Color Inspiration for Digital Illustration: Color Palettes in Procreate

1. Intro: Hi, I'm Maya Favor, and in this class, I'll teach you my favorite way of creating color palettes. Creating a color palette for your digital art can be really fun, but it can also feel challenging. I mean, where do you even start? Where do you look for inspiration, and how do you create the palette that works great with your artwork and not only little dots on the mood board. This is a fun and creative class where we will go out and about to find color inspiration. We will explore how the colors of our palettes interact. By the end of this class, you will end up with a perfect color palette for your digital art. We will challenge ourselves to see all the colors that surrounds us. I will show you how to amp up those dull smartphone photos that doesn't do the colors of real-life justice, so that you can use your own unique inspiration to create a color palette that you love to use. I will use the iPad app Procreate in this class to create my color palette. However, you don't actually need an iPad or Procreate to take this class. You can use the same technique in other desktop or iPad apps as well. We'll focus on the process of creating a color palette. The tools we use can be different, but the process and workflow can still be similar. As a bonus, I've included a bunch of previews in this case, you will get one free coloring template to use for coloring exploration, two free monoline Procreate brushes that you can use alongside with me in class. If you like me, use Procreate. Last but not least, one free Lightroom preset to amp up those dull smartphone photos. This class is for you who wants to learn a fun way of creating color palettes. It's for you who might be bored of only finding inspiration online, and for you who wants to challenge yourself with colors to create a new color palette that you love to use. 2. Color Theory: Before we start with this class, I just wanted to mention that I have filmed it outdoors, and I have a screen protector on my iPad, which makes the screen feel a little bit more like paper to draw on, but it also makes the screen look a little bit pale and the colors aren't popping as much as they do in real life. Keep this in mind when you look at the class, and I just wanted to mention this if you feel like my screen looks really pale and you don't see the colors as you should. This is not a class that will fully cover all there is to know about color theory. Even if I don't follow rules when I create color palettes, I have the basics of color theory in the back of my head. Therefore, I feel that it's worth mentioning some simple color theory so that you have a base to stand on when it comes to color. This is the color wheel. You have the warm colors with yellow, orange, and red hues, and the cold colors with a purple, blue, and green hues. The three primary colors are red, blue, and yellow. The three secondary colors, which basically means that you mix the primary colors, are green, orange, and purple. When you mix the neighbor colors with each other, you will end up with a wheel of colors. Basically, warm colors like yellow, orange, and red are associated with happiness, energy, and activity. Cool colors like purple, blue, and green are associated with calmness, authority, and elegance. With this very simple explanation of the color wheel, let's talk about color schemes. I will just clear this layer. If you use Procreate, you can very easily create different color schemes by tapping harmony at the bottom of the color panel. At the top, you can see different color schemes. There are a few different color schemes that are common ways of creating color palettes. There's three basic schemes or harmonies that I want to highlight in this class. First, we have the complementary colors, which means the two colors that are opposite of each other. If I drag one of these dots to a color, for example, a blue, the other dot will be at the exact opposite of the circle and give me an orange color. Complimentary colors gives a high contrast and makes a pop effect if used together. If you, for example, have made a pellet and need a color that pops, you could go and fetch a complementary color to that color. The second color scheme is analogous, which means colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. If I move these little dots, the other dots will follow along with me and create neighbor colors. Let's go ahead and select pale red pinkish color, and the neighbors are pale orange and pale yellow. Creating this palette will give your artwork a sense of calmness. Nothing pops that much, but the colors will feel gentle next to each other. The third scheme is a triadic harmony. These are three colors that are placed opposite of each other on the color wheel. Choosing triadic colors will create a good contrast at the same time as the colors field in harmony with each other. Let's select a dark bluish color and go get our triadic colors, which is a red and a green. Now, you know a little bit about color harmonies and schemes, so you can play around with this. This can be a handy tool to fetch colors if you get stuck when you create color palettes. If you, for example, create a palette and feel that you need a color that pops, you could go and fetch a color from your palette. Let's say this teal one, and then you know that this color will pop next to your teal color. I feel it's good to know some basic color theory like this. You can play around with color schemes here in Procreate, or if you use another digital app that works the same to get to know these three different basic color schemes. 3. The Color Recipe: Now that we have talked about some basic color theory, you might wonder if there is a color recipe, a way of creating a color palette that makes every pallet you create perfect. Well, no or yes, it all depends on who you're asking. When I first started out creating designs, I thought that there was this special secret formula of creating color palettes. I heard from somewhere that you should have this and that many colors, so-and-so many neutrals, mid-tones, darker and lighter shades. That might be the best way for some. But personally, I don't follow any hard rules. Sure, I know some basic color theory, but I don't think actively about color theory or certain rules when I create a palette. Color theory is great to have as base so that you can refer back to it. But for me, color is all about flow and feelings. Sometimes I add a bunch of neutrals, and sometimes I add a few colors that pop. It all depends on what I create for, for whom I'm creating, a client or for personal project, and how I feel that the colors interact with each other. Some busier artwork that I create might need some more neutral colors to feel calmer and some might need more colors that pop to make the artwork feel more interesting. For me, there's no secret recipe that I follow every time I create a color palette. How do I create color palettes? Well, let's head over to the next lesson for the first step of my workflow. 4. Find Inspiration: Finding inspiration is the first step of creating a color palette, and this is the part of the process that I really enjoy. You can find inspiration everywhere as colors are all around. Sometimes, I go only online to find inspiration for a new project. In that case, I usually go on Pinterest and pin away. There's so much inspiration online. But if you like me, sit a lot in front of the computer and work digitally, you might find that you sometimes get a little bit restless and bored watching your screen all of the time. Whenever I get the chance to go out and about to find inspiration, which basically is every time I'm out exploring or taking a walk, I take the chance to soak in all the inspiration I see. This actually happens by cell for me, I don't actively need to think about finding inspiration for colors. I constantly take quick snapshot of things with my smartphone that inspires me. But in this class, I will actively go out to explore both the city and nature to find inspiration to show you how I do it. Let's grab our smartphones and go. The trick is to keep your eyes open to the colors that surrounds us. If you see a building that is a neutral color and think, well, that's now color inspiration for me, then look a little bit closer. Maybe the building has mailbox that is colorful, maybe there's a flower in the window. Like in this example, the full image of this house might not inspire me with the colors, but if I zoom in, go closer, I might find some really nice color combinations. Sometimes it might be the combination of color that inspire you, and sometimes it can be just one color of its own. While walking around searching for inspiration, you don't need to have the end color palette in mind. In fact, I prefer to not know anything about the color palette that I will create when I'm out finding inspiration. I just gather everything that inspire me and then when I'm home looking through my images, I often can see a pattern of colors that I snapped pics of. Almost, I unconsciously lean towards a certain palette. So snap photos of everything that inspires you when it comes to colors, you can take three pictures if you want to or 100. It really doesn't matter. As long as you feel that you've gathered some inspiration that you can use when creating palettes. 5. Edit Images: Do you really need to edit the images you've taken? Well, of course not. I, however, feel that my iPhone doesn't always do the photos justice, that the colors doesn't show the same way as I saw them in real life. You can do this in many different ways to edit photos on your phone. You can do it straight in the image app, which I feel isn't that good, at least not for me, or you can have another image editing app that I use, Lightroom and for me that is the best app to edit photos in. The Lightroom app is free to download for your phone and it's a great tool for image editing, not only for this class, but also for all kinds of images that you take for all kinds of purposes. I won't go through the full app in this class, but I will show you my quick way of editing images. In this class, I've included a free download that is one of our 10 Lightroom presets. It's named ColorPop1 and all of this tan color pop presets that is available to buy on my website are made to pop up the colors to make the photo look more natural in colors, because I feel that my iPhone camera makes the colors dull from real life. To download this preset to Lightroom, you tap the color pop dng, tap the three little dots and share. I export the file, my settings are in Swedish, but yours will probably be in English and then I scroll away until I find the Lightroom app. You can also save this image on your camera roll and import it into Lightroom that way, but for me this is the most efficient way and I hit "Start Lightroom now". Here on my recently added, there should be a file that looks like this and in this file, the preset is embedded. If you tap and hold, you will see the original image and let go, you will see when the preset is added to the image. To save this preset now so that you can use it on your photos, we scroll all the way to the right and hit "Preset" and here we tap the three little dots at the top right corner, create presets and here you can name your presets to ColorPop1, and save to a new group maybe. I have already a group that's named Faber company presets, so I will just name this and tap the little checkbox. Now if we go back and choose another photo, let's choose this one with the door and then we can scroll to our presets and I will go to the folder named Faber and here I have ColorPop1 and you can see the difference in the photo, so it really makes the colors pop. We also have more presets that you can use. For some photos ColorPop1 might not be the best alternative, but that is the one that you will get for free in this class. Use that as much as possible and if you need to, you can always go in here and change the settings if you need to make it brighter and all of this kind of photo editing settings that I won't actually go through further in this class, but you can explore yourself in Lightroom. Now when we have our photo, we export it and you can just export to camera roll and there you have your new edited photo with pop up colors. 6. Color Moodboard: Now that we have edited our photos and we have a bunch of inspiration for our colors, let's go ahead and create a color mood board and start to build on our palette. First, I will just create a new artboard, a new canvas. The size really doesn't matter here so I will go for screen size. The first thing that we will do is to create a color mood board that we will use to create a larger palette. That larger palette, we will basically narrow down to our final color palette in the end, but the first thing is to create a color mood board. This is just a document that is screen size in Procreate. You can use any size. It really doesn't matter for this purpose. What we will do first is to add our inspiration images. I will just select some of the photos that I like the best. I really like this blue hue on that one. Size it down a bit, add another one. Let's go for this starting with some close-ups, I guess, and then let's see. I really like this yellow here on this building. First there's some building photos and then let's see. I like this artwork, so let's add that one too. It doesn't really matter how many images you wish to add here. I will go from something like eight or 10 maybe. If I feel that the images take up too much space on my art board, I select all of the images, the arrow, and I will just drag down the size a bit and continue to add some more inspiration images. Here I have a bunch of images that I really like, some of them I might like some detail color, and on some of them I like the whole feeling of the photo. The next step is to fetch colors from this color mood board. I will just use our Faber company monoline number 1 brush. I can go all the way up incising so that I will get these dots when I fetch the colors. Then I will just tap and hold to fetch some colors in these images. At this moment, I won't mind if the colors aren't exactly what I wanted. I will just go ahead and create many dots with colors that catch the feeling that I have in this color mood board. I might want some dark green color and some lighter green color because there's a lot of greens here. There's also no surprise, a lot of peach colors and pink, which are my favorites. Some more like forest green, usually I don't work with that much, but that's interesting. I could also go a little bit darker there. If I have a color in the image and I feel that, but I might want to have a little bit darker, I will just go to the color panel. I like the Classic View, and I will just go a little bit darker and then make a dot like that. I really like this blue hues, but I feel now that I should add some more neutrals because there are bunch of neutrals in this color mood board as well. That was a gray beige color, and I feel that I want that, but a little bit lighter because I need some light colors as well. Even though that I don't follow any hard rules on creating color palettes, I know that I need some light colors, some dark colors and some midtones. I have that knowledge in the back of my head when I create a palette. This pink color is interesting, I might want that one. Let's go ahead and fetch some more neutral colors. Maybe that was a little bit too pale, something like that. That was a little bit too dark, and then I can just drag a new color to fill my dots. Go ahead with your images and you can even zoom in if there is a color somewhere that you feel that you really want to add to your color mood board. I feel now that I have a lot of greens, blues, some dark, some midtones, some neutrals. I don't have that many peach and pink colors that I would like, so I will add some more of that. I will actually try to if I can't fetch a color from the image, I will try to get the same feeling in the color when I adjust it in the color panel. Is there some color that is missing? Maybe something that is more yellow. I would like to get this mustard yellow. Let's see if I can just add one of those mustard yellow myself. Something like that. I really like that one. Then maybe some more, like really green. Something like this. It doesn't matter how many colors you have here. I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. I have about 20 colors, that's more than enough, but I feel that in this stage it's nice to just brainstorm and create and fetch as many colors as you want from your photos without thinking of the end result, the end color palette. If you are finished with this, we can go ahead and create a new palette in the color panel. We will add all of these colors to the new palette. I will just fetch, I won't mind. I'll just drag that one out. I won't mind any particular order with the colors. I will just fetch them and add them as a very large palette. Let's head over to the next lesson where we will explore these colors, try them out and try to narrow down our palette. 7. Explore Colors: To explore these colors and narrow them down to a perfect color palette, I will use a sample image. You could use a piece of art that you already created, an old sketch of yours or you can download my sample image, the fruits. This is from my coloring book that I've named, Things Coloring Book that you can buy on my website but this is an image that I provided to you for free in this class so that you can use it for learning purposes only of course. Here as I use Procreate, I will use the Procreate file and import that into Procreate. If you tap the file, you will have one layer that says line drawing and nothing more than that. What we will do here is color blocking. We will add colors to this artwork, to different parts of the artwork to see how the colors interact with each other and how the color combination work. You could if you want to use this line drawing and just drag in the colors. That's how I would do it if I will use this as a coloring page as it is when I seal it. But for this purpose, I don't want to do this because then we will have all the colors on the same layer. What I will do is use two fingers to undo, and I will add another layer, drag that underneath my line drawing and I will use our favorite company on a line number 2 brush that you can download for free in this class. I will just drag out my Palette that I've created which is this one, and then I will start to fill in beneath these lines. Let's start with a yellow color on this banana. I won't mind if I draw a little bit outside of the lines. I'm not a perfectionist and I also think it's a little bit charming to draw outside of the lines. Here I will just go ahead and create a new layer so that all of the same color is on one layer. Let me show you what I mean. This is the yellow layer. Let's go ahead with a new layer and try out blue color, for example, and draw the apple in the blue color. Now I have the blue layer and the yellow layer and on the blue layer, I might also color in these little berries. On this sample image or also on your sketch is nice to have blocks of color that interact with each other and not just one color here, one color here, one color here, one color here, one color here, you get my point. But you have if you have blue there, you will have blue on this side and if you have pink here on the strawberries, you might have pink on that strawberry as well. Let's try that out. We will do a new layer and I will just drag the color to this side and try out a pink. Zoom in a bits and I will just draw this part of a strawberry pink and as I'm on the pink layer, I will draw this part of the strawberry pink as well. Just fill that in and this one too. By doing this color blocking, I will see how the colors interact. There will be a little bit of a perfectionist here and I don't want it too much outside of the lines. But as I said I want to see how these colors interact. For my eyes is nice to have the pink, the blue, and maybe this lemon or orange will be the same color as this one. Let's go ahead with that one, a new layer and we can try out maybe brownish color for the lemon. Let's try brownish color for the peel like this and for the inside maybe I will go for a little bit more pale brownish color. I don't really like how that looked so I will go for more white, yellow color for this on a new layer. All the separate colors on separate layers. That way we can change the colors later on and it will be much easier to try out different colors of our Palettes. Let's see. We can create one new layer and maybe we want to have the leaves in some colors. Let's go for a brighter blue just to try it out. Don't be afraid to try things out here. This is just for experimenting and fun and yeah, I think that it is supposed to be a fun part of the process, trying out different colors and see how they work. Also as I mentioned, the combination of colors and how they also interact with each other. Maybe I want to use that blue color on these berries as well to make this image go together to make it good together, and maybe I also want to make the lemon in this bluish color, like that. Now I have the blue color there and I want to add maybe one more color on the little details here. Maybe I'll go for a new layer and add some brownish color, lighter brown. Let's try it out. That might look good. Sometimes I like to fill it in like this because it feels like I'm drawing not digital and sometimes I'm lazy and I just fill it in by dragging the Fill Tool. These strawberries should be the same as the strawberry on the top, please that's what I want for this color blocking exercise, like that and maybe I should add that brown color there and to the banana maybe to the top and bottom of the banana and maybe to these little things of the berries. Great. Now we have different colors, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 colors. That's a good amount of colors. If you feel that you aren't happy with one of these colors, you can go ahead to one of your layers, click "Select". I selected the blue layer, and then I can just tap another color to see how it looks, but I will just go ahead with the blue one for now and we will experiment more in the next lesson. 8. Color Combinations: The next step of creating a palette is to try out color combinations because here we have only used, how many was it? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 of our full color palette. I think that I want to end up with something like that, 6, 7, or eight colors. But I want to try out these colors of my palette, my larger palette more. The next thing I will do is to create four of this and try out colors. If you want to, you can go to gallery and just duplicate this so that you always have your original. That's a good thing to do. Then go in your art board, and I will just group all of these together. Drag to the right to select and tap Group. In this class, I'm a little bit lazy, so I won't mind naming the groups and naming the layers and all of that. But if you want to work organized, you can, of course do that. With my group selected, I will tap the selection tool and then just drag down with uniform selected so that I will get four of this, four pieces of art on my canvas. Tap the selection tool and now I have one small and I will go ahead and duplicate that one, and then I will go ahead and duplicate that one. Tap and drag, and the last one. I feel that I might want some more air around these, so I will just select all of my groups, tap the selection tool, drag down the size a bit, and then I will go ahead and select one, drag it down, and we'll just arrange them a bit so that I feel that it's a little bit more air between them. Maybe something like this. Now, the next step is to change colors on these so that I will try out my palette. I will go to the color panel, and I will use my palette and I might even want to add colors. Let's go ahead. I will keep that one as it is, and we will see that one is that one. This one, I will keep it as it is for now. I will go into this one and change the colors. I can zoom in a bit and I can change to, let's change to brownish to something that is little more like this maybe, a little more brighter brown, that gives a nice contrast. Then I might want to change the orange or the apples. Let's change that one to, let's try a green. We haven't tried out green colors. So I'll go for this green, maybe pump it up a bit, something like that. Then I think that this blue is a little bit too much saturated. I will try to tap and select and maybe go a little bit lighter with the blue. I feel that this looks really nice. Maybe something like that. The banana, I might want to keep that way or I can try to make it a little paler. Maybe something like this. Maybe I want a pink banana. No, I don't like that. Something like this. A little bit more orange maybe. Yeah, let's go for that. Then I go ahead to my next group, and it's this one. No, it's that one. This is what happens when you don't organize your groups. So don't learn this mistake from me. But anyway, I will go ahead and maybe I want to start with changing the banana. This is just all about trial and error, trying out, see what works and what doesn't work. If I have that really bright pink, I don't think that I want this bright blue, so let's select the blue and maybe I want some more pale on that one. Maybe something like that. The strawberries, I might want to have a little bit more popping. Let's try out a little bit more pinkish on the strawberries that really pops. Now, I don't like the pink banana when I have this other pink color. Then you can just go ahead, try it out. Nothing is right, Nothing is wrong, you can just try until you find something that you like. This is part of my process, the trial and error thing. I don't mind that I don't know from the start what I want. I just try and see what I feel works with this piece of art, how I feel that the colors interact. Maybe this really saturated pink doesn't look that good with all of these other pale colors. Then I might go a little bit more for a pale pink if I would like to add a pink to this one. Let's try out to change the color of the orange and the berries as well. Oh, I didn't select that one. Tap the color, tap select, and then I'm going for green again. Here here feel that something is happening that I like this green thing. So I go for that again and try that out. Try out this combination with a pink instead of the brown, and yeah, it's all a trial and error thing for me. Then let's go ahead to the last group. Is it this one? Yeah. I will change the lemon. Maybe I want that one to be, let's go for Let's go for apricot color for that one. The apple we can try out maybe a brown color. That might be fun, maybe the banana can be blue. Here's something else. This popping, the banana is popping, and we have all of these monochrome colors with a brownish, apricot, pinkish color. Let's see what we want to do with lemon. The lemon might be nice like that. Oh, I really like where this is heading now. As you can see, this is how I go about it. I just try, I use color blocking to see how the colors interact. Green here, green there, pink, pink. Then I can see if my palette is cohesive, if it works together and all of those sort. The next thing I might want to do is to try backgrounds. Let's go ahead and try a background for this one. Maybe I will use a darker background for that one, and I'm using a mono line number 2 brush and I just draw a really rough background. That looks pretty cool. Then I might add a new background to that one. Maybe I want to try a really pink, let's try out this one. That looks pretty cool, but it's too saturated for my taste. So I will just go for paler pink, maybe even a little bit more red in it. That looks pretty cool, but then I don't like how the green interacts with the pink, and now the strawberries disappear. As you can see, you can just try and see what works. Maybe that one is nice, it's calm, it gives a calmer feeling. This one is my favorite so far. Let's try to add a background to that one. It is not that one. It is this one. What do I want to add? Maybe a pale pink. Oh, I'm really digging how this looks. I really really like this one. It has soft colors, pastel colors, it has popping colors, and green that grounds it and takes it down a little bit more. I really like this combination. Let's leave it like that for now, and then add a background to this one. Should we try a bluish or green? Let's try green. Oh, that's a little bit too much. I'll just erase that one there. That's a little bit too green for me. It's vibrating the colors next to each other, the blue and the green and the pink. I will want some green color, but I think I will go through a little bit more pale green and maybe a little more gray in it. Something like this. This looks really really nice for me now. I'm digging all of these color combinations. But now I start to think, which one do I like the most? How do I like the colors, how they interact, and all of that. At this moment, I feel that I really really like this combination, and I think that this is the one that I will continue with. 9. Create a Palette: Now I have decided that I want to go forward with this color palette. I can of course, save this for later. I might find that I want to use it for something else, but for this particular drawing, I want to use this palette. What I do then is that I go back to gallery and I select this artboard, duplicate it, and then I go into the copy. Let's see where we had that one. It's this one, so then I go ahead and delete all of the others because I have saved that in the other document. I will select both of these and we'll increase the size. If you work with Procreate, which is a raster app, you probably know that the resolution will decrease. You will get a lower resolution when you increase the size of your artwork. If you create the final piece of artwork, you should never increase the size like I do here. But for this, we are just making a color palette sample image. We won't use this for anything else, but fetching the colors for our palette. I don't mind if I increase the size of the artwork and lose some resolution. I don't mind that at all for this purpose. Now I go and create a new layer, and I will actually create a new palette as well, and then I just go ahead and I can use my monoline number 1 brush from favorite company, which is free to download in this class. I will just go ahead and fetch my colors and create the dots. But I feel that that dot was a little bit too small, so I will just draw my dots. That beige and maybe this pink after that. You can choose if you want to dot your colors or if you want to draw like me, it really doesn't matter. Let's go ahead and fetch that pink, and that yellow, then green, and there's this brownish and the vanilla white color. I want to have it a little bit more centers. I select that one and I center it to the bottom of my artboard. Here I have my palette. It is made out of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 colors. I don't include the black color that is line color for now. I could if I want to, but I could also take away the line color and see that this palette looks really good without the black as well. The last thing we will do is to add these colors to a palette, and then I could just add them in an order that I feel look pretty just because it's prettier and more fun, or you could just go ahead and add them in any order that you wish. Here you have your finished color palette that you can use for anything that you wish for artwork for all future, and you find the inspiration from real life, from your unique photos, which makes this palette completely unique to you. 10. Thank You: That's all for this class. Thank you so much for watching. If you liked this class, hit the Follow button by my name to make sure that you don't miss out on my future classes. If you have any questions at all, please ask them on the Discussions page here in class. Feel free to leave a review to let me know if you enjoyed this class, I would love to hear your thoughts. Make sure you share your project here in class. If you post it on Instagram, feel free to tag me @maja_faber. Thanks again for watching.