Master Color with the Recolor Artwork Tool in Adobe Illustrator

Bonnie Christine's class on the Recolor Artwork tool is a narrow, practical course built for one specific problem: how to move a finished vector illustration through multiple color options quickly, without redrawing anything. It does not teach Illustrator, and it says so upfront, pointing newcomers toward her other Skillshare classes first. What it delivers instead is a compact, thirteen-lesson walkthrough of one dialog box and the decisions around it.

The course opens with palette building rather than the tool itself, which is the right call. Christine demonstrates pulling colors from a photograph with the eyedropper, drawing a grid of swatches, and saving the set as a named color group. She is specific about the ratio that makes a palette usable: several hues of the same color, a spread from very light to very dark, and a handful of neutral base tones like beige, gray, or tan. That framework recurs throughout the rest of the class and gives the later technical lessons a purpose beyond button-pushing.

Inside the tool

Once the Recolor Artwork dialog is open, the lessons move briskly through its features: randomizing colors, editing individual swatches with the CMYK sliders, linking or unlinking harmony colors on the Edit tab, and dragging a saved color group onto existing artwork. The color-reduction lesson is a good example of the course's practical bent, showing how dragging one swatch on top of another instantly merges the two, collapsing an illustration from a dozen colors down to four for cheaper printing or simpler production.

Two techniques stand out as genuinely useful beyond the basics. Locking a color, covered in its own lesson, keeps a chosen swatch fixed while every other color in the artwork gets randomized or swapped, which matters most on patterns where a background color repeats across many shapes. And the watercolor recoloring lesson solves a real problem: randomizing colors on a watercolor illustration produces noise rather than a gradient, so Christine instead groups elements by color family, blends two endpoint colors into a stepped range with the Blend tool, and sorts the resulting swatches light to dark before applying them. It is a workaround built from three separate Illustrator features stacked together, and it is the most technically interesting sequence in the class.

Where it thins out

The Pantone conversion lesson is short and mostly conceptual, walking through the swatch library dropdown rather than digging into the mismatches that can occur between a screen color and its nearest Pantone match. The closing lessons on choosing a palette and avoiding common mistakes are useful but more like a designer's personal checklist than a technical lesson, built around rules of thumb such as keeping two touching Pantone colors at least two numbers apart for adequate contrast in print.

At forty minutes across thirteen lessons, nothing overstays its welcome, but nothing gets deep treatment either. There is no student project walkthrough, no critique of finished work, and no discussion of how these techniques hold up across Illustrator versions since the class dates to 2017. For a designer who already has finished artwork and just wants to color it faster and more intentionally, though, the course does exactly what it promises.

What you will learn

• ·Build custom color palettes by sampling photos with the eyedropper and organizing them into Swatches color groups
• ·Reduce an illustration's color count by dragging and dropping swatches onto each other inside the Recolor Artwork dialog
• ·Lock specific colors (like a pattern background) so only the rest of the artwork changes when testing new palettes
• ·Recolor watercolor illustrations by grouping elements, blending gradient steps, and sorting swatches light to dark
• ·Convert a document's CMYK colors to the nearest Pantone matches with one click
• ·Judge whether a palette works using neutrals, contrast, and repeated hues, plus a two-Pantone-number spacing rule for adjacent colors