The overall impact of your image should reflect a visual statement or quality known as “gestalt”. When you see an image as a “unified whole”, you are seeing the gestalt in the image. Briefly, gestalt refers to the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The following art work called “desert & dream” is composed of a number of elements, and is an example of gestalt. Each element is created within one layer in Illustrator. The layers are demonstrated hereby.

Desert & Dream, Illustrator Image (10 Layers):

1.    sky and moon: Sky was created with the RECTANGLE SHAPE and filled with a GRADIENT dark blue to light blue.  Moon was created with two ELLIPSE SHAPE and PATHFINDER TECHNIQUE: SUBTRACT FROM AREA was applied.
2.    dimmed star: Draw a star with STAR SHAPE.  Use the star to CREATE A SCATTER BRUSH, name it star.  Use the pencil tool to randomly draw some circle. Apply the star scatter brush to the circles.  There will be stars in the sky now.  Select the stars, apply EFFECT GAUSSION BLUR to them.  Then set the TRANSPARENCY mode to screen, opacity to 60%.
3.    bright star: The same as dimmed star, except no transparency.
4.    meteor: Draw a STAR SHAPE filled with white, and then a small ELLIPSE SHAPE filled with blue. Select both objects, and apply BLEND to them. Use the blend options: specified steps 12.  Use the PEN tool to edit the path on the blend shape to make it bend a little bit.  Use the SCALE and ROTATION transformation tool to adjust its length and width as well as the direction the meteor goes to.
5.     bg and river: There are three main objects here. Two red grounds, created by the PEN tool. And a river in between. River is filled with GRADIENT (dark blue to light blue). To make it look more water-like, I used the BRUSH tool to draw some lines and used GAUSSION blur.
6.    reflect: These are the objects in the river: the Moon, Stars and the Meteor.  The REFLECT TRANSFORMATION is used.  For the reflected moon, the SCRIBBLE effect was applied.  And the reflected meteor and stars, the TWEAK effect was applied.
7.    desert: the red ground is supposed to be the desert, but it may not look so. Basically, I just draw several columns using the PEN tool, apply effect of DROP SHADOW, and connected them with BLEND (specific steps) to make the ground.  Since the blended ground shape is a little bit different from the shape I want the desert to be, I used the two bg shapes to create MASK on them, which is shown in the layer panel.
8.    my girl: Use the PEN tool to sketch the face and hair of girl. Some hair is in front of the face, and some are behind it.  So the hairon and hair down layers were created above and underneath the face.  The art brush: Fude was used for the stroke of the hair and face.  Create a drop of tear and use it to CREATE a SCATTER BRUSH, name “tear”.   Apply the brush on the girl’s face and hair.
9.    type: copy the outmost hair path of the girl, and apply the TYPE ON A PATH tool. Use the character of “Bernhard Modern Std, Bold Italic” and 23pt. Fill color set to pink.
10.    light:  the last layer is added to make a light spot in the river on top of the reflected meteor. Two 4points stars were created on top of each other, one big and one small, filled with white and no stroke. GAUSSION BLUR applied to them.