Subtitles of the Movie

Clipping masks are a very cool device that you can use whenever you want to apply a decal like effect onto something, and that's just one example as to why you might want to use one. Let me zoom out a bit and show you what I have here. I have a lightning bolt with a gradient and I have a, a shape that looks like an airplane wing, and I have the flaps and everything here, a couple of lines in there. Let me zoom in on that. Now the goal is I want to have the lightning bolt look like it was painted on there, but I don't want it to be as so neat that it looks like you know, somebody took the design and just resized it so it fit neatly on the wing. I want the strokes to go all to edges of the wing itself. So to achieve this, I'm going to use the clipping mask and the end result is going to have the lightning bolt like this and the parts of the bolt going all across the wing itself, and it even passed it, like this. So that's the goal. Now how am I going to do that? Well, the first thing I wanna do is I want to copy the wings. So I'm going to move this out of the way, and I'm going to simply grab all of this here and I'm going to copy this. Edit, Copy. Now you might be asking, why am I copying that? Because once we create a mask, the mask object itself disappears so you can see what you were trying to cover up or reveal; in this case, the lightning bolt. Let me demonstrate that to you right now. I'm going to put this lightning bolt right back where it was and I'm going to bring this shape, which is going to be my mask, in front. So I'm going to go Object, Arrange, Bring to Front. Now I'm going to shift click on the lightning bolt so I have the wing and the lightning bolt selected. Then I'm going to go Object, Clipping Mask, Make. So as you see, the lightning bolt is clipped, but the wing is gone, because the mask object, which is the object in front, in this case, the wing, goes away. So I'm going to undo, and I'm going to show you something really cool here. We're going to create a compound path to include these two pieces of the artwork as part of the mask itself. If I try to use all three of these pieces to create a clipping mask, it's not going to work. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take these three pieces. I'm going to go to Object, Compound Path, Make. So now, these are going to be treated as one piece of artwork. Now that I have all three selected, I'm going to once again, copy, just in case I got rid of it by mistake. I'm going to now Shift click on the lightning bolt, and here comes the magic. Object, Clipping Mask, Make. Now check that out. We have the lightning, and it's clipped, and we see the outline of the wing. But this is that part where I reveal why we copied it. Now we can go to Edit, Paste in back. And there's the wing. Let me zoom in. And now you have what looks like a painted-on decal of a lightning bolt as it is painted on a wing of an airplane. So a clipping mask is a great way to get a design to fit across your artwork without looking like you took your time to really get it to the edges of the artwork. You don't have to worry about that with a mask. The artwork can be everywhere and the object in front is going to clip it so that you only see what you want to. The only thing I would suggest is that you always copy your mask object so you can paste it behind your new design, and this is the finished result.