From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

882 Recolor a freeform gradient in Illustrator

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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882 Recolor a freeform gradient in Illustrator

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Today I come to you from Antarctica. Seriously, just ask the penguins. This is a piece of Antarctica, which is one of the coolest places I've ever been. And speaking of cool, today I'm going to talk about Illustrator 2020, specifically how you apply an old feature, Recolor Artwork, to a new feature, Freeform Gradient. Now technically this is a remedy to a bug in Illustrator 2019, I mean just ask the penguins. But let's put cheerful little smiles on our chilly little faces and call this a new feature. Here, let me show you how this cool thing works. All right, so here we are looking at the opening slide for my cradle to grave three-part course, Illustrator 2020 one-on-one. The fundamentals course is out right now here at LinkedIn Learning. The Advanced and Mastery courses are on their way. All right, so notice this boundary right is filled with a Freeform Gradient and now, thanks to the fact that I can recolor that Gradient on the fly, I can come up with these alternate color schemes such of these vivid colors right here and what I'm calling these steely colors. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch back to the original version of the document, and I'll click on that border object in order to select it. And now I'll just take a quick moment to review how Freeform Gradients work by switching to the Gradient tool, which you can get by pressing the G key. And now notice these circular color stops right here. I can go ahead and drag them to any location I like, and if I want to modify a color, I would just double click on it. In my case I've assigned a global color swatch as you can see over here in wise the Swatches panel, but I can dial in my own color if I like by clicking on this little RGB icon, and then for example cranking up the amount of blue in order to produce this much more vivid color. All right so I'll go ahead and press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to accept that change. Now let's say I want to apply some global color modifications across the entire Freeform Gradient. Then I could go up to the Edit menu, choose Edit Colors, and then choose this very first command, Recolor Artwork, or perhaps a simpler way to work is to go up here to the horizontal Control panel and click on the Recolor Artwork icon. And incidentally, if you're not seeing that panel, you can go to the Window menu and choose the Control command. If you're seeing the Properties panel instead, which Adobe is specifically designing to replace the awesome Control panel with this big hunking panel over here which takes up way more screen real estate, notice that the Recolor Artwork icon is missing. So take that, Properties panel. I'm going to go ahead and close that guy, and click on the Recolor Artwork icon in order to bring up this terrific dialogue box right here. So I want to stress the Recolor Artwork command has been with us for a while, and Freeform Gradients were first introduced in Illustrator cc 2019, but the relationship between them is a new function of Illustrator 2020. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and move that dialogue box back up, and let's say you want selective control over each and every color in your Gradient. Then go ahead to switch to the Edit subpanel right here, at which point you'll see every one of your colors represented inside this color wheel. And so notice this pale yellow in the top left corner of the Gradient. That's represented by this guy right here, and so if I were to drag it a different location, then you can see that Illustrator recolors the Gradient on the fly. You also have the option of modifying your HSB values. You've got this little brightness slider right here that's going to affect all of the colors in kind. If you want to be able to drag all your color values together, so relative to each other inside the color wheel, then go ahead and click on this Chain icon right here to link the harmony colors. And now notice if I were to drag this guy, which is the shade of teal in the top right corner of the artwork, then I will not only modify that corner, but I will change all the other colors in kind as well. And so I'm going to try to come up something that's a little less outrageous here, maybe this color scheme could work. And then if I decide I want to modify one of the colors independently of the others once again, then I would turn the Chain icon off in order to unlink and those colors and then drag this guy to a different location. And I think I'm going to move it over here so we get more of a purple color, and then I'll click OK in order to accept that change. And that is how you recolor a Freeform Gradient here inside Illustrator 2020, and I presume moving forward. Okay that last color scheme looks like penguin food, I mean just ask the penguins. Which is why if you a member of LinkedIn learning, I have a followup moving in which I show you how to take color groups from the Swatches panel and use those color groups in order to make things look much, much better. But who cares? I'm in Antarctica. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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