Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

Thanks to good friends showing me the error of my ways and Il-

lustrator’s Live Paint feature, the Olympic spirit can continue on—

now also available in necklace form.

Recoloring Artwork with Live Color

Live Color is really an umbrella term for a group of loosely related

features that are scattered between a handful of icons, panels,

and dialog boxes. With it, you can dynamically alter the colors in

your artwork, even going so far as to reassign all the colors across

an entire illustration. And you can choose your new color scheme

from an existing library, another illustration, or your own custom

crafted color group.

Figure 11-44.

After introducing it in CS3, Adobe

abandoned the phrase “Live Color”

in the actual interface in favor of the

prosaic and literal Edit Colors and Re-

color Artwork. But I continue to call the

over-arching feature set Live Color, be-

cause it’s alive and it’s cool. Changing

the entire color theme across an illus-

tration in a matter of seconds? Effort-

lessly distilling a piece of artwork with

17 colors down to a one-color spot job?

If that’s not “live,” I’m not sure what

is. In this exercise, we’ll perform such

feats with the live color set of tools.

It’s still invigorating and fun to use,

despite the decidedly less vivacious of-

fi cial verbiage.

1. Open a colored piece of

artwork. We’re going to

start with the illustration

you see in Figure 11-44

Stock footage.ai, which you’ll fi nd

inside the Lesson 11 folder in Les-

son Files-AIcs5 1on1. This piece

comes from artist Bulent Ince of

iStockphoto. As you can see (if not

immediately count, just trust me)

it contains 13 colors not including

black and white, all of which we’ll

alter during this exercise.

P E A R L O F W I S D O M

The concept of Live Color all started with a Web-based application from Adobe

Labs called Kuler (pronounced “cooler,” because it just wants to be). With Kuler,

you can dynamically create a group of fi ve colors, called a theme (analagous to

a harmony in Illustrator), which you can then share with friends or download for

use throughout your creative suite —created artwork. Go to kuler.adobe.com to

check it out. It’s kul.

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Recoloring Artwork with Live Color