Tips & Tricks To Amp Up Your Designs: Photos, Textures, & Clipping Masks - Oh My!

 

When working on any kind of design work, it's important to remember that your text, shapes, and other materials don't have to be flat, boring, single-color images on the page. A really easy way to make your text and shapes more interesting and exciting is to use them as a cut-out for photos and images of texture. Think of it like putting a cookie cutter into a piece of cookie dough - you're just cutting out a piece of the photo in a specific shape, size, and format.

Here's how to do it:

1a) Choose the shape, text, or other object you wish to edit in Illustrator. For this example, we'll be using the letter G.

1b) If you are using a letter like I am here, make sure to change convert it to a shape before making any more edits. You can do this by selecting the letter and then clicking the "create outlines" button on the Quick Actions tab in Illustrator.

1c) Once your letter is converted to an ordinary shape rather than a piece of text, it will appear selected the same way with the same bounding boxes as any other shape would, which is distinctly different from when it is a piece of text as the bounding box is much closer to the edges of the letter.

See here:

2a) Once you have your shape or letter selected and made to be the size that you want, it is time to select a photo or image of texture and place it behind the letter or shape you are using in the SAME LAYER. Do NOT create an additional layer for this!

For this example, I am using a picture of water as my texture imagery.

2b) If you are looking to have the texture or photo positioned or sized in a specific way within the letter or shape, you can preview how it will look once it is cut out by changing the letter or shape to have no fill color and just an outline. This way you can change the position of the photo easily and get it exactly the way you want it to look in its "cut out" form before moving on to the next step.

Here's an example of this preview method:

3) Once you have gotten the shape or letter to the size and format you desire along with the photo or texture imagery, select both the shape and the image beneath it in Illustrator and click "make clipping mask" in the Quick Actions tab.

This will make the shape or letter you have positioned on top of the photo or texture act like a cookie cutter as mentioned earlier. The resulting image will look something like this:

 

4) You're done! You can do this to multiple letters to make an entire piece of text such as a title more interesting, and you can do it to significantly larger and more complex shapes to make the entirety of your design more engaging.

For example, I outline the image of this bridge in Illustrator:

And created this black shape from the outline:

I then used it to make a cut out of this image:

Which resulted in this:

From there, I place the resulting cut out onto another photo of a city to create this:

As you can see, this can be an extremely fun and interesting way to edit your designs and photos to create something beautiful and rich with detail and color.

Notes/Reminders to keep in mind when trying this technique:

1) If you are working with letters, you will get the best results when working with thick letters that have wide strokes. If your letters have narrow strokes, the effect will be harder to see.

2) Plain strokes that are just lines and not complete shapes do not work this this technique more often than not. If you are looking to have a really thin, line-like cut out, you are best off using extremely thin rectangles for the cut-out shape.

3) You cannot use multiple letters or shapes at the same time to perform this technique. While I cannot explain why you can't use more than one shape or letter, I can only inform you that trying to do so simply will not achieve the desired effect. If you want to use multiple shapes or letters as cut outs, you must do them one by one. This takes a lot of patience but the outcome can be well worth the effort.

4) Make sure that any and all letters and shapes that are meant to be a single shape are made into compound shapes / are merged together into one before performing this technique.