping Masks - Part 4: For this final example, we're going to create a layer clipping mask. I'll choose File and then New and I'm just going to use the same size document as I've been using, 960 by 560, and it is an RGB document. So I'll click "Okay". I'm going to add an image to this document. So I'll choose File and then Place and I've gone ahead and downloaded this image here from Morguefile and I'll give you the link to download it. Just going to add it to the document here. I'm going to the last panel here now and I'm just going to lock this image down so it won't move. Now, the image as you'll find it on Morguefile won't probably look quite as bright as this. I've actually brighten this up and cropped it a little bit. But basically, what we're here to learn about is this layer clipping masks. I'm going to open the last panel again. I'm going to add a new layer. So I'm clicking on "Layer 1", I'm going to click here, "Add a New Layer". This gives us layer 2 and we're going to put everything on layer 2 that we want to be clipped to this layer clipping mask. We're going to create the clipping mask itself. We're going to do that as a thought bubble. I'm going to click on the "Ellipse Tool", I have just white here, no stroke, just a white fill. I'm going to drag out a circle. Then I'm going to the Selection Tool, Alt drag on this circle to create a series of circles to make a long tall thought bubble. You can make yours as complex or as simple as you like. Having done that, I'll select over all of these shapes and I'm going to unite them with the Pathfinder. I'll open the Pathfinder and click "Unite". You can also get to the Pathfinder by choosing Window and then Pathfinder. We need a small anchor point. I want the thought bubble to be attached to this hammock. For that, I'm going to use the Pen Tool. If you really hate the Pen Tool, it's fine, this is very, very simple to do. You're going to click and drag downwards from the middle of the thought bubble hitting towards the bottom left corner of the image. Then you'll just click once on the hammock. Don't click and drag, just click once. Then go back into the thought bubble and click and drag out pretty much to the side here and then go back to the starting point. That will give you a little tail that you can use for anchoring your thought bubble. If you don't like how it looks, go to the Direct Selection Tool, and you can select over the anchor points and just reshape them until you get something that you do like. When you've done that, select either both of these objects and again unite those using the Unite Tool in the Pathfinder. So you have a thought bubble. The thought bubble is going to be this shape that we'll use as the layer clipping mask. But I'm going to bring in next an image that I want to appear inside to the thought bubble. Again, I'll choose File and then Place. This is another image which you can get from Morguefile and I'll give you the link to download it. Just going to add it to this document. I want it at a fairly large size. I'm going to open up the last panel here and I'm just going to make the icons or the thumbnails here just a little bit larger so it's a little bit easier for you to see. In the last panel, I've got the paper on top and I've got this thought bubble underneath. I need to reverse the order of these because when you create a clipping mask for a layer, it's the shape at the very top of the layer that becomes your clipping mask. We have to make sure that this thought bubble is at the very top. Next, we need to click just on this word Layer 2. I want to click there and that makes this icon available and it's the Make/Release Clipping Mask icon. I'm going to click once to apply this shape here, this thought bubble as a clipping mask for the entire layer. In the last panel, you'll see that the object now is called clipping path and it has an underline underneath it. It doesn't have to appear in any specific position in the layer once it's actually been used as the clipping path. Has to be at the top when you create it, but it's quite all right to pull it down to the bottom and even lock it later on. Now, anything that we do on layer 2 is going to be clipped to this thought bubble shape. Let's just go and let's create ellipse. I was going to find a blue color for it and let's drag out an ellipse. The ellipse is on layer 2, layer 2 has a clipping mask applied to the entire layer, so anything on that layer will be clipped to that clipping mask. If I were to add a new layer to the document and move this oval up onto it, then all of a sudden we see the entire contents of the shape because it's in a layer that is not affected by a clipping mask. But anything on layer 2 will be clipped. I'm just going to delete that shape. The value of layer clipping masks is that you can now do anything on layer 2 and it's going to be clipped to the shape. It just makes working on a clip shape a whole lot easier than it would be if you created a regular clipping mask. I'm going to add some type to this, so I'm just going to click on the Type Tool. Going to click here and add a little list. It's a little reminder list. This is a kind of image and text effect that you might want to use for social media, for example. I'm going to select over the text and I'm going to use a font called Angelina. I downloaded this from the web and I'm going to give you the link to download it if you want to use it. It's just a nice little handwritten font. The type is going to need to be a bit bigger, so I'm just going to enlarge it while I'm here. Then I'm going to rotate the type so that it roughly lines up with the paper underneath. I'll just move it into position. Let's zoom in here a little bit. One thing I'm concerned about with this type is that it's not lined up with the lines on the paper. I'm going to do that now by choosing Window and then Type and then Character. This opens up the character palette. Here it is here. I'm going to select over the text and it's this option here in the character palette that is controlling how far apart these lines of text are. They need to be closed up a little bit, so I'm just going to decrease this value until all the text appears as if it's written on the line. Then I can just click "Away". This piece of text is on the same layer 2 and so it's going to conform to the clipping mask. So if we move it out of the way, it's going to be clipped. When you're working with clipping paths on layers, if you want to at any stage get rid of the clipping path, you can do so. Just click on the layer name itself here and click the Make/Release Clipping Mask option, and that will release all of the mask. Of course, to put it back again, it's very easy. I'm just going to unlock the shape and move it to the very top of this layer. It's important that it's at top of the layer because that's what makes it a clipping mask. I'll click again on the layer here and just click "Make/Release Clipping Mask". We're back to our clipping path shape. Now, this clipping path can also have a border around it. If you want to apply a border to it, just select it and then you can add a border. I'm just going to add a stroke here, just a very narrow stroke. You lose the stroke if you release the clipping path that standard with clipping paths so you would need to remake the stroke if you wanted to. Let's just Control or Command 0 to go back into our document. Now, this clipping path can also be edited just the same way as any regular shape in Illustrator. I think it's a bit big. I'm just going to resize it around my text and I'll go back to my text and I just want to push that a little bit off the page so it looks a little bit cut off here. I'm going to take the entire contents of this layer and just move everything down. There is a different clipping effect in Illustrator the clipping path, make sure that anything and everything on this layer will be clipped to that shape. Your project for this class is to reproduce one or more of the examples that you've just seen created. That was the text reflection effect, where we used an opacity mask with a gradient to fade away the reflected text. Then there was a series of objects that we created and cut to a shape using a regular clipping mask. Then we made a cloud shape and used that shape to clip a photograph. We also used a radial gradient with that particular opacity mask to fade away the image where it hit the edges of the clipping mask shape. Finally, you have the clipping layer effect where you're actually going to create an object and clip an entire layer in the document to that object. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and I hope that you've learned a lot about clipping masks and opacity masks and clipping mask layers in Illustrator. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help other subscribers to see this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.