In this lesson you'll learn about the importance of the Appearance panel and
how to use it.
In Illustrator, you can adjust the Fill, the Stroke, add a lot of effects and styles
and they're actually live affects. What I mean by that is, it's similar to, if you think
about the Adjustment layers or Layer Styles in Illustrator, how you can turn
those effects on and off. In Illustrator if you go to Window and then Appearance
to pull up the Appearance panel, you'll see, at least the Fill and the Stroke and what
you've applied there. So make sure this is selected and just click on it with one of
the selection tools and from here we can change the Fill, for example.
And again we can hold SHIFT if you want to bring up the different menu or just
click there to pull something from the swatches. You can adjust the Stroke and
you can also see the Opacity as well.
But I've made a round corner effect on this and also a Scribble effect so I can click
this and it brings up the Scribble options. So you could affect it like that
and then hit OK or Cancel. Either way. So it's a live effect and I can also press
the eye icon to toggle the visibility of that effect. So if I click this top one,
it takes off the rounded corners effect. I click this one it takes off the
Scribble effect. Take off the Fill as well and Stroke.
I can just do rounded corners and then scribble and so on. So all the effects that we add to
something in Illustrator are going to be here. Now if I resize it or something
like that, let's say I resize it here, it's not adding anything over here, right.
This is only the Fill, the Stroke and the many different effects, some of which I'll
show you in this section.
You can also add new effects down here and that's just like as if we went up
here and went to Effect and then applied some of the effects which I'll show you in the
next lesson. And another quick tip. If you press this right here, that's going to
actually clear the Appearance. It'll get rid of all of the effects that we've added.
So I'm going to Undo. You can also click in the upper right-hand corner and there's a
couple of short cuts that are also down here. So Add New Fill, Add New Stroke,
Clear Appearance, Reduce to Basic Appearance. So why would you want to do two strokes?
Well, I'll get rid of some of these effects. I'll show you why we would want to do that.
So I'm going to Add New Stroke and I'm going to make this one, let's make it
one specific color, and I'll make it 12 point. And then the other Stroke here,
let's make this a different color and let's make it 16 point.
So see how 18 point is on the edge there and then the 12 point is in the middle.
If I move this above it, so if I just click and drag that above, now it's on top.
It's actually covering up, kind of like a Layers Panel but not quite the same thing.
But it does cover it up. So we have the Stroke here. The Red Stroke is covering up the
one below. So I'm going to click and drag it below the blue one, and
make sure it's selected there. See how I didn't have it selected, so, and there we go.
Add back the Scribble, Rounded Corners if I click it first. There we go.
That's how we would add multiple strokes to a shape in Illustrator is to use the
Appearance Panel. It's a quick way to add more color to a design.
Thanks and I'll see you in the next lesson.