Illustrator strokes, tips and secrets – advanced version

Hi friends, it’s time for a new Illustrator tutorial. On our previous tut we showed you all the basics regarding Illustrator strokes, now we want to share a quick trick that our friend Michel taught us a while ago and that will help you a lot if you’re looking to make abstract figures, sunshine elements and others.

The first thing we have is an average circle traced with the Ellipse tool, nothing to be surprised about.

Now from the Stroke Panel, which we’ve already taught you how to display (Windows>Stroke), activate the Dashed Line option and give a dash value around 8.

OK, now before we continue, it’s important to check if a certain option is active, so please go to Edi>Preferences>General.

The option we want you to look for is ‘Scale Strokes and Effects’, you must leave this option unchecked so when you change the size of a figure, elements like stroke weight and others won’t scale to fit the new size.

While holding Shift for not distorting the figure, reduce the size of our circle, you will notice that though the circle’s size has been reduced, the stroke weight and dashed line values have not changed.

And here comes the fun part, using the Dashed Line section only, we can create really awesome designs, just play with the dash and gap values to obtain something like this:

Pretty cool isn’t it?, you can play with the Profile option as well to generate even crazier designs, let’s take a look at it:

Finally, you can expand the stroke’s appearance so you can edit it with absolute freedom, to expand an element’s stroke, go to Object>Expand Appearance.

By expanding our object’s stroke, we can now add an additional stroke to it or play with the Appearance panel in many great ways.

The possibilities are almost infinite, you can combine different dashed values, weights, profiles and colors to create stunning designs 100 % vector.

We like to thank our friend Michel Almonacid who shared this tip with us, you can see this tip applied in many of his designs.

Hopefully this tip can give you some ideas for your next design project, Illustrator is definitely an awesome program that is always surprising us with its different features and secrets, if you enjoyed this article, please leave leave us a comment and so we will continue posting useful Illustrator tips to make your life easier, thanks for visiting Mishes and we’ll see you in our next post.