Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

15. Copy the beveled hand out of its group. We’re nearly there.

While I like the look of the paler brown hand, I wish the stroke

were still 100% black. Unfortunately, since I asked you to change

the opacity of the group, the opacity of that stroke alone can’t

be restored because—as you’ll see in this step—the opacity of

the stroke is still set to 100. Here’s the trick for copying an ele-

ment out of a group:

• Switch to the white arrow tool by pressing the A key.

•

Alt-click (or Option-click) the outer hand path to select

the entire path.

• Press Ctrl+C (-C) to copy the path.

•

Deselect the path by clicking anywhere off the artwork,

and then paste the new hand at the front of the stack with

Ctrl+F (-F).

It’s crucial that you deselect the path before pasting. With nothing

selected, Illustrator pastes to the front of the entire layer. However, if a

piece of artwork is selected, Illustrator pastes it in front of that piece (in

this case, just in front of the group).

Once you paste the path, you’ll see that its opacity is 100%—

demonstrating that while the group itself is translucent, the

individual pieces retain their original opacity.

16.

Change the fi ll of the hand to none. Last step—you’ve restored

the dark stroke, but the fi ll is now obscuring the inner hand

underneath. Remove the fi ll by pressing the

key.

And there you have it! Starting with a simple black line and ...