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Adobe Illustrator CC - Advanced Training

How to multiply strokes to a path in Adobe Illustrator CC

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, in this video we're going to look to add more than one Stroke to a path. What that means is that there's just one path and these extra Strokes applied to it. Makes it cool when we do lame old roads like this. You can see, it follows along, and it's just one path. You can turn it into a Style, so that you can apply it simply quickly. Cool, let's go learn how to build that now. 

First up, open strokes.ai from your Exercise Files. You don't obviously need that one, but if you want to follow along. I'm going to draw a shape, I'm going to draw a star. I'm going to give it 'no' Fill for the moment, just to give an effect. It's for awesomeness. I'm going to move down so you can see it. So first up I'm going to give it a Stroke Weight of something kind of heavy, maybe 10pt. I'm going to give it a Fill color of anything. I'm going to use the colors I've got here in my Swatches Panel. Adding more Strokes is easy, you need to use the Appearance Panel. Now in this version you can hit the dotted lines, and it opens up, or you can go to 'Window', 'Appearance'. And all you need to do is click kind of where your Stroke is, then click this new one. It duplicates selected item. And now I've got two lines. They're the same color and the same width, so it's not going to work. So all I need to do is pick a new color, and pick a new size. And I'm going to go up to '20'. Awesome, huh? That's how you can add more and more Strokes. 

You can add as many as you like. I'm going to add another one, and down here I'll show you a little trick. Say you want jump sizes, big, so instead of going up 1, 1, 1, 1, hold 'Shift' and click the 'up', it goes up to 10pts. You can go in really big chunks. Also you can play with Layer order, decide who's at the bottom, and who's on top. So if you get it around the wrong way, just click, hold, and drag them. Now let's apply it to a couple of things, so let's go to, I'm going to grab my 'Ellipse Tool', draw an Ellipse. I can use my Eye Dropper Tool to select the center of this, and it will apply. 

Now one thing to note as well is that if I grab my 'Black Arrow', and shrink this down, it depends on what your settings was last, but if I shrink this down, can you see, it's actually made the lines proportionately smaller. That's maybe what you want but know that, with it selected - actually click off in the background - nothing selected, there's this one here that says Scale Stroke & Effects. If I turn that 'off', you get a different effect. So hold 'Shift', scale it down, you see it retains the same matching size. Now it's kind of what I want to do. I want a couple of shapes that I could resize, that match this. Let's have nothing selected, turn that on and off. Now we've just done some, I guess, interesting Strokes. 

I teach lots of different people Illustrator. Sometimes it's Designers, Illustrators, Fashion Designers, Urban Planners, everyone has use for lllustrator. Now let's say that, the urban planners, right? They do lots of things, like roads, and detailed drawings on maps, and stuff. So let's grab our 'Pencil Tool', you might find yours underneath the Shaper Tool. Let's kind of draw out a shape. I'll show you kind of a cool thing, with it selected you can get quite complex, so I'm going to go-- I'm going to start with maybe dark gray, maybe light gray. Light gray. And size wise, I'm going to make it 40pts. 

Next thing I want to do is, I'm going to click the same thing again, I'm just going to show you how you can build some reasonably complex. 10pts? Maybe a little bit more. That's going to be the edge of my road. I'm actually going to have another one, it's going to be yellow and it's going to be 2pts. We'll drag it to the top here and click on 'Stroke', and get all the Stroke options here, and you can have a dashed. If it's dotted, weirdly, you need that 0. Dashed will leave that 0, and that gap, 2. You can get dotted and dashed. You also might need to switch to 'Cap' to round it. Then, actually the Cap probably needs to be bigger, 20. If you didn't know how to make dotted lines, you do now, weirdly it's really hard. Dashed is easy, but dotted, you got to put 0 and then the Gap spacing, and make sure you're not on Butt Cap, you're on Round Cap. But let's say you make it even more detailed, when you want to use it over and over again for other projects. I'm not sure why we got dotted lines, but anyway, with it selected, you can use your 'Graphic Styles' library. It's under 'Window', down here, 'Graphic Styles'. And with it selected, just drag it into there. 

The cool thing about that now is I can draw any lines instead of using my Eye Dropper Tool. 'Pencil', let's go. Selected. Cool, huh? Same with these guys, you can use that one, drag it in. Now the interesting thing that happens is, if I make a new document, those don't come along. You can see, it's kind of cleared off. So what you can do is, say you do spend some time, say you're a Fashion Designer, you make some cool kind of, like maybe some zipped patterns, or some sort of seams, you make some complex things, you want to save them out, share them with yourself, or other people in your team, what you can do is-- you can tidy this one up. I'm going to select all of these, and just bin them. Let's say I've made just this one here. I think you need to delete the default in there. So what we can do now is go to 'Option' here and say, I would like my friend to be saved. Give it a name. That's stored it somewhere, and might be cool, all your roads, and all your stitching. And if you want to load it, say you go to 'New Document' and say, you, 'Open'. And down the bottom here it says, 'Other Library', and go find that thing you just saved, and it will load in there. 

There are some interesting ones in here. Have a look, these are the defaults from Illustrator. I am not a fan of them all, Neon's kind of cool. Some kind of cool Neon one. It's my favorite of the bunch. Come on 80s, let's get all Neon. Let's zoom in. It's kind of Neon, right? So Graphic Style Library, also know that there are other people who have made Graphic Style Libraries. So I bet you, if you have a look, Google 'Graphic Styles for Stitching', you will find some sort of stuff out there. Let's download it, and go to that open library. I hope that was interesting, let's get on to the next video.