Learn the steps to making objects transparent in Adobe Illustrator, building shapes out of strokes, and preparing the final artwork for export as a PDF. This comprehensive guide provides a detailed walkthrough of the process, from creating an initial shape to grouping elements and exporting the final design.
Key Insights
- The article provides instructions on how to make objects transparent in Adobe Illustrator, including turning lines into shapes and using the shape builder tool to create the desired effect.
- A step-by-step guide is provided on how to group different elements of a design together, giving you the freedom to manipulate them as a single unit, enhancing the design's adaptability.
- The piece also highlights the process of preparing and exporting the design as a PDF, ensuring the final product is ready for presentation or submission, maintaining the integrity and quality of the artwork.
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Let's start where we left off. Unfortunately, we still need to do some work making these objects transparent.
To do this, let's go back into the helmet by double-clicking and double-clicking again to go into specifically the isolation mode for the helmet. From here, I'll zoom in and as we can tell, our line is currently set to white. However, we want it to be transparent.
If we go to our stroke and click no fill or none, we'll see that it just disappears in front of the black background. Therefore, instead I'll hit CTRL Z to undo. And another thought might be to use the shape builder tool to do this.
So with the selection tool, we'll click and drag a selection box over all of our objects and use the shape builder tool to create a shape. However, we can see that this doesn't work with lines. We're not able to create a shape.
We click and drag. It simply turns it white. It doesn't match the width of our lines.
We'll hit CTRL Z again. Instead for this, what we need to do is convert these lines into shapes. To do this, I'll hit v on the keyboard.
And then hitting CTRL shift a, I'll deselect all and only go back to select the four lines. With these four lines selected, we'll go into object, path, and we're going to go to outline stroke. Outline stroke will now create actual shapes out of the strokes we've created.
So from here, we can hold shift and select the helmet as well. And then use the shape builder to create one shape for our helmet and create the shapes that we'll be deleting and removing from the helmet. From here, I'll simply hit v. We'll hit CTRL shift a to deselect.
And we'll go back and delete the shapes we need removed. I'll then highlight the helmet so that we can color it black going to our color panel and see where the shapes are. Next, we'll select all three triangles holding shift and hitting the delete key.
Now, if we double click outside the helmet and zoom out. If we click and drag our helmet over, we'll see it's fully transparent. I'll hit CTRL Z to undo this.
And finally, as one final addition, we'll go to our shapes and hit delete. Highlight the rectangle tool. And we're going to be adding a rectangle background to our shape.
We'll release and you can color it whatever color you'd prefer. I'll leave mine this color. And we're going to now add it behind our helmet and glasses.
To do this, we'll hit CTRL shift open brackets or we can drag it beneath. And we'll see that our helmet is now transparent for the white areas and only is filled with black. Next, let's group the helmet in the background together using v on the keyboard.
And highlighting both the helmet and glasses as well as the background. We'll right click select group. And we'll rename this 16 midterm.
As a final step, we'll now prepare to export this artboard. Let's hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work. And next, we'll go to file, save as.
And from here, we're going to be renaming this midterm. From the drop-down menu for save as type, we'll select adobe pdf. And in this case, we're going to change it from all or all the icons to simply a range.
For our range, we'll remove one and we'll simply keep it at 16. This way, we'll be exporting just the 16th artboard. With our customized helmet.
We'll then hit save. And in this case, we'll go to the top. Selecting the pdf preset.
And we'll select smallest file size. We'll then hit save pdf. Click ok.
Letting us know that this pdf won't be able to be edited. And we've now completed our midterm. Please upload this file to the portal.
For our grade. In the next videos, we'll be working on a postcard. See you there.