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ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR FOR BEGINNERS COURSE 1

LESSON 8 Fill & Stroke

In this unit we'll learn to adjust the fill and the stroke of our shapes.

There are multiple ways and techniques in Adobe illustrator

that you can use to change the colours of your shapes.

So, follow me.

Let's start with the most common one,

which is just click on the object that you want to recolour

and then you see here on the left-hand side

that you have some icon showing you the current fill and the stroke.

If I double click on the Fill Color, it pops me up the Color Picker.

I can change this yellow

by moving the Color Picker around the graph.

And you can see here the preview of my previous colour

and the new one that I selected.

I can also switch to a totally different colour

and not just a shade of yellow just by moving this handles here around

and select different colours from the shades.

You can also adjust them manually by using the RGB,

or the HSB colours, or CMYK.

What they usually use is RGB or CMYK colours,

or the hex code, which refers to web design

and web applications.

You can adjust the percentages of the colours.

So, if you're working on a CMYK file,

I would suggest to work also with CMYK values in your colours.

If your file is RGB, then it's perhaps more useful

to use the full range of RGB colours, so work with these percentages here.

In order to check on what colour mode your working,

you can look at the top of your document here,

where it says RGB or CMYK corresponding.

Once you select the colour that you want to apply,

you just press OK and the colour will be applied to your shape.

There are a few more things going on here.

First of all, there is the Stroke option.

Currently, you see that this cross with this red line,

which means that we don't have any stroke colour at all.

In order to add some, I just click on that.

So, I bring it in front of my fill,

which means that I'm currently working on the stroke,

and I can double click to get the Color Picker

and select the stroke colour.

You see that I have now a stroke on my shape.

I can quickly, with this arrow here, switch the order of them.

So, swaps the Fill with the Stroke colour.

I can also make my colours just black and white

by clicking on this icon here, so the Default Fill and Stroke.

And I can swap them again around if I want to,

or I can also remove again the stroke just by pressing None.

Or if I click firstly in the Fill, it brings it up front,

that is now the colour that I'm editing, I can click again None and remove it.

And even swap the none with a stroke colour.

This is how this little panel here allows you to do

quite a lot of the stuff that you want to achieve.

Another panel that you can use is the colour panel.

Now, if you don't see it here on the side,

feel free to navigate through Window and then select Color.

As you can see here, you have the main colours,

transparent, none, black, and white,

so if I just click on that, you see that it applies it to my shape.

Or I can also select from the spectrum just by clicking anywhere

it applies the colour to my composition.

What happens if I wanna be more precise on the colour that I'm picking.

What you can do is scale a bit up this panel

and be able to select the colour

that you want to apply to your composition.

If you want to see the values of your colours

and further information, you can go on the three lines at the top

and select Show Options.

And now you see that I have still my bar with a spectrum

and my main colours, but I do have also this part here,

which allows me to see the fill and the stroke

and adjust the CMYK colours with the handles.

I can swap again fill and stroke.

I can go back to just black and white.

Since I'm working on RGB colour mode on this file,

why should I use CNYK colours and narrow down my options?

In order to switch, you click on these three little lines,

you can select the corresponding one, so Grayscale, RGB, HSB, or Web Safe.

And now I have the new handles that represent the colours

of red, green, and blue, corresponding to RGB colours,

as well as the hex number, which is right here.

If you go on these three lines again, you have some options.

So, if you want to invert your colour, you just click Invert.

So, instead of yellow, it's going to create this time blue,

but let's go to the basic colours

Instead of white, if you invert it, you will get black colour.

You also have what we call Complement colours.

The complement colour for green is the magenta.

You can quickly switch to this panel

and invert either your colour

or find the complement colour.

Once you're happy with this combination,

you can go ahead and select any other kind of shade

and carry on editing it.

You can amend the colour on multiple objects at the same time.

This is grouped, so I'm going to firstly ungroup it.

Select these two black shapes.

I can go ahead and switch their colour at the same time

Or even shapes that have different colours,

even if it looks like a question mark,

I can select and it's going to swap them at the same time, both of them.

Another feature that I want to talk to you about are the strokes.

We already talked about strokes from this little panel here,

so stroke and fill,

but there are more things that you can do with a stroke.

Firstly, you can adjust the thickness of it.

From the properties panel here at the top,

you can either make it thinner or thicker, however you like.

And you can define also the variable width of your line.

By clicking here you can define if you want, for example,

to be on the one side, nice and thick, and then on the other like thin,

or if it's going to be thick just in the middle.

So, you can select how you want your line to be in terms of style.

Also you can define the different brushes

by clicking on the arrow next to the initial brush,

which is the Basic.

You can select from the existing ones here

or you can access more by using this icon of the three little books,

which allows you to access the brush library.

So, I'll go ahead, for example, and select Arrows.

And I'm going to have a pop-up panel, which has different kinds of arrows.

If I wanted to quickly access more brushes,

I click on these three books

and it allows me to quickly access the rest of the brushes.

There are a few more options that you can do with your stroke,

that you can either access by clicking on the stroke here

and define your weight as we already talked about

or some different kind of assets.

What I personally prefer

is to use the corresponding panel here on the right side,

which, again, if you cannot locate it, click the Window,

and select Stroke from the dropdown menu.

As you can see, you only initially see the weight.

To access the rest of the options,

click on the three little lines and you select Show Options.

The first option defines

how the edges of your path are going to look like.

So, you can currently see that the last anchor point

is aligned with the edge of the path.

If I'm going to click on that last icon here,

you will see that it works

like a little square around that point instead.

Or the middle one makes the edges nice and round.

On the second line, we have options about the corners.

We have the option of having nice and miter corners

or round ones,

or the other is the bevel corners.

On the next line here,

you have some options of how to align your stroke,

which applies to paths that are closed, not open paths.

So, I'm going to go select the shape.

You will notice that the line of the selection,

so where our points are, is in the middle of the stroke,

but I can also push it on the outside,

so the stroke goes all within our points,

within our selection or correspondingly on the outside,

so it aligns either the stroke inside your shape or outside.

One more thing is about having some dashed lines.

So, in order to do that, you have to enable the Dashed Line option.

You can define the length of the dash itself,

as well as the gap between the dashes.

And if you don't want them to be equal,

you can change them and say the next dash will be five,

and then the next will have 10 points gap and so on

to make an unequal dashed line.

What do you can also do is to add some Arrowheads.

Have some arrows for the edges of your line.

And you can also have an arrow or image

to close your shape in the end.

From the Scale underneath,

I can define how big or how small is this arrowhead going to be.

You can link and unlink the proportions of the two arrowheads,

so the shape in the beginning and in the end of the path,

by clicking on that icon here

and you can swap the start and the end arrowheads

with this icon next to the arrowheads.

The Profile refers back to the profile that we talked about,

so the type of our line.

The dashed line and the arrowheads can also be applied to the other shapes,

so it's not just a straight line,

it can be to a bubbly line, for example, this one here.

So, you can already see how from a simple line, a simple stroke,

you can actually create so many different kinds of styles,

such as this dash line here with the arrows

or this nice and wobbly arrow and so on.

It's worth having a look and exploring all these options,

so you can find the most convenient one for your workflow.

Let's move on to the next unit,

where I will show you how to cut and merge objects.