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Color Overview

Welcome back, folks. Here we are with another fantastic episode of what to do with Illustrator. So today's class is going to be all about color and illustrator, understanding all the ins and outs of color. And if you've ever worked with color and illustrator, there's so many different places that you can get color EDIT Color Color PANEL Working with your swatches Getting your color picker your color guide your color theme. It's like, Oh my gosh, it's just it's actually like overwhelming. Well, we're gonna walk you through so many things with color today that hopefully it will go ahead and make it seem a whole lot easier. There's a lot I have to tell you that there's a lot going on with color and illustrator, So we're gonna go through and we're gonna make this a Z Z as possible. But you don't have to buckle up for this one because there's a lot of things that happened. So starting off when you create a new document in Illustrator, you have a choice between RGB mode or C M. Y que. So if ...

I go under file new and I want to do some type of design for a mobile device or for WEB. You'll see the color mode is gonna be RGB simply because that's the color mode that we use for anything that's going to be on a light emanating device. Now, if I'm gonna be doing something for print, you'll see that I'm going to switch over to C N y que. Because we print with pigments C N y que inks. So those are the color modes that I am going Thio. Go ahead and work in, depending on what I wanna dio. Now when you start up a new document in that color mode, it's not a big deal if you're in the wrong color mode to begin with. Obviously, you want to be in the right color mode as you go on. But if you start up a document, you realize, oh, whoops, I'm in the wrong color mode, not a problem. Go under the file menu, go under document color mode and you can switch the document color mode right here under the file menu. Now you definitely want to do that as you begin so that you know what color mode that you're in because as you create colors in here, it's going to go ahead and create colors based on the color mode that you're in. So first things first. Here. We've got several different things that work with color. And first of all we have are swatches panel and all of these were going to be under the window menu. We have our color panel. We have our color guide. We're gonna have our color themes as well. We're gonna open up that one. That was a big one too. And then also are swatches panel down here as well. And then we also have radiance, which we're gonna be doing a class on as well. And those are basics of going through and being able to find edit, create colors. We're gonna start with the swatches panel because this is the default set of swatches that we have here in Illustrator. Now, with the swatches we've got a just is a basic set with a couple of radiance and a couple of patterns here. And then we have all of our shades of gray and increments of 10. And then we've got just a nice section of bright colors, and this is nothing more than a set of default colors that illustrator gives you just to get going. And in the swatches panel, we've got a couple different icons here. They can list all the swatches as a list or list them as thumbnails, and you can click on the cheese grater, and we have a small, medium or large thumbnail view so you can see them small, medium or large. And then we also have a small list view or a large list view so you can see them differently. It's all the same set of swatches here. I prefer the medium view on the swatches, but pick and choose whatever you want. We're gonna walk through all thes icons here at the bottom what it is that they mean so we can go ahead and get a better idea of how we can manage and create and actually find swatches in Illustrator. So first off, when I create any object to start here, and I'm just going to create a shape and the default colors are going to be a white Phil and a black stroke now we see are filling our stroke in a couple different places. First of all, we see it over here in our toolbar where we have our fill icon and we have our stroke icon right here. We also see it in our swatches panel where we have our fill or stroke. But we're also going to see it in our color panel where we have our fill in our stroke. Now the default is black and white, but the defaults are just simply there's you have something to start with and you can change that at any point. So when I select an object and I decided that I would like to go in and change the Phil or the stroke, I could go in specifically to my properties panel. And here it's interesting because my fill and my stroke are actually separate. So if I click on my fill icon here, this gives me my swatches panel, the one that we see floating on my desktop. Here is the identical one that flies out right here, and I can go and select something for a fill color. I go to my properties panel and I can select something for the stroke color, and then I could go and edit the stroke. And this is nice because you have these separated out, and you do not have to worry about whether you have your stroke or your fill selected here by going through and using your appearance section or if you use your appearance panel, that's great. What happens if you're moving a lot quicker and you want to be able to go ahead and access Phil or a stroke right here in your swatches panel? We'll hear what you have to dio is if I would like to apply a stroke, I will need to go to my little fill stroke icon. I will need to bring the stroke to the front or activate it, and then I'll go ahead and apply the color to my selected object. Now, when you are using these Phil and stroke icons here, inevitably you've got the wrong one selected because you select your object here and you're like, Oh, I want to fill it with something and then you click on it. It's like I had the stroke selected. I have to undo that. So then you have to go in and you have to Then bring this forward in order to go ahead and get your fill, which is one of the reasons why the appearance, um, section here is quite nice, because when you click on your fill, you get your fly out. But it's extra steps. So one of the shortcuts that we have here in order to be able to bring your fill or your stroke to the front when you're dealing with your swatches panel or when you're dealing with your toolbar is simply the Letter X. And I'm sure you've seen this pop up several times while watching this and literally, it's just the letter. X on All X does is brings whatever was behind front. So if the stroke was behind there, it's gonna bring that to the front right now. The Phil was in back, so if I go ahead and bring that that activates that. So it's a very simple thing. X just simply swaps back and forth between the fill in the stroke. So if I'm working on something, I can see the Phils forward and then if I click on that now, my color Is that Phil Now it isn't uncommon that you run into the issue where you have put the fill on the stroke in the stroke in the film because you're working quickly and then you're like, Oh, boy, you know, now I gotta go back in and select the fill in the stroke and do the opposite. Well, interestingly enough, in the swatches panel, we don't have the ability to flip the fill in the stroke in the color panel, we dio because we've got this little double ended arrow here. And then we also have the same thing going on in the toolbar we have This little double ended arrow is well, and this arrow allows us to flip the fill in the stroke between each other, and you can also see there's a shortcut associated with that shift. X X goes ahead and brings the Phil or the stroke to be active. Shift X is going to you. Go ahead and swap the fill in the stroke so it's available in the toolbar. It's available in the color panel, but that little arrow is not available in the swatches panel, but the shortcut still holds true. So not a bad thing to know those shortcuts. So now that we've got our fills in our strokes taken care of right here, one more trick that we have is well in the swatches panel. You'll notice there is a no Phil or a nun with that red slash right there. Whatever you have active, whether it be your fill of your stroke, you can always go ahead and remove the Phil or the stroke color. Here. Shortcut for that is really easy. It doesn't show up here, but a shortcut for that is just simply your slash and that shared with your question mark key. And that slash just simply takes whatever is active your fill or your stroke and simply allows you to shut it off. So we have the same thing here and you can see in your toolbar. It does give you that shortcut right there. So whatever you have active is gonna allow you just simply click the slash key, and it just fills it with nothing or removes the color from the stroke, which is quite handy to have. So those are the basics now, starting off here if you wanna go when you want to create new colors. Very easy to dio. If we go to our swatches panel, we click on the cheese grater the very first thing here is create a new color swatch. And by the way, there's lots of ways to create new color swatches here. This one right from the swatches panel is going to be direct and easy. So new Swatch. And because my document is in C N y que mode, my new swatches automatically start off in four color process right there. Now, if I'm creating something and I want to have a different set of color creations, I can always go to the color mode and I've got my drop down list of different color modes that I can choose and we're on C m like right here. I slide my sliders back and forth, I create my colors, and when I'm done creating those colors, I can go ahead and click, OK, and it adds it to my Swatch panel. Now we do have this thing that says add to my library and what is this? Well, this is for color creation here in Illustrator, but I may be using this color in other adobe applications and I want this exact color without having to copy the names down or the numbers down to create this color. I can create it here and put it into my new library. And when I do that, it automatically adds my color to my swatches panel here, and it also creates a library here in this library can be opened in any adobe application. You just go into the window menu and the adobe applications gonna have this library. And when you create a color here, it's available in other applications. So that's quite nice. Okay, so there it is. I went ahead and I created a color here, and it parked the color right in my color swatch there and parked it in right after the color that I had selected here and there it is. Now what's interesting here is this color Swatch looks different from all the other color swatches, and it's got that little corner on it right there. And it's like That's really interesting. Well, when we go on, we create a new color swatch here. One of the things that we have is we have this thing called a global color. Now, a global color is very unique and interesting, and if you've used color and in design, all the colors or global, so in illustrator colors or not normally global. And what does that actually mean? Well, a global color means this. I'm gonna show you what a non global color does and what a global color does. I have my initial container here, and it is filled with this color green. Now, if I don't have this container selected and I decide that I would like to go in and edit this color green, I could simply edit any color by double clicking on it on this watch panel. If I decide that I would like to edit this color green and I would like to change it on, I go ahead and I click. OK, it changes that color green. But do you notice how it doesn't change where that green was actually applied? So now I have lost that original color green in my swatches panel. It's gone. This one is filled with that color green. But I don't know what this is anymore, because the color doesn't match. So what I just showed you is I just showed you a non global color, which means if you edit the color here, it doesn't edit it where you've used it in your document. So a global color means if you change it in your swatches panel, it changes it globally in your entire document, wherever you've used it, whether you used it in a tent or a solid application, a stroke or a Phil or type whatever you edit that color here and it's gonna change it. Not so with a non global color. So the original set up here is all non global colors, which means I can use all these colors here, and I can apply anything that I'd like. And if I views this throughout my entire document and I'd like to go in, I'd like to change this color globally every place that it was used. That's gonna be a whole lot more difficult to do, because I can't just go in and edit this color here because it doesn't. It's just completely independent of everything else. Now, if I use this and I decide that I'm going to go and I've used global colors for this one, I can go in and I can edit a global color, and I'm gonna turn on the preview here so I can see what's going on. And if I edit this color and I change the preview here. You'll see I don't even have these selected. Once I edit a global color, it edits that color globally throughout this open document. So this is extremely helpful. Toe have. My recommendation is always create global colors, and this is on by default. So when you create a new color, swatch global colors is always checked and it's quite handy. How do you go in and create global colors with everything else? Well, that's the problem you have to go in. If you want all of these to be global colors, you'll have to double click on everyone, turn on the global and click OK and people always ask. It's like, Well, isn't there a way to globally make all the colors global? Not that I know off. I would love to be able to go through and do this and then set this up, but it's a real pain because it's like, Oh, my gosh, so a lot of times you don't need to edit your colors, but the second you need to when you have a very large document, it becomes a real hassle, so use global colors. Okay, and illustrator finally has this checked as a default up until, like the latest versions here, this was never checked, and it was always a source of grumbling. I wish they would just make all the colors global no matter what, so that you never have that issue. So once we have our colors picked in here, we can use these. However, we want Thio. Now there's multiple different ways that we could go in and create colors, and they see people do this quite often. They'll draw a shape, and people like to go in and use their color picker on the color picker is when you go over your toolbar here and you double click on your fill or your stroke icon and it calls up your color picker. That's exactly what it iss. If you are used to Photoshop, this is virtually the same thing. He's got the same set up here, and we can go through, and people love the full spectrum that they can simply go on and visualized the color and say, Oh yes, that's the color that I wanna have that's awesome and they go ahead and they pick the color and they're like this is the color that I want. Here's one of the issues when you go in and use your color picker, So do you notice this little warning sign right here? This little warning sign comes up because we're dealing in C M. Like right now, we're dealing in print, the amount of color that we can print and C n y que is very limited. When we use rgb we that's the entire visible spectrum. When we try to print, we can print far fewer colors in the visible spectrum allows us to. So when we see this out of gamut symbol, this means that this is fine for RGB on a light emanating device. But we can't print this color. So even though we have the full spectrum here, we'd have to go ahead and click on this little out of gamut warning and you'll see it's going to shift the color so that it brings it into a printable range on C N. Y que right here So I could go through when I can pick any color that I want. But if I do get that warning on anything, I need to click on that and get it into the printable range. And I can tell you the colors will shift people like, Yeah, but I don't want it to shift. That's how colors work, folks. You'll notice there's no radio buttons here because we can't click on C N Y que here because the reality of it is a C N y que is on Lee for print. We have our hue, saturation and brightness here and then we also have our RGB spectrum right there. RGB spectrums a little bit more difficult to pick color from people love when they go in and you do the hue, saturation and brightness. And by the way, when you do the brightness slider, this is going to give you the complete visible spectrum where people like to see and pick colors and you can. So if I pick a color from here, make sure it's out of gamut, I go ahead and click. OK, now I've just picked that color, and if I have an object selected, that color is now right here in my object. If I don't have the color on object selected and I go in and I pick a color and say OK, that's the color that I want right there, and I click. Ok, where is that color? Well, the color is on Lee here in my color picker. It didn't put it into my swatches panel. And so if I would like to then add that to an object I can't click on an existing object because all of a sudden existing object is going to show what Fillon stroke it has. And I've lost that color. So I'm gonna undo that. Yeah, that color's gone. So it's like, Oh, my gosh, How do I keep that color? Well, when you select a color through your color picker, you need to put this in your swatches panel just by picking the color in the color Picker doesn't do anything for you unless you've applied it to an actual object. So to bring this into your swatches panel, you can drag it all the way over from here. I'm gonna go into my swatches panel because this felon stroke mimics the one here in my toolbar, and I'm going to simply drag this right into my swatches panel. Now here's the problem. I double click and I get my color picker I find the color that I like, I go ahead and I click, OK, and there is no way for me to add this to my color swatch panel here, so I've got to drag it in And guess what? It's a non global colors. Now I have to double click on it. I have to click on the global color and click OK, so a multi step process to go ahead and use the color picker so you can do it. People do it all the time. But you got several steps I could do the exact same thing going in and using my color picker here. If I go to my color picker, I can go and I can use my sliders right here. I can also do the visible spectrum. Okay, so the color panel mimics my color picker and the one cool thing I like about this is normally the default for this is that you have this little teeny spectrum, but you can go ahead and open it up so you get the full spectrum and you can pick and choose whatever it is that you want. You're like, OK, I love this color, right? here. I really like it. That's great. Okay, now I can go and I can take this and I can put it into my swatches. And it's like, Oh, while my swatches panel is nested here and my color panels here, Well, I can go over to my swatches and drag it right in here. I can also take whatever color I've chosen right here and go to the color cheese grater and say, Create new Swatch and that's not really creating a new swatch. What it's doing is it's putting this swatches you just selected into your swatches panel. So if I say create new Swatch, there it is. It's a global color and I click OK, and now it's put it into my swatches panel right here. Now there's a couple interesting things with global and non global colors beyond the fact of being able to edit them one color in the swatches panel and have a change every occurrence in the entire document. If I have a non global color and I go to my color panel, I can change the color settings here and I can pick right for my visible spectrum and I can create any color that I want. But what happens if I have a color? And I really like this particular color that I'm using here, and I would like to create a tent of this. I want this color, but I want, like, 80% version of this color. There is no place that I can go in here and create a tint of this color. And some of you may be saying is I've created tents before. Here's the deal. I'm gonna pull my color panel off so we can see you can never go in and tent a non global color. So if I create this watch and put it in here and I would like to create attentive this color, I can't do it now. If I take this color and I turn into a global color, watch what my color panel does. All of a sudden, my color panel loses its C M I K sliders. It loses the spectrum. And now I can create a tent of this color Aiken Onley tint global colors. So if I'd like to use this color in varying different objects here, but I would like to use this is different tents. I certainly can. Now the benefit of this is that I can take any color intended. And tenting is the by definition adding white to the color here So I can have this anyway that I want Thio and it's great, Absolutely fantastic. Okay, but you can Onley tint a global color. You'll never see this unless the color you're using is a global color with that little angle on it. Now I want to show you how fantastic using global colors is because I've decided that I'd like to change this color slightly. I'm gonna go back to my swatches panel, double click and edit this right here. And as I edit this color on, I click OK, It will also added that color wherever it's used. Plus, it will also remember the tents that we apply. Now, if I've got tense here and I would like Thio not just keep selecting the color and then applying a tent to it right here. If I'd like to go in and keep these tents here in my swatch panel, I can I can create a color and I can also create a tent of that color and I can park it right there so that every time I grab a tent, I could just put it in here. And these could be my colors. And these could be the tent of my colors. You'll see when I hover over them, it shows me what it is. And it shows me the percentage I'm gonna show this enlist view because this will make a little bit more sense and list view here. I can see all my could see my color here, and then I can see the tents of my color right there. Now, if you are very anal retentive like I am, I want to make sure that everything is together. You can simply grab these colors and you can move them around in your swatches panel. Okay, Very simple. And it's like, All right, you know, the purple one should come after the blue, or however you want it. You can simply click and drag and move those all around in here to get them all together. It doesn't change anything. It just makes it that much easier for you to work through all of your colors. Now, if I go in and I edit any one of my colors here. This is basically my parent, and then these are the Children right here. If I added any one of these colors, doesn't matter which one. Ideo When I double click on when I edit that color, it is going to globally change that color and everything based on that color. And sure enough, it's done. So global colors air Definitely the way to go when you're working and illustrator, it's just going to save you so much time. I cannot think of a reason why you would not want to use a global color and people will say Yeah, but what happens if I want to edit the color here and not change it wherever it ISS? It's like you mean you want to create a copy of the color? It's like, Yeah, I want to create a copy of the color. Okay, grab a color, go to your swatches cheese grater and say, Duplicate this watch. Keep that swatch and make a different one or just create a new Swatch. It's like, Okay, so I can't imagine the reason why you wouldn't want to use global colors, because if you have never used the global color feature and you never edit the color and then change it globally. That's fine. But if you ever have thio now you can. But a non global color in your color panel will show up with the sliders in the spectrum. But whenever you click on or create a global color now your color panel will be a tent slider where you could go in and activate the tent of this. However you'd like so a lot of cool stuff, but definitely one of those things where it's like, Wow, Okay, there's a lot of information already. Now what happens if you are not really good about picking color? And you just say, Jeez, you know, I've got all these colors. What's gonna go good with my, um, I'm creating a logo or a Nikon, and I just really need some colors. One of the swatches panel. We have color libraries, so if you click on the cheese grater, go down to the bottom. We have our color libraries, and we can pick all sorts of things right here. This is where you confined spot colors for people who are working with spot colors. This is where you get your spot colors from so spot color is a color book and then we've got all of our Pantone's here, and, uh so if I go in and I say Pantone solid coated the interesting thing is that every time you open up a color library, it always opens up its its own floating panel. Now, if I click on any color here, this is a spot color here. If I click on any color here, no matter what I dio, it's automatically gonna put into my swatches panel for my use right there. Okay, But that's not the only color library that we can grab. We could go under the cheese grater and maybe I'm going in and say, Oh, you know, I'd like to see something with nature and landscape colors. Well, there it is. There's a whole bunch of pre made colors with landscapes that are all put together, and it's like, Oh, you know, I like these colors. This is great color combination. I think I want to use thes, and you can. I'm going to switch back to my swatches panel here in my thumbnail view, and if I open up a library, I can simply grab that folder or if I want just one of those colors, I could grab one of the colors, but I'm just gonna grab this folder from my library window and drag it over into my swatches panel so that it's there now, this swatches panel, when I go through and edit it is on Lee for this document. If I open a new document by swatches panel goes back to normal. So these are the things that I have on Lee in this particular file right now, when I save this file, everything is going to be in here. Okay, So libraries air great. We've got lots and lots and lots of libraries. So many different things right there. You want patterns? Neutral nature, kids stuff, radiance foods. You know, ice cream. There we go. They need a bacon color panel. I just need it. So there's all the ice cream. Anything else? Great. You've got those readily accessible libraries are also available underneath the color icon. Here, there's the swatches library menu. It's the same thing that you click on that and then get your entire color panel. But if you're looking for spot colors there, there is well, color books is where you can find all your spot colors. Got color properties to it. SSM a zing you can go through and collect all this stuff. So a lot of choices to go ahead and get color. Now, one more thing that we have here well, several more things that we have in orderto go ahead and get color. It's awesome. The adobe color themes Now this adobe color themes is a free floating panel, but really, it's like a little Web browser, so you have to be connected to the Internet. In order for this to show up, you can also go right Thio, adobe colored adobe dot com and call up this exact same thing just in a website. And how this works is pretty simple. We see the color wheel here, and this is gonna make a little bit more sense very shortly. I'm gonna click the Explorer button up here, and the explore allows me to explore all these themes based on keyword searches. And so I want to do an infographic on watermelons. But I'm gonna simply search for watermelons. And these are all user created, um, sets of colors. Some of them may be way off. It's like, Okay, you know, some of these things They're like, I never would think this is watermelon, but okay, somebody does. And it's like, Oh, you know, this one really looks like watermelon. So once I do a search for this and I would like to go through and get these colors, use these colors or change the colors ever so slightly, I find the theme that I'm looking for. I click on the three dots. I can edit this theme if I want to. To change the color is ever so slightly. If I choose edit, it brings me back to here. And then I can select the color here at the top. You can see where the little triangle is, and those lollipops will bounce right there. So we know where it is. So I can saturate er de saturate. Er change the hue. I like these, so I think it's fine. Let me go back to my watermelon search here because I want to show you all the features. So I do my search for watermelon and click on that dot Again, I can add this to my swatches directly from here if I don't want to change anything. So if I like this and I say, yeah, this is my color thing right here. Add this to my swatches. I choose that, and in my swatches panel, it has added my watermelon colors. Now, mind you, these air, not global color. So I would have to go in, double click on each color, turn them into a global color so that I could make sure that I just don't have that hassle of doing him. And the reason why I do this now before I use them is because if I use them in my document, then turn him into a global color. It doesn't remember when I apply it here. And then I change it here afterwards. It doesn't go ahead and reconnect to that color. Okay, turn your colors global first, and then go ahead and apply them to your objects. Don't go ahead and apply them and then turn these into a global color. Because then you'll have to reapply the colors. Okay, so the adobe color themes are quite awesome. Okay, if you want to create something from scratch when you open up your adobe color themes here. You've got all your little wheels that you could go and you can bring them all around and you can slide them all around. It's like, Why are these all connected together? Well, the reason why is because you have basic color rules, color harmonies, alright. And so if I click on the color rules right here, I can have analogous. I could have monochromatic, complementary colors. There's complementary colors here, compound colors, And how is it picking it? Well, it's picking it from the initial color right here. So this is the initial color right there. And then if I change this initial color right there, then my color harmonies air going to go ahead and base it on whatever my initial color is right there, and that's just a matter of taking that color, putting it around the color wheel. Okay, but I can go ahead and I can de saturate those Aiken saturate those, and the bar at the bottom allows me to make them lighter or darker so I can get that entire color range as well. If I have a color that I want to start with so that that becomes my initial color to go through And Dio I could go in, select something and I click on this little arrow right here. I think these arrows air backwards. These don't make any sense. This one to May says, Okay, take my object and make that the color. And this one's like Okay, take the color I have and make take the color and put into my object. No, they're backwards. Okay, so this one with the arrow going out is saying Take my collar and put it in here, which I just did. And this other one is going in here and saying, OK, take my selected color that's here and send it out. Thio my object right there. I think those icons or backwards, but anyway, that's what you have. So if you start with a color here and then you'd like to bring it in, use the opposite arrow, it brings it in, and then you can use your color harmony rules in order to access that and then edit your colors. Now, once you've gone through and set those colors and you got all your content here, how do you take all these input? You're newly created ones into your swatch panel. Well, you click on a little fly swatter waffle, and that's gonna add that to your swatches, all of them. I click on that. Go to my swatches panel and there are my colors again, their non global. So you're gonna hear this time and time again. Make your colors global. It's gonna save yourself a whole lot of hassle. So that's how you can do the adobe color themes right here. Or go to color dot adobe dot com website and you can access the same feature same thing right there, and be able to load the things directly into your illustrator file or any other adobe application that has this adobe color themes there. This is just nicer because it's right here in my illustrator file. So there's my swatches. I've been able to choose from my library's. I've been able to go to my color themes here, and everything is working good