Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to recolor
open paths or shapes in Adobe Illustrator. All right, let's get started. All right,
so I'm here in Illustrator, and I'm just going to open a file that I downloaded from Vecteezy.
The link for this file is in my description, but I did delete some parts of it and change things
so it would make a little more sense for this tutorial. So what I mean by open paths is, like
this section right down here, I'll zoom in on it. And you can see it doesn't quite touch down here.
And same over here, and with a few other places, too. So when you're using the Live Paint Bucket
Tool to recolor, sometimes it's not going to work. First I'll need to click on the cactus
that I want to recolor. I'll get on my Live Paint Bucket, which is underneath the Shape Builder.
And then I'll just choose a green color. And now I can just click on different pieces of this,
and recolor them easily. And I'm going to zoom in right here. This is something that Live Paint
Bucket does if two pieces are really close together, and this is actually a good thing.
It can help us out, but in this case, we'll have to actually fix it a little bit by doing this.
Now, if I come over here to this piece, the Live Paint Bucket has a little prohibited symbol on it
because it's not allowing me to color this shape. And that's because it's not a closed shape or not
close to closed. See it's getting this one even though this one is also not closed.
We'll go ahead and click in here. So to fix this, there are a couple of ways.
We can get on our A Tool, which is our Direct Selection right up here, draw a box around those
two little points to select them here at the bottom. The ones that are blue are selected,
and the ones with a white fill are not. Now I can just click on those and pull them down.
And then when we get on the Live Paint Bucket Tool, it'll work OK.
I'm going to zoom out. So this works fine in this situation. Here's another one where it's
wanting to fill both of these areas, because it's not a separated shape. So I'll undo that,
and we'll do the same thing here. I'll zoom in, use my Direct Selection Tool, and highlight these
points at the bottom and just pull them down. And then we'll get back on our Live Paint Bucket,
and we can change these to other colors now. Now you'll notice that where this crossed over,
it turns white. And that's something that we can fix once we expand it all. So I'm going to select
everything and expand with CMD E or CTRL E on a PC. All three are selected. I'll say OK. You can
also get there by coming up here to 'Object' and going to 'Expand' right here. OK, so let's zoom in
here to where that problem was. The reason this is happening is because it's a compound path,
but I don't want to release the compound path, because I'll show you what happens if we do.
Let's come up here to Object>Compound Path and>Release. So it's going to kind of recolor
things in a strange way. And compound paths can be a little bit confusing. So let's undo that.
And I'll just come in here... I'm going to hit A and just grab this point right here.
And I'll copy that with CMD C, and then paste in front and join it with CMD J or CTRL J on a PC.
OK, and now we can just hold SHIFT and select the black here, and come down here
to Pathfinder and Unite. Now if you're not seeing Pathfinder here, you can come up here to Window
and choose Pathfinder right here, and all these other windows are also available under Window.
I'm going to zoom back out and see what we've got. OK, and it's looking pretty good. Now I'm going
to show you another way to recolor open paths or shapes, because sometimes you don't want to
kind of connect this piece if that makes sense. So let's go ahead and open another graphic. These are
SVG files. But SVG is a scalable vector graphic and it'll work the same. So I'll just drag this
into Illustrator. OK, and here's an example of what I mean. Let's say we want the color in here,
but we don't want black across here. Also, in this case, our Live Paint Bucket won't work
because they're too far apart. But what I would do to solve this, is to get on my Group Selection
Tool right over here. Well, first, I'll zoom in, and then I'll get on my Group Selection here.
I'm going to click on the very edge of the piece I want, which is this shape in here.
That's what I want to be colored. So I'll click right on the edge of it.
And then I'm going to copy. I'll click off... that part is pretty important. If you don't,
it'll try to change this shape. It'll think it's part of it. So you need to deselect or click off
and then paste in front with CMD F or CTRL F on a PC. Now, this looks all crazy up here, but don't
worry about it. The only pieces that we're going to end up with are the ones right here. Next,
let's zoom in to this little piece right here. Now we need to complete this shape because right
now it's a negative. We need to make it its own shape. So I'll zoom in on this part of the stem.
And then I'll use my Pencil Tool. That's N on your keyboard, and it's also located right over here.
Now I'm going to redraw this path by starting here, and then coming over here and then ending
up on the interior part, also. So I'm going to do that real quick. I'll click here and start drawing
along this path. And then I'll kind of guess at what this should be, and I'll end up drawing the
same direction along this same inner path. And what this has done, if I CMD minus or CTRL minus
to zoom out, it's given us a solid shape using the pieces that already existed. So now if we want to
change this black to another color, we can just come over here. And now we have a filled shape,
and it does not have black along the bottom. Now it's kind of hard to get it exact, so you
can see some white in here. We can just come in here, click this and then just move that out.
We'll CMD minus or CTRL minus to zoom out. So those are two ways to color paths that aren't
connected. Basically have to make a new path that's closed, that can hold the color that
you want, if that makes sense. I hope it does. All right, if you like the way I teach, and you also
are interested in die cutting machines like Cricut or Silhouette, I also have a YouTube
channel that covers tutorials for those, and I'll link it in the description below. Thank you!!!