Shapes drawn with the pencil tool are always created with the basic fill appearance, even if "new art has basic appearance" is not checked.
- Create a new Illustrator document.
- In the Appearance panel, deselect "New art has basic appearance", if it's selected.
- Select the pencil tool and use it to draw a curved line.
- Set the stroke of the line to 10 point and the color to red.
- Set the fill to black.
- Draw another line with the pencil tool. The stroke is 10 point red, but the fill reverts to none.
- Repeat with the pen tool. This time, the fill stays black when a second line is drawn.
This problem was not present in earlier versions of Illustrator.
System: Adobe Illustrator 27.6.1, M2 Mac Studio, MacOS Ventura 13.4.
David Baselt
shared this idea
This is due the 'Fill new pencil strokes' option in the Pencil Tool Options dialog — it forces the new paths drawn with the pencil to drop their fills, even though the New Art Has Basic Appearance option may suggest both will be preserved.
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David Baselt
commented
Thank you, that was the problem. I just upgraded from CS6, which didn't have that pencil options dialog or, for that matter, the "new art has basic appearance" option. I suppose there must be cases when it's useful to click a filled shape of some sort and have the pencil tool pick up only the stroke style from that shape, but not the fill...
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David, please check if you have the option 'Fill new pencil strokes' enabled in the Pencil Tool Options dialog (hit Enter while having the Pencil active or double-click the tool’s icon to open it).
This is really an interesting clash of options... originally, this option prevents the Pencil from having open paths filled, but it also applies to closed paths and directly contradicts the New Art Basic Appearance routine...
What do you think can be improved in this situation, to avoid problems like this and others?
