Transcripts
1. COLOR: The Recolor Artwork Tool: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another Skillshare class from me Christina [inaudible]. I am an illustrator and surface pattern designer from Mariefred, Sweden. I've been working with illustrations, surface pattern designs full-time since 2010. I have quite a bit of experience and I am so happy to share that with you in these classes that I've been doing. This is my fourth class. In previous classes I have brought up color, but in this class, I'm going to really go deep into color. In the following videos I'm going to be sharing how I collect inspiration for color, how I think about color palettes, whether or not I start with color before drawing, or I draw and then find the color palette that suits the artwork, all that stuff. Then I will show you how I create custom color palettes, how I saved these for later use, and then how I implement them using the recolor artwork tool in Illustrator. I'll be showing as many tips and tricks and features that the recolor artwork tool has, that I know of, and that I use. It is just of course a very powerful tool, and it's amazing, and it's seriously revolutionized the way that I think about color, and how I use color, and change my color palettes around. It's amazing. I hope that you get as addicted to it as I am. I think it's an amazing way to just come up with something new that you would have thought of at the top of your head. For your class project in this class, it's pretty easy because just going to take existing artwork that you have, and give it new life within your color palette using one or three different techniques that I'll show in the following videos. Let's get started.
2. Finding color inspiration: To begin with, let's talk about how I think about color when I am creating artwork. For the most Bay I think is 50-50 with how I think about color in my artwork. Sometimes I will draw a pattern or an illustration and I will figure the colors out afterwards. Other times I will have a color scheme in mind. That will inspire what I'm drawing. It all depends. I think it's a good way to think in both ways so you not reliant on always on the motifs that's going to tell you the color or always reliant on the color, telling you what to draw. I think for the most part, we as artists and creators, we gravitate to a certain color palette. Not truly so I naturally gravitate towards a very soft posterity color palette. I usually use alot of pink and a lot of blues. I love like soft colors like that, sometimes they go up into the candy colors as well. But the majority of my work doesn't really go into the dark side. I have been trained to push myself to use darker colors and I think it looks very sophisticated and know so I'm going to continue to push myself to try different colors. But I can also think there's nice to have a signature color palette that you use so that when art directors and other people are looking at work, sometimes you can just see right away that it's a certain artists work click. I think a good example is Helen Doxdik, where she always, her motifs are always in the classic primary colors, very poppy colors and she has a similar color palette that uses throughout all of her work. Another surface pattern designer they think of who has very signature look with her color palettes is Elizabeth Olwen. She uses very soft, muted, very greeny color palette. Sometimes it's a little bit of [inaudible] on the vintage you say like all of it. But for the most part this is a very soft, like jungle green aqua, where she mixes with whites and pinks, other blues, but she also tests other colors but I think that's the color palette that I think of when I think of her work. It could be interesting that you'd think of a color palette that suits you and your style and stuff like that, but I don't think it's a problem to test new things on occasion, I think that's healthy. When I pick color palettes for the most part, I just do it intuitively, instinctively. In the computer, I will just kick pick colors as a go, I think that's the majority of the way that I work. But I'm trained to push myself and pick new color palettes that I wouldn't pick up naturally and its gets boring using the same color all the time. Here's a couple of examples of how I go about picking colors. There are a couple of analog ways that I think and discover color. One fine way is that, it just bring out a box with colored pencils and look at these and mix and match and find color combinations that are interesting to you. Just by using colored pencils like this could be a fun exercise to try. I have been inspired a couple times my son, he likes to color now, so sometimes he'll grab their hams, so colors will now be random. But somehow I'll be like a really nice color palette that I haven't thought of. That's inspired me a couple of times. You can also use some color guide to pick colors. I have this really old Pantone color guide. I can't say that I use this very often. But I think maybe if you're doing something very specific for whether you're going to be printing on fabric and you wanted to make sure that it's the exact shade that you had envisioned could be important to use this. But I think it's hard to come up with a palette like this. Especially when you can't really put them side by side so well, when it's in a book like this, but it's still fine to scroll through. Maybe like one day I'll be insane inspired like these beautiful coral colors really screaming out to me like I really need to draw something that has that included and I think that would be really pretty. When you are just looking at colors sometimes you convinced by obey something in an idea will pop into your head. The same thing I have with a spoon flower color map, and that, just like this, you know, has tons of colors with their hex codes on it so you can easily input them into the computer. We can go into photographic inspiration. I think this is where maybe I get more inspiration. Sometimes I will flip through a magazine like this Swedish interior design magazine. I can pick colors from different spreads like this cover photos, really beautiful like pink and white and gray and shades of blue and the natural wood color. I think that would be a beautiful palette for a illustration pattern. I think that's a fine way to come up with colors and new color schemes. I just advise you not to take colors from other artists. I think if you are taking colors and color pallets from that a certain artist, you're running the risk of maybe copying them, maybe not consciously but subconsciously, you might take their color palette and then all of a sudden you might draw something similar to what their color palette was so I think you should take inspiration from different genres. Take inspiration from fashion magazine or a flower book or something like that, rather than taking inspiration from other fellow artists, I think that's important so that we don't plagiarize, that's not good. Then there are, of course, digital options like Pinterest and Pinterest is amazing for color inspiration, there are like 5 million different color palettes that you can look through and gather inspiration. There are people who have made ready-made color palettes for you that you can just pick and choose from. You can tweak them slightly and make them your own I think that's of course the best, but you can use them as a starting off point. That's what I usually do. I'd say Pinterest is where I gather the most inspiration just because it's so easy to save things for the future and so you just bring it up on your computer and then you have like, all inspiration that you could ever want to meet. In the next video, we're going to jump into the computer and I'm going to show you how I save custom color palettes.
3. Make a custom color palette: Now we're in the computer. I have Pinterest open on one side and then I have Illustrator opened on the other side. As you can see, I've already started inputting some new color palettes here. I have to start off with, I have done three color palettes with eight colors in each of them. Then I did four color palettes with four colors only. I've got very simple pallet that could be fun to play with. I usually use way too many colors, I think it would be nice to reduce that and force myself to think much more simple. I'm going to show you how I go about creating one of these custom palettes with you. Yes, if I'm going to use, say, Pinterest for my inspiration, I scroll through the different boards that I have saved, all the different things that I have saved and I find something that I like. I thought that this one here was interesting because it's only warm color palette and I never ever use a primarily warm pallet. I always seem to want to shove in some blues and stuff like that. I think it would be fun to try to test out something that's just warm, lots of pinks and yellows and stuff like that. To start off with, I go into Illustrator and I have a little rectangle tool here and just create a box. It doesn't matter what color it's filled with, just press and hold Alt when you click it and you can move it over a little bit. There we have two boxes and then you can do Command D and it will duplicate that actions. Then it just becomes really neat pleasing that they're all lined up perfectly in the same size. We'll do eight of these, there is 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Then we're going to go and start picking a color palette. I'll start off with the first box and then I will refer to these images that I have here. You could save this image and then open it up into Illustrator if you like. You can eye drop colors directly from there, but I think it's another great step to make it your own by just eyeballing it and tweaking the color palette becomes your own. You're not straight up copying this, you're taking inspiration from this. Yes, I'll start off with some nice pinks. I'm just going to find a nice correlate pink to begin with. Domain up here and then quite red. I think that looks good. Then sometimes I like to take the same color, I drop it, but then let's make it a different tone of that same one and we'll find a color that's a little bit lighter. I like to do that a lot to have different tones of the same color. I think that becomes nice look, it brings a whole piece together, so there's not just a completely different colors. I think I'd also like to bring in like they have a very vibrant magenta, just maybe not to purply, then with that maybe brighter. That's cool. Then I like that they have over here like a really dark one of those. I like to have lighter shades mixed with the medium shades and then have dark shades, light shades so that you have a really mixed color palettes. They're not all just one tone that can look really flat in my opinion. Here we go, I'm going to choose really dark tone of this. I think that could be good. Yes, we have some corals and we have some magenta, pinks. Then I think we should get something similar to this one but a little bit more red possibly. That could be cool. Popping a red there. Then let's pick three like orangey mustard tones. Let's see. I got mustard, that could be too bright. I think I'm going to make it a little bit more muted so it doesn't stick out as much. Then I'll take another tone, this one may be a lighter yellow like that. Then the last color, which should that be? Too much of this. I like how this here is like cream, but I also like that this is like a grayish tone in here. This is a hard decision. I think I'll go for something a little grayish so that we will make this color, but make it very gray. Let's see what that looks like. Because I think it's also nice to include some neutral in your work as well so they're not all just candy colors sometimes. I think I'm pleased with that. Here's another custom palette that I've created, now I have tons of different things. Then of course you can do this all day, you can make a million color palette to choose from. I think eight is a good place to start. You can always add more and you can always take away. If you're digitally printing your artwork, you can use five million colors. But if you're working with certain companies that screen print or have different processes of coloring where they pay per color, I have noticed that maybe around six is the amount that they would prefer. Something to have in mind. If you're working, maybe not always use 20 colors. If you're going to be selling your artwork to certain companies, they might ask you for a very limited color palette and it might be difficult for you to change later. I think it's good to have a mix of really limited palettes and then larger palettes.
4. Save custom palettes for later : All right, now that we have some color palettes to work with, this is definitely more than necessary. You can just do as many as you like, but it's so much fun, it's hard to stop yourself. So I'm going to share with you how to save these color palette so that you can use them in future projects without having to reopen them every time and save them. This is pretty easy. You have all your colors here as different, all swatches in rows. We're going to go over here to the swatches panel. Maybe I'll bring it out so we can make it a little bit bigger to see. Let's make this, we'll clean this up. So let's delete these primary colors that are already here because we don't want them and we'll select those so everything is clean. Just to note the swatches panel is completely clean. Let's start inputting our new collections of colors. Just select your row of color. Come down here to these folders, are new color group. Click that, you can name and if you want, but I'm going to do that. So use your first little color group and just do this for the rest of them. Now that you have your new swatch groups, we can save these, so you can open them up into any Illustrator file that you want to use them in. Go down here to the Swatch Libraries menu, save swatches. We'll call these skillshare color palette, which is very handy, and press Save. So now, if you open up any Illustrator file that you're using, you can go into the swatches library, go down to user-defined, and they'll be down here, here's your colors swatch panel. They will pop up like this instead. We have lots of fun color palettes to choose from. I think there's still in my signature looks at I like there's a lot of pink and blue here. I'll push myself too hard this time. I need to work on that, but this is at least a starting point. So we'll close out of this. I'll just save it quickly, for later use maybe and we close. I've decided to use these three patterns to recolor. What's cool about Illustrator is that you can recolor a finished pattern you don't have to recolor the items that you create or the motifs that you created to create the pattern, you can just go ahead and when everything is finished, tweaking and re-change colors like that. I think that is amazing. So to make things easier and cleaner in this one, we're also going to clean up our swatches panel and we're going to import new one that we create. We can delete those. We're going to make sure to keep these. These are my three patterns for years, so I don't want to delete those have easily. I'm going to delete all this mess. Yes. All right, now like I said, you can import these ones that we save. So we go down here to user-defined and the mice goes your color palettes. To get them into this swatches panel that we can use later, you just simply click on them and they pop in to your workspace. So that's it and you can close that. Now you have all of these color palettes to choose from. That's simply how you choose custom color palettes and save them for later use. In the next section, I'm going to show you how to use that recall outward tool. This is going to be so much fun.
5. Recolor Artwork Tool Basics: Okay, now we're going to start re-coloring and this is the best part. For these illustrations, these two first ones for my Paris collection. They are both using the same palette that I chose. Then here, what's in my bag print is something that I chose instinctively. I didn't have a color palette in mind when I drew the items; but these ones, I had the color palette in mind, before starting to draw. Those are the two different ways that I work. I thought that we should run through the basics of the recolor artwork tool, to begin with and then we'll start getting more and more advanced as we go along. You just select your artwork that you want to recolor. Hope that it's nice and big. Here you go. So that we can see all the details, maybe I'll zoom in a little bit more, so that we can really get a feel. Here we go. Then the recolor Artwork tool is up here. This S symbol. You get this dialogue box that pops up. To just run over what's happening here. To begin with, here are your active colors. All of the colors that are in your artwork. Here they are, as well, listed. There are seven of them, it says here. This is the color that you have currently in your artwork, and this means whether it's going to turn into this new color that you're going to recolor. Over here we have all of your new color swatch groups that we created. These are all the things that we can use to recolor your artwork. But you can also manually do lots of different tweaks and changes. But I'll go into that real soon. Illustrator does one thing that, it always assumes that you're going to want to not change black, so it doesn't have the little arrow here and there is no new color. It assumes that you want to keep black things black and that's not always the case. But if you do what all your black lines say; I use black lines for the most part, and I don't want those to change. This is good that it's already in there, but you can also add another color and it will then also change black like this. You have the black that's in the piece and it will be changed, as well, since you have the little arrow here. If you decide that you don't want to change a certain color. You can click here and becomes a minus sign, and then it won't change that color. You can do that to any color, such as, if you are really happy with the background color. You don't want to change that while you're going through, you can just unclick it, like this. Then there's some nice features down here. That was adding a color in a new row. Say something smart do you have in mind? Illustrator also does this with white, so that goes, if your piece has white in it. The same thing will happen. That white won't change, but you can add it to the color palette and then it will become a color that you can change and tweak. Okay. Another feature down here that I love is these random tools and the search tool. The search tool works in a way that it just blanks out everything. If you have very complex piece with lots of colors and you can't quite figure out where they are sitting. You can click on the color and it will pop up where in the piece that it is. Like the yellows here, here's all the pinks, you know like that. That can be handy if you need to find a certain color, and then these I think are my favorite tools. This one, especially is the randomly change color order. This you can click 5 million times and it's going to change all of the different colors that you have. Sometimes it looks crazy, sometimes it doesn't. You just have to go through and test different things but sometimes I think this is a great way of finding colors that you wouldn't have thought of, if you had just changed. This is a really quick way. The only problem is you can't step back, so if we do like something, you have to like stop, save a copy, go back into Illustrator, the recolor artwork tool again and start over from the beginning. If you want to test out different color palette. That's the only thing you can't save, a color version that you like. While in here, you have to like press, "Okay." Then, you may make a copy of this and then go back. You can just like control Z or command Z. It doesn't make sense. If you really like this pattern, but you're a little bit too quick to press buttons and you go to the next one. Well, you don't have any way of going back to that without just pressing this button a million more times and hope that it'll pop up again. That's just something to keep in mind. What is close is that you can go completely back to the beginning where your pattern was, when it opened by pressing this eyedropper tool. Now we'll go back to the palette that you had to begin with. That's really handy at least. If you're fiddling way too much. Here is a way to start from the beginning without having to cancel out and opening up the tool again. We've gone over that. Here's an area where you can adjust hues of certain colors like this background color. If you wanted to adjust a little bit slightly with saturation. Also make sure that you have this checked in of course, otherwise you won't be able to see the changes that you're making. I've remember that I had not shown you this randomizer tool. I'm going to go back to how it was and then this one, it randomly changes the saturation and brightness of all the colors. It keeps the colors that they are. It's just going to make them slightly lighter or darker versions. This one, I never use because I never find that this is flattering, really looks good. I think really, we have the eyedropper tool here as well and here we're back to a nice color palette. In this little drop-down menu, here's tons of other swatch libraries that can be found in Illustrator. If you hadn't brought in your color swatches into your interface and have them here. You could actually have found them here, as well, in the user-defined section and they would have popped up there, as well. You don't necessarily have to save them here, as well. But I like having them here for whatever reason. Just so I can see them and I wanted to show you how to do that. That's mainly it. This is the assign area of the recolor artwork tool but there's also the edit area where you can see more of the color palette, get more technical. There's way more tools you can change the way it displays, if you like. Here's the same tools that you saw before. Here you can adjust the brightness of the entire piece and stuff like that. If you wanted to do that. That's a basic rundown of how the recolor artwork tool is set up. I'm going to start showing you how to implement it; to change your artwork into different color palettes.
6. Globally adjust your color palette: Now I'm going to start showing you what the recolor artwork tool can do. Let's open up this one again. I have it selected. Yeah. Have it selected. Open up the recolor artwork tool. In this section, I'm going to show you how to change the colors of the whole piece as a whole. Rather than changing individual colors, maybe you're pretty much happy with how the color palette turned out, but you just want to tweak it slightly. I'm going to show you how to do that. Go to this little menu here and you can press global adjust. This is going to open up this little dialogue box. This way you can change all of the colors and the whole piece as a whole. Maybe you thought this needs to be a little bit brighter or you want it a little bit more subdued. You can bring the brightness up or down a little bit lighter. You can just adjust the entire piece in one swoop rather than changing all the individual colors. You can also change temperature, was a little bit too cool or warm. That became crazy quick. Tell you a little bit about warm pallet. This is an amazing way to just like change quickly all of the colors to gain new look. Luminosity is also another way of changing. This became very nice, warm summary palette, very pasteli, it's really pretty. You could also do the same thing in edit mode. Here you see all of the colors as they are now. If you press this button, its a link. Then you link all of the colors as they don't really. The relationship between the colors of that make sense doesn't change. You can adjust them so they have the same relationship to each other, but they move around the color palette. This is an incredibly cute palette wheel. The pinks and purples and greens as beautiful, I love that. It's a fun way to pull them together. This is a way to change and play with colors. I notice that you can pull out colors as well. If you want to change the look of certain colors, make certain colors darker and stuff like that. This is something that you can play with as forever. Finding noon colors in that way and just playing around, you don't even have to have color palettes in mind. You might stumble upon something that's really cool. The same thing here, you can't go one step back, like you can't go back to that really cute purple palette. But I can go back to how it was from the beginning by pressing the eyedropper tool. That's how you globally adjust the entire piece. Play around and discover new things that maybe you hadn't thought of before. I also want to show you that illustrator has a lot of color palettes available to you already. This way, you don't have to take the time to make your own if you didn't want to or if you want to try to see if you can tweak something that illustrator already has available. They have tons of different ones as they are at Art History, was a impressionism could be one. It's automatically changes to a different palette of colors. That's a destine greens and blues. It's neat maybe or renaissance. What did I think that is. That's a [inaudible]. Let's see, kids stuff. Yeah, it's really poppy. Then the same thing here. You randomize the color palette until something pops up that you like. Now the black is also bumping around, but that's okay. Then also something that is handy. I'll go back to how it was, is that they all illustrator has a different color books available like pantone. If you wanted to change all of your colors into pantone colors, it will convert. Now, it's converted all of these colors into the closest pantone color that it could find. You can check this by double-clicking on the new color and you will come up the pantone color here. That's handy I suppose. If a company wants to know exactly what pantone you are using. This is also a way that you can, if a company has a specific pantone color that they want you to use, you can search and write in here. The pantone that you would like this brown to be. If you have, say, color book beside you, you can input that here. That's really handy as well. Yeah. That's the gist of how to change your colors as a whole. Which is pretty neat, I think. You can get tons of new looks just by fiddling around with what illustrator already has to offer. Just keep going until you find something that you do like.
7. Recolor with your custom palettes : Now we're ready to start using all these tips that I showed you to change the color palette. I'm going to show you how to open up this one again, and let's change it to one of our new color groups and see what happens. To do that you just click on the new color group that you'd like to change the color palette to. Because I have seven colors, it's actually just six, because the black is not changing here. It's not going to use all of the colors always in the new color palette. But when you randomize, they will pop up. You have endless amounts of possibilities for new color palettes, so you can just go through and check out, and see if anything looks good right away. I think for the most part sometimes it's not perfect always, there's going to be some things that you're going to have to change. But it's fun to get idea for something new like this, this is really cute, and I would never have colored in this way. Let's change to this one. See what happens when we do this really bright and orangey color palette. I can't say I'm wild about this one. Then we'll go to this one, that is really sweet, I like that. Easterly. See when you change the look of something it can become completely different thing. Like this I really feel like it's screams Easter me. That's really sweet as well with all the different little pinks. I really like that as well. How about we save that one there, and then we'll open up my other piece if we don't get tired of this one, but I think that's pretty cute. I don't want to change the swatch group before closing, just press "No". Let's open up this one and try to see if we can switch it out for one of our smaller color palettes. I'm just going to click, I'll move this to the side so we can see it. We'll try to use some more of these smaller color palettes, because I have four colors here. Well, and that's sophisticated. Oh, I like that one too. This is so fun, I love it. Try this palette. That's nice, I like that. I'll try a couple more just for fun. That's cute as well. Oh, that's cute. Maybe I'll keep it at this one. It looks like a nautical, it looks like that because it's the French flag colors with red, white, and blue. It also makes it seem a little bit more French, which I think is cute because it was inspired by Paris, this collection. I think we'll keep at this one for that. Yes, this just how you input your different color groups, and there's not much to say about that. It's just really fun to go through, test out different ones, save different versions of them as well. I can show you how I would go about saving, if I really like this one I would press, "Okay". Here I would just make a copy if I wanted to test out something new again, I select this, press "Alt", and push it up and move it out to the side. Then you can go back into the recolor artwork tool, knowing that you have a copy of the other one that you really like, so then you can test something else like I really like this color palette as well. This one that came up, I think it's really girly, and sophisticated, and beautiful, so let's keep that one as well. Just for kicks, since we changed that palette twice, let's do one for this. One is selected, we go in here, which ones did we like? Do we test this one? I'm not in love with this, but I feel like something's there, so let's also test out what I was talking about where you can globally adjust things. I'll make sure that we're globally adjusted, and maybe I'll make the brightness lighter. Everything with lighter or the temperature comes a little bit more orangey, that's cool. We can go into the Edit mode and lock, it's locked so that the relationship between the colors is safe, and we can start switching here. We're moving away from that original color palette, but could be fun. It's horrible. No, go back to this, but that looks fun. I'll keep that, could be cute, not sure. Maybe this one has to grow on me a little bit. Now we have changed our original artwork and have come up with some new color palettes. They have different looks than they were before. I think this is a great way to renew your older artwork. If a piece has been in your portfolio for awhile, and you love it, but nobody is buying it, maybe it's just the colors that need to be changed, so that you can market it towards a different person or a different company. Maybe they're looking for something more sophisticated or they're looking for something a little bit child-friendly, what pops off colors. This is a great way to just go through your existing artwork and give new life to it.
8. Recolor individual colors : In this section, we're going to talk about changing individual colors. You don't have to change the entire piece as a whole always. You can change individual colors, which is really handy. I'll open up this one again so we can play around with that feature. You can switch out colors like this really easily just by switching and then the blue turn red and the red turn to blue as [inaudible]. We can play with things you can here. Is this one even being used, I don't think so. I don't know even where is that. I'm not sure. Anyways, if you're unhappy with this red color and you want it to be a little bit more vibrant, you could double-click that and change that. You can do this multiple times. You can make it lighter. Just up with that looks like, comes a little pink. You can also adjust in down here as well with the traditional saturation brightness tools if you don't want to use that. I'll go to the beginning. I wonder why this is so weird. See, I can use this one to figure out where this color is. I'm not sure. It must be just one tiny little dot of another color in my piece. That's messed up. I've done anyways. Not important. This is something that you can also edit individual colors in here in the Edit Mode. You can just choose one of these little things as well to play with. Just different ways of doing the same thing to quickly test out different looks. I think that's fun. Let me go back to "Assign". That's another way of picking out colors. You can double-click a color, you can use color swatches. These are all of the color swatches that you have in your color groups. You can pick and choose from any of these. Silly thing that's annoying here is that they're not in groups. You have count out or guess where one ends and the other one begins, but it's pretty easy. Like here, the first eight as the first group. You could choose colors from different color groups if you want it, if you're happy with that color. Say, if you want to go back to the blue, you can just drag it into that new color. You can do the same thing by testing other colors that you have going on in the Color Palette. You can go back to where we were. What else can we do with individual colors? I think that's pretty much the gist of it. You can implement your own colors, get implement colors from your color groups by clicking the Color Swatches. You can change colors in that way manually. If you're randomizing your color order, and you're pretty much happy with the piece such as this, maybe we really like this basie and the pink, but the white curtains aren't really doing it for you. We can change his white to a different color. You can go into the Swatches panel and maybe chooses. Light blue could be cute. Yeah. That's a way that you can change different colors. Even if the randomizer comes up with something pretty good, you can make it better by customizing it and changing colors until you are completely happy with it. Otherwise, go back to the original. That's all I wanted to share in this section for changing individual colors.
9. Recolor advanced features: Alright, now we're on the final section of my recolor artwork tool tutorial, and this section I'm going to show you some advanced techniques. I’m going to open up this print my, What's in my bag print. Select that, open up the recolor artwork tool, and here you can see that when I colored this, I use 30 colors. That's not too many if I'm using, say like digital printer like, spoon flour, it's going to be printed digitally for a post to print, but if you're selling it, maybe that's a little bit too much. Let's reduce the color palette by a lot. There's a several ways that you can go about doing this. You can do this slightly manually, I can drag the colors that I think are similar or they could act same way. I don't really even see the difference between these colors. You can just drag them together and they become one color. You can continue to do that with similar colors until you have less colors. It will have empty spots here, so you have to move those down out of the way kind of. You can continue to do that with all of the different colors, combining ones that are similar, you can have multiple three, here we go. We will reduce the amount of colors. Start from the beginning. You can also, here where it says auto, you can write in the amount of colors that you want to change it to and illustrator will figure the process for you, I'll say ten instead. It combined all the colors that it thought was, were similar. Now you only have ten colors for the piece. Another thing I'd like to mention is when it combines the colors, it still as you can see is not one solid colored, so it's still going to use tones. There's a menu here that you can choose. Right now, it has scaled tints or preserved tints, I'm not really sure what the difference is here. But it's going to take these four colors and turn them into the same color tone, but then have tints of them to differentiate them. But if you click exact, all of them are going to turn into just one color rather than having preserved colors. Before maybe you were only using ten colors, but it was ten colors plus tint to those colors, so it was still 30 colors. Now, I have converted the whole piece to be ten colors. These ten colors are the only ones that are being use and all of these four colors had been turned into this pink color and all these three beige being clothes had been turned into this color, and so on. Does that make sense? Here is clicked applied also all of them did the same thing, but you could go in and unclick this just change it to certain colors if you prefer. That's another way that you can change the colors, and you just see that becomes completely a different look already because so many of the pink squares mushed together so they're all the same. Then another way, of course, we’ll start from the beginning, is to choose a color palette that has less colors as well. I'll show you what happens here. We'll pick this first one and the same thing happens. It groups together the different colors and it turned it into a new color here because they'd already done previously that it was the exact color, but I could also have scaled tints on like it was previously. Then we have completely different look, but as you can see, you still has many different colors. Maybe there are still 30. I like to keep it on the exact so that we bring down the amount of colors in your piece. Once it's down to ten colors here, plus there's also black, gray, and white in my piece still, that you can also add and change in. You can randomize until this is something that is working for you as well. You can of course also change it down even more. But I think because this piece is so detailed, it's going to be difficult to find a color palette that works with only four colors in it. But we can test that just for fun. Doesn't look so bad actually, I thought it was going to be way worse, but something like that would work actually. We can do a couple more variations. You can get a feel for how that looks but this is hard. But that looks cute, maybe I'll keep it at that. That can totally work for some things. Some pieces don't have to be super colorful, all items don't have to have different colors to all of them. This is a great way to reduce your colors, and that was three ways that I showed you, right? I think we'll keep it at that. There's one more thing that I want to show you before I say bye to this class. When selecting the colors for some of these pallets we manually adjust it as well, so they didn't become the exact same color that we had picked from the beginning. I thought it would be important to show you how to save that. So if you're going to do a collection with this new color palette that you know how to retrieve those colors. If you're going to continue using the same color palette that you came up with into following pieces. This is one of the pieces, if you remember that we tweak quite a lot and played around, so it was in totally different, or not maybe totally different, but it's quite different from the original palette that we were using. To save this color palette, you just select the artwork and you do the same thing that you did with the color swatches, you create new color group. The new color group will pop down here and you can save this, of course, like you do any other one. I just wanted to show you that so that you know how that works. I think that's it. I think I have shown you everything that I know, or everything that I used the recolor artwork tool for. I really hope that it made sense. I know there's so much more that you can learn, but mainly it's a kind of tool that you have to play around with yourself to figure it out and how you like to use it. But I hope that I've given you the basics of what you can do so that you can really, what do we say? Go to town, choosing new color palettes and finding new looks that you would maybe not have naturally came up with. So yeah, this is the end of the course.
10. Thanks for watching!: All right, that's it. Well then and I hope you really enjoy this class. I hope that you learned a ton about color and you were inspired by the way that I choose color and think about color and that also the recolor artwork tools a little bit more, that you understand it more now. I really loved that tool and I hope that you too, I can't wait to see your class projects. Just take existing artwork that you already have and give it new life with your custom color palettes to bound either analog or digital or a mix of both and share them with us in the class project area. If you would like more content from me in between my classes, you can find me on Instagram @emmakisstina. I'm also sharing free video content on my YouTube channel also the name emmakisstina you could find me there. Thanks again for taking my course. I hope to see you in internet and bye.
Kristina Hultkrantz, Illustrator & Surface Pattern Designer
