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About this lesson
Show how to change the weight of a stroke or make the caps rounded or flush.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s related exercise files.
Adjusting Strokes - Instructions.docx58.9 KB Adjusting Strokes - Exercise.ai
6.6 MB Adjusting Strokes - Exercise Solution.ai
6.6 MB
Quick reference
Adjusting Strokes
Show how to change the weight of a stroke or make the caps rounded or flush.
When to use
You can adjust the weight of a stroke any time that you want to make an outline heavier or more bold. You can also change a stroke from a hard edge to a rounded cap for a softer look.
Instructions
- Open the Adjusting Strokes - Exercise.ai file and select the 'Contours' layer in the Layer Panel.
- Select one of the outlines that we created for one of the three peppers.
- Click on the Stroke Panel to the right side of the interface to open the dialog box.
- With one of your contours selected, change the weight of the stroke to see the lines getting more or less bold.
- Toggle the roundness of the corners as well as the caps on and off to see how it affects the appearance of your shapes.
- You can also choose a dashed line that will alter the appearance of a shape.
- Try out some of the different Profile settings found at the bottom of the Stroke Panel to see the different types of lines that you can select and how it changes the look of the peppers.
- Select the Width Tool from the toolbar and experiment with changing the width of some of the lines to broaden or tighten the lines to create more contrast between the lines.
Hints
- If you ever used a dashed line you have the ability to input values for the length of the gap as well as the length of the dash in a line.
- The Width Tool is a very handy tool for changing the thickness of any line in Adobe Illustrator.
- The shortcut for the Width Tool is Shift+W on the keyboard.
- 00:04 So back here in our illustration or our tracing of these peppers,
- 00:08 now that we have our contour lines, there's a few things that we can do.
- 00:12 So the first thing I'm gonna do is just use my regular selection tool
- 00:15 to select one of these peppers.
- 00:18 And now I'm gonna come over here all the way to the right side over to my
- 00:21 stroke panel and you'll see that I have the ability to change the weight, the cap,
- 00:26 the corner and so forth.
- 00:29 So the first thing I'm gonna do is click on the weight and
- 00:31 maybe make it somewhere around eight and
- 00:33 you'll see right away that that just makes my lines nice and bold.
- 00:37 If I select my second pepper, I can change it to four and my third one,
- 00:42 maybe let's make it two, so you can kinda see the range and what that looks like.
- 00:47 Now of course, you can go really heavy, you know,
- 00:49 until the point where you can't even really tell what it is anymore.
- 00:53 But this is just to demonstrate for
- 00:54 you guys kind of how to control these lines a little bit more.
- 00:59 Now in addition to that, there's some other cool things that I can do here.
- 01:02 I could make this a dash line if I wanted to and
- 01:06 you have control over things like the dash and then the gap in between.
- 01:10 So the dash is going to determine more how long that line is, whereas,
- 01:14 the gap is how much space is in between each of these lines as I work.
- 01:19 So by changing that up a little bit, you guys will see that there's a little bit
- 01:23 more of a variety now in that line, okay?
- 01:27 And there's some other things that I can do here.
- 01:29 We can change the profile or the type of line.
- 01:33 And these are a bunch of the preset lines that are available in Illustrator.
- 01:38 So, you can kinda see how they taper off a little bit and
- 01:41 some of the lines become a little bit thinner towards the edges.
- 01:47 Now I wanted to also show you guys what the CAPS do but
- 01:51 it's a little bit hard to tell because we're working with a closed shape.
- 01:54 But, if I were to just draw a regular line above these shapes and
- 02:00 I zoom in, you can see that the edges of them are flat, right.
- 02:05 So, if I change the cap to a rounded cap instead, you can now tell
- 02:10 that it comes to more of a rounded kinda smooth cap at the end, there we go,
- 02:15 you can see it it a little bit better when I increase the weight.
- 02:18 Okay and if I were to now add a corner to this,
- 02:22 click on my last point and do something like that,
- 02:26 you can see that although I have a rounded cap this corner is now pretty sharp.
- 02:30 So if I select that and choose the corner to be rounded,
- 02:33 a round joint, you'll see that it kinda rounds that off.
- 02:38 So I also have the option to do that here and
- 02:40 to kinda see how it changes our shape a little bit.
- 02:42 All right and just experimenting with some of these options.
- 02:47 All right, so right there you can tell that some of the points now are rounded
- 02:51 off as opposed to our second pepper here where it comes to more of a point.
- 02:55 So these are just some of the options that you have available to you
- 02:59 when in playing around with your lines and your paths, okay.
- 03:03 And if I wanted to I could select all three of these and
- 03:07 just make them all the same weight of two.
- 03:09 Now there's a very another useful tool that you can guys can use when you're
- 03:13 working with strokes, and that is the width tool.
- 03:16 Now if I select the width tool, it'll allow me to come in here and
- 03:19 I'm just gonna zoom in for a second to show you guys how this works.
- 03:22 It'll let me come in and actually modify the width of a path, all right?
- 03:27 So if I zoom out, you can kinda see now,
- 03:29 this side of the shape is much thicker than our other side.
- 03:35 All right, so if I, again, if I select my stroke or my path and
- 03:38 grab the width tool or press shift and W on the keyboard, that'll
- 03:42 allow me to select some of these points and change the width of them manually.
- 03:47 And this is a great way to add even more variety to your shapes because there's
- 03:51 a lot of times where you don't want everything to be equal line width.
- 03:55 For example, just by having a little bit of thickness here,
- 03:58 it almost looks like it could create a little bit of a shadow effect.
- 04:02 All right, so again, if I grab that, all I have to do is click on the anchor point
- 04:07 and I can drag this as far in or as far out as I want.
- 04:11 So using the width tool along with your paths,
- 04:13 it's a great way to add a lot more variety to your shapes.
- 04:16 In addition to just having things like control over the weight and
- 04:20 the roundness of the caps and the corners and the line profile.
- 04:24 All right, so I just wanted to demonstrate some of that for you guys so
- 04:27 you could check it out.
- 04:29 But continue to experiment with these things on your own.
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