Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to this. Video tutorial today we’re looking at expand appearance and transformations and strokes in Illustrator. I have an example where something looks identical, but we get very different results when we actually expand it. And I want to show you how to get the results. Perhaps that you want rather than ones that. Illustrated aims to give you, but before we begin. I have some illustrator training at Skillshare Comm. When you sign up for Skillshare you get access to thousands of classes there, including over 250 of mine in the description below, is a skill share coupon for you, which is at least as good as the current skill share of that and typically mine will be better. I also have Illustrator training at Udemy Calm and there’s a referral link for every one of my courses in the description below, Please feel free to share these with family, friends and co-workers. Let’s return to illustrator, and I have a series of dots here. So this is a dot and what I’ve done is. I’ve applied a couple of transformations to it, so lets. Just turn those off. This is a dot that has a stroke around it, and if we have a look at the stroke placement, you’ll see that the stroke is aligned to the inside on this shape. Now it could just as easily be aligned to the outside. We’re going to have the same problem with this sort of stroke placement, so let me just turn the transforms back on for this particular object. This one looks similar, but it is slightly different. In this case. We’ve got the same circle or the same dot. But the stroke here has been applied to the center, so the stroke is sort of over the edge of this dot, and that’s going to have a different result and down here. I’ve just got the circle, but it has no stroke on it at all now. Each of these dots has had the exact same transformation applied to it. So what we’re going to do is start expanding them. So I’m going to take this dot and I’ll choose object and expand appearance. Because that’s the only one that’s available to me. Now let’s go to this one and do it the exact same thing and to this one and do the exact same thing. Let’s have a look inside the layer’s palette to see what the result of this is. So is they group that we’re working with? This is a group that is selected. You can tell because it’s got this little box beside it. Let’s open up the groups that are stored here and lets. See what we get well? Each of these objects is a compound path and a path. So we’ve got our dot and this is a compound path, so it’s actually a filled shape, so we’ve ended up with two filled shapes for every one of these dots. The stroke has been converted to a compound path so far. So good, let’s go and have a look at this one here. It is lets. Open it up this time. We get something completely different. This time we’ve got a path. So when I just select this path, you’ll see that it’s got a stroke, but we’ve also got the inside and that’s a path by itself. So what’s happened is that our object has been broken up instead of being a dot with a stroke around. It is now two dots, one of which has a fill and one of which has a stroke, but it’s no longer a dot with a stroke. It’s no longer a single object. It’s two objects, so if those are not the results that you want if you want to be able to apply a transformation to a shape and when you expand it end up with a shape that has a stroke around it, don’t. Put the stroke around it before you do the transformation do as I’ve done here And just create the dot, apply the transformation to it and expand it. Then you’ll get the shape so here we have here inside here. Just the paths, and if we go and break them out of this group, so I’m going to select this entire group and I’m going to choose object ungroup and we’re going to keep doing that until Ungroup is no longer an option because that gets them back to just regular shapes. They’re just now a set of shapes. Well, let’s go and add our yellow stroke to them, and we can put the stroke on the inside or the outside at this stage. It doesn’t matter so what we’re ending up with here is a shape that has a stroke after we’ve applied the transformation, but the only way that we’re going to get That result is to do the vertical and horizontal transformation without the stroke applied to the shape, then expand it and then apply the stroke Because we really can’t trust illustrator to give us what we want. If we have the stroke on the inside or the outside, then we’re going to end up with a compound path and a regular path. If we have the stroke over the center, then we’re going to end up with two paths, one of which has a stroke and no fill and the other one, which has a fellow no stroke. And so if you want a shape that has a stroke and a fill, then you have to create the shape with the fill, transform it, expand it and then ungroup it all the way out of the group and then apply your stroke to it now at this level. If this is all you want from your output, you may not need to know about what illustrator is doing behind the scenes, but if you plan to take these shapes and do something different with them, then you probably need to understand how illustrator is working and you need to know that you need to go to the layers panel and just work out what illustrators given you because you can get different results with later steps in your illustration process, depending on how you got to this shape in the first place because these are very very different groups of objects and they will react differently later on with different effects. If you’re taking this as the starting point for something later on in illustrator, so I just thought that you’d be interested in that certainly as an eye-opener to me. If you did enjoy the video, please give it A thumbs up, hit the subscribe button and that notification Bell. So you’ll be alerted when new videos are released until next time my names. Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me here on my Youtube channel.