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I'm still working inside the Playful violin.ai file that's found inside the 01_hello_illustrator
folder which itself is inside the exercise files folder, that's available
to you as part of this series. And this illustration of course you may recall,
comes to us from Illustrator Aliaksandr Stsiazhyn. And I'd like to take you on a tour of how
this illustration is constructed. Basically when you're working with a hand
drawn graphic, like if you were working with say a pencil and a piece of paper,
why then you would actually be drawing lines on that piece of paper.
Well Illustrator kind of works that way as we'll see, you do draw objects here and there
but notice that word that I just said, objects. You're basically creating
every single one of these lines as a separate thing and those things
are known as objects inside of Illustrator. And they're piled up on top of each other,
so you're actually building an illustration. You really are constructing it. So
let's see how that works. Let's get a little feel for that.
I'm going to switch to the black arrow tool so that I don't have my magnifying glass going
on screen here, and you can do that just by clicking on that black arrow/Selection
tool. Adobe calls it the Selection tool. I call it the black arrow,
because what color is it? Black. And then we're going to bring up the Layers
palette and you can get to the Layers palette by going up to the Window menu and
choosing the Layers command. You also might want to think about memorizing
this keyboard shortcut because the Layers palette is a very, very useful
palette inside of Illustrator. F7 brings up the Layers palette. F7 hides it and F7 works
across many of the Adobe applications. So there's my Layers palette. I'm going to
go ahead and extend that palette by dragging it down and I'm going to drag
the top of the palette upwards so that we're basically taking up the better portion of
my screen with this palette and you should see nice thumbnail previews of
each one of these layers and you can think of these layers as being sheets of
vellum, if you'd like to, that are layered on top of each other, each one of which contains
different graphical information. So here's what I'd like you to
do to so we can see how things are building up here,
I want you to press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac
and click on that bottom eyeball right there. And what that does by virtue of the fact that
you have the Alt or Option key down, and by the way you can release that key now.
By virtue of the fact that you had that key down when you clicked on the eyeball you hid
everything but that layer. All right, so now we're just seeing the Background
layer, again courtesy of Alaiksandr. He created this layer.
Next turn on the Body layer by clicking its eyeball. Notice that this
area is blank where the eyeball formerly appeared. If you click in that blank area
you'll make the eyeball come back. So we're not Alt clicking or Option clicking, we're
just clicking. There is the body of the violin, very interesting, and just one shape,
there's only one shape on that entire layer and then click on this layer that's called
highlights. And by the way if you're seeing truncated
layer names you can go ahead and drag out this left side of the Layers palette
until all of the layer names are completely visible. I'm still missing a little bit of
Orange lines there. There, we go. And I'll use the Hand told the scroll my violin
over just a little bit so that we can see it. All right now at this point we
have this sort of psychedelic effect going on thanks to this Highlights layer.
Now I'm going to turn on my Orange lines layer and this is where the sketchy lines begin
to form inside of this graphic. Then we've got the Red lines layer.
Them we've got the Dark lines layer, these dark lines that are built on top, so layer
upon layer of lines. This is not something you have to do when you're building
an illustration. This is what this particular artist decided to do, so
this is the way he decided to assemble his illustration. You could of course work just
with a single layer of lines if you wanted to. And then finally I added this
text on this Text layer, and you can see a little bit of the text up here in the
upper left-hand corner and you may be able to see more of the text on your screen.
Now each one of these layers contains a bunch of different objects and you can see what
those objects are and I don't want you to be frightened by this word objects
because it is pretty darn unfriendly. It just means stuff, it just means
various lines and shapes and other items that are going on inside of the illustration.
Objects is just a catchall term for that. Go ahead and twirl open this backdrop player
by clicking on its twirly triangle right there and you can see the various items
that make up this layer. There's the teal twirls and there's the lower,
let's go ahead and expand this palette a little more so that we can see what in the world
that says. Lower swirls and then we have the background, which is just
a big rectangle, so even a rectangle can be an object.
So you can basically get in there and dissect each one of the objects that exist on these
layers. Now why in the world would you want to? Well because even if you're
working with an illustration that's created by someone else, as we're doing here,
you can still modify it to suit your exacting needs. So you can change which layers are
turned on and which layers are turned off and you can modify the composition
of the paths and you can add various drawn elements of your own and you
can subtract elements that were already there and I'm going to show you what I mean by all
that stuff, a very simple example, in the next exercise.