- In this movie, I'll show you a few new ways
to assign colors to fills and strokes inside Illustrator.
First using the eyedropper tool,
and then, by dragging and dropping
swatches from the swatches panel.
All right, but first, I'm going to make
a couple of arbitrary modifications.
I'm going to click on the hexagon
that surrounds 2030, and I'm going
to click on this second swatch
up here in the control panel,
the one that represents the stroke,
and because this is the first time
we've visited this specific panel,
we're seeing the tiny swatches,
and so I'll remedy that by clicking
on the flyout menu icon and choosing medium thumbnail view.
Now I'm going to click on the sky blue swatch
in order to change the stroke to blue, like so.
All right, next I'm going to click on the hexagon
that surrounds the month of September,
and I'm going to click on it's stroke swatch,
and select that final yellow swatch from the list.
All right, so notice now where September is concerned,
we have yellow stroke in a black fill.
I'll go ahead and select that object again.
And I'll get the eyedropper either by
selecting it from the bottom portion
of the toolbox, or you could press a
keyboard shortcut, which is the I key.
And now notice this orange shape
that's surrounding the month of March.
If you go ahead and click on it,
whether you click on the fill or the stroke,
you're going to lift both attributes.
So notice that I have now replaced
both the fill and the stroke of that
shape around the month of September.
And that's how things work when
you click with the eyedropper,
but this tool also has a couple
of surprising tricks up it's sleeve.
So what I'm going to do is press
the control key, or the command key on a Mac,
to temporarily gain access to my last used
arrow tool, which is the black arrow,
and then I'll go ahead and click on
the hexagon that surrounds the month of October.
Now, notice that the fill is active
at the bottom of the toolbox,
and let's say that I want to replace
the fill color with this blue of this stroke.
If I just click on that stroke,
then I'm going to replace the stroke
of the selected shape with blue,
and I'm going to replace the fill with this purple.
That's not what I want, so I'll press
control Z, or command Z on the Mac to undo that change.
Instead what you want to do is shift click,
and that will replace the active attribute
with whatever color you shift click on,
whether it's part of a fill, a stroke,
or an imported image, or what have you.
All right, now I'm going to deselect that shape
by going up to the select menu and
choosing the deselect command,
or you can press control shift A,
or command shift A on the Mac.
And then, I'm going to go over here
to the first swatch in the control panel,
the one that represents the fill,
and I'm going to click on it, and I'm going
to change that fill color to beige.
And notice that the control panel is
telling me that I have no selection,
so in other words, I'm not affecting
any of the objects in my illustration.
All I'm really doing is affecting the
default setting, so if I were to now draw
a rectangle, for example, that rectangle
would come in with a beige fill
and a two point wide stroke.
I don't want that rectangle, however,
so I'm going to press the backspace
key, or the delete key on the Mac,
to get rid of it, and I'm going to
switch back over to the eyedropper tool.
Now, instead of pressing the shift key,
I'm going to press the alt key,
or the option key on the Mac.
Notice that does two things,
first of all, it flips the tool, like so,
and it also fills it, and turns the
eyedropper into a kind of color squirter,
at which point if you were to click,
you will go ahead and assign the
default fill and stroke attributes
that you've established up here
in the control panel to that object.
All right, now let's take a look
at dragging and dropping.
Let's say that I make the stroke active,
which I can do by clicking on it
down here at the bottom of the toolbox,
or I could just press the X key.
And that's going to go ahead and send
me back to the color panel, so I'll
go ahead and click on the swatches tab
so we can see our swatches once again.
If I were to grab this next color,
faded yellow, and drag it and drop it
into the fill of the shape, as I'm doing right now,
then I would change the stroke,
and that's because any time you
drag and drop swatches, you affect the active attribute.
Obviously that's not what I want,
so what I have to do is press control Z
or command Z on the Mac to undo that
change, press the X key to make the
fill active once again, or of course
you could just click on that fill if you want to,
and then drag and drop the faded yellow into that shape.
The advantage of dragging and dropping
incidentally is that the shape
doesn't have to be selected.
All right, now let's take a look at
the final month, December right here,
and let's say I once again make
the stroke active, in which case,
if I drag and drop steel blue onto
December, I'm going to affect the
stroke rather than the fill.
If you run into that problem,
then there's one more keyboard
trick that I can share with you,
and that is that you want to start
by dragging the swatch, and then,
before you release, before you drop it,
go ahead and press and hold the shift key
and then, you'll affect the opposite
attribute as we're seeing here.
And so, there you have it, a few
different ways to assign colors
to fills and strokes, both using
the eyedropper tool and by dragging
and dropping swatches here inside the swatches panel.