Although you can add colourways to your design in the Design Window, there are many benefits to creating your colourways in the Layout Window. The main advantage is being able to view all of your colourways at the same time, making balancing colours very easy.
Other benefits include features such as Colourway Permutations and Inspire which are not available in the Design Window. This article provides an overview to creating colourways in the Layout Window, with Learn More... links, which take you to a more detailed description of each feature.
For the basic colouring techniques, you should refer to the Recolouring designs in the Layout Window article. When you are comfortable with recolouring, the next step may be to create colourways of your design, and AVA offers a variety of tools to help you to do this.
Adding a new colourway to the designThe main colourway controls are found at the top of the Layers Palette as sown opposite. Click the small + button to add a colourway to your design. The active colourway will be duplicated, and the number will update to reflect the additional colourway. So, if your design only has one colourway, and you press the + button, the number will update to 2. Pressing + will always duplicate the active colourway.
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Make ColourwaysAccessed from the Colour Menu, this lets you quickly add as many colourways to your design as you like. You can even choose if these new colourways are blank (leave Random From Colourfile unticked), in which case each layer in the new colourways will be black, or whatever you have set as the Default Spot Layer Colour in the File Format Settings , or generated randomly from your active colour file. This features works well alongside Inspire. Simply add your colourways, tile them on the page, activate them all, and use Inspire to start colouring them.
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InspireOpen the Automatic Colourway window from the toolbar of the Layout Window. You may need to customise the toolbar and add this feature if you have not already done so. Activate the layers you want to change and then enter the colourway number you want your new colourways to be based on into the Inspiration Colourway dialog box. Adjust the H (Hue), C (Chromaticity) and L (Lightness) sliders, and choose to constrain the new colours to your active colour file, or your printer and/or monitor gamuts. Click the dice to create a new colourway. Every time you click the dice, the colours will change. |
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Colourway PermutationsThis creates colourways based on all possible combinations of specified colours. The maximum number of colours from which permutations can be created is 6, which creates 719 colourways. From 5 colours it creates 119 colourways, and from 4 colours in creates 23 new colourways. To create permutations, activate up to 6 layers in your design. Go to the Colourway Menu and select Make Colourway Permutations. If you have added a low number of permutations to your colourway, use the Colourway Chooser to browse these. If you have added a high number of permutations, use the Colourway Browser to scroll through these. |
Colourway BrowserThis browser displays all colours within all colourways side-by-side. You can recolour the colour chips in this browser, making the balancing of colourways nice and easy. All the standard colouring techniques apply in this window, and you can drag and drop colours between colourways. You can re-order the colourways simply by dragging and dropping the columns accordingly.
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The Colourway ChooserOpened by clicking on the colourway number in the Layers Palette, this is a nice way of scrolling through, duplicating and deleting colourways from a design and it can be used in the Design Window and the Layout Window. To delete a colourway using the Chooser, simply hover over the colourway with your cursor, then press backspace on your keyboard. To duplicate a colourway, hover over the colourway with your cursor, then press J on your keyboard. Lock the colourway by pressing the padlock icon, and change the size of the Chooser using the Mountain icons.
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