Use of the Livepaint bucket in Illustrator

Well we have the new streamline in Illustrator, called live trace these days in Illustrator.

Another thing we have is pathfinder, really neat panel tool.

But sometimes you don't get the result you want by either.

We also have the Live Paint bucket tool.

This can be very handy.

Let's say that you have a couple of shapes and you want to colorize them. The live paint bucket does it.

But sometimes your needs expand beyond that.

When you have a live paint group you want to play with the shapes.

Select the live paint group with the black arrow then go to the object menu and "expand" it.

Now it's just a group, but all the shapes are editable and illustrator was smart enough to see that the overlapping shapes are divided in separate colorized shapes.

if you ungroup them (sometimes several times) you can edit them to add for example rounded corners, everything you could imagine doing with a normal shape.

Helpful to create complex shapes. Try it :-)

Let's be smarter than the software...