Here's my problem: I have a myriad of little expanded brush shapes on the canvas bordering to the bottom. The remains of these shapes poke out of the canvas, so I added a simple rectangular clipping path to delimit the actual "visible" artwork. Now: usually I use the ctrl+7 shortcut to clip the shapes "inside" the rectangle and then use the merge command to cut them off (or use the crop command with a rectangler over all the shapes - same thing, but I like to work the first way so I clean them only at the final export stages). But this time each one of those little shapes has an individual gradient applied to it and they are grouped together all one on top of the other (very various, chaotic). If I use the crop or merge command what happens is that each one of those shapes sliced every single individual shape and what I get is a million, literally million of little shapes all sliced where they shouldn't be.
How am I supposed to tell illustrator to use the crop command ONLY using the rectangular and NOT minding about all the shapes inside? I don't want every one to slice the neighbours, but only the rectangle to isolate and crop the shapes as a group.
Grouping them doesn't work. I always get multisliced shapes all over the place. If I change the colors of the shapes (example applying a white fill to all of them) and use the crop command, I usually get one compound path (and that's not what I want).
Any suggestions? Or will I have to crop them one by one individually?
