From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

Creating flattened color - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

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Creating flattened color

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(dramatic tune) - [Instructor] Welcome to Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory. This movie is based on a question I received from a viewer who asked me, can you explain why you would flatten the color when working in Adobe Illustrator? So let's take a look at how you can flatten colors and why do you want to use this feature in your own workflow. Now this is going to be really dependent on the type of work you're doing and if you even prefer to do this. But I've been asked this question many times about flattening colors and I just thought it was a little pedestrian, so I never thought about turning it into a DVG Lab, that is until I spoke at a conference Creative South, did a workshop with a friend of mine Sean where we both worked on the exact same project and just showcased how we both approach it differently just to kind of make the argument that finding the way you prefer to work is always the best route for you to go. So what I'm going to show you here, isn't like the only way to work, if you figure out a different methodology that works for you that's great, I'm just sharing the way I handle this. So usually when I deal with colors, if we have a background color like this, this is this golden color and then we have this blue with the color break listed down here, the opacity is 100% on both and there's no blend mode used. But if we go to this one, the exact same two colors but on the opacity on the blue, we're going to go ahead and modify this, so we're going to modify this to a 70% blue and you can see how it's kind of showing the gold behind it coming through on that color value, but we now want to apply a blend mode. So in the transparency palette, we're going to go ahead and select multiply. This takes the top color in this case 60% opacity of this blue is now mixing with the color underneath visually and this is going to create this green. And so I'll use this methodology to do shading, mostly in the context of illustration, I never do this when I'm working on a brand I keep with solid colors because well, that's the way you should work when you're working on a brand. But I'm going to demonstrate why I do that and at times I do have need in the exploratory process to build it this way, but then I want to flatten it later. And here's an example of the exact same color, set up the exact same way, 70% multiply on top of the back color. Now, the problem with working with transparency and blend modes and it's only a problem when you have to use it in the widest variety of ways that's not a problem to use those features they're there obviously. But if I take this blue down here and I just take the eyedropper sample this color that's sitting on top down here, it's blue but it has the same setting 70% multiply, it's only when it overlaps another color does it make that third color and that's expected. But let's say we like this third color and we want to turn that into an actual separate hue that's in our swatches palette. Well, we're going to have to make that somehow, so how do we determine what the mix of these two color values and settings are, in order to get this third color, well that's where flattening comes in. We're going to go ahead and go up here to this which is the exact same setup as we did here and we're going to select both of these two things right here. And we're going to go up to object and we're going to click on rasterize it's going to bring up this window, right now we're in CMYK mode, so we'll just stay with that color model. Resolution, what do you want to set the resolution to? This is set for 300 PPI but we can even go higher, so if you want to do in other type of resolution, you wouldn't want to go smaller, you'd want to go higher, so we'll go other and let's just punch in 600 PPI, so almost double offset print resolution. Are optimize is what you want to default to, we're going to keep the background white, we're not going to see any of it, it'll be completely encompassed by the golden color, but you wouldn't want to pick transparent, everything else will lead by default and we're going to click OK. (mouse clicks) So what we've done here is this now if I go to keyline view, let's do that. You can see it's no longer vector shapes, it's an image and if we go to links, you're going to see that image right here, so it made it an embedded image. Now, the reason why you'd want to rasterize is because once you have it rasterize, you can grab the eyedropper tool and we're going to sample this middle green here that was made from the blue, (mouse clicks) and you can see the color it's going to load will be right here and that's what we want, so we'll go ahead and drag this into the palette we've set up for these colors. I'm going to double click into this, right now it's a fractional number and that's what you're going to get when you use this methodology. So here I probably just rounded off to 45, actually if you look at the title, Illustrator kind of does this already, so if you ever have fractional numbers just look at how Illustrator did it and that's a good sense of where you can go. Although you can round up or round down, I round to the closest whole number in which case both of these are rounding down to do that, so my final CMYK break will be this numbering right here. I'll also click on global that means later if I decide to change the color or change any iteration of the color and then I'm going to click OK. So now we have this, as its own independent color. And so what do I mean by that? Well, let's go down here, here we have this setup originally with multiply and we had 70 will go back to 100% value here. (mouse clicks) And we're going to just click this green and now we have the exact same green, let's pull this out we'll clone it Command + C, Command + F. We'll size it down, bring it over, so you can see we now have the exact same look and feel but it's flattened so we could access this color and make an independent color over here. That's one way to do it, you can rasterize it or you can select both of these, in this case we have the same here and we're going to go ahead and group these, then we're going to go over to object and we're going to go flattened transparency and then it'll ask you for a resolution, I always default to high and everything else I'm going to leave default and I'm going to go OK. Now if we click into this isolation mode, and we drag this over notice it's no longer transparent, that's because we've actually created a third color here and you can see it's the exact same color break we had before. So we're going to go ahead and drag this into the same palette, (mouse clicking) click out of isolation mode and we're going to double click into this just so we don't get the error saying, you already have this color, we'll round up on this first one and we'll go ahead and round down on this second one and then we'll click global, OK. (mouse clicks) So if we take these two shapes, (mouse clicks) let's go ahead and paste that back in, I'll line it, (mouse clicking) so it's back in the middle here (mouse clicks) and what was blue originally we can now color this new color we have here. So again, this is opaque. So that's the two ways you can flatten a color to do that kind of thing. And the difference is once again, if we have this color down here and we had it originally set up, (mouse clicks) like this or we take this color and we bring it over, that's the difference. One is transparent, so it's only going to appear this green over a specific color background one we've created a new hue whether it was the first way being rasterized or the second way being flattened, it's going to work as a third hue. So you might be wondering well, why would you even do this, well, I'm going to show you a context in which would be a good example of something I worked on recently where I had to do this. So we're going to take a really quick look at a project, this is where it started. It was for a museum I was doing a branding for, based off of the Chisholm Trail, which is a cattle driving the history of cowboy and lure here in the United States, and this is one of the directions I came up with. The reason why I'm showing you the drawing is because a lot of people ask me, why do you draw in analog, why don't you just draw on your iPad Pro or why don't you draw using a Cintiq and I could that. I could draw in Illustrator actually with the Wacom like this where in Photoshop to do my sketching, I just don't like the whole kind of glovebox feeling of working on a tablet or working on the iPad Pro to draw. What I mean by glovebox, you think those scientists handling uranium rods with their gloves going through into the box, that's kind of what drawing digitally feels like to me. It's not that it's wrong, it's not that it's bad, some people love doing it and do it really well, my daughter is one of them, I just have always drawn in analog, I don't mind digital drawing you get all the same benefits, aesthetically and cognitively actually if you do draw digitally, I just prefer drawing in analog, so I just want to touch base on that really quickly. Let's keep moving forward, this was my refine sketch and of course on top of it, I built the vector art, so what I had one as all said and done is the base vector art is showing here. Now on this design, this was the tonal family I used and instead of this start black, I wanted to kind of get more that cowboy feel, so we have a brown here. We'll go ahead and colorize this that color the background is going to be a blue. We'll color his skin tone and his hat will be this kind of lighter color brown and also his mustache. So these were all the base colors I used on this design direction. Now when it comes to flattening color, it's something I do a lot if I'm working on branding and if I'm using transparencies because I never like embedding blend modes or transparencies inside a brand asset like a logo, I just don't think you should do that, I always want them to be whole value swatches that are based off of a specific pantone color because right now all these colors I'm using here, these are all raw CMYK colors. If I double click into this orange one, these are the color breaks I've figured but this isn't based off of any universal reference point it's just based off of what I see on screen. And what I'll do when it's all said and done is all take a pantone book and I'll spec from the color. So this is all exploratory work, well as I was working on this I created shading and these were all the shapes for the shading in his face and it's this coloring over here, this color right here is the shading color that I'm going to use but I'm not using it at full value. Meaning if we look at this example here and we go to the transparency palette you can see it's that value here, but it's set to multiply and it's only 50% of that value, so if I click on the shapes we created for shading and I go ahead and shade it the whole color value for the shading, you can see it's way too dark, it's not going to work great, then almost looks like he has a sunburn. So I'll want to select this and then I'll knock the value down by half and then I'm going to multiply it with the skin tone underneath and that'll give me a better value for their overall shading on this character. Now the whole reason I'm doing this, I might go lighter than this, we'll try 35 see what that looks like. (mouse clicks) And yeah, I think I like that better actually. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to I'm making an on-the-spot change here, so we're going to go ahead and just change this to 35, I think that looks better. I'm even exploring as I'm trying to explain how I did this while exploring, so there you go. But this is the value in the look and feel I want but this isn't going to work for a logo, I want to solid pigment color reference there based off of the pantone color and I can't do that, if I'm using blend modes and transparencies. So this is where I would use flattening in either of the two methods before, so if we take these two colors the skin tone, the shading on top and we group it and I go to object and I go to flatten transparency, we'll keep all the same settings we have, click OK, I can ungroup this and now I have a flat color and you can see there is no transparency and that's what I want. If you look at the color break, it's going to be that fractional numbering again, but we'll go ahead and drag this down because it will now become the shading value that I'm using here, I'll go ahead and round down on these like this, set to global and click OK. And then on this because it was set to multiply we're going to bring that back to normal, we're going to bring this back to 100% value and instead of the base shading color we're using we're going to color it the new color that we flattened. (mouse clicks) So now all my artwork is ready for me to compare with pantone books and I can spec all the pantone colors based off of actually let's change this one, this will be all the colors now, I'll go to pantone and I'll spec the exact colors I wanted to use so I can ensure that that color the shading color specifically is going to match on whatever item it's going to be printed on, so it wouldn't be possible if we still had blend modes and transparency set to it. When it comes to illustration, I use blend modes all the time and I never spec pantone because you really don't have to that's such a broad mix of CMYK that as long as you've use those colors in the past and they're real-world tested and you've seen them printed and they look great for the most part they're going to work fine. So that's the difference between branding and illustration is illustration has a lot more flexibility just because you're dealing with such a gimmick color, nobody is going to notice something if it's a few percentage points off, on a branding color it's quite the opposite. So let's take a look at a few more things here. This principle of flattening can be used in a lot of ways to get colors. So let's say we combined all these colors, these are just multiplied sitting over the top of one another but if we go ahead and group these and go object and we go flatten transparency, we'll keep all the same settings, OK. So now what we have is it'll break it up into individual colors. So you might be working sometimes and this is a great way to get additional colors really quickly to figure them out, so all we had need to do again is select a color and then drag it into our swatches palette. Again, it's going to be these fractional numbers, here's a case where I just round up to 70 and this one I'd probably round down and this one I keep as five set for global and OK. Now if I take this color, actually let's go ahead and compare, if I take this color and we set it to what it was originally and then I take this one and color it the non-fractional number version (mouse clicks) and then I bring it up on top. There's barely I don't even know if you can see it, there's just barely a difference between the two, so with dot gain, imprinting digitally, you're never going to notice a change between that slight of a color modification within the CMYK mode, so I just wanted to cover that really quickly. So once again all these colors are raw colors, all these colors, anytime I'm working on design project or an illustration project for the majority of time I'm working in raw colors, meaning speculative colors, meaning I'm exploring as I'm creating and trying to visually get the look and feel of the hue but then ultimately when something's approve ready to move forward, I have to go to my pantone book and then I spec colors specifically for design projects not illustration. So for example, if we take a look at this, this is an illustration project, none of these colors in my swatches palette are pantone colors. These are all just raw CMYK colors that's okay, but you can see I'm using all these layers. So this is another thing you'll want to do at times is I'm going to go ahead and just select everything will go to the option menu and I'm going to go flattened artwork. It's going to move it all to one layer, I also like to go Command + G and group it that way if a client gets his file and they move something they don't leave something else behind and then I usually name it what it is, so let's say, (keys clacking) happy spring flowers, for the lack of a better term. Now this file itself in its unflattened condition with all those layers was six megabytes, once I flattened it, it's now a 3.1 megabyte file, so it almost cuts the memory down in half. I rarely if ever flatten an illustration, it used to be important to reduce file sizes but in the world of terabyte hard drives and HD printing and screen resolution that tends to be higher than actual print resolutions, it's becoming less important to do so. So the majority of my flattening happens within the confines of my creative process using color and composing a design. Thank you for watching DVG Lab and as always remember, never stop drawing.

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