Master Colors in Adobe Illustrator with Color Guides Recolor Tool

Hi everyone, Simona here from VectorTwist and welcome to today's tutorial where I'm going to show you how to pick your isometric colors and I would like to share a way to pick the colors via the color guide in Illustrator. Now before we start please take the time to hit the subscribe button and the notification bell so you'll get notified when a new tutorial is live on the VectorTwist channel. And without further ado let's get started. On the artboard you'll see already my shapes, for example my city tower. We have our left, we have our right, the top and the windows. Now the windows have a blue color and my city tower is going to be green but I only have one color. I need two more colors. Now you could of course select the color, double click in your fill to bring up the color picker and then work with the saturation and the brightness to pick your lighter and darker color but that is quite tedious. We can actually be working with the color guide panel. So here's the color guide. If you don't have it in your toolbar just open it under window, color guide. I'm going to drag it out and then let me explain a little bit about the color guide. Now the color guide really helps you to pick colors. From the drop down you have harmony rules. Now you can choose from the standard, complementary, monochromatic, triad and so forth. It doesn't necessarily mean that these harmony rules actually work together but it really helps to just pick colors. Now when it comes to isometric design I usually like to work with shades. So from the drop down you can pick shades or you could also pick monochromatic too. Now how this works is following. Now under the drop down on the right you can hide the options, you can edit the colors, you can save the colors as swatches which is really helpful and you also have color guide option. You can select to show tints. These are currently shown. If I switch to warm and cool you'll see how it changes. It basically shows me to my reference color warm on the left and cool on the right. Or if I switch to vivid and muted I will have muted on the left and vivid color on the right corresponding to my main color that this particular one here is the base color. And then it will accordingly pick from the harmony rules I've selected. I usually like to work with tints and shades. Now there's another thing you can do as well with the color guide panel. Under the burger menu you can change the color guide options. When I open it up you can select your steps. Usually it's set to four steps. You can increase the steps so basically you get more variations or you can increase them if you only want two steps. The lowest step is three so you can go below three. So I usually leave it as four and then you have the variations. You can have less or more. Right now it's set to a hundred percent. Now if I pull it all the way over to less I'll get less. You can see that I now have only four rows of colors. If I increase it slightly I just get more variations, more shadings and more tints. Now it depends how many colors you need. Usually for isometric I need anything from three to five. Basically my three basic colors for my sides, the top, the left, the right and then maybe a really strong highlight and maybe a really really dark for the shadow. But for now I'm just going to pick my three colors. I already have my first that's my base color so I'm just going to have my variations at zero percent and then I press okay. Another way how it works with the color guide. If for example I select the blue from the windows my base color will show up in the square here but it is not updating for my shades. All I have to do is double click my base color. This will set it as the base and then I get my harmony rules which are currently set for the shades from the drop down and then I can pick my variations from shades or tints. Again if I want to pick the colors for my city building I'm going to be selecting the top. I'll double click my base and it will update my colors. Now I know my light in this example will be coming from left top so the top shape of my city building will be the lightest. So I have it selected and I want to select a really light color. This would be number three here so I just click it once and it will apply this color to my shape. Now I know that my left shape will keep the color that is currently applied to it. All I have to do now is change the color of my right. So I'm going to select it and then I'm going to click the darkest one and then I can move my pieces together. Now for my windows I have them on both sides the left and the right. I'm going to be using my right side to be darker so I leave the color as is and my right side is going to be lighter. Now when I place my shapes onto my pieces you might be thinking while your right side is already lighter this is an optical illusion because I have the color blue on a darker green and the same color on a lighter green which actually makes the blue darker appearing. But if I place them on top of each other you can see I have the same color. Now I need to change this blue to be lighter. So I'm going to select it and I'm going to set my base color. So hit the square once my shades get updated and then I can pick a light blue from the harmony rules. If you need more variations of course you can go back under the options and then under color guides and just push the variations up and then you can select more shades or more tints from that base color. I'm going to leave it as is and just going to press the lightest color. I think this works really well. It's just a little lighter than on the side at least it appears so and then that's my base for my city tower. Now let's move it into the middle. If you like these colors you can easily save them into your swatches panel. Now let me open up the swatches panel. In case you're going to be working with this green set and the blue we can just add them to our swatches panel. So let's select our base. This is the green for our base. Set it and then we're going to add it to the swatches. So from the drop down select save colors to swatches and now we have all of the colors in our swatches panel. The same we can do for the blue. So we started with the darker blue. We'll set it and then we're going to just save it to our swatches panel. Now in case you're going to be working with a lot of shapes and a lot of other colors and you would like to create variations of it. In this example for a city skyline we can actually use our first shape with the colors to create multiple isometric city buildings out of this. So let me move this onto the side. I have everything selected and I would like to have this color group in my swatches. So select the shapes, hit the group icon for new color group and in the pop-up I'm going to deselect convert process to global. I'm going to call it green tower and then I'm going to hit okay. Now I have all the colors in my swatches in a group and I still have my greens and my blues in case I want to work with them later on. Now let me show you how you can easily create multiple skyline towers out of one and apply different colors to it with just a few simple clicks. So create a copy of this and then we'll push it to the side, keep it selected and then we're going to open up the recolor artwork. Now either click the button icon in the top toolbar or go to edit, edit colors and choose recolor artwork. Now in the pop-up we're going to be using the edit button. We get our wheel. Our colors are linked currently, you can see that here. If you want to unlink it and then just change one color, just click it but I would like to keep it. So let's keep it selected and then let's create a more purple tower out of this. So I'm going to just push my color over into the purples and it will color everything accordingly. My top is a lighter purple, darker on the right, a little bit lighter on the left and my windows match too. Now before I press ok we want to make sure we'll hit this icon up here where it says new color group. So press this. You can double click it and give it a new name. Let's call it purple tower and then we'll press ok. You might get a pop-up saying save changes to swatch group purple tower before closing. We want to save the changes so just click yes and now we have a new tower with the corresponding colors already saved in our swatches panel. Then we're going to create another group of our first tower. I'll put it to the side, I'll repeat the step, I'm opening up the recolor artwork and then we're going to choose new colors. Maybe we're going a little bit more with the reds. I think that looks pretty good. We're going to create a new group so let's call it red tower and then press ok. We get the same message, say yes and now we have another piece with the corresponding colors saved to our swatches panel. Now let me move this out of the way. Now let's say you alter one of those towers and then you're going to be scaling it up. You're basically going to change it a little bit. This one becomes a little bit taller, the other one becomes a little bit shorter, this one is going to becoming taller on the bottom and then let's group them as well and then you create your city skyline really easily with the elements you've created and that's pretty much it on how you can pick your colors with the help of color guide and then create variations out of it with the help of the recolor artwork. But there's one last tip I would like to show you. Now let's say you want to create a copy of the green and then put it over to the side next to the red one but you would like to have the green in the purple again. Now that's really easy to do as well. All you have to do is select it, open up the recolor artwork again and then just select the color group that we've already saved to our swatches panel. So if you want to have it a purple, select the purple group and then it will apply it to it and then you have to just click ok. Now in case you would like to create a copy of the purple small tower and place it in front and give it the green coloring, you might think works the same way. I'll just go back into recolor artwork and then just select the green tower color combo. But when you apply it, it does not look the same. It sort of shuffles it. So it's not an exact science but the easiest way is simply to uncheck recolor artwork. You'll see the original and then move the colors around. So these are the current colors, our color bars. These will be the new colors from the color group. So we know that this color is the top, so we have to just place the lightest green on top. We know that the dark purple is the darkest, so we'll push this on top. So we basically just reordering it and then here we have the lighter blue and the darker blue. Now if we select recolor artwork, you can see that now it corresponds properly to the first tower in green. And then you can press ok. We're going to press yes and now we've created variations in colors for our isometric designs. And just one more tip how you can work with colors in Illustrator, especially with the color guide and the swatches. If you already have created color groups, you can create variations from it. Now you can either work with the color guide, select the new base color and then choose one of the harmony rules and then add it into the swatches panel. Or you can work with existing swatch groups. Just select the color group that you would like to change. So click the icon and then hit the button down here called edit color group. You'll get the pop-up for edit colors. It's very similar, if not the same, to recolor artwork with one difference. We can't change the color of the artwork on the artboard because we haven't selected it, so it's grayed out. But we can change the color group itself. Now you can push the colors around again and then all you have to do is create a new color group, call it yellow tower and then press ok. Say yes and now we have a new group in our swatches panel. Then you create a copy of our first green tower, push it to the side, reselect the recolor artwork and then apply the new color group that we've just created. So press it and then it will be applied and then you can click ok. And this is it. This is how you can work with colors, the color guide and create color combination shades and tins, save them as color groups in your swatches panel and then work with the recolor artwork to create new color combinations for your isometric designs. I hope this was useful to you. If you enjoyed this tutorial and it was helpful to you, please give it a like and also leave a comment and let me know what you liked about it or what you didn't like about it or what you'd like to see more. And at the same time remember to subscribe to the channel if you haven't so and hit the notification bell, so you'll be notified when the next tutorial on the Vector2's channel is live. I'm Simona and I'll see you next time.