Evenlypiece

This is a short and sweet tutorial on how to convert your stroke to a shape. Why do we need to do that? Say you’ve drawn a nice combos of straight lines and curves with your pen tool but you’re not satisfied with it just having a solid color. You can apply gradient to it by changing it to become a shape so it will be treated like one.

Below is a random pattern I have drawn with a pen tool. Nothing special. They are all strokes as you would have known from the blue line in the middle. You can tell a stroke from a shape by looking at where the path is. In this case, the path is obviously in the middle followed along by the black stroke hence it’s a stroke. In a shape, the path is the outline, and if below was a shape, the blue line/path should be, therefore, not in the middle, instead outlining it.

So to change the pattern from strokes to shapes, just select the strokes and go to:
Object >> Expand. The Expand dialog will appear, make sure Stroke is checked and click ok.

You should see the path outlining the pattern indicating their change into shapes.

Now they are treated as shapes because they are already shapes. So let’s do some testing. Gradients work only in shapes so while the paths are selected, try changing the gradient color. You should see something like the one below.

That’s all! Hope you find this useful :)