Controlling Automatic Color Style Creation

Let’s take a closer look at the Automatically Create Color Styles dialog, the one responsible for the miracle performed on the kayak. The top portion is self-explanatory: simply choose fill or outline colors or both to be used in creating color styles.

The Automatically Link Similar Colors Together option tells DRAW to group similar colors into a single color style. That is the key to the whole operation, really, because if you uncheck this box, every color in the selected object will become a parent color. This might be desirable if you want to add shading to an unshaded drawing. It would ensure that every color in the original becomes a parent, so you can create appropriate shades for each. In the case of the kayak, though, it was crucial to check this option, and in fact, it is checked by default.

The Convert Child Palette Colors to CMYK option tells DRAW how to handle colors from different palettes. When enabled, colors from other palettes, such as Pantone, are converted to CMYK so they can become part of a color family. If disabled, each color from a different palette is made into its own parent. If a drawing has colors from disparate palettes, and uniformity is the objective (like with the kayak), you would want to check this option.

Perhaps the most useful, but volatile, control in the dialog is the Parent Creation Index slider. Slide it all the way to the left (Many Parents) and instead of one red parent with 16 child colors, the kayak would yield 13 red parent colors with a total of 28 children; 41 shades of red in all! Good for Corel for including a Preview button which would show you exactly how many parents and children would be created at any point along the slider.

Creating Shades

In the last section, we saw the beauty of automatically creating children from an existing drawing. When starting fresh, you might want to adopt another strategy if you think you will want several variations of a main color.

Start by creating a style based on a main color—let’s say the rich navy blue color we found in our TruMatch swatch book, No. 36a (70M, 100C). From the docker, click Create Shades to get this dialog.

When you request Lighter and Darker Shades, DRAW creates an equal number of each. If your parent color is very light or dark you may not want equal numbers of lighter and darker shades. Just create your shades in two passes, specifying the number of darker shades and the number of lighter shades separately. Figure 31.7 shows the result.

The Shade Similarity slider in the dialog allows you to control the range your set of shades will encompass. Leaving the control at the default setting of Very Different will spread darker shades nearly to black and lighter shades nearly to white. A Very Similar setting will cluster the shades close to the parent color.

	NOTE You can also create shades of a shade. Whatever element is selected in the docker when you click Create Shades is what gets shaded.

Color Styles and Custom Palettes

From the context menu of any parent or child, you can choose to add that color to a custom palette. This allows you to extract a single color from a color family and keep it in your custom palette for future use.

FIGURE 31.7  Creating shades of your main color is a good way to start a project.

	NOTE A color that is added to a custom palette loses its connection to the color style from which it came. Changing the parent color of the style will not change the color in the palette, nor will it update the fill of objects that have had the color applied from the palette. When you use the color from a custom palette, it’s just a uniform fill like any other.