: How to overlap a continuous line on itself? Yesterday I tried to create the following shape: Following the path from the top it goes round, crosses over itself (bottom left), goes around again

@Cugini998

It is possible to do this without cutting the curve. What you do is you use the appearance panel to overlay 2 strokes on top of each other. Then over this layer copy the same strokes, but this time with a dash that is set up so that the stroke only covers a part of the curve.



Image 1: A path that overlaps itself.

This works irrespectivelly wether the curve is open or closed. There is also a an alernative approach for this problem that has been answered before in the question:


How to overlap custom art brush shapes

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@Nimeshi706

Illustrator does not have any method or ability to control the stacking of an object upon itself. There's no way to control what does or does not "overlap" on a single object.

Only separate object have any stacking abilities. So to create a visual overlap, you must have more than one object in Illustrator.

How you achieve multiple objects appearing like a single overlapping object depends a great deal upon the nature of the image itself. However, in general, there's no real easily editable method which is better than any other. The method you've outlined in the question is as good as any other.

If any improvement can be made in the editing, I would suggest using a single path with multiple strokes applied via the Appearance Panel. Then it is a fairly easy matter to use the Direct Selection Tool to copy a section of the path, paste it in front, and alter the end caps of that pasted section so it visually appears not present, but does create the overlap.

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