Adobe Illustrator CC - Advanced Training

Class Project 04 - How to change all the colors at once in Adobe Illustrator Recolour artwork (Recolour the whale design)

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hello, color loving Illustrator people. In this video we're going to take our whale, and we're going to recolor with my couple of different options. Super quick, super easy, using the Recolor Artwork option in Adobe Illustrator. Let's go learn how to use that now. 

First thing to do is, open up 'Recolor Artwork' from your 'Exercise Files'. I'm going to zoom out a little bit, I'm going to grab the Artboard Tool. The shortcut is 'Shift O', it's a weird one. But I use it all the time, 'Shift O'. And we're going to make a duplicate. Easiest way to make a duplicate is holding down the 'Alt' key on a PC, or 'Option' key on a Mac I use this for duplicating shapes. You can get the same, but you've got to drag the actual name, that's the best bit. Click on the name 'Artboard 1'. And we're going to have a second color option. 

With my 'Black Arrow' I'm going to select all the colors I want to adjust. Basically it's only kind of two things. There's two kind of Gradients I've got. And I've locked the background here. So, I've got them both selected, and 'Command H' gets rid of all the blue lines. I do that when I'm recoloring. It's 'Control H' on a PC. Just to kind of make it look nice. Make sure you turn it back on, you'll get lost. 

With it selected, over here there's one called Recolor. Make sure you're on 'Properties Panel', click on 'Recolor', to mainly adjust him. I've kept this quite simple, it's only four colors going on. That's either side of both of these gradients. You might have a lot more here. So to manually go and change, you might go and actually-- instead of having to reach through the whole document and find out all the instances you can just go, double click this guy. That's my current color, and this is where I'm going to switch it to. You just double click that 'Swatch' and you can go into here, and say actually I want to switch that out for pink. Click 'OK'. 

You can see, it's gone through and switched every instance of that for the pink. You can do that for all of them. This guy here as well, he's got a different pink too. I'm going to make it look ugly, I know I am. You know what's going to happen. You get what I mean, right? So you can manually go through and double click these to change it. Let's click 'OK' and look at it in a different way. I'm going to grab my 'Artboard', remember, 'Shift 0'. No, it's 'Shift O', not zero. Hold down the 'Alt' key, or the 'Option' key. Black Arrow, which is the 'V' key. Select all of this, we're going to go to 'Recolor' and what we'll do is-- actually what I might do is duplicate the first one before I made it run. 

So this guy, I want a second copy of. While we're here, I'm going to do another one after this. I'll have four in total. So I'm going to select this guy, and go to 'Recolor'. One of the other interesting options is the Random one. So all this is going to do is grab-- you've got four colors, and we've used them in a specific way. It's going to go-- this little icon here, a Random. This goes and randomly changes them. Moves him all around the place. It's just a nice kind of way, I guess if you've got maybe-- Gradients is not working as well but maybe you've used five color Swatches, you just want to kind of go through all this, see what a different kind of mixture might be. So you can click on 'Random'. 

Let's look at the last one here, and probably the most important. I saved it till the last. It is Recolor. What we want to do now is go to Edi, because Assign is what it is by default, let's click on 'Edit', and you get this Color Wheel. There's two ways of doing it. You can just kind of drag them around by themselves because, these are the colors, right? That's the kind of width that I'm using. These are the two greens, and this is the kind of yellowy thing I was using. You can just move him around, just drag him in. It's not much different, I guess, then that first option, when we double clicked him. 

Where it gets really cool is if you link them all. So when you change this one, they all change. It kind of gives you a way of kind of recoloring the whole thing at once. And they keep the kind of balance of initial Gradient color selection. And the Color Well moves around. Am I making this better? Not sure. I'm going to leave it there, click 'OK'. 

What I'd like you to do as a class project is to go through, come up with your own color options, maybe make a few of them. Take a screen shot, send them to me on Instagram or Twitter. I am @bringyourownlaptop on Instagram, and I'm @danlovesadobe on Twitter. Or of course, post them on the website here as a class project. I'd love to see what you come up with. You don't have to use Gradients, you could switch those out first. Let's get on to the next video.