Using and Understanding Masks, Gradients, and Blend Effects in Adobe Illustrator
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
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MASKS EXPLAINED 94
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OPACITY MASKS 96
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USING OFFSET PATH TO CREATE A MASK 100
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BLEND THEORY 103
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BLENDING AND MASKS 105
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USING OPACITY MASKS TO CREATE GRADIENTS ON GRADIENTS 109
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MASKS WITHIN MASKS 113
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CREATE A TRANSPARENT SHADOW 116
IN THE PAST if someone gave you a pile of digitally produced artwork it was a snap to divide the images easily into two piles—those created in Photoshop and those done in Illustrator. Soft, shaded, semi-opaque objects were evidence of a Photoshop experience, whereas crisp, clean vector lines were obviously the handiwork of Illustrator. Not so today. While Photoshop has garnered the ability to create vector shapes, so has Illustrator been given incredible tools and methods to give line art three dimensionality through techniques such as masks, blends, gradients, and true transparency.
Masks and Transparency
Masks are one of the most powerful and misunderstood features in Illustrator. Masks are extremely versatile in what they can do, and yet for many, masks are a hard concept to wrap their head around. A mask, no matter what program it is created in, basically selectively shows and hides certain elements. Depending on the type of mask you use, this could mean hiding some elements completely or just partially. For example, in the project, “Masks Within Masks,” we show you how to fit a pattern within a shirt and then a shirt within a body using clipping masks. The powerful opacity mask enables you to create a transparent effect whereby your background partially shows through your elements. In this chapter, masks of all sorts—clipping, layer clipping, and opacity—will be presented in detail.
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Gradients and Blends
If you desire more of a three-dimensional look to your Illustrator art, using gradients and blends, often paired with masks, is the way to go. We’ll show you how to overcome one of the biggest difficulties—creating multiple gradients that intersect seamlessly into one another. We’ll also describe the instances where blends are actually preferred over gradients. In the section, “Blending and Masks,” we’ll use a combination of blends and masks to give a statue her voluptuous undulations.
We hope that, after you’ve perused this chapter, you’ll be inclined to use masks, gradients, and blends with less hesitation and even a tad of enthusiasm.
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Masks Explained
As we mentioned in the introduction, many people are baffled by Illustrator’s masking capabilities. There have been numerous attempts over the years to make using masks easier, the latest being the introduction of the “layer clipping mask.” In this section we’ll introduce the two basic types of masks and describe the pros and cons of each.
Clipping Mask or Mask
Masks have been around since the earliest versions of Illustrator, but in version 9, “masks” became “clipping masks.” The functionality is exactly the same; only the name was changed. However, being the artistic nonconformists that we are, when we refer to masks in this book, we are referring to clipping masks.
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You can create clipping masks from any type of vector object: paths, compound shapes, or text objects. In short, a mask is a group of objects with the topmost object “masking” all objects below it in the group.
An easy analogy would be to compare a mask to a box of playing cards. The box represents the group, and the cards within the box are the objects. The top card is always the ace (or mask), and the cards beneath it (the objects) can be shuffled in any order.
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To create a clipping mask, begin by positioning the object you’d like to function as the mask on top (in the stacking order) of the object(s) you want to mask out. Remember, the easiest way to change an object’s stacking order is by using the Paste in Front/Back command (see “Tip: Arranging Objects Inside Masks”). Then select all objects and press Cmd (Ctrl)-7, or use the contextual menu and choose Make Clipping Mask, or choose Object > Clipping Mask > Make.
Making a clipping mask groups the objects together and, more important, clears the fill and stroke attributes from the top object being used as the mask. Even though releasing the clipping mask (Cmd-Option [Ctrl-Alt]-7) will ungroup the objects, the mask object’s original fill/stroke attributes will not return.
Layer Clipping Masks
A layer clipping mask is almost identical to a regular clipping mask with a couple of notable exceptions. With a layer clipping mask the masking object resides as the topmost object in the layer. As you add artwork to that layer, the objects become masked as long as you position the artwork’s layer underneath the layer clipping mask in the stacking order. The biggest difference, however, is that a layer clipping mask is not automatically grouped.
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Since a layer clipping mask depends on using one mask per layer, its usefulness greatly depends on your workflow and the type of work that you do. For involved work that requires a number of masks, using layer clipping masks might prove cumbersome due to the number of layers you’ll need to produce. Also, since the layer clipping masks are not grouped, it might be harder to identify masked objects with a click of the Selection tool as you can with a regular clipping mask.
To create a layer clipping mask go to the Layers palette and click the triangle on the layer to reveal its contents. Make
sure that the object you want to be the mask is on top of the stacking order for that layer. Click the layer name (not the
object) and either choose Make Clipping Mask from the palette menu or click the Make/Release Clipping Mask button at the bottom
of the Layers palette A.
Insight: Identifying Masks and Layer Clipping Masks
Every once in a while you’ll be called on to deconstruct another person’s work. Since masks are grouped and layer clipping masks aren’t, besides clicking on the objects with the Selection tool to see that, how else can you tell the difference between the two? One way is to look at how the masks are configured in the Layers palette. A mask shows as a group in the Layers palette, whereas the clipping mask layer is indicated without a group.
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