Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

Filling, Stroking, and Stacking

In the previous exercise, we focused primarily on how to color ob-

jects, with a few instances of moving objects forward or back. In

this exercise, I’ll show you how to move shapes directly in front of

or behind the selected object, as well as how to manipulate entire

groups, even when those groups may be nested inside other groups.

We’ll wrap up by restoring the face in the center of the artwork.

This is our last exercise with the tonalpohualli (and the last exercise

of the lesson), and by the end you’ll have a complete (and complex)

high-quality illustration.

1. Open the calendar art. If you have your fi le from the

last exercise open, you can keep working with that; if

not, open the fi le Topo halfway.ai, found in the

son 02 folder.

2.

Fill the two outermost stars. Using whatever method you’d

like, fi ll the outermost star with Light Clay, and the star just

inside it with white, as in Figure 2-79.

3. Move the stars to their proper place in the stack. If you tem-

porarily turned off the Paths layer (by clicking its ), you’ll see

that the stars are supposed to be behind the thickly stroked

circle about halfway out from the center. You have to move

them, but how?

So much of Illustrator is a building process, rather than a traditional

pen-and-ink process. The stacking order is a crucial part of building

a successful illustration, and ...