In what may become a bit of a series (subject to response, as always… ) I’d like to add answers to some of the more interesting and less-often-asked questions posed by my training delegates.
This one comes up from time-to-time as people explore some of the path effects: Outline Object. You may well have tried this one yourself, and been baffled by the result – it doesn’t seem to do anything and surely you’d just add a stroke to a shape?
You may well just think that it’s a feature from an earlier version of Illustrator that the engineers have just forgotten to remove and leave it at that, but the persistent and curious will know that’s extremely unlikely and dig a little deeper.
The help system is usually the next port-of-call but that’s usually pretty fruitless – and again persistence may well lead you to discover that it works with images. So, you place an image in your document, apply the effect and… it suddenly disappears – eek! “Maybe I should add the stroke first,” you think, and one rapid undo later you find yourself trying to add a stroke by clicking firstly on the swatches (with the focus on the stroke attribute, of course) only to find that nothing happens there either – but you’ll be pleased to know that you are on the right track, at least.
What’s needed now is a trip to the appearance panel, and adding a new stroke either by:
- clicking the icon at the bottom of the panel (first one on the left)
- visiting the panel menu and choosing “add new stroke“
- or, if you’re a super-duper-power-user with the shortcut alt-cmd-/
Once you’ve done that, all you then need to do is apply the effect and (hey presto!) it works. You can add other strokes to it as well to build up effects – mystery solved.
