Quickly Change Fills and Strokes
Tips | March 18th, 2008
I like to work efficiently, so I get a little annoyed when something slows me down in Illustrator. Have you ever been cruising right along and accidently added a color to the Stroke of an object when you meant to add it to the Fill? Now you have to go back and do it all over again, wasting time. Luckily, there are a few useful keyboard shortcuts to help with Fills and Strokes.
Below are some Fill and Stroke functions, with the keyboard shortcuts following in parenthesis. These functions can also be accessed on the bottom of the Tools Panel, but not as quickly as using the shortcuts.
Default Stroke and Fill (d)
Change any object to the default black Stroke and white Fill.
Swap Attributes (shift x)
Swap the attributes of the Fill and Stroke. This function will not work when the current Fill is a gradient, because gradients cannot be applied to Strokes.
Toggle Between Active (x)
Toggle between the active Fill and Stroke.
Color (<)
Make the current unfilled Fill or Stroke filled.
Gradient (>)
Make the current Fill a gradient.
Apply None (/)
Apply a none attribute to the active Fill or Stroke.
Again, these shortcuts can be very helpful. You won’t realize how time you are saving until you start using them!
Just started using Illustrator properly and I’m trying to learn shortcuts to speed up workflow. Thanks for the tips!
I’m also finding it hard to find helpful Illustrator websites so keep the good content coming!
Hey dude. Thats awesome! Those are some that I didn’t know.
Very helpful, thanks!
Beautiful template!
First a big Hellou form Bosnia and Herzegovina and i wanted to thank you for your effort. I’m new in Illustrator and your posts are so helpfull. Keep up the good work.
I’ll be reading you.
I’m using Illustrator since years but all the time i have something to learn. Thanx for this beautiful site and for the tips!
another great tip bouquet, many thanks!
Hi from France! Thanks a LOT for all the good illustrator tuts, it helped me so much for my work, I just started learning CS3, I used to work with Photoshop 7 now I try to extend my knowledge to Illustrator for professionnal ..Thanks again
Thank you for this tip! Will definitely come in handy!