Hi Everyone!
Was looking for some help solving an issue i’m running into. What I have is a pencil that is made up of a clipping mask. When I expand the shape and merge it, it looks all messed up. I’m trying to merge it so I can divide it.
The top pencil is before expand and merge. The bottom pencil is after.
You have several clipping masks there; the lead tip, the tapered naked wood, and the eraser.
Go back to the original state and Ungroup if necessary, then select just one masked object at a time and use the Pathfinder > Crop function to apply and eliminate each respective clipping mask. (You won’t see a visible change on the artboard, but Layers panel shows the difference.)
For instance:
Click on the eraser shape to select the masked object.
Click the Crop button in the Pathfinder panel.
This will “crop” the underlying object to the confines of the mask and leave just the new, mask-shaped object.
Repeat individually for the other masked objects.
After that, you’ll get a more viable result from your Expand operations.
I’m a little confused. To me this can easily be done without clipping mask.
Oh, since you’re already using gradients, you might want to apply another one to the metal band for the eraser.
Of course I thought the same thing, but it occurred to me that maybe the pencil graphic wasn’t originally built by the OP. A lot of clipart-type items come with odd constructs like this.
There are infinite ways to do things in AI, LOL. I was experimenting with the gradient mesh inside of a clipping mask.
How would you do it?
This doesn’t seem to work for me. To make sure we are on the same page, I have multiple shapes inside ONE clipping mask:
When I try your method of cropping an individual element, it does not work as it turns the shapes another color or crops it away entirely 
Mind you, we’re not looking at anything complex.
It looks to me like you have multiple clipping masks, perhaps nested in an outer one.
Right, the end product required no use of clipping masks whatsoever. In fact the clipping masks themselves constitute the composition, and could each have just contained its respective fill, as opposed to masking another object containing that fill.
Yeah, maybe we’re saying the same thing in different ways?
I’ve taken one shape (the main pencil) and created one clipping mask. From there, I’ve pasted all the other elements into the main clipping mask.
Either way, cropping any of the shapes inside the mask makes them disappear.
I just went ahead an rebuilt since it doesn’t appear to be possible to expand objects in a clipping mask. Especially if you are using a gradient mesh.
I think here need to do clipping path to remove edges to fix this problem.
I think here we need to do a clipping path in photoshop to remove edges to fix this problem
Not if you want a vector pencil.
It’s very simple, you can select all layers of clip making & from the transform option (Ctrl+T) can expand it.
Seeing as this thread is 2 years old, I’m betting the OP either has this under control by now, or gave up long ago.
