- [Voiceover] In this movie, I'll introduce you
to the color guide panel, which automatically generates
a library of swatches related to a base color.
And while that might not sound like the most exciting topic,
it's actually super useful.
And so notice I have a couple of designs here
from the Fotolia image library, about which
you can learn more and get deals at fotolia.com/deke.
And while I'm very happy with the path outlines,
I want to introduce some color.
So to keep things as straightforward as possible,
we'll be using fills, no strokes,
and I've gone ahead and combined everything that's filled
with the same shade of gray into a single compound path.
So, for example, if I go ahead and
click inside this area of medium gray here,
I will select all the other subpaths
that are filled with medium gray as well.
All right, so to change to fill, of course,
I would click on this first swatch
on the far left side of the control panel,
and I would select one of my default swatches.
Now this happens to be a basic RGB document.
It could just as easily be CMYK.
You're gonna see very similar colors.
And so, let's say I decide I want to start off
with this shade of blue here, R0G113B188.
But that's not exactly the effect I'm working for,
and so to customize the color, I would press the shift key
and click on that first swatch.
And if you're working along with me,
that's probably gonna bring up the RGB values.
I prefer, however, to work with HSB,
because it just makes more sense
to start with a core hue value
and then determine the saturation,
that is to say, the color intensity, and the brightness.
And so, I'm gonna set that hue value to 210 degrees,
which is blue, and then I'll take the saturation value
down to 77 percent, and I'll take the brightness
down to 77 as well, and don't worry about the fact
that Illustrator has to updates the values,
it's just trying to find the nearest RGB equivalent,
at which point I'll just go ahead and press the enter key
or the return key on a Mac to accept that change.
Now I'll click on this rectangle in the background
right there, the dark gray one, and I'll go ahead
and click on that first color swatch again.
Now the problem with the default swatches
is that, with the exception of these browns here,
as well as these very dull browns,
which don't really work very well for this design,
we have a lot of garish colors at our disposal,
such as this shade of orange, which means that
after applying something that looks more or less right,
I'm gonna once again have to press the escape key
to hide that panel and then shift-click on that color swatch
to bring up the HSB values, and then I might dial in
a hue value of 20 degrees, and set both
the saturation and the brightness values to 77 percent
once again in order to achieve this effect here.
And then, of course, I could continue
to dial in more and more colors.
Now, this specific illustration contains just five
different compound paths, so relatively simple.
But you could imagine working at this rate,
this process might still take me 15 minutes or so
of goofing around trying to figure out exactly what I want.
What if you know, however, that this shade of blue
right here is exactly what you're looking for,
and you now want to find some colors to complement it?
Well then, go ahead and select the blue object,
and then go up to the Window menu
and choose the Color Guide command
to bring up the Color Guide panel,
and you'll see this group of colors here,
which is based on the selected color or at least it will be
as soon as you click on that first color swatch.
So currently, we've got a bunch of colors
that are based on this first color swatch right there,
and then you might say, "Well, that's kind of nutty
that you have to click after selecting the object.
Shouldn't it just know that's
the color you want to work from?"
Well actually, no, because notice, if I go ahead
and click on this color swatch, this first one,
in order to instruct Illustrator that that is my base color,
and then I want to change the color of this shape
in the background, if I were to click on it
and that would switch the base color, I would be in trouble,
because I would no longer be seeing
the colors I actually want to work with.
So now at this point, I could go ahead and click
on a different color in order to change that fill
and, by the way, you'd want to make sure in advance
that your fill is active here inside the Swatches panel.
All right, I'm gonna switch back to the Color Guide panel,
and while these colors are great,
I've got a total of five colors in this set,
as well as a bunch of shades and tints by default.
Incidentally, you might be seeing a different set of colors,
and that's because if you click on this
down-pointing arrowhead, you have a bunch
of different so-called harmony rules to choose from.
And so I'm currently looking at tetrad 2,
and this is a point at which a lot of folks lose patience,
because what in the world does "analogous" or
"triad versus triad three" and so forth,
and they do have very specific meanings,
as I will demonstrate in detail in the very next movie,
but for now let's just go ahead and choose something simple
like complementary two, which gives us a whole bunch
of color complements, as we can see right here,
and then I can decide, I want this guy to be this color
right there up in the top strip,
or I could go with a darker shade.
So notice we have tints over here on the right,
once again by default, which are brighter and
less saturated colors because we're introducing paper white.
And then over on the right-hand side,
we have darker, less saturated colors,
because we're introducing black.
I'm gonna go, let's say, with this color right here,
or I could brighten it up just a little bit, like so.
And then I'll go ahead and click on this black rectangle,
over here on the right-hand side behind the white one,
and I'll change it to this shade
right there in the fourth row.
All right, now I'll go ahead and click on
one of these bright gray colors,
and I'll switch them to a pretty bright shade of blue
right there, but of course you can totally go your own way.
You can select any color you like.
And then I'll click on one of these white rectangles.
They're both part of a single compound path,
and then I'll set them to the lightest color
in this fourth row, in order to
produce this muted effect right here.
And now I'll deselect my artwork by pressing Ctrl-Shift-A
or Command-Shift-A on the Mac.
All right, so there you have a very basic introduction
to the time-saving Color Guide panel.
In the next movie, I'll show you how to work with
every single one of these harmony rules.