- [Voiceover] In this movie, I'll show you how to reduce
the number of colors in your artwork.
Specifically, we're gonna reduce the number of colors
in the emoji to just three spot colors and nothing more.
The reason being that, currently
if I was to print this with a commercial printer,
then it would separate to cyan, magenta, and yellow inks
which would make for a much blander piece of artwork.
What I wanna do instead is apply some Pantone spot colors.
Specifically, PMS 186 for the red, PMS 130 for the orange,
and then we'll just use black for everything else.
And I came up with these colors
by searching through a Pantone swatch book.
Alright, so I'm gonna go ahead
and marquee the top right face.
And then, I'll click on Recolor Artwork icon
up here in the control panel
in order to bring up that big old dialogue box.
And I'm gonna click on this arrowhead
on the right hand side of the dialogue box to,
for the moment, hide those color groups
so that I have a little more room to work.
And now there's a bunch of different ways, by the way,
to combine colors together.
You can go up to the Colors option there
and just go ahead and select a number
of colors such as five.
But that's gonna do quite the number on the artwork
because you can see that Illustrator
is just automatically collapsing the colors together.
So, in this strip right here we have the dark red
and the medium red being changed to the medium red.
And then we have these colors being changed
to the shade of brown right here
which is Brown 3 I believe.
And then we have, for some reason,
this very dark brown and this bright yellowish orange
being changed to the yellowish orange and so forth.
So, presuming that's not what you wanna do,
go ahead and click on the Eyedropper
in order to restore the original artwork.
Another way to work is to drag and drop these guys.
So, let's say I wanna combine
all three shades of red that make up the eye.
Then, I'll just go ahead and drag this medium red
and drop it onto the dark red at the top
and then I'll drag this bright red
and drop it into that strip as well.
And you can see that the eyes
are now made up of a single color.
Albeit, it's set to different tints
in order to preserve the relative brightness.
What I wanna do instead is select a Preset
by clicking on the word Custom right there.
And I'm gonna choose 3 color job...
At which point Illustrator's gonna ask me
if I want to work with a color library.
Turns out, I do.
So, I'll go ahead and click on this Library icon
and I'll choose PANTONE - Solid Coated
which will provide me with spot colors.
And because I'm gonna work with three colors,
that is to say, three inks as opposed to
four processed inks: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black,
I'll save a little bit of money while I'm at it.
Alright, so I'll go ahead and click OK
in order to accept that change.
And now you can see that basically all the colors
are being combined into this shade of brown.
Yellow remains yellow and that's it.
So, what I'm gonna do here is start off
by double-clicking on this little color item right there
in order to bring up the Color Picker dialogue box.
And you wanna make sure
if you're seeing the standard Color Picker
that you click on the Color Swatches button
in order to dial in the Pantone color.
And I'm gonna start off with 186,
which is this shade of red
and then I'll go ahead and click OK to accept that change.
Now, I'm gonna double-click on this second guy right there
in order to return to the Color Picker list
and this time I'm gonna dial in 130.
And again, Pantone sells these swatch books
for close to a 100 bucks
that provides you with all the color information you need.
And so, I'll go ahead
and select that shade of orange and click OK.
Alright, now what I wanna do
is drag things around a little bit.
And so you can see that black is already remapping
along with gray and if that's not the case for you
then you can click on that little dialogue box icon
and turn off the Black checkbox.
Make sure Grays is off as well.
We don't care about White.
Then you can click OK.
But you can also click on that little arrow icon
to turn it off or click again to turn it back on.
Alright, now we're gonna drag and drop a few colors
and it looks like I messed up everything, by the way.
I'm not sure how that happened but I'm gonna go ahead
and double-click on this guy again and dial in 186.
Yes that's it.
And select that color and then click OK.
And then I'll try again with yellow
by double-clicking on it, dialing in 130,
selecting that color, and clicking OK.
And now, I'm gonna drag and drop some colors
from this top color strip down.
So, I'll drag this bright shade of orange
so that it shares some space with yellow.
And I'll go ahead and drag down this shade of orange
and this one as well
in order to produce this effect in the background.
And then, I wanna get these browns out of here.
And I'm just gonna move the browns
in with black and gray in order
to produce this darker monochrome effect right here.
And I'll finish things up
with that sort of greenish shade of brown
and I'll end up with this effect here.
And notice, if you will, that when you hoover over
this color swatch right there
you'll see a little down pointing arrowhead.
In which case, click on it
and you can specify different ways of mapping the colors.
For example, right now we're scaling the tints
which means that we're brightening the main color
in order to create some distinction in the luminous.
But you could also just preserve the tints
that are already built into the gradients
by selecting the second option.
It won't preview, however,
until you click off menu in order to hide it
and you'll end up with this effect here.
So, that's one way to work.
Notice, by the way, that goes ahead
and affects the eyes as well
because they applied to all checkboxes turned on.
And so, if you don't want that just go ahead
and turn the checkbox off
and switch the eyes for example back to Scale Tints
and you'll get this effect right here.
At which point, I'll go ahead
and expand the dialogue box again
by clicking on that arrow on the right hand side.
And then, I'll enter a name of Three Spots, let's say,
and I'll click on a Folder icon
to create this new group right here
which contains a total of three spot colors
as indicated by those little white wedges
with black dots inside them.
At which point, go ahead and click OK
in order to apply that change.
And now, click off the artwork to deselect it.
And that is how you go about
reducing the number of colors in a piece of artwork
to just, in this case, three spot colors
using the Recolor Artwork feature here inside Illustrator.