- Creating rectangles
- Creating a rounded rectangle
- Editing the corners of a Live Shape
- Creating an ellipse
- Creating polygons
- Creating stars
- Changing stroke width and alignment
- Working with lines
- Joining paths
Changing stroke width and alignment
So far in this lesson, you’ve edited the fill of shapes, but haven’t touched the strokes (a visible outline or border of an object or path). Every shape and path, by default, is created with a 1-point black stroke. You can easily change the color of a stroke or the weight of a stroke to make it thinner or thicker. Strokes are also aligned to the center of a path edge by default, but you can change the alignment as well using the Stroke panel.
- Click to select the bottom rectangle beneath the circle.
- Select the Zoom tool (
) in the Tools panel, and click that rectangle once to zoom in. You may need to move the Transform panel out of your way. - Click the underlined word “Stroke” in the Control panel to open the Stroke panel. In the Stroke panel, change the Stroke weight to 5 pt. Notice that the stroke of the rectangle is centered on the edge of the shape by default.
- Click the Align Stroke To Inside button (
) in the Stroke panel. This aligns the stroke to the inside edge of the rectangle. - With the rectangle still selected, click the Stroke color in the Control panel (to the left of the word “Stroke”), and change the stroke color to the yellow used earlier, the one with the tool tip “C=5 M=0 Y=90 K=0.” Press the Escape key to hide the panel.
- Press Shift+X to swap the stroke and fill colors.
- Choose Select > Deselect.
- Choose File > Save.
NOTE
You can also open the Stroke panel by choosing Window > Stroke, but you may need to choose Show Options from the panel menu (
).
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NOTE
If pressing Shift+X doesn’t work, you can also click the Swap Fill And Stroke arrow (
) toward the bottom of the Tools panel.
)
About aligning strokes
If an object is a closed path (such as a square), you can select an option in the Stroke panel to align the stroke along the path to the center (default), inside, or outside:
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