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

943 Turning your cat’s eye into a dragon’s eye

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

943 Turning your cat’s eye into a dragon’s eye

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Remember this, this vector and pixel based cat's eye set against these greatest reptile like scales. But see, the thing is about this reptilian cat's eye is that it's really just the setup for a dragon's eye. After all, the only difference between this and this is the overarching color palette. And so here we are inside Illustrator. If you take a quick peak in my swatches panel, you'll see that I'm working with a group of global swatches as indicated by these tiny white wedges in the swatches bottom right corners. This means that each swatch is linked to the objects that are colored with them. So if I make a change to a global swatch, all of its objects change in kind. Now you may be aware of another way to recolor our cat's eye, which is to first select the various objects you want to change, and then click the recolor button here inside the properties panel, or the color artwork icon up in the control panel. See all my global swatches up here at the top of the dialog box? Notice what happens if I switch to the edit tab, turn on the link harmony colors icon, and drag any one of these circular stops inside the big color wheel. Just like that Illustrator recolors the artwork, but it also converts all of my swatches to stand in colors. In other words, all of the links between the global swatches and their objects are gone. One day this may change. In fact, I very much hope it will. However, in the meantime, the best way to transform our reptilian cat's eye into a dragon's eye is to edit our global swatches one swatch at a time. Oh, don't worry. It's more exciting than it sounds. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so here's the final version of the dragon's eye, just so you have a chance to see it open inside Illustrator. And here's the cat's eye that we've been creating so far. So, again, thanks to the fact that we have all these global swatches. We can just edit the swatches and see our changes reflected inside the illustration. So I'm going to start off by double clicking on pale yellow here inside this cat eye colors group. And that will bring up this dialog box right here. Now you can edit inside any color mode you want. I'm most comfortable with HSB, just because hue, saturation, and brightness happen to make the most sense to me. Notice that the global checkbox is turned on, and the add to my library checkbox is turned off. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and modify the hue value by changing it to 30 degrees. So right now it's 50 degrees, which is yellow. 30 degrees is orange, by the way. And then I'll increase the saturation value to 80%. So lots of saturation. You can see a lot more color in that swatch right there, and a brightness value of 100% is just fine. I'm going to turn it on the preview checkbox, not the add to my library checkbox, but preview, so that I can see my changes reflected here inside the document. So notice down here at the bottom of the eye, we have this highly saturated orange. At which point I'm going to change the name of the swatch to neon carrot. That's actually the agreed upon name for this color. At which point, I'll click OK. So I just want to stress, I did not make up that name, but notice if I hover over that swatch, it's still called pale yellow. And so we've got a little bit of a bug in these last several versions of Illustrator. If the last thing you do is change the swatch name, then it does not get reflected. So notice now, if I change its same to neon carrot, all the values, by the way, all the numerical values are still intact. Then I'll click OK. And you can see now, if I hover over that swatch, it's name is changed. Now, there is a way to anticipate that problem, which is to double click on dull gold, for example, to change its name upfront. So I'll call this guy cedar chest right off the bat. And, again, this is a generally agreed upon name. And then I'll tap my way by pressing the tab key down to the hue value, and I'll change it to 20 degrees, which is going to be in the orange red zone, by the way. And then I'll take the saturation up slightly to 60%, and I'll leave the brightness value set to 77%. And I'll click OK. And suddenly all my changes are applied here inside the central region of the eye. And if I hover over that color swatch, you can see that his name is now cedar chest. So, that's the way it works right now. Anyway, I'm going to double click on khaki green, and I'm going to change its name to red beech, let's say, after the tree incidentally, and then I'll tap my way down to the hue value, and I'll change it to 20 degrees. And that's it. By the way, that's the only change I'm going to make. At which point, I'll turn it on the preview check box. And we'll see that change reflected here inside the document window. At which point, I'll click OK. And now if I hover over that swatch, you can see that it's called red beech. So just the way of anticipating that bug. I'll go ahead and double click on golden brown, just so we have a chance to do this again, and I'll change it to rose wood, let's say. And then I'll tab down to the hue value. Notice that the HSB color mode is sticking, which is very nice. And I'll change its hue value to zero degrees, which is red, just full on red. We've got a saturation of 100%, and then I'll tab down to the brightness value and darken it up by reducing that value to 33%. Then I'll turn on the preview checkbox, just so we can see that modification reflected once again inside the iris of the cat's eye. At which point I'll click OK. All right, now, if we kept doing that over and over for the next four swatches, things might get a little bit tedious. And so notice I have the second swatch group that's called alternates and it starts off with bright red. And so, if I were to grab bright red and just drag it and drop it someplace inside of this other group, cat eye colors, then I would just move that swatch to a different location. That's not what I want. So I'll press control + Z, or command + Z on a Mac, to undo that move. So anything you do inside the swatches panel is undoable inside Illustrator. And instead, I'm going to press the alt key, or the option key on the Mac, and drag bright red over onto dark green is the name of that color. And notice I have a little fist with a plus sign next to it. And that tells me that I'm going to replace that color swatch like so. And notice that I have modified a bunch of colors here inside the illustration. So if I press control + Z, command + Z on a Mac, this is the before version of that region around the pupil. And if I press control + shift + C, or command + shift + C on a Mac, this is the after version. All right, so now I'm going to grab this guy, which is known as khaki green two, because it's the same color we had just a moment ago assigned to this swatch, which is now red beech. But what I want to do is alt or option drag this guy onto what's known as Dodger blue. And so notice I have a fist with a plus sign, and that tells me that I'm going to replace that color swatch like so, and I'm also going to replace the colors inside the eye's highlights right there. So if I press control + Z, or command + Z on a Mac, this is before. So notice the highlights in the eye are kind of bluish. And if I press control + shift + C, or command + shift + C on a Mac, to redo, we now have these golden eyes, because after all our dragon is sitting on a big heap of gold, let's imagine. All right, so now I'm going to grab maroon. And by the way, this is the HTML name for this color. And I'll go ahead and alt or option drag it onto this color that's known as dolphin right here. And that goes ahead and replaces a bunch of colors inside the blend. Do you see that right there? And you can see once things update, it makes a huge difference where these rough scales are concerned. All right, now I'll go ahead and do the same thing with Persian red. I'll alt or option drag it onto this final color stop, which is known as midnight, and it occupies the bottom portion of this blend. And after things update, you can see that we have a very dark red to a kind of bright orange gradient of rough scales behind the eye. All right, now, the thing to note is that even though we updated those global swatches, we did not update their names. So this guy, for example, is still called dark green. If that's a problem for you, then double click on that swatch and go ahead and rename it bright red, for example, because that's what we're going to call it. At which point, if you click OK, Illustrator is going to get mad at you and tell you that bright red is already in use. In which case, all you can do is click OK, and then cancel out, and then select this color group right here, the one called alternates, and get rid of it just by dragging it and dropping it on that little trash can icon in the bottom right corner of the swatches panel. Then if you double click on that swatch, once again, and change its same to bright red, let's say, and then I'll add a D, click OK, and notice Illustrator's no longer mad at me now. Double click on the one that's called Dodger blue. I'll rename it khaki green, which is kind of a strange thing to call it, because it has a hue value of 50 degrees, which is on the orange side of yellow, but, still, that's what this color is called. And khaki is a very strangely spelled word, but that aside, I'll go ahead and click OK. And notice the change happens. You can see that it's now called khaki green. This guy's named dolphin. That's not right. It should be called maroon. Again, that is the HTML name for this color. At which point I'll click OK. We have just one left. I mean, I could tell you at this point, that's all we're doing is renaming swatches. But if you want to see that happen, then I'll go ahead and call this Persian red and click OK. And now the deed is done. Notice the name of that swatch has been updated as have the various colors inside of this document. And so where previously we had a cat eye, now we have a red dragon eye here inside Illustrator. Wow, after all of that, what could I possibly have in store for you next week? Well, I actually haven't quite decided, but after five weeks of cat's eye, it'll be something different. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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