Subtitles of the Movie

Many times when you're about to create artwork inside of Illustrator you'll be basing it on a pencil sketch, a photograph, or something else like a logo, so you have to create, well, you don't have to but it's very helpful to create something called a Templated Layer so that you can do that, so I'm going to show you two ways to do this. I'm going to create a regular 8 and a half by 11 document and I'm going to choose this Orientation right here, as you see we have the ability to go from Landscape to Portrait, so I'm going to go ahead and hit OK and I'm going to go to the File Menu and I'm going to choose Place. You see, in Illustrator when you want to bring in other artwork and you already have a document open it's a good idea to choose Place instead of choosing Open. Open is typically when you want to open up an Illustrator document. So I'm going to go to Place and on my Desktop I have an image here, a sketch that I did, called Frankie and the Bug and this is going to be a little humorous illustration of Frankenstein's monster kind of being enamored by a little firefly here and he's going to try to catch it, so he's kind of got a little sense of wonder. So this would make a nice illustration to trace over inside of Illustrator. So as you could see I have the sketch on a Layer and I'll go ahead and tear the Layers off and show you that here he is. So if I wanted to manually protect this sketch so that I couldn't touch it when I try to trace over it I could double-click right here where it says Layer 1 and I could just type the word sketch and then I can simply say OK. Then I simply hit right here to add a Lock. Then if I create a brand new Layer and if I'm still on this sketch Layer you'll notice that if I try to draw on it the Pen icon turns into a little pencil with a little cross mark through it so I can't interact with this sketch Layer at all because it's locked. But sometimes you want to go a little further and make this Sketch Layer a little bit see-through so that you can focus more on your line work. So let me go ahead and just zoom in a little bit. So as you could see this is nice but I could make it a little dimmer so I could focus what I'm trying to draw on another Layer. So I can grab my Pen Tool, for example and I can click and I can start to trace over this character, alright? So let me go ahead and get rid of that and show you the other way that you can have this, a Template Layer, created for you. So what I'm going to do is once again go to File, Place, I'll choose that same artwork, let me zoom out just a little bit here and I'll move it into position. And what I'm going to do this time instead of locking it myself is I'll double-click where it says Layer 2 again and I can name it and you can call it whatever you want - call it sketch, call it template, you can also change the color of this little boundary we see here. You'll notice that we have this red color. Well, that's based on the color of the Layer you're on and you can control that. Go to where it says Color and you can go to this drop-down list and choose anything else. So I'll go ahead and choose dark blue and then I can click right here where it says Template. Once you choose this option you'll notice that the lock automatically enables itself and you also have a new option called Dim Images to. This percentage is how this image will dim or ghost out a little bit which makes tracing over it a lot easier. So I'll hit OK and you'll notice that we can't, once again, interact with this Layer because it has a lock on it and it's also ghosted out quite a bit. So, in order for me to trace over this I have to create a brand new Layer and then I can grab my Pen Tool or whatever I want to and I can go ahead and manipulate the Pen Tool to trace over this artwork. And that is how you can create a Template Layer so that you can trace over artwork or a photograph and you can then translate that into Vectors inside of Illustrator.