Lessons

Lesson Info

Lines and Custom Strokes

withdrawal of containers. And those were all from our basic container tools. Right there. Next is gonna be our line tool. Online tools. Pretty simple. It's a line. If you want to draw a straight line, always hold down your shift key again. Let go of your mouse first before you let go of your shift key. When I hold down, my shift key shift will constrain vertical 45 degree angle or 90. So if you ever want to draw something at a 45 you can hold down your shift key and get a perfect when I'm dealing with my line tool right here. I've got a couple different attributes that I could do with a line as opposed to a border around a container. And so this is commonly known as a stroke so we can have a stroke around our container here, and we can also control the stroke on the line as well, to work with her options under the window menu, we can call up our stroke panel on our stroke panel, allows us to come in here and, of course, control the weight of our object. Our line that we have and we ca...

n do some other fun features with this as well by default. When I draw a line and I employ a weight to that, I can have end caps right here, right now by line is just simply blunt at the ends. I can round the corners here when around the corners and gives me a nice little rounded end. And, of course, those little rounded radius is will grow or reduce with the size of the line. What I have in existing container here. One of the things that I can do with a container here is I can also use my stroke panel to go in and put the weight around an object. And it's a little bit different because when I use a cap here, cap is on Lee for the open end of the line. But when I have a container like this, you'll notice that we may have some really sharp edges. When they come right to an absolute corner. I can use my joint feature, which is when I have an existing container where I can actually slightly round the edges right there to see how it just round the outside of the corner. It's different than putting a camp on it. You may not see that very well. I'll show you right there. So by default we just have normal square edges. But sometimes people just like to do a rounded join at the coroner's nice little way to do it. Or you do a flat joint of the corners right there different than an end cap and capture for open ended lines. The joint is for any type of closed container, just nice little subtle features that you have when we have a just a single line selected here. We can choose all the different types of line from our stroke panel, which, by the way, is also duplicated exactly up here in the control bar as well, right underneath the line. Wait, either one. They're identical, and I can control any type of line that I want. Dashed lines, Japanese dots, wavy, you name it, you've got those choices. I also have the ability to put start instead, start and end items on my line as well, and I can choose from my list of large and small, weird crazy. It's like that now I can't go in and I can't control the size of these ends here. The size of the ends are going to be controlled by the weight of my line, so I can have arrows. I can have ends. I can have tails. I can have square's bars, circles. You name it on my line. And that's all going to come right from my stroke panel right there. A couple interesting items, though, when we're dealing with the stroke around an object you'll notice when I put the stroke around my object here that when I actually do this, I've got this blue line in the middle, and when I click on that, or when they hover over that right there, that blue line is kind of the shape of my document. So watch what happens with this, You'll notice is a decrease or increase the line. Do you see how the line or the stroke with line actually builds around the shape of my container? This happened. This is something interesting that you have to be careful with, because when I go to snap something to a guide or line something up, it's going to line up to this little portion right here. So you could easily have a container with varying widths that all line up on the actual shape of the container. But the container can give the illusion that is not lined up simply because the width of the stroke goes over the entire box by default. When we put a stroke on an object, it always gives it equal weight on both sides of the object. But if I want to line this object up, I'm gonna have a problem with the alignment. So in the stroke panel, we have the ability to change the default. The default is aligned, the stroke to the center of our object. If I align the stroke to the inside of my object here, my object stays the same size. And when I reduce or enlarge the stroke here, you will see that it does not change the size of the object. It stays inside the object and therefore, when I line up the edge of the object here, that stroke will never go beyond the edge of the object, which is really quite nice. So I can control that that way and other instances, I may have a container where I have a very specific clear area inside the container that I do not want to stroke to infringe on. Then I can set the stroke to be on the outside of the container so that free area inside the container will never be infringed on. And when they increase or decrease the stroke, it will always put it on the outside of the container. So there's varying reasons on why I would use one of the other by default. It always puts it right down the middle. So just be careful. When you put a container with a large stroke at the edge of your page, it will seem to extend beyond the edge because it will snap right to your actual container portion of it. They're so different reasons why we would use the align stroke feature. We have very good reasons for all of them. So here's how the Miter Lim works, and here's what happens when I go in. I'm gonna draw a polygon here, and I'm going to use my, uh, sorry, folks do that, then hit the space bar. Now I'm going to go ahead, and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do a really spiky star and I have a very spiky star right here. And you'll notice when I do my spiky star I can have all these little angles come in. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna increase by, Phil right here, and you can see how these kind of flatten out at the ends even know I've got points. The miter limit is kind of interesting, because as I increase the miter limit, what's going to happen is when you increase the miter limit. I'm going, Teoh be able to go in here. There we go. You see that? See, it happened just like that. The miter limit is basically telling me when it gets to really sharp angles. At what point am I just gonna cut it off or what point am I gonna actually match that whole thing? So I'm gonna reduce the wait here and you can see as they reduce the miter limit CEO, It just gives me the flat blunt ends right there as I increased the miter limit. Basically, how this works is as the number goes up, the angles that I have on the star really sharp angle. Okay, so is increase the miter limit and that might a limit number goes up, it's going to then mimic the really tight angles. If I have looser angles, I can have a minor limit. That's a lower number. You know, it really doesn't matter the correlation between the numbers and the miter, but as you see that you can see what that does. So that's got a really spiky star, as opposed Teoh, the same one with a slightly tighter might limit its just has kind of a star that lost all its nubbins. So when you have objects that have really, really tight angles and it's kind of filling in and getting really chunky, that's what your miter limit is going to go ahead and adjust. Okay, and some damage may go to 10 to 30 toe whatever, but do it until you see something the tighter the angles, the higher the number for the minor limit to actually get this stroke toe match those tight areas and everything to use that until all of a sudden you do something. It's like, Why does everything have a point on it in this one end has a blunt end, and then you're like, Why does that happen, you go online, and you would never guess to search for minor limit. No, seriously, I mean, you might as well search for, like, cheesy poof doodles, you know, and come up with the exact same answer. But that's what the miter limit does when you have that. For years, I had no idea what it waas. Then years later, I found out, and I'm like, Oh, okay. And you, when I use it to show people how it works, that's about it. That's how it goes. So we can create strokes around any object. We can create any types of lines any of our objects. Strokes can also have multiple lines around the whole thing doesn't matter if it's an open line or a closed container. Aiken do from my list. And I can set these all, no matter what. Cheesy, fabulous, horrible, catastrophic. Interesting. Amazing. Yep. India. You can also go in and you can control by making your own strokes as well. Stroke styles. You can actually go in, and you can actually create new ones here, and you can just simply create new and you can create what it is that you want, right here with the dashes and the strokes right there. There is this really cool thing called an Easter egg. And inside here you can go in and they actually have. I want to see if this is it. It iss So check this out. They have heat their feet. They have lights, they have rasta. So what I did is I just created a new style here. And the name of it, I just simply typed in feet. And now when I have my object here, I actually have inside here. I've got feet. Look at that little feet. You can do Christmas lights, you can do Rasta and it's all in the name. So when you go into the stroke style here, basically all we have is the ability to create dashed and stroke lines. But if you create new and let me see if I do like lights L I g h t s see if that works. Did that do it? Nope. So media Rasta, Maybe it needs to be a striped one. Let me try this with lights, But you can go online and you can do this stroke. Siles already done. So I need to take those out. But this is always fun, and I can never. There's a certain combination right here. When you do this, it has to be like a dash or a stripe and let me lie now with a stripe. Rasta has to be a stripe, so I do that. I had that. No, I guess it doesn't, but we can check that out. But I know the feet one. When you put the feet one in their regular, create new and it's a dashed one. You type and feet and you will literally get feet. And they have the Ross that I think they have happy faces. They've got Christmas lights. I know. Yep. I wonder if it's the striped one that now that doesn't do it. We'll find out. But you go online. It's just called an Easter egg, and you just throw in a whole bunch of them because other than that, creating different strokes styles here. It's basically just dashes and filled lines right there. But, you know, you do the feet. Look at that. I mean, who doesn't love to have feet around their object right there? I know that's pretty great. I know people in the chat room. Or, like, I'm gonna go right on there, right now. Look for in design CC, Easter, egg strokes. And they're all going in there. Find out the Christmas lights are actually really cool. The things that you dio how soon we get off track, you know? But yeah. I mean, what better way? If you want to send something like that, then just go in and say, Okay, I want to have my feet there and your due to you Just trucking right along, you know? Awesome way that we had a general question you might want to address. Sure. Know a lot of people out there, you know, when they subscribe to the creative cloud, get access if they do the whole thing to so many different pieces of software, including in design, including Illustrator What's the What's the difference between illustrator and and in design? Why would you drive somebody to that one particular? Absolutely. It's a great question. And basically in design is a page layout application. So if we're gonna lay out a multi page book, magazine, newspaper, business card, any type of printed material weaken do right in in design, we basically build everything in pages we floor copy in or we put type the copy in. But in general, we don't really create anything really graphic based in and design. We're going to take anything that's already been created. Any images are always gonna be done in Photoshopped color corrected fixed and we bring them in and we simply place them, scale them, crop them in there and they become a placeholder with illustrator Illustrator is literally for going in and creating logos, creating graphics, infographics specialized work with type. Being able to create patterns fills strokes and being able to literally create a graphic so that we can then bring that in and in design really isn't a graphic production kind of thing. It's going to take existing content. So basically text that we either put in or read from somebody else images graphics that we do from some other file illustrator can do. A lot of the things in design can do. However, Illustrator does not have pages, it just has art boards. So it's not really something that has Page 12345 Doing automatic page numbering doing facing pages, doing book features, things like that it's much more difficult to do an illustrator. On the other hand, it's much easier to draw. Illustrate, Create icons objects in illustrator than it is an in design. So there is that trade off. So illustration is illustrators for illustrations, logos, type icons, package design as well and in design is going to be for printed books, manuals, newspapers, postcards, things like that basically printed pieces. For now, we can also dio interactive stuff, but we'll just leave it printed pieces for right now and here. Thanks to David Blattner, who is also a big in design guy, he has on his website right here how you actually create your little happy feet, your rasta. And here's your lights right here. And so just like we did. You go under the stroke styles and you choose new. Make sure it's is stripe, and then you type in either rainbow wolf, happy feet or lights, and it's going to give you that. So I had done that under that. So now we choose new and we choose stripe. And then if we do happy, I think it has to be capitalized. We can add that and no, okay, did I read that incorrectly. Come on. So you choose straight from the menu. Choose Rainbow. I'll see that one then. So stroke styles, new stripe taping a rainbow. Add that to it. There we go. Now, if we do Rasta, You know, some of these require a different type. There's roster right there on lights. Oh, no, that didn't do it. So I don't need to take that out. But I think lights need to be a dash. We'll try dotted now. I don't think it started. Let's do a dashing streetlights. There it is. Lights, You have to have the dash. There's your styles right there. No more feet. We got the lights. Told you that. My gosh, No. A radio crossed a man. Yep. Here it is. Horrible, but fantastic one in the same. So those were your custom ones there. And every application has Easter eggs in it. Easter eggs. Just little hidden things that people park in there. For years, illustrator used to have a little eyeballs the number of days toe Christmas number of shopping days to Christmas, more these phone number, random number, and then eyeballs. Own moon phase illustrator used to have moon phase in there. To say the best was Court Express with the alien? Yeah, the alien. The leader. He had the alien deal. Yes, I know. People are wondering What are you talking about? And it's like because we're old. Been there, done that numerous times.