How-To’s Day: Illustrator: Apply Multiple Strokes To One Path In Illustrator CS (Part 1)

Illustrator was born in the mid-Eighties, as were pals PageMaker, QuarkXPress, and Freehand. Unlike its contemporaries, however, Illustrator isn’t showing its age.

Packed with tons of new and powerful tools and abilities, it’s just as spry as ever. Often the best ones, the little or shy ones that can pare down a two hour illustration task into one, go unnoticed in favor of the larger, flashier additions like Scribble and the new 3D filters lifted from Adobe Dimensions.

One such oft overlooked, but incrediblly powerful feature, perhaps as vital as the venerable Pen tool itself, is the Appearance palette.

Of the many, many functions of the Appearance palette is the ability to apply multiple strokes to a single path. In the years before the Appearance palette achieving multiple strokes was a complicated process of layering duplicate objects with different stroke widths and/or colors. Naturally, if one needed to be changed, so did they all. Now one object, one path, can have all the strokes one could want; when the object changes, so does the stroke.

In part one of this two-part tutorial we’ll create the seal shown here.

1. Start with the Star tool—in the Toolbox click and hold on the Rectangle tool. From the flyout, choose the Star tool.

2. Don’t draw with the Star tool. Inside, click once in your new blank document. Up will pop the Star tools option box.

Radius 1 is the radius of the area inside the points, while radius 2 is the outter most radius, where the star points will terminate. To create a seal similar to mine, set a shallow difference between the two and increase the points to a large number like 50. You may have to experiment with a few stars before achieving the desired result.

3. Once your seal is created, set its fill and stroke. For mine, I created a tri-tone, radial gradient fill (Magenta, center, then Va Va Va Voom Red, and Moroccan Rust on the outside perimeter). For what will become the center stroke, I chose 0.5 pt Crimson.

4. If the Appearance palette isn’t already showing, turn it on by going to Window > Appearance. Your Appearance palette should look similar to mine above.

5. This is where it gets interesting. On the Appearance palette click once on the Stroke. Then, on the bottom of the palette second from the right, click the Duplicate Selected Item button. Your Path should now list two Strokes, the Fill, and “Default Transparency,” though you will see no perceivable difference in the seal drawing.

6. Click on the Stroke second down in the list—be careful not to select the first one—then use the Stroke palette to increase its width to 3 pt. Change the color—I used Va Va Va Voom Red for contrast.

Now you should see a second border behind your 0.5 pt stroke. Because Illustrator’s strokes always straddle the path—that is, half the stroke falls inside the path, overlapping the fill, and half falls outside, pushing out the object edges—it will look as if you actually have three strokes.

7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 once more until you have three strokes in the Appearance’s palette just like mine. Incidentally, the third stroke color I chose was Moroccan Rust. You should now have a seal that appears to have five borders. If you only see one, but your Appearance palette shows three, make sure the smallest stroke is on the top and that the others grow larger below it. You can simply drag and drop them in the list to change their order. The top listed stroke is always the one in front, followed by the one directly below it, which is in front of the one listed below it, and so on. If you only see a single stroke, you probably have too large a stroke at the top.

You should now have a seal that looks like mine (I added a drop shadow to get a jump on the rest of the tutorial).

In the second part of this tutorial, on the next How-To’s Day, we’ll create the checkmark in the center. As you may have guessed by now, the checkmark also has multiple strokes assigned to one path, but it has other things going on as well. It’s got—Well, we’ll talk about that in two weeks.

• Part 1:  Multiple Strokes
• Part 2:  Multiple Strokes Bring More Control Than Just Multiple Strokes
• Part 3:  Multiple Fills and Special Effects (aka The Cast Shadow Tutorial)

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TAGS:  design howto quark indesign adobe graphics  

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