Hi, this is Anne for Graphic Design How To, and today we're going to talk about the Live
Paint Bucket tool and the Live Paint Selection tool.
And these are both really easy to get the hang of once you know what you're doing.
So let's get started.
Okay, we're in Illustrator right now.
And to get to the Live Paint Bucket tool, you can just hit K. And it's right here.
And the Live Paint Selection tool is right underneath it, so everything is under the
Shape Builder tool.
Alright, so K will get you there quickly.
And really, before we start using the Live Paint Bucket Tool, we need to have some shapes.
I'll hit L to get my circle tool and draw that and then I'm just going to hit V. Start
dragging and hit SHIFT and OPT to make a copy.
And I'll hit CMD D to transform again.
I've got three shapes and I have a stroke and no fill here.
So I'm going to hit X to bring the stroke to the front, and then I'm just going to clear
it by hitting the question mark key or backslash key.
I'll hit K to get back to my Live Paint Bucket tool.
You can see the three little squares above the icon and those represent some of your
swatches.
So right now we have no fill for the middle.
And then the left is this kind of crazy swatch over here.
And then to the right is white, so it's actually toggling through some swatches.
So what I'm going to do is hit the right arrow button.
And now you can see that we've got white, black and red, and it's the same white black
and red that we have up here.
I'm going to choose red.
And then I can just click in here and fill just this shape.
I'm going to click my right arrow button to get the yellow and click this one.
I'll click right and get the green and the blue and the purple.
So the difference between using the Live Paint Bucket is that whenever you use your regular
tools to color things, it colors the whole shape.
So if I have my Move tool, and I have selected this with the Move tool, and I click a color,
it's coloring that whole shape.
And this one is behind the shape.
The Live Paint Bucket Tool sees each overlap as a separate shape.
So that's kind of cool.
And that can be really handy if you're making something that each section needs to be re-colored.
If we wanted to use the Live Paint Bucket Tool down here, we can first select it, hit
K to bring up that tool, and then we have some options here.
So let's say we just wanted to turn the middle part to that lighter blue.
I'm going to hit my left arrow key, and then just click.
So now this is a Live Paint Selection.
Okay, next we're going to draw a few shapes with the Pencil tool and that's N on your
keyboard.
I'll bring you to the Pencil tool, and I'll just draw a circle.
Maybe we'll have another one crossing it.
Although you can't see these because they have no stroke and fill.
I know they're there.
So I'm just going to highlight them with my V tool which is right up here.
And now we'll hit K to try to make a Live Paint group of this, I'll choose a green.
And it's telling me that I cannot paint this.
So I'm going to Undo.
And then we'll go up and go to Object > Live Paint and Gap Options.
So I'm going to turn on Gap Detection.
And we'll do just Large Gaps and we'll set it as the default.
So now when I come in here and try to do this, now it's going to go ahead and connect that
area.
So that's kind of nice, I can tell where to fill it.
Another thing we can do is choose a color from over here to fill this area with.
If you hold OPT you get the Eyedropper tool so you can choose a color here and then paint
with it here.
We'll try that again with the pink and then click to paint.
The Live Paint Bucket tool has some options.
If you're on that tool, you can just hit Return.
And you can see what options there are, you can change your highlight color when you mouse
over.
If you're working with lots of reds, you might want to change this to something else, so
that it shows up.
You can also choose to paint strokes.
This one usually is not checked, but I have it checked because I want to show you.
So you have to create something that already has a stroke, generally speaking, for this
to work.
So I'm going to add a stroke here that's black, we'll increase it a little bit.
And now I'm going to add another shape on top of this.
I'm going to select both and then hit K for the Live Paint.
I'll hit my left arrow to get that.
And then if we come up here, we get some other options.
Since we have black, that is going to choose this area of the swatches.
Once it's on there, I'll just arrow over for the red and click, and you can see that it's
already colored the stroke and same over here.
I'll just get green and choose that.
And then maybe we'll change this one to blue.
So you can see that we have a lot of different options here, especially if we're wanting
to use strokes and fills.
When you're done with your shape, you'll notice that you have this weird bounding box around
it that's a lot different than what you see if it's not a Live Paint Group.
That will always move with the group.
And it will always be grouped until you expand which is CMD E. So if we expand this, then
we get actual shapes that we can move apart.
But it does cut off your image in a weird way that you might not be used to.
And of course, this is no longer a Live Paint Object.
Okay, let's talk about the Live Paint Selection tool.
This tool is a little weird.
Once you select something, you can't move it or anything, but you can select several
pieces and color them all at once if you wanted to.
So that can be handy.
And we can drag across all three, for example, and change them to green if we wanted to,
but they're still separate objects as you can see.
So that's basically how the Live Paint Bucket tool and the Live Paint Selection tool work.
Alright, that's my video for this week.
If you liked it, or if you have any questions, just leave a comment in the comment section
below.
And I also wanted to mention I have a Skillshare class that is for complete beginners to Illustrator,
and you'll draw three icons in this class.
So I just wanted to give you a heads up about that.
The link for that is in my description.
All right, I'll see you next week for another graphic design tutorial.
Thank you!!!