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

921 Recoloring a blended pattern

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

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921 Recoloring a blended pattern

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- In this movie were going to take our seamlessly repeating scallop pattern, which has a kind of waxy candle quality to it, and were going to light up the interiors to create this effect here. All right so I'll go ahead and switch over to the waxy version of the pattern and I'll click on it with my black arrow tool in order to select this rectangle, which takes up the entire bleed boundary. All right now I'll go and zoom back in. Now one way to work would be to click on the recolor artwork icon up here in the horizontal control panel, or you can also find it inside the big huge Properties Panel. But notice if I do so that I'm going to see a very long list of colors right here, and notice that the current colors value is 106. And that's because Illustrators pattern feature doesn't support blends, and as a result it breaks up all the blends into individual path outlines. And so I'll just go ahead and cancel out. What we want to to instead is modify our swatches here inside the swatches panel. And because I've gone ahead and saved these guys out as global swatches, they will be applied to our artwork automatically. And so notice if I click on one of these swatches like so, I end up replacing the fill, that's not what I want. So I'll press Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac to undo that change. And then I'll press Control + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A on a Mac to deselect my artwork. And now I'll go ahead and double click on color one, the very first of my global swatches. Notice that the global checkbox is turned on, and it was turned on when I first applied this color to the blend, that's very important by the way. If you turn it on afterwards, then Illustrator is not going to recognize the correlation. And in the event, I'm going to switch the color mode to HSB right here. I'll change the hue value to 180°, and then I'll Tab to the saturation value and take it up to 100%, and I'll leave the brightness value set to 100%. At which point I'll turn on the preview checkbox so I can see the change applied to my artwork. And notice that affects the top most paths, but nothing else. All right, I'll go ahead and click OK in order to accept that change, and then I'll double click the second color swatch, which is called color two, and notice I'm seeing my HSB values once again. I'll click inside the hue value and press Shift + Down Arrow a few times to take that value down to 240°. And then I'll Tab to the saturation value, take it up to 100%. And Tab to the brightness value and take it down to 50%. And then I'll turn on the preview checkbox, and notice were just changing this one line inside the pattern, and that's because the pattern isn't recognizing the intermediate blend colors. Not to worry, we'll take care of that in a second, I'll just go ahead and click OK to accept that change. And then I'll double click on color four, so were going to leave color three alone, and I'll change its hue value to 0° so that we have red. And then I'll Tab to the brightness value and take it up to 50%, and I'll click OK, and that changes a single line inside the patterns once again. Finally I'll double click on color five, in order to bring up these values. I'll change the hue value to 20°, which is a kind of reddish orange, and then I'll take the saturation value up to 100%. Now I'll leave the brightness value set to 100% as well. And then when I click OK, I'm going to see a bunch of orange lines. Again, that's because patterns are not compatible with blends. So what I need to do is turn off the pattern layer, and then turn on the colors layer right here, which is updated automatically because this layer contains those dynamic blends. All right to select the blends, just go ahead and click in the top right corner of that layer here inside the layers panel, and that'll select all these objects like so. Then you want to go up to the object menu, choose pattern, and choose make, in order to switch to the pattern editing mode. If you get an alert message just click OK, and I'll go ahead and call this pattern fire and ice lets say. And then I'll Tab my way down to the width value, and I'll set it to 708 points, just as we did in the previous movie. And then I'll Tab to the height value and change it to 472 points. Then drop down to these overlap options, you don't really have to change the first one, you just have to change the second one to bottom in front, like so. At which point, were done. So you can go ahead and click on the done button up here in the top left region of the document window in order to create that new pattern. Then turn off the colors layer, turn on the pattern layer, go ahead and click on it with your black arrow tool to select it. Make sure the fill is active here inside the swatches panel, and then click on that fire and ice swatch in order to update the pattern on screen. And then you can deselect the the rectangle by pressing Control + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A on the Mac. And that is how you recolor a pattern that's based on a multi color blend using global dynamic swatches here inside Illustrator.

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