Subtitles of the Movie

Grouping is really going to come in handy when you need to make mass changes to like-minded elements. For example, in this Illustrator document I have these trees that have these leaves. I have some clouds. I also have this moon and other things. But if I want to easily change the colors of just these leaves here, which could also function as clouds if I change the color, I can grab all of them and then I can go to the Object Menu and I can choose Group. I can also use the Shortcut key of Command or Control and the letter G. Now I'll go ahead and deselect it by clicking on something else. When I click on that object that is grouped, it selects everything that's associated with that group. So what does this do for you as an artist? Well, as you see here, the little question marks say that these things have different strokes and different fills. But since I have the Stroke and Fill selected here on both of these elements, I can choose to change the color of all of them in one fell swoop. Notice how I'm changing the stroke to orange on everything that's in this group. I'll also do the same thing with the fill. And I'll make these guys clouds now. It's a lot easier to work this way and much, much faster. So you have to ask yourself while you're working, what elements do you want to put on their own layers and what things you might wish to change in one fell swoop in the future. And this is for a very good reason. If you're a professional, you have a client who is pretty much finicky and they're going to want you to make mass changes to parts of your illustration. Let's say you draw a building and all the windows in that building are a light blue. But they prefer a more, you know, cloudy look to them and they want them to have more of a gray color. Well, all you can do is group all of those or you could put them on their own layer and then choose Select All and then you can easily change the fill and stroke. The other benefit to grouping things is since they're in a group, I can easily transform these. So I can scale them and I can rotate them and I can do all kinds of things because they're all in one group. So what happens when I'm finished with this group and I want to put it back to individual elements? Just return to the Object Menu and choose to Ungroup. Now I can click on these guys one at a time and they're no longer associated as one big clump of artwork. So as you can see, there's a huge benefit to grouping things. You can easily change them, change the color, rotate them, scale them and when you're happy with it, you can always ungroup it if you need to.