From the course: Illustrator 2021 Essential Training

The power of appearances - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2021 Essential Training

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The power of appearances

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- [Instructor] Everything you see in Illustrator, every stroke width you change, every fill color you modify, that's changing an appearance. Remember that vectors themselves actually don't have any dimension at all. They are just locations and connections between those locations. Even looking at things in Outline mode is itself an appearance so we can see things. But you can do some tremendously powerful things in Illustrator with appearances and I believe they are actually unrivaled for that. Looking at the object that's on screen right now, how many things do you think would go into making this object? Well, let's take a look at it in Outline mode. If I switch to that using Command or Control + Y, you might at first struggle to see anything, but that's because it is made with one single anchor point. If I go back to the preview, Command or Control + Y, here it is, and it's a huge combined appearance here with lots and lots of different strokes, fills, and effects that have built it out to what you see here. Even the background that you see here is part of that one anchor point appearance. If I go into the Layers panel, you'll actually see there is a layer there called Trace, but if I want to, I can turn the visibility of that off. There's still nothing there. That is a completely empty layer. The only thing that's in here is this one solitary anchor point. It's my favorite part of Illustrator, playing with appearances, and hopefully by the end of this chapter, it will be yours too.

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