 Hello everyone, welcome back to another Adobe Illustrator tutorial. We're in Illustrator 2021 and I want to show you how to work with template files or for those of you that do sketches and you want to bring them in and you want to reduce the opacity, lock the layer and all that stuff. It can be done with pretty much one click. So let's get right into this. For those of you that are following along, the first step is of course you open Illustrator then you go to File New and for this demonstration I'm going to use Art in the illustration as one of the template sizes but you can really select whatever works for you. We're going to go ahead and left click on Create. The next step is you want to head up to File and you want to click on Place. We are now going to place an image and I'm going to use a PNG of my dog. This is a picture but in a lot of cases people will want to use their own hand drawn artwork. So again, whatever picture or whatever artwork you have hit Place. The next step is you're going to see here that I've got his handsome face here and he's a handsome dog. I'm going to left click on the document and it's just going to place him in this size. Now when I hover over it and again this will be depending on how big the file is that you selected, you'll notice here however when I hover over it that I can increase the size so if I just start pulling it like this I can increase the size and increase the height and the width. However, if I hold down the Shift key it constrains the proportions. So I'm going to go with a size of about this let's say for this demonstration. Great! I'm going to maybe grab the Selection tool here. This is the Selection tool. I'm going to drag it down and I'm going to, I don't know, I'm going to like eyeball it but I'm going to like put it right about there. Okay, we are on our way. The next step is you want to double click outside of layer one. So right about here you'll see where my mouse is. Double click that and you're going to see here that there is an option called Template. When I left click and fill that box it gives you some options and in particular it says Template. It selects the lock and it's going to dim the image to 50%. Now this can be adjusted down or up so if this is a very dark picture so I'm going to dim it to 30% in this case but again you can season this to your taste and then I'm going to left click on okay. Now you're going to see here I've got the layer and it is now dimmed out and it is locked. This lock button indicates well I can't move it so if I grab the Direct Selection tool it's not going anywhere. So it's locked in, it's done. The next step for those of you that want to work a little further on this is you want to go down to the bottom here and click Create New Layer. This is the layer now above it so we've got this layer locked underneath and it's the template layer and this is the new layer and then you can go and do whatever it is you want to do. So if you want to maybe brush it in like this or whatever I'm just doing it you know free hand here guys that's what you do if you turn off the eyeball here the layer the template layer is still there and now you're working non-destructively on top of your image or drawing guys that's how you work with template layers onion skinning call it what you will. That's all there is to it guys thanks for watching this tutorial I got a ton more stuff coming up stay tuned