- [Instructor] In this movie, I'm going to show you
how to draw holes using a feature called knockout group
that's available inside the transparency panel.
So, when you see something here, if you zoom in
on the forehead, notice that we have this gray line,
right about there, and it goes all the way across,
and it's a function of this white line in the background.
That's happening because I have a stroke around my headline.
And so, somehow, I need to get rid of that.
Well, you might figure one approach would be to select
the image and then, let's just go ahead and twirl open
the clipping group right here.
Notice that the clipping mask has automatically
jumped back to the top.
So, Illustrator apparently really prefers it
to be at this location.
But in any event, I can go ahead and select this
and then I might go up to my fill swatch, up here
in the control panel, and change it to white,
just so that we have something in the way.
Well, if I go that route, then we don't have that
interaction with the gradient background anymore.
And I could try to fake it by changing that fill color
to purple, but that's not really the effect I want.
So I'm just going to set this back to none.
What I want to do instead is cut a hole in that line.
And so, I'm going to go ahead and twirl the image layer closed
and I'm going to turn it off for the present,
and I'm just going to go ahead and zoom in a little bit here.
Now, one way to carve a hole would be to get the rectangle
tool, and I want to make sure that I'm working on the right
layer, which is this guy, push posh, and then I could drag
across, like so, in order to create a rectangle there.
And then I could press the V key to switch back
to my black arrow tool and shift-click on this guy,
and then I could go up to the window menu
and choose the pathfinder panel.
Now, if I just subtract the front shape, then I'm going to get
this effect here, which is obviously no better.
But even if I were to press the alt key, or the option key
on the Mac, and click in order to create a dynamic
compound shape, I still trace around the whole thing.
So, I'm faced with a couple of solutions.
One is a permanent solution, which is to grab scissors tool
and just start cuttin' away at that path outline.
But let's say I want to work dynamically, and with a high
degree of precision as well, as you're about to see.
I'm going to undo the creation of that rectangle
and I'm going to draw another one, one that's bigger,
just so we can really see what's going on.
And I'm going to swap the fill and stroke attributes
by pressing shift X.
So, we have a black fill and we have no stroke.
Alright, now I'm going to switch back to my transparency
panel here and I'm going to expand it as well.
And I'm going to reduce the opacity value to 50%,
just by pressing the five key, because I've loaded
dekeKeys, after all.
Now, notice what happens.
We're seeing through the object to the objects below,
and that makes all the sense in the world.
But we could also instead create a knockout,
and we could treat this shape as if it is tunneling through
everything else on this layer.
And to make that happen, you want to go ahead and target
the layer itself by clicking on the circular meatball.
And so, you need some form of container, either a group
or a layer, something, and then you've got this
knockout group checkbox here.
Now, by default, it has this little minus through it,
and what that's telling you is you're currently
in the neutral state.
And so, the idea is the checkbox is turned neither on
nor off, just so it doesn't end up overriding
other groups inside this layer.
So it's basically as if this function doesn't exist
at this point.
But your other option is to turn it on by clicking on it,
at which point, notice that we're actually burrowing
through the other text on this layer.
Now, you can ignore the word your,
because it's not on the same layer, and so, for the moment,
I'll just go ahead and turn it off here.
And so, we'll just pay attention to the one layer
we're working on.
So, in other words, regardless of the opacity
of this rectangle, it is going to entirely knock out
everything behind it.
Alright, I'm going to press the V key to switch back
to my black arrow tool.
I'll click off the shapes for now and I'll click back on
this rectangle, and so, I could press the nine key
in order to increase the opacity to 90%,
and I'm still not going to see anything in the background.
I could press the one key to set it to 10%,
and I'm not going to see those objects on this one layer.
So they've all got to be in a single container together.
Again, that could be a group, but in our case, it's a layer.
What I really want, though, is to be able to see
entirely through this rectangle.
Notice, if I click off of it, it's still partially there,
which is why we have an opacity value of 0%.
And so, I'm going to select that rectangle and tap
the tilde key, you may recall, if you've loaded dekeKeys,
or, of course, you could just manually set this value to 0%,
at which point we have a floating hole.
And I can move that hole anyplace I like
in order to cut away this layer.
Alright now, I don't really need this rectangle
to be this big, so I'm going to bring back the image layer
so I can at least see what's going on.
And the easiest way to scale this rectangle
is going to be to bring back the bounding box.
And you can do that either by going up to the view menu
and choosing show bounding box.
I hate drifting through this menu, though,
there's so much going on.
Which is why it's so great that you can just press
control shift V or command shift V on the Mac.
Alright, and now I'll go ahead and drag this guy down.
It's too low, but I don't want to have it over
the text at all, so I might just drag it out here
where I can see the text, and then I could drag this up,
but, doesn't really matter at this point,
we can leave it big down here.
Now I want to drag it in at the sides to this location
right there and over to here.
And because her hair is jet black,
it ends up covering things quite nicely.
After which point, I'll once again press control shift B
or command shift B on the Mac to turn off the bounding box,
and then I'll click off the rectangle to deselect it,
and then I'll turn back on my your layer.
And I want you to notice something about the your layer,
something I really didn't make obvious
in the previous movie.
If I go ahead and target that layer and switch back to
the appearance panel, notice the top-left corner of the Y.
If I turn off that gradient fill, you can see
a little bit of gray up there.
Whereas if I turn that gradient fill back on to enhance
the contrast of this effect, that little area
turns absolutely white.
So that's the kind of stuff you can accomplish
with a little bit of additional effort.
Alright, one other thing I want to show you is what appears
to be a bug in this particular version of Illustrator.
If I select the type tool, I'll switch back to the layers
panel and I'll click on the push posh layer,
and I'll click right about there, notice things are already
going extremely wrong.
And then, if I go ahead and click off the text,
there is some white text sitting right there, by the way.
I'll just move it over so we can see it better.
And notice that it appears just fine on the fly
when I'm moving it around, but as soon as I release,
it looks terrible.
So what I'll do is I'll press control Y or command Y
on the Mac to switch to the outline mode for a minute,
then I'll press control Y or command Y again to switch back
to the preview mode, so that Illustrator has a chance
to refresh the screen and things go terribly awry.
And that is a function for now, at least.
I'm setting a layer to knockout group, turning knockout
group on, when that layer contains small type.
And so, notice our type size is currently 12 points.
If I take it up to 120 points, the problem goes away,
and I can make that even more evident by pressing control Y
or command Y on the Mac a couple of times in a row, at which
point you'll see everything reconciles quite nicely.
So, that's just something to be aware of.
I'm going to go ahead and get rid of that text by pressing
the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac,
and then I'll press control zero or command zero on the Mac
to center my zoom.
And that is how you turn any path outline into a hole,
it can be text as well, by setting its opacity to 0%
and then making sure it's inside of a group or a layer
and turning on the knockout group checkbox,
here inside the transparency panel.