» Easy Automatic Color Manipulation in Illustrator- tutorial blog

Adobe Illustrator has some cool and powerful tools for manipulating the colors in your document. Using these tools, you can achieve some very nice colorization’s even if you aren’t particularly good at choosing colors. It also becomes easier to try out different versions quickly!

Blending Colors

You can select multiple objects in Illustrator and have them automatically “blend” in color. To illustrate, make a row of objects of all the same color. Make the one on the left the bottom-most object (if it isn’t already…) with Command-Shift-{ and make the right one the top most object by selecting it and using Command-Shift-}.

Select the right/top-most object and make it a different color. The more different, the better, so you can see the effect.

Go to Edit > Edit Colors > Blend Front to Back…

You can use this on any number of objects. It can be a quick way to make a kind of interesting pattern-y 3D background:

Recolor Artwork

Now that all of your objects are technically different colors, Illustrator’s Recolor Artwork feature will be of great use. Again select all of your objects you wish to change color and go to Edit > Edit Colors > Recolor Artwork…

From this dialog you should have a dropdown menu where you can choose from a variety of common harmonic color rules (Complimentary, Split Complimentary, Monochromatic, Split, Triad, etc).

Try selecting a few different ones and seeing the results you get!

You just mind find a color combination that you like that you would not have thought of yourself! You can use these techiques in conjunction with one another to quickly play around with existing illustrations and see if you come up with something you like. I took a quick illustration I had of an owl head and did this in about 30 seconds. It’s not incredible… but it’s kind of an interesting start to what could be a larger and more interesting piece.