Subtitles of the Movie

In Illustrator, you can use one of your layers to act as a template or a layer that simply holds artwork that acts as a reference, so you can trace over it. So let me show you how to do that. I'm going to go to the file menu, and I'm going to choose Place instead of Open. Let me show you what happens if I choose Open. If I go to File, Open and I locate my sketch, it opens it in a completely different document. Let me go to the window menu and show you, all the way on the bottom here. Here's my untitled file, and here's the pumpkin sketch in its own document. Now of course, that can be handy if you're just starting a new document all together, but let's say you wanted to work in this document already; you had some other artwork there, a logo, for example. You want to bring that into this particular document. You go to File, and you choose Place instead. Now when I choose the pumpkin sketch, it will show up in the document and I can move it where I want it to go. I can resize it if I so desire, and whatever I need to do. Now, you wanna trace over this artwork, but it's a little too dark. You would like to dim it somehow. Well let me show you how to do that. I'm going to double click on layer one here and show you that I can rename this, and I normally do name it Template. And then I select this guy right here where it says Template. It automatically will choose Lock and it will dim everything else. Let me go ahead and deselect that. So as you see here, it ghosts these guys out and it also locks this layer. So this won't print. It's going to be a reference only. It will also allow you to dim the image to a specified percentage. By default, it goes to fifty percent. We can always change this. Let's go to OK and see what we have here. We see that the image has been ghosted out to fifty percent of the original color or value and the pencil has a little slash to it, which means I can draw on this layer. It is a template. It is locked. So what you would do is create a brand new layer above it or layers and then simply trace the artwork. To see what I did with this particular piece of artwork, be sure to check out the work fold demonstration at the very, very beginning of the tutorial. Now, let's say you want to dim this further. Double click on Template again and enter a lower value or a higher value. I'll enter twenty percent, and now you can see a very, very dim image. And I'll zoom in. Sometimes I like to see just that; sometimes I want it a little darker. It's up to you. But the template mode is a really good mode to use when you want to trace your artwork in Illustrator and have a reference that you can see and+ hide at any time to see how your artwork's coming together.