From the course: Illustrator: Coloring Artwork

Mixing custom colors with the Color panel - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator: Coloring Artwork

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Mixing custom colors with the Color panel

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- [Instructor] There are many different ways to find or create colors in Illustrator. Let's start off by taking a close look at the color panel. First, you can simply click in the color ramp to pick a color, and you can change the size of the color ramp by clicking right at the bottom of the color panel here and then stretching it or shrinking it. I like having the color ramp as big as I can so there's more colors in here. And, of course, you can move the sliders here to mix colors. I like to dial my colors in numerically by selecting a number in a field and dialing in a number. I can then switch to the next field with the Tab key, and toggle through all of these really quickly by tabbing through them. If you want to exit out of those selected fields, the Enter key will take you out of that. Every color model is found under the panel options menu. We can mix colors with any of these models regardless of the color mode of the document. We can also toggle through these by Shift clicking on the color ramp. We've been playing with colors here, but nothing's happened on the art because I don't have any art selected. So I'll select the shape for the hat, and then just pick a color here from the color ramp. Currently, the fill color is active. The X key will switch between the fill and stroke. So with the X key the stroke is now active, and I can pick a different color for the stroke. Let's dial the size of that up so that we can see it better. The shift + x will also switch the colors between the fill and the strokes. So we can switch the blue and the green with the shift + x. Clicking this icon here will switch whatever the active color is to none or we can get there with the backslash key. With the backslash key, I remove the stroke. If I hit the X on my keyboard, that'll bring the fill color forward, and I can remove the fill color with the backslash. To reset the colors to the default white fill and black stroke, use the D on your keyboard. I'm going to fill this hat with a nice, bright purple color so we can talk a little bit more about the color models and the color mode of the document. We've talked about how you can mix colors with different color models regardless of the document's color mode. And, currently, I've been mixing colors with RGB, but I'm working in a CMYK document. It's important to understand, however, that only the color panel can support the color model if it's different than the color mode of the document. The color of the object gets converted to the color mode of the document. So we can see that the purple color in my art is not quite as bright as the purple that's in the color panel. This warning icon here tells us that this RGB color that I've dialed in is out of gamut for the CMYK color mode. Clicking on this warning icon will snap the RGB to the closest value that will match the current color working space for this CMYK document. The 3D cube icon is another color warning. This one tells us that it's not a web-safe RGB falling within the 216 specific colors that are determined as web-safe colors. This wide gamut warning isn't really so important anymore, because most people have monitors that can achieve a wide range of colors, but if it's important to your workflow, you can click on this 3D cube. That will snap the RGB to a web-safe RGB. So in summary, the color panel is a great place to mix colors using any color model or to quickly grab a color by clicking on the color ramp. However, the color panel doesn't provide any way to manage those colors after they've been applied to your art. Check out the Color Swatches movie next to learn more about that.

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