Procreate Color Palettes: A Simple Process for Stand-Out Palettes

1. Welcome to Procreate Color Palettes: Hey there and welcome to Procreate Color Palettes, a simple process for standout palettes. My name is Kiley Bennett and I'm an artist and designer and Skillshare teacher based in Central Kentucky. In this class, I am so excited to share my process for creating lively and balanced color palettes inside my favorite app Procreate. This isn't a class on color theory, this is a class about how to notice and become aware of the color palettes that exist all around us and how to use your instincts to create color palettes that you'll want to use over and over again. Color is one of the most powerful design tools that we have at our disposal and it's everywhere around us. It's most certainly found in nature. It's probably found all around your home. It's definitely found in unexpected places and even inside your imagination, so join me for this class and I guarantee you will be more confident with color and you'll walk away with four unique color palettes that you can start applying to your creative practice today. 2. Class Project: Throughout class, I will share four unique color palette prompts for you to follow. Your class project is to create one or more color palettes, either following along with me using these prompts or to interpret the prompts with your own gathered inspiration and then share them using the lesson on how to share your color palettes. I hope you will tag me on Instagram @KileyBennettco so that I can re-share your color palettes with my community. Let's go ahead and get started. 3. Overview of Color in Procreate: [MUSIC] In this video, we are going to cover how to use the color tools and features inside Procreate. As of November 2021, there have been some cool updates to the color tools so we're going to explore those as well as do a really basic overview of how to use the color tools inside of Procreate. This is more of just a general review rather than a comprehensive tutorial. If you'd like something that is more in depth, make sure to check out my other class, the Procreate class, which is here on Skillshare, and anything that is out of date in that class, as far as color goes will be covered in this video. To find the color menu in Procreate, all you have to do is open up a document, any document. I have started a new document. You can find this circle in the top right and then click on that and that's going to open up the color menu and then you've also got five tabs down at the bottom that do different things. I'm on the Disk tab right now it's just the first one, and I love using the disk this is probably the most used color tool inside of Procreate just for me because it is the most intuitive for me to use. How you use the color disk it's really easy. You're going to use this outer ring to select the color family that you want to be in and then the inner circle, you can use this little picker to select a light and a dark of that shade. It's really easy to use. Something that is really cool about the color disk is that you can double-tap on certain points in this inner circle and it will give you certain colors. If you ever want to find true white, no matter which color family you're in, you can double-tap in the top left of this inner circle and it's going to populate to true white. Then you can also find true black by tapping down at the bottom and it'll select true black. Then you can also tap on all the quarter points of this circle to select the color that is, I guess just the truest value of that specific color family. If I want to go to yellow, up here at the top, it's giving me a really bright yellow, over here it's giving me more of a rich yellow, and then that's a muddy brown, black, little bit of a charcoal gray, a true gray and then we've got true white. You can experiment with what it's like to click around in all those points and see what colors you like to find. Whenever you select a color so let's find an orange that we like. I tend to like Corelli oranges quite a bit so let's find something there. You can tap into this palette below. Let me select a few more colors. I also really like blue-green, really light, and soft blue-greens. Whenever you select your colors, you can put them into the palette. If you forget to put them in the palette and you use a color inside your document, so let's find just a color. I'm going to make a mark in my document, but I forgot to put it in my palette it's going to show up on my color history. Color history is an updated feature in Procreate and it shows you the 10 most recent colors that you've used. That's really handy. If you find that you forgot to add something to your palette, it's going to be right there and you'll be able to then add it to your palette. Something else that you can do with your palette that's really neat, is you can drag and rearrange colors when you have a lot of them, that can be really handy and you can also hold down and you can delete swatches as well. That is a little brief overview of how to use the color disk and then I'm going to clear off my history here, which you can do as well. If we move over to the classic color picker, it is basically the same as the color disk, but it is a little bit different. I'm going to also clear out this layer so that you all can see. It's a little bit different. You've got sliders. The sliders are basically the same thing as the color disk, they just look a little bit different. The first slider is going to allow you to choose your color family and then you can go from left to right with this slider and then top to bottom with the third slider. That's basically going to give you light and dark and then this is going to give you, I think the tone of that color. Let's slide it over to yellow. We can also go inside here and then move around if we want. Then you can also tap on the top left to find true white and then if you go all the way down, you'll find true black. Then it's the same idea you just select your color and then you add it into your palette just like that. It's really easy. Like I said, I prefer to use the disk it's just slightly more intuitive, but it's totally up to you. The next tab is the Color Harmony tab and while I think this tab is really cool, I hardly ever use it, but I'll show you how to use it if you'd like to, it could definitely come in handy when you're trying to put together color palettes. You want to click on this little word up here "Analogous", and then it's going to open up a larger menu of different options to choose from. If you wanted to go with analogous colors which are right beside each other on the color wheel, then you would stay on analogous and you can move any of these around actually and it's going to allow the other two to follow along with it so that you'll always be finding analogous colors on the color wheel and then all you have to do is click into whichever color you want to select, then you can add that to your palette. You can also move to the inside, those colors are going to get closer together, outside, they're going to be farthest apart. Then you can use this slider to go to dark and light as well. If you click on complementary, they're going to always be colors that are right across from each other, let's brighten this up, on the color wheel. That can be really useful when you're putting together a color palette and you want to have colors that complement one another or that contrast in a really nice way, that's a great way to find colors that are complementary. Then you can just look around in split complementary. Honestly, I don't really know color theory that well, I know just enough to be dangerous, but I'm not an expert and I don't want to teach you anything that is not accurate. My advice to you is to just get in here and play around and have fun that's what I do, and it always works out. Let's go ahead and move on to the Color Value tab. In the Color Value tab is where you can manually input color codes to get a precise color. If you've created a color palette in Illustrator or if you are looking at color codes on some other website and you want to have that exact same match show up in Procreate, you can use the hex code or the RGB and HSB number values to type in the exact same numbers there so you can get a perfect match. That can be really handy and it also goes the other way as well. If you want to select this pink and you want to send it to Illustrator or Photoshop, you could just type in the color code into those programs and you may have an exact match. Sometimes when you transfer a document from one screen to another screen, it doesn't always translate exactly the same, the colors might show up differently if your screen is not calibrated properly, which is a very complicated concept if you're just trying to get started. Don't worry about that just worry about having the same codes show up on all your different programs and that will take care of that problem. Then lastly, we have palette and so this palette menu is where all of your palettes are going to be stored. Something new that has happened with Procreate, which is a pretty cool update is that, so let me select a palette as my default. I'm going to click on these three little dots, will select that as our default and then I'm going to click on cards and it's showing my color palette. Let me zoom back out. It's showing my color palette as this thing called the cards, which is pretty cool. It also gives each color a description. They don't always feel totally right to me. [LAUGHTER] this does not look like a light grayish orange, that does not look like orange. But you can actually give these very specific names, which is something that I like to do and we're going to talk about later on, but you can tap into any of those and then open up your keyboard and you can give them very specific names. Let's go back to the compact view. Oh, before I do that, you can also move things around, drag, and reorder them. You can really make everything look really nice and organized that way if that's something that you'd like to do. Then if we go back to compact, I wanted to just explain a little bit about how to use the palettes if you've never used them before. You click on this plus sign to create a brand new blank palette. It's automatically going to set it to default and how you know, something is set to default is it's going to have that little blue check and it just means that that's the palette that is showing up at the bottom of all of these tabs. You can also name your palettes by clicking on untitled and that'll give you the option to name them. You can also use those three dots to share a palette so you can share a pallet with another Procreate user, you can duplicate a palette, or you can delete a palette. I'm going to go ahead and delete that one. I have quite a few palettes here, I just got this new iPad, so I don't have as many palettes as I did in my old iPad, but the possibilities are limitless and you're going to have a lot of fun filling this up. That is a crash course in the color features in Procreate and now that you are refreshed, let's go ahead and move on to our next video, which is all about finding inspiration. 4. Finding Inspiration: [MUSIC] In this video, we're going to talk about finding inspiration for color palettes. This can be done online in your home, out in the world, or even inside your own mind. We're going to start with the easiest way to source color inspiration, which would be photographs, and specifically photographs that you can easily find online on royalty-free websites. My favorite source for royalty-free images is Unsplash. They have a really wide variety of photos that are really unique. There's a lot of opportunity for color palettes. You can also create an account on Unsplash and start a saved folder of images that are inspiring to you, so you always have some inspiration to pull from. You can also use Pinterest. It's a really great place to find inspiration, but you have to make sure that the images that you're gathering inspiration from are royalty-free. If they're not, that you are really truly just using them as inspiration and you're not pulling directly from those photos, which I'm going to show you how to do in just a minute. While finding photos online is definitely the easiest way to find inspiration, I've used it many times. There's nothing wrong with doing it this way. It's really my least utilized way to source inspiration. I really prefer to seek out my own inspiration by being out in the world or out in nature. Let's talk about those ways because they're a lot more fun. You're like me. You've got your phone with you everywhere you go, which is great because it means you can capture inspiration anywhere. When I say anywhere, I mean it. I have taken pictures of parking lots at sunset of retro wallpaper in an old bathroom. Quilts that my grandmother made. Vegetables from the farmers market or even the thread display at the fabric store, the zippers, or different types of fabric at the fabric store. You just never know what you might encounter out in your everyday life when you least expect it. Keep your eyes open and always be noticing color. I keep an album on my phone that's dedicated to photos that spark some color inspiration for me. One of my secret weapons for creating color palettes is to look in the past. For me personally, the color palettes of the '50s and '60s, and '70s, they are some of my favorite. They are inviting and they are comforting and oftentimes they're really unique. I really found myself in this late inspired by vintage and retro color palettes. I like to take trips to the flea market or the antique mall and I'll just take photos of anything I see that catches my eye. I also find a lot of inspiration from old photographs where the colors are really muted and soft, as well as old quilts. You're going to see that in this class. Vintage textiles are some of my favorite ways to gather color inspiration, but my most favorite and most used way to create color palettes is by using something tactile, holding something in my hands. It just helps me spark inspiration so much and that's where my secret weapon comes in. I love using paint chips. They really are my secret weapon. You can find them for free at your local hardware store or anywhere where paint is sold. I am a frequenter at the hardware store because we always have a home project. I'm always grabbing a few each time I go and I'm just slowly adding to my collection. I bring them home. I cut them apart because usually, they come in a strip where you've got several colors on a strip together. I just separate and organize them and store them in a little box so that I can easily pull them out whenever I need to. It is so easy. Why are like using something that's tactile is I feel like seeing and holding the color chips in my hands allows me to create really balanced pallets, which we're going to talk about. Also, the possibilities are just endless. When using paint chips, you can try to recreate palettes that you find in your gathered inspiration photos, or you can use your own made-up themes to spark a palette idea. When I think about themes, it really helps me come up with pallets from the top of my head, which guarantees that I'm not intentionally copying what another person has done. You could start by being really broad with your themes, like you could do summer or autumn, Christmas or beech, forest, canyon, etc. Or you can get more narrow and you could create themes like muted summer, which I have done. Let's go ahead and move these out of the way. This is my muted summer palette. We've got some greens and some gold, a bright yellow, we've got a really pretty soft blue, some soft peach, a little bit of a purply pink. Then we've got a couple of bright colors in here as well. But I've hidden them so you can see less of them because we want some contrast. We don't want everything to be the exact same tone because our color palette is going to look flat. We're going to talk about that soon. But when I'm using these paint chips, it also allows me to think about how colors are going to be distributed. In a muted palette, I definitely want to have contrast with some brighter colors, but I don't want them to take over my palette so I can know that I want to use less of this purple and pink. Then maybe I will allow that yellow to take over more because it is a softer color and it's not so bold and bright. This would be one idea for how I would use paint chips. I would let the ones that I want to highlight the most take over the palette. Then I'll show less of those bright colors or the colors that I don't really want to use as much, but I still want to have them in order to have balance. I also went ahead and pulled this canyon at sunrise palette, which is really pretty. I did a retro Christmas which is one of my all-time favorite palettes to work on. This is a beachy palette, and then this is a palette that represents a cabin in the woods, autumn type of palette. Now that you know the various ways to gather inspiration, let's go ahead and move on to our next video, which is how to transfer our palette ideas to procreate. 5. Creating Palettes in Procreate: [MUSIC] In this video, I'm going to show you the really simple process for transferring inspiration photos, or real-life pallets into Procreate. Let's go ahead and start by talking about photos first. First thing you want to do is make sure that the photo you're going to use is in your Camera Roll on your iPad. My iPad syncs to my iPhone, so all of the photos from my iPhone are automatically inside my camera roll here on my iPad already. You can also air drop a photo and have it open inside of Procreate. I'm going to show you the quickest way that Procreate allows you to create a palette from a photo. It's like a cheat, and I don't really use it because I prefer to use my own eye. But if we go to our Palette menu, so on our Palette menu, we're going to click the plus sign. Then we're going to select "New From Photos." I'm going to click on "New From Photos" and then I'm going to go to my album, see all my cat photos that I have. I'm going to click on "Color" and then I'm going to select the photo that I want to use, which for me is this photo of my grandmother's quilt. Just tapping on that, it says palette from image because it's pulled colors from that image. Let's go ahead and go into our palette. I'm going to zoom in so you can see what this looks like up close. I will insert a photo of my grandmother's quilt side-by-side so that you can see that the palate that it naturally pulls doesn't really represent what my eye is picking up from this photo and why I was initially drawn to this photo. I was drawn to this photo because of this soft colors and I don't see any of that beautiful yellow that I wanted to pull from that photo inside this palette. Sometimes it is hit or miss and it's really miss on this photo. I prefer to pick manually to pull colors from the photos using my own eye and not to rely on Procreate to pick my palette for me. Let's go ahead and I'll show you how to manually pick colors from a photo. I'm going to delete this palette. Just click those three dots and then click "Delete". I'm going to open up that photo inside the document by going to the Wrench icon. We're going to insert a photo and then go to my album for my color. Then we're going to click on that quilt photo. It's now inserted inside our document. I'm going to open up my color disk and I've got a blank palette selected for default, which is perfect. I'm going to use the Color Picker option or the Eyedropper tool to manually pull colors from this photo. I like to start just the top corner, and I'm going to start pulling colors that I see with my own eye, and I'm not going to limit myself at all. I want to pull as many as possible and then narrow down later. Using my color picker, I really want to capture this yellow. I'm going to go to just move it around until I find a yellow that looks like what I want. There we go. I use a yellow that I want. Then I'm also going to gather a couple more shades. We've got where the shadow is. It's a really rich golden brown, so I want to capture that as well. Then let's see if I can capture a really light soft yellow right there. Then definitely got to get this blue that's represented. What I'm focusing on is there's colors that my eye is picking up on from the photo. Those are the colors that I want to focus on capturing from the palate. If your eye is drawn to blues, red, soft pink, yellow, this creamy white background of the quilt, those are the colors that I'm going to focus on getting and I'm not going to worry so much about trying to represent every single color that's inside the quilt. I'm going to go ahead and speed this up and I'm going to fill up this blank palette with colors from this photo. [MUSIC] One thing that I also want to make sure I have represented in my palette is a neutral white and then a neutral dark of some sort. That's also something that I want to focus on no matter what photo I'm looking at, I want to try to find some neutral white and a neutral dark. That was really easy in this palette because we have this really pretty creamy white of the quilt base. Then we also have some dark navies and some blues. Then I can also pick out some really neutral darks from the shadows of the quilt. No matter what photo you are looking at, that's also a good idea to try and seek out some neutral colors as well. We're going to talk about that a lot more in the next video when we talk about creating a balanced palette. I'm also going to narrow down this palette of colors that I have to create something that's really pretty imbalanced. No matter what photo you have, you can use the same process. You can also take photos of your paint chip pallets or any palettes that you have in real life. I also wanted to show you this. It's really cool. I ordered some swatches for furniture in the mail, and I just got them in as I'm filming this class. Look how beautiful this palette of colors is. What I would do is I would snap a photo on my iPhone or on my iPad of this palette. Then I would use the same method to pick out the colors and create a mini palette with this, and I might add to it as well. Color inspiration can truly be found anywhere today. It was found in my mailbox. Let's go ahead and move on to the next video and we'll talk about creating balanced palettes. 6. Creating a Balanced Palette: [MUSIC] Let's talk about what makes a balanced color palette. A good way to frame this would be to share some dos and don'ts, and these are just some quick rules to follow that will make pallet creation easier for you. They are not absolutes, they are not universal laws, they're just my little rules of thumb. If you find that you don't agree with one or you have a better way of doing it that is totally fine. Color and what looks good to the eye can be subjective, and then goal here is that you will have some things to take with you as you move forward and you'll feel more confident in trusting your own eye when creating a palette. The first do of pallets is contrast. It is important to have contrast, this means have lights and darks. If your palate consists of only colors that are in the same tone whether that's all lights, all darks then your palate is going to look flat and you want your palette to look alive, so having a mix of lights and darks is going to achieve that. The next do of palettes is to include an off-white and an off-black. The biggest mistake that I made over and over again early on in creating color palettes was to have a really bright pure white and a really dark pure black. The problem with that is these colors are rarely found for us in nature, and they're almost always only pure black and pure white when we are viewing them on a screen. If you put these colors in with a really natural organic palate, they are probably going to look out of place and they're going to take away from that natural lifelike feel that you want your palette to have. It's a good rule of thumb to choose an off-white or an off-black, and these off colors can lean warm, or cool, or muddy, or neutral, or really whatever you want them to be to fit in with your palette as a whole. You also might not need to have a white or black at all if you're using a small or a limited palette, and there are many cases in which pure white or pure black look really good in a design. You will once again know whether this looks right in your palette or it looks like it doesn't belong, so use your eye to make this call. Another do of a balanced palate is to please do use several shades of the same color. It's okay to have several oranges, or blues, or greens in different shades to fill up your palette. I will often have at least two of the same color family, but sometimes three or four colors of the same color family in a palette consisting of anywhere from 10-20 colors. A lot of my design work is focused on surface pattern design and I usually do need to have as many as 18 colors available to use in my palettes, so in that case I would need multiples of some colors. What I like to try to do is get shades that are different in tone or temperature, so let's think about greens for example. I might have a true grass green, but I might also pair that with a muted mossy green as well as a dark-rich green. Making sure that your greens or blues reds are different enough from one another ensures that your palate is going to be clear and it's not going to be confusing to the eye. The finale do I have for this is to put in practice and use your intuition. I don't know color theory nearly as well as I should for an artist and designer, but I still feel like I have a good grasp on color. I've had years of practice in putting together color palettes, and in all those years I've always relied on my own eye to know whether a palette was balanced or not or whether it was missing something. Sometimes it takes using that palette in a piece of artwork or in a pattern to know whether it really works, but I promise you have the right stuff, you will know. Trust your instincts, put in some practice, and you'll become more confident with color in no time. Now that we know the dos and don'ts of creating a balanced palette, let's go ahead and work on narrowing down that color palette that I created previously using my grandmother's quilt as inspiration. We're going to take all the things that we just talked about into account when working on this color palette. I'm going to go ahead and start a new layer and just hide the layer with the photo. The first thing that I noticed is that I've got a couple of colors that are really similar to one another. I've got several oranges that look the same, so I'm going to drag those around and put them side-by-side. Then I can see what needs to change, and then this pink also looks really close to these colors as well. What we can do is we can put them literally right next to each other on our screen and you can almost not tell the difference. If I really liked one of these colors; so for instance I really like this peachy coraly orange color. I might change this orange to be a lighter version, but it looks like I already have a lighter version there. Let's see how that one looks next to this one. That's more contrast, but still they're pretty close to each other. I think what I'm going to do, is I'm going to eliminate this darker orange just by holding down and click "Delete", and then I'm going to lighten up this orange just a little bit more so that we have some contrast. Let's clear this out and then we can color with that colourly color and then with that light orange right beside it. That looks like there's enough difference between those two that it's not going to be super confusing, but I still think I could take it even a little bit lighter. All I'm doing is just moving it to the left a little bit and I think I like that a lot better. We will include that color in our palette and we're going to delete this orange color. Now I want to look at these two reds. They're basically exactly the same, so I'm just going to pick one to delete and we won't worry about that one. There's a pink here that's really close to this coraly orange. I'm going to lighten up this pink by selecting it, and then taking it up and to the left a little bit. That's what that's going to look like. Next to this orangey color, there's definitely enough contrast there for me not to worry about that. Then we've got some blues that are pretty close to one another, but I think they are actually different enough. Let's just make sure. Just a great way as you can see to test out your palette is just to put colors right beside each other and just make sure that they are not super close. I've got these two really neutrally white colors and one leans a little bit more of a pink. I don't know if that's translating on-screen and then one is really a very light white. They look the same on the camera but they are different on my screen, so I'm going to take this one that leans pink and I'm just going to have it lean a little bit more pink. Let me drag that down a little bit. I think that looks good. Let's make sure we tap into our palette to catch that one and then we can delete the one that we're not going to be using. I'm also going to reorder these now that I'm eliminating some colors just so I can see what we've got. Let me do that real quick. [MUSIC] This is what my palette is looking like. If I put this up side-by-side with my quilt photo, I like this a lot better as a representative of the colors that I was drawn to in this photo in the first place. I'm making sure as I complete this palette that I've got some contrast, so I've got some really bright bold colors. I've got this orange; this orangey coral which is really bright. I've also got this golden yellow which is very bright, then I've got some dark grounding colors as well. I've got a brown and then I've got this dark navy, and then I've also got a really neutral white, and then I've got a really soft yellow as well as a soft pink. Those can also serve as neutrals as well. I'm very happy with how this ended up. The final touch is going to give it a name, so I'm going to name it after my grandmother since it's her quilt. One thing that I notice is that I don't have really a green, but really there wasn't that much of green in this photo. It's also okay if you are missing some colors in your palette, it's not that important to always have every single color family represented. If I start to create some pattern design or another illustration using this palette and I feel like I'm really missing some greens, then I could go ahead and add some green in there and try to find a shade that fits with the feel of this palette. That completes this video on the dos and don'ts of creating a balanced palette. Let's go ahead and move on. 7. Palette 1: Found in Nature: [MUSIC] This first palette that we're going to create together is something found in nature. I want you to take a walk outside or go somewhere and keep your eyes open, and snap a photo, does not have to be a good photo. Don't apply a filter to it. Just snap a photo of something that sparks that color inspiration for you, and that's what we're going to use together for this. Remember, this is the first of four palettes that we're going to create together. I want you to create your own palette based on your own photo and you can share it as part of your class project. You can share all the palettes that you do or just one, it really doesn't matter. But the point is that we're going to start putting this into practice. I'm going to go to the wrench icon in a fresh document, I'm going to insert a photo, go to my album, and then I'm going to select this photo down here. This is not a fancy photo at all. I just snapped a photo because I was so drawn to the colors that I was seeing here on a walk. I'm going to move that over to the side, and then open up my color menu and I've got a fresh blank palette to choose from. Let's go ahead and grab the color picker. I'm going to start moving around and grabbing colors. Actually for this one, I might try to just start in ROYGBIV order so that I can keep it organized. You don't have to do that. But it might be easier for me to do it that way, so I'm going to search out for any reds that I see, and I actually do see a few up here. There are more reddish pinks but it still work. [MUSIC] I found a lot of really beautiful colors in this photo and I'm really excited because I think this palette for me is going to be full of greens and pinks. That's what I'm going to focus on, and then a couple of those really pretty orangey-yellow, golden colors that are in the leaves, so I'm already thinking that I want my palette to be just like chock-full of pinks and a gold and then lots of really pretty greens, and I'm thinking about how I can apply this palette to an illustration, so I would love to recreate some flowers similar to this and to do a really pretty floral pattern, perhaps, using this color palette, which I might just do, and I'll show you if I happen to do that. But I want to go through the process now of narrowing down some of these colors. I'm going to start a new layer. I'm going to use that same process that I talked about earlier to start narrowing colors down. [MUSIC] I'm really happy with this palette. I'm not exactly sure about where this bright orange fits in, it just doesn't really feel like it's really belonging there. For now, I am going to delete it. Just use my instinct. I have several colors that can serve as a golden yellow if I need them to, and I have two that are really close together. But I think I'm going to have to get in and start using this palette on a design to really narrow down between the two, so I will post a finished palette for you to see, so this is Palette Number 1 found in nature. 8. Palette 2: Inside Your Home: [MUSIC] Palette number 2, I want you to find inspiration inside your home. So I'm going to go ahead and pick out a photo that I have of the inside of our home. Let me insert photo, go to my album, and I am going to pick out this picture of my kitchen that I have not yet created a palette from. For some reason I just really liked the colors that were happening in this palette. Palette number 2 is going to be something found in your home. I have a picture that I have taken of my kitchen just on a particularly bright day. My kitchen doesn't get a lot of natural light. So when the sun is really shining inside of my kitchen, I always take notice of it. I just really liked the colors that were going on inside this photo and I've yet to make a palette from it. Right away I know that I have a lot of pretty greens and neutral colors to pick from. For me this is going to be a neutral palette, I can already feel it. I am going to slide this over here and then I've got a fresh pallet to get started with. I'm going to clear my history, and then we're going to go ahead and get started on this one as well. [MUSIC] So as I'm working on my palette, I know that my cabinets are this really pretty color green. I know exactly the shade of green that they are, but I'm not able to really pick up that green in this photo. When I actually use the eyedropper tool on this photo, it's green, but it's like a brown top with a green undertone. It is not at all what I really want. I am going to manually select a green that I know even when we open it up, it's over here in the orange and our eyes are reading green. At least mine are. They might not be through the screen, but I know that I can manually select the color green in my cabinets that are in my kitchen, and I'm going to go ahead and do that. Let's see if we can get really close to the screen. They are a neutral color, and I do have a little bit of yellow in them. That looks about right, right there. That is actually closer to the color that the cabinets are in real life. Maybe a little bit muddier and lighter. I'm going to manually select that color, and then I'm going to give it a little partner. Something that I like to do is, if you want to focus on a certain color family and you're only picking up one shade that you really like in your photo, you can give it what I call partners, which is you select that color. I'm going to go back and select that color and then I'm just going to move it, hold onto it and just move it down into the right. I'm just giving it a darker version of that color. This is what they would look like together and they play really nicely together. They look really good. Then if you wanted to give that darker one a partner, you would just move it down even a little bit more, and then now we can see how beautifully those all go together. If you wanted to create a monochrome palette where all the colors really played nicely with each other. That's kind of how you could do it, but I actually don't want a dark green, so we're going to delete that. I am going to narrow this palette down as well, and I will show you the finished result. [MUSIC] 9. Palette 3: Unexpected: [MUSIC] This next color palette that we're going to create together is something unexpected. You don't have to think too hard about this, it can just be something unexpected. You weren't really taking the photo for the purpose of color, but then when you take a second look at the color, you see how beautiful it is, or it can be color inspiration found in a really unexpected place. I am going to go with the first option for me. I snap a lot of photos of my cats, like a lot. I have three cats and they are the cutest cats in the world and they're always doing something cute because that's what our pets do. When I was creating my color album, I inserted this photo of my cat lying in the sun, not an unusual thing for a cat to do. But I look back on this photo and I just see so much color inspiration in this photo. This is my cat and she's lying on a rug in our living room and the sunlight was just washing over her, and she just looks so blissful and happy, and I am so inspired by all the colors that I see in this photo. That's not originally why I snapped this photo. That's what I'm going to use for this prompt. Let's move her over to the side. Then I've got a fresh palette to start with. I'm going to clear my history, and then let's get started. It is going to be really [LAUGHTER] hard to narrow those one down because I can already tell that there are so many pretty colors. I mean, where do you even start? Sometimes it's really hard to find exactly what you're looking for, so you need to really get up close so you can select the exact pixel that you want to capture, and I still didn't get it. There we go. While we're here, I know that my rug has some greens in it. They're really hard to find, but once again, I know that just because I look at it every single day and I've studied this rug so much that I know there are green undertones in it, so I'm going to try to find those. I'm specifically going to set out for them, but if I can't find them that I might manually select the green. It looks like there's some of them. They are going to be a little bit hard to find, so we might have to find them ourself, which is not a problem. Gosh, there's just so many colors, I'm just getting distracted by all the possibilities. I'm not finding any greens in this palette, and I'm also not going to find hardly any blue at all in this palette, and that's okay. If you feel like your palette is leaning too much in one direction, it's totally fine to add some blues, add some greens. I'm going to add some blues, I think for this palette to ground it a little bit further, it's leaning a little bit too earthy, and I know grounding it sounds like I want to make it even more earthy, but I actually just want to balance it out and ground it so it's not too far in one direction. What am I do is select one of the colors that's leaning a little bit more green, and then even though it says that it's orange, [LAUGHTER] it's not, it leans a little bit green. I'm going to slide around to the blues. If I just hover around in the blue area, even in the green, and to the blue area, I can just leave everything where it is and then I can select some blues that will be along the same tone as the colors that I have been selecting. Then I can move it around a little bit further. I really tend till I really soft, muddy blue colors, those are sort favorites. I always hang out over in the left side when it comes to blues. I also tend to do that a lot with green and a lot with purple. For some reason, that's what I like. I'm going to hang out over there and then select a couple of these colors, and then I might go over to the purples as well. I've got a couple of wildcard colors down there that I can use as I narrow down my palette and then create a palette that looks really nice and balanced. [MUSIC] I'm going to go ahead and do that, and then I will show you the final result. 10. Palette 4: Freestyle: [MUSIC] The final prompt that we're going to do together for creating a palette is what I'm calling freestyle. So I've gathered up some inspiration from around my studio, I'm going to be using my paint chips, but you can really use anything you want, anything that's inspiring you that you find in nature, in your home, at a store can be a photograph, it can be anything. I'm going to move this out of the way while we do that. I'm going to use these that I showed you earlier, and then I've also got a little painting here. This is a print of an original watercolor that an artist in my hometown did and I have that there really like some of the blues and the pinks that are in this. Then I'm also going to take some of my paint chips and they are no longer nice and neat, but I think we can figure it out. Let's go ahead and start with a brown and then I'm really liking this green, it's similar to the background of this, which is what I wanted. Actually, that pink is really close as well, so let's start with these three. [NOISE] I'm going to switch out this. This is more of a yellow gold and this is more of an ocher, like a really rich brownish gold with some green undertones. So let's start with these three. I like that I'm seeing some blue here, like a more true blue. So let's try to pick something out of our paint chips that represents that color. Something that I'm doing is I'm holding up colors to see how each color reacts with the other colors around it and that is really, really helpful. This color plays really nicely with each of these. So there's enough contrast between these. I'm loving the contrast between this and then that's really pretty as well. Then I've picked out this, it's called hearts of palm and it's a really light green color that's muted and I really like that. So I think for sure that I want to use that coral. We definitely want to make sure that we have some contrast. So we have dark of this color, but we might want to have a dark of another color. I like that. I think I might like that. I think I would like to add a purple in here as well, something that's not going to interrupt anything else. Let's see if we can start out with that. Also, I've got some really pretty golden yellows that I feel could work really well too. So I'm going to start with these colors. This is pretty normal for my process, I'll just start gathering up some colors and I really don't need that many to get started. It's just a good starting place for me right now and I'm going to snap a photo on my iPad and then we're going to bring this photo into Procreate and we're going to start pulling some colors and then that way we can add more, we can take away, we can refine, we can tweak, we can do all that. So I'm going to just quickly snap a photo. This is a great starting point. I'm really excited about these, I've got a fresh color palette, and let's start picking out our colors. What's going to be great about this is since this is velvet, there's a lot of variation going on here. So we've got the light greens and then as we move we can just see that the color changes, so that's going to be really great to play with and make sure to grab and least a light and a dark. I'm just going to be very careful, so I can make sure to select ones that have enough contrast in them. Let's move on to our pinks. I'm going to grab a light from the velvet as well as a dark from the velvet too. Then I know what color I want from this and it is that just true rich brown gold color that's a little bit more brown than what I want, so we are going to manually just move it up a little bit and I'm going to take it to the right, which means it's going to be a little bit richer of color, so we're just going to delete that. Swatch and move that one over and then I might do it again, give it a partner, bring it up into the right and then just tap beside it because that's going to be a nice color that's going to match with that really well. Then let's grab just yellows, pretty easy to grab. We've got our colors here. We have 11, so I'd like to make it an even 12. Let's add another color. I feel like we could add, say we have three greens, we have three yellows, we've got to mobs, we have one purple, so we could add a dustier darker purple. Let's try that and then we can always tweak it if we don't like how that one looks. [MUSIC] 11. Share your work: [MUSIC] In this video, I want to talk about some creative ways to share your palettes. Once you've come up with your color palettes, there are a lot of different really creative and unique ways that you could showcase the colors that you come up with. I'm going to share a couple of ways that I have shared my color palettes with my Instagram community in the past. The first of which is to draw some circles or some creative little brushstrokes or something on your document and then to fill each of those with the colors from your palette. You can leave it just like that, or you could take it an extra step and use the text feature in Procreate to give each of your colors a name. I especially like to do this when I'm thinking seasonally or I've created a palette from a theme. Every month on Instagram, I create a color palette for that month and I'm using names that go with things that happened in my life or things that are happening in the season or that time of year, when I'm coming up with the names and people always really seem to like it and I'll ask, what's your favorite name or what's your favorite color and they always use the names are in the palette, so that's a pretty fun way. Another way to share your palate would be to create a piece of artwork and then to showcase the colors in your palette using little circles or squares just right beside that artwork, so that people can see the inspiration that you started with when you sat down to create. But I wanted to show you a way that you can showcase the photographs that you used for your inspiration, as well as the color swatches that you came up with right here inside of Procreate using some really cool little shortcuts. The first thing you want to do is decide which photo you want to use and you'll want to make sure that you have that color palette selected. I'm going to go down to my color palette and I'm going to set that as my default. Then I want to insert that quilt photo into this document. We're going to go to the Insert a photo, go to albums, and then grab that quilt photo. It's taking up a lot of this space right now so I'm just going to slide it over until I have a decent amount of space. You could do it one side or the other. You could even do a top or a bottom. If you wanted to have all of your swatches down here below, that's also an option as well. I'm going to create a brand new layer and that's where all of the swatches from my palette are going to go. I'd like them to be in rectangles that are starting, touching almost my picture and then coming all the way to the end. You could just use the Quick Shapes tool to draw in a rectangle. That would work totally fine, but I like to get really precise and I'm going to grab this ribbon selection tool. Then I'm going to select rectangle, and that's going to allow me to draw a rectangle really easily. I'm just going to start at the top corner and then pull down and create a rectangle, and it doesn't really matter what size it is, we're just getting that rectangle created. You're still in this selection mode right now. I want you to go ahead and fill it with the first color in your palette. Let me go to disk. Mine is a really light color, so you're probably not going to be able to see it very well on screen, but I'm just grabbing it and dropping it. Now I'm going to tap that and I'm going to be deselected from that selection mode. Now I have my rectangle just like that and all I have to do now is just duplicate and I'm going to move that one down, then fill it with my next color. I want to count how many colors I have. I have 16 colors and I have two of these rectangles that I don't think I'm going to be able to get 16 in here, but let's go ahead and try. You can play around with this. You might have less colors, you might have more. If you need to resize. What we're going to do is I'm just pinch those two together. Let me show you that again. Got my layers open and I'm going to pinch to combine the top rectangles that I've created. I'm going to duplicate those and we're going to try to get 16 rectangles evenly spaced in here and if you have magnetics on, that's going to be really easy. I'm going to pinch again. I'm going to have a total of eight rectangles. This is just a workaround in Procreate. This would be so much easier in a program like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. But I'm just trying to show you way you don't have to use any other program but Procreate. Now I've got eight rectangles. I need to make it 16, so I'm going to pinch those eight together. Then I'll be able to size these up. I'm going to select free form, and that's going to allow me to just grab the bottom. That looks like it's about halfway. Let's duplicate again and now we've got 16 rectangles, pinch those to combine those. I know this is a lot of steps, but you got to get creative inside of Procreate. I'm going to extend these down to the bottom. Just make sure that you have free form selected. Now we've got 16 strips that we can fill with color. I'm going to continue filling these up. Not going to include one. I'll show you how we fix that in just a minute. If you miss count or you've got one too many or one too few, you can use the same method of grabbing it and making sure you've got free form on. If you're missing one, you can just slide up until you've got room for another one and then duplicate a rectangle from this grouping and then move it down. In my case, I've got one-to-many because I omitted a color as I was filling up my swatches. I'm just going to grab this and move it down. Just like that. Now I can deselect it and it's going to look totally even and just for spacing reasons, I'm going to tap to get this where I want it to be. I've got the same amount of white space on all sides. If you didn't know that little trick in Procreate, if you're trying to get something positioned really precisely, you can tap in the direction that you want it to go and it will move it pixel by pixel, which is really great for precise placement. I'm going to tap a few times top. Then I've got my quilt color palette inspiration ready to share with the world. You could also add your name somewhere on here if you want to share this and then make sure that no one is able to copy it. What I would do is I would add my logo in another program. You could also just add it into a new layer inside of Procreate. Then when you're ready to share, you just want to go to the wrench icon click Share, and then you're going to save it as a JPEG and you can send it to your phone, you can send it to your computer or wherever you post to Instagram. I can't wait to see your color palettes. I am really excited to see what you created and don't worry if this tutorial was a little bit overwhelming. Like I said, I just want you to be able to not have to leave for another program in order to put this together. Watch that video as many times as you need in order to get the hang of it and you will be ready to share your palate with the world. I can't wait to see it.