Discover how to enhance your digital artwork by adding layers and cityscapes in Adobe Illustrator. This article will walk you through the process of importing, placing, and recoloring your city layer to create a cohesive and visually striking image.
Key Insights
- The tutorial explains the process of adding a city to an image by first locking the existing moon layer, creating a new layer titled 'city', and then importing the city as an entire file, not as a JPEG or exported image.
- Adjustments to the imported city include changing its color to reflect the background color, shrinking and repositioning it in front of the moon, and updating the color of the city by unlocking all layers and using the fill color to match the background color.
- The article also covers how to add reflections of the skyline to the image, providing a step-by-step guide to creating a new layer, reflecting it below the city, and adjusting the proportions accordingly for a realistic look.
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In this video, we're going to be adding our city to our image. To do this, let's first lock our Moon layer. Next, we'll be creating a new layer. We'll retitle this layer City and hit ENTER. From here, we're going to be importing our city. Rather than importing the city as a JPEG or exported image, we'll be importing the entire file. We'll go to File > Place*, and we're going to be placing our City Completed Illustrator file. Click Place*. Now, if we click and drag our city, we can place it into our file.
Let's now drag it over to the left-hand side, and we're going to shrink it just a bit. We'll reposition it in front of the moon so that we have the edges lining up with the edge of the moon. If we click outside, we can see that this image is starting to come together. The first thing I notice is that we want to change the color of our city to reflect the background. In order to do this, we first need to access our background color. To do this, we'll utilize the Eyedropper Tool and select one of the corners of the background, making sure not to get too close to the center—as those colors are different from the corners. Selecting our fill by double-clicking it, we can copy the hex code by hitting CTRL+C on the keyboard, then click OK*.
Next, it's time to open our City Completed file. We'll go to File > Open*, and from here, we'll open the City Completed Illustrator file. Click Open*. We're now going to change the color of our city. To do this, we'll first need to unlock a few layers. Unlock all current layers. With these layers now unlocked, we’ll want to fill the main buildings with the selected color. We'll select the outside edges, inner buildings, and the customized building. Then go to the fill color, double-click, hit CTRL+V to paste the hex code, and click OK*. We've now changed all the black elements to have the same fill color as our reflection.
We'll hit CTRL+S on the keyboard to save. If we go back into our city reflection image, we'll see a dialog box letting us know that one or more items have been updated and saved. Therefore, Illustrator can update them for us.
We'll click Yes*, and we'll see that our image is now updated to the appropriate color. This now looks good with both the background and the building colors. As we can see, our skyline now fades into the darkness on the edges. If we'd like to resize it a bit more, we can hold Shift and resize as preferred. I like the way this now looks.
Next, we're going to be adding the same building set of our skyline down below. Let's add a new layer and retitle this layer Reflection*, then hit ENTER. From here, we'll select our city and hit CTRL+C. Within Reflection*, let's hit CTRL+Shift+V on the keyboard. Since we'll be reflecting it below, we could right-click and choose Transform > Reflect*, or—because we also want to stretch the proportions of our reflection slightly, as it will appear longer due to the height of our view—we can simply drag downward from the top to create our reflection manually. I'll drag it so that it's just above the bottom, and I like the look of this.
In addition, we’ll want to add one more ellipse below and behind our skyline. Let's select one of our moons. Unlock the Moon layer, and from within the clip group, select the largest ellipse. We'll hit CTRL+C on the keyboard to copy it. Within our Reflection layer, let’s hit CTRL+Shift+V to paste it in place. Hold Shift as we drag it downward, and let’s move it behind by selecting the path and dragging it down until it's about lined up. Click outside, and now we have our buildings with a reflection and a light color behind them.
Let's now hit CTRL+S on the keyboard to save our work. In the next video, we'll begin working on our reflective water.
See you there!