Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to color
a black and white drawing in Adobe Illustrator. Alright, let's get started. Okay, I'm here in
Illustrator. And first I'm going to open a black and white drawing. This one is from Vecteezy. But
you'll probably be image tracing yours if you drew it by hand, and it needs to be vector to do this.
And if you need to know how to use Image Trace, I have another video about converting a JPEG or
a PNG file to a vector. and that'll be at the top of your screen and also in the description below.
We're actually only going to use this bird, so I'm just going to select all the others and delete
them. And I'm going to click and hold the ALT or OPTION to make a copy of him, just so that we
have the original off to the side, if we ever need it again. That's always a good thing to do -just
get in the habit of keeping the original. The next thing I want to do is to make sure we have
black only for our drawing. And I'm really only doing this so we're at the same starting point.
It's not 100% necessary, but just having other uncolored parts or different colors in there might
cause you some unexpected problems later. So let's select our image, and then we'll come over here to
Pathfinder. Pathfinder can be found under Window. And all these other palettes that you see here
are also available under Window. Okay, so in the Pathfinder window, we'll want to come down here to
the second pathfinder and choose divide, which is the first one. And if you have other things in
there, like white or whatever, it'll divide it all out. Now I'm going to get on my Group Selection
tool. And I'll just click on the edge, you should see black over here in your fill, and then come up
here to Select Same Fill Color. And then I'm just going to hide it with CMD 3, or CTRL 3 on a PC,
I'll use the Group Selection and just draw a box around where it was.
You might see some things that are filled with nothing or filled with white.
Just delete everything. And then we'll come up here to Object > Show All. Okay, so let's just
select him and come over here to the Pathfinder again, and unite this time. So now we should
have just black, he's all mine shape. And we've got black over here, when we have him selected.
Okay, so now let's zoom in, I'm hitting Z on my keyboard, and I'll just draw a box around him.
And I want to get on my Live Paint Bucket, which is underneath your Shape Builder tool.
I want to use some different blues, he looks like a pigeon, but I'm going to go ahead with blue.
I'll choose a blue up here in my Color Window. To fine tune this, you can just double click here
and choose a different color here. But I'm liking this light blue. So I'm going to click here,
I'll just click a few different places where I want the light blue,
then I'm going to get a darker color of blue...might make it a little more saturated. And
I'll click some of these other areas that I want to be that color. I'm liking the white here for
now. Okay, and now I want his beak to be orange. So I'll double click over here. I'm gonna choose
an orange color. There we go. And now I'll click his beak. I'm going to go ahead and fill in these
white parts with actual white. So I'll choose white, and then just click in here, here and here.
Maybe we'll change this one to white. Okay, now let's get back on our Paint Bucket tool.
And I'm going to hold ALT or OPTION to sample this orange color, basically change our color
to the beak color. And then we'll have to go in here and click on these little pieces separately.
Now there's a whole lot of them, and you run the risk of accidentally clicking the outline. So
I think there's a better way to do this. So let's undo,
I'm going to get back on my Selection tool We're going to select all of him,
and you can see our bounding box is different now. And that's because of the Live Paint. Live Paint
is kind of its own separate thing. So we'll need to expand that Live Paint group. So we'll come up
here to Object > Expand. And we'll do all three and say OK. Now I'm going to zoom in on the feet,
and I'll use my Group Selection tool to highlight and just make a box around all
these things down here. Now I'll hold SHIFT and deselect the outside. And I'm also going
to deselect this blue in here - you have to get right on the edge to deselect these things.
And now I have only the feet parts that I want to recolor selected. Now it's showing black over
here, and that's because these are actually cut out of the black that you see. So we want them to
be their own shapes. And to do that I'm going to cut them with CMD X or CTRL X on a PC, and
then I'll paste them with CMD F or CTRL F on a PC. Now we can zoom out with CMD minus or CTRL minus,
hit I on our keyboard and just select that beak, and it recolors all of those pieces.
Now to do the wing, I'd like to change the wing color. Right now Live Paint is not going to work,
it's going to change that whole thing. But I want just the wing. So I'll show you how to do that.
We're going to use the pieces that are there, but we'll have to draw in this part up here. So
I'll get my Group Selection tool and just click right on the very edge of that path. So
you can see we've got all of this selected, of course, it's going to get all this stuff too.
Let's copy that. And then deselect. Deselecting is a very important part. So go ahead and click off
or use SHIFT CMD A or SHIFT CTRL A to deselect, and then we'll paste in front with CMD F/CTRL F.
Okay, so we have the piece that we want. We've also got a lot that we don't. So to get rid of
that hit Enter on your keyboard to get to your Pencil tool. And then we're going to start drawing
along the interior part of this and we're going to continue it up here. So I'm going to click
right on that line and draw in like this. And I will continue right along the interior part
of this line. And now we have the piece that we want, I'm going to hit I on my keyboard,
and click this darker blue. And now we need to kind of get it behind all of those little marks.
So let's cut it again, CMD X or CTRL X. Let's see what happens when we click this blue with our
Group Selection tool and paste in front. So what we've done is just put this blue right in front of
this blue, but behind all these little marks, I'm going to zoom in here and just get on my A tool,
which is the Direct Selection, click right on this line and kind of bring this up and then we
can smooth it out by hitting N and OPTION or ALT & just smooth that out right about there. And now
our bird is recolored. Alright, if you like the way I teach and you are interested in die cutting
machines like Cricut or Silhouette, I also have a YouTube channel that covers tutorials for those
and I'll put the link in the description below. Alright, I hope you check it out. Thank you!!!