How to color separate vector art in Adobe Illustrator so it's screen print ready.

In this video we go through the necessary steps in Adobe Illustrator to color separate your vector art so we can make films for your print project. Most printers charge for this service as it can be time consuming, but you can simply follow these steps to save yourself some money and have more creative control over your art.

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Closed Caption:

ok we're going to go through a quick
tutorial on how to color separate your
vector in Adobe Illustrator so
everything is film and print ready and
we've got all the important color
information we need for your project
so we're going to jump down into
illustrator and open up this document
we've got here this is your working
document you've got strokes and a bunch
of things that you can edit we're going
to make some changes to this that will
make it somewhat uneditable and so
you're not going to want to like use
your actual piece for this we're going
to copy this jump into a new document
and paste it and work in a completely
new document on this one you can see
with this selection here we've got these
colors that the yellow the red overlaps
the black the blue overlap several
colors this doesn't work for screen
printing we typically don't print color
on top of color and most spot color
circumstances so it's going to be a
situation where we need to take care of
going to go up to object here scroll
down to expand this is going to expand
our fill and stroke and then with the
use of the Pathfinder tool going to be
able to flatten this artwork so now
we've expanded that so we no longer have
editable strokes everything's flattened
we've got a window make sure our
pathfinder selected we've got our open
here already on the right there's two
rows here
second row third column there's an
option says merge we're going to click
on that you can see with our selection
everything's kind of cleaned up to a
cookie cutter we don't have colors to be
on top of each other any longer they're
all independent next we are going to go
into our swatches panel and we've got a
bunch of squash is going on
they kind of get in our way we're making
film so we're going to go and get rid of
these and build around swatches so we'll
start by selecting the white scroll down
to our last watch holding shift click on
the last watch now everything is
selected going to go and delete these
watches we don't need them now we're
gonna go ahead and use our magic wand we
can hit why to select the black go back
into swatches want to create a new
swatch here would call this pot black
under color ties we're going to make
sure we have spot color selected there
we go
better spot black we can see the spot
color because it stabbed going to repeat
this step for the remaining three colors
yellow cyan blue color and last but not
least read okay so now we're working
spot color of everything should be kind
of where we needed to be but we're going
to go ahead and click on window again
and go two separations preview i already
have this opened up but you can click on
that make sure it's checked it's going
to pop this panel we can click over
print preview here and going to get rid
of a our background color going to click
off of CMYK and you notice something
interesting happened there we just
actually lost kind of a little piece of
artwork in here so one of these black
strokes that we had was a different
black so we're going to turn this off
we're going to use our hover over this
with our want selected click on our spot
black now click back in over print
preview and we converted that to our
spot color this happens often will be
many blacks sometimes when you're
designing it just happens there many
blacks in a document we need everything
to be unified into one black so now
we've got the spot colors to work with
and this is kind of like a print check
our press check we can go ahead and
start turning some of these off we can
see kind of this their first plate or
yellow plate or red plate or blue plates
and our black plates and so there you go
you've got color separated artwork
we've got colors that work for us and if
you want to take this step further and
you actually had pantone colors we can
go ahead and go into swatches panel
click new color group the colors that we
have here helps i didn't have all of
them selected so i'm going to select
everything hit new color group all this
DisneyToon and now it's given us kind of
this new color group but it's also
activated this color wheel down here
we're just gonna need we can edit or
apply color group click on this we
scroll down to this drop-down scroll up
to color books it's going to give us our
pantone color books we print ninety-five
percent of our stuff in water base and
so we primarily work with a pantomime
plus solid encoded color book or mixing
your colors so go ahead and click on
that and hit ok it's going to ask us if
we want to save these changes its fine
so now we have converted these two
pantone colors and obviously its turn
the red and more of a pink so that's
probably not going to work but it's
given us a pretty good color panto 299
you for the blue and pantone yellow you
and the spot black still spot black so
we can go and convert all of these two
closest panting well as possible
sometimes you might actually need to get
into the color book to pick the exact
color that you desire but for color
separation purposes we've gotta clean
file here and if it's ready to go if
that we're not going to have any delays
on and that's all we need to do so we're
going to go ahead and save this and your
email it off to us and we'll go ahead
make some great shirts thanks for
watching