Color changing issues in Illustrator, paint bucket

[James HG Creative]

 Occasionally I have texts or shapes that come with black fill kind of like a drop shadow. I need to change the fill and the shadow colors but Adobe will only change the fill. If I had a paint bucket like Photoshop then this would be easy but I can not figure out how to change it in Illustrator. If I change the color in Photoshop I lose all my vector quality. Help please?

[Ton Frederiks]

Can you show an example? With the object selected and the Layers panel and Appearance panel expanded?

[James HG Creative]

[Ton Frederiks]

That is a font with a baked in "dropshadow".

You cannot separately change the dropshadow because it is not a separate object.

You may try to outline the font see if you can separate the shadow from the character shapes.

[James HG Creative]

Ok that makes sense. I did try to outline it but that did not work. Why wouldn't Illustrator have a paint bucket like Photoshop where you can just change any color without needing to make it a separate object?

[Ton Frederiks]

"Why wouldn't Illustrator have a paint bucket like Photoshop where you can just change any color without needing to make it a separate object?"

That is the because they are very different ptograms.

One is vector and object based, the other pixel based.

[meganchi]

Illustrator does have a live paint bucket tool. It's nested with the shapebuilder tool on your tool palette.

You would need to outline the font first, then use the paint bucket to fill in the center part of the letters with a different color, then you could expand and ungroup to play around with changing colors on the letters or dropshadow area, or add different color strokes to the top letters etc.

[kphotopage]

Ton, That is a font with a baked in "dropshadow".

LOL!!!!!

As suggested, Outline the type, then Live Paint will do the trick.

Example shown.

Similar Freebie downloaded font.

https://www.dafont.com/circus.font

Move forward as you wish from there.

K

[James HG Creative]

Thank You. I will try that.