- [Instructor] In this movie I'll show you how to save
a color as a swatch inside Illustrator.
And swatches are essentially squares of saved colors
that you can access anytime you like
from the Swatches panel.
And the Swatches panel is found in
many locations in Illustrator as we'll see.
Now the great thing about swatches
is they help you establish a color theme inside a document.
They also help you to stick with that color theme
as we'll see while building this calendar,
and finally they automate the application of colors
to both strokes and fills.
And so the practical upshot is that if you think
you're going to use a color more than once inside a document,
then go ahead and save it as a swatch.
Now the first step is do define a color
here inside the color panel.
And so you can adjust the HSB values
to anything you like, for example,
or you can just go ahead and select an object
that's already colored inside of your illustration.
For example, I'm going to click on
this hexagon for the month of March,
and we'll see it's HSB values,
once again inside the color panel.
The thing is, this is a CMYK document,
as you can see up here in the title tab.
And so the primary values are going to make
a lot more sense if I click on this fly-out menu
in the top right corner of the color panel
and choose CMYK.
And then you can see we've got a cyan value of 30%,
a yellow value of 30, and the other two values are 0.
All right,
now let's go ahead and save this color as a swatch.
By going up to the Window menu,
dropping down to more or less the bottom
and choosing the Swatches command,
which will bring up the Swatches panel.
Now by default, the swatches are pretty darn dinky,
which is why I like to go ahead
and click on this fly-out menu,
and choose Medium Thumbnail View
in order to make the swatches a little larger, like so.
And then, I'll just go ahead
and drag the bottom edge of this panel
to expose all of the swatches
associated with this particular document.
All right, now all you have to do
is click on this little page icon,
which just as it makes a new layer or a new artboard,
creates a new swatches inside the Swatches panel.
And it'll be automatically named after its CMYK values
as you're seeing here.
But you can override that name
if you just enter a name of your own.
And so I'm going to call this guy
something moderately more creative
such as Seafoam, let's say,
now notice these two check boxes,
global and add to my library.
This first check box is awesome
as I'll explain in the next movie.
The second item is, in my opinion, flat out annoying,
because it means you can end up with libraries
that are cluttered with random colors
that you just have to tediously remove later.
So for now,
let's just go ahead and turn both of these check boxes off,
and then click OK.
And sure enough, I have a new swatches here
inside my Swatches panel.
And now I can use that swatch to fill a different shape.
So for example, I'm going to zoom in on the month of September,
and I want you to notice that it's actually two hexagons.
We've got one in front and then we have another one in back.
And that's true for all the hexagons, by the way.
Just a design decision I came up with.
So go ahead and click on the outline
for the outermost hexagon for September.
And then make sure the fill is active
in the top left corner of the Swatches panel.
If it isn't, if the stroke is active instead,
then you can just click on the fill.
And notice that shortcut that's popping up there,
which is the x key.
So you can press the x key all by itself
to switch back and forth between the stroke and the fill,
either inside the Swatches panel
or it works inside the Color panel as well.
All right, so I'll go back to the Swatches panel here,
and with the fill active you can just
go ahead and click on Seafoam,
and you will adjust that rear shape's fill
as we're seeing here inside the document window.
Another way to work,
I'll just go ahead and undo that
by pressing control z or command z on a Mac,
is to go over here to the first swatch
in the horizontal control panel,
and click on it to bring up a miniature version
of the Swatches panel.
And if you'd like to see these thumbnails be bigger as well,
then click on this fly-out menu icon
and once again choose Medium Thumbnail View.
And I'll go ahead and make my panel a little bit bigger,
so that I can see all of the swatches at the same time
and then I'll click on Seafoam.
And so the idea here is it doesn't matter
whether the fill or stroke is active.
And so if I undo that change and click on the stroke
here inside the Swatches panel,
I can still go ahead and click on that first swatch,
which represents the fill no matter what,
and select Seafoam, and that will affect the fill
and not the stroke associated with that rear hexagon.
All right, so another way to work is to drag and drop.
So let's say this time I go ahead and click on
a hexagon for April right here.
Well then i can save that color as a swatch
by switching to my two column toolbox
so that I can see my fill and stroke icons,
and then I'll go ahead and drag that fill
and drop it into the Swatches panel like so.
At which point I have yet another new swatch.
Or I'll undo that change, by the way,
again by pressing control or command z,
so anything you do in the Swatches panel
is entirely undoable,
and then I can drag that first swatch in the Control panel
and drop it into the Swatches panel.
Or here's another way to work.
You can actually drag and drop from the color panel.
Now of course, I can't see my Color and Swatches panel
at the same time because they're both grouped together.
But watch this,
you can go ahead and click on that fill swatch
and then drag it over to the Swatches tab,
wait for the Swatches panel to come up in front,
and then drop your swatch into place.
Now you may wonder after all this,
well gosh,
it seems so much easier to click on that little page icon
as opposed to dragging and dropping.
The advantage of dragging and dropping, however,
is that you can drop your swatch into a specific location.
So for example, I want all these colors to be
in the same order as they appear in the calendar.
So I want to drop that color right here at this location
as opposed to Seafoam which appears at the end.
Now you can drag your swatches around
inside the Swatches panel,
but that is of course a second step.
Now I'm going to have to rename that swatch I just created
by double clicking on it,
which is also a separate step of course,
and so you just have to decide how you prefer to work.
And I'll go ahead and call this guy Harlequin, let's say.
And notice those check boxes are remaining off,
at which point I'll click OK
in order to accept that new swatch name.
Now notice that I've messed things up.
The stroke was active,
and so now if I zoom in you can see
that I've changed the stroke around that hexagon
to that same shade of green.
And that happened as soon
as I double clicked on the swatch, by the way.
And the best remedy for that is to just click on white,
which is one of the default swatches in Illustrator,
and that will return that stroke to white,
as we're seeing inside the document window.
After which point I'll go ahead and zoom out once again
and I'll click off that shape to deselect it.
And that's how you save your colors and swatches
as well as how you apply a swatch to a fill or a stroke
of a selected object here inside Illustrator.