585 Designing multicolor arrowheads

- [Instructor] In this movie I'll show you how to create a multi-color arrowhead inside Illustrator, which is technically impossible. After all, Illustrator allows you to tint your arrowheads, but they ultimately are assigned one color. If you want to get this effect where we're combining brown and orange or dark and bright blue or black and red then you need to create two arrowheads that are designed to be paired together and assign them different colors. So once again we're going to be working inside the Arrowheads.ai file, which is found at this location on the PC and this location at the Mac, assuming that you're working with the newest version of Illustrator and it's the US version as well.

Otherwise you're going to have to extrapolate these instructions. Alright, so obviously I've made a few modifications already. I'm getting pretty tight to the bottom of the artboard however, so I'm going to switch to the artboard tool, and then I'll select the top left point here inside the tiny reference point matrix up here in the control panel, and then I'll click after the H value and enter something like +120 let's say, and then I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on a Mac to apply that change. Alright, now I'll press the Escape key to switch back to the last used tool, which for me is the black arrow tool, and then I'll go ahead and marquee these Tinted arrowheads right here, and I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to bring up the Move dialog box.

I'll set the Horizontal value to 0 and I'll take the Vertical value up to 60, happens to work well, and then I'll click on the Copy button in order to copy those arrowheads. And I need a second copy, so I'll press ctrl + d or cmd + d on the Mac to repeat that duplication. Alright, now I'm going to zoom in on these guys here and I'm going to change their names really fast, at least as fast as I can type. And so I'll start by naming this first guy A solid, let's say, because these are going to be the non-tinted versions. Then I'll click in the second one and change it to B solid, and then, of course, we've got C solid.

And next I'll go ahead and click inside this guy and he will be A tints, let's say, and this guy will be B tints, and then finally I will change this guy to C tints. Bearing in mind, of course, however that these labels have nothing to do with the final name of the arrowheads, that you decide when you convert the arrowheads to symbols. Alright, now I'll press the Escape key in order to return to the black arrow tool. And I'll go ahead and marquee all six of these guys here and now I'll go up to the control panel and click on the Break Link button.

Now that converts them all to a bunch of unnecessary sublayers. And to break those up I'll go to the Layers panel, click on the fly out menu icon, and choose Flatten Artwork. And that will get rid of all those guys. You'll still see the colors here inside the Layers panel, but you can fix that just by twirling this layer closed and then back open. Alright, now they're all groups, as indicated by the word Group on the far left side of the control panel, so I'll go up to the Object menu and choose the Ungroup command, or you can just press Control + Shift + G, or Command + Shift + G on the Mac.

Alright, now the main thing about these guys is each one of pairs, for example, A solid and A tints, have to be exactly the same size. And so I'll click off the artwork to deselect it and then I'll click on this dark gray shape and press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of it, and then I'll select the light gray shape and Shift + click on the larger black one. And next I'll go up to the Window menu and choose the Path Finder command to bring up the Path Finder panel, and I'll click on the second icon in the first row, Minus Front, and that will cut a hole in that arrow.

And we need it to be a hole, because one stroke's going to be on top of another. Alright, now I want to shorten this line that represents the stroke, because otherwise we will see this stroke in the middle of the arrowhead. So I'll press the A key to switch to my white arrow tool and I'll go ahead and find this point right there, that anchor point, I'll click on it, then I'll Shift + click on this anchor point, and now I'm going to zoom in a little, so I can better see what I'm doing, and I'll press the left arrow key a couple of times to scoot that guy in. And I think it might want to go a little bit further, so I'm going to press ctrl + k to bring up the Preferences dialog box and I'm going to change that Keyboard Increment value to 0.2, and I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac, and then I'll just press the left arrow key to scoot that guy over that much more.

Alright, now I'll zoom out a little and I'll will scoot things up here, so that I can see this tail. And I'll press the v key to switch to my black arrow tool and I'll marquee tight to the bottom of it, like so, so that I don't select the invisible rectangle. If you accidentally select it just Shift + click on it to turn it off. And then I'll Shift + click on this black outline in order to deselect it, and I'll press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac in order to get rid of all that stuff. Now once again we have a hollow interior, so I'm going to press the a key to switch to my white arrow tool.

And I'll just click on this anchor point and Shift + click on this one, so that they're both selected, and then press shift + left arrow a couple times to scoot those guys over. Now I happen to know from experience that these points need to be moved over to the right a little bit, so the first thing I'm going to do and I wouldn't know this if I hadn't tried this in advance, but I need to select this anchor point right here, and then I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on a Mac to bring up the Move dialog box, and I'm going to change this Horizontal value to 0.1 is what it needs to be, and then I'll click OK in order to slightly nudge that guy over.

And then I'll press Control + Y or Command + Y on the Mac to switch to the outline mode. I'll grab this anchor point and this one too, very important it seems that both are selected, and then I'll go ahead and drag this guy while pressing the shift key, so that I'm constraining the angle of my drag to exactly horizontal until it snaps into alignment right there. And incidentally my Smart Guides are currently turned off. Alright, I'll press ctrl + y or cmd + y on the Mac in order to switch back to the preview mode and we get this effect here. Alright, now I'll zoom out a little bit and I'll scoot down to this guy.

And next what you've got to do is use this big diamond shape to cut a hole in the one in back, so I'm going to click and Shift + click on each of these four shapes right there, and then with the Path Finder panel still up on screen I'll click the first icon in the first row, Unite, and then I'll Shift + click on that black diamond in the background and I'll click on the second icon, Minus Front, in order to cut that out of there. Alright, I'm zooming in again, and now what we need to do is take these two gray shapes and cut them away from this black shape, which I already united in the previous movie.

The thing is if you take a look at this icon it's labeled Minus Front. It only subtracts one front shape. So if you want to subtract two shapes, which is what I want to do here, you first need to combine them into a single shape by going up to the Object menu, choosing Compound Path, and choosing Make. It won't look any different, but now Illustrator considers that two shapes a single path outline. I can Shift + click on the black shape and then click on the Minus Front icon, or for those of you who are crazy for keyboard shortcuts you can repeat the last Path Finder operation by pressing ctrl + 4 or cmd + 4 on the Mac.

Alright, now I'll press the A key to get my white arrow tool, I'll click on this anchor point, Shift + click on this one, and press Shift + left arrow a few times, and then press the right arrow key until I get the anchor point to about this location right here. Now I need to cut this stuff away and I found the easiest way to do that was with the Rectangle Tool. So I'll just grab the Rectangle Tool and then I'll draw a shape that's just barely to the right of that edge right there, and then I'll press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool, I'll Shift + click on this shape, and I'll once again click on the Minus Front button, or again you can press Control + 4 on the PC or Command + 4 on the Mac.

And I just want you to see that edge is sticking way in there, and that's because I don't want any of this roundness here to be revealed. Alright, now let's take care of the tint interiors by scrolling down to this guy right here. Alright, I'm going to select both these interior shapes right here and I'll press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of them, and then I'll press the A key to switch to my white arrow tool and I'll select this anchor point, and actually more than that. I'm going to need to marquee all these guys right there, I don't want the rectangle, so I guess I ought to just be more careful.

I'll run that marquee again, and then I'll Shift + click on this anchor point here. So you want to select all the anchor points along the top half of the shape, and then press Control + C or Command + C on the Mac to copy them, and press ctrl + f or cmd + f on the Mac to paste them in front. And then I'm going to change the fill, this first swatch up here in the control panel, to this medium shade of gray in order to produce this effect here. And the reason now I'm going with darker tints is because that way I can apply brighter colors and achieve more saturated results.

Alright, now I'll move down to this guy, I'll press the V key to switch to my black arrow tool, and all we're going to do here is change some colors. So, for example, you don't want to get rid of this outside thing right here, because that'll change the size of this arrowhead and then they won't line up properly. So you want to keep everything the same size. However, I am going to go ahead and click and Shift + click on these dark gray shapes, like so, I missed that one, so I'll Shift + click on it to turn it off and then Shift + click on these two, and I'll change them to black. And then I'll click in this light gray shape right here and Shift + click in the other light gray shapes as well.

It'd be nice if I could do a select similar color thing, but there's so many other similarly colored shapes in this document that that won't work. And now I'll change this first swatch once again to the medium shade of gray. And so again we're going with dark tints, because that way we can apply brighter colors. Alright, now I'll drop down to this guy and I'll select each one of the dark gray shapes and I'll change them to black, and then I'll select each one of the light gray shapes right here and I will change them to that medium gray.

And we end up with this effect here. Alright, now I'll zoom out, so that I can take in each one of my six arrowheads. And I'll go ahead and marquee this top guy, just so that I make sure to select the stroked line, and it's OK that the stroke is stroked, because it's just a stand-in for the actual path outline, and I'll also make sure I've selected that invisible rectangle. Then you want to go up to the Window menu and choose the Symbols command in order to bring up your Symbols panel. Make sure you have enough room to work, and then just go ahead and drag this guy and drop it into the panel at the end of the list.

And I'll call this guy A solid this time, and I'll also turn on the Static Symbol option, very important, and then click OK. And then I'll grab this guy, drag him and drop him into place, and I will call him B solid, and then select Static Symbol and click OK. And go ahead and select this guy and do the same thing. This is just the same thing over and over again. I'll select Static Symbol, click OK. And now let's do the same thing with the tints. I'll go ahead and grab this guy, drag him and drop him into the panel, and I'll call him A tints this time, and I'll go ahead and copy that text, just so I don't have to keep retyping it.

I'll select Static Symbol, click OK. Grab the fifth guy, drag him and drop him in, B tints this time around, Static Symbol, OK. And then finally, I'll just scroll down a little bit, grab this final arrowhead, drag it and drop it into the panel, go ahead and call it C tints this time around, and select Static Symbol, and click OK. And now at this point you can just go ahead and hide the Symbols panel if you want to, then go up to the File menu and choose the Save command. Now, as we've seen before, Illustrator has to restart in order to load those arrowheads, so I'll just go ahead and quit the program and Clear the Clipboard.

And so to save everybody a little bit of time here we're going to do that in the background. And so here I am looking at a restarted version of Illustrator. Switch to the single column toolbox. Go ahead and click on the Layers tab in order to expand that. And let's start with this brown line at the top here. Notice that its line weight is already set to 16 points. I'll go ahead and click on the word Stroke, and then I'll change this second arrowhead option to A solid. And if the arrowhead looks too big you can scale it independently of the line weight by clicking in this percentage option here and I'll just press shift + down arrow to take it down to 70%.

Alright, now we want to create the orange version of the stroke and you do that by going to the Window menu and choosing the Appearance command, and then here inside the Appearance panel go ahead and click on that stroke item and click on the little page icon at the bottom of the panel to duplicate it. Then I'll change the color of my stroke to bright orange, and then I'll click on the word Stroke and I'll change that arrowhead to A tints, and with any luck they'll line up exactly. Now I want the bright part to be on top. I did design the arrowhead that way, except now it's flipped the other direction.

So with this new stroke active drop down to the FX icon, choose Distort & Transform, followed by Transform. Then you can turn on the Preview checkbox if you want to and turn on Reflect Y and that's going to flip that stroke independently of everything else. After which point you can click OK. Alright, now let's see how the tail fares. I'll go ahead and select this blue line, click on the word Stroke up here in the control panel and change that second arrowhead option to B solid right there. Too big once again, so I'll click in this percentage value and I'll press Shift + down arrow to take it down to 60%.

Alright, now let's add the tint version of the arrowhead by clicking on the stroke here inside the Appearance panel, then you want to click on the page icon to make a duplicate of it, now I'll change its color to this bright blue right here, and then I'll click on the word Stroke, and I will change this second arrowhead option to B tints, and it ends up aligning perfectly. Alright, now I'll select the black line, click on the word Stroke up here in the control panel, and change the second arrowhead option to C solid, then click in its Scale value and take it down to 70% once again.

Alright, now I'll click on the stroke inside the Appearance panel, click on the little page icon to make a duplicate of it, select that bottom stroke, go ahead and change its color to this bright shade of red, and then click on the word Stroke, and change its arrowhead to C tints. And notice that the Scale value remains intact. Alright, again I want this bright quadrant to be on top, and so to repeat that last effect make sure the stroke's active, and then go up to to Effect menu and choose the very first command, Apply Transform, and that will repeat the application of that Reflect Y checkbox.

And now I'll just go ahead and click off the line to deselect it. And that's how you create multi-color arrowheads by designing arrowhead pairs that work together inside of the Arrowheads.ai file, which is included with any version of Illustrator out there.