Subtitles of the Movie

We're going to talk about how to use layers in Illustrator and why you want to use layers. Let's go ahead and start off with the why. When you're creating artwork in Illustrator or Photoshop or any application that will require you to create very complicated pieces of artwork, it's a good idea to manage that artwork as best you can and layers will give you that ability. The layers palette or panel is located right here. When I click on it, I can tear it off and I'll put it right here, for example. What you'll see here is we have one layer by default and I'm going to go ahead and expand this palette because we're going to add a few more layers. We also have some icons that we have to talk about. Now, let's talk about layer 1. That's not very descriptive, so let's put something in that layer. I'm going to go to my shapes here and I'm going to grab a star and I'm going to draw out a few stars, alright? Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to select all those stars and I'm going to change the stroke color. Alright, now we have some stars. Now what we're going to do is double click where it says layer 1 and we can rename that star or stars. We can also change the color that represents that layer. As you see here, the layer icon will be blue when we have some content on there. What we can also do is lock this layer. We can make it a template so we can use it as a tracing object. We can also dim the contents on this layer. We'll talk a bit more about these layer options later on. As you see here, we have stars and what I'm going to do is create a new layer by going down here and I'm going to create another layer, but before we do that, I'm going to show you one of the true benefits to using layers, the ability to lock them and to hide them. If I want to create more content and I don't want to accidentally select any of these guys here, I can click right here and now I have locked that layer. Watch. I can't grab the stars, no matter what I do, because they're locked. I can unlock it by clicking once again in this space and now I can choose my stars and move them around or resize them or whatever I'd like to do because they are no longer locked. I lock layers all the time because I have a tendency to actually select things. Now I'm going to click on layer 2 to make sure it's active. You can always tell the active layer because it's blue, the highlight, and now I'm going to go back to my shapes and I'm going to grab the ellipse tool and I'm going to drop the size of the stroke down to 20 and I'm going to draw a few ellipses here. Once again, I'm going to grab my selection tool and highlight all those guys and I'm going to click once on my stroke and I'm going to change the color of said ellipses. NowÉlet me tear this off, by the way, and put that down hereÉwe have some ellipses and we have some stars, so I'm going to double click and rename this layer circles. Why type ellipses when you don't have to? I can also change the color of this particular layer to something like tan. Now, you'll notice that it's tan here and it's blue here. This kind of helps you know what's going on, which objects belong to what, so if I were doing something that had a whole bunch of trees, I could make all the tree layers tan so I can see them all tan in my panel here. It's really helpful for organization. I can also lock this layer now and hide the stars layer by clicking on the eyeball icon. I can also hide the circles or ellipses, if I want to, by doing the same thing. So it's very, very helpful to do this. Now what I'm going to do is show you one more thing. I'm going to click on one of the stars I see here. Look over here. Do you see this little blue dot? This tells me which layer this artwork belongs to. I can make it a part of this layer very easily. I don't have to copy and paste. All I have to do is make sure this object is selected and I click on this little blue dot and move it up and the color changes to brown and the outline changes to brown. Now it's a part of the circles. It has defected and I can go ahead and hide the rest of the stars and we see that we have a star that now lives in circle world. It's defected from its home and it now lives here. So this is why layers are so important. They help you to manage your artwork. You can create everything you want to. You can click and drag to rearrange the layers. By the way, I put that in the layer by mistake. I don't want to do that. That's one of the things about changing the order of the layers. You have to be very careful. Click and move your mouse until you see the line here appear. You want to see this solid line or a line right above it. Then let go of the mouse. Otherwise, you click and drag it and put it inside of that other layer. So layers are very powerful. You can create layers by clicking down here. You can delete the selected layer by clicking on the garbage can. They're very important to organizing your artwork, hiding and showing what you don't want to see, and also locking artwork so you don't accidentally select what you don't want to work with at the moment.