832 The downside of using blends in patterns

- [Instructor] Now, I should mention that there are downsides to using blends inside patterns. And that's because where normally, object blends are dynamic, when combined with a pattern, they become static. And let me show you what I mean. I'm going to go ahead and turn off the pattern layer for a moment. And I'll double-click on color 4a, which is that bright shade of green. And I'm going to switch the color mode to HSB. We've got a global swatch, so anything I do inside this dialogue box will update automatically. So I'm going to increase the hue value to 150, let's say. And I'll crank the saturation value up to 100. And I'll turn on the preview checkbox, and I want you to watch this green region right here. It's going to update as we're seeing. So I could set it to any color I like. And that blend is going to update on the fly. But as I say, I want 150 degrees, and so I'll go ahead and enter that guy and then click OK. All right so, the blend's working great, except inside the pattern. And so notice if I bring back that pattern layer and zoom in right here, we have changed the colors of these two triangles, but we're not updating the rest of the blend. And to see why that is, make sure nothing's selected in your artwork, and then double-click on that rainbow swatch in order to switch over to the pattern editing mode. And I'll scroll this guy so that I can see what I'm doing. And I'll just go ahead and click on any one of these paths, and notice we don't have a blend anymore. Instead, if you look over here on the far left side of the control panel, you can see that it's a group. So it's just a group of static path outlines. Which is a little bit puzzling to me, because after all, blends were first introduced in Illustrator 88. The pattern editing mode came to Illustrator in CS6. So literally, more than a couple of decades later. And yet, blends are not supported. So, what do you do? Well, go ahead and press Control + Z or Command + Z on a Mac to undo that change. And then I'll press Control or Command + Z again in order to abandon the pattern editing mode. And I'll undo the modification of that color by pressing Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac a couple of more times. All right then, I'll go ahead and zoom out. And I'm going to turn the pattern layer back on. And I might zoom into it just a little bit here, and then I'll click on that rectangle to select it. And if I now want to modify the colors in this pattern, then I would click on the recolor artwork icon up here in the control panel. At which point you can see that I have tons and tons of colors at work here. And that's because each and every one of these path outlines is filled with a different shade of purple or blue or what have you. All right so, I'll go ahead and click on the word edit right there in order to switch to the edit panel here. And then I'll go ahead and link all the colors together by clicking on this link icon. And now I could drag any one them around. And I'm going to assign new colors across my artwork. And by the way, you can adjust individual colors if you go ahead and turn off the link, but that's going to be tricky because every single one of these paths into blends is independent and filled with different colors. And so, assuming I like what I see, I'll go ahead and click OK. And then I'll press Control + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A on the Mac to deselect my artwork. And so the thing to remember here is that any time you use dynamic object blends to create a repeating pattern inside Illustrator, the program goes ahead and converts them to static path outlines.