how to create colour drawings without any outline?

[rajanvenkat]

I am using Illustrator. Normally, I draw outlines and then group, expand appearance and make Live Paint to colour inside the drawing. Now I want to draw some colour icons without outline, but simply colours as in the attachment. Please guide me on how to do that in illustrator. I want to do this without using basic shapes. Thanks

[Doug A Roberts]

You can do what you describe in the first sentence of your post, but just remove the stroke from the live paint group.

[Ton Frederiks · Accepted solution]

If you use Live Paint and choose Object > Live Paint > Expand the result will be a group that contains 2 other groups.

One group will contain the strokes, the other the fills.

Just delete the stroke group in the Layers panel.

[Ashutosh_Mishra]

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. I hope you found your answer. We'd appreciate if you can mark the appropriate response correct. If you used any other method, you can share it with us. It'll help other users with similar concern.

I'd also recommend checking out this help article to know about live paint groups in Illustrator.
Let us know if you have any other concern, we'll be happy to help.

Regards,

Ashutosh

[rajanvenkat]

I am extremely thankful to you for the link provided. It gives a lot of information. Thanks a lot!

[rajanvenkat]

Thanks a lot. It really worked ..Great!

I have one more doubt: Generally, my workflow for live paint is like this: 1. After creating sketch outlines 1. select 2. group. 3. expand appearance ( if the lines are created using a brush) or expand 4. Live paint >make and then I do the painting using paint bucket. I am grouping and expanding appearance for the purpose of deleting the extra intersected lines that came in the outline sketch process. In this process, even after I do  Live Paint> expand, I could not get a separate group for the strokes. They are combined with live paint. Is there any way to deal in this situation? Thanks 

[rajanvenkat]

By trial and error, I have found out why I am not getting two separate groups as explained by you, (one for live paint and one for strokes). The 'expand appearance' step used by me to break the strokes and delete the superfluous lines of the sketch is the reason for not getting a separate group for strokes. Thanks for your excellent support and the best answer. Hereafter I can draw solid flat images! 

[Ton Frederiks]

Good to hear that was helpful.

Yes, Expand Appearance expands the brushes and creates shapes that are no longer strokes.

When I need brushes in the final artwork, I don't expand them, but I make a copy of the brushes on a layer above the artwork and lock the layer.

When I create the Live Paint, I let it convert the brushes into normal paths.

After coloring and expanding the Live Paint, I delete the strokes group and still have the original brush strokes on top.

[rajanvenkat]

Thanks a lot.. It is working well now!