- Show the Elaborate Balloon folder and its caption. Click in front
the Elaborate Balloon folder to turn on the , and then click the
� to reveal the layer group contents. The Elaborate Balloon group
contains the talk balloon as well as several layers of patriotic fol-
derol required to frame the commanding urgency of the caption.
Turn on the Caption layer to display more of my hand-drawn
text (which appeals to the dinosaur I’m riding to get a move on).
Everything we’re about to do works just as well with the sort of
live typeset text that we discuss in Lesson 7; the hand-drawn
text just happens to better suit my graphic novel composition.
As shown in Figure 5-59, the text is currently green. But that’s
just a placeholder color. I ultimately want the letters to cut holes
through all the layers in the Elaborate Balloon group and reveal
the dark shadows of the Badlands background. I can approach
this vexing conundrum in two ways:- Layer masks can be applied to individual layers or entire
groups of layers. So I could create a mask for the Elaborate
Balloon group in which the text was black (invisible) and the
area around the text white (visible). But it would take extra
work and it might limit my options in the future. - I could establish the Caption layer as a knockout, thereby
cutting holes in the layers behind it. Not much work + very
flexible = preferred solution.
- Layer masks can be applied to individual layers or entire
Figure 5-59.166 Lesson 5: Working with Layers