- [Voiceover] In this movie, I'll show you how to target
and format an entire layer inside Illustrator.
And just so I'm not coming at you too hot and heavy here,
we're going to do something pretty similar
to what we did in the previous movie,
but this time we're gonna take
this bird and it's tail, notice that?
The bird already has a stroke around it,
but we're gonna stroke 'em both together
with a big, thick stroke, like so.
But the big difference is we're not using a group.
We're using a layer to pull off this effect.
So, the first thing we need to do
is switch back over to the layers panel here,
and the layer in question is this guy right there, Bacon.
So I'm gonna turn off the lock icon
for that layer so I can select it.
And as opposed to selecting all the objects
on that layer by clicking in the upper-right corner,
that selects all the objects independently, by the way,
and so if we were to assign a stroke now,
we would stroke each one of these objects on its own.
That's not what we want.
We wanna stroke the entire layer,
and so you wanna target the layer by clicking
on that circle, in the right hand column.
And now, we have our double outline meatball,
which indicates that the target
of whatever we do will be the layer itself.
Now to give the layer a stroke,
you need to switch back to the appearance panel,
which for me is located right next door here.
If you can't find it, then go up
to the window menu and choose the appearance command.
And then, we will once again drop down
to the add new stroke icon, in the bottom-left corner
of the appearance panel, and click on it too add a stroke.
Now, in my case, I'm getting a kind of weak black.
I don't want that, so I'll go ahead
and change the color to the strong black, right there.
And then increase the line weight value
to six points in order to produce this effect.
But the big problem is that we're not only
stroking this big, fat stroke around the bird,
but it's going through the edge, between the bird
and the tail, and it's going around
every single color of the tail.
That's not what we want, so make sure the stroke
is active, and what we need to do
is fuse the stroke together using a pathfinder operation.
And to make that happen, you don't want
to go to the pathfinder panel.
That's not gonna do you any good.
Instead, you go to the effect menu,
and you drop down to the pathfinder sub-menu,
and you can experiment with these guys if you like.
It's mostly an exercise in frustration, I have to tell you.
The one we want is add, which is gonna unite
the entire stroke, and that will produce this effect here.
Assuming, that you assigned add to
the stroke itself and not to the entire layer.
So if you missed the stroke and you're seeing the word add
either up here at the top or the bottom of the list,
then you're gonna end up getting this effect here,
where you don't even see the tail any more.
In which case what you need to do
is go ahead and drag that add option
and drop it onto the stroke, like so.
And that will produce this effect here,
after which point we'll press Control+Shift+A,
or Command+Shift+A on the Mac,
in order to deselect my artwork.
Alright folks, that's all there is to it.
That's how you target and format
an entire layer, here inside Illustrator.
And if you like that, you're gonna love the next chapter,
which is entirely devoted to the appearance panel.