Subtitles of the Movie

During your adventures in Illustrator you will occasionally come upon the need to have some kind of artwork fit neatly into other artwork. For example, a tattoo on someone's arm, or a design on a shirt, an emblem, or any kind of symbol or logo. Now, what you would typically think you'd need to do is you would grab your Pen Tool and then you would zoom in on your artwork and then try to follow the contours of whatever it is that you want to fit a design in. For example, the little zigzag on Charlie Brown's shirt. So I'm going really close to the edges, like so, and then I could fill it in with a black color. I'm going to show you a far easier way to accomplish this same kind of goal. Notice, by the way, how sloppy it is on this side. I'm going to show you a technique called Clipping Masks. Now a Clipping Mask is going to allow you to create your artwork as sloppy as you'd like and then place it on top of your artwork and then fit perfectly inside. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab my friend the Blob Brush, and I'm going to draw that zigzag line right above the shirt, like so. And of course you can use whatever tool you're comfortable with. Now, what I'm going to do with this is put it where I want it to go, which is right about here. But the first thing I'm going to do is click on the shirt and make a copy of it. Let me explain why we need a copy. When you make a mask what happens is, it clips the thing that you're trying to put it neatly inside of, so we're going to be left with the zigzag line and no shirt. So, by making a copy we can simply paste the shirt and have it fit neatly inside of it. So, what I'm going to do at this point is I'm going to click on my shirt here and bring it to the front. So, I go to Object, Arrange, Bring to Front. Then, I'm going to Shift Select the design that I want to go inside of the shirt, so once again hold down Shift and click. So we have a shirt, or whatever artwork you have drawn, and then the object that's going to go inside. Now we can go to the Object Menu and choose Clipping Mask, Make. Now as I promised, the shirt goes away. So what we can do is go to Edit, Paste in Back, and now when I zoom into the edge it's nice and neat and it fits perfectly inside of the shirt. Now what I'm going to do at this point is show you how you can actually erase the mask, or get rid of it. Select your group like so, return to Object, and if you need to go to Clipping Mask and you can choose to Release it. And you set it free and this line can now go back into the wild. Good luck, guy. Good luck out there. So, that's how you can use a Clipping Mask to neatly fit any design inside of your Illustrator artwork.