Ever wondered if there’s an easy and fun way to recolor entire artwork or icon set in adobe illustrator? If your answer is yes, you’re in luck cause, today Iāll show you some cool technics for changing the color of the entire icon set in Adobe Illustrator.
If you don’t have the Adobe Illustrator and you still wonder if how you can change the color of the icons easy, check out this post: How to Recolor Icons Using Online SVG Editor.
There are lots of ways of changing or replacing a color in Adobe Illustrator, you can do it manually shape by shape, you can use global colors if you want to speed things up or experiment with the hue and saturation of the entire artwork. It all depends on what you want to achieve.
In this post, Iāll show you a few techniques I use on a daily basis. If after reading this post youāll still have questions, donāt be a stranger and just start a discussion in the comment section, Iāll be happy to help in any way possible š
During this tutorial, Iāll be using a few icons from my Hand Drawn Business Icons Pack as an example, but as I said earlier it should work with any other vector artwork you will work within Adobe Illustrator. So, without further delay let’s jump straight into the good stuff.
This technique is best when you want to change the colors for the entire set, but you donāt have a specific color palette in mind. You just want to try out different colors, look for the best option for you.
My main color palette for this set was light blue for the background, and few washed out colors that complement each other. Hereās how it looked like originally
Letās say you want to recolor entire artwork. The one way to do it will be using global colors. Global colors allow you to change the color once and it will be replaced in the entire document.
1. But first, you need to extract your color palette from the artwork. Start by selecting the icons you want to recolor. If youāre changing the colors of the entire document just select all items (Ctrl + A on Windows, and cmd + A on Mac).
2. Having your artwork selected go to the swatches panel (if you donāt have it opened go to the main menu Window > Swatches) and click the hamburger menu on the right.
3. Then from the popup menu pick āNew Color Groupā
4. This will open a new dialog window with some options. Make sure that āConvert Process To Globalā checkbox is selected, then click āokā to apply the changes
5. now you can see a new color group in your swatches panel.
6. Double click each color to change it globally in the entire artwork. Like this:
The global colors trick can be useful when you are testing out colors, but if you have a specific color palette in mind already this method will work better.
First of all, you need to extract the existing color palette (if you haven’t done it already). You can use the same technique presented earlier. Just donāt select the āconvert Process To Globalā checkbox. Then create the same amount of squares as you have colors in your color group. And apply the colors to the squares. It will be easier to select a specific color than try to select it from the artwork.
Now itās time to introduce your new color palette into your workspace, you can either copy and paste an image youāve found online with color palette into your workspace, or just use preexisting palettes you either made earlier or picked from your library. The important part is to have it in the same form of colored squares like this:
Finally, itās time to change the colors š
Thereās another method that you can use to recolor entire set of icons or any other artwork, you can use it when you don’t have specified color palette and you want to test things out with a bit of luck. You need to have your Color Guide panel opened (Main menu: Window>color guide) and your Swatches panel (Main menu: Window>Swatches). If you are all set, hereās what you need to do:
I hope this tutorial helped you to with editing the colors of your icon set if you have any questions feel free to let me know in the comments. š
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Comments (1)Add comment
Boris
Thank you!