You all know how much I love Adobe Illustrator and how I use it in my everyday cartooning. Well even though it is such a great program, some folks are hesitant to use it due to its steep learning curve. Although if you know Photoshop or any other paint programs, then you are already half way there. The beauty of Illustrator is in its resolution independence and its vectors.

In an attempt to tackle some of the more common problems encountered in Illustrator, I will be presenting tutorial sections on the problems most often encountered when using Illustrator for your cartooning.

One of the biggest hurdles, and most confusing to deal with, is the concept of “knockouts”. I don’t know the artistic term, but in manufacturing circles, a part that needs to be removed (to make a mold for instance) is called a “knockout”. If you use Illustrator, or have even dabbled in it I’m sure you’ve come across this problem. Let’s take this step by step, shall we?

First off, let’s start with out drawing. I’m using a pen and ink drawing that has been scanned in and converted to vectors (covered in my “How To” section on how I do my strip).

Just your basic pen and ink drawing. Looks just fine, doesn’t it? Well what if we put it on a colored background?

Hmmm. It seems we have a problem, right? The drawing has white space where you should be able to see through to the blue background.

This is due to the fact that the converted line drawing has drawn in the closed off areas and doesn’t differentiate between what is white space that is supposed to be there (skull, leg bones, headphones, etc.) and what should be “see through” (between the headphone cords, between the legs, etc.)

Let’s highlight the trouble spots with yellow just so we know what to focus on.

Note: you don’t NEED to convert these areas to yellow when you try this yourself, I’m just doing it to highlight the trouble spots.

Well why don’t we just delete the parts we don’t want. Simple, right?

Not quite. As you can see removing a piece just shows us the background vector.

As you can see below (if we move the main black outline off to the side) the vector program gives us a black “outline” that is really a filled black shape that the smaller white pieces just sit upon. Now this is fine and dandy for those of us who work in black and white, but what about if we use backgrounds or colors?

Here comes the “trick”. Highlight the main back black part of the image (the “outline” if you will) and then select all the little white pieces inside that you want to knockout. Like so.

Remember: not ALL the white pieces, just those you want to be able to see through to the background.

Next, open up the Pathfinder toolbar (this is from Illustrator CS, but I believe most versions have something similar).

You want to ‘Subtract’ the shapes from the background (the black part).

Now if I remember correctly, older versions might have called it something else. If you don’t find ‘Subtract’ or it does not seem to be working for you, then try a few of the other options. Play around and see what results you get. Hey, it’s how I found out about this feature I’m showing you. =)

Let’s see what we get after we knockout our pieces.

Oh Nos! Someone has haxxored our pixels!

Ahh, don’t worry if you image looks something like this. Basically when the ‘Subtract’ tool is used the black layer that was in the very back gets moved up to the spot where the closest removed piece was (in this case it looks like the piece between the legs).

No worries though. Just go to your toolbar and with the background black piece still selected, choose ‘Options’ – ‘Arrange’ – ‘Send To Back’.

The ’send to back’ option sends that particular selected vector element to the “back” of the page. Take a peek and you will see you can move individual elements backward and forward to have them overlap or recede. Just think of it as layers without actual individually assigned layer windows.

And there we have our finished product. A piece of art with all the right parts missing.

Hopefully this tutorial will not only help you with that pesky problem of “knockouts”, but will also show you one or two things you can play with to make your Illustrator work easier.