Illustrator 04

Fills and strokes
- Activating the fill/stroke options.
- Using the color swatches
- Accessing swatch libraries
- Stroke width
Gradients
- Select Gradient tool (on the left) then
- Use Gradient panel (on the right) to choose a fill for gradiant
Stroke panel
- Arrowhead
- Dashed line
Width tool: Changing the width of strokes

Some tools (such as the Width tool) work on simple vector lines. Lines made with certain tools like Brushes come with what is called "appearances" and they are not just simple vectors anymore. (Similar to how word doc file is not the same as plain text file). In order to convert a line back into a simple vector line, open

Window -> Appearance

From the top right flyout menu, "Clear Appearance" or "Reduce to Basic Appearance"
Appearance

Starting from a rectangle, if you apply multiple strokes and fills, you can get the results like below:

Notes

You can select color from an image (of a painting) and save it to a swatch library

Notes

Point type -- click and start typeing
- Scale and gets bigger
Area type -- drag and draw out a rectangle/box
- Size of box changes and text flows in the box
Control Panel options
- Character, Size, Alignment...etc
  
  Alignment: center, right...etc.
Window -> Type -> Character
Type on a path tool - flow text along a path
Object -> Expand: to create path out of type. Note that you will lost the ability to edit your text! Use when you want to add accent to the text or when you are sending the file to another person and if you are not sure if they have the fonts you are using.

Notes

File -> Place
- with "link" checkbox on: it references the image file.
- if you "embed" (in the control panel) the image, the image will be saved within the illustrator document. Make sure you embed the image when you hand in the illustrator file.
Clipping Mask - No layer mask in illustrator but similar function
- Place image. Then place shape on top of image.
- Select vector shape then image. Then, "Object -> Clipping Mask -> Make" to clip out the image in the shape
- You can release the mask by "Object -> Clipping Mask -> Release"
Shapes in Illustrator can span areas outside your art board.

To maintain the integrity of the shapes, rather than using the eraser to cut the lines, I suggest you use the clipping mask (at the very end) to create a mask that shows the poster area
Image trace
- Select raster image
- Object -> Image Trace -> Make
- Open the image trace panel to adjust
- "Expand" to convert to path. Otherwise it will keep on calculating everytime you resize. Note that once you expand, you will lose reference to image.
  On "Expanding"
  
  In its simplest form, a vector can be thought as a line with stroke and fill properties.
  One of the confusing things about Illustrator is that some shapes aquire more properties than that. Images trace, brush, or appearances are such cases. Fonts also contain more information than just stroke and fill.
  
  Often times, you can "expand" these richer formats into a simple vector format

Notes