Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to fix a problem
where you can't change the fill color of something - it only changes the outline color, if that makes
sense. We'll go over a couple of different ways to fix this. All right, let's get started!!
Okay, so I have some simple outline designs from Vecteezy.com. I'm going to select
everything and then come up here to Color. Sometimes it'll come in all black like this.
I'll just change this to RGB - so just click the flyout and change it to RGB,
then you can double click and choose a different color. And as you can see, these objects are a
fill only, even though they look like outlines, they don't have strokes. So this means that the
stroke was probably expanded, or this was made with some kind of brush or something like that.
I'm gonna go ahead and change these to a darker green color, something right around here, and now
I want to get the fills of these to be a different color. So there are a few ways to do that.
First, I'm going to hit K to get to the Live Paint Bucket tool. We can choose a color and
then just click this part to fill it. You can see above the paint bucket that we have three colors.
You can use your arrow keys to move through the colors in your swatches easily instead of coming
all the way over here to your swatches to click on this. So I'm going to change this on to blue,
and we'll make this yellow. So the Paint Bucket tool works really well, if you have a simple shape
like this. You can see that the Bounding Box looks a little different, so this is a paint bucket
group, and we need to expand this. So I'm just going to come up to Object > and Expand. We'll
say OK. Now the only thing about the Paint Bucket tool is that you have to click on each section
individually to fill it. So if you have something really detailed like these plant shapes over here,
you can just do it all at once by drawing a rectangle behind it that's whatever color that you
want. So we'll hit M to get to our Rectangle tool, which is right over here. I'm going to click the
green color, I'm going to draw a rectangle that'll cover all of the plant shapes, and then we'll send
this to the back with Shift Command [, that's Shift CTRL [ on a PC. Then I'll use my Group
Selection to just select the plants and that box, and we'll come down here to Pathfinder and Divide.
Now what this is doing is actually breaking apart all of these and making shapes out of them. So
with my Group Selection tool, if I click on this background shape and move it, you can see that the
green pieces have been cut out of this background shape, so I'm just going to delete that background
shape. Now if we zoom in, every single piece is colored with green, which is what I want. But
the thing is it won't get your negative shapes, so you have to click on those individually and delete
those. Now if I want to recolor some of these flowers, I can do that easily by just clicking
on the dark green part of the flower and hiding it with CMD 3 or CTRL 3. And then I'll just select
those little pieces up there, we'll change those to pink, and then I'll unhide with OPTION CMD 3,
or ALT CTRL 3 on a PC. We'll do the same over here - I'll click on the dark pieces,
and I'll hide those with CMD 3. By the way, I'm using my Group Selection tool to do this.
Then I'll select just those pieces up there, and this time, I'm going to use a magenta,
but I want to make it a lot lighter. We'll say OK, and I'll unhide with OPTION CMD 3, or ALT CTRL 3
on a PC. I'll do the same here, and we'll make this yellow. Maybe this thing can be
an orange color. So that's how to quickly add color if you're working with outlines
only that have actually been expanded into fills. All right, I hope this video
has helped you with this problem. If you liked it and you want to see more videos like this,
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every time a new video comes out. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!