Adobe Illustrator Tutorials - Clipping Masks and More!

First, I wanted to share with you all a website with some good illustrator tutorials:

http://www.yvelledesigneye.com/2012/06/15/cs6-illustrator-tutorials-tips-tricks/

This site consists of all CS6 tutorials so I figured it'd be a good place for people to look at. They've shown off some of the cool effects you can make and create, and best of all, they're all pretty straight forward, easy to follow, and don't take very long to do!

I also wanted to provide the class with another extremely useful tool:

http://www.lynda.com/Illustrator-tutorials/Illustrator-CS6-Essential-Training/97951-2.html

Lnyda.com is a great place to learn new software. When I attended TC3, I used this site as a way to learn Adobe Flash CS5 and it helped...a lot. The only draw back to lynda is that it costs money to stay subscribed. If you're new to Illustrator though, and you need some more assistance learning the program beyond what the book is teaching us, I would highly, highly recommend at least giving it a try.

Finally, here is a tutorial for clipping masks in Illustrator CS6:

http://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/clipping-masks.html

I know this is the same page some of us looked at last week in class, but after doing Chapter 8 in the book, it seems to be much simpler than we originally thought. I figured I'd just hit some of the highlights that are explained in that tutorial.

First, you're going to want to make sure the mask and the content you want masked is all on the same layer. Once you have a mask created (it shouldn't matter the shape, size, if it's grouped or not, etc), you bring it to the top of the layer in your Layers panel. All of the content you want masked should be below it. Select the layer, and then select Make/Release Clipping Masks in the Layers panel. That should make the mask. From what I can tell, and what I've read, the sandwiching technique is no longer necessary. Hope this helps for people!