Working with Live Paint Groups: The Paint Bucket Tool is an integral part of Live Paint Groups. Experiment with different stroke attributes to create intricate designs. To enable this feature, select the desired gap detection option from the Options bar that appears at the top of the interface when the tool is active.Ĭhanging Stroke Attributes: By adjusting the stroke weight, color, or style before using the Paint Bucket Tool, you can achieve unique fill effects. Gap Detection: Illustrator’s Live Paint Bucket Tool can automatically detect and fill gaps within complex shapes. The Paint Bucket Tool in Adobe Illustrator offers several advanced options to enhance your workflow including the following advanced techniques: What is the Paint Bucket Tool in Adobe Illustrator The Live Paint Bucket tool can automatically detect where there are gaps in the design and fill them in as long as you have the setting enabled.In Adobe Illustrator, users can use the paint bucket tool to add color to their projects by just using a few simple steps.How to Use the Paint Bucket Tool in Adobe Illustrator.Where is the Paint Bucket Tool in Adobe Illustrator.What is the Paint Bucket Tool in Adobe Illustrator.Obviously you could have any combination of transparent gradient stops, but if you just want to replicate what we’ve made above, you’d need a gradient with two identical stops, with the same opacity setting.Ī bit of a pain, and rather odd, But for whatever reason, this setup translates fine into the PDF, and makes an image created in this way usable elsewhere. Remember that you can add gradients to the swatch panel too, and these can also contain transparency. This isn’t great news if you actually need to produce something using this method!įortunately, there’s another way. This is because other applications can only view the PDF side of the AI file, and while this method works fine in Illustrator, something evidently gets lost in the translation to PDF. You’ll see the same thing if you place the AI file in InDesign, or if you export a raster file such as PNG. You can see the stroke through the transparent areas! Knockout group should prevent this, but for some reason it doesn’t.

Looks fine in Illustrator, but you’ll get a hint as to what’s wrong with this if you check a preview of it in Bridge or your OS: Pretty silly, but that’s what you want for some reason. You’d add it in the appearance panel, drag it below the live paint contents so it doesn’t visually cover the whole group, and then set knockout group so it doesn’t show through the transparent areas (read more about the very useful option knockout group here). Say you wanted to add a stroke around your butterfly. It’s quite a niche situation, but could be critical if you fall into that tiny niche and can’t figure out what’s wrong. Looks delightful! However, there’s one pitfall I’ve found of this method. So naturally, you create a set and colour away with the live paint bucket. It’s just colour it’s only attribute as a pattern is that it has 50% opacity. Patterns can be transparent! In fact, if you make a transparent filled object and drag it to swatches, a pattern swatch is what you get: You can fill a live paint group with anything in the swatches panel, including patterns and gradients. The first clue as to how you can go about this is here: Say I wanted his colourful wing segments to appear transparent, but the dark areas to remain opaque. You can still select individual paths (and the fills themselves with the live paint selection tool), but if you look at the appearance panel you’ll find you still just have the live paint group selected - there’s no way to add a stroke to an individual path either. Read up here if you’re unfamiliar.Īnyway, one thing you can’t do without breaking your live paint group into separate closed paths is adjust the transparency of individual filled areas. With live paint, you can just draw and let those things take care of themselves for the most part. Before live paint, you’d probably construct everything you needed to fill as a closed path, which makes a bit of planning and close attention to the stacking order of objects essential for complex drawing. Live paint is a useful shortcut in Illustrator that people probably take for granted now, but it was probably originally a way of making things in Illustrator a bit more Photoshop-like for newcomers. Something I hadn’t considered before it came up at work was that it might be useful to sometimes have areas of varying transparency in a single live paint group.

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