Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

Filling and Stroking Path

Intersections Dynamically

Live Paint gives Illustrator the ability to detect any color intersect-

ing areas within an illustration. So rather than treating everything

in terms of discrete objects that overlap and cover each other, Live

Paint sees your illustration as consisting of the lines in a coloring

book or the panes of a stained glass window. You don’t need to cre-

ate a specialized object to which you apply your color, you merely

select two overlapping shapes and click on the intersection with a

paint bucket. No need to draw a new shape or create a subpath.

And even better, as you change the intersection, by moving one or

both of its components, Illustrator updates the effect to the altered

area of overlap.

The convenience of Live Paint has always been pretty obvious to

me, but the day I came to appreciate its real power was when I

consulted my good friend and former Illustrator product manager

Mordy Golding. I wanted to create a set of Olympic-style rings,

with all the overlaps and underlaps in the proper places. I was be-

moaning Illustrator’s inability to create such interlocking objects,

when Mordy calmly pointed out that it could in fact be done with

Live Paint. And then Mordy proceeded to expand my mind. The

following exercise reveals what I learned from that conversation.

1. Open a fi le. Go to the Lesson 11 folder inside Lesson

Files-AIcs5 1on1 and open Olympic dreams.ai. As you

can see in Figure 11-33, it’s a simple set of decidedly

non-interlocking rings created with compound paths.

how the blue ring completely covers the yellow one, which com-

pletely covers the black one, and so on. This is a by product of

standard vector-based stacking order.

Figure 11-33 .

413

Filling and Stroking Path Intersections Dynamically

2.

Convert the rings to a Live Paint group Select all the rings

by pressing Ctrl-A (-A on the Mac). Then grab the live paint

bucket tool (the one that looks like a bucket of paint) from the

toolbox, as in Figure 11-34. If you can’t fi nd it, press the K key.

3.

Choose the fi rst paint color. Live Paint will fi ll your image with

a color from the Swatches panel. Above the paint bucket cursor

is a triad of mini-swatches that show you the current selected

color in the center, with the previous and proceeding colors on

the left and right respectively. Press the right-arrow key until

the center color above the bucket is yellow.

4.

Create a live paint group. Click the lower of the two areas

where the yellow ring intersects the blue one (as demonstrated

in Figure 11-35). You now have a live paint group.

Move your cursor around the image, and notice how different overlapping

areas light up with the thick neon red outline like the one around the small

yellow section in Figure 11-24. The outline indicates you could click to paint

the areas should you choose to.

5. Enable Live Paint to work on strokes. The default setting for

Live Paint is to just supply fi lls, but you can set it to work on

strokes as well. Double-click the paint bucket icon in the tool-

box to bring up the Live Paint Bucket Options dialog box, as

shown in Figure 11-36. Turn on the Paint Strokes check box,

and click OK.

Figure 11-34 .

Figure 11-35 .

Figure 11-36.

414

Lesson 11: Live Trace, Paint, and Color