Have you ever been frustrated working in Illustrator when you have tried to fill an object only to find that it is either made up of several objects or open paths and as a result the area that you wish to fill won’t fill?
There are a number of ways to get around this!
You could try using some Pathfinder methods but what most people tend to do is re-draw the shape that they want to fill.
Let’s have a look at how the Live Paint tool works.
Live Paint tutorial
What we’d like to do is to change the colours of the overlapping areas without affecting the objects. To do so, Select all your objects and go to the Object menu and choose Live Paint > Make.
Live Paint > Make
The only difference that you can tell is that there is now a bounding box with big handles around the objects and they appear to be grouped together.
Let’s try re-colouring these objects now. Go to the Toolbar and find the Paint bucket tool. Choose a colour and click on the overlapping area. Experiment with any patterns you have or gradients as well.
Experiment with fills
Now, the next thing you want to do is to change the strokes independently of the objects. Double click the Live Paint bucket tool and select Paints Strokes as opposed to Fills (uncheck this).
Live paint options
Bring the Stroke to the front and choose a stroke colour from the Swatches and a weight. Hover your cursor over a stroke in the image until you see the stroke of the image highlight. Then click and see it change!
Live paint with fills and strokes
Imagine how hard this would have been using any other method!
In the next part we will look at how to use the Live Paint Selection tool.