Color Crazy! Design Spoonflower Pattern Palettes in Adobe + Procreate

1. Color Crazy! Design Spoonflower Pattern Palettes in Adobe + Procreate: Hi there. My name is are Cantwell, and I'm an illustrator, surface designer, and educator. I'm also a very successful spoonflower artist. Are you an artist who sells or wants to sell their patterns on spoonflower? Did you know that print on demand companies like Spoonflower, where you can sell your own art on fabric, wallpaper and home decor items promote products based on color. That's because thousands of spoonflower customers shop based on color. It's great to call out specific colors like pink, yellow or blue in your spoonflower products? But if you want to really stand out, did you know you can design using exact color matches to specific paint colors? Even the color of the year. With this class, I'm giving you all the paint color digital swatch files from the big three paint manufacturers, Benjamin Moore, Sherwin Williams, and Bear. Including the color of the year and accompanying color palettes. Imagine you're redecorating your house, and you want to match your Benjamin Moore October missed paint trim to your wallpaper. Or maybe you want to buy throw pillows that perfectly match your October missed walls. And this extends beyond personal projects. There are thousands of interior designers, home decor companies, small manufacturers, and DI wires shopping spoonflower every day for fabric, wallpaper and home accent products that match specific paint colors. One of the best ways to attract these potential customers to your spoon flower shop is to confidently promise that your patterns use exact color matches to paint colors from major manufacturers. You can also ensure your spoonflower products are up to date because these paint companies release colors of the year, which are on trend and in demand. In this class, I'm going to teach you how to install and use color swatches from major paint manufacturers in your art. I'll show you how to use these colors to create new art or recolor your existing art in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, Illustrator for the iPad and in Procreate. And all of the tips and tricks I'll show you in class can also be applied to illustrations or digital paintings as well. They're not just for patterns. This is an excellent class to take as a companion to my popular spoonflower success secrets class. You'll learn how to level up your spoon flower shop by using colors that are guaranteed to match paints your potential customers are already buying. You don't have to be an Adobe or a procreate power user to take this class. All you need is a basic working knowledge of the software. So are you ready to get started? Let's do this. 2. Install Swatch Libraries in Adobe Illustrator: With this class, I'm giving you a free zip file that contains all the latest as of the filming of this class, paint software swatches available from what I consider the big three. Benjamin Moore, Sherwin Williams, and Bar. Benjamin Moore even has physical fan decks that you can purchase on their website or in store. In this class, I'm going to demonstrate how to use the color swatches from Benjamin Moore. I'm not in any way affiliated with that company. It's just my favorite paint. It's actually what I use in my own home. I also love Benjamin Moore's wide variety of color choices. I have several of their physical fan Dex, and I love using these to choose colors in person and then being able to apply those exact same swatches to my digital art. Okay, so here's how to access the class freebies. Go to are cantwell.com slash Color Crazy. That's all one word. This will take you to my website. Then you will see a form where you will enter your first name and your e mail address. This will add you to my e mail list, which means you will get my email newsletters and you can unsubscribe at any time. Once you hit the unlock button, it will take you automatically to a Google Drive zip file that contains all of these color swatch files. Then you can download the zip file directly from here onto your computer. All right. So let's get started with installing the swatches that I gave you for free with this class. It's really easy, and now I'm going to show you how to do that. Let's start with Adobe Illustrator. I am actually in Adobe Illustrator right now. You can just open Illustrator and just create any new document. It doesn't matter. We're not going to be really doing anything with the document yet. What we're going to be messing with here is the swatches panel. With this class, I gave you a zip file, which you have probably downloaded onto your computer by now. Make sure you put it somewhere. You can easily find it. In this zip file, we're going to find all of the swatches for the class. So I have mine saved on my desktop, and I'm just going to double click on it to unpack it. It's really easy. So once you do that, then you will have a folder. It's going to be called color crazy swatches. And inside this folder, I've actually put three folders, three subfolders. So these are there, I guess, the big three paint manufacturers that are out there. So Benjamin Moore and Sherwin Williams are kind of standalone paint companies. Benjamin Moore is really my preferred company, but Sherwin Williams is really good too. But Bar, I believe is the house brand of, I think I want to say Home Depot, but maybe not. But they are a really major player. Actually, I just saw an advertisement for them on YouTube the other day. So in my opinion, these are the big three. But if you have another paint company that you really like working with, chances are they may also offer some swatches that you can use for your software. And if they don't, you can always ask them. You know, These paint companies, they really want us to use these swatches. Because if we design our art using their colors, and then we help promote their, you know, colors in our art, like on spoon flower, for instance. We're also encouraging customers to buy their paint. So it's really a mutually beneficial relationship. And it's also really cool because you have a built in audience. If you have somebody who really wants to paint their house with Benjamin Moore, you know, October Mist, or whatever, how cool is it going to be that you can promise that you can offer a pattern that match with, you know, colors in it, that exactly match that specific Benjamin More color. So anyway, I could go on and on about the benefits of this, but I won't. So anyway, we've got our folders open here, and I'm going to go ahead and install Benjamin Moore. I'm going to install one of these color palette files. Bar has a set of blues, cool, neutrals, greens, oranges, purples, et cetera. These are the same paint colors that Bar sells in Home Depot stores. You can visit Home Depot stores in person and get free paint sample swatches and then match them to the color libraries in these files I'm giving you. I found this cool color swatch at Home Depot, and it is called Solar Energy, and the number is P 300105. All I had to do was open the Bare yellows color library. There it is. There's the number and the name. And then I can just apply that directly to my digital file here. And it's that easy. Perfect match. So let's install the classic colors from Benjamin Moore. And this is what I'm about to show you is going to behave the exact same way for all of these files, all of the Benjamin Moore, all of the Sherwin Williams, and all of the Bar. The reason is because they are all the same file type. If you look at the extension here, it says ASE. That is the universal file type for color swatches for the Adobe software. I think it stands for Adobe swatch Exchange. Let's install the classic colors, and you can repeat this process for each of these. Now, you do have to do this process that I'm about to do for the classics. You have to do that for each of these sets. I know it might get a little tedious, but you know, it's definitely worth doing. Especially if you go and get a fan deck, there is a fan deck called classic Colors, you can physically get that deck. It's hundreds of colors. And then, you know, if that's the one you're looking at in front of you and you want to just proof these colors in person, then you don't have to install all these if you don't want to because everything you need from the classic Colors fan deck is going to be right there. But let's install this. So now that I have my zip file unpacked, let me show you how to import just this one into Illustrator, and then you can do that repeatedly. So if you are in Adobe Illustrator, you should have your swatches panel open, by default. But if you don't, you can just go up to Window, and then you go down to swatches. So it's not under color, that's different. But if you go to window and you drop down to where it says swatches, if you just click on that, if there is not a check mark next to it, the reason mine has a checkmark is because mine's open right here. But if it doesn't, just click on that and it'll show it. See how I did that and it went away. It's okay. I'm going to bring it right back. I'm going to go to Window swatches and there it is. Okay. So this is how you actually would load any color palette into your illustrator document. You can create your own color palettes as well, obviously, but we're going to use the Benjamin More one. So once you're in your swatches palette over here on the right hand side to the right of the word swatches, you will see a little three line menu. I think that's called a hamburger menu. It's like three dashes. It's kind of small, but it's at the top, just on the same row as swatches. Click on that. And then when you click on that, you're going to get a little flyout menu. And if you go all the way down almost to the bottom, you will see where it says, Open Swatch Library. Now, I have a ton of swatches that are already in my library, and then you will probably also have a ton that come default with Illustrator. There's a whole section of art history, corporate, earth tone, et cetera. I'm not really concerned about those. What I want to show you how to do is load this new library. So if you go to the very bottom here where it says other library, all you have to do is click on that, and now it's going to pull up a little pop up. And now, it's actually asking, where do you want to pull this library from on your computer? So here's where we're going to go back to that folder, which was the Benjamin Moore folder from our zip file once we unpacked it. I remember now it was on my desktop, and there it is. It's under color crazy swatches and it's under Benjamin Moore. And I'm just going to drag this folder out a little so I can read everything this little border here. And we want to load the classic colors. So all you have to do is just click once on that, and it's actually telling you, you know, it's enabling the swatch files. Leave that alone. You don't need to change that. And then just click on open. So as you can see, our Benjamin Moore library did not actually get added by default, like, automatically to our swatches panel here. But it did pull it up in this little convenient pop up window. I'm going to expand this little window and just show you the incredible selection here. And this is just one of the color libraries that is offered by Benjamin Moore. If you have the fan deck that's called classic colors, and these are the ones you want to use, then this is the one that you want to kind of play around with, especially because with a lot of these fan decks and these files, each of these individual color libraries, for instance, one of them is it's I'd have to scroll to see all of it. It's huge. It's like six scrolls. The classic color one is not as big as some of the other ones, and this can be really helpful to use. The reason is, for instance, using a smaller library like this, if you really are trying to match to a specific fan, You're going to have less of a hard time finding what you're trying to match because there's just less to choose from. But there is a lot to choose from. If you don't want this little pop out menu in your way while you're designing, you can really easily just grab it and then drag it over to the right just below your swatches panel. And then it will just embed it into your tool bar on the right hand side. And then you can just scroll. I'm just using my scroller wheel, but there's a little arrow and slider bar over here. So, you don't have to have it in the way of everything you're doing. I'll see you in the next lesson. But remember, if you want to install any of these other libraries that were included in the ZIP file, you can just repeat this process again for each of these ASC files. 3. Create Palettes in Adobe Illustrator: One thing I like to do when I'm working in Adobe Illustrator is I don't want to get confused with all these other colors here and accidentally use the wrong one. Especially if I'm recoloring stuff, it makes it simpler. If I just get rid of everything I don't want to use in this document. So the quickest and easiest way to do that is if you just single click on the first one, you don't want to click on the very first one, which is it looks like a little target. It says registration, but you want to go to the one right after that, the very first one, and then hold down the Shift key and click on the very, very last one at the same time, and then you're selecting everything in your swatch library for this document. Do that. And then just click on the trash can and just click Yes. So now we've got a blank slate. So we're not going to accidentally use the wrong color. We want to keep everything very consistent. Yeah. So let me show you now, if you wanted to pick out, let's say three colors that you wanted to use in, let's say, a pattern, and you wanted them in the Benjamin Moore classic colors library. All you have to do is you can go through and pick out a color. You want to pick one at a time. And you know what? I like this bright red. It's called pinata. If you just click on that, do you see what happened over here? Just by clicking on that, it actually automatically populated in my swatches folder here, so you don't have to do anything else. I like that. Now, if you're like, Oh, my gosh, you know what? I don't want to use that. I changed my mind. All you have to do is click on it and hit the trash can, but see it didn't delete it from up here. So it's not really deleted out of your library for Adobe Illustrator. It's just deleted out of this document. And that's really helpful because I like working in limited color palettes, and I just don't want to confuse things. I'm going to put it back. I'm just going to click on that, and then there I have my pinata. So if I wanted to do, let's do a red, blue and yellow. Let's do a primary color palette based on this you know, this Benjamin Moore swatch library. I'm going to find let's find a yellow first. I really love bright colors lately. So I'm going to find a nice, bright yellow. And let's see I like this one. Oh, look, it's called Bold yellow. And at any time, you know, if you're like, wait, what color is that? You can actually hover your mouse over top of the swatch, and you can either do that in the Benjamin Moore flyout library or You can hover over it here in your swatches panel. So see how it's saying 007 pinata. It's the same as it is over here. So you can remember. Now, it does not say Benjamin Moore, though. So keep that in mind. If you're worried about losing track of where this came from, you know, just keep that in mind. So let's go with that bold yellow. Where did that go? I'm hovering. There it is. 3306 bold yellow. I'm going to click on that, and there it is right here. On the right. Nice. I've got two out of three. Let's pick a blue. Yeah, this Crystal Springs is really pretty 764. I'm going to click on that. Cool. And now we've got a simple three color library saved in our swatches panel for this document. I close this Benjamin Moore swatch library, everything stays there. And every time you open this illustrator file from now on, you're going to have those three colors populated in your swatch library. Here is one thing that I like to do. Every time I am working on a file, especially if I'm going to be doing something like creating a pattern collection. I like to create a palette for each collection that I create, and I like to save and name those palettes, and then you can load them anytime. So let me show you quickly how to do this. And this works with any color swatches. So you can do this with any color you pick. It does not have to be Benjamin Moore, but I'm going to show you with these because I'm going to show you how I keep track of these and why I like using them. So first thing I want to do, is I want to take these three colors that I just chose, and I want to put them in a new folder, a new color group. So what I'm going to do is if I click single click on the one on the far left, hold down the Shift key and single click on the one on the far right. Now I've selected all three. If you go down to where the folder icon is, which is at the bottom of your little swatches panel, click on new color group, and then you're going to get a little pop up. And this is asking us what we want to name this color group, we're going to be making a color group out of these three Benjamin Moore color swatches from the classic Colors library. And I'm going to name this. Benjamin Moore, bright primaries Classic. I'm not just saying three colors or cool colors or even bright primaries. This is a definition that only I am going to see, but it's going to be really helpful in the future. If I go and open this file again several years from now, and I'm like, where did these colors come from? Are these colors that I created myself, probably not because they have these numbers and names if I hover over them. So then you're going to remember they're from the Benjamin Moore library, and you can even give yourself a little note that says Classic. So now I know they're from the classic collection. So I'm going to click. And now you see how the little folder kind of jumped down here and it has our three colors in it. So now we've got our own little custom folder that's called Benjamin Moore Bright Primaries Classic. So now we know, what kinds of colors they are. They're bright primaries, where they came from, Benjamin Moore, and where specifically they came from within Benjamin Moore. They came from the classic color library. This is so helpful. Trust me. The more art you create, the more easily it is to get confused. And, you know, you want to be able to make your work really efficient, you know, so it's just going to save you a lot of confusion in the future. I want to show you one more thing that I do with all of my color swatches. This is something that I do, no matter if they're Benjamin Moore or they're just, you know, color libraries. I created myself, and I have tons and tons of palettes. Let me show you. So remember, when we loaded these, see here where where it says swatches at the top of this little panel. If you click on the three line menu and you go down almost to the bottom? Do you see where it says Open Swatch Library? We're back there again. Now, there's a ton of stuff here. There is the Benjamin Moore. These are all the ones that I actually have loaded on my computer. And also, I believe Panton used to offer them in Adobe. I don't think they do anymore, but that's okay. I like using Benjamin Moore anyway. But if you go to the very bottom of this library here, do you see where it says user defined? These are the actual color palettes that I created. So when you first open illustrator, if you've never created your own, you know, color library, this is probably going to be blank. But look at this. Look at all these color libraries I've created over the years. So I created a palette for East Fork. When Spoon flower did a design challenge for East Fork, they gave us specific colors. I created a palette for it, so I didn't have to remember what they were. And I actually have done that with other like, I have a Panton mega Matters, Ultra steady. Here's Peach fuzz for 2024. Anyway, So this is a really useful tool to have. In fact, these are my default swatches, here's my brand colors. But I want to show you right now how to save this little library that we created for yourself so you can apply it to other illustrator documents in the future. If you click on this folder here and you select it and you can see there's our name. If you go to the menu here, which is to the right of swatches, the three line menu, click on that. And then go down to Save Swatch Library as AI. Now, there are two file formats that you can save your swatch libraries as. And the reason that you saw some of those swatch those swatch libraries that I created that had two of them. That's because I create both an AI and an ASC file. You don't have to do that. If you're going to do only one, I recommend doing ASE, but I like to use AI because Adobe Illustrator is the primary software that I use, and I just like to be redundant because I'd rather have more backups than risk losing anything in the future. So I'm going to do that first. So I'm going to click on Save Swatch Library as AI. And now, actually when you do this, you don't have to choose a folder. In fact, don't switch folders. It's actually automatically opening up your Adobe Illustrator folder for the version of Illustrator that you're using right now, and it's actually showing you where it's going to be putting this AI file, the Adobe Illustrator file. It's going into the version I'm using is 28. It's going into the English version. It's going into swatches, and then here are all my color swatches, as you can see. So if you look, see how I have Sweet pastel and I have sweet Pastel AI, Sweet Pastel ASE. Let me show you guys really quickly why you might actually want to save both an AI and an ASE file of your color libraries. So you are not probably going to be able to see this on your machine, if you're on a Mac, if you're on a PC, you can probably see it. But if you are on a Mac, the MAC tends to hide certain folders from people from users only because they don't want you to accidentally delete something that might be a really important support file for your software. So my swatches, as I'm saving these as AI and ASE Whenever I do that and it just goes into that folder by default into the software folder, this is where it is. So it's going into my Mcintosh users, my name, library, application support, Adobe, Adobe Illustrator 28, because there's multiple English swatches, and then there they all are. I actually had to do command shift period to see this folder. Now, I am not telling you to do that. In fact, I do not recommend that you do that because if you do view folders that are normally hidden on your mac, you could actually delete something that's really important even if you don't think it is. But if you do want to see those folders, you can hold down the command and the shift button at the same time on your keyboard and then type the period. But this is where these are. This is where all of them are located. So as you were seeing that huge list when I was in Illustrator, that's where these are. But the reason that you might actually want to save these, there's an AI, and there's an ASC. The reason you might actually want to save these as an AI and an AOC file is because an ASC file, if you open that in Adobe Illustrator, you will not see the swatches, they will not even show up in your swatch panel. But here's an example, if you here's Sweetsmmer, let me show you where did that go. Sweetsmmer That was one of my collection names. And it's way down here. Okay, see how I have sweetsmmer AI, and then I have sweetsmmer ASE. So I duplicated my efforts. But here's why I like doing that and why you might want to do that too. Although it can get a little cluttered. So if you actually were to open that AI file in Adobe Illustrator, you're not going to actually see anything in the document, but if you go to your swatches panel, those swatches are right there. As you can see up here, where it's asking you what you want to save this as, it's actually giving you the default name untitled one. We don't want to keep that, but then it's automatically adding the file extension.ai. So you don't have to do anything other than type the name of it here. And that's it. So I'm going to do Benjamin Moore right primaries classic. This way, now I've actually saved that same name, and I'm going to go ahead and just click on Save. You don't need to change your file format. Don't change the location because this is where it needs to go. So I'm just going to click on save. Now if you want to see it in action, now let's say we open a new Adobe Illustrator document. Doesn't matter what it looks like. Now we're back to our defaults here. Now if you go to your little three line menu and you go down to Open Swatch Library, and you go down to user defined, let's see if it's in there. And it's a very long name, but look, there it is. We I just save this color library, there it is. So I'm just going to click on that and check it out. It pulled it up in its own little window. And then all I have to do is grab this folder and drag it over here, and now it's in my permanent library for this document. Now, remember, if you don't grab that folder and drag it over here, when you open this document again, it's not going to be there because this little pop up is not going to show up. I like to keep my library for the document I'm working on in my little swatch library with the document. I'm going to go back. To our original document where we were creating little where we were saving these libraries, and I'm going to show you one more thing. So I'm going to close this little pop up. Now, I want to be a little redundant, but again, I'm just I always like to err on the side of caution, and I'm definitely going to save this as an ASE file. And the main reason is because that is the default file type, and that is what Benjamin Moore and everybody else uses anyway. If you double click on this folder, As you can see, it's actually giving you the option to edit these colors, you can absolutely do that, but I wouldn't do that in this case because these are exact matches to that Benjamin More. So if you start playing around with this slider, that's cool. But you might regret it because then this color isn't going to match anymore. I would not mess with that in this case. But what I do want to show you is where in this little edit colors pop out box. See where our file name is right there. If you click in that box, now it's actually giving us a little cursor because we could edit this. I don't want to edit it, but what I do want to do is copy and paste this extremely long name, so we don't have to type it out again. And this is what I usually do. So if I hold down the command key and then hit the letter A, that is going to select all. I'm on a Mac. It should be the control key on a PC. And then I'm going to hold down command and C for copy. Same thing on and on a Mac and on a PC, it should be Control C. I've now copied that text. I've copied that name. That's all I wanted to open this for. I'm going to click Okay, and I do not want to save changes, no. All I wanted was to put that a text into my clipboard. Now we're going to save this as an ASC. It's the same process with the folder selected, click on it. You can see that it's selected. Go to your little three line menu here. Go down to save Swatch Library as ASE and click on that. And now here we have the same menu we saw earlier. But now our file extension is ASE, and it's saving it in the same location, Illustrator 28 N for English and Swatches. And now, see how this is highlighted. It says titled one, and it's highlighted. Don't click on anything. Just hold down the command key and click the letter V or tap the letter V for victory on your computer and check it out. It just typed all that for, just filled out all that for us. It's so much easier. And then just click on save. And now I want to see if I can load those Benjamin Moore swatches as an ASE file that I just saved. So I'm going to go to the three line menu, go down to Open Swatch Library, go down to user defined, and there it is. So one of these is our ASE file, and one of these is our AI file. It really doesn't matter, but that's why you're seeing two of them. Now, if you really don't want to deal with that and you don't want to deal with confusion or you don't want to list like this, which is a little out of control. I'm just used I name everything, so I'm just used to scrolling, and it's, you know, alphabetical. You can just do the ASC, you don't have to do AI. But anyway, I'm going to click on that, and there it is again, and then I can just grab the folder and drag it over here. This is what I do. I delete everything but the colors I'm using. So I clicked on the first one here, holding down shift, clicked on the last one, and I'm going to click on the trash can. So now, every time I open this file from now on, I'm just going to see these three colors. If you notice here, do you see where it says, copy? So that is because we copied this over. So you know, you may want to. Remember when we copied that text, no pun intended and pasted it. You just want to check your folder name, and I'm just going to hit Command V again and I'm going to rename this. So I'm going to click, and I'm going to hit yes to save it. So now we do have two. You can delete one of them, but you don't want it to just say copy because yes, it does tell you the color names, but I don't know where they came from. So I'm going to delete the redundant one and now I know that these colors are from the Benjamin Moore classic color library. So make sure before you close any of your documents, if you want to remember exactly what these swatches are, just make sure that you have your folder named correctly. I always do what I'm about to show you every single time I create any type of swatch library, whether it's this Benjamin Moore one, not the ones that came, that I downloaded, but I'm talking about ones that I create. There is a chance in the future, you may update Adobe Illustrator, and you could possibly lose this library, the one that is your user defined. So it has not happened to me yet, but I have met people it's happened to. And let me tell you if you spend years creating and curating these incredible palettes and you lose them all, you are not going to be a happy camper. Okay. So I like having them in that folder where they got put by default, when we were looking, it was in our Adobe Illustrator folder. And Adobe Illustrator is pretty good about when there's a new update, a new software update, they do transfer that over. And they may ask you. You always want to say yes if they say you want to transfer your preferences and settings. But I don't want to risk that because that's kind of depending on adobe to do the right thing or not have a glitch. And I don't want my entire, you know, livelihood and all the color palettes I spent all that time creating to be ruined or deleted because Adobe had a little glitch. I'm going to save it one more time. I'm going to save it just as an ASE file. But if I click on the folder here, and then I go back to the three line menu and I go down to Save Swatch Library as ASE, I'm going to do that. And remember, when we did that, see how it gives us this default location. It's going into my Adobe software, Illustrator, English swatches. But this is inside the software. See where I've updated Adobe Illustrator. There's an older version, right? So I may have older versions. I may have swatch libraries in those two, but I'm going to save this somewhere completely outside of this software in a completely separate folder of mine that I will never lose track of, and especially won't lose if there's a software update. So remember how we copied and pasted that text. I'm going to hit Command V for victory again. And I'm going to name this. And then what I'm going to do instead is I have my own little separate folder, on my computer. So if I go to documents and I go to stock, I actually have a stock like images folder, stock files folder, and in there, I have a section for brushes, actions, and templates. What I have separately as its own unique folder is one called color swatches. So you can create a folder anywhere you want and name it anything you want. But what I highly recommend you do to keep yourself organized and also to save yourself potential future headaches is to save it to a folder that's not inside your application inside your folder. So if I'm just going to click on color swatches and now you can see all these see all these color swatch ASE libraries, and I only save them as ASE here because I just didn't want to have duplicates, but at least that way, I have access to it, and then I'm just going to click on Save. And now, if we want to open that separate folder that we created just for ourselves, not inside the software, we can do that, too. So if you ever lose your swatches that are inside your Adobe software, never fear, you can get them now that you've saved them in your own personal folder outside of the software folder. So if we go to the little three line menu here, Go down to open Swatch Library. Then if you go all the way to the bottom where it says, O library here, click on that. Now we can just pick a folder from anywhere on our machine. By default, it's asking you if you want a library that's already in your Adobe software. But remember, mine is in documents, stock and it's in brushes, actions, templates, and color swatches. And now I can actually pull up a color swatch palette that I created that's not inside my software, and there it is. And I'm going to drag this out so you can see it. Benjamin More Bright Primaries classic, and then I'm going to click Open. And that's it. It's that easy to create and load not to mention save color palettes in Adobe Illustrator. 4. Recolor in Adobe Illustrator: If I have a pattern that I designed in Adobe Illustrator, I can really easily recolor it and I can use these paint swatches. So I can tell my spoonflower customers, Hey, guess what? These colors are going to match the paint on your walls. Here's an example of one of my pattern blocks. You may recognize my format. Does this look familiar? That's from my first class that I ever taught on Skillshare on half drop patterns. I'm going to use this one as an example because it's a simple one, and I have a really simple three color Benjamin More palette that I created. So let's say I already have my swatches palette open, and again, you can do that by going to Window and Swatches. And I have four colors here, but I want to load those Benjamin Moore bright primaries. So all I have to do is go to that little three line menu to the top right of the Swatches panel. And I'm going to drop down to where it says Open Swatch Library, and then I'm going to drop down to where it says user defined. And here are all my palettes and check it out. There is my Benjamin Moore bright primaries from the classic collection, I'm just going to click on that, and there they are. And now I'm just going to grab the folder from the flyout menu and drag it into my swatches panel in my document, and I can close this. So I'm going to leave my background color the same, but I have these three color rainbows, and I'm just going to go to my selection tool, which is the black arrow here at the top left, and I'm going to select everything. And then if I go to edit, and then I go down to edit colors, I'm going to go to recolor artwork. So if you just click on that, now you're going to get this probably advanced color theme picker color menu that is giving you these sliders and stuff. That's okay. I'm going to click on advanced options. When you first hit recolor, you may get this, but if you don't, just click on advanced options. So here are my three colors of my rainbows, and there are the three colors that I created with this palette. And now you're probably saying, Aha, I know why she had us create a palette. Be watch this. I just clicked on that palette, and it changed everything all together. So I could have gone through and double clicked on these and then manually made some adjustments, or I could have chosen from my other swatches in my local library. But I didn't have to do that. That's one of the joys of using pre made color palettes and why I recommend if you're going to be doing anything with color, including using these incredible paint color swatches from all these big three paint manufacturers. I recommend creating palettes, and then you can actually call those out in, for instance, spoonflower listings, and your customers will love you for it because they'll know that your patterns are going to match their paint. If you want to individually recolor one by one, instead of using palettes, you can also do that. Way I typically do it in illustrator is if I want to change maybe one thing, I will select an object or you can select multiple objects, and I will go to edit, and then I will go to edit colors and recolor artwork. Now, I'm going to get this dialogue box first. You can change those in your settings, but all I have to do is click at the bottom here where it says advanced options on advanced recolor options. This is where you can actually manually change a color one by one, one at a time, instead of using an entire palette. So let's say I just want to recolor this blue here. All you have to do is double click on this little box on the right hand side under where it says new. And now I'm going to get my color picker. Now, I can go in here, and I can adjust the hex code, the RGB, and the CMYK values. But if I already have a saved swatch in my color palette, all I have to do is click on the box that says color swatches. And now I can manually choose from whichever colors I already have saved. So I'm going to choose bold yellow, and I'm going to click on. And now it just changed the ones that I had selected, and it just changed one color. Again, if you double click here as well, if you click on color swatches and you realize, you know what? I want to change the hex code. You can get back to that previous screen. All you have to do is click on color models. And now you're back to where we were before, and you can also even use a manual slider, and it will show you a little preview here. The top is what your new color will be, and the bottom is what your old color was. So you can kind of see the comparison between what you're changing it from and two. What if you wanted that red to be maybe where the blue is, and let's say you wanted it red, yellow, blue, right? So it's really easy to fix. So right now where the blue is, I want the red to be there instead. I'm just going to grab this here and I'm going to drag it on top of the blue, and then it switched the colors. So now it's red is on the inside. But I actually want the yellow and blue switched still. So I'm going to do the same thing. I'm just going to grab one of these right here and then pull down and drag it on top of that, and there we go. And I'm just going to click on. And I'm going to say no here because the reason it's asking me this is because I did make some I didn't actually make changes to the colors, but I rearranged the order that these swatches were in. If you ever get this message, especially after you're moving things around like this, you can just ignore it because you have your palette set up. You know it works, and you don't want to make any changes. So I would just click No, and that's it. Now you've got your pattern block, which you can upload to spoon flour or wherever else you want to put it, and you've now applied these new colors in the palette. Stay tuned because in a future lesson, I'm going to show you how to leverage these color names and the fact that you actually used colors that will match existing paint colors. I'll show you how to leverage that in your spoon flower listings, so you can make more sales and stand out. 5. Color Swatches in Adobe Illustrator for iPad: As of the filming of this class, there really isn't an easy way to be able to open these color libraries that we created and these palettes in Adobe Illustrator for the iPad, the way that we're doing it on the computer here. But I do have a workaround for you. So here's a really easy way to basically be able to set up your little color palettes in Adobe Illustrator for the iPad. So here I have my three Benjamin More Bright primaries, classic colors. Let's say I want to have these in a document on Illustrator for the iPad. All I'm going to do is create a new Adobe Illustrator file on my computer, And I'm just going to draw. I have three colors here. So I'm just going to draw three squares. It really doesn't matter where they go or whatever or what they look like, you know, as long as you can use these to sample the colors. And then I'm just going to turn one of these squares. I'm for one of these squares, I'm going to apply that pinata color. Let me make sure that it is not on my stroke. And then for one of these colors, I'm going to apply the bold yellow. And then for one of these little swatches, I am going to apply crystal springs. So here are these are the three colors that we set up earlier in our little mini palette. So if you are subscribe to Creative Cloud, you can really easily save this, and then you can just pull it up immediately on your iPad. So if you just go to file, and then you go to save. And then when you get your little pop up here, all you have to do is save Cloud document. So you're going to be saving this to the Cloud so you can open it on your iPad. So let's just name it color Let's just say, let's just do color swatches. That's fine. And actually, I'll just call it new because I might actually have one with that name. Okay. So what it's doing now is it's just saving this file to Creative Cloud so you can access it on another machine. Just click on Save. And now I'm on my iPad and I'm going to open Illustrator, and there's the color swatches new file that I just saved from my computer. I saved it to the Cloud. So I'm just going to open that. And the quickest and easiest way to get these colors into another Adobe Illustrator file is to copy and paste these boxes. You can do this with a new illustrator for iPad document, or you can also paste these boxes into an existing one two, if you have art that you want to recolor. I'm just going to select these three boxes with the selection tool. That's the arrow at the top right. And then I'm just going to go over to the left hand side where the little scissors icon is and click on that. And then the middle icon is the one for copy. So I'm just going to copy these boxes. This means that I'm copying everything to the clipboard that I have selected. Now I can close this document and create a new one or I can open an existing one. And now, when I paste these boxes into that document, the swatches automatically get populated to the local swatch library in this Illustrator for iPad document. I'm just going to go over to the left again where those scissors are, that scissors icon. And the third option is for paste. So I'm just going to click on Paste. And now you can access those swatches, and they just got automatically populated to your swatch library. If you go to the right hand side here on the bottom, see where that little dot is. There's actually two dots. One is your fill and one is your stroke. Click on either one of those, and that will actually pull up the swatch library for this document. And look, there they are. Those are the colors that we selected. Those are the colors from the boxes that we just pasted. You can also go through and manually delete the colors you don't want in your document by just holding your Apple Pencil tool over the swatch and hitting remove. And that's it. Once you're done deleting all of the color swatches that you don't need for the document that you're in, you can go ahead and delete those boxes that you pasted, and those swatches will still stay in your color library for this iPad document. 6. Install Swatches & Recolor in Adobe Photoshop: O. All right, so I want to show you guys how to install these swatches in photoshop and also how to recolor any of your art in Adobe Photoshop. The first thing we want to do is install the Benjamin Moore color library. We're going to install the same one that we did in Adobe Illustrator. So I'm in photoshop, and I have my swatches panel open. It's over here. If you don't see your swatches panel, you can just go to Window, and then you can drop down to swatches. And mine has a check mark next to it because mine is showing. So I'm actually going to pull this swatch library out so you can see it. So this is my swatch library right now for this document, and these are all preloaded swatch libraries that came with photoshop. So I want to load that Benjamin Moore one, and we're going to do something similar. So in the Swatch library where it says swatches on the same row all the way to the right, there's another one of those little three line menus. I'm just going to click on that, and then I'm going to go down to import swatches. And I'm going to click on import swatches, and now it's actually allowing me to choose any file on my computer, well, not any file, but an ASC file that I can load into Photoshop. And the thing is, these ASE files, these are Adobe swatch Exchange files, which means you can open them in any Adobe software. So I'm going to open the Benjamin Moore Classic Colors library just like we did in Illustrator. I'm just going to click on that and I'm going to click on Open. And now it's showing at the very bottom of my swatch library. You may not see it because yours may be kind of contracted like this. Just expand your swatch library, and then you'll be able to see it. And it may be helpful for you to kind of pull it out like I did so you can see what you're doing. And now, if I click on the little arrow here next to the folder, now I can see this is all the color swatches in that Benjamin Moore classic color library. Cool. And here's one that you may recognize. This is the 007 pinata. That was one of the ones we were using in our bright primaries palette. So what I want to do, I have an image here. This is an image that I drew in procreate, and it has a lot of layers. I'm in my layers panel, and you can kind of see all the layers I have here. And one thing that is really important, When you're designing raster art not vector art, it's very important to be able to keep all of your colors, if possible, on their own layer. And I also have all my effects on one layer. So like, for instance, I have this stipple effect on the bow, and I have that, you know, kind of, you can show and hide it. But I have that on its own layer, and then I have the white for the bow on its own layer. And you can see show and hide what's on each layer. If you're in your layers panel, if you just click on the eyeball to the left of a layer name, that'll show and hide the layer. So you can see where you are. If you're not seeing your layers panel, all you have to do is go to window and layers. And mine has a checkmark because it's showing. But what I want to change right now is I want to see what happens when I change this poodles face to be that 007 red pinata color. It may be a little crazy, but I just want to try it out. So one of the reasons you want to keep your colors each on its own separate layer is because it's going to be a lot easier to change, and you're not having to worry about, you know, having multiple colors on one layer that you're trying to adjust at one time, especially if you're trying to make exact changes like change your colors to an exact Benjamin more color. So what I want to do is I want to select the layer that this poodles face is on. So I'm going to figure out where that layer is. So, this one is the poodles face, and I know that because I am showing and hiding the layer. And if you hover over the layer, it actually will tell you what the blend mode is, the opacity and the fill. So this is actually a normal blend mode, meaning it doesn't have any effects applied to it, like, you know, you're not multiplying or doing anything fancy, and it is opacity 100%, and it's fill 100%. And that's important because if you're going to be changing from one color to another, And you want to be really exact about having this is the exact color and it's a solid color, and it's matching this Benjamin more color. You don't want to have any serious shading or multiply blending modes, any kind of crazy things going on that are going to change the hue or the tint of the color because you're not going to end up with an exact match. So really, the main thing that you want to do is focus on when you're making color changes with raster images. You want to have images that have solid colors that have 100% opacity and fill. So what I want to do is change this pink poodles face to be that red pinata color. When you want to make a change to a raster image, not a vector image, the best way to do that, without destroying your original work is to use non destructive editing techniques. The best way to do that is to create things like new adjustment layers in Photoshop. You can create a new layer, which is called an adjustment layer, and then you can make changes, but you actually still get to keep your original color, your original layer. So you're not actually destroying the original art. And that's the way I like to work. So with this layer selected at the bottom of your layers panel, If you go down to the little icons here on the bottom. There's one that is kind of like a circle and it has half of it filled and half of it not. It looks like a little almost like a Ying, and it has a little hover over it. We're going to create a new adjustment layer, new filler adjustment layer. I'm just going to click on that. And then when I do that, I have all these options. And actually, what I want to choose is the first option, which is solid color. So I'm just going to change one solid color to be another solid color, so I'm just going to click on that. And now I have a new adjustment layer. It's a color fill, and I can select any color that I want to change this poodle face color here to be and I'm going to change it to a different color. So by default, your eyedropper tool is automatically pulled up. So anything that you click on, Any color is going to be sampled. If for some reason, you don't get that pop up little color dialog box. It's really easy to open it. If you go to your adjustment layer that we just created above our original layer. There's a little box here on the left hand side that is our adjustment layer and our color fill. All you have to do is double click right there inside that box where the color is. And then it will pull up your color dialogue box. So, if I click on this blue background, it's now changing the poodles face to be blue, which is the same color as the background, which is why it just disappeared. We don't want to do that. What I want to do is go over here to my Benjamin Moore classic library, and I'm just going to click on that 007 pinata color, and there we go. That is an exact change. That is an exact match because it's 100% opacity solid fill color, and we just change from one color to another. So that's it, and I'm going to click on. Now, obviously, this looks a little weird, but I just did it for effect to show you guys how easy it is and quick. To make exact color changes even with raster images. It doesn't just have to be with vectors. Now, the other thing is too, remember we did an adjustment layer. I'm going to hide that. Look, so there's our original. So we did not destroy the original art. That's what's called a non destructive editing technique. So we can hide and show this. We can also double click here in the little color fill box, and you can change it to anything. But remember, if you want to do an exact match to, for instance, a Benjamin Moore color, you really want to use your Benjamin Moore palette, which is why we installed that color library. If you have any images that have a blending mode applied to them, a blending mode is when you change the brightness, the way it is kind of blending on top of the layer underneath it, you're not going to get an exact result. So you really want to stick to things like, you know, solid colors if you're worrying about matching something like the Benjamin More color library. You want to stick with things that are 100% opacity, 100% fill with a normal blend mode. That's just because we're working in raster images, and you have a lot more options with things like shading and texture, but you also have a lot less options in terms of getting exact colors and unless you're working with true solid colors. 7. Color Swatches in Procreate: The color swatch files that we are working with in this class all have the same file extension. It is ASE, which is Adobe swatch Exchange. The A for Adobe means that these are easy to open and use in any Adobe software, but they are actually not meant for use in procreate, but there is a really easy work around that I like to use. If I want to put these same paint swatches into my procreate documents, so I can create art and recolor art with these exact colors. I'm in Adobe Illustrator right now. I'm actually just going to create a new illustrator document. I'm on my computer, a good size, I would say, would be 10 " by 10 ". And I'm just going to click on Create. I'm just going to load my Benjamin Moore Bright Primaries color library that I created. What I'm going to do is go to my swatches panel and I'm going to go to my little three line menu and I'm going to go to Open Swatch Library, and then I'm going to drop all the way down to user defined. And there is my Benjamin Moore Bright Primaries classic palette. Now, of course, I can also open any of these Benjamin Moore palettes that I have installed or any of the other ones that you have for this class. You can install the Sherwin Williams or the Bar ones as well. But these have a lot of colors in them, and I was very careful to curate my own custom palette. And that's why I love doing this. So I only have these three colors, and I'm just going to draw three really quick boxes here with these colors. So I'm going to select my rectangle tool, and then I'm going to go down to my color fill and stroke. I'm going to turn off the stroke. And by doing that, the way you can do that is clicking on the stroke, which is the second option. And then I'm just going to click on the little button here. And then that turns off the stroke for the box that I'm about to draw, and then I'm going to go back to the main the fill part of it. And then I'm going to click on the box again, and I'm just going to draw a box. I'm holding down shift while I do this. And now, if I click on my selection tool, and then I just go over to my Benjamin Moore palette here, I'm just going to hit the first one, which is pinata, and now it has changed it to that color. I'm just going to duplicate this box. I'm going to hold down the option key, and then I'm going to drag this over, and I'm going to do the same thing With my objects selected, my foreground color is right there. I'm just going to choose that bold yellow, and then I'm going to hold down the option key and drag this down here, and then I'm going to do the same thing with the crystal springs. Perfect. Each one of these is the exact match to these three Benjamin more colors. I'm now going to export this as a JPEG, and then I can open that in procreate and sample these colors. So I'm just going to go to an illustrator file, and then I'm going to drop down to port. And then I'm going to go to export as. I'm just going to name this bright primary colors. So I'm going to go to the bottom of my little dialogue box here. I'm going to make sure to click on US artboards. That's going to use this white artboard and make sure that that's what it exports. I'm also going to export it as a JPEG. You can export it as anything almost, but I just find JPEGs are easier to work with. And that's it. I'm just going to click on Export, and then I'm going to leave my JPEG as RGB, quality ten, and I'm going to make sure it's at 300 PPI. Now, if that is not what yours is at, if it's at screen or something like that, under resolution, just change it to 300. So you have the highest image quality and make sure that your quality is ten and color model RGB for me, I just like to work in RGB. That's what spoonflower prints in, and that's what a lot of printers use. So That's it. I'm just going to click on, and now it has saved that JPEG to my computer, so I can put it on my iPad and open it in Procreate. And now I have on my desktop on my computer that JPEG that I just exported from Adobe Illustrator, so I'm just going to airdrop it to my iPad, which is really easy because I'm using a MAC and I'm going to be airdroping it to another Apple device, which is my iPad. So if I just click on that, if I just select the JPEG, I'm going to control click, and I'm going to go down to share. And then if I select the option airdrop, I can actually choose where I'm going to airdrop it. And I don't know if you heard that little ding, but that was it getting transferred to my iPad. It even says sent. So I can just click on Done, and now that image is going to be on my iPad. So now, I'm in procreate on my iPad. I'm just going to create a new document. It does not really matter what size it is. And now I have this new procreate document. I want to import that image into Procreate. So all I have to do is go up here on the top left next to gallery, and I'm going to click on that wrench icon. And all I have to do is under ad and if you don't see this, you'll probably want to go to the very left where it says ad. I'm going to click on the second option, which is Insert a photo. And now it's pulling up my photo library. So I'm just going to select that image, that JPEG, because I imported it into my iPad from airdrop, and it just automatically was loaded into my photo library. So I'm going to click on that, and there it is. These are the colors that I sampled from Benjamin Moore in Adobe Illustrator. I want to create a new color palette for just these three colors. At the very top right of the screen, there's a little dot. That is a color. It may be blue or red or black or white. It doesn't matter. It depends on what your current color is, but that is the color picker tool. I'm going to click on that. And if you don't see it, you may be in this mode or classic or something. But at the very bottom right, if you click on palettes, that is where your color palette tool is. I want to create a new color palette. So at the very top right of the palettes panel, there's a plus sign. I'm going to go ahead and click on that and I'm going to click on Create New Palette. Now, you may not see it immediately, but it's going to be created at the very top of your list, and there it is. It's called untitled. Obviously, I want to name it. I'm just going to click on it. I'm just going to name it Benjamin Moore Bright Primaries Classic. Now I have my color palette named. All I have to do is color drop these colors. The way you want to do that is if you go to the left hand side, You'll see this little slider tool over here, and at the very bottom of that is this little rectangle. I'm going to click on that. And by clicking on that, now I have my color sampler tool. I can just drag this around with my Apple pencil and any color I drag it on top of, it is going to change in the little color library here. And all I have to do is open my palette and then click in there, and that's it. And I'm going to do the same thing again. I'm going to select this, and I'm just going to go over this bold yellow, and I'm going to do the same thing again. I'm going to click on the yellow now on the top right, and I'm going to click right here with my Apple pencil right next to the red and add it to my palette. Same thing again, I'm going to go back and then I'm going to select crystal springs, go back in here, and there it is. Now, These don't have names. This does not say, you know, pinata or bold yellow or crystal springs, like those other ones did in our Adobe software because we're not loading them from Benjamin Moore. But these are still going to be matches because we're directly sampling them from that JPEG that we created. So now, if you're in Procreate, you can create new art, so you can draw, you know, anything, really. And now I'm going to be drawing with crystal springs. And if I want to draw with bold yellow, same thing. So that is a really great way to be able to say, I am creating art patterns or illustrations in procreate using these exact colors that match Benjamin Moore. Now, if you have a piece of artwork and you want to recolor, let's say one of the colors or multiple colors in there to match these That's actually really easy to do too. So I have a piece of art here that I drew. And if I open my layers panel here on the top right, you can see, I'm pretty good about keeping my color layers separate from each other. So that blue in her clothes is on its own layer. The blue rain streaks on the window behind her are also on their own layer. If I want to change these to crystal springs or maybe I just want to change one. All I have to do, I'm going to unlock this layer is make sure I'm on that layer. And then I'm going to zoom out so you can see it. I'm going to go back to my color picker tool. And there is my crystal springs right there. It's on the right hand side. I'm going to select that. I'm just going to hold down the color with my apple pencil and drag it and pull it on top of this blue right here for the rain streaks. Now, you notice it's only coloring one of them. If you drag to the right, your slider will move up. That is going to color everything on that layer. So you can do that to color all the blue on that layer, that color, or, you know, you can also, if you want to drag it on top, you can just color individual elements. So see how with the slider, you know, you can kind of adjust And the way I'm doing that is with my Apple pencil. I'm just dragging it to the left and right. The left is a lower threshold, and the right is a higher threshold. But if I want to color all that, I'm going to go all the way to the right. And it's that easy. So now I could easily go through and change all of these colors. So let's say I want to change her clothes to crystal springs. I'm going to do the same thing. And I'm just going to pull the slider down, and now her clothes are that crystal springs color. What if I wanted to change this yellow that the book is to be that bold yellow? So I'm just going to do the same thing here. Go up to my color picker, click on the yellow, and then drag it directly on top of the book. And that is the bold yellow. And then, of course, I have this pink here. If I want that to be that pinata color, I'm going to select that, and then I'm going to drag it on top of the pink and use my slider to make sure that it covers everything. So it's that easy. Now, it works a lot better if you have solid images, solid shape, solid colors in procreate, because if you start playing around with shading and stuff like that, you know, you're not going to get an exact match. But I tend to design in a very simple way. So my colors are usually pretty solid, and that's it. That's how you can create color palettes using these exact paint colors in procreate, and you can even recolor and create new art. 8. Spoonflower Tips & Staying on Trend With The Color of the Year: I want to show you my spoonflower stats really quick. So if you look at my sale, some of my top sales, one of my top selling products is this Portuguese floral tile pattern that I designed specifically using Benjamin Moore Blue Nova. So this is the product. This is a Portuguese floral tile pattern that I designed. I used Benjamin Moore Blue Nova, which is 8205. There are tons of potential customers on Spoonflower specifically searching for Benjamin Moore Blue Nova. Because it is the color of the year for 2024. So, you know, I am going to take advantage of that and recolor my art with that specific color. One of the color palettes that I am giving you with this class is the Benjamin Moore color trends 2024 AS file. And if I open that in Adobe Illustrator into my swatch library, This is actually the Benjamin Moore color trend library for 2024. Look at what the first color is. It's blue Nova. So now I know that Blue Nova is the color of the year. I can go in and either create new art or recolor existing art using Benjamin Moore Blue Nova. Benjamin Moore even has a suggested color palette of colors that are going to coordinate really well with the color of the year for 2024. How cool is that? In my product title, I made sure to call out Benjamin Moore and the color name and the color number. I also did it in my tags. Here is a tag for Blue Nova and here's one for Benjamin Moore. So now that there are going to be interior designers and DI wires who are going to be painting their walls with Benjamin Moore Blue Nova. How awesome is it that I can promise that this pattern that I created that they can purchase on wallpaper on spoonflower is going to match exactly with Benjamin Moore Blue Nova paint. So if someone wants to paint the trim in their house with Benjamin Moore Blue Nova, and then they purchase this wallpaper from me, they are going to know that my pattern is going to exactly match their paint color. How cool is that? So take advantage of it, leverage the company name recognition and help yourself stand out on spoonflower by being one of the very few artists who takes advantage of using specific paint colors in their patterns. One reason it's a win win for Benjamin Moore and you is because if you design your patterns, keeping in mind specific paint colors from, for instance, Benjamin Moore or Bar or Sherwin Williams, and you call those out in your spoonflower listings, you're also encouraging spoonflower customers to go out and buy that specific paint color. This is another of my top selling patterns on spoon flower. I designed this Magnolia flowers pattern, and when I designed it, Benjamin Moore, October Mist was the color of the year. And one thing that's great about using the color of the year, whether it's Panton or Benjamin Moore is that you have a built in audience. You have people that are going to be purchasing Benjamin Moore October Mist because it's the color of the year. Those people may be interior designers. They may be small manufacturers who want to make purses. There are going to be people looking for October mist. So I recolored this vector art using Benjamin Moore October Mist. That's that green kind of sage green color there. So you better believe I took advantage of the name recognition of Benjamin Moore and the color of the year. So I made sure to include the words October Mist in my title. I also made sure in my tags to use not only the words October Mist, I also used Benjamin Moore. That is what I think made this one of my top selling products on Spoonflower. The moment I found out that October Mist was the Benjamin Moore color of the year. I jumped on recoloring this pattern and because I thought about people who are going to be shopping for it and my end user and what they were going to be searching for October Mist and Benjamin Moore, that really helped me boost my sales and stand out on spoonflower. I want the same for you. So make sure you take advantage of this, leverage that name recognition and leverage those colors. Benjamin Moore is certainly not the only paint company that releases a color of the year, either. Bear also has one. So for 2024, the color of the year that Bar released is called cracked pepper. It is really a cool, dark charcoal, and this is going to be what a lot of people are purchasing in 2024, not only to paint their walls, but it's going to inform home interior design and decor trends. I went to Home Depot recently and they have a huge section just for bear paint swatches. And so I went there and I actually picked up a few fun cool colors in different paint swatches directly from Bar. These paint swatches are free, and they have not only samples of the actual color, but they have the color names and the color numbers. I had a lot of fun just looking at all the colors and creating a little custom palette. I also happen to find a little swatch for the color of the year, which is cracked pepper. They even had this cool little cheat sheet with different sheens showing mat and flat and satin, gloss, et cetera. It was really cool and honestly, really helpful to be able to look at all this stuff in person. And I also happened to find in the cool neutrals color library, which, by the way, is included in the freebies for this class, the Bar color of the year, cracked pepper. And now I can digitally recolor my art directly from Bar using the color of the year, and I can be sure it is going to match their paint. 9. Class Project & Final Thoughts: Now that you have either created new art or recolored existing art, using paint colors from major manufacturers, it's time to put it to use. Please share in the class project gallery, your art that you either created or recolored using some of the paint swatches that I shared in this class. Or if you have another set of swatches that you prefer to use, whether they're from pantone or even another paint manufacturer, please feel free to share that as well, and let us know what you used. I am always learning so much from my students, and I would love for us all to cheer each other on. Project bonus. Please share your art on Instagram and tag me. I'm Carrie Cantwell Art. I cannot wait to see which colors you used and where they came from. And sharing your art on social media is an excellent way for potential spoon flower customers and art directors to discover you as an artist. I hope you had fun and found this class valuable. Please make sure to leave a review so other students can know if this class is for them. Never underestimate the value of your review. I personally enjoy reading all of them. Please check out my other skill share classes, which are excellent companions to this one. You can learn how to draw and procreate, create patterns, find your signature style, design mock ups and learn everything you need to know about spoon flower. I have an exciting, welcoming community full of other artists just like you called Graphics Gang, and we would love for you to join us. There, you will discover expert chats, tutorials, freebies, and more. Plus, I meet with the Graphics Gang live via Zoom once a month. You can find it by visiting patrion.com forward slash Graphics Gang. Please follow me on Skillshare. You can just click the Follow button on my profile page or just below this video. And make sure to say hi on Instagram. I'm Carrie Cantwell Art. Thank you again for taking this class, and I will see you next time. Bye.