There are so many ways to be creative in Adobe Illustrator.
In this tutorial, you'll work with the Appearance panel, Transparency and Effects to create a neon glow effect on the text you see here to complete the artwork.
With artwork in Illustrator, we can set a fill and stroke in the Properties panel on the right.
But we want to give this text some dimension and make it look like it's glowing.
To achieve that look, you'll apply multiple layered or stacked strokes and fills to it without creating a bunch of copies of the text.
So, let's jump in.
With the lesson file open, and the Selection Tool selected, click this DINER text to select it.
To open the Appearance panel which is where you're going to do most of your work, Click here in the Appearance section of the Properties panel.
The Appearance panel gives you a snapshot of what has been applied to selected content to achieve its appearance, including Strokes, Fills and effects like a drop shadow.
Right now, after selecting the text with the Selection Tool, you'll see Type at the top of the panel, and you'll see characters down here.
Type represents the type object or the box that the text is in and not the actual text.
Double click Characters here and you'll now see the formatting for the text within the box and the text is now selected.
If you look at the bottom of the panel, you'll see two buttons for adding more strokes and fills to artwork.
Add New Stroke and Add New Fill, but they're dimmed.
You can't add a new stroke or fill with text selected.
If you want to layer multiple strokes and fills you need to select the text box.
Click Type at the top up here and the text box is selected again and not the text characters within.
After doing that you might see these little arrows that are open, and you'll see Opacity for Stroke and Opacity for Fill.
You can adjust the opacity for the stroke and opacity for the fill separately.
Click these arrows to hide the opacity for each.
With text you can apply strokes, fills and effects to the box and they'll apply to the characters.
Any new strokes and fills you apply now will override strokes, fills and effects applied directly to the characters.
Click Add New Fill and a new fill is added to the content.
To apply a new color to the fill, click the Fill box and select the yellow.
You can now see that the black color seems to be gone.
But actually, the yellow fill color is now on top of the black fill color covering it up.
Press the Escape key to hide the colors and you can see it in the panel.
Now to add a color to the stroke, click the Stroke color here, then click the box again and apply the orange color.
Then to make the stroke larger, click the 1 pt size here to change it and change the size to 2 pt.
In the DINER text you can barely see the orange color peeking out from underneath the yellow.
The text now has two fills applied, black and yellow in a single stroke.
Now you'll add another stroke that is larger to see how stacking strokes and fields works.
Click the Add New Stroke button down here and the light orange stroke is duplicated and stacked on top the original stroke.
Now to make the stroke larger, change the stroke size to something larger like 8 pt.
Because the new stroke is under the fill, in the text you can see the fill on top.
You can actually reorder the strokes and fills in this panel to change how they're stacked on the artwork.
Dragging from an empty area of the stroke row, drag the top 8 pt stroke down below the 2 pt stroke.
When a line appears release to put the stroke at the bottom of the stack.
The 8 pt stroke is now underneath the fill and 2 pt stroke in the artwork as well.
To finish the artwork, you can blur the larger stroke to make it look like a glow.
If you want to apply an effect, say a drop shadow to a single stroke or fill, you can select that stroke or fill in the panel first, then apply the effect.
To apply an effect like a shadow to the text as a whole, you can click Type to select all the text first, then apply the effect.
Click the 8 pt stroke row to select it if it isn't already.
You can tell it's selected because it's highlighted.
To apply effect, click Add New Effect down here.
To blur the stroke, choose Blur, Gaussian Blur...
In the dialog box that opens to see the effect, select Preview and drag the amount slider to blur more or less.
Click OK when you're happy with it.
And the last thing we'll do is put the 2 pt stroke on top.
So, click the Stroke to select it and drag it above the Fill.
When you see a line, release.
Give this method a try in your own artwork, even adding more strokes, changing their stroke size, ordering and blur to give your artwork an even more realistic neon glow effect.
