Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you three ways to mask
your art in Adobe Illustrator. Alright, let's get started. The first way to mask is the way
that most people know about...kind of the normal way. So you make a shape over the top of a bunch
of shapes, if you want. And then you select all and you make a mask. So let's do that real
quick. I'll go to my Rectangle tool and then come down here to the Ellipse tool, I'm going to hold
SHIFT and just draw a circle right over the top of this. Now I don't need a fill or a stroke on this,
so I'm just going to get rid of both. But I do have a circle across all the elements, I'll hit V
on my keyboard, select everything, and then we'll come up here to Object > Clipping Mask and Make,
and it'll mask all those things into the circle. That's the first way that most people know about.
The second way is to draw inside. So this time, I'm going to make a circle at the beginning,
I'll hold SHIFT and just make it a perfect circle - it obviously does not have to be - and I'm going
to use my Eyedropper tool and just click on this yellow color so you can see what I'm doing
a little better. And now I'll click the circle. And I'm going to come down here to the bottom of
the toolbar and choose this third one which is Draw Inside. And when I do that, I'll get this
dotted line outline type thing, it's just to kind of indicate that this is a Draw Inside object.
So I'm going to hit B on my keyboard to get my brush, I'm going to open my brushes window.
And I'll just grab this brush, I'm going to use a green swatch for this.
And I'll just draw across that circle. And you can see that it's all enclosed within the circle.
Let me just choose a different color and a different brush.
And now we'll get back on the regular mode. Now the thing about this is it's actually just set
up exactly like this one, it's just a different way to make the same thing. So we can also come
up here to Object > Clipping Mask and Release. And we'll get the same result: all those pieces with
the circle on top. If I re-mask it at this point, we're going to lose our fill color. So before
doing that, I'm going to copy, and then click off, and then paste behind with CMD B or CTRL V.
And now I can select everything and hit CMD 7 or CTRL 7, to get back to the same point we were at.
The third way to mask in Adobe Illustrator is to use an opacity mask. And this will make
our artwork fade to transparency. I'm going to make a copy of this by holding option and then
just dragging. And I'll get my rectangle tool. I'm going to just draw a rectangle over the top of it,
then I'm going to get my gradient palette up. So I'll go to Window > Gradient. I'll make sure
my fill is in front and then just click on the gradient here. This will give me a white to black
gradient. And the way opacity masks work, the black will show what's going to be transparent.
And the white will show the actual graphic itself, if that makes sense. So what I'm
going to do is CMD X or CTRL X. I'll click on this design and get my transparency palette
open. Now if you don't see it here, you can go to Window > Transparency, and it's right here.
So I'm going to click Make Mask. And what this does is it adds a black mask to this
group of objects. The black means everything is transparent. So when we look over here,
you can see it's all transparent - we don't want that. So I'm going to click right on that mask,
and then paste in front with CMD F or CTRL F. And that takes what we cut a minute ago, which was the
gradient square, and places it into that mask. And now you'll notice that the stuff on the white side
of the gradient is showing here. And the stuff on the darker side of the gradient is turning to an
opacity. By the way, if you're clicked on this mask, you won't be able to click other parts as
a drawing, you'll only be able to select that gradient. So let's go ahead and click back on
the objects themselves. I'm going to select this and move it over to the side so you can see that
it's actually transparent behind there. Now let's say we want this to go to completely transparent,
and then show my design completely over on this side. What we would need to do is to
get back on our mask, and then in our gradient panel, we can just hold OPTION or ALT and pull
another black area out and you can see that it's made it completely transparent on this side.
I'm going to hold OPTION/ALT and bring the white side in too, so we get a solid color over here.
And now we'll get back out of our mask so we can move these around. I'm going to pull it back off
to the edge so you can see the transparency a little better. Now we can also release this
and get our gradient back. Now a reason you might want to do this, you might want to be able to see
the white and black here on the gradient as you pull around the sliders. Once you get that the
way you want it, you can select everything, making sure that the gradient is on top,
come back over here to the transparency and click Make Mask. So it's just another way of doing it.
So those are the three ways to make masks in Illustrator. You've got the normal way, you've
got the Draw Inside way, and then you've got the opacity mask. Alright, if you like my style
of teaching and are also interested in cutting machines, like Cricut and Silhouette, I also have
another YouTube channel, and I'll leave the link for that in the description below. Thank you!!!