20 Adobe Illustrator Color tips in 20 mins - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch 20 in 20 tips Intro: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and today it's 20 color tips in 20 minutes or less in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes each of which teaches a small range of techniques or tips. Today we're looking at 20 colored tips in 20 minutes or less, and we're doing 20 today because I simply couldn't whittle it down to 10 there were just so many great tips that you can use every day in Illustrator in relation to color. We're going to cover a whole heap of them in this class. We want to look at the color palette, we're going to look at color guide, we're going to look at shortcut keys, we're going to look at global colors and swatches and sample colors from things, turning things into grayscale, adjusting saturation and a whole lot more. Now, as you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too may enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now, if you're ready let's get started with our 20 color tips in 20 minutes or less. 2. Pt 1 Before We Begin: Before we get started with our 20 tips, I'm going to go over a few things that I'm assuming you already know about color in Illustrator. I'm assuming that you know that this is the fill color here and this is the stroke color, and it will be applied to any object as you draw it. I'm also assuming you know that by clicking on the fill color and bringing it to the front, you're targeting it, so that you could change that color, for example. If you need to change the stroke color, then you're going to click on this watch here to bring the stroke to the foreground, so that you can change the stroke color. I'm assuming you know to double-click these color swatches so you can select a different color. Double-click the fill one, and then the fill color is going to be changed, but this is not being applied to this shape here because the shape wasn't selected when we made those changes. I'm also assuming that you know how to get hold of your palette either by clicking them in a palette list like this or by choosing window. Then, choose for example, color, color guide or swatches. They are the panels that we're going to be most interested in, in this class. 3. Pt 2 Five Illustrator Color Tips: Change the color modes and display the sliders in the color palette. When you're working in the color palette, you can instantly display the sliders by clicking on this triangle icon. Click once to collapse the panel and then again to expand it so you see all the sliders. Click once more and you'll go back to just seeing the spectrum but not sliders. You can also change very quickly from the RGB spectrum that's shown here to one of the other color modes. Hold down the Shift key as you click on the spectrum and you'll switch to HSB. Click again, CMYK. Click again for the web spectrum and, then grayscale, and then we're back to RGB. You could select those same options from the flyout menu here but sometimes just Shift-clicking on the spectrum is a whole lot quicker. Investigate color harmonies for a color using the color guide. When you have a color and you want to see colors that would go well with it, select that color and then choose Window and then Color Guide. You'll see that color here in this little box, and you can double-click to update the harmonies. Color harmonies are colors that are related to the color that you've chosen by their position on the color wheel. Right now we're seeing the complimentary color; the color opposite this one on the color wheel. It will generally go well with this color, but there are other color harmonies and every one of them is listed here. You can select any one of these color harmonies if you want to use it. I'm going to use Triad, which are an additional two colors that are placed at intervals around the color wheel relative to our blue color. When I select that, those colors are added here. If I want to add them to the swatches panel, all I need to do is to click here to save the color group to the swatches panel. Here is my new set of colors that I can use. These are colors that will go well with the color that I have selected. Change a color or change an entire color harmony. When you have a color harmony that you like, you may want to investigate other options for colors that have the same special relationship. To do that, click the Edit Colors button here at the foot of the color guide. With my colors locked, which they are right now, I can just rotate them around to find other combinations of colors that have the same special relationship. When I find a group of colors that I like, I can add them to the color swatch by clicking here on create new color group, and click ''Okay''. Now, because I didn't have any objects selected, the new selection has not had any effect on these objects, but I can do it with the objects selected as well. What I'm going to do is to go back to my original set of colors. I'm going to click here on Edit Colors, go back into edit, and let's roll around a different set of colors. This time I'm not only creating a potential new color scheme, I'm also recoloring my shapes as I do so. Dynamically change the color of an object. In the previous step, you saw the re-color dialogue you used to create a palette, but you can also use it to dynamically recolor a object. I have this rectangle selected. I'm going to click here on the re-color option and I'm going to edit. The reason why I love this dialogue is that it allows me to see in place exactly what the color I'm selecting is going to look like as a backdrop to my cactus. I can experiment with all sorts of colors here and I may come up even with a color backdrop that I would never have imagined using it by simply selecting a color using the color selector. You can dynamically experiment with various colors to see what you like before clicking Okay to use that color in your illustration. Handy shortcut keys for working with the fill and stroke color pickers. Use Shift and X to swap the fill and stroke colors. Press the letter D to set the default fill and stroke colors. Press the letter X to toggle between targeting the fill and the stroke. When you have the stroke or the fill selected, pressing the forward-slash key will set that option to no fill or no stroke. Press the full stop key key set it to a gradient, and press the comma key to set it to a solid fill. If you check on your keyboard, you'll see that these options for the comma, the period, and the forward-slash are side-by-side on the keyboard making it easy to remember which is which and where they are. 4. Pt 3 Five more Illustrator Color tips: Making a solid color swatch from a gradient stop: When you have a gradient that you like that you want to get a solid color out of, here's how to do it. First, select the object that has the gradient applied to it, and open the gradient panel. Select the color stop for the color that you want to extract. For example, this color here. Now, I'm going to deselect my shape here and click on this color to make it the current fill color. I can now add it as a swatch by clicking here on new swatch and click" Okay". Clean up and make more relevant your swatches panel. When you have an untidy swatches panel, you can remove any colors that are not used in your document by simply clicking the flyout menu and choose, "Select All Unused". Click the "Delete" button and click "Yes". All unused colors are now removed from the swatches panel. To add any colors that are not in the swatches panel but which are used in the document, click the "Flyout" menu and choose "Add used colors". Now the swatches panel better represents the colors in use in the document. Understand and create a global color. Global colors are special colors. You'll see that they have a little triangle in their bottom corner. Where a global color is used to color an object, you can recolor every one of those objects that is colored with that global color without even selecting them. I'm going to double-click on this color and just change it. When I click "Preview", you'll see that everywhere that color has been used in my artwork, it's being changed even though those objects were not selected. You can create any color as a global color by first selecting the color that you want to create. I'm going to click here now on "New Swatch", and I'm going to click "Global". That's all you need to do to create that color as a global color. In future, I can now use this global color to color objects that I create. Global colors and tints. I have two shapes here, both of which have been colored in a different way. This one, I'm going to change the color off by selecting the base shape. I'll double-click on the color and then apply a different color to it. You'll see that the highlight and the shadow haven't changed. In this case, I've colored my object with tints of a global color. When I double-click the global color and change it, the tints change color as well. You can create tints of a global color by first filling the shape with the global color and then go to the color dialogue. I'll choose window and then color. This will automatically show you the tint adjuster. I'm going to apply a tint to this shape. This color will now change automatically whenever I change the global color that it's based on. Create global colors from an existing piece of art. To create global colors from an existing piece of art, first, select all the art. Go to the swatches panel and click the "New Color Group" option. You'll select the "Selected Artwork" option and then select "Convert Process to Global" and click, "Okay". Now all of the colors in this artwork have been created as global colors. If I double-click on a color and change that color, anything that was created in that artwork using that color will now change accordingly. 5. Pt 4 Five Illustrator Color Tips: Replace one color swatch with another. Sometimes it's handy to be able to replace a global color swatch with another color. I have a pink color selected here, it's not a global color, but I'm going to use it to replace this particular global color. To do so, I'm going to select the swatch just by clicking on it, and I'm going to hold the Alt key as I drag and drop it on top of this global swatch. Anything that was colored with that previous color will now be colored the color that I've created as my global color by dragging and dropping. You'll see that the pink color is now a global color. Organize colors into color groups. It's easy to organize your swatches palette so that you put your colors into groups. I'm going to start by making a group of green. I'll click on a green color, and click New Group. I'm going to call this Greens. I'm going to drag and drop greens from my swatches palette into this new group. I can organize them in any order that I like by just placing the green in a position I want it to appear in. I'll click away and select the yellow, click New Group, and type Yellows. I can now drag and drop additional yellow colors into this group. I can also double-click the color picker and create a nice yellow to use. Once I've created my color, I'll select the yellows group, click New Swatch, and click "OK", and my new color will be added to the group. Find and use Illustrator's swatch libraries. Illustrator ships with a number of swatch libraries that you can use for your own projects. To find these, click the flyout menu on the Swatches panel, choose Open Swatch Library, and you can start with something like Earthtone. Here you'll find a series of color groups and if you see one that you like, just double-click on the color group to add it to your swatches panel. You can progress through the libraries by clicking this icon that'll take you through the various swatch libraries. Whenever you see a swatch that you like, just double-click on it to add it to your swatches panel. When you are done, you can just close this panel down. These colors are now available to use in this document. Save and load your own custom swatch libraries. Sometimes you might have a series of colors that are appropriate to a company or a particular project that you want to be able to use in a series of documents. Well, you can save them as a swatch library. Open the Swatches panel, click the flyout menu, choose Save Swatch Library as AI, and then type a name for it, I'm going to call this corporate, and I'll click "Save". I'll close this document and open a brand new document. I can now go and access my saved swatch library by clicking the flyout menu, choose Open Swatch Library, User Defined, and I'll click corporate. Here are the colors from the swatch that I just saved that are now accessible to this document. I can simply double-click each of these color groups in turn to add them to my swatches for this particular document. Ensuring that a swatch library is always accessible. In a previous tip, I created my own swatch library, which I'm now going to go ahead and open from the user defined group. If I want this swatch library to always be accessible and visible when I create a new Illustrator document, I can do so. I'll click the flyout menu and choose Persistent. I'm going to go ahead and close this document, and I'm going to create a brand new document. You'll see the swatch library that we created as persistent is opened automatically when the new document is created. 6. Pt 5 Final Five Illustrator Color Tips: Sample colors to use as solid color swatches. You can sample colors from almost anything to use as a solid color swatch. For this gradient, I'll click the "Eyedropper Tool" and then hold the Shift key as I click on a color that I want to select as a solid color. To add it as a swatch, I'll click "New Swatch" and click, "Okay". I also have a bitmap image here, a photograph from unsplash.com. I can click on any of the colors in this image and add them as color swatches as well. Convert artwork to Grayscale. It's possible to convert your artwork to Grayscale without having to adjust the actual color swatches. To do this, you'll choose Select All to select the artwork, and then choose Edit, and then Edit Colors, Convert to Grayscale. This converts the artwork to a Grayscale image. If you need to create swatches for it, you can choose, Select, and then All. Click the "New Color Group" option and click "Okay". Creating templates with color swatches. I've got a document here with slides that I would like to use frequently and with all my swatches already set up for that document. I'm going to choose File and then Save as Template because that allows me to create this as a template that I can use over and over again. I'm going to call it corporate and I'm going to click, "Save". I'll close this document, and now I'm going to create a new file from the template. I can select the template and just click "New". I now have a document which has a Swatches Panel with only the swatches that I want to have accessible to that document. The document size and color mode are those that were set up with that template. Partially, they saturate your artwork. I have a piece of artwork here created using global colors and I want to desaturate it. I'm going to select everything on the artboard and choose Edit and then Edit Colors and click "Saturate". I'm going to zero this out and then click "Preview on". Now I'll reduce the intensity of the saturation to remove some of the saturation from the artwork. I'll click, "Okay", when I'm done. Now, I don't need to create a new set of global colors because these are still global colors. If I want to change the background here, I'll just double-click on the color that is controlling that and change it to a different color. Create quick and easy tints and shades using Color Guide. I'm going to create tints and shades of these colors using Color Guide. I'm going to select my first color and choose Window, and then Color Guide. I'm going to double-click on my color to bring up the tints and shades for that color. If I don't see tints and shades, I'm going to select them here. Now, I'm going to select the color that's going to have the shade and I'll select a shade for it. Now the tint box and I'll add a tint. If I don't like that, I can go a little bit lighter. Now, I'm going to the pink color. I'll double-click to get the tints and shades for my pink. I'm going to add this as a shade and this one as my tint. I'll now click my yellow color, double-click here and go and pick up the shade and the tint for my yellow color. Now I have tints and shades of all my selected colors. 7. Pt 6 Project and Wrapup: Your project for this class will be to tell me quite simply in the class project area which of these tips really spoke to you, one of the ones that you didn't know already, and that you think you can use pretty much every day in Illustrator. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you have learned things that you didn't already know about Illustrator and about color in Illustrator. As you're watching this video, you will have seen a prompt which asks you whether you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learned things from it, give it a thumbs up and write just a few words about why you enjoyed it. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley, thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.