Illustrator Tutorials: Clipping Masks and Live Trace

Learn to use Illustrator’s brilliant live trace tool and wrap your head around clipping masks while you’re at it.

For this tutorial I am making a HOPE Rwanda wallpaper. Please take a few moments to check out their website and, if you feel led to do so, support the foundation.

Final Product:

Step 1: Getting Started
Create a new document and make the dimensions whatever you please. I chose the landscape A4 template (29.7cmW x 21cmH).

First off, we’re going to make our background. Select the rectangle tool (Shortcut M) and click anywhere on the art-board. Enter the dimensions of your document, click OK. To align your rectangle to the art-board, bring up the align palette (Window > Align) and make sure the “Align to Artboard” option is selected. Then click on the options “Horizontal Align Center” and “Vertical Align Center” to centre the rectangle.

Fill your rectangle with the grey #232323. This is your background layer (which you can go ahead and name something ingenious like “background” if you are an organised person).

Step 2: Text
Make a new layer (If the window palette isn’t open, find it by going Window > Layers and click the second button from right at the bottom of it) and write the word HOPE in the font “Myriad” (I know, I know, a really basic font, but trust me, it’ll look good at the end) three times on separate lines with the Type Tool (shortcut T). Centre your type using the same method as in Step 1.

Press Ctrl+A to select all of your text, make the size 120pt and set the leading (the space between lines) to 165pt.

Now we need to make our text into an object, and we can do this by selecting the text layer and clicking Object > Expand. You can leave both Fill and Object selected–it’s not relevant here–and press OK.

Alright, now we have our text as an object and can touch up our type. Select the ends of the E’s and make the top and bottom ends all the same length. Next delete the middle of the P’s by using the Direct Selection Tool (shortcut A) and selecting and deleting the inside path points, then finally, delete the all the O letters completely. The beauty of Illustrator is that our text is 100% vector, so we can edit the path points of our words at any stage.

Your text should now look like what I have below, and you are now ready to turn it into a clipping mask.

Step 3: Clipping Masks
Clipping masks are very easy in Illustrator. All you need is the object you want to use as a mask (the text we just made) and the object you want to be clipped.

Here is the image I want to be clipped by our text. An extremely emotive photograph of poverty evidenced in an African child. (I am unsure of the photographer otherwise I would credit them.)

After downloading the picture, click File > Place to insert it into your document. It should be a little bit smaller than our text, and we want it to cover the entire wording so we need to enlarge it accordingly. To do this, select the Free Transform Tool (shortcut E) and drag any corner outwards while holding down Shift to maintain our aspect ratio. Change the layer priority so that it sits underneath the text sublayer.

Now we need to turn all our text letter objects into a compound path for this to work. Don’t worry, it’s easy peasy. Select the entire text object group and click Object > Compound Path > Make (Ctrl+8 or Cmd+8 for Mac).

Next make the clipping mask by selecting both the layer with our placed image on it and the new compound path and click Object > Clipping Mask > Make (Ctrl+7 or Cmd+7 for Mac). Now your text should clip your placed image, and you can now go ahead and move the photo around to show which parts you want to by using the Free Transform Tool (E). I wanted to show the young boy’s eyes so I moved it up and enlarged it a little more.

We’re almost there; all that’s left to do is add the “O” which we will do in step 4.

Step 4: Live Trace
Probably one of the coolest features in Illustrator is the Live Trace Tool. And we’re going to use it to cut out Africa and use it for our “O”.

This is the continental illustration of Africa I used (all images used in this tutorial are available in the downloadable .zip file at the top of the page).

Again we are going to place this image into our document using File > Place, but first create a new layer so that our placed image will go into its own layer.

Now that our image is placed, you should see an option at the top centre of the program window called “Live Trace”. But instead of clicking the button, we are going to click the little drop down arrow right next to it and choose “Comic Art” instead of the default settings. This isn’t a particularly vital step as we are just going to change all the settings anyway, but it does give a slight head start I suppose, and also shows you that there are various presets there by default to choose from. All of these are editable.

Once the dialogue box pops up, make sure you click the option “Preview” so you can see the results of your changes before applying the trace.

Your picture will probably look a little jagged and tacky at the moment, but never fear, let’s just change a few settings.

Blur (The amount of blur made to the original image. Using this can dull sharp edges in the original image making the traced version less harsh): 1px with a Resample of 70px
Path Fitting (The lower the number you set in the ‘Path Fitting’ option, the tighter the image will be traced): 5px
Minimum Area (Defines the minimum area in pixels to be traced, which will help to avoid insignificant blemishes being traced): 3,000px
Corner Angle (Sets the sharpness of corner angles. The lower the number, the sharper the corners): 121

De-select the Stroke box (if it isn’t already) and select the Fills box so that you get one vector block. Click OK. Your picture should now look like a nice black and white of Africa, but it needs to be expanded so that you can delete the white background. To do that, select the layer and click the “Expand” button at the top of the screen.

We can now delete the white background by grabbing the Direct Selection Tool (A), clicking the white area and pressing Delete.

Africa is officially not a continent anymore; it’s an easily movable vector on our screen, hooray!

All we have to do now is resize it to fit in the space where the letter “O” used to be, duplicate it twice and position them all in the three “O” spaces. Change the fill of the middle one to a colour that you like to give make the wallpaper really standout. I used the very light highlighter blue-green colour #00FFCE.

After that I simply played around with different images layered over the top of the entire document in Photoshop. (This is also easily do-able in Illustrator). I ended up layering the cracks of a barren desert (the photograph was taken by Poh Wei and can be found in the resources .zip file) over everything and changing the blending mode to Color Dodge.

And that’s it, we’re done!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and learned something from it. If you would like to request a tutorial, you can do so simply by clicking the button below and filling out a quick form.

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• Photoshop Tutorials: Paths–Part I December 19, 2009
• Photoshop Tutorials: Making the Most of an Average Photo–Part I January 7, 2010
• Photoshop Tutorials: Things You Probably Don’t Know December 22, 2009

Tags: Program Learning, Styrus Updates