Fills and Strokes

During this video, I worked on different types of strokes and fills and where to find and apply them.

To start, the fill function allows you to cover a large space of your image with a solid color or pattern and the stroke command makes it easy to paint borders around whole images or within them.

When the path is selected, the fill and stroke settings appear in the control panel above the artboard. By clicking the arrow in the box to the left of Stroke, a wide range of colors, gradients, and patterns appears, and in the top left corner, there’s a none option. When clicked, the path disappears, but its anchor points still exist. If you have trouble finding the path, simply click and drag a marquee around the general area, selecting and highlighting the path.

Going back to the stroke box, the same color panel appears, and when a color is selected, the path will change to that color. To the right of Stroke, there’s a box that has 1 pt (point) labored which changes the thickness of the path. When clicking the arrow next to the box, a list of selected points appears, making it a quick access feature. By clicking on each of them, the path changes its size whether it be thick or thin determined by the pt measurement. Usually, the bigger the number, the thicker it is and vice versa.

There are some additional options as well, for example, the Variable Width Profile. When selected, the path will have a unique shape, changing the appearance of the stroke on the path. There’s also a dropdown menu which allows you to change the definition of the brush.

For a closed path, the same stroke options apply, however, a new option appears: fill. The default fill is transparent to the background, and to change that, you got to head to the box left of the stroke box. When clicked, the same color panel appears, and when a color is selected, it fills in the closed path with that color.