Having difficulty dividing up color on paths in Illustrator

[joyemcc]

Hi,
I’ve bought some vector images in Adobe stock but there are areas that I want to cut and other areas that I want to engrave. I can’t seem to separate the paths to do different colors without redrawing them.

For example, I want to engrave/score the pistil of the flower. I’m new with Illustrator so maybe this is easy to do but I can’t figure it out by playing with it!

Thank you!

[Jules]

Yeah, that would be somewhat complex to do in Illustrator alone. (It can be done but it will take a while.)

What I would probably attempt is to just create a raster image to do the engraving, and that requires Photoshop if you have it. But it’s going to be a LOT quicker.

1. Open the image in Photoshop.
2. Use the Magic Wand tool to select the area enclosed by the outlines.
3. Create a New Layer.
4. Go in with the Paintbrush and paint the areas that you want to be engraved. You won’t need to be particularly careful since all of the outlines are already captured by the selection.
5. When it looks the way you want it to look, Hide the bottom layer with the outline on it. That should leave you with just the engraved areas and a transparent background.
6. Save the file as a PNG file.

Then you:

Open the original file in AI.
Drag the PNG file onto the open artboard and let it go.
Embed the engraving image into the file. (Select it, then click on Embed Image, at the top.)
Align the engraving over the outlines the way you want it.
Then Save the File as an SVG. (If you need the correct settings for that…they are listed here:

Glowforge Interface - Correctly Save a File as an SVG for the GFUI

For All Programs: If you want to engrave a bitmap (raster) style image and include it inside a vector SVG file, you need to Embed the image in the file if you want it to stay aligned inside the SVG file. Otherwise you will need to re-load the raster file and use the camera to align it visually. (That’s fine, but you will completely lose the benefit of more accurate alignment that you get from the design software.) There are instructions for how to Embed raster images for some of the main 2D…

That should work.

[joyemcc]

Thank you Jules, I’ll give it a try…I’m actually much better with Photoshop so it’s nice to know I can use that!

[Jules]

I was too. For this though, it’s just a better tool to use than a drawing program. (Rather than struggle through doing it in the drawing program and then have the GF interface turn it into a raster image anyway.)

[ekla]

You don’t need to redraw the paths, just duplicate and erase what you don’t want

A pretty quick way to do what you describe:

• Duplicate the artwork layer and lock your original layer so it doesn’t get messed up. (This ensures that your new engrave pistils are properly aligned in the exact same spot.)
• Select the linework path and set it to a fill color and no stroke (it appears from your pic that it’s just stroke with no fill, if so you can just hit “x” on your keyboard to “flip” them)
• use the Eraser tool to erase what you DON’T want to engrave. (if you erase clean across a part it’ll cut into separate objects/paths that you can delete, faster than dragging the eraser over every last bit)

Ps- since your using AI you can use the keyboard ctrl/cmd + c/v to copy paste directly from Illustrator to the GFUI dashboard.