| The Power of the Appearance Palette |
pages (2): [1] 2 |
|
|
If you are like me, you have probably
over-looked one of Adobe Illustrator’s most powerful
features, the appearance palette (it is actually
a
window but I like to refer to them as palettes). In
this palette lies a great wealth of ways to control and
manipulate vector objects within Illustrator,
and is even useful in creating a reusable graphic
styles. In this tutorial we will take a
look at some of the functionality that makes the
Appearance Palette so useful, and describe ways to
save your effects for quick use in other projects.
Initial Setup
Bring your Appearance Palette forward
as we will be using it throughout this tutorial. You
might even want to expand the length of the palette
to about twice its size to make viewing
all the layers easier. Notice I said “layers”. The
fills and strokes in the Appearance Palette act
just like layers in a sense. But, compared to
layers... the fills and stroke views can’t be turned
on
or off without trashing the complete stroke or fill
or dropping opacity down, and they cannot
be labelled like layers for easy reference. Keep
this in mind as you work.
I am going to use a lesson from Ergodraw.com on
creating a 3D ball effect as inspiration for this tutorial.
I wanted to use their lesson as an example of just
what can be done with the Appearance Palette
versus using layers. My method has a couple of
drawbacks and a couple of advantages
compared to the layers method shown at Ergodraw
and I will point out these differences later in the
lesson. In their original lesson, the user was
instructed to create 4 layers each containing the
same duplicated circle filled with orange hue of
your choice. We will be doing the same, except we
are going to create multiple fills rather than
layers in the Appearance Palette, and we are
going to create them one at a time since we
cannot label or hide view easily.
Getting Started
So, starting out... draw one circle and
size it roughly to 140 points in diameter. Make
sure it is filled with an orange hue (just for this
exercise... you can change it to another color
for different results if desired). Leave the
stroke for this circle blank. If you select this
circle, you should see that we have one fill with the
orange color and a stoke with nothing
(Example A). Go to the flyout menu in
the Appearance Palette (upper-right-corner button) and select Add New Fill (Example B)
or you can make it easier on yourself
and just select the fill layer in the Appearance
Palette (while the circle is still selected) and
choose Duplicate Item, which will duplicate the
orange fill with new fill on top. The same
can be also be done by dragging the fill layer to bottom of
palette and releasing it over the button to
the left of the trash can located at the bottom of
palette, or just by selecting the fill or stroke and
clicking the button. The latter 2 methods work best,
because if you choose New Fill from the
flyout menu, you also have to select the same orange hue
to fill it, adding more steps to the
process.
Now if we look at our Appearance Palette, we should
have 2 fill layers that both contain the
orange color we started with and a stroke layer with
no color (as seen in Example C). If
you selected New Fill from the flyout menu instead
of duplicating our original fill and don’t
have orange for the top fill layer simply select
the top fill layer and then select the same
orange hue for the color fill that we used in the
first step. Then it should look like the
Appearance Palette in Example C.

Our circle shouldn't look very different right now.
Its still the same circle of orange we started with, only now with 2 stacked fill
layers. This is where you will begin to see the
magic of the Appearance Palette. Select the top most
fill layer of orange and then go to the
transparency palette. We want to set the blend mode
of this fill to Multiply. Just like any
other vector object in Illustrator, we can change the
opacity, and the blend mode of our fills and
strokes within the appearance palette. Setting our
top fill to Multiply doubles the orange fill
to make a darker and more saturated orange color
because it lays on top of the solid orange
we created before. The results of this operation will be visible on
our circle and in the Appearance Palette
(Example D). Notice how the top layer now has a
subgroup below it containing our transparency
settings? You can click this fill layer and change
the opacity or blending modes again in
the Transparency Palette later if desired (Example
E).
Building Up Detail Select the bottom color fill. We want to
use this to start adding some depth to the
circle and we do this with the same method as the
Ergodraw lesson. With the bottom fill
selected, select Effect > Stylize > Inner Glow. As everyone should know
by now, anything from the Effect menu applied to
a vector object in Illustrator shows up in the
Appearance Palette for the object and can be edited
or deleted at any time in future. Using
this same great feature, we can apply these same
effects to individual fills or strokes within
the Appearance Palette, allowing for the same editing
capabilities later if desired. Using the settings shown in Example F as a reference, change the blend mode to Multiply and
select a dark color or black for the glow and spread
it out about 18pt to get the example
shown (Example G) with about 60-70% opacity.

Once you have added the INNER GLOW EFFECT from the
menu, you should see this effect
show up in the Appearance Palette on the bottom fill
layer as a subgroup. The dark
orange circle should look very similar to Example G. It should be easy to see
how this process works now - We are adding
layers within the Appearance Palette to
build our 3D looking button. Should you apply the
wrong effect to the wrong fill... don’t worry.
You can reposition the fill and stroke layers or
delete layers and effects almost the same as in
our layers palette.
Going off the beaten track... Now this is
where my lesson takes a left turn from other more
traditional routes.
I have a few more
steps to get the look of my finished button. Once you
are comfortable with this process and
understand how to use the Appearance Palette to its
fullest potential, you may find other
methods that are shorter or work better for your
purposes. Feel free to experiment with this
but, for now, we will be doing things my way.
Haha!
Our next step is to create a gradient fill which we
will screen over the previous layers to help
give the circle more shape and dimension. So start by duplicating the top most fill again.
Once you have duplicated this fill, change the
Opacity settings that were attached from
the previous fill. Let’s set this third fill layer
to Screen and about 70% Opacity. Now go to your
swatches and open the Gradient Swatch palette. There
you should see a default set of
gradients. Choose the white to black radial for fill
to replace the orange fill. Now, to deepen the
color effect... go to the Gradient Palette while our
gradient fill is still selected in the
Appearance Palette and add some muted yellow to the
white on one end, and maybe adjust
the solid black on the other end to more dark brown
(Example H), or leave the other end of
the gradient black.
- Tutorial written by Synthetic
| 
|
User: Culann (#55635)
Date: Mon Jan 19, 2009. 20:30:40 | Post #3 of 3 |
|
Quote from Man1c M0g;55557: There's a LOT of images of varying sizes - this is the best way to get them all to play together nicely. =] |
Woah; it almost makes me wonder if the text isn't hidden by the pix. BTW, is every word of the title supposed to be on its own line on page 2?
Perhaps the pictures on page 1 could be a tad smaller? I can read the text just fine, so the pictures would be okay small enough to have a slight margin. |
Reply to this post |
|
|
Quote from supertackyman;55555: I cant really comment on the functionality of the tutorial since I dont use illustrator. but... the text looks a little tight against the images, mostly on the first page of the tutorial. |
There's a LOT of images of varying sizes - this is the best way to get them all to play together nicely. =] |
Reply to this post |
|
|
I cant really comment on the functionality of the tutorial since I dont use illustrator. but... the text looks a little tight against the images, mostly on the first page of the tutorial. |
Reply to this post |
--- View Entire Thread ---
|

|
|
 |
php, shoutbox problems Author: vanhansen Posted: Nov 17th, 1:30am Activity: 5 replies, 92 views
|  | MarkupGeeks Logo Author: ahstanford Posted: Nov 16th, 8:45pm Activity: 11 replies, 148 views
|  | Drawing Tutorials Author: ahstanford Posted: Nov 16th, 12:46am Activity: 0 replies, 98 views
|  | Superbowl predictions, anyone? Author: ahstanford Posted: Nov 15th, 10:46pm Activity: 10 replies, 137 views
|  | Photomanipulation Footsteps Author: ahstanford Posted: Nov 15th, 10:43pm Activity: 4 replies, 94 views
|  | Learning to draw... Author: ahstanford Posted: Nov 15th, 12:43pm Activity: 4 replies, 115 views
|  | Looking for simple UI elements Author: FenixRoA Posted: Nov 15th, 6:40am Activity: 7 replies, 108 views
|  | HDD Help? Author: Phoenix Wynde Posted: Nov 13th, 2:31am Activity: 1 replies, 106 views
|  | Fun New Battles Posted! Author: ahstanford Posted: Nov 11th, 7:33pm Activity: 0 replies, 139 views
|  | 4-man Simon Tournament Author: ahstanford Posted: Nov 11th, 3:28pm Activity: 0 replies, 90 views
|  | Design Brief Inspiration for BioRUST Battles! Author: ahstanford Posted: Nov 11th, 7:19am Activity: 4 replies, 139 views
|  | The BioRUST Free Stock Photography Thread Author: ahstanford Posted: Nov 11th, 6:32am Activity: 2 replies, 146 views
|  |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| --- Site Resources --- |
| Total Tutorials: | 212 |
| Total Downloads: | 415 |
| Linkbase Links: | |
 |
|
 |
 |
|