Organizing colors into groups - Illustrator Tutorial

- [Instructor] Working with color groups will help you keep organized when you work and that's always a good idea. Color groups also tell Illustrator how the colors in your art should relate to each other and this gives Illustrator the power to edit multiple colors at once making it easier to recolor existing art or to try out a variety of color themes on the same art. It's not possible to do this if you're just working with the single swatch colors. Here we have a finished Big Foot illustration that was create by Von Glitschka. If we take a look at the Swatches panel, we'll see the global color swatches that Von created to color this art. We also see all of the default swatches. The default swatches come with two color groups. We see the grays and the brights here. If I switch to the list view, and then scroll down, we'll see the names of those color groups. I'll switch back to the thumbnail view so that we can see all of the swatches. It's easy to group colors that are found in the Swatches panel. There's a couple ways to do this. If there aren't any swatches selected, I'm going to click in this space here to make sure no swatches are selected, and then clicking the bolder Group icon at the bottom brings up a menu to name it. I'm just going to create a group called Blues and that creates an empty folder group here. I'm going to change this to the medium thumbnail view so we can really see what's going on and now it's just as easy as dragging and dropping swatch colors into that folder group, so I'll collect a few of these blue colors and add to that group. Once you have colors in a group, it's pretty easy to just change the order of them too, so I can drag and drop these to change how they're ordered. Maybe I want to go light to dark here. With this method we started with an empty group folder because there wasn't any swatches selected. It'd probably be a good idea to clean up the Swatch panel by collecting all of those global colors and putting them into their own group, so I'll select all of those by shift clicking from the start to the end, clicking on the folder icon here and we'll call this Bigfoots Colors and then say OK. That created a new group with all of those global swatches, so we're starting to clean this up and it's looking a lot better. So, this is how you create color groups working with swatches that are already in the Swatches panel. But if you create color themes with the Adobe Color Themes panel, or at the Adobe Color CC website or with the Adobe Capture Mobile app, those are automatically created as groups. Let's take a look at that real quick here with the Adobe Color Themes panel. If I just click here to add to swatches, and then switch back to the Swatches panel, let's double click this to collapse it, we'll see the new color group created from the color theme in the Adobe Color Themes panel. A few more things about color groups. Groups can only contain solid colors, so we can't drag one of these gradients for example and drop it into a group and you can't do that either with a pattern. Finally, we should clean up the Swatches panel 'cause there's too many colors in here that won't be used for this illustration. It's really easy to do that by going to the Swatches panel option here and select all unused. That selects all of the colors here that weren't used to color this art and then we'll click the trashcan to get rid of those. So, now this document's looking a lot more organized but if we really think about the way this illustration was colored, it would make sense to go a little bit further with this organization and that if we wanted to recolor the fur, all of the fur color should be in its own group and if we wanted to recolor just the tan body parts, we would want those colors in their own color group. Well, I've already organized all of the colors. I'm going to switch to that file here and if we take a look at the color groups in the Swatches panel here, we have four groups. I'll switch to the list view so that we can see the names of how those were organized. Sometimes you may want to use the same color in more than one color group. If we take a look at the mouth, for example, it contains a black color but the group for the mouth doesn't contain that black. You can duplicate a color swatch to be used in more than one group but there's a little bit of a trick to it. I'm going to switch back to the thumbnail view so we can see this better and I think I'll take it up to the medium thumbnail view so that we can see it even clearer. Taking the black color and dragging it down to the page icon will create a duplicate and we see that that duplicate color swatch is duplicated outside of a folder group and that's the important part of this workflow for it to work. Now, I'll double click on that swatch to bring up the Swatch Options panel. We'll see the name has been appended with the name Copy. I'll just take that off and say OK. Now we have two color swatches that are identical. I can take this color swatch, drag it down into the group for the mouth and the best part is these swatches retain their connection to each other. So, if I go back to this first one, and open the Swatch Options and change the color, let's turn on the previews so that we can see this in real time. I'll take all of the black out of that color and notice that both of the swatches are updated with the new color as well as the blacks and the art. I'll go ahead and cancel out of that because I don't want to make the eyes a gray color. So, now that you see how easy it is to create color groups, make it a habit to create these groups at the start of each new project. This will help you stay organized as you work and make it many times easier to edit the artwork later.