How to Quickly Recolor an Image in Illustrator

I want to start off by saying that I am not an advanced Adobe Illustrator CC user. I know enough to do minor edits and make basic icons, but that is it, so if you happen to be more versed in Illustrator and know of a better way to do this, feel free to comment below. I’m always looking for better ways to accomplish a task.

I had a graphic designer that specializes in creating caricatures create one of myself:

The graphic designer gave me the original source file, so I could make my own minor edits in the future. I wanted to create multiple caricatures of myself wearing different colored shirts. The only way that I knew how to do this was to change every part of my shirt individually. I didn’t want to change every part of my shirt one at a time because that was too time consuming. Luckily, I found out about the Recolor button in the Properties panel. To make the Recolor button show up in the Properties panel, you need to make a selection. In the screenshot below, I selected my whole caricature.

Click the Recolor button, and you’ll see a Recolor Artwork window pop up like this:

I’ll explain the numbered items:

1. I click on a color swatch that looks like what might be the color of my shirt.
2. I modify the hue by clicking on the swatch and changing the value. I adjust the saturation and brightness by sliding the respective slider or by changing the respective percentage value.
3. If I changed the color of the wrong item, I can always click on the eyedropper tool to undo all of my color changes.
4. When I’m satisfied with the color changes, I click the OK button.

Here is my caricature with a green shirt.

If you found this blog post useful or if you have something helpful to add, please let me know in the comments. Thanks for reading.