Unit 7 | Layers & Appearance

Introduction

Unit 7 moves past building individual shapes and into controlling how a whole composition is organized and how each object looks, layers, appearance, effects, and blending, closing with a finished album cover or gig poster.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:

Organize artwork using the Layers panel
Apply fill and stroke through the Appearance panel
Add effects like shadows, glows, and 3D
Control opacity, blending modes, and masks

Calendar of Events for This Unit

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
2/1	2/2	2/3	2/4	2/5
F \| 7.1	F \| 7.1	F \| 7.2	F \| 7.2	F \| 7.3
2/1: Cambron Back; 2/4: Report Card grades due, close 4:00pm (MP2)
2/8	2/9	2/10	2/11	2/12
F \| 7.3	F \| 7.4	F \| 7.4	S \| 7	PD Day
2/8: Report Card grade verification window closes (MP2); 2/10: Report Cards delivered via Parent Portal, EOD (MP2)
2/15	2/16	2/17	2/18	2/19
Presi- dents' Day	S \| 7	S \| 7	S \| 7	S \| 7
2/22	2/23	2/24	2/25	2/26
S \| 7	S \| 7	F \| 8.1	F \| 8.1	F \| 8.2
2/24: Interim grades open in Infinite Campus (MP3); 2/24: Grade Correction Deadline (MP2)

Lessons

Unit Vocabulary

Sublayer: An item nested inside a layer in the Layers panel. Every path, group, or object Illustrator creates gets its own sublayer automatically. Expand a layer’s disclosure triangle to see and select individual sublayers.
Stacking Order: The front-to-back order objects are drawn in, both within a layer and between layers. Items higher in the Layers panel list draw in front of items below them. Dragging a layer or sublayer up or down in the panel changes what’s visually on top.
Merge Layers: Combining two or more selected layers into one, while keeping each object’s relative stacking order intact. Different from Flatten Artwork, which collapses every layer in the document into a single layer and can’t be limited to a selection.
Appearance Panel: A panel (Window > Appearance) that lists every fill, stroke, and effect applied to a selected object as a stack, in the order they’re applied. Click any listed attribute to edit it, or drag it to a new position in the stack to change the result.
Eyedropper Tool: Samples the complete appearance of one object. Fill color, stroke color and weight, and any effects. And applies that whole look to another object with a single click.
Recolor Artwork: A dialog (Edit > Recolor Artwork) that displays every color currently used in a selection as an editable color group, letting you remap colors, reduce a design to fewer colors, or apply a harmony rule to an entire illustration at once instead of editing each fill individually.
Drop Shadow: An Effect (Effect > Stylize > Drop Shadow) that renders a soft, offset duplicate of an object’s shape behind it to simulate a cast shadow. Adjustable for offset distance, blur, opacity, and color.
Feather: An Effect that fades an object’s edges into transparency over a set distance, softening a hard vector edge without changing the object’s actual path data.
Glow (Inner/Outer): An Effect that adds a soft halo of light either inside an object’s edge (Inner Glow) or radiating outward from it (Outer Glow). Commonly used for neon signage or light-source effects.
3D and Materials: A set of Effects (Extrude & Bevel, Revolve, Rotate) that build the illusion of a three-dimensional object from a flat 2D path, with adjustable lighting, surface shading, and material controls. Like every other Illustrator effect, it’s non-destructive and stays editable until the object is expanded.
Transparency Panel: The panel (Window > Transparency) that controls a selected object’s Opacity and Blending Mode, and is also where opacity masks are built by dragging a second object onto the mask thumbnail.
Opacity Mask: A mask built in the Transparency panel where the values of a masking object (how light or dark it is, not its color) control how transparent the artwork beneath it becomes. White areas of the mask stay fully visible, black areas disappear completely, and gray areas partially fade.
Blending Mode: A setting that changes how a selected object’s colors mix with whatever is stacked beneath it. For example, Multiply darkens by combining color values, while Screen lightens. The same concept as blending modes in Photoshop.
Clipping Mask: A mask made from a single vector shape (the topmost object in a selection) that crops everything beneath it to that shape’s outline. Unlike an opacity mask, a clipping mask only knows “inside the shape” or “outside”. No partial transparency.