From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Advanced

Assigning multiple fills and strokes - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Advanced

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Assigning multiple fills and strokes

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- [Instructor] So the primary purpose of the appearance panel is to allow you to assign multiple fills and strokes to a single pass outline. So while this may look like multiple albeit random ellipses, it's actually just one, as I can confirm by going up to the view menu and choosing the outline command, or of course we have that keyboard shortcut of control Y or command Y on the Mac. So whenever you're looking at a document in the outline mode, you're seeing the core paths outlines and nothing more, but if I press control Y or command Y on the Mac, then I see the fills strokes and other dynamic attributes. And so let's see how that works. I'm going to go up to the file menu and choose new from template. And for those of you who went ahead and created a template, along with me back in the fundamentals course, then you can go ahead and select that RGB with center guides .AIT document, or the like, and then click on a new button in order to open up that new center guidance document. All right, now I'll go in and switch from the rectangle tool to the ellipse tool. And then I'll just go ahead and alt click or option click at the intersection of those two guidelines. And I'm going to enter a width value of 800 points, and I had value of 300 points and click okay. All right, now I'll just go ahead and switch back to the black arrow tool by pressing the V key in order to get rid of all those live shape widgets. And I'm going to take the line weight up to 12 points, let's say, and I'll change the color of that stroke to this darkest blue. And then I'll go ahead and change the fill color by clicking on this first swatch up here in a control panel and I'll change it to this lightish blue like so. All right, so from that control panel, that's all we can do. We can apply one fill and one stroke and nothing more, but from the appearance panel, we can heap on more fills and strokes. And so just to clean things up on screen, I'm going to turn off the guides layer and then I'll go up to the window menu and choose appearance in order to switch over to the appearance panel, which for me is located right next door to layers. All right, so let's say I wanted to add another fill to this path. Then I would drop down to the second icon down here in the bottom left corner of the appearance panel, and I would click on it and just like that I have a new fill and then I can change that fill to any color I like. And in my case, I'm going to go ahead and change it to this light orange, right there. The one that begins with R251 for what that's worth, and then I can press the enter key or the return key on the Mac, to hide that swatches panel. Now for those of you who are interested in keyboard shortcuts, you can also add a new field by pressing control/ that's a forward slash by the way. And of course, as command slash on the Mac, at which point I get a new fill up here at the top of the stack. And I'll go ahead and set that fill to let's say this medium shade of green. All right, now let's say I want to add another stroke. Then I can just click on this very first icon in the bottom left corner of the appearance panel. And it's going to come up with the same line weight I applied before. As a matter of fact, I'm going to get the same stroke color as before, but I'm going to go ahead and change that stroke to the orange. The one that begins R=241. Now, of course you have a keyboard shortcut for creating new strokes as well. And that's control alt forward slash that would be command option forward slash on the Mac. After which point I'll go ahead and change the color of this stroke to this dark shade of green. And of course I have the option of moving these strokes and fills up and down the stack as much as I like, in which case I'm going to see new combinations of fills and strokes appear here inside the document window. Now, one of the more useful applications of multiple strokes, is to create multi stroke effects. So for example, if I was to select this bottom stroke, the blue one and changes line weight to 36 points then we'd end up sticking out further than the other ones. And if I were to then select that green stroke right there, the one in the middle and change it to 24 points, it would stick out as well. And so now we have, as you can see here, this orange, green, blue stroke effect, the question then becomes what in the world is the point of multiple fills? Well, for one thing, you can turn the fills on and off by clicking on their eyes and this is a saved setting incidentally, along with the illustrator file, but we can accomplish much more than that by integrating what are known as dynamic effects, as I will demonstrate in the very next movie.

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