Subtitles of the Movie

A Template is a layer in Illustrator that contains artwork that you can dim and then you can trace over. I do this quite often and I'm going to show you how to do that. Now, here's what the Template will do for you. When you bring in a sketch that you either scanned in or, let's say you had a digital camera and you took a picture of your artwork and emailed to yourself and then dragged that picture to your Desktop you can bring that into Illustrator by placing it and then locking that layer and that is a Template so you can draw on top of it. So, what I'm going to do is show you how to do that. I'm going to go to File and instead of choosing Open, I'm going to go to Place. So, File, Place, and on my Desktop I have a sketch that I did of a skeleton warrior Ð I just love fantasy artwork Ð and this skeleton I'll resize a little bit, so I'm going to zoom out so I can grab these handles up here then I'm going to hold down Shift and just resize this guy so he fits into my document. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom back in and I'm going to go to my Layers and as you can see here, what I can do is double-click on the layer and I have this option here. So I can name this, but I normally do name it Template as well. So I'll go ahead and name it now and I can choose to give it a color so when I select that layer I can see this color as the layer's color, and I can click Template. Once I click Template you'll notice that everything else locks for me. So, it's going to show the artwork, it's going to give me a preview, and it's going to lock it for me. I can also Dim the image as much as I'd like so I can trace over it without being distracted by this dark artwork here. So I'll go ahead and click OK. Notice that it's nice and ghosted and the layer is now locked. What I could do then is create my layers, so let's say I want to draw the shield on this layer and then draw the rivets on another layer, and then the skeleton's bones on another layer and the arrows and so on and so forth. Now that this layer is locked I can do that without interfering with it. Also, I can decide that it's a little too dark still and I want to lighten it. So, I'm going to zoom in just to show you the difference. I'll double-click on the Template layer and where it says Dim Images 2, I'll make this 30 percent. Notice that it ghosts out just a little bit more and now what I draw over it Ð let me go ahead and just get rid of this color here, go to a new layer, and let's say I want to draw his armor, I can now focus on what I'm doing instead of being distracted by the artwork itself.