Portrait artworks accompany extensive use of color gradients. While using vector-based software for drawing a portrait, you need to experiment with color gradients a lot. Further, when you decide to modify highlight color for fine features like hair, selecting elements can become cumbersome. What you need is an intelligent selection tool. This is where the magic wand tool of Adobe Illustrator comes to your aid.
Magic wand tool
The Magic wand tool is a selection tool available in Adobe Illustrator. It can select elements from the illustrator artboard that share similar attributes. When you select a particular element, this tool scans the artboard for similar elements and automatically selects them. One might wonder, how do we define similarity? Well, we can define tolerance values for each attribute. Based on this tolerance value, the selection of elements will change.
The magic wand tool is located in the toolbar and the icon looks like a magician’s wand. If you cannot spot it in the toolbar, expand the toolbar and select the magic wand tool. You can also use the keyboard shortcut “y”.
Attributes supported by the magic wand tool
When you double-click on the magic wand tool icon, a new window pops up. Alternatively, you can open the Window menu and navigate to the Magic Wand menu item. In this window, you can find attributes supported by the magic wand tool. You can consider attributes as a property of an element like fill color, stroke color, and width, etc. In the following sections, we will discuss various attributes supported by the magic wand tool.
Fill Color
Fill color is the first attribute you can see in the magic wand tool window. It is the default selection of the magic wand tool. You can also see a default tolerance of 20. When the Fill Color check box is selected, the tool will search for similar fill color elements as the spot that you have selected. If you want to select the elements with an exact color match, set the tolerance to zero. The higher the tolerance value, the greater the range of color selection. Setting tolerance values for selecting elements that aren’t an exact color match needs a little experimentation. However, you will get a hang of it easily.
Stroke Color
The magic wand tool can also select elements based on the stroke color of the elements. You can adjust the tolerance value to find elements with exact or similar matches. The default tolerance value is 20. Many illustrations use texts as shapes. Appropriate stroke colors help the text to stand out and make the message loud and clear. Therefore, one must experiment with stroke color. In such conditions, selection by stroke color feature comes in handy.
Stroke Weight
If you are an artist who uses hatching as a fill, this selection option is surely for you. With selection by stroke weight check box on, magic wand can select elements with similar stroke weight. The tolerance value can be adjusted to find an exact or near match to the selected stroke width. The default tolerance value is 5pt. This means the selection will include elements with a stroke value between plus and minus 5 pts of the reference value. The reference value is the stroke width of the element that you have clicked on at first.
Opacity
With the magic wand tool, you can also select elements with similar opacity levels. The tolerance value of opacity is specified in percentages. The default value is 5%. This means the selection will have elements having opacity between plus and minus 5% of the reference value. Usually, shadows, highlights, and backgrounds are set to a similar opacity level for various elements. Hence, with the opacity-based selection option, you can select any one element representing say shadow and make necessary changes to all such elements. Efficient and easy.
Blending Mode
You can also select elements with similar blending modes using the magic wand tool. Selecting and making changes to the foreground and background objects becomes convenient with blending mode-based selection.
Summary
When you select elements using the magic wand tool, it allows you to change all possible attributes of selected elements from the property panel. You may start by selecting elements with similar colors and choose to change their opacity to match some other elements. It saves your precious time and effort.
Secondly, you can use the attributes mentioned above with one another, this offers you a wider range of selection options. The only effort required is to experiment with the tolerance settings.
Also, after the selections are made using the magic wand tool, the elements don’t budge while dragging. This ensures that your artwork doesn’t get distorted.
Just select the magic wand tool from the toolbar. Then, select any element for a reference. The magic wand does the rest for you. Remember to change the default fill color-based selection to suit your requirements. For hanging the tolerance levels, use the mouse clicks on the up and down button on the tolerance setting box. There are keyboard shortcuts as well. Press and hold the Alt key on Windows or Option key on Mac and press the up or down arrow on the keyboard.
Looking for more Illustrator Tips and Tricks? Visit our Blog
Need help deciding which file type to use. Find out what file type should you use here.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.