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In this exercise I want to you give a sense for the kind of problems that you
can solve using Live Paint inside of Illustrator. So we'll see the problem that we can't solve
without Live Paint in this exercise, and then we'll see the solution,
Live Paint, in the next exercise. I am working inside a document called RGB
primaries.ai. The file has two layers inside of it, Demo
#2, which is turned off currently, and Demo #1, which is visible.
I'll go ahead and twirl open Demo #1, and you will see inside there that we have
three circles and nothing else, a red circle, a green circle, and a blue circle.
Now, if I go ahead and meatball the blue circle to select it, we'll see
that it's 100% Opaque, up here in the Transparency palette, and it's set to
the Normal Screen Mode. So no special Transparency settings going
on, hence we have a hollow meatball. But the other two objects, red and green,
have volumetric meatballs, meaning that there is some sort of Transparency associated
with them. If I go ahead and meatball green, it's set
to the Screen blend mode. That's the only special thing that's going
on with it. Same with red, if I meatball the red object,
its set to Screen as well. As a result, we are creating interactions
between the three shapes, so that we are blending red, green, and blue in order
to create these secondary color primaries, which are cyan, magenta, and yellow,
and then where all three shapes intersect, we are seeing white.
Now, the beauty of working with the blend mode is that it is a live effect.
So if I go ahead and drag, for example, this red circle to a different location,
we go ahead and create a live interaction between these various objects.
So the cyan, magenta, yellow, and White areas are updating on the fly.
The bad part is that our strokes don't look right at all.
So what I want is solid black strokes, regardless, inside of this diagram right here.
I'm getting these sort of weird light whites going on.
That's because if I go ahead and select all three objects, and go over to the
Color palette, and make sure that my stroke is active, I'll see that I have a
rich black assigned to these objects. As a result of the fact that we are not quite
100% for all of these values, we are getting sort of these different sorts
of light strokes going on inside of the diagram. Now, I'll press Ctrl+H or Command+H for a
moment to hide all those anchor points and so on, so that we can see the intersection
of the objects. I could change out this rich black stroke
with a standard 100% K stroke, by clicking inside that tiny black swatch.
Notice now, we are dropping out the cyan, magenta, and yellow, and so we end up
with white strokes at the intersections of all these objects.
But as I was saying I want black. So you might say well, all right then, just
take all those values up to 100%, I guess, and then they will equal black.
But no, they are not going to equal black, instead they just disappear entirely.
So that's not the solution either. Well, then you might say okay, well, then
why don't you just apply the blend mode settings to the fills and not the strokes?
That should work, right? All right. Well, let's try that out.
Let's go ahead and hide that Demo #1 layer, and then I'll turn on Demo #2,
which has all of the shapes with no special blend modes settings applied to
them, and I'll go ahead and twirl open Demo #2, so that we can select each one of these
objects. I'll go ahead and meatball the green object,
and I'll go over to the Appearance palette.
Notice that I have moved it over to the side so it's available at the same time as Layers.
I will select the fill, make sure that its active, exclusive of the stroke, and
then I'll change the blend mode to Screen. We get this lovely interaction of the two
fills, but we still get an interaction with the strokes. What gives there?
Well, let's go ahead and do the same thing with red.
I'll go ahead and meatball it, make sure its fill is active, as it is, and then
I'll change the blend mode for just the fill to Screen.
Again, let me demonstrate, if I twirl open fill, we can see that the Opacity is set to
Screen. Otherwise, we have got default Opacity going
on. But we still have interactions between the
strokes, because the fills are interacting with the strokes, and we can't
avoid that. So now we have an even worst solution than
we had before. I have to say I love Transparency. It is fantastic.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that transparency and blend modes and
all those options that we saw in the previous advanced section of this
series, that's a more powerful feature actually than Live Paint, but it
doesn't match Live Paint. Live Paint is the only thing that's going
to get us the effect we are looking for, and I'll show you how that works in the very
next exercise.