9th January 2012

Post

Tutorial: Coloring your drawings in Illustrator using Live Paint

Using Live Paint in illustrator allows you to color shapes surrounded on all sides by lines or vectors.  I’m not an expert in Live Paint since, well, I just learned how to use it a few days ago.  But it’s been fun to play around with it, and I look forward to learning more about it in the coming weeks!

1. Scan your drawing.  My super dull uninteresting scanner gets the job done.

2. Open a new document in Illustrator, and drag in the file that contains your drawing.

3. Select your drawing, and go to Live Trace>Inked Drawing.  (Not “grayscale”, like what’s highlighted here.  Boy, it is hard to take screen captures for this sort of stuff on my mac!) (Also, on second thought, you might not like Inked Drawing best here.  Feel free to play around with the other options.)  Then click “Expand”.

4. Hurray!  Now you have a lovely vector version of your drawing.  Celebrate by doing a quick google search of “Why did Lacey Chabert leave Family Guy?” because now is the time that that needs answering, obvi.

5. It turns out, the internet is not really sure about this whole Lacey Chabert thing.  Ok, back to your drawing.  (I had to then select and delete the little extra bit of another drawing that’s on the left side of my scan.)  Select your drawing and go to Object>Live Paint>Make.

6. Click the little paint bucket, or press K, to start Live Painting.  Just pick a color and click the space you want to fill…see how parts of the drawing light up when you hover over them with the paint bucket?  That means your dreams are coming true.

7. Finish coloring in your drawing.  Adorable, no?  I made this little boot red, like Ted’s boots on How I Met Your Mother.

What do you think?  If you’ve never tried Live Paint before, does it seem doable?  If you have used it before, do you have any tips or tricks to share?

Tagged: tutorial