Layers in Illustraor

I was reading a chapter on layers in Illustrator. I felt like the book explained where to find different tools but did it no justice of why layers are so important.
 

If you are a complete beginner:

 

Layers are sort of like transparent sheets on which all your elements go. you can have everything on one layer, or you can have multiple (essentially infinite number of) layers. Layers can have sub-layers, groups, and paths. Sub-layers can have their own sub-layers, groups, and paths. Sort of like infinite Russian dolls. Here's an example and its hierarchy.

 

Now, bring up the Layers panel (F7), hover over the buttons, take a look at the menu, poke around figure stuff out, I'm not going to go into too much detail here - I strongly believe that you can figure out how to add new layers and delete them :D .
 

if you are not a complete beginner:

So. Layers. In Illustrator at first it seems they are not so important as you can have a bunch of elements on the same layer and can still manipulate them individually. However, when you make something complicated (and trust me you will very shortly after getting into Illustrator), you will end up with a really big list of elements and will have to scroll a lot to find what you're looking for.

 

So, layers and groups help with organizing and keeping you sane.

 

For example if I draw a person (or an animal, or an alien) the facial features are always on a sub-layer and grouped up in a way that makes sense to me (like left eye group, right eye, mouth, etc.)

 

More importantly keeping things on separate layers will make your workflow a lot faster and easier - because you can lock layers making them unclickable and uneditable. Or you can hide them. The locking of layers is important because if you have a bunch of paths overlapping one on top of the other you will get annoyed trying to select the correct element. A couple shortcuts and tricks that will help:

 

Click to Target - every layer, sub-layer, group, and path has a circle on the right to their name. Clicking on it will select all elements in that entity. This is very useful for repositioning stuff in your artwork.

 

Locate Object - (one of the buttons on the layer panel). This is a life-saver. Select your object with any selection tool and click that button - it will find it for you on the layers panel. Instnatly. No scrolling around. 

 

Reverse Order - select a couple layers (they don't have to be consecutive), click on options from layers panel, and click reverse order. This is a lot faster than rearranging a bunch of layers manually by dragging them around.

 

Alt - Click in layer's lock column on the Layer panel - this will lock all other layers of same indentation. This is really convenient when you need to do some fine work on specific paths without anything else getting in the way. Alt-click on the same layer again to remove the locks from other layers. This works the same for visibility field (show/hide layers).

 

Collect in a New Layer - select a bunch of same indent elements click options on layer panel and click Collect in a New Layer. Self explanatory. Much more convenient than manually dragging it to a new layer.

 

Ctrl - click on Create New Layer - if you're in draw normal mode: the new layer will be the top layer; if you're in Draw Behind mode it will be the layer on the very bottom.

 

Layer Options (double click on a layer):

 

This is pretty neat - every layer has its own color for selection tool (V) bounding box. You can change the color to whatever you want. This is handy for when the selection color is close to what's on the layer - like if you have a sky background and the layer color is blue it will be hard to see.

 

Template and Dim Images to %: These are a great features and quite similar. They dim the layer. Template works fine but if you want to make it even more dim or if it's too dim then just check dim images to instead and enter the desired percentage. The reason why this is important: it works great for when you have a scanned sketch that you're going to use as a stencil for your illustration.
 

Layer use and good practice

 Ok, so layers are good and all-mighty - I never work without Layers panel open - and I do mean never ever - I'd feel completely lost without it. However, don't go overboard with layers either.

 

If I have a couple artboards I make a separate layer for each of them and make sub-layers where necessary. If I have only one artboard then I will have different parts of the illustration on separate layers.

 

I almost always have a background layer - sky, grass, the view in the distance - all that goes there. You can add more stuff to it it's up to you. I prefer having a separate layer for say flowers and other details. That layer comes right after the background. That may be a couple layers. Then for each person or object in the foreground I will have a separate layer.

 

If it's a simple drawing I will add another layer for shading. or shading will be on sub-layers for each layer. For shading I usually use a brush, black color, then select everything on that layer and add transparency or set the visibility to overlay or multiply (Appearance panel Shift-F6). Same for highlighting.

 

Here's an example:

 

 

So at first I would draw all that on respective layers except shading, then painlessly reposition the girl or the trees or whatever else. Once I was happy with it I would do the shading. If I knew in the future I may want to move stuff around again I would make shading sub-layers for each layer, so that it would move around with the respective objects.

 

This post is based on my personal experience and my workflow - different people may see things differently and in the end there is no right or wrong. However, I myself find it most useful to see how other people in the field do things and use things and share their thoughts or experiences - it's one of the best ways to learn and get good habits. So, I hope that this will help some people out there :) But definitely don't take my word for it - go try it out yourself, mess with it, click stuff, make your own mistakes, get your own experience!

Comic book art

This is done the same way as described in the previous post - sketched, inked, scanned, colored in AI, and background made in AI. For sketching I used a wooden manikin to get the pose and proportions right. I was going for a dynamic pose - it's a little bit of strange one but hey maybe she just let go of a rope she was hanging onto and is going to punch somebody while dodging to the side... Definitely made it challenging to draw.

If I end up making some comics she will definitely be one of the main characters. And if I go with animation I can simplify it a bit out of this style and make it more cartoony but in either case this will definitely be used later on one way or another.

Anyway, drawing her and coloring her in AI took me about a day. All things considered not too bad timing for right now in this style. I stepped away from learning AI a little bit and have been training myself in drawing lately but after making this I realized there is still a lot I need to learn to do in Illustrator so I'll be back to that.

Digitizing hand-drawn art

Creating art directly in Illustrator is great - you can mess with each single line and change colors and even components on the go. However creating something from scratch is rather tedious and time-consuming - even if you're pretty good with a stylus it still is faster to draw something by hand with a pencil (at least in my case anyway). This of course doesn't apply to say abstract-ish sort of art like the three I posted before. I'm talking about drawing pretty detailed characters and objects.

I got a book called "how to draw your own graphic novel" (which is great by the way; has good advice and nice practice exercises). I went ahead and drew the very first character from there - a barbarian. Once it was done I used a 0.05 Black ink pen to outline it, erased all the pencil and was done with it. I wanted to color it in Illustrator so it was time to test out the Image trace feature. I took a photo with a DSLR camera, tuned it in photoshop a bit, and placed the file and tried different tracing modes. It wasn't the best result - I kept losing either the very top lines or the very bottom ones because of the way camera focused. I tried using a tripod and went back and forth with it. Then I started just rebuilding the whole image with curves and lines using the photo as a guidline. It worked but the process was very slow and tedious. And well it wasn't what I wanted.

Then I figured I'd go get a cheap scanner and see if that will make my life easier. I got a $50 Canon scanner (2400x4800dpi). Scanned the image (in grayscale or black and white), upped the contrast and placed it in AI. 

Inked sketch

Image trace worked like a charm - I used the "Sketched Art" option. The black outline was a compound path and all the pieces had no fill but where there so I didn't even have to use a brush to give it a fill - just selected each single piece or groups and colored it. Then I made a couple sub-layers to add shading and detail. After that was done I made a background layer and drew the ground, mountains, etc with a stylus - easy stuff.

Final result

Now, please remember, that this is a picture from "how to draw your own graphic novel" book - not my own creation - so don't use it anywhere or for anything :)

Another way of doing this is building the art point by point and using the sketch as a guide. This method is described in Part 2 of this tutorial.

Buffy / original Scoobies

This was a good show. I decided to attempt making a t-shirt design (which was limited to 5-6 colors). That didn't fall through for me but I still had fun. Anyway here's my original image and t-shirt version.

 

 Next time I make a tv-show themed graphic it will probably be either Doctor Who (10th doctor) or Game of Thrones. But for now I have a bunch of other things I need to make first, so probably will be a while.

Product Naming and Domain Parking

So, you decided to name your company / product / app / website / brand etc? You've been told by everybody how important the name is, given a bunch of vague unhelpful advice of how it should be something memorable, strong, fashionable, short, expressive, awesome, modern, 'edgy', and many other adjectives found in the language? Aside from that you've given it a lot of thought and want it to be "you". Something unique, and related to you in some way. You sit and think about it day and night, right down names on walls because you ran out of paper around the house / office, it comes to you in a dream and in the morning you wonder what drinks you had or what did you have before falling asleep to come up with such horrible idea.

Anyway. The point is you put a lot of thought and effort and time into naming your precious. And YES finally! You got it! It's just right! Sunshine and joy, good mood, cheerful singing, the world is at your feet. You get your cup of coffee and go to godaddy.com, asmallorange.com, or any other hosting spot. You type in myPrecious.com and that smile is wiped off of your face - the name is taken. You say "fine. I'll try this one". Nope that's taken, too. You try .net .org, ... .tv! (you're desparate!) taken... taken. TAKEN! You wonder who has thought of that name that you love so much. You go check out the page and oh what a surprise it's not being used - it's parked. Pay somewhere between $500 and $1.500 or hey $25.000 and that domain will be yours. The other 40% says "hey, if you want this domain click here or contact derpderp@domainnamesiwant.derp." Eventually, you will come across a couple of websites that use a similar name as you had originally chosen for a really horribly "designed" page that actually has nothing to do with the word.

From this point you have a couple choices.

Look around you, pick an object, type in that, if it's not taken - hey it's all yours. Name your precious creation ForkOnAPlate or GlassOfMilk or laVase etc. To anybody who questions you tell them they are not artistic enough to comprehend (and in your mind say "you're not autistic enough to understand").

Or make up a name that means absolutely nothing just put in random letters or close your eyes and type something.

Or, open a dictionary, find a verb that you like, skip a letter or two, or misspell it in a fancy way, let your imagination loose. One of them should work.

Anyway, the point is it's hard enough to find a name, and it's even harder to find a domain name that's not parked or in a very rare case used by somebody else. So next time you make fun of product names or laugh at how they have nothing to do with the product / website / brand, understand that people just didn't want to spend unreasonable money on buying out a... name.

It's really bad out there and nobody is doing anything about it. In my opinion parking should be illegal and monitored by hosting providers. But of course it brings in money to providers so why should they move a finger? The system works fine for them and brings in extra money. And why would they spend time and resources on something that's sort of profitable for them?

On the other hand, if there was a domain provider who would forbid domain parkings, it would probably get all the clients from all the other ones that don't. It would take just one to do that. They could even up their hosting prices - and balance out their no parking policy. Eventually all the other providers would end up with name parkers and no other business, bad reputation, and hopefully either go out of business or change their policy to no parking as well. Sure wouldn't happen overnight but hey would work and pay off eventually. And we would stop having ridiculous brand names and have less chaos, less headaches, less stress, sunshine and singing.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Perfect world. It could and should happen though. I think, a lot of people never give any thought to this problem until they come face to face with it. Then, as soon as they settle for other bad options they forget that there was a problem at all and don't want to so much as raise a finger and do something about it, talk about it, start a petition, raise awareness, or anything else that people do. But first step is realizing that there is a problem that needs solving. A problem that shouldn't have been there in the first place. I bet if somebody went out to all the stores bought out all the milk, and started selling it for $500 per carton or say to the highest bidder I bet people would not be too happy about it and not tolerate it. So ask yourselves why should domain parking be tolerated?