From the course: Learning Illustrator Draw

Working with layers

From the course: Learning Illustrator Draw

Start my 1-month free trial

Working with layers

“

- [Instructor] If you've ever painted in a digital painting application like Photoshop or Painter or Rebelle or many others, including Illustrator and other applications. Then, you'll know how important layers are. Now, the file you're looking at here is, my Electric Lionfish. I've been doing a few things like this. The electric oceans pictures that I'm doing. And it was made here in Illustrator Draw. And layers were invaluable in creating them. You'll see, if I turn the Mask layer, as it were, off the top, so the top layer that masks all of this off. Just how messy that is underneath. But it enabled me to paint freely and that's what we're going to do in this movie. So, if you like, create a brand new document. So, it doesn't mess about the profile. I'm just going to choose Landscape because it's better on your screen. And then, I'm going to draw simply something that looks like a butterfly wing shape. It doesn't matter how far away it looks from a butterfly wing. Certainly, not right now. I'll redraw one afterwards. But create some new shapes like so. In there, okay. And then, making sure they're all closed. Just long press there to fill that with color. So, I'm just going to press down my finger, which often is a better way to actually do that. And if you want to, you can clean things up. If it really matters. And then, we're going to add a new layer, okay? So, tap the plus on the top of the layer stack. If you can't see it, the control for that is at the top of the screen. And choose a Draw layer. Now, it needs to be underneath the layer we've just drawn. So, press on there and drag that down, okay? If you want to, you can tap on that and give it a name. Which is sometimes a good idea. So, we'll call that, Color. Just simply tap on the name and type. There you go, you can see it's got a name. And what we'll do then is, we'll just get a brush, like this round brush here. Make it as big or as small as you want. Go for about, I don't know, 40% opacity, something like that. And just paint with abandon. Just have a moment. Just making stroke shapes on there. Make all sorts of interesting patterns. Change the color out a few times. And get something a bit darker. Maybe make the brush a little smaller now, so you're getting more lines there. Change the opacity if you want to. But just do that, okay? And build up a stack of colors. Don't worry about going inside or outside of the lines. Which you can clean that up very, very easily, after. We're just making a pass around with a fairly large eraser as I'm doing just now. And the other things you need to know about layers, are how to duplicate them. And how to merge them. And also, how to delete them. And all of those things are in the controls we get, when we tap on the layer. You'll see that you can duplicate a layer. So, if I do that just now, I've got a duplicate. If you want to merge that down. So, make that one with the layer underneath, you just choose Merge Down. And down it goes. And if I just duplicate again. If you want to delete a layer, you simply tap and choose Delete. It's as simple as that. So, just go ahead, do some more painting on your butterfly wing until you're happy with it. And then, the next movie, we'll take a look at how we can transform layers.

Contents