- [Voiceover] In this movie, I'll show you how to mask
the contents of an entire layer.
And this is a really great feature
that often times goes overlooked.
So if you're working along with me,
go ahead and turn on the Bird layer,
here inside the Layers panel,
and I don't know if it makes much sense right now,
but these are a bunch of objects that are gonna
serve as highlights and shadows inside the bird's body.
But, first we need to mask these objects
so that they look like this.
So I'll go ahead and switch back
to our document in progress here.
And what you want to do is twirl open the Bird layers.
So, go ahead and click on a triangle in front of it,
in order to expand that layer.
And then go down to this guy right here, at the bottom.
It's a group, and you can see that's the case
if you go ahead and target it by clicking on its
circular meatball over here in the left hand column.
And now, what I want you to do, is go to the Edit menu
and choose the Copy command, or press
control C, or command C on the Mac.
And then, press control shift A or command shift A
on the Mac in order to deselect the artwork.
And then return to the Edit menu,
and choose Paste in Front, or press
control F, or command F on the Mac.
And the reason we're pasting in front
is that whole layer clipping masks
have to be on top of a given layer.
Alright, the thing to know about the paths in this group,
is that they both contain dynamic effects.
And you can see what those effects look like
by double-clicking anywhere inside the group
in order to enter the isolation mode.
And then go ahead and click one of the path outlines,
such as this circle right here,
and go to the Window menu, and choose the Appearance
command, and you'll see this dynamic
effect, Warp colon Shell Lower.
And so if you click on that item,
you'll bring up the Warp options dialogue box.
Notice that the style is set to Shell Lower.
We'll learn more about these when we discuss
dynamics effects in an upcoming chapter.
But, for now, make sure that the preview checkbox
is turned on, and then you can play with the Bend value,
in order to modify the effect.
And then I like what I have, so I'm just gonna cancel out.
If you select the skinny ellipse up towards the
top of the document, you can see that it's responsible
for all three of the feathers as a result
of these various dynamic effects working together.
And if you wanna find exactly how I put this bird together,
then you can check out Deek's Techniques
number 207 from the year 2013.
But for now I'm just gonna press the escape key
in order to exit the isolation mode.
Now here's the thing to know about clipping masks.
They generally speaking have to be static path outlines.
They can't have a bunch of dynamic effects assigned to them.
And so to turn this into a path outline, go ahead and
click anywhere inside the object to select the entire group.
And then go to the Object menu and choose Expand Appearance.
And that will give you a group, as you can see
on the far left side of the control panel
of static path outlines.
After which point, go to the Window menu and choose
Pathfinder, to bring up the Pathfinder panel,
and then click on the Unite icon, which is the first
icon in the first row, in order to turn that group
into a single static path outline.
Alright, now you can hide the Pathfinder panel
and switch back to the Layers panel.
Now, for this next technique to work,
you need the layer, not the mask, the layer to be selected.
So, go ahead and click on the layer,
you don't have to target it,
just click on the layer name, here inside the layers
panel, and, by the way, the object
itself doesn't have to be selected.
So, if I press control shift A, or command shift A on a Mac,
to deselect the artwork, we can still take advantage
of this icon, down here at the bottom of the Layers panel.
Notice it?
Make Release Clipping Mask?
That is going to turn the top path outline
into the clipping mask for the entire layer.
Even if some other object is selected.
So, let's say I target this thing called High,
which are the highlights, it doesn't matter,
as long as the layer is active,
as long as you've clicked on it,
here inside the Layers panel, then you can
click the Make Release Clipping Mask icon
and that's gonna turn that top
path outline into a clipping mask.
And you can tell that's the case by targeting it,
at which point you'll see these two clipping options
up here at the top, Edit Clipping Path, and Edit Contents.
Alright, now at this point, the reason the thumbnail
for this object appears as a jagged outline
with no fill is because converting a path outline
to a clipping mask, at least in this manner,
goes ahead and sacrifices the fill and stroke attributes.
But you can bring it back up here in the control panel.
And so, for example, I want to assign
this path outline a stroke, and so I'll click
inside the line weight value there
and change it to three points and that will
automatically give me a black stroke
as we're seeing in the swatches panel.
Alright, I'll go ahead and press the escape key
to hide that panel, and I'll press control shift A
or command shift A on a Mac, to deselect the path.
Alright, now I wanna soften the shading a little bit,
and I'm gonna do that here inside the Layers panel,
by targeting this item called High,
which represents the highlights.
You also wanna shift click the meatballs
for the next two objects down,
which include this compound shape
as well as this item called Rear.
And so, it's very important that you target the items
by clicking and shift clicking on their circular meatballs
in the right hand column of the Layers panel.
Then, go up to the Effect menu, choose Blur,
and choose Gaussian Blur.
And I came up with a radius value of three pixels,
you can see what that looks like by turning on
the preview checkbox, and as you can see
it goes ahead and softens those path outlines
so that they more closely resemble custom gradients.
And so now, I'll click Okay, in order to apply that change.
I also figure that it didn't make sense for the shadow
to be just a standard ellipse,
without any grass action in it.
So, I'll go ahead and click on that ellipse to select it.
And then, I'll go up to the Effect menu,
choose Distort and Transform, and choose
the Roughen command, and I'll dial in those same
values I used a few movies ago.
I'll go ahead and set this guy to absolute.
I want the size to be five points,
and then I'll take the detail up to 30 per inch.
And you can see what that looks like by
turning on the preview checkbox.
Notice now we have a little bit of
wiggling grass in that shadow.
After which point, I'll click Okay,
in order to accept that effect,
and I'll press control shift A,
or command shift A on a Mac to deselect my artwork.
And that's how you mask the contents of an entire layer
using the front most static path outline on that layer
here inside Illustrator.