Layer "Interlacing" - Weaving Layer
Content
By Pete Bauer
Sometimes you need to make it appear that the content of one
layer appears both in front of and behind
another layer. One example is the Olympic rings. The rings
appear to be linked, with each ring "passing through" another.
Here's an easy way to handle that problem.
CREATING THE OLYMPIC RINGS:
We'll start with a new blank image. I'm working with a 400
pixel by 200 pixel RGB original. Add a new layer (don't work
on the "Background" layer). In the Toolbox, select the
Elliptical Marquee tool. Hold down the Shift key (to ensure
that the selection is perfectly round) and drag a circle from
the upper-left corner of your image. The circular selection
should be about 30% the width of your canvas.
TIP: Press Command-R (Mac) or Control-R
(Windows) to show the Rulers. Control-click (one-button mouse)
or right-click (multi-button mouse) on one of the Rulers and
select Percent.
[OPTIONAL: You can name each of the
layers in your artwork according to the content, in this case
we can use the color of each ring. Double-click the name in
the Layers palette and type the new name, then press Enter or
Return on the keyboard.]
Select the color for the first of your
rings. Use the menu command Edit> Stroke. Select an
appropriate width (I'll use 6 pixels) and select Inside. Leave
the blending mode set to Normal and the opacity at 100%
(unless, of course, you're creating a special effect for a
more elaborate piece of artwork). Click OK.
Click the New Layer button at the bottom
of the Layers palette to add a new layer. With the selection
tool still active, Shift-drag the active selection to the
right, into the upper-center of the image. (When dragging, the
Shift key constrains the drag to 45-degree angles. In this
case, it makes sure that the next Olympic ring is perfectly
aligned with the first.) Make the foreground color black (the
color of the upper-center ring) and again use the Edit> Stroke
command.
Add a new layer, Shift-drag the
selection, and stroke with the appropriate color until you've
created all five of the Olympic rings.
INTERLEAVING THE LAYERS:
Now that the rings are created, each on a separate layer, it's
time to link them.
In the Olympic rings, the yellow ring
appears to be in front of the bottom of the blue ring, but
behind the blue ring to the right, linking the two rings. In
this example, the yellow ring is on a layer above the blue
ring, so it appears in front of the blue ring. To make the
yellow ring appear to be going through the blue ring, we'll
simply erase a small part of the yellow ring.
To ensure that we make a very precise
erasure, we'll start with a selection. In the layers palette
the yellow ring's layer is the active layer (because that's
where we want to erase), but we can Command-click (Mac) or
Control-click (Windows) on the thumbnail of the blue layer to
select that layer's content.
Now, using the Eraser tool and just
about any size brush or the Eraser's Block option, we can
quickly --and, thanks to the selection, very precisely-- erase
only that part of the yellow ring that falls directly over the
blue ring.
With the yellow layer still active in
the Layers palette, Command-clicking or Control-clicking on
the black ring's layer makes another selection, enabling us to
precisely erase the area where the yellow ring should appear
to be passing behind the black ring.
Leaving the selection active, we can
click on the green layer in the Layers palette (to make that
layer active) and quickly erase the area where the green ring
should appear to pass behind the black ring. Leaving the green
layer active and Command-clicking or Control-clicking on the
red ring's layer enables us to create the final "link" with
one more click of the Eraser tool.
THE IMPORTANT LESSON:
When elements of your artwork are on separate layers, you can
make one layer active, make a selection of another layer's
content, then erase the active layer to make it appear to be
"behind" the selected layer.