My Artboard won’t export other Artboards on top of it

Sketch 49 changed the way Artboards export their content. This means that if you have a large Artboard with smaller Artboards placed on top of it, you can no longer export the background Artboard to save all your Artboards as a single image. To do this in Sketch 49, you must now create a slice layer to export all the content within.

Artboards in Sketch are a great way to contain multiple screens, or canvases in a single page. They behave like a special kind of group, and can contain other layers. However, while Artboards can appear on top of each other in the canvas, they can’t contain each other in the Layer List — this explains why they shouldn’t be able to be exported in this way.

Technically you should never have been able to do this so we fixed the behaviour in the latest update. However, we know that this was a common workflow for many users and that’s why we added the “convert to slice” button in Sketch 49.

To create a slice and export your Artboards as before, just select the larger Artboard underneath any smaller ones you want to export and simply click on the convert to slice button in the top right of the Export panel of the Inspector.