Adobe Illustrator CC Digital Classroom

Lesson 9: Organizing your Illustrations with Layers

 

Complex illustrations with many components can make it more difficult to work with and select individual components. In this lesson, you will discover how to use Illustrator CC’s Layers panel to organize and manage your illustrations.

What you’ll learn in this lesson:

• • Selecting items on a layer
• • Locking and hiding layers
• • Creating new layers
• • Moving items between layers
• • Organizing layers

Starting up

Before starting, make sure that your tools and panels are consistent by resetting your workspace. See “Resetting Adobe Illustrator CC Preferences” in the Starting up section of this book.

You will work with several files from the ai09lessons folder in this lesson. Make sure that you have loaded the ailessons folder onto your hard drive from www.digitalclassroombooks.com/epub/illustratorcc. See “Loading lesson files” in the Starting up section of this book.

Getting to know the Layers panel

Whether you deliberately work with layers or not, every time you create, import, or paste items in an Illustrator document, you are placing those items on a layer. The default layer that is in every new Illustrator document is called Layer 1. The order in which you add new elements to the document determines their arrangement on Layer 1. The latest additions appear on top of the earlier ones; this is called the stacking order. Just like ...