From the course: Inkscape Essential Training

Working with layers - Inkscape Tutorial

From the course: Inkscape Essential Training

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Working with layers

- [Instructor] Like many graphics applications, Inkscape offers you the ability to organize your artwork with layers. And besides organizing your artwork, there are several reasons why you'd want to put objects on different layers. You can show and hide a layer to control the visibility of all items on it with one click, you can lock or unlock a layer to prevent any items on it from being moved or modified, and you can change the opacity and the way objects on a layer blend with other objects on other layers. And there are three places in Inkscape where you work with layers. There's a layer menu, a layers dialog, and the status bar at the bottom of the window. I can show the layers dialog by going to the layer menu and choosing layers, or I can choose it from the command bar. Right now, this document has just a single layer called layer one. In the layers dialog, I can show and hide all the objects on a layer by clicking on the eye icon, and I can lock or unlock a layer by clicking on the lock icon. When I lock it, I can't select any of the objects on the layer. If I unlock it, then I can select them again. I can rename a layer by clicking on it and typing a new name. I'll just call this icons. And to add a new layer, I can click on the plus button in the dialog. For now, I'll just call this layer two. And I can choose a position. I can put my new layer above the current layer, below the current layer, or as a sub layer of the current layer. Sublayers give you a way to organize content within a layer when you have really complex artwork. I'll choose above current and click add. And I'll click the plus button to create layer three on top. In the layer menu, I have that same add layer command. And I also have commands for renaming the current layer, controlling its visibility and lock status. And I have commands here to switch to editing the layer above or below. This is useful so I can create artwork on the layer I want rather than having to move it later on. Note that you can only have one layer selected at a time in Inkscape. This is also known as the current layer. So I can switch to layer two by choosing to switch to layer below. And I'll just create a new object to confirm that it really is there. And I'll hide layer two by clicking on the eye. And sure enough, my new ellipse is the only object that gets hidden. I can also switch to a layer by clicking on it in the dialog. So I can switch to layer three, or my icons layer here and draw artwork on those layers. I can also choose a layer from the menu in the status bar. Whichever one I select here is also going to be selected in the layers dialog. Note that when I switched to a different layer, anything I had selected on another layer becomes deselected. Now, what if I want to move an object from one layer to another? Well, for that, I can select the object. I'll select one of my new ellipses, and go to the layer menu and choose the appropriate command. So I can move it to the layer above, move it to the layer below, or it can move it to a specific layer that I can choose in this dialog. I'll select the icons layer and click move. Also note that I can right-click on an object and choose move to layer from here. Another way of accomplishing the same thing, moving an object from one layer to another, is just by cutting the object, pressing control + X, selecting the layer you want in the layers dialog, and then choosing edit, paste in place. And now the ellipse is on layer two. I also have commands to rearrange the layers themselves. With a layer selected in the dialog, I can use these four buttons to move a layer up or down in the stack. So if I have layer three selected, I can lower it, or move it to the bottom. And when it's on the bottom, I can move it up or move it to the top. These same commands are found in the layer menu where you can also see the keyboard shortcuts. Also notice at the bottom of the layer menu, these commands for duplicate current layer and delete current layer. Duplicate will create a new layer with copies of every object on the original layer, and delete will delete the layer and everything on it. Now earlier, I mentioned the status bar at the bottom of the window contains some layer controls. I can see the current layer and its visibility and lock status. If I hide a layer by clicking on the eye, it's name appears grayed out. If I lock a layer, its name appears in brackets. I'll show and unlock this layer again. Now there's one last trick I want to show you. And that's to right-click on a layer in the dialog to get a menu of some common commands. Most of these actions can be accomplished elsewhere, but a unique and useful thing here are the commands to show and hide other layers and lock and unlock other layers. This can be very useful for when you want to focus on a specific part of your artwork and quickly get other stuff out of your way. So I'll choose lock other layers. And you can see now, every other layer has been locked and I can just focus on layer two. So in this movie, we saw how to work with layers in Inkscape. We saw how to create and arrange them, how to move artwork between layers. And we took a look at the different places where you can control layers, the layer menu, the layers dialog, and the status bar.

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