20 Layers
When creating complex artwork, it’s a challenge to keep track of all the items in your document window. Small items get hidden under larger items, and selecting artwork becomes difficult. Layers provide a way to manage all the items that make up your artwork. Think of layers as clear folders that contain artwork. If you reshuffle the folders, you change the stacking order of the items in your artwork. You can move items between folders and create subfolders within folders.
The structure of layers in your document can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. By default, all items are organized in a single, parent layer. However, you can create new layers and move items into them, or move elements from one layer to another at any time. The Layers panel provides an easy way to select, hide, lock, and change the appearance attributes of artwork.
Create Layer
If the artwork will contain more details, it needs to be separated into different layers. Also maybe you want to hide something or just take a look at the example, but you don’t want to see the layer when it’s exported. There are many options and many ways to work with them, so let’s start with creating a new document and layer.
Press to create a new layer. You can create as many layers as you want, but try to think about every layer and for what you are going to use it.
How Layers Work
Layers are like papers on top of papers. Only difference is that, you can see through all the layers, all your objects. If the illustrator have 5 layers, with 5 different illustrations and all of them are open, it might be a little confusing to understand the whole artwork. The process you can see below. Illustrator have to create artwork in different layers, but it has to be the same illustration, not 5 different. You can drag the layers if you want and change their positions.
A really helpful tool is the little eye near the layer name. You can hide your layer and work without any problem if you want. Just click the eye and hide your selected layer.
So if the illustrator wants to have a good illustration, the best way is to put everything in certain places, in different layers and if there is a need in the end it is easy to group all the layers and have only one.
Drag, Delete or Merge Layers
When you finish drawing your objects or illustrations you can always merge all your layers together and make only 1 from 5.
- Select all the layers and press the button on the right. There you can find merge selected.
- Also you can always delete the layer you don’t need.
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