Illustrator appearance panel
fidel (332 pencils) | Tue, 2009-10-27 14:29I read about people having problems with Illustrator.
There was a forum item about filling live text with a gradient and not being able to do so. Changing an effect on an object, putting a stroke at the outside of a character, and so on
Often all those problems can be solved with the "Appearance panel". This little devil is one of the most powerful panel tools that you have in Illustrator.
It is like looking through a magnifying glass.
When you select an object you get information about the status of the selected object, and also how it has been constructed.
It is similar to layers but completely different.
See it as a stacking mode looking from the top to the bottom. What's on top hides what's under it. So by moving elements in the stacking order you can achieve nice things. Or from the panel itself you can apply an effect to a stroke or a fill, change the stacking mode and so on.
A few examples:
Adding a gradient to live text
Select your text with the black arrow, go to the appearance panel and o the three little lines at the top right of the panel. Choose "add new fill" and then go to the gradient panel and create a gradient fill. Simple as that...
Multiple strokes around an object or text.
Select the object with the black arrow, go ot the appearance panel and on the three little lines at the top right of the panel. Choose "add new stroke", select the thickness and color, now drag the stroke under the characters, Apply several times with different weights of the stroke and you create easily a college t-shirt effect on your object.
Change an effect appearance.
Apply an effect to an object, if you want to change it's behavior, go to the appearance panel, double click on the applied effect and change it.
Make the appearance panel one of your basic panels in Illustrator and it will help you find solutions.
Good luck
Commenting on this Forum topic is closed.
what confuses me a lot is the scissor, eraser tool. it's way up there. i get confused. but the good thing with the eraser tool is that you can erase it but not use the scissor.
The difference between the scissors and the erase tool.
Let's say you want to divide an ellips in different segments, than you use the scissor tool because it keeps the lign segments as seperate vectors.
The erase tool gets rid of segments and you are left only with what you didn't erase.
You people should just stick with MS Paint!
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