- In this movie I'll show you how to combine
multiple stokes on a single path outline,
in order to achieve increasingly interesting effects.
So for example, let's say we want to take
our dotted border that we created
a couple of movies ago,
and we want to turn it into this pattern here.
Where we have dots in the center
that appear to be braided together.
Well that's a function of three strokes
assigned to a single path outline.
And here's how it works,
I'll go ahead and click on the rectangle
in order to select it,
and then I'll go up to the window menu
and choose the appearance command
in order to bring up the Appearance Panel
which I positioned in the lower right corner of my screen.
Now notice that we're seeing our stroke and fill attributes
listed inside this panel.
And we see their stacking order as well,
so in other words the stroke is stacked
on top of the fill.
Not that it currently matters
because the fill is set to none.
Now to add another stroke,
go ahead and drop down
to the lower left corner of the panel
and click on the Add New Stroke icon like so.
And that's going to result in a little bit of a mess here.
And that's because for whatever reason,
Illustrator has decided to select
a preserve option right there.
What we want of course is to align those dots
to the corners.
So I'll go ahead and click on the second icon,
and that solves that problem.
And now I'm going to change the color
of this stroke to white.
By clicking on this little color swatch here
inside the Appearance Panel,
which once again brings up my swatches.
And I'll select white instead.
Alright now what we have is a 20 point stroke
directly on top of a 20 point stroke.
So the white one is covering the orange one.
To make the orange one visible,
go ahead and click on it.
So click on that second stroke there
inside the Appearance Panel.
And change it's line weight right there
form 20 to 40 points,
in order to produce this effect here.
Now because the rear stroke is 20 points thicker
than the forward stroke,
we're seeing what appears to be 10 points of stroke
drawn around each white circle.
And that's because the 20 extra points are
evenly distributed on either side of those white dots.
Alright now with this bottom stroke selected,
I'm going to make a duplicate of it
by clicking on this little page icon
at the bottom of the Appearance Panel.
And that'll create an exact duplicate of that stroke
and that way the aligns icon stays on.
And now I'm going to drag it and drop it
on top of the white stroke like so.
Now because it's so darn thick it's covering everything up
which is why I'm going to take it down to 10 points
in order to produce this effect right here.
And then I'll click off the rectangle to deselect it.
Now there's nothing that says that all of your strokes
have you match each other.
For example, you can mix plain strokes with dash ones.
And so I'm going to go ahead and switch to the last
document I was working on with the custom letters.
And I'll go ahead and press control 0 or command 0
on the Mac to center my view.
And this time I'm just going to go up to the view menu
choose Guides, and choose Clear Guides to get rid of them.
And now I'll go up to the select menu and choose Letters
in order to select all of those letters like so.
Alright now here inside the Appearance Panel,
I'll once again click on the add new stroke icon
in the bottom right corner of the panel.
And this time I'm going to click on a stroke color
right there and I'm going to change it
to this kind of lilac color inside this folder.
Which for some reason is designated as a CMYK color.
But it's C26 M41 Y0 K0,
and we end up with this very muted color here.
And now I'll take it's line weight down to 10 points
let's say in order to produce this stroke
inside of a stroke.
Now to turn this stroke into a dashed outline
I could either click on the word Stroke
in order to bring up the Stroke Panel like so,
or I could just work inside the dedicated stroke panel.
And so I'll go ahead and turn on
the dashed line check box.
And I'll make sure the dash value is 0,
which is giving us circular dots because after all,
we selected round cap.
And then I'm going to take this gap value down to 10 points
so that it exactly matches the line weight
and every single one of these dots touches.
After which point, I'll just go ahead and click off the text
in order to deselect it.
And so that's how you combine multiple strokes
on a single path outline,
really as many strokes as you like.
In the next movie we'll bump things up a notch
and I'll show you how to offset the strokes
in order to produce the effect of depth.