From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

883 Recoloring a gradient using a color group

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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883 Recoloring a gradient using a color group

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- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how to recolor a freeform gradient with the help of a color group. And so you can see here that I've established three different color groups, all of which contain four swatches apiece, here inside the Swatches panel. And so as you may recall in the previous movie, we took this freeform gradient that's surrounding this slide for my Illustrator 2020 One-on-one Fundamentals course. And we basically winged it, in order to recolor the gradient like so. Well, in my opinion, this is trash, these colors are terrible. And so I want to gain a little more control over the process in order to create this vivid color scheme here, as well as these steely colors. And again, that's something you can do very easily using color groups that you establish inside the Swatches panel. And so I'll go ahead and switch over to the original version of my artwork here, and I'll click off that shape to deselect it. And so what you want to do is bring up your Swatches panel, which you can do by going to the Window menu and choosing the Swatches command. And then, you want to go ahead and establish some swatches by clicking on little New Swatch icon, which will allow you to define a swatch, give it a name. Notice by default, it's going to be a global swatch, meaning that it's linked to any object that you assign it to. I'm going to cancel out here and then after you create a handful of swatches, you'll want to group them together by clicking on this little folder icon. All right, so once again I've already done that in advance, and so I'm going to click on this object that contains the freeform gradient, so this boundary right here around the artwork, which I've expressed as a clip group, for what that's worth. So in other words what we have here is a big huge rectangle that's filled with a free-form gradient and then clipped inside a compound path. All right, so with that object selected I'll go ahead and click on the Recolor Artwork icon up here in the horizontal control panel, in order to bring up the Recolor Artwork dialog box. Then, if you're not seeing these options right here, click on the Assign button in order to switch to the sub panel. That's because if you click on Edit you're going to see that color wheel, which is what got us into trouble in the previous movie. All right, so I'll go ahead and click on the word Assign, and then notice over here on the right hand side of the dialog box, we're seeing the various color groups, and so all I have to do is click on Vivid Swatches in order to reassign those colors to my gradient. And so because my original colors were just these four right here and my Vivid Swatches group contains four colors as well, Illustrator just goes ahead and swaps them out. Now you may want to swap your colors in a different order. For example, if I click on Steely, notice that I once again switch out my original four colors, these guys right here, for my new four color swatches, but let's say I don't really like the way that they're assigned, as opposed to my dark color appearing down here in the lower left region of the artwork, I want it to appear in the top left corner. In that case, I would just grab this color swatch right here and drag it and drop it up here at the top of the stack and that's going to swap those two colors like so, at which point I'll just go ahead and click Okay to accept that effect. Now, because I changed the order of the colors, Illustrator's going to ask me if I want to save those changes to my Steely color group. I don't, it's not necessary, so I'll just click on the No button. And that is how you recolor a freeform gradient using a color group that you've established in advance here inside the Swatches panel.

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