How to adjust the colors of one of our clipart images.
Changing Colors in Adobe Illustrator is very simple and fast. You can reduce the colors, merge them or delete them altogether. This is how to do it.
How to:
- Delete unused or unnecessary colors
- Merge colors
- Change the color
Before we start you need to have your swatches panel showing. It is found in the “window” pulldown menu at the top of the page.
The Swatches Panel
What you need to do.
When you open a new file the swatches panel probably looks like this. It comes loaded with all sorts of pre-made swatch options. I prefer not to use these swatches for a number of reasons. Most of which are not relevant to this tutorial. However, in this instance they just get in the way and make things more complicated.
So let’s get rid of those unnecessary additional swatches.
Hold down the shift key and click on the first swatch color. In this case (white) and then click on the last swatch (lightest grey). This should select all of the swatches. Now all of the swatches should have a white outline surrounding them.
Click on the menu icon at the top right of the panel and select Delete Swatches.
Now you have a clean swatches panel. At this point we can paste the clipart image into the page.
As you can see the swatches panel repopulated only with the colors that are in the image. This should happen with all of the images you get from TeamLogoStyle.com. However, if some of the colors are missing you can add them to the swatches pallet manually. I address that in this tutorial.
Reduce the number of colors without selecting shapes.
In this example there are 9 colors in the image. This is way to many for a typical team logo. So lets drop that down to around 4 colors. We will start with the Dk Red and the Bright Red. Click and hold on the bright red swatch box and drag it in front of the dark red. (In this photo I have curated the entire palate by dragging all of the similar colors next to each other. )
Next I select all of the swatches that I want to merge by holding down the shift key and clicking on each of the swatches. (Just like we did at the beginning of this tutorial). This only works if swatches are next to each other which is why we did the previous step. Your selected swatches should be highlighted. Then we click the menu icon again and select merge swatches.
I did this process a number of times until I had merged the colors down into a manageable number. You can reduce your swatches down to 3 colors, 2 colors, or until you are left with just one color line art.
Now we need to change our colors to blues and greens to match our school colors.
Change the color throughout the entire design all at once.
This is even easier. Just double click on the swatch you want to change and the dialog box opens up. Now you adjust the color using the sliders until you get the color you want to replace the current color with. Check the preview box to see your changes as you are making them. Don’t forget to change the name of the color. Repeat this step for additional colors and you are done. It’s that easy!
Just add text and design elements for a finished logo.
Add some text, some outlines, and an element or two and you have a finished logo in no time whatsoever. These techniques will be discussed in additional tutorials.
I hope you found this short tutorial on changing colors in Adobe Illustrator helpful. There are more short Illustrator tutorials in my hints and secrets area. Don’t forget to browse my clipart images before you start your next t-shirt design project.
Need a printer for your t-shirts and team apparel? Call my print shop at 1-800-315-9411 for a quote or visit us at ChromaCustomApparel.com
