Digital Inking Tutorial Video #6 - Adobe Illustrator Graphic Styles and Grouping

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Video #6 - Graphic Styles & Grouping

A Graphic Style is the stored combination of a line's stroke color and brush shape, or a color and fill of a shape. It means you can select anything in your image and instantly apply many different stylistic properties all at once, really quickly.

I have created a few graphic styles that I use when I'm inking comic books, like "Black line, no fill" or "White fill, no line," etc. These are included in the downloadable Adobe Illustrator Inking Template that I made to go along with these tutorial videos.

There are different versions of the template, so whichever version of Adobe Illustrator you are using, you will find the right inking template.

You can download the Adobe Illustrator Inking Template at:

http://cartoonsnap.com/template/

You can see in this video how graphic styles are applied. Graphic styles are easy to create and modify, and I show you exactly how I do it. Then we'll cover the topic of grouping.

Each stroke or shape in Adobe Illustrator is seen by the application as a distinct item that can be moved or colored separately. It's often easier to deal with all of these different elements if you tie them together into groups that makes sense in the context of the illustration. Again, this is kind of hard to explain in text, which is exactly why I made the videos!

Here's a YouTube version of the same video if you're having any problems viewing the high-resolution video at the top of the post.
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In case you missed them,
here are links to the first five
Adobe Illustrator Inking tutorial videos:

#1 - Setting Up and Importing Images
#2 - Palette Options and settings
#3 - Freehand Calligraphic BRUSH Tool
#4 We Start INKING in Illustrator!
#5 - Ellipse Shape Tools