Vectordiary

Day 25: Applying Live Paint

With Live Paint, you can freely paint your artwork. It is like painting a kid’s coloring book where you have the line art and you start filling them will different colors. In this lesson, you will see how to break a star into different segments using Live Paint.

Creating a Beveled Star using Live Paint

I will show you an example of using Live Paint to draw a beveled star. Let’s turn on Smart Guides to make snapping of points easier. Go View>Smart Guide to turn on Smart Guides.

Draw a star on the canvas. Select the Pen Tool and roll over the top anchor point. The anchor text will appear. Click once.

Click the second point at the bottom of the anchor to create the first line.

Continue doing this for all opposite points.

Here is the final wireframe.

Select all the shapes with Selection Tool. Next click the Live Paint and fill the first area with light grey.

Continue filling in different shades for all segments.

You notice the black stroke is still on. Select your star and click None for stroke.

Once you are happy with it you can expand the shapes to break it into normal paths.

This is our final beveled star.

Conclusion

Imagine drawing this beveled star using Pen Tool only, you will have to draw 10 different triangle segments which will definitely take up more time. You may even have problems aligning the points. With Live Paint, this chore is made a lot simpler.

Next Lesson: Masking using Clipping Path/ Opacity Mask »
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