Comments on: Improve Your Illustrator Workflow with Layer Masking

By: Rachel

Rachel — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 15:18:12 +0000

Very new to Illustrator and just trying things out at the moment – for what I need this is ideal – and easy as well! Thanks very much!

By: Arthur Lee

Arthur Lee — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:25:27 +0000

I’m new to Illustrator. The drawback I think to this method is, if you have many layers, you have to create many mask layers. Why not make just one layer on top. Make four rectangles on that layer with a white (or whatever) fill and a zero stroke. The rectangles border what you want to show. Now just making that 1 layer visible or not will truly in the literal sense of the word “mask” whatever is underneath. I suppose you could make a single compound shape of rectangle within a rectangle and make it even simpler. You could just copy this shape to any different file, and resize it as appropriate

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 03:34:27 +0000

Hey, I just wanted to drop a note here thanking you for this little tip. I’ve been wasting so much time making clipping masks. You make them, but before you can edit anything you have to release them. This is going to save so much time it’s crazy.

By: Arif Kabir

Arif Kabir — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:02:27 +0000

Thank you sooo much – I used to have to manually put white boxes all around the border and then have to lock them, but this way is soooo much easier! Thank you once more!

By: Marcus

Marcus — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:00:25 +0000

THANKS I REALLY APPRECIATE IT!!!!

By: CasTex

CasTex — Tue, 19 May 2009 05:10:30 +0000

Very nice job, thanks!…

By: joe

joe — Wed, 13 May 2009 13:23:48 +0000

Hi Aira,

Not sure what your issue is specifically. It’s been a while since I had my issues with masks that I mentioned above. However, there are quite a few ways to mask something.

Since learning this technique, I’ve learned another (along with the original clipping mask technique that I don’t seem to use very often).

Try this tutorial for another method that seems to have all sorts of edit capabilities:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzkeIGrPC2s

The guy who does these tutorials uses this masking technique in a lot of his other illustrator tutorials, so if it doesn’t make sense at first, try a couple of his other tutorials and you should get the hang of it. The ones on making an Iphone icon and making a glass button use the masking technique several times each.

Good luck,

-Joe

By: aira

aira — Wed, 13 May 2009 09:25:31 +0000

I have the same problem with musique, have tried to compound path, and doen’t work either.
The shape just disappears, wondering what’s wrong???

By: Sew

Sew — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:01:07 +0000

This is an awesome feature!! Thanks for sharing!

By: Requested Tutorial: Crop Excess Illustrator Artwork | BittBox

Requested Tutorial: Crop Excess Illustrator Artwork | BittBox — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:48:05 +0000

[...] a non-destructive way to acheive a similar effect, I have a post on “Layer Masking” in Illustrator. It’s not the same as a clipping mask, and It gives the same effect as this tutorial without [...]

By: joe

joe — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:07:27 +0000

Musique.

I was having the same problem and looked it up on other posts. My problem was that the path I was using to create my mask was a grouped path. This confuses illustrator and makes it freak out and axe everything. if your path is made of more than one object, select them and chose:

object/compound path/make

then retry the mask. Worked like a charm for me, and I was pulling my hair out over this for hours, trying to figure out what I had done wrong.

good luck

By: musique

musique — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 07:39:33 +0000

It didn’t work for me, sadly. I have NO IDEA what I am doing wrong … after aligning, when I click “apply your mask”, it disappears with leaving everything hanging outside.

I created plain circles of 2 different colors on 2 different layers, created a 350×350 pix rectangle on top of those circles layers but after selecting the rectangle layer and clicking on the mask toggle thingie .. rectangle disappears.

Someone please help!! Thanks ….

By: prischan

prischan — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:30:23 +0000

thanks. is very useful…I really needed this.

By: green_lantern

green_lantern — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:25:42 +0000

This is a good tutorial, but CLusterPluck is absolutely right: this is ten times easier and more useful in Freehand with the Paste Inside feature. And being able to nest lots of Paste Insides inside of other Paste Insides is so useful. I’ve been told by some folks that CS5 may incorporate some features of Freehand that make it so intuitive and simple, and I hope Paste Inside is one of them. Please.

By: Ezuddin

Ezuddin — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 05:21:20 +0000

Nice Totur

By: Jord

Jord — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 06:28:43 +0000

Wow, again this is a really handy tut. This is going to save me a lot of time. Thanks, this site is very good, keep it up.

Jord

By: Lorraine

Lorraine — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 01:29:34 +0000

This is brilliant! Thank you for sharing.

By: Grafiko

Grafiko — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 20:06:44 +0000

So simple, thanks for the tip.

By: Tiffany

Tiffany — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:10:24 +0000

THANK YOU SO MUCH… saved me TONS of time today! :)

By: RSBtenchar

RSBtenchar — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:18:36 +0000

Thanks a lot for this tutorial. I was drawing a portrait and needed to trim it down (but didn’t want to delete anything, just in case) and this really helped me out.