Everyone. Uh, it's time to learn the appearance panel. Hey, we'll do a basic introduction. Here it is the big unlock for Adobe Illustrator. We're gonna use the appearance panel a lot through this course. It allows us to add multiple fills and strokes to objects.
Okay, so this one here I can easily grab, okay, steal the appearance. We can do some cool things where we drag the appearance onto different objects, style things really quickly and consistently without having to do the like add stroke, outline, stroke and stroke outline stroke. You've done it. You can just actually add multiple strokes all at once. Go the appearance panel, right? Let's jump in.
First up, open up the file cord appearance panel from your exercise files. Okay? And this is the push pull sign that I made earlier. Uh, let's start with something simple. Let's grab the star tool. So hold down the rectangle tool, grab the star tool, uh, draw a star, pick a feel color and a stroke.
And I want you to make the stroke nice and thick for me. Okay? I am bumping mine up to 10. You can hold shift and click it, okay? To get a nice thick stroke. Now let's look in the properties panel.
Let's go to stroke. Click on the word stroke and we can set this to the outside, right? So we can, or the inside the center line. So it crosses over the middle or the outside here. Okay, all great. But let's say I need a second stroke.
I could outline it. Outline the path. You might've done that, right? Like outline stroke or expand appearance and then add another stroke to that. And that kind of works if you've done it that way. Get ready for awesomeness.
Okay? Let's open up the window and go down to appearance. Okay? This is like, I dunno if you know how to use the appearance panel half good. You are in top 10% of illustrator users. So much of illustrator and the advanced things rely on this.
So get ready for goodness. So with it selected with my black arrow, I've got it says, look, I've got a path inside of it. I've got a stroke and a fill down the bottom here. Look, I can add a second stroke or a second fill. Let's go to add new stroke. You're like I didn't do anything.
Ooh, it's the same as the um, one we've already got. It's just duplicated. So I've got 20 pixels and it's the same color. Let's pick a different color. Uh, and let's pick a different size. So I'm gonna make mine even bigger.
Okay? And now this appearance panel actually works like layers in Photoshop. So this stroke is on top of this stroke covering it. So what we can do is we can click any of this blue area here. Okay? You can grab lots of different parts.
Okay? You get the hang of it. I just grabbed the like no man's land of uh, this layer here. Can you see the line that appears? Little blue line? Okay, you can say I want it below this stroke and ready.
We've got two strokes. Cool, huh? It's gotta make sure one is bigger than the other, then not the same size and make sure the different colors. Otherwise you won't be able to see them. It's go crazy's. Add a third stroke again, needs to be bigger than the last one.
I'm holding shift. Make it a little bit bigger. Gonna pick another color. I'm gonna make sure it goes down, down, down. Okay. You can see I've got inside and outside here.
What I can do is I can select on this. There's not too many options in here. You can do basic stuff, but you can click on the word stroke or click on it over here to go. Actually I want this one to be, I don't know. I want this one to have like a rounded joint so it goes around the corners. Get what I mean.
It's not um, I dunno, it's Not really what I want. But know that you can do stuff to it by clicking on the word stroke. Okay? You can open it out, you can see the opacity for it and you can get into the weeds with it by clicking on the word stroke and get all of those goodness in there. Look at us multiple strokes. I'm gonna turn that thing off.
Another cool thing about the appearance panel is if I grab the ellipse tool and I've drawn something that has nothing on it, okay? So no, it's just a plain one. How do I get that to that? I can use the eyedropper tool kind of. I can say I've got that selected. Grab the eyedropper tool and I can say grab that and grab bit of it.
You're like, I don't just grab it all. You can force it to watch this. If you double click the eyedropper tool. Remember lots of tools can be double clicked. I can say grab the whole appearance. It was only grabbing part of it on the whole thing.
So it all ticked. And I want to apply everything. So grab everything from the appearance and dump everything from the appearance. Let's click okay. Now when we do it, look, it grabs it all. There's another trick.
I don't know why I'm giving you more than one. This is the advanced course. I'm trying to impress you. I'm gonna turn that one off. So normal old circle. How do we get it over here?
Watch this. If I grab my black arrow, grab this one. This little thing here, this little swatch is actually everything that's in the appearance panel. Watch if I grab it and just drag it onto it. Kabam go on two ways of doing the exact same thing, Dan. Excellent.
Next up, if we can have more than one stroke on an object, we can have more than one fill. Remember earlier on we made this kind of push pull thing and I showed you a little hack to kind of just have two shapes, okay? One at the bottom that had our patent fill that we made and one on the top that had a fill of black and the opacity turned down on it. Okay? So what we're gonna do now is get rid of you. Okay?
It's fine having two separate shapes, okay? But you are gonna bump into projects where somebody else has made it and it's more advanced to do it all in one go. Tidies everything up. Plus we can turn it into a style later on. So with the selected, I've already got a fill in it. Okay?
So it's got the fill of my patent fill. What I'm gonna do is say I want another fill. See this one here? Add you fill, okay, it's duplicated. I've got two patent fills, which is not fun. Hey, I'm gonna say I want the top one to be black and not completely black.
If you can't see it, click this little chevron and then you should be able to click on the word opacity and lower it down. I think it was 42%. Okay? Now why is this different? This thing is one unit now, okay, I can copy and paste the appearance onto other things. I can set it as a style and share it with my team and it's just all together.
So the appearance panel is handy. Multiple strokes, multiple fills. You just gotta remember the layer. Order is important. Survive this, fill underneath everything, okay? It is down the back also, if I undo that, if I have the stroke, okay, depends on where the stroke is.
So if I add a nice big, bright stroke so you can see it, I'm gonna hold shift and click the up arrow a few times. Okay? You go to decide do you want the stroke to be affected by the fill or do you want the stroke above it? Okay, not affected by this fill. It's top down like Photoshop. I'm looking at the top, see the stroke first, then the fill, which covers a bit of the background.
So layer order is important. Um, one of the weird things about the appearance panel, everything I showed you is the, for some reason type doesn't work the same way. Um, I've got this other document here. I'm gonna copy this out. So you can type any old text. I found a cool font.
Um, what is it called? That flickery. Okay? One thing with fonts is, I don't know, it's a weird thing. Okay? But watch this.
If I go stroke and I want to increase it, can you see it just kind of creeps into it and you're like, I know how to fix that. Click on stroke and instead of going align stroke to the center line, I'm gonna say align it to the outside. Outside, outside or the inside. I think I got those backwards, but neither of them work with fonts. I dunno why. You can outline the text and that will work.
Okay? And we can start messing around with it. But I want the text to stay editable. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get rid of this stroke and I say you have no stroke, okay? And what I can do is I can kind of make the thing that I want, okay? And use our trick before and say I want you text, okay?
To steal the appearance of this, I'm gonna use the eyedropper tool, okay? And just double click the eyedropper tool and make sure that all of it on the ticks up here are all on. So I'm gonna grab everything from this and apply it to this. Cool. It kind of works. So you can see the strokes applied to the outside.
It's doing some weird stuff where you're like, why can I see the inside overlapping bits? Remember it's layer order. So at the moment the stroke's on top, I can see it's black and everything else gets a bit muddled. If you want the center of it, which was orange. Phil? Phil.
Phil. Phil, okay. I want it to be above the stroke, below the stroke, okay? It depends on what you're looking for. Your parents panel can be really handy. Anybody done the outline text and you're like, um, add stroke, expand appearance, add another stroke, expand appearance.
Some of you will be shaking your heads knowing that you've done that before. I've done it before. Welcome to the world of the appearance panel, advanced stuff. It's kind of simple once you understand it, but it really does unlock a lot for Illustrator and a lot for this course. So that is the kind of like quick version of the appearance panel. We'll dive into it as we get through this course.
Alright, that is it. That is the appearance panel and illustrator, I will see you in the next video.