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How to add multiple colors to the Swatches panel in Illustrator

Feb 17, 2021 | Tips & Tricks | 0 comments

How to add multiple colors to the Swatches panel in Illustrator

Do you find creating Swatches in Illustrator a bit of a chore? Whether you’re creating your own color palette or pulling the colors from existing artwork, doing it one Swatch at a time can get tedious pretty quickly.

The good news is it doesn’t have to be done this way. There’s ways to create Swatches for multiple colors at the same time.

Adding multiple colors as Swatches

There’s two ways that you can do this:

Method 1

Select the objects you want to grab the colors from. In this example, we have three circles.

Object selection in Adobe Illustrator

Go to the Swatches Panel (Window > Swatches).

Swatches panel in Adobe Illustrator

Open the Swatches panel menu and click Add Selected Colors.

Add Selected Colors in Adobe Illustrator

Method 2

This time, make sure nothing is selected then open the Swatches panel menu and click Add Used Colors. This will automatically create Swatches for all of the colors you’ve used in your document.

Add Used Colors in Adobe Illustrator

What’s great about both of these methods is that the Swatches are created as global colors, which means that when one of these colors is changed, all objects in your document with that color applied will update instantly.

Written by Sam Jones

Sam is a designer and creator based in Staffordshire, England. The founder of StudioRat, he loves to write about creative processes and share useful design tools, tips and resources.

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