Stacking strokes in Illustrator to create railway tracks and roads

By default, a path in Illustrator has a single stroke and a single fill. It’s easy to add multiple strokes to a path and some very interesting looks can be achieved when changes are made to attributes like the colour and width of those strokes.

TIMELINE

0:00 – Introduction

  • The Properties panel can only display a single stroke for a path. To view multiple strokes or fills applied to a single element, select that item and view all of it’s properties inside the Appearance panel.

0:57 – Create roads

  • First stroke
    – 20pt
    – Black
  • Second stroke
    – 18pt
    – Grey (RGB 102) (Hex 666)
  • Third stroke
    – 3pt
    – Yellow
    – Dashed – Dash 12pt

4:26 – Create railway tracks

  • First stroke
    – 17pt
    – Black
  • Second stroke
    – 12pt
    – White
  • Third stroke
    – 24pt
    – Black
    – Dashed – 5pt 6pt
  • Set the white stroke Opacity to 0%
  • For the Object Opacity, tick the Knockout Group option

7:50 – Graphic styles

  • Capture road and railway track as styles

9:16 – Solution for problem with paths meeting

  • For paths that intersect, undesired results can occur if the same Graphic Style is applied to them individually. To correct this, first group the paths together and apply the Graphic Style to the group.
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