25 Tips for Recoloring Artwork in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. 25 tips for recoloring your artwork in Adobe Illustrator Intro: Hello, and welcome to this class, 25 tips for recoloring your artwork in Adobe Illustrator. My name's Halen Bradley, and I'm a Skillshare top teacher. I have over 270 courses here on Skillshare and over 185,000 student enrollments. In this class, we'll look at tips for recoloring your artwork in Adobe Illustrator. We'll look at the Swatches palette and the recolor artwork dialogue, including investigating some recent changes to this dialogue that make it way more functional than before. Also look at how to compare different colorways for your design side by side. This class provides you with color tips and techniques for working in Illustrator every day. Without further ado, let's get started with our Illustrator artwork recoloring tips. 2. Tip 1 Convert Process Colors to Global Colors: The artwork that we're looking at here on the screen is a set of ice cream icons, and you'll see that there's a limited number of colors. These are the six colors I've used, and they're repeated throughout the document. Now the problem is that to be able to change the color of the blue objects, I would right now need to select every single one of them because these are what are called process colors. They're individually applied to the objects and there's no link between them. Now, the other kind of color is called global color, and it has a little white corner in the swatches palette, so it makes it readily identifiable. When you use global colors, all you need to do is to change the color and everything that's colored with that will change automatically. That would be a really good idea for this particular set because I'm re using colors over and over. Having created this document and not use global colors, we're left with the situation of how do we get these colors to be global, and how do we apply them to our artwork? Well, luckily, it's really, really simple. The first thing we'll do is go to the selection tool, and we're going to select over all of these objects. Not only because they contain all the colors, but also the process that we're about to do is going to turn every one of the colors that's applied in this image to global colors. Not only are we going to get global colors in our swatches panel, but all of these colorings are going to be global. So we want to select everything that we want to affect. Going down here at the bottom of the Swatches panel to new color group. I'm going to click on that once. Now I'm going to give my new color group a name, ice creams. I'm selecting selected artwork. In other words, everything that's selected is not only going to be sampled as a potential color, but also in this process, I'm going to be converting all my process colors to global colors, so I'm making sure that everything is selected, so it will be all subject to this change. I'm just going to click Okay. You'll say that there's a second color group now in my swatches panel, but let's go and select an object. Now, I'm using the group selection tool to do this because these ice creams are in groups because they're icons. So each one is a group, I need to select just this ice cream here. You can see that it is colored with this global color, not this color here, this one here. And each one of the is now a global color. So not only have we sampled the color scheme if we hadn't already had it here as a color group, we would have sampled it and created it as a color But also these colors are global and they've been applied to everything in the image. Let's see what the implication of that is. I'm just going to click away from here. I'm going to get rid of our process colors because they're not using those. So let's look now at what happens when we change one of these colors. I've got one color here that's pretty close to this one here. I'm actually going to take it and change it to a very bright yellow so I'm going to double click on it, and then let's go and change its color. Now, we've got HSB as the model here, which is hue saturation brightness. You could also use RGB if you prefer. I'm going to use hue saturation brightness. I'm going to kick up brightness of it, and I'm going to move it a little more soundly into the yellows. You can see here because I've got preview turned on that the change is throughout the document, I selected this color here, but this one and this one and this one and every other element in this illustration that was colored with that original color would now be changed. I'm just going to click. You can see here there's a big advantage in using global colors when it comes to recoloring your artwork. 3. Tip 2 Create and Save a Color Library: Sometimes when you've created an illustration in Illustrator and you've got colors that you like, you may want to save them so that you could use them later on elsewhere. We're going to do that now. I'm going to open up my swatches panel and just see what I've got. Well, I've got the process colors from this illustration here as a color group, but there's a lot of other stuff here as well. If we're going to save this set of colors, this color group, to a library so we could use it later on. The first thing we're going to need to do, and it's very counter intuitive. It makes no sense, but believe me, this is the way it's done is we're going to empty out all of these colors. Just a heads up. If you want to be able to come back to this illustration in future and have access to all the colors in the swatches panel, save your document right now. Because what we're going to do is the next step to saving this color group is to get rid of everything else. Let's assume that I've gone ahead and saved this file. But now the next step is, I want to save this color group as a library that I could use in future. The first thing I'm going to do is make sure I don't have anything selected. That is critical. Now I'm going to select on the first of the colors I don't want. Now, in this case, I don't want anything except this group. I'm going all the way up to the top here, I'm going to shift click on the white color that's sitting here. Can't delete none and registration, so there's no point in even selecting them. You're just going to click the trash can. This is about to get rid of not only color swatches, but also gradients and patterns. I'm just going to delete everything. What's left in the swatches panel is the colors that I want to save as a color library and the two things that I'm not able to remove anyway. To save them, we're going here to the flyout menu. And we're going all the way down here to Save Swatch Library as AI. You'll be taken automatically by illustrated to the location E expects your swatches to be in. Now I'm going to call this ice cream icons, and I'll just click save. As you can see, the process that we've just done has empty out the swatches panel. If you need to get those swatches back, before you save this file, you can do edit and undo delete swatches, and that you will just bring them back. But let's have a look at a new file. I'm just going to choose File new Now, in a new file, I'm just getting my standard Swatches panel. This is very unlike Photoshop. If you're familiar with photoshop, if you had added something to Swatches panel, then that would be still there. In Illustrator, it's not. This is the Swatches panel for that type of file that I just created. So if I want to get access to my ice cream icon colors, this is what I'm going to do, either click the Fly menu here and go down to Open Swatch library user to find, or I can do it here from this icon. So we're going to use a defined, and what we're going to do is look for ice cream icons, which is the one that I just saved. Click on it. And that opens up this ice cream icons panel. You can see that the only thing in it because we set it up correctly in the first place is these ice cream colors. So what I need to do is to get them from here to here because you can use them out of here, but you can't use them out of here. So I'm just going to click ice creams, and that takes them all into the swatches panel for this document only. Now I can just close down this panel. These ice cream colors are now available inside this document so that I could use them to color my artwork. 4. Tip 3 Recolor using a Color Library: One benefit of using global colors for your art is it makes it fairly easy to recolor things. What I'm going to do is open a color library that I've previously saved and use it to replace the colors in this piece of artwork. Inside the Swatches panel, I'm going to click on the Fly menu. I'm going to use it to find. Now I happen to know that the one that I'm looking for is called hydranga. I'm going to click on that. I'm going to click the colors to add them to my swatches palette. What I've got here is a set of process colors, and I've got the global colors that are in use in my image. And what I can do is a straight one for one replacement. So I could take this green color here. Notice that I don't have anything selected, which is really important right now. I'm going to grab this green color. I'm going to hold down the ult or option key, and I'm just going to drag it on top of one of these other colors, and it's going to replace it throughout the image. I'm going to do that with all the colors, all the process colors that I brought in and use them to replace the colors in the original image. So not only have they replaced the original colors, but also they've been converted to global colors within this image. So if I don't like one of them, for example, this green, I can simply double click on it, change the color a little bit, and then just click. So you can see the process colors are unchanged, but these are the global colors in use in the image. If I tweak this image a little bit to actually get a look that I like and colors that I like, then what I would do is get rid of the added color library. This would be my new color library. I'd save it so that I could get access to it again in the future. While this is a useful method of recoloring your artwork using a color library. It's not the only one, and it's probably also not the most efficient one. 5. Tip 4 Apply a Color Library to your Art: Probably the most efficient way of recoloring artwork in Illustrator is to use the recolor artwork dialogue. To do this, you'll first need to select the artwork that you want to recolor. I'm going to the selection tool. I'm going to select over everything, including my little palettes here. With something selected in the document, you get access to recolor artwork. So this is an icon on the bar up here, but you can also get access to it by clicking Edit and then Edit Colors and recolor artwork. Whichever way you go, you're going to get exactly the same dialogue and you're going to be in exactly the same starting position within that dialogue. Now, what the recolor artwork dialogue does is like a heap of things. So we're going to explore those, but first up, we're going to look at color libraries, and in particular, the color libraries that are shipped with Illustrator. So I'm going here, I'm going to click this option. And these are the color libraries that are shipped with Illustrator that are on disc, not currently available in the Swatches panel, but available from the disc. So I'm going to choose the neutral one because that's got some interesting sort of neutral colors in it. I'm just going to click once. When I do, notice what happens to the color wheel here. What happens is that I can see the individual colors that are in that color library and there are a lot of them, and some of them have been applied to my image, not all of them, but some of them. You can see here that I've got three colors that are really, really similar. That may not work for me, but let's just see what we can get. Once the colors have been applied to your image, you can click on this icon here, which allows you to randomly change the color order. These six colors that are currently in use in the image will just be rotated around. So where a color might be applied here, right now, it may be applied to a different color in the underlying image the next time round. So let's just see what we can get. Now, one of the problems with these three colors is they're so similar that we're losing quite a bit of the detail in our image. But if we can split those colors far enough apart, then we may get some looks to our image that we like. Now, if you're not seeing anything there, you can reset it, so I'm just going to click on reset and you can go and find a different set of colors to use. I'm going to try nature and then beach and see what that gives me. There's a lot of really right colors here, but these are the colors that we're being offered. We don't have so many colors that are so close that we're losing detail in our underlying image. So it might be better to use something like this instead. Of course, if I find something I like, I'm just going to click away from this, and my illustration has been permanently changed. The colors in the illustration are changed permanently. The colors in the color group here are changed permanently because they were global colors. Now, in addition to the reset option, there's another one in the recolor artwork dialogue. So let's just go and say that, I'm just going to undo the recoloring. I'm going back into the recolor artwork dialogue. I'm going back to my beach color scheme, and I'm going to walk it around my document again and say that I saw something a second ago that I really liked. Then in this particular part of the dialogue and not in any other part of this dialogue, unfortunately, there is an undo changes option. So if you want to undo your changes, you can do so, so you can wind back to something that you like here. Then when you find it, you can just click away and that's going to be the new color scheme for your artwork. 6. Tip 5 Apply a Color Group to Artwork in one Step: Continuing on with our look at the recolor artwork dialogue, I'm going to select all my art. I'm just pressing Control or command A, click on the Recolor artwork dialogue. Now, you can see over here that I have a color group, a second color group in this particular document. I can use the recolor artwork dialogue to apply this color group to this art. So the way that we do that again, this first panel is from the color library area. I'm going to click this and I'm going here to color group. I can go and apply automatically my hydranga color scheme to my artwork, and going to click on that. Again, we can do the same thing as we were doing previously and just roll these colors around to see if we can get them into a better placement within our art. When you find something that you like, you can just click away, but you can also progress backwards and forwards through these color changes to see if there was something that you saw as you went through that you like best of all. I like this, I'm going to just going to click away. 7. Tip 6 Color with all the Document Colors: The next tool we're going to look at as a little esoteric, but I do want to point it out to you. In this iteration of my ice cream icons, I have a swatches panel that does not include the color group of colors that are in use in this document. That's really important. These colors are not here. In addition, you'll notice that pink is fairly highly represented in this document. There's two different pinks here and they're used quite a bit in the illustration. They're not appearing here. There are no pinks at all. That's less of an issue, perhaps, but it's just notable. So what I'm going to do is select over my artwork, and I'm going to use these colors to recolor my artwork. So we're going back to the recolor artwork dialogue. And in this first panel in the color library area, is this option called Document Swatches. Now, color group would allow us to get to any one of these particular color groups individually, but document swatches is going to give us all of these. So I'm just going to click on it. And some of the colors have been sampled from here as matches to the tone and underlying colors in my image. And we can just do exactly what we've been doing. We can rotate these around. I'm just going to click here, and we're just going to rotate those colors around. Now, it's the set of colors that initially get applied to the image. These may not be colors that you like, but in addition, they might be colors that you do like, they might give you interesting effects. I like this. I'm just going to click away from my image, and that would be another possible recoloring of it. In this case, using the colors that are actually appearing currently in the swatches panel. 8. Tip 7 Duplicate an Artboard and its contents: Up until now, you've no doubt noticed that every recoloring that we apply to our artwork has resulted in a permanent change to that artwork. If we wanted to save different versions of the artwork, then we would need to be saving our file, giving it new names all along. We're going to take a really small diversion at this point to see how we would populate a document with multiple versions of our artwork so we could get some comparisons going. What I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom out a little bit and just move my artwork over to one side. I'm holding the space bar as I with the selection tool, just grab my artboard and just move it out of the way. Now I'm going to the artboard tool, so I'll just click on it. In art board mode, I can make a copy of this artboard by holding down the old key on a PC option on a MAC. I'm going to start dragging, and when I get it clear of everything, I'm going to add the shift key because that's going to move it perfectly horizontally. As soon as I've got it into position, I'll let go the left mouse button and then let go the shift and ult keys or the shift and option on a MAC. Now got a copy of that artboard. I'm going to drag another version away adding shift as I get it out of the way, and I'm just going to place it pretty much in line with the others. Still with my artboard tool, I'm going to click on this artboard. I'm going to shift click on this one and shift click on this one. So I now have all three artboards selected. Again, holding down the Alt option key. I'm just going to drag down, add the shift key, so I'm going in a perfectly vertical direction just so things are neat and tidy. When I get it into position, let go the left mouse button, let go the Alt Shift Option and Shift on a MAC. Now, we're in artboard mode at the moment, let's just click on the selection tool to get us out of that. Now we have, for example, six individual artboards. I could select over the content of one artboard. Click on the recolor artwork icon, go to color libraries, and apply a different color scheme to my art. I can move the colors around until I get something that I like and click away when I'm done. I've got my original artwork with a newly colored version. So that's giving me a visual look at successive recolorings of my art, and we're going to use a setup like this for the next few videos. 9. Tip 8 Changing the Prominent Colors in the Image: Let's continue our investigation of the recolor artwork dialogue. I'm going to select the content on this artboard, go back to the recolor artboard dialogue. The colors that we're seeing here are the colors in the image. Of course, we can rotate them around by just clicking this icon. We're taking the original colors and just mapping them differently within the image. The colors themselves aren't changing, where they appear in the illustration is changing Now, at any point, we could come down here and look at the prominent colors. These are a representation of the colors in the underlying image. Let me just go for a minute and reset the document back to what it was. The pinks are very dominant in this image. What we could do is reduce the dominance of the pink by just sliding this slider across. These colors become more dominant. We could add a bit more blue by just increasing the blue and give it more of a blue look. This is a little bit heat and miss, but it can give you some interesting results, and it is what you're going to do with this prominent colors area of this dialogue. At any time, of course, you can reset your image. You may want to rotate things around and then try that tool again. When you find something you're happy with, just click out of the way to apply it to the image. 10. Tip 9 Shift Image Colors towards another Color: Another feature of the recolor artwork dialogue is the ability to take all the colors within a selected piece of artwork in a certain direction. I've got my artwork selected. I'm in the first panel of the recolor artwork dialogue. I'm looking at this image and I'm thinking I would like to take it in the direction of green rather than the leaning it has towards pink or red right now. To do this, I'm going to double click on the color wheel to open the color picker. I'm going to choose the color that I want to head in the direction of, which is going to be a sort of green color. I'll click it and click. And when I do, the entire image has been taken in a different direction. Now, this is hit or miss. This is really quite hit or miss, but you might find that this takes you in an interesting direction with your art. Just going to reset that. Let's try something more like an orange. And this time we're taken into some really hot colors in this image, but just rotating them around might give us a result that we're interested in using. I'm pretty happy with that. I'll click away. 11. Tip 10 Adjust Brightness and Saturation: The recolor artwork dialogue also has features for shifting the brightness and the saturation of your colors, and it's this slider down here. Right now we're seeing brightness and hue on the color wheel, and we can adjust those by dragging on this slider because that's going to brighten the image. We can also adjust saturation, and that's this option here. When I click on that, we can make the colors more saturated, or we could make them less saturated tending towards more neutral colors and gray scales. There is the ability to take any of the colors that you achieve either through this dialogue or through applying colors to your image and just brightening them up or adjusting their saturation using this dialogue. This is not something that you can easily do elsewhere in Illustrator. When you need to adjust brightness and saturation, the recolor artwork dialogue does provide you with some interesting and really useful options. 12. Tip 11 Sample and Use Colors from other Artwork: Another feature of the recolor artwork dialogue is this color theme picker. To be able to use it, we're going to need to do some work first. I have an image here, which is another set of vectors in Illustrator. I'm going to select over them, and I'm going to copy them. I'm just using control or command C. I'm going back to our illustration here and I'm going to paste them in with control or command V and just position them over here. Now let's go back and select our artwork and go back to the recolor artwork dialogue. Because here the color theme picker can be used to select the colors from this art over here. I'm going to click it. I'm going to draw around my artwork. Now the colors from the artwork have been applied to my art. The same thing is going to work. We can rotate those colors around where set with the colors we're using, but we can rotate them around our artwork. Now, if I reset this, we could be a little more strategic in the colors. I'm going back to my color theme picker. If I just like oranges and yellows, then I could select around an object that's just colored with those colors, and now we get different shades of orange and yellow in our artwork. And again, we could do something like just isolating the watermelon slice here. It has a more limited set of colors than the entire piece of artwork, and so we might get some interesting results here. Now, while this piece of artwork only has what looks like four colors in it, it's been stretched to six, and the way that Illustrator does that is it takes one of those colors and it tints it to get these extra shades. So just be aware of what it's doing there. When you find something that you like, you can just click away. And again, that's another iteration of this recoloring of our artwork. D 13. Tip 12 Sample Colors from a Photograph: Another option that you have in the recolor artwork dialogue is to sample colors from a bitmap image. For example, a photograph. The kind of images that you can place in Illustrator like BMPs or PNGs or JPEs. I'm going to choose file and then place, and I already have an image here to use. It's from the Grand Canal in Venice. I'll click Place, and I'm just going to drag out a small version of this photograph in my Illustrator file. We'll go back and select our artwork back to the recolor artwork dialogue We'll go to the color theme picker. I'm just going to click on it and then click on my artwork. The result is that illustrator is loosely sampling colors from this image to apply to the artwork. As usual, we've been given six colors to map onto our six colors. We can rotate them around. But clicking somewhere different in the photo is not going to give us any different results in terms of the colors that we see, I've experimented with this quite a bit, and it doesn't seem to change the colors that you get. You get what you're given, and that's what you're seeing here. It is another way of getting a different variety of colors in your artwork sampled loosely from an image 14. Tip 13 Create a Color Group from a Photo: We saw in the previous video that we could sample colors in general from a photograph and use them to recolor our artwork. If you've got a photograph with interesting colors and you'd like to be a little bit more accurate, a bit more strategic about how you apply the colors, this is what you can do. You can sample and create a color group from that photograph. I'm going to open up the swatches panel, bring it over here for convenience. I'm making sure that none of my swatches are selected right now because otherwise, illustrator tends to walk them around. I'm going to click on the new color group icon and just click Okay. That adds a new color group. Now I'm going to the eye dropper tool and I'm going to shift click on a color in the underlying photograph. The shift click allows me to sample the color under the eye dropper. Here it is here. I'm just going to drag it onto the color group, and then I'll go back and get another color. Now, if I don't want that exact color, I could select a lighter version of it, just adjust it before I drag it into the color group, or I could do that afterwards, doesn't matter. I'm thinking something lighter is probably a good option as well. Once I've got the colors in my swatches panel, we know exactly what to do. We're going to select over the artwork, go back to the recolor artwork dialogue. It's a color group and it's exactly the same size as the one that is currently being used to color this illustration. From the color library panel, we'll go down here to color group, and we're going to pick up our new color group, and then we can rotate the colors around. Until we find something that we like, and when we're happy with what we see or we can go back to something that we saw earlier, we can just click away. 15. Tip 14 Generative Recolor with Illustrator Prompts: One of the exciting new features in Illustrator is the ability to recolor your art using AI. I'm going to select over my artwork back into the recolor artwork dialogue. This time we're going to choose generative recolor. Now, if you haven't used that before, you will need to accept the terms for using I've already done that here, so I'm just going straight to generative recolor. Now, this dialogue gives us access to what it calls some sample prompts. Now, if you haven't used AI before, the concept is that you give it some a prompt. In this case, illustrators coming with nine sample prompts. The sample prompt is Salmon Sushi, and that's a prompt for colors that can be used to recolor your art. So you can select any one of these nine sample prompts. Let's look at Salmon Sushi. Depending on the speed of your Internet connection, it may take a little while for the colors to come back. So these are variations of those colors. I'm just going to click on one of them to see it in my artwork, and there's another one and another one and another one. Now, if you're not happy with what you see, you can generate it again to get variations of these colors. And again, we've got some different options here. When you find something you like, you can just click away from the dialogue, and that will be a new potential color scheme for your art. 16. Tip 15 Generative Recolor with Custom Prompts: In addition to using the generative AI prompts that are shipped with Illustrator. You can also create your own prompts. Back in the generative recolor dialogue, let's type our own prompt. Now, your prompt can be anything that describes the kind of colors that you might want to use. I'm going to call Min Beach umbrella, and I'll click Generate. And so now I'm getting colors that are reminiscent of a beach umbrella or at least what illustrators, a e tool, thinks are beach umbrella colors. I can generate again if I want to get different iterations of those colors. Again, once I find something that I like, I can just click away to apply it to my artwork. 17. Tip 16 Specify Colors for Generative Recolor to use: Another option that you have with generative recolor in Illustrator is to use specific colors. Now, this can be done with either the sample prompt or your own prompts. But I'm going to use my own prompt because there's something I want to show you some behavior here, which is really a bit of a nuisance. I'm going to go back to my beach umbrella and you can see that as I start typing the prompt that I'd previously entered is offered up to me. And it seems to be an invitation to click on this, to add it to the box. Well, if you click on it, nothing happens. So instead, as soon as you see the prompt that you want to use appearing here, use the down arrow key to select it. Now, again, avoid the temptation to press enter because illustrator will, if you press enter, simply head off and start generating color themes for you. In fact, what you want to do is to add colors to guide your prompt. So I must move things out of the way because this little box is going to open up over here. We get offered some suggestions, so we could use some of the document swatches, and I'm going to use one of those. I'm going to use this purple color from the document swatches. Now, if I go and select another color, it's going to replace this one, so I have to click away, click the plus sign to add a second color. I could continue to add other colors from here if I wanted to, or I could create my own color. This is none, but you just need to start dragging on the sliders, even though it doesn't look like you've got slides to drag on, and that will let you specify your color. I'm going to change from CMYK. Well, I'd like to change from CMYK to HSB. But I can't right now until I actually kick start this process. As soon as I do kick start some sort of a color, then I can go and switch to HSB being my color options. That's just going to work a little bit better for me. I've got a purple. I'm going to look for a unsaturated teal blue pretty happy with that. I've got two colors that I want to appear in the final result. This is my prompt I'll click Generate. These are some of the options that I'm being given. If you want to, you can set it off to generate more and see if you get a better result. I think I like this, so I'll just click away. 18. Tip 17 A Second Method to Apply a Color Group to your Artwork: Let's look now at the third panel of options in the recolor artwork dialogue. So we're going to open the recolor artwork dialogue, and we're going to advanced options. If we click on the flyout here, we'll get access to our color groups, and this is an alternative way of applying a color group to a document. So what you can do is just click on the Color group. Be aware that if you click the down pointing arrow, all you're going to do is to see the color group. If you actually want to apply it, you have to click on it, and that will apply the color group to the document. In this case, things are slightly different because all of the colors that are available in the color group can now be rotated around the document by simply clicking on the randomly change color order option here. You can see that the current set of colors used for the illustration doesn't include this blue. But if I start to randomly change the colors, then the blue is going to be cycled in. In a way, this is a slightly better way of applying colors to your document if you're wanting to use an existing color group. The color group has to be available in the swatches panel. The downside of this, it gives you benefits and then takes them away is that there's no undo option. If you see something that you like, you want to exit this dialogue really quickly because your chances of getting it back again are really slim. Well, at least your chances of getting it back by rotating colors is pretty slim. You can get it back by doing it yourself, but not by rotating colors because there are so many different options here that you're not going to see the same one a here anytime soon. When you see something that you like, you're just going to click. You see this dialogue and you're being asked if you want to save changes to the swatch group, you can answer yes or no. It doesn't make any difference to the artwork here. 19. Tip 18 Swap Mapped Colors: Let's return to the recolor artwork dialogue and back into these advanced options and let's reapply this particular color group. Let's start rotating some of the colors around. Now say you get to something that you quite like, but it's not perfect. Let's just close up this panel because we don't need it any longer. But say I like these basic colors that I've got here, but I'd like to rearrange them slightly. What's happening here is we've got six colors in our original document, and these are the six colors, the new colors that are being mapped onto those colors. You can see that anything that was dark, pink, is now this green color, and anything that was this color is now this yellow color. Anything that was this brown color is this almost similar yellow color. If you want to change the way things are mapped, you can do so. Let's look at these two oranges here, and you can see them in the illustration down here. If I want to reverse these, so for example, what is this green color is now this orange color and vice versa, let's see how we do that. We're going to firstly find our green color and our orange color. To switch them round, we're going to switch the underlying colors. I'm going to drag the pink onto here and I'm going to take this color back the other way. Now the orange and green are inverted in the final image. That might give you a result that works a little bit better for you. Any combination of colors here can be easily switched around that way. 20. Tip 19 Recoloring with Insufficient Colors: Before we have a look at the next feature of the recolor artwork dialogue. Let's just set the scene. What I've done is I've created a color group, this one here from the ice cream colors. I've got my fruit icons here, and what I want to do is to use the ice cream colors to recolor my fruit, but there will be a problem. There are six colors in the ice creams. Let's just sample our fruit and see what the situation is here. I'm going to create a color group from the fruit. And you'll see that there are two more colors in this fruit image than there were in the ice cream. Something's going to happen when we try to recolor something that has eight colors in it, when we've only got six colors to use. Let's see what's going to happen. I'm going to click on the recolor artwork dialogue. I'm going back to advanced options. I'm going to click this little fly out here because I need to get access to this color group, which is my ice cream colors. Being aware that the only color groups that are going to appear in this panel here are ones that are in the swatches, which is why I made sure that I had the ice cream colors in the swatches panel before I started, or they wouldn't be accessible to me. So I'm just going to click on that color group to apply it to the fruit, which is hiding under here. I'm going to close this panel because I don't need it any longer. So let's see what's happened because we have successfully recolord all the fruit, and all the colors have changed. But remember, we were short a couple of colors. So what Illustrator has done is it's doubled up, well, it's tripled up these colors. So it's taken what was yellow, what was green, yellow, and what was green, and it's made them all blue. But it hasn't made them all the same blue. You might notice here that this blue and this blue are different. They're different tints. We can tell that they're tints because we can see it here, but we can also click this down pointing arrow and see that it says scale tints. When it's putting colors together, it's changing the actual tint of the color that's applying depending on what the underlying color is. Now, you can make the exact if you want to. So you can just click on this and say, effectively saying, I want all my blues to be exactly the same blue. We're squashing up the colors if you like. We're taking an eight color image and making it a six color image. Now, if you don't like how it's done that, you can change that. You could take any one of these colors and put them somewhere else. You can also go back to just scaling the tints if you want to so that you get different versions of your colors. But you could take this yellow, for example, and you could put it up here with the orange. You'll still get tints, but in this case, you'll get different combinations, or you might take your yellow here and just see if it looks better. Well, it's starting to look better because it's not running into other colors, and you could take your green and put it somewhere else. In addition to being able to just switch the color order yourself for colors, you can also take colors that are doubled up or tripled up and split them, take them somewhere else entirely. Now, if you wanted to, you could also add another color. I say you said to yourself, you know what, I'd really like to add another color to this color scheme. Just going to click on new row. I'm going to add a color stop for it. At the moment it's bright red, but it doesn't have to stay that way. And let's say that we're going to drag out one of these colors. So let's grab this green out and put it down here. So everywhere that that green is in the underlying image is now this red. But as I said, it doesn't have to stay that way. We can just double click on it and make it any color that we like. If you're happy with that, you can just click and that color scheme will be applied to your art. You can add colors, you can move them around, you can have them scaled tint wise, or you can have them fixed to the exact same tint. Lots of ability to manage your colors, but just being aware that if you start off with more colors in your art then you're remapping onto that art, some of those colors are going to share a target color. 21. Tip 20 Adjust Saturation Brightness and Temperature: Earlier, we saw that the first panel of the recolor artwork dialogue had the ability for us or gave us the ability to adjust brightness and saturation. But if we click on advanced options, then we get some more sophisticated options for globally adjusting the colors in an image. We're going to go across here to this little hamburger icon and click it. And here, we can change the way that the colors are shown to us or we can adjust the colors from RGB to HSB or C NYK. But there's also a global adjustment here. What that does is it allows us to change all of these colors based on saturation, brightness, and temperature. Luminosity is a little less valuable, but these other three are quite valuable. So this is the artwork I've selected. These are the colors I'm working with. I'm just going to increase their saturation. You can see that every single color in the image has its saturation adjusted. Again, this is not something that is easy to do anywhere else in Illustrator. So let me just set that back to zero, and let's have a look at brightness. Brightness, can be brighter or we can be much darker. Just a word with saturation, if you go in the negative direction, you're going to get in a neutral color scheme. So that can be really nice for those muted colors. I just wanted to point that out. And temperature is warm and cold. So one direction gives you warmer colors, the other direction is going to give you cooler colors. And all of the colors that these original colors are now mapped onto are warmer or cooler color versions. And if you find something that you like, you can just click the k button. If you still want to rotate colors around, you're working now with this new set of colors, you can do so. Now, at any point in this dialogue, if you want to get back to what you started with, that's very easy, too. You can just click here on the reset option. There's no undue option, so you can't back out through the things that you've been doing since you opened the dialogue, but you can reset it back again. So let's just go and find some of those warmer colors again. I actually quite liked what I had. There at that point, I might just adjust the brightness a little bit to get it slightly more pastel, maybe. And I'll just click. So that's a more subtle iteration of the original colors using those global adjustment tools. 22. Tip 21 Finding Colors in the Image: One of the features of the recolor artwork dialogue that's very handy when you start applying different color themes to a piece of art, and so things are changing around quite a bit is the ability to find out where colors are in the image. So here we've got a lot of yellows. And if we want to see where one of these yellows is being mapped into the image, if we didn't have this reference material around, that this is what we could do. We could click on this icon here, which has got a little magnifying glass on it. Let's go and see where this yellow is being applied because this is the blue and the underlying image, and it's now being mapped onto this yellow. If we want to see where the pink was, we'll just click on the pink, and this is where it was, and it's now this yellow and click here and we can see which bits of the image were this brown color and now this orange color. Click again on this icon and everything comes back. That's a really handy tool to use when you need to find out where these colors were in the first place. The handy feature of this particular part of the dialogue is this option here. Open advanced recolor artwork dialogue on launch. What this allows you to do is to come into this area. Immediately you launch the recolor artwork dialogue. Now, in the past, that would have been super helpful because this is probably where we've spent most of our time. But these days, with the option to generatively recolor the image, and also the fact that this recolor option here, this first panel of the dialogue had so many features in it. It's not an option that you maybe need to consider. But if you always do click on advanced options to come into this area of the dialogue, then you can short circuit this by clicking this option here because then this will be the starting point in future when you come to recolor your artwork. 23. Tip 22 Drag to Change Colors: So far in our exploration of the recolor artwork dialogue, we have successfully avoided probably the most fun portion of this tool, and that is in the advanced options area, the Edit Option. What this gives us is the color wheel and all the colors that are in our image, and they're all selectable and they're all editable. Now at the moment these colors are linked because if I clicked here, I would unlink them, so just be aware that this is the icon for these colors are linked. So if I start dragging on one of these colors, I'm going to take them all with me, and they're all going to rotate into different colors, but they're going to maintain the same spatial relationship between them. Now, I can drag inwards to get more pastel, more muted colors, and I can drag outwards to get more saturated colors. You can also split these colors so they don't travel together. I'm going to unlink them, and now I can individually drag these colors wherever I want them to be. Dragging in is going to give me a lighter, less saturated version of the color, and dragging out is going to give me a more saturated, almst darker version of the color, and you can take these wherever you like. Having changed those colors, you can also re link them and then take them somewhere else. You can say this is going to be my new spatial relationship between the colors, but let's see what I can get when I just drag them all around somewhere different. When you see something that you like, click okay because if you move again, you're not going to be able to find that again easily, if at all. Because there's no undo here. You can't roll back specific stages that you've been, you just get what you've got right now on the screen, or the other option is to reset and go back to what it looked like when you first came in this dialogue. That's the only two options that you've got. But if you like using this tool and you've got these color set up like this, you can go to generative recolor, and then you can go to recolor, and this is the same slider. We could start dragging around here, get the same result, but you can see in this part of the dialogue, we've got an undo changes. It's a little inconvenient because we can only roll back the changes that we've made in this particular area of the dialogue, not the previous area, but we can roll them back. We can go back to where we were. That's just handy, if you really like this dragging around facility, you want to exit advanced options, go back into generative recolor, so you can get back into recolor, so you can get back to here to have the ability to drag colors around and do it if you don't like what you see or you want to go back to something that you had previously. You've also got this time a different icon. This is Link unlinked harmony color. Right now they're linked, if I click on it, they're going to be unlinked. Here we could also drag around to create a different color. Again, we've got that undo option available here. This part of the dialogue is really valuable, but advanced options obviously is extremely valuable as well. 24. Tip 23 The Special Case of Working with Patterns: Up until now, we've been working with individual icons on an artboard. This particular document here is very, very different. This is a pattern. In the Swatches panel, let me go and just get it back because I've lost it. In the Swatches panel is this pattern. If I double click on it, you can see it was just created using the pattern make tool. Now because this is a rectangle or a square filled with a pattern, we can use the recolor artwork dialogue with it. Let's just click on recolor artwork and let's go and make a change to the pattern. Let's go to advanced options. Let's go to edit, and let's just start moving these colors around. Right now, they're linked, so I can just take them into a slightly different area. I'm going to unlink them and get rid of this red, which is I'm not very happy with at all. When I see something I like, I'm going to click. Now, if we were working with a piece of art that was just vector shapes, not a pattern, then we would have lost the artwork colored with the original colors and we would have new colors only. But because this is a pattern, it's treated differently by Illustrator, because here is the original pattern that was here when I opened the file, and here is my new version of it. So every time we use the recolor artwork dialogue in any form, even if we're using generative recolor, for example, to make a new colored version of this pattern, Illustrator is going to add it to the swatches panel. We don't have to continually save our patterns. We can just go and recolor them as and when we like because we're going to get all these versions here in the Swatches panel. That's just a heads up in two ways. One, if you're using patterns, you don't have to have this multiple artboard thing going on because the patterns are all stored. Every single pattern is here. The other thing is to be aware that if you're used to using the recolor artwork dialogue with patterns, be aware that individual pieces of art don't work the same way. You will have to be careful about using multiple artboards or saving different versions. If you're just working with art, such as these icons here. They are going to be treated very differently to recoloring patterns with the recolor artwork dialogue. Although the dialogue works exactly the same way with patterns as it does with individual art, it's just the final result when you click is very different. 25. Tip 24 Recoloring Black White and Gradients: Let's have a look now at this image because there are quite a few things going on here that are interesting in terms of the recolor artwork dialogue. For a start, if I select everything and go to recolor everything, I'm going to be recoloring potentially the background here. If you don't want something to be recolord, don't select it. The easiest thing in terms of this image would be to open up the layers palette because the background is going to be at the very back. Isolate it and just lock it down. Now when I select everything, it won't be selectable. So let's go ahead and do just that, and let's go to the recolor artwork dialogue. There are a lot of colors in this image. There are gradients in this image. The way that illustrator treats gradients in terms of recoloring is that it allows you to recolor any stop on the gradient. So let's just get out of there for a minute, and let's select one of the pieces of these birds. So this bit here, and let's have a look at the gradient. Well, this gradient has two stops in it. What's happening in the recolor artwork dialogue is that there will be color selectors for these two colors. If you change those, you're obviously going to change the gradient. If there are more than two, I think these are all just two color gradients, but if these were gradients that had three stops or more, then every single color on that gradient would be accessible. Just be aware of that. Let's get rid of the gradient selector. Let's go back to the recolor artwork dialogue. That's an explanation as to why there are so many colors here. Let's go into advanced options. Down here at the very end are two interesting colors. This case, today, I'm having trouble getting a black that behaves like this white here. What's happening here is this white is surrounding the birds, and typically illustrator will isolate black and white in the recolor artwork dialogue and not map them onto another color. Essentially it's saying to you, because you've got white and black in your illustration, you probably don't want to change them because they're probably there for a specific reason such as outlining. I'm certainly using white as an outline here. If you wanted to be able to change this white outline, then you would need to add a little box in here for it. You're going to click here and illustrators prompting you as to whether you want to add a new color. What you're saying here is I want white to map onto white. So it's now mappable. If you disable this option, then it won't actually be reclored, so it's there, but it's not able to be reclored. You can protect colors that way. Let's go into the edit option. All our colors are linked. If I start dragging them around, all of these birds are going to change color and you can see that the gradients are changing at the same time because the colors at either end of the gradient stops are just colors on the color wheel here and they're going to change. Going to see if I can pick up one of the colors from the gradient. I'm thinking this pink here might be relatively easy to find There's the wing of the bird here, and there's some browns in here as well. So in a sort of hunt and peck manner, you should be able to isolate where the colors for these gradients are and adjust them. You can also go to the assign option, and you could have a look and see where these colors are in the image using this magnifying glass option where you can just click on a color and that's where that color is in the image. You should be able to find the colors in your gradient here. Here's this color and this is its mapped color. If I click away from it, this would be a color that we could change in the image to change the way that gradient looks. 26. Tip 25 Recoloring Color Groups: Until now, we've been using the recolor artwork dialogue to recolor artwork, but there is an additional feature that you can use it for, and that is for recoloring color groups. With the color group just appearing in the swatches panel here, you'll see that there's nothing on the bottom of this panel that indicates that the recolor artwork dialogue is accessible to you. But if I select the color group and click here, I get to what is the recolor artwork dialog for editing color groups. I'm just going to click on it. In this case, what we can do is we can edit this color group to create a different color group. All the same things apply, we can drag our colors around, we can link and unlink them, but we can also use the global adjustment tools, so we could increase the saturation of all of the colors. You can see them appearing up here. These are different to these colors. There are more saturated versions of them. Could increase their brightness as well. We could change their temperature going towards warmer or cooler values. When you see something you like up here and I met it is a little difficult to see it exactly, but if you see something you like, you can just click, then yes, because what you'll get then is another color group that is these original colors, but they've been edited in this case globally, but we could also edit them individually. There are a few greens here that are pretty close to each other. I might come into the edit colors dialogue here. Link the harmony colors and just walk these around, perhaps to get a slightly green or green and perhaps to get a slightly yellow or yellow to go in this color group, click, and yes, I will save the changes. It can be used in a different context to change your color groups to adjust all the colors in your color group relative to each other, changing them as individual colors or doing a global adjustment to all of them, making them brighter or darker or less saturated or more saturated, for example. 27. 25 Project and wrapup Tips for recoloring your artwork in Adobe Illustrator : We've now completed the video training portion of this course, so it's over to you. Your project for this class is simply to tell me which of these tips was most valuable to you and that you think will help you most as you work in Illustrator every day. I hope you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned lots about the options you have for recoloring your artwork in Adobe Illustrator. Now if you did enjoy this course, I would really appreciate you taking the time to review it. Even just indicating if your expectations were met is helpful to me. By writing a sentence or two explaining why you enjoyed the course, you'll help other students to say that this is a course that they might like to take. Now, if you see the follow link on the screen, click it and you'll be alerted when I release new classes. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and I respond to all of your questions and comments and I look at and review all of your class projects. I'm Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in another class here on Skillshare soon.