Illustrator CS3 + In The Mod + Live Paint = Happiness
Illustrator CS3 + In The Mod + Live Paint = Happiness from dr woohoo on Vimeo
The Live Paint Bucket is one of my favorite new tools in Illustrator CS3. Combined with the ASE palettes from either kuler and/or In The Mod (ITM) along with two scripts (SortByHue-Sat-Bri and RemoveAllSwatches), the Live Paint Bucket is fine-tuned to speed up the workflow of coloring your artwork and designs. In this video you can see the palettes, scripts and Live Paint Bucket in action. Here’s a play-by-play of what’s going on:
1a) From the Swatch Panel, select the Swatch Libraries Menu.
1b) Scroll down to Other Library… and import your ITM ASE palette. In case you missed it, here’s more info here on ITM ASE color palettes.
A new Swatch Panel appears. In order to take advantage of Live Paint, we need to transfer the color swatches to the main Swatch Panel. Before doing so, I prefer to delete the default swatches. To simplify this process, I created a script that automatically removes all of the swatches called RemoveAllSwatches. It will delete everything, with the exception of the 2 Group Folders, which, as far as I know can not be deleted via code at this time. You can download the RemoveAllSwatches script here. After unzipping it, I suggest moving it to the Adobe Illustrator CS3/Presets/Scripts directory so that the script is readily available the next time you launch AI.
While you’re at it, if you haven’t already done so, you might also want to download the handy sorting script I created for sorting your swatches by Hue, Saturation or Brightness. You can do so here. I would recommend installing it in the same directory as above.
2) With these scripts installed, I can now easily delete all of the swatches in the active document’s Swatch Panel by navigating to the menu File: Scripts: RemoveAllScripts. So Ok at the prompt and all of the swatches are deleted. As mentioned before, the Group Folders remain, so I simply select both and delete them.
3) In order to take full advantage of Live Paint I need to transfer the swatches from the Swatch Panel I opened to the one that is now empty. Selecting all of the swatches by shift clicking on the first and last swatch, I then open the popup menu on the Swatch Panel and select Add to Swatches.
All of the swatches are then moved from my panel to the active documents Swatch Panel. Now I can select my Live Paint Bucket and you’ll notice a special cursor with 3 color swatches above it. These colors correspond to the colors to active swatch as well as the two colors to the left and right of it, respectively. I can then toggle through the swatches by using the left and right arrow keys. Beautiful! The only thing I can think of that would make this tool better is if it had a total of 5 color swatches for the cursor, adding one to navigate up the Swatch Panel with the up arrow key and one to navigate down.
The color swatches from ITM are organized based on popularity – from left-to-right, top-to-bottom – meaning that the most popular colors in the particular painting the colors were sampled from are in the top-left corner, the least popular in the bottom-right of the Swatch Panel. To enhance working with color palettes from ITM and the Live Paint Bucket, being able to sort the colors by Hue, Saturation or Brightness becomes invaluable. To sort the Swatch Panel of the active document by Hue, Saturation or Brightness:
4) (Assuming you have downloaded and copied the SortByHue-Sat-Bri.jsx file to the Presets/Scripts directory) Select from the menu File: Scripts: SortByHue-Sat-Bri. A dialog window asks how you would like to sort the colors. Enter H for Hue, S for Saturation or B for Brightness.
I hope this helps you out as much as it has for me. Btw: That beautiful color palette I loaded was from the new set of paintings added to ITM from the talented Julie West. For more on it and Julie, click here.
Stumble it!