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© 1998 by Deborah J. Cook. All Rights Reserved.
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CorelDRAW's color styles have come a long way (baby) since the tease Draw users first saw with version 6's Select by Properties Rollup. Creating—and then changing—colors styles based on hues and spot palettes became possible with the release of Draw 7, where changing whole ranges of colors based on hue worked effortlessly. Things were a lot less automatic, though, if you wanted to change from one spot color and various tints to others. With Draw 8, almost every color change becomes as easy as the click of a mouse. (I say almost, because there are still limitations, referenced at the end of this article.)
Designers often tediously create artwork based on a client's color specifications, only to hear the client then say, "Gee, I wonder what this would look like if the reds and blues were changed to puce and magenta." It used to be a painstaking process in Draw to manually select each object and change its fill and/or tint. And, of course, as soon as you'd finish doing that, the telephone would ring and you'd pick up to hear the client telling you that he'd changed his mind—red and blue were fine after all! Other situations where quick changes are helpful is when the Draw file is "template" art; the actual objects remain the same, but the specified colors change on a regular basis. Projects such as newsletters and clipart manipulation come to mind.
And, then there's the inspiration for this article … Quilts. Or, more accurately, quilt-ers, whose talent and patience I admire greatly while at the same time I quickly admit I have neither in this particular field! During my travels through the Corel community, both virtual and actual, I have been surprised to learn just how many Draw users use Draw to design quilt patterns. I don't know exactly why I find this surprising; I guess it's just because not being a quilter myself, I never even imagined how many quilters there are.
Although a posting by quilter Dottie Stelmacher on Corel's newsgroups gave me the idea to use a quilt pattern in the graphic examples accompanying this article, do not stop reading here if you don't know how to thread a needle, let alone piece together an entire quilt. Color styles have many applications and you're sure to pick up a hint or three to make (re)designing in your design field easier. So, let's get on with it!
Figure 1 |
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Let's start with Figure 1, an actual quilt pattern lent to me by Dottie for this article. By now you know I admit I have no talent for quilting, but you're probably thinking I'm colorblind as well. But no, I deliberately chose a mish-mash of seemingly unrelated colors to help illustrate the power of Draw 8's color styles. Read on...
For this pattern, I used CMYK colors; later there is an example for using color styles with spot colors. If you are unsure which color model(s) you've used in your design, I recommend first running the Find and Replace Wizard (Alt+E+F+R) to replace a color model or palette, so that your color styles will all be based on the same color model. In the Find and Replace Wizard, choose the option to Find any color model or color palette and Replace it with either the CMYK, RGB, or HSB models. Other models are appropriate too, but the three recommended here will provide some of the best results. Do not choose the Grayscale and Registration Color models for reasons I'll describe later on. You will have to run the Wizard twice; once for fills and again for outlines.
Figure 2 |
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Next, open the Color Styles Docker (Alt+V+C+C) shown in Figure 2. When creating color styles, only styles will be generated for objects currently selected. For my example, I double-clicked the Pick tool to select all objects in the drawing. (Note: If your drawing contains an unusually high number of objects or complex fills, select and create styles for only a portion at a time in order to avoid a crash! Color styles which have been previously generated for a drawing will not be duplicated.)
Figure 3 |
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Now, click the Auto Create Color Styles button in the Docker. You will be presented with the dialog box shown in Figure 3 from which to choose various options for creating the styles. Because the right-click What's This? and Online Help available for these options is good, I won't detail each option here. I will point out some tips along the way on a few of these options, though, starting with the preview button. This preview button is one of the big improvements in Draw 8, allowing you to try the various other options without committing to the final processing. (Even after the styles have been created, you can still change your mind with a quick Undo.)
Figure 4 |
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Figure 4A |
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When choosing color styles options for this quilt pattern template, I found it best to first assign each area of the pattern a discreet color/fill and to then select the Many Parents option from the create color styles dialog, so that each color generates a separate style. This way, changes can be made later without affecting other areas of the pattern. (See, I wasn't colorblind after all!) The default middle area is a good starting place, but depending upon your design, your mileage may vary. Choosing Few Parents is handy too, as you can end up with one Parent style and a monochromistic design. See Figure 4. For this example, I chose Many Parents which generated the color styles shown in Figure 4A. Colors that are not named in your palette will be named Style 1, Style 2, etc. (You can rename the styles by right-clicking on the style name in the Docker.)
There is a thing or two I do know about quilting. First, most quilters have favorite patterns they like to use over and over, and, second, they all have a TON of fabric, in various colors and patterns. Trying to visualize different colors and/or patterns for a particular design can be hard, in both quiltwork and print. Now's where the presto-chango fun begins!
Figure 5 |
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In the Docker, select the color style you wish to edit and then click the color wheel button to open the Edit Color Styles dialog. Choose a new color and OK out of this dialog. Instantly, every color assigned to the old color style is updated with the new color. In the example, I filled some middle triangular areas with a two-color pattern fill. When creating color styles, there is an option to include the colors used in pattern and other fills. By enabling this option, all I have to do now to change the colors in the fill is to select the color styles for that fill from the Docker and edit them. See Figure 5. By selecting color styles in the Docker and editing their properties to represent the colors of your current design, you can see how easy it is to update your project.
(Note: While you can update pattern fills which have had color styles generated, you cannot use the styles directly from the Docker to generate a new pattern. You will have to "manually" create the new pattern fill with the Special Fills rollup and then use the Auto Create Color Styles button in the Docker to generate new styles if the colors you chose were not already in the Docker.)
Figure 6 |
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Figure 7 |
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Other tools available from the Color Styles Docker include the option to generate "shades" of a particular color. You can choose the number of shades you want, whether they are to be lighter or darker than the original color, or a mix of both. See Figures 6 & 7. You can also create a new style without running the Wizard, you can reassign child colors to parents, and you can drag styles between open documents. Be sure to check out all of the buttons and right-mouse menu options!
Once you have your color styles set up, you can drag colors from the Docker to objects in your drawing, to be applied either as a fill or outline color. The interactive cursor will change to a hollow box as you near the perimeter of an object signaling to you when to "drop" the color for an outline. For fills, drag the style swatch to the center of an object and let go. Using the Color Styles Docker to apply fills and outlines (rather than the palette bar) ensures that object fills and outlines use the styles you set up. Dragging colors from the Docker is also an easy way to change the color style for objects on an individual basis. And, of course, you can always use the Auto Create Color Styles Wizard for new objects and fills.
Figure 8 |
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Figure 8 is the same quilt pattern as the previous examples, but this time filled with Pantone spot colors (well, until I had to convert it for this webpage!). While you will probably never use this many spot colors in one design, I am using them to illustrate the power of spot color styles. This time, I chose the default number of Parents to auto create the styles shown in Figure 9. As you can see, some of the colors are actually different tints of the same spot color, and automatically appear as children of the parent color. Now, when you edit spot colors you will be presented with a dialog box where you can specify the tint percentages. See Figure 10. And, if you add shades, the shades will be tints of the parent spot color. Very handy, eh?
Figure 9 |
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Figure 10 |
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The final example is from the CorelDRAW 8 clipart library (rosella.cdr). I used the Docker button to Auto Create Color Styles and then edited the style properties to instantly change the clipart to the colors I wanted. See Figure 11. Now, when you find just the right artwork but in all the wrong colors, the sky (blue)'s the limit!
Figure 11 |
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Note: The limitations I found with color styles are with Grayscale colors, percentages of CMYK black other than 100%, and Registration Color. While it is possible to eventually wrangle Grayscales and other >100% black colors into color style submission, it does take a lot of work. I'm hopeful that Corel is reading this and will improve color styles for black inks in version 9. On the other hand, Registration Color is not a color you should be using to fill graphic objects, so I'll let Corel slide on that one!
Read more articles by Deborah J. Cook along with a short bio.
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