Quickly shadow Illustrator CS2 with paths.

[Dal123]

I'm trying to copy and paste layer ontop of each other then to just moving the back image seperately a little with a different colour to merge two and have that as a shadow but don't want the remaining image inside (Only want the shadow to remain).Paths are important as it's vector and sending to vinyl cutter, too tedious/ impossible to do by hand.
Surely there must be a quick way of doing this with the pathfinder (trim gets close but only does the outside, I need it where all the layer meets the other).
Sorry about ambiguous description.
Any help appreciated.

 

[covisio]

Are you saying you don't want the shadow to be inside the skull? If so you will have to delete that manually but this is easy enough.
Actually I've re-read your post. If you just want the shadow to remain, what you need to do is use pathfinder to do a 'subtract from shape area' (second button along, top row) whilst holding down the alt key.

 

[Dal123]

Thanks for your input buddy; but there's a bit more to it than that. I think what I wanted was too much for pathfinder. I had to redraw the graphic as all paths were important as the information was being sent to plotter and shadow was being cut out of different layers etc, bit hard to try to explain in writing, but thanks for trying appreciated .