Chapter 13: Clip with Masks

Overview

Clipping masks play an essential role in cropping artwork in Illustrator. This is one of those concepts that can be a bit disorienting for designers migrating from Photoshop or other bitmap graphics software.

Artists coming from a bitmap background to Illustrator often ask, Where s the eraser? There is an Eraser tool (found on the Pencil tool tearoff and discussed in Chapter 4), but it s not really what you need to crop objects in Illustrator. Instead, Illustrator crops objects by imposing a clipping mask over the object and then trimming away everything not covered by the clipping mask.

In Figure 13-1, the rectangle is the mask, and the streets are masked objects. As you can see, the only part of the label that is visible after masking is the part within the rectangle.

Figure 13-1: The rectangle acts as a clipping mask over the map to constrain it to the proper size .