Lessons

Lesson Info

Manipulating Stroke and Fill

In this section, we have got some ground to cover but it's two majors features we're gonna hit. We're gonna hit color and type. And there's a lot to hit in there, there's a lot of things to look at as far as applying color, work on color. We're gonna do gradients as well so we're gonna kinda some of that because it's pretty essential to what a lot of us will do. And with type, we're gonna go in. And I don't know what I'm looking at right now, I'm looking at butterfly but with type, what we're gonna do is we're gonna explore because type in here can be a little interesting compared to other programs so we'll go through that. What I'd like to do right now is I'd like to actually clean up a little and kinda close some of the files we have open that we're not gonna use anymore, there's a lot. So what you could do if you want to, I'll tell you my QREL, I just quit Illustrator. And then it says would you like save? Would you like save and save and save? Yes but you can come up to each tab if...

you want and you can see there's an x there. We don't have to go to file close, you can just click on the x. So why don't you do that? Go ahead and starting clicking on this to kinda close 'em up. And it's gonna say go ahead and save them, if you wouldn't mind you can save 'em. And the pen practice, you don't have to save if you don't want to. You can always at home as well, you can always use that to practice your pen tool, you can save your robot, you can save everything we've got. Don't have to worry about layers, all of these close 'em up. (clears throat) Excuse me. Alright. And the last thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go in and we're gonna reset the workspace once we open up a new file. Once you have them all closed, you're gonna see we are back into that start screen. And the start screen it starts to get a little naughty. You can see all the files that we've had open here which is actually good, I like the recent list. You can if you want to up here where it says recent if you have that selected. You can actually go in and save, let me look at 'em. I actually prefer this cause the list, my naming convention styles sometimes is horrible, it's like version 1AF and all that so yeah so you could see. Anyway, what we are gonna do is we're gonna go in we're gonna open up a new file. So you can either click open here or go to file open up in the menus. And what I'd like you to do is come to the day one folder and come to that segment three folder and you'll see that we have robots-start. Now I have the final version of this. That was just kinda inspiration playing around with at home later on, you guys can look at that. But let's just open robots-start for right now. I'm going to click open. And it's gonna show us a lot of different art boards that I've got here, what I'd like to do first is show all the art boards. So does any remember after our long lunch where that was? Under view, fit all in window. By the way, if you use Illustrator enough, you're gonna use these commands, you're gonna learn 'em. Command zero and then command whatever that one is. I just do it on my keyboard I'm like, "Eh command option zero." Okay the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go in and we're gonna reset the panels. I've got a lot of panels hanging out here I don't need right now so I wanna get 'em out of my face. Come up here to the workspace switcher it's called, which should have essentials. The one thing I didn't mention before was that Illustrator actually has a lot of panel sets or ways of setting the workspace for you if you're gonna do a particular thing. If you're gonna work a lot with well actually tracing which is kinda cool. They pull out all the panels for you if you picked that workspace. So these are really good to explore if you're doing something particular. The other thing that we are gonna do, hopefully as we go through this day. I wanna create a workspace and show you guys how to do that. You can actually go in when do the panels where you want them set out here, you can save it and always go back to it. You can have a panel workspace called like my awesome space. Why don't you go ahead and reset essentials for right now? (clears throat) And go ahead and click on the libraries panel should be open go ahead and click on the tab to collapse that one. The libraries panel CC libraries are phenomenal, we're gonna get to those tomorrow, I hate closing that thing but we will take a look at that. The first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna start to look at color and before we jump into making color, we gotta explore how Illustrator does it. There are six million ways to make coloring here. And you gotta pick your poison, you gotta pick what you're gonna do, how you're gonna do it depending on your project so we're gonna through a few methods here. Click on the art board up here or easy way, just come down to the art board navigation menu down here and just pick one. I wanna fit the first art board, the top one there in the window. And you know what, look what I did wrong there. This is a do as I say not as I do moment. This is not first art board is it? Yes. Okay it is. Go to the art boards panel on the right over here. This is actually why I did this so you guys can understand. Actually I didn't I screwed up. (students laugh) I'll admit it. But this is why you name your art boards and you wanna put them in the right order because if it says one out there if you go to one, this is technically this third, fourth art board down. So this is where you're gonna be like, "I'm gonna guess which art board I'm going to." So go to three, art board three. That was an epic fail by Bryan, it's fine. So go ahead and collapse the panels by clicking on tab or the icon over there. Now, when you work in Illustrator, color is gonna be one of the big things to do 'cause you're not gonna just do black and white artworks. So we're gonna be colorizing a lot of different types of things. In a past years ago, we used to call it painting and that was kinda wacky 'cause it's like you think of painting, right? Well we're gonna go in and we're gonna apply color to a lot of different shapes and objects. And to do that, we need to understand stroke and fill and kinda how they work and what they do. I've got a shape right here, I know this is pretty simple but with the selection tool selected right there, go ahead and click on the shape. Now, this is something to pay attention to. I didn't mention this earlier but look at your cursor, look at the pointer at all times. You're gonna get used to this. If I look at that thing right now before I click, I'm gonna see a little black box next to it. That means that I have something clickable underneath the cursor. So if I click I'll select it. If this box was filled with nothing, it's right now filled with like a white color. If it was filled with nothing, we wouldn't see anything next to the point arrow. So it's those little subtle things that can help. Click on that to select it. And you'll see we've got all our stuff out there we can add it. Now, I wanna go in and change things. The first thing to understand is stroke and fill. If you look at the box, you're gonna see in a couple areas in the application here. Look up here first of all, up in the control panel. You'll see we have two options, we have fill right here and we have stroke right here. It's kinda easy to figure out once you get to know it. But the fill is the inside of the shape, and the stroke is the border of the shape, let's just say that. If you want to, we've kind of done this a couple times, you can come right up here and depending on what you wanna select your change, you just pick it. So I wanna change the fill so the inside of the shape. You click on the arrow on the right there and you're gonna see the swatches panel. Let's go ahead and do that, just click on that. Now what's crazy about the control panel up here, this whole bar running along the top right up here, anytime you open something up here whether one of these orange words or a menu, you're most likely gonna open up a panel that's actually out in the interface. This is called the swatches panel and this is just another way to find it. Like I said you're gonna do this however you wanna do it. Now the swatches panel is a place where we can save our colors and reuse them. And it's something that you will get used to using eventually. It contains all these little color swatches, these little chips. In the swatches panel, you can actually have solid colors in different form, shape, whatever. You can have gradients which you're gonna see some right down here. You could also have patterns. So patterns we can create ourselves and the pattern maker in here's is actually pretty awesome. We can also, just like in design for instance, we can go in and we could organize our colors by folder. Now that's pretty cool because if you're creating logos and different things, you might want different versioning, that type of thing. These little folders also allow you later on to apply these color sets, color in the folder as a group. You could say, "Give me a logo." I'm gonna take that whole folder and just apply it to the logo. It's some pretty magic stuff, we'll see it. Alright so why don't you pick another color? Pick like a whatever, I don't care. The thing about the colors right here is that these are kinda set in stone. Every document you create from scratch is gonna have a set number of colors. If you wanna make your own, you can easily. And I'll show you how to do that in just a little bit. Why don't you come over here to the stroke and you're gonna click twice on the arrow here because once closes the previous panel and another time opens this one so they wouldn't do that. And you're gonna see the same thing. I mean it's the same swatches panel but you're telling it to apply it to the border for the stroke. So you can pick a color, whatever I don't care. Pick a gradient, pick at this, pick on that, I don't really care. It's just you are going in, you're applying it to the stroke of the object. Now the stroke itself like I said is the border, we can change the stroke way it's called 'cause by default, every object you create has a stroke of one point so pretty small. If you come to the right over here, why don't you do this for me? Press the escape key, I just got used to doing that. I don't know, you might not like it, don't do it if you don't want. And that's gonna hide the panel. And you're gonna see over here that we have the stroke just to the right of that. So why don't you come into the one point, you can change it 15 ways, you can type in the number if you want, you can choose from the menu over here or you can use little arrows to increase or decrease the stroke rate. Let's change it to like a ten, I'm gonna change it to ten. Ten point, there we go. I should be able to see it happen out there. Now a stroke, this is the fine tuning, this is the stuff you're gonna notice over time but look at the box, where is the stroke in relation to the edge of the box? Hopefully I'm saying that right. Middle. Yeah, it's kinda like straddling the edge of the box, right? By default, that's what happens to every shape. If you want to you can change that. And I'm gonna show you a couple little options here that we'll look at. We're gonna use this quite a bit as we go 'cause you'll see. Click on the word stroke up here which is gonna open up the stroke panel which is a pretty big one. And you'll see, I know there's a lot going on in here but everybody asked me they're like, "Where do I do like an arrow like an arrow head? Or where do I make a dash line?" It's all in here, this is where you go. So you'll see in here that we have dash lines, we have arrowheads and there's two of 'em here 'cause it's either end of every line or object. Up here, you're gonna see we have a couple options. Cap and corner you're probably I don't know, you're probably not gonna use it too much in the beginning, I wouldn't worry about it. This is the big one, align stroke. You're gonna see we have align stroke to the center, align stroke to the inside and align stroke to the outside. Go ahead and choose align stroke to the outside. And take a look the shape. Then try align stroke to the inside. Does that make sense? When I first started doing that I was like, "Okay it looks different that's great but why would I actually use that?" There's a lot of reasons. A lot of times when you're trying to take two shapes and align 'em together and they have an overlap of some kind or maybe they're but ride against each other, if you put the stroke on the outside, one's gonna be wider than the other one. You can't really fix it, it's really hard to do that. So if you put the stroke on the inside, you can align them and they're perfectly aligned. There's just little things you can do so. The align stroke options in the stroke panel are important and something we will look at more. Now here's something else we can do as far as color is concerned. Look down here in the tools panel at the very bottom or at least close to the bottom. And you're gonna see the same two color boxes, you're gonna see a fill and a stroke. Now this down here are if you guys have used Photoshop, you probably have used something like this right this down here. In here, these are the fill in stroke. If you want to, you can actually change the color here by double clicking. Why don't you come to the brown or the color you chose for the fill, can you guys figure out which ones fill and stroke? It's yeah, the border around. So double click on the fill. And you're gonna see our friend, the color picker. This is something that I actually tend to use a lot. I flip a lot between Photoshop and Illustrator and Union Design for that matter. And this is found in all three programs. So if you're used doing in one, you'll be relatively comfortable with it than the others. It's a little different between the programs at times but it's a place you can go to pick colors. We'll look at this in just a little while. But I wanted to show you that that is there. Go ahead and click cancel. Now, if you want to apply color, there are other methods here. And I'm kinda tryna take it through a quick tour of some of this stuff because it's important. A lot of times I will use the options up here the stroke and the fill just 'cause it's there. But sometimes you'll come over here and you're gonna use other panels to apply color. We have five different other panels or so. Come to the swatches on the right, and you're gonna see the little color icons there. This is the exact same thing you're gonna see for the most part as what you see up there. The humongous difference though, look at this little boxes right here. So what are these boxes telling you? These two right here. Those are stroke and fill right? This is kind of interesting but this actually just came in the Illustrator a few versions ago. They have been in InDesign and Photoshop forever that type of thing. But when you're working with objects with this panel, you have to pick what you want to apply. And everybody's gonna run in this problem, everybody messes this up. I wanna change the stroke of the box. Select it right now. So the first thing I have to do always remembering is I have to choose the stroke or select the stroke. It's a big deal otherwise you're gonna affect the fill. Now if you use this panel, the swatches panel by itself like that, you've got to choose stroke or fill. If we come up here just by clicking stroke, I'm telling it. We're just doing the stroke, right? So kind of a difference there, something to think about. I use the swatches panel all the time, this is something that I'm doing probably every job I work with but. So the swatches panel are where we can save color where we can access them. Every document has it's own set of swatches. So if we make a color in here and we save it, and this is where we're gonna save it as a little color swatch, you're not gonna find it another document.