- [Narrator] In this movie, I'm gonna show you
how to take your tinted arrowhead designs
and save them out to symbols
so that you can apply them from the stroke panel
as we're seeing here.
All right, so here I am,
working inside my own Arrowheads.ai file
that's found on my hard drive.
You should be working on the one that's found on yours.
And then, I'm just gonna move these guys over a little bit,
and go to the window menu,
and choose Symbols in order to bring up the symbols panel.
And, I'll make my panel a little taller,
so that we can see the 39 default symbols,
as well as my custom one, two, and three.
And I want to make something clear:
you need to save off your arrowheads to the symbols panel
inside the Arrowheads.ai file.
That's it.
You don't have to worry about those symbols
showing up inside other files,
and that's because as long as they're found inside
the Arrowheads.ai file,
they're gonna auto-populate to the stroke panel,
and they're gonna be global,
so they're gonna travel across all open documents.
And also worth mentioning,
is if you create a custom arrowhead
in your version of Illustrator,
and you give that document to someone else,
the arrowheads will survive,
and I'm gonna show you what I mean by that.
I'll go ahead and switch to this file,
which you can open if you like,
even though you don't have these arrowheads.
And so, if I go ahead and select this guy right here,
and I change its color, just so it's a little more obvious.
So, I'll click on a second swatch
up here in the control panel,
and I'll change this guy to purple, for example.
Then, notice, if I click on the word Stroke,
and I click on this first arrowheads option,
even though this particular arrowhead
is not found in my menu, it does survive.
So, you can open this file on any machine.
Now, that doesn't mean other people can use your arrowheads.
It just means that they'll be able to see them.
All right, so I'll just go ahead
and switch over to this file once again,
and I'll marquee all of these objects right here
with a black arrow tool.
So, you want this line right here, this horizontal line,
you want this empty rectangle,
and you want the elements
that make up your custom arrowhead,
and then you want to click on a little page icon
at the bottom of the symbols panel.
I'll go ahead and name this guy Tinted 1.
This is the only name that matters, by the way,
the name of the symbol, and then,
I'll switch it to Static Symbol,
just because it's more flexible.
Dynamic symbols do work,
but static symbols are backward compatible.
And so, I'll go ahead and click OK,
and then I'll partially marquee these guys,
click on the little page icon, name this guy Tinted 2,
and select Static Symbol, and click OK.
And now, I'll partially marquee these paths,
click on the little page icon,
name this guy Tinted 3, this time around,
select Static Symbol.
And something else I wanna say is,
even though you can select Dynamic Symbol,
to my knowledge it does not provide you with any benefit.
So another reason to stick with static.
And then click OK.
All right, now you want to go up to the file menu
and choose the Save command in order to
update your Arrowheads.ai file.
Now initially, that doesn't do anything.
So notice if I switch to this guy,
and select this top path by clicking on it,
and then I click on the word Stroke,
and I select this first arrowhead option,
and I'm scrolled all the way down to the bottom.
I can't see my tinted arrowheads
because they only load when you load Illustrator.
And so, I'll just go up to the File menu
and choose the Exit command,
which is the Quit command on the Mac,
or you can just press Control + Q here on the PC,
or Command + Q on the Mac.
No, I don't want to save my changes.
Yes, I guess I do want to clear the Clipboard,
although, doesn't really matter.
All right, now you just want to go ahead
and relaunch Illustrator.
Here on the PC, assuming I want to do some more work
on that Arrowheads.ai file,
I need to right-click on that application shortcut icon,
and then choose Run As Administrator.
And a moment later I'll see that Illustrator
is indeed launching.
All right, now I'll go ahead and switch
to the single column Toolbox,
and I'll expand my Layers panel,
and I'll go up to the File menu and choose the Open command,
and I will navigate my way to the en_US folder
that we've seen so many times,
and I'll find that arrowheads file.
That doesn't really matter, but I'm gonna go ahead
and open it anyway, just so that we have it up on screen
and you can see that I do indeed have
Tinted 1, 2, and 3.
File I'm really looking for is found on my desktop,
at least for me it is, inside the Exercise Files folder
inside the 36_symbols folder, and it's this guy right here:
A few custom arrowheads.ai.
I'll go ahead and select it and open it,
and then I'll marquee, let's say, this horizontal path
with my black arrow tool.
All right, now we're working
on a red layer with a red object,
and I want to see it better,
and so I'll just go ahead and
change the stroke color to purple, let's say,
and then I'll click on the word Stroke,
and I'll click on this first arrowhead option,
and I'll change it to Tinted 1,
which will produce this effect here.
Now, notice I reduced my line weight to 10 points,
I'm gonna take it back up to 16 points,
which is the line weight that's at work
for the other two strokes.
That gives me too large of an arrowhead, however,
so I'll click on the word Stroke again,
and I'll take this first scale value down to 70%,
and press the enter key or the return key on the MAC
to make it so.
All right, now I'll select this guy,
and I'll click on the word Stroke,
and I'll click on this first arrowhead option,
and I'll change it to Tinted 2.
Again, that's too big, so this time I'm gonna select
the scale value and take it down to 60%.
And then I'll select this guy right there,
the gradient stroke, and I'll click on the word Stroke,
and click on the first arrowhead option,
and select Tinted 3.
And you can see that we don't get any tints.
That's because tinted arrowheads
are not compatible with gradients.
And so what I need to do is click on this second swatch,
and let's say I go with a dark shade of green
this time around.
Maybe not that dark, maybe this guy right here,
that begins R=0, G=146, B=something else,
and I can't say the value because it wouldn't make sense
given that I lead into this thing saying, "Starting with."
All right, so I'm just trying to be consistent,
so now I'll click on the word Stroke,
and I'll change that first scale value to 70%
and press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac,
to make that change.
All right, now that's not quite right.
I'm gonna go up to the File menu
and choose the Open command,
and I'm gonna go ahead and scroll my way
down to tinted arrowheads and click the open button.
And notice the difference here.
This is this guy right here, notice him?
The one that I just applied.
And this is what I was looking for,
with a couple of pieces of sheath, let's say,
some kind of rope or hemp
that's actually tying the arrowhead to that horizontal line.
And so what do you do if you make a mistake
and you want to edit your custom arrowhead?
Well, for the answer to that question,
I invite you to watch the very next movie.