Design a Color Theory Poster in Adobe Illustrator - Color & Design for Beginners

1. Class Introduction: Hey, there friend, are you new to the world of art and design? Maybe you didn't make it to design school, and that's okay. That's why we have Skillshare, right so that we can learn more about the things that we love that maybe we didn't have the time or resources to before. If you're into art and design, then you probably love color as much as I do. Maybe you're eager to learn about co and working with color harmonies. Maybe you want to learn more about vocabulary. Maybe you want to learn more about mixing colors digitally with apps like Adobe Illustrator. Whatever it is, I got you. I'm Chico. I'm an artist, designer, and design educator. I have several courses on skill share on art and design. I also teach a signature course on color called Color camp. Here's a peek at some of my work. You can always go to studio chico.com to see more of my work. If you're interested in learning more about color and design with me, then check out my other courses on Skillshare or join me in my design club for free at chico dot circle. That's Chico with a x. Don't forget. Now, when we think about color theory and mixing colors, we usually think about mixing colors with paints. Yellow and blue, green. Most people know those basics. But today, we're going to learn a little bit more about color theory and color harmonies as we make a poster together in Adobe Illustrator. Through this project, you're going to learn more about color theory and color harmonies. You're going to build your essential color vocabulary. You're going to learn tips and tricks for Mine and working with digital color and the fundamental tools and workflows of Adobe Illustrator. You'll see me working with Adobe Illustrator hands on. In the end, you're going to have a gorgeous color theory poster that you're going to be able to use digitally or you're going to be able to take to your local print shop and print it out and hang it in your own space. Let's get ready to learn about color and jump into Adobe Illustrator. 2. Project: In this course, I'll teach you the basics of color theory, and you'll learn some fundamentals of Adobe Illustrator as we design a color theory poster together in Adobe Illustrator. I'll teach you about color theory and color harmonies. You'll build your essential color vocabulary, tips, tricks for mixing and working with digital color, and fundamental tools and work flows in Adobe Illustrator. As I teach you the basic concepts of color theory, I'll walk you through step by step, designing a color theory poster in Adobe Illustrator. You'll see how I use hands on some of the most essential and basic tools of Adobe Illustrator. You'll get a better feel for using the selection tools, using the shape tools, using the type tools and applying color to shapes and objects. After this course, you're going to have a beautifully designed color theory poster that you can use digitally, or you can take it to your local print shop and have it printed out. You can hang it on your wall or your space. I can't wait to see what you create, so let's get started and jump into Adobe Illustrator together. Now all you're going to need for this course is Adobe Illustrator. I'm going to be using the desktop version If you have the iPad version, your interface is probably going to be a little bit different. But if you can find your way around, you can probably figure out some of the basic tools. But once again, I'm teaching this in Adobe Illustrator on the desktop. I can't wait to get started building our color theory posters. Let's jump into Adobe Illustrator together. I'll see you in there. 3. Create your file in Adobe Illustrator: All right, here we are going to do Illustrator, and now it's time to make a color theory poster together. First thing I want to do is open a new file. So once you have illustrator open, you can go to file new up here. You can also press command in or press new file in this interface. Here, you'll see some selections of file types, and I'm going to start with rt and Illustration. Art and Illustration starts in RGB color mode, and I prefer to start my work in an RGB color mode because I have a wider variety of colors available to me when I work in RGB. This is because RGB has a greater color gamut than CMYK. So I prefer to start with RGB because I can get exciting colors like neon and really vibrant paints with RGB that I can't achieve in C MIK. So let's start by giving our poster a title. Let's call it color theory poster. Okay. And let's change it to measurement. We're more familiar with, so let's change it to inches. And let's do a standard paper size. You can do any size you want. You could even do it horizontal if I do a vertical. You could do it on a letter size paper. You could do it so that it fits your screen size if you wanted to save it as a wallpaper on your desktop. You could do it any size you want. But I'm going to do it at 11 by 17, which is a standard taid sides in the US. And it's basically two letter sheets put together. But we're going to do it vertical. So it's 11 by 17 " for our poster. This is something that you could take and print out at your local print shop, and they should be able to print this out for you. And that's all we really need to worry about for this particular exercise. So let's just cook create. And now we have our 11 by 17 TableLize artboard. 4. Prepare your workspace in Adobe Illustrator: Before we get started, I want to make sure we're all on the same page, and there's a few tools I want to make sure you have accessible. First, I want to make sure you have a character tool accessible. This panel, you can find over in window and go down to type and find character. It's also Command T. Okay. The next window I want to make sure that you have available is a line. You can also find that under Window. Align. The next tool I want to make sure you have available is the color panel. You could find that in your window colored. The next tool is watches. We're going to get a window, Swatches, and also stroke. Make sure you have that elevated. Some of them may pop up as fool panels. Some of them may be collapsed into a menu bar like this. But you can play with it and set it up the way that you'd like. My goal for you for this lesson is to learn about color theory, to pick up some tips and tricks about Adobe Illustrator and learn how to mix color in Adobe Illustrator the way that I think about mixing color. 5. Getting Started in Black & White: All right. So let's just get started. We're going to use a type tool. You just click on a Type tool, click up in the corner and you're going to see it's going to give you some pre filled text. And it's already highlighted so I can start typing. I'm going to type color theory. Okay. I'm going to click on my selection tool. I'm going to use command space bar to zoom in, and I can see. Here's my type. So we can go over the character tool now and we can change our type face here. And I'm just going to start typing in Proxima Nova. The type face. I use a lot. It's my favorite current sana type base. And let's do semi bolt. And here I can control the size. I can click here and control the point size. So let's start with 36. That'll be a large header. And I'm going to press command zero to Zoom out. All right, now I could see my full poster. So I'm just going to arrange this. When I like to arrange my artwork on my artboard, I'm always conscious of the negative space. So I'm looking at this empty space here that frames my text. I don't want my text to fill too high to that edge and to open here, nor do I want it to fill too close to that edge and to open there. So I'm really looking at how this corner of the text sits within the page here. Now I'm going to zoom in, and I'm going to turn on my rulers. You can go to view and scroll down the rulers and show rulers. F my key command. It's command R, you might have a different key command. Now with our rulers shown, we can go over here to the ruler and we can click and drag and we can drag over a guide. I'm just going to drag over a guide here so I can see where my C is. While we're talking about guides, let's turn on our smart guides. I'm going to go to view and just make sure your smart guides is checked right there. You can toggle them on and off by pressing Command U. I'm going to collapse this window by pressing the arrow there. And when I'm doing that little trick of zooming in and out, I'm doing Space bar Option command. That gives me zooming out and command Space bar gives me zooming in. That's just by clicking. I can also marquee to zoom into a specific area. Okay. And if I want to see the full page, command zero. All right. So when we first think about color theory, people usually think about the color wheel. But I'm going to start with black and white. Understanding black and white is so important when it comes to talking about color. Black and white is at the base of understanding value in contrast. These are two of the most important aspects of color theory. They provide equilibrium to our designs. So I'm just going to zoom in here, and let's start by slipping our ellips tool. I'm just going to draw a circle. Here. It just pull it down, and holding shift to keep it in alignment. And I'm going to make a copy of color theory here by holding option and then holding shift to keep it in alignment. All right. I'm just going to pull it down a little bit. And I'm going to double click here and write black and white. All right. Now, let's just make a copy of this by holding option again and holding shift. You can see that pink guide is a smart guide and it's constraining that alignment. All right. Now I'm going to go over here and make this white just by clicking the fill, and we can't see the circle, so let's give it a light stroke. Let's just give it a light gray. Down here, you could see our gray scale. Now we can see that there's white there. That gray scale might be too faint. We might need more contrast so we can make it a darker gray. I'm going to go up. And that's better. We get the idea that that's black and white. 6. Black & White Vocabulary: So when we talk about black and white, there are some key words we want to understand. One is contrast. One is value? One is a chromatic. Before we get into these definitions, I want to just highlight my text, and I'm going to go a little bit smaller with my point size. So let's just click this and we can go down to 82 point. Okay. I just getting some visual alignment here. Okay, so let's talk about contrast. So I'm just going to go back here and let's start typing in the definition of contrast. I've actually copied it and pasted of my clipboard already, so I'm gonna cheat. What a past to do here. Contrast is the difference in lightness, saturation, or hue between two colors. High contrast colors create a bold and visually striking effect, while low contrast colors appear more subtle and harmonious. So an example of high contrast is black and white. You can see that these really play off each other in a very strong way. I'm going to just select these two and pull them down. And now, if I take this black, let's say a little bit lighter, and I take this white, a little bit darker. Now I have a low contrast, and these colors don't have as strong as a reaction to each other. I'm going to zoom in here so you can see something. You can see that I still have this gray circle around here. I don't need this. In this case. I still need it in this case to define the edge of this because this would have no contrast with the background. If it was white, it would just bleed out into the white. But here, I can go to my stroke and I can hide my stroke. And now I have a nicer feel between my colors. By having that lighter stroke there, I almost creates a little bit of a vibration between these two colors. Now these feel more harmonious. I can take these even lower contrast by taking the color a little bit darker. That's the same color, but that's even lower contrast. I can increase the contrast by making this darker. Let's go back to this one, and we'll keep this as an example of low contrast. Let's just take our type tool here and we'll type. By contrast. Let's make this a little bit smaller in character size. Go to 12. Is this whole option. I'm going to drag it up here. Here, I'm just going to use this one now to type low. All right. And we could arrange this maybe a little bit nicer. I'm just going to drag over these two so they're together. Pull this down a little bit. All right. So let's get to our next definition. Value. I have it ready on my clip board as well. I'm going to paste it in here. And I'm just going to click here and hit Return. And I'm going to click over here and hit Return. All right. I'm going to go right here in front of the word value. And hit return. I'm going to go here from the word A chromatic and hit return. Now I'm starting to get more form to my poster here. And I work very loose like this all the time. And as I work, it starts to take on its own appearance, and we'll go and fine tune everything at the end and really get this poster looking beautiful. But for now, we're going to kind of put everything in there as a placeholder, and we'll get it off the end beautifully soon. Let's get back to value. Value describes the lightness or darkness of color. Lighter colors have a higher value, while darker colors have a lower value. Imagine turning on the brightness knob up or down on a color. We'll get more into understanding value a little bit later. Now, the last word we have on our list is A chromatic. I have this ready here on my clipboard as well. I'm going to go right here front of color ps and return and Let me break the thought here at shades. Achromatic. These are colors that have no hue, meaning they lack colorfulness, which we typically associate with colors. Black, white, and all shades of gray are considered achromatic. All right, so let's take our type and just pull it up here a little bit. You can see that I'm getting some suggestions with this pink line, and that is my smart kinds at work. And let's see. We could probably bring this type down a little bit in size. So it's 18 point, t's take it down to 14 point, so we have more space. 7. Value + Grayscale: Okay, let's put in some more examples of value now. I'm going to just draw another circle. And I'm not going to worry about this being the same size. I actually want to make this a little bit smaller. There's no particular size. And I'm just got a line it over here. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold option to make a copy, and I'm going to hold shift, and I'm going to release it. Now I'm going to press command D, and that's going to duplicate that move. We went about nine or ten circles. Okay. Let's put on this side, white. Now, up here, I'm representing white with a gray stroke. So I can simply click eye for the eye dropper tool. Click here, and now I already have that filled in exactly the way that I want it to be. Now I'm going to go here and refer to this preset gray scale that Illustrator already has. So I'm going to start. Just going in here. We don't have to get everyone to understand this concept. But these are basically done in steps of 10%. So you can see here that we have a range now of colors going from 100% black, all the way down to 0%, which would be white. The reason why I say 0% is because think about your printing in on a piece of paper. And if you had all of the, the black coming out of your printer, for example, you would have 100% fill, 100% black. If you had no ink, it would be 0% and it would show the paper and represent white. So that's why I described it going from 100% down to 0%. You can see that here in the middle, we would have a 50% gray, and then maybe this would be a 10%, and this would be a 70% or 80%. So we have all these different percentages of gray. This gives us a gray scale, but it also represents what we call value here. So when we associate a color, for example, I have this green, and let me just make a quick copy of that. And I have this green, and I may have this green. We can see that there's a certain darkness to this. It's somewhere more down in this world. Probably right around here is the value of this color. This has a different darkness, and it's probably right about here in value. You can see that when this color is close to this gray, they almost merge together in a way. Whereas, when we bring this down here, they have higher contrast. So we know this isn't the same value. And this value is somewhere in the lighter zone probably right around here. So every color has a value and understanding how that value relates back to gray scale is going to help you understand contrast, and it's going to help you understand how to use color better in your patterns. So let's just select all three of these and delete these. All right. And I'm just going to hold option and shift to bring this down. So we have a copy of our text that's exactly the same pot and everything. And we can just type value. 8. Create Your Color Wheel: Now, let's talk about the color wheel. This is really what everybody thinks about when they think about color theory. One thing I really want you to understand about color theory is that these are not rules. These are simply guideline. There are so many ways of thinking about color theory. And the way I'm about to teach you is the most common way that many of us have learned in primary school or in high school or in college when we learn about color and mixing color and thinking about color. The reason why I teach you this way is because it is the most universal way of understanding color. But it's really important to remember that this isn't the only way of understanding color. Ancient civilizations like Egyptians, Greeks, and Nso American cultures believe colors stem from elements like fire, water, and Earth. In the 17th century, Sir Isaac Dutton revolutionized things, he experimented with light passing through a prism, discovering that discovering the spectrum and laying the groundwork for the color wheel. While Newton's wheel wasn't quite the one that we know it today, it inspired further exploration. Johan Wolsky Van Go, a writer and scientist is credited with creating the familiar circular arrangement of colors in the early 1800s. Color theory continued to evolve with different artists and scientists proposing various color harmonies and relationships. The invention of synthetic pigment in the 19th century allowed artists to experiment with a wide range of color, further solidifying the importance of color theory and artistic expression. Artists like Itty, Bear and Albers, have all greatly influenced the way we think about the interaction of color, and they've greatly had an influence on my understanding and relationship of color. So the color wheel is a fundamental tool for us. But remember, it's only a guideline. And today, there are other people in the world who still think about color very differently. I look to my friends and Totin Delve and Wahaca and see how they have used for generations a color theory that's based on natural dyes and the availability of color, but also while using science to alter the colors by adding acid with things like lime to greatly change the color right before your eyes. Alright. Let's make one of those color wheels from the 1800s. First thing I want to do is hold Option and make a copy of this text, so we have the same size. I'm going to take my type tool. Double click in type color wheel. All right. To get started, I'm just going to use one of the circles we already have here. I'm just going to hold option and copy it. It doesn't have to be in alignment, but you can see that our handy guides are trying to suggest where it should go for us. Now, what I need to do is I need to make 12 circles in a circle. So I need to make a circle about this size with 12 circles. Why do I say about this size? Because I'm imagining one, two, three, about a quarter of the way round, four, five, six, so that's about halfway. I need to create a point of rotation somewhere here in the middle. I'm going to zoom in. And let me just select this. What I'm going to do is bring over a guide again. And then I'm going to imagine right between the center of these two. We're about there. Okay. I'm going to go to view and make sure that my guides are locked. Lock guides. All right. My guides are locked. Now, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to create my 12 circles starting with this circle. Let's delete this. And I'm going to click my circle. I'm going to click the rotate tool. And now, let me zoom in here. You can see that I have a little blue axis mark. See that little mark right in the center there. That little crosshair there represents the center of axis where it's going to rotate. So if I rotate a circle, you're never going to see what actually happens because it's just going to be rotating right in place. But I want my point of axis to rotate from down here. So how do I do that? I use my rotation tool and I hold option and I click right where I want it to rotate from. So click right there. And now I'm going to enter I'm no mathematician, so I don't know how many 12 is in 360. I'm going to enter 360 degrees because I know that's how many degrees are in a circle, and I know I want 12. I'm going to hit my slash key on my keyboard, and then I'm going to enter the number 12. I have 360 degrees divided by 12. Illustrator is going to do this math for me. I'm going to hit copy, and you can see it popped one right there. Now I'm going to hit command D to duplicate, and I just keep hitting that. And you can see now I have 12 circles perfectly in a circle with each other. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make these into a group right now so I can move them all together. Right now, they're just individuals. So I'm going to mark drag over everything. Command G to group. Now I'm going to color these all a lighter gray, and I'm just going to move them tuck a little bit more here under this title. 9. Primary Colors: The first color harmony to learn is primary colors. Primary colors are the colors that all other colors could be made from theoretically. So we're going to double click into our group now, and we're going to start with red. I'm going to drag my swatches out over here so they're closer to where I'm working, so I can work quicker. We're going to start with red, and I'm just going to use the illustrator preset colors here. And then we're going to add yellow. And then we're going to add blue. These are our three primary colors. I'm going to go over here and click the Polygon tool, and you can see that my smart guys are letting me know where the center of those two circles are. So I know that's the center there. And I'm going to click my Polygon tool, and I'm going to click the Polygon tool. I'm going to enter three for triangle and click Okay, and now I'm just going to click the corner. I'm going to hold options so it drags from the center and hold shifts so it stays constrained. Now I'm going to go over here and flop my fill and stroke, bring my stroke to the front, and I'm going to color this gray. So this is called a triadic harmony, and these are three primary colors. So let's make a note of this. So what we're going to do now is select this whole group. I'm going to hold Option and drag it down here. And I'm going to make this a little bit smaller. So let's use our scale tool and double click it, and I'm going to say uniform, and let's say 35%. Okay. So now we have a little diagram down here. One thing I want to point out is, you can see that we can barely see this triangle. This is important to remember as a designer. When you're scaling the strokes, they scale small. So this stroke right here when I double click into my group and look at it, it's one point. When we scaled it, if I double click here and look at it, it's 0.35. That's because we scaled it 35%. I might want to make this one point so it's more visible at a smaller scale. Okay? Remember that when you're working with fine lines in your artwork, that that same concept also applies. Let's grab one of our little text headers here. I'm going to hold option, and just drag it down. And let's go here. Double click. And right primary. All right. So these are our primary colors. The next color group we want to think about are secondary colors. 10. Secondary Colors: Secondary colors are a mix of primary colors, red and yellow make orange. Let's double click into our group, and we're going to select orange. Now, yellow and blue make green and blue and red, make purple or violet. Now we're going to turn our triangle. I'm going to go over here. You can see my tal rotation tool pops up when I get to the close to the corner. I'm going to hold shift. So it rotates in increments, and it's 180 degrees. You can see there's a little box right next to my arrow that says 180. So now, these are our secondary colors. So let's make a little note of this. I'm going to double click out of my isolation mode. I'm going to select my group. I'm going to hold option and drag it down. I'm going to double click on my uniform scale. This time, where it says scale stroke and effects. I'm going to click off of. Now it's not going to scale my stroke. My stroke will be the same size and it will look like this, so it is still visible. All right. So now my stroke is the same size. Let's just zoom in here. And let's get these in on. There we go. And let's double click into our group. I'm going to hold shift and select the three primary colors, and let's wake them back to the gray color. All right. And now we're going to hold Option and hold shift to keep it locked in. You could see I got my smart guy that aligned me there. I'm going to double click here and type secondary. 11. Tertiary Colors: Now our next colors. We're going to fill in our tertiary colors. The tertiary colors are made of a mix of a primary and secondary color. Click into our group. Red and orange, make red orange. Orange and yellow, yellow orange. Yellow and green, yellow green. Green and blue, blue green. Blue and violet, blue violet. Violet and red make red violet. These now are our tertiary colors, and they complete our color wheel. You might have noticed that when I'm saying the names of these, that the primary color always comes before the secondary color in the naming. So it's not orange, red, it's red, orange. It's not green, blue, it's blue, green, because we always refer to the primary color first. Okay. Now, let's make a note of this. This time we're going to have to change our shape here. So let's double click into here and I'm going to delete this. And let's go back and grab a polygon. And I'm just going to get in the center there and click one. And this time we need to have a hexagon, so we're going to intersex and hit. And I'm just going to scale that out. We have it at one point. And now let's double click out. I'm going to drag this down. I'm going to double click. It's already set at 35%. I'm going to click. Let's just a lining up there. There we go. I'm going to hold option and bring this over. Double click with my type tool tertiary. And then let's double click into our color group, and now I'm going to hold shift and select our primary colors, then our secondary colors and color those gray. Now we have our tertiary colors. 12. Color Vocabulary: Now, what's that a few more definitions to our color chart here? I'm just going to click this group of texts, and I'm going to hold option and make a copy of it and just bring it down here. I'm going to zoom in. I'm just going to go in here. Command A to select all. I'm going to start typing my new text. Double return. Double return and brightness. These are important words to know. People often use the word hue and color interchangeably. Hue really refers to the purity of color, the pure color itself. So it's almost as if you're talking about the color on the color wheel. Let's blow swatches back over here. And I'm just going to go over here and going to think and hit return. So if saying red, blue, green, orange, that's hue. It's the purity of color, the pure color. Now, saturation is the intensity or the purity of color. So When we have pure color, and when we're referring to hue, that has the most saturation adding gray or black or white to our color, It has less saturation. So a high saturation means it's a very vibrant and strong color. While low saturation is dull or grayed out. Imagine adding gray to a pure color. The more gray you add, the less saturated it becomes. Now, brightness is the lightness or darkness of color. Think value. Brightness is essentially value. It is what I showed you. Where does that color lie in terms of the gray scale? Hue is the pure color. Saturation is the intensity or the amount of purity of the color, and brightness is the level of lightness or darkness of that color. Now, these are important to understand because when we talk about mixing color digitally, these are the three key elements that we're looking at to mix our color. Let's move on and talk about some other concepts. I'm going to grab one of these up here by holy option. I'm just going to bring it over here to the edge. 13. Shade, Tint, Tone: So let's move on and talk about some other concepts. I'm going to grab one of these up here by Holy Option. I'm just going to bring it over here to the edge. Now, let's talk about shade, tint, and tone. So I'm going to start with this one circle, and I'm going to make a copy of it. And I'm going to press Command D to make another copy and Command D to make another copy and Command D to make one more copy. I'm just going to grab this by holding option and locking it in. And I'm going to write double click. Shade. Now I have this little group. I'm going to highlight and select everything. And whole option and select the whole group, and this one I'm going to call it. Let's just highlight that again and drag it down. It's called this one Tone. Let's make a tin tone and shade of all the same color. I'm going to just hold shift and I'm going to drag across each of these sets of circles, and I'm going to make them all the same color. You can choose any color for this exercise. I'm going to choose this biro purple. Now, we're all starting with the same purple color. First thing I want to do is I want to add black to get a shade. So I'm going to go here to the next one. I'm going to go to my color panel, and I'm going to double click to put my color picker. Now, this is my favorite way of mixing color in Illustrator. Now you might remember some things I just taught you, Hue saturation and brightness. What do we see right here, Hue saturation, brightness. We also see RGB for red, green, and blue. We also have the Hex code if you want to put a hex code for your color, and then we have the CMYK color measurements. I never check this only web colors. This is older technology, and you don't really need to worry about that. So let me show you here. This is our hue when we're talking about hue. Up in the corner here, I have my brightest version of this hue. This has the most saturation. This has the most saturation of color here in this hue. If I go up, I change the hue to red, I change the hue to blue, and this is always the highest point of saturation of any of these hues I'm choosing. You can see that the hues moving only and the saturation and brightness are staying exactly the same. I'm going to go cancel to undo that, and let's go back into it now. Double click into here. I showed you Hue. Well, now we're talking about adding shade. If I go down here, I'm in the same hue, but I'm making it darker, so I'm making a shade. Shade is adding black. If I go up to this corner, I'm adding white. This is making a tent. So across this edge are your tints, at the highest saturation, highest purity of color. These are your shades at the highest purity of color. And then going diagonally down, we're making tones because we're adding gray. This is the way to think about when you're creating and mixing paints by hand, you're adding white to create a tint. You're adding black to make a shade or you're adding gray and sometimes in painting a complimentary color to make a tone. But we don't do that really in Adobe Illustrator. This is the best way to think about making your shades tints and tones. So we're in the zone of our hue we want to be in, and we're going to go down here and just make this a little bit darker shade than the one before. And I'm going to click Okay. Now I'm going to click this one. I'm going to use my eye dropper tool. I select this color, and I'm going to start with this darker color now because I know that that's darker and I just want to go a little bit darker than that dark. I'm going to click Okay, click this, use my eye dropper tool. Double click into my color picker and go a little bit darker. And then I'm going to click this one. You guys, click back. Double click here. I'm going to go darker, but I don't want to get quite black. I want to be right in that kind of burnt egg plant color. And those give me a wide range of shades starting with this color. So now let's use the same concept to make tints. So we have our original color here, and I'm going to start here with this one and double click. And I'm just going to go up and add a little bit of white. I'm to go in that direction, but not quite up all the way. I'm staying, so it's kind of more of a pastel and has a little bit of a gray tone to it, you can see in this zone. I'm going to click. Okay. Now I'm going to click here. I for the eye drop your tool. Click the one to four. Double click into my color picker and go back up here a little bit wider. And click Okay. I'm going to click here. Now you can see that I have a range of tints. Now let's add a range of tone. I'm me start with this one. Double click here. Go to the cray direction. I drop looked at the C picker. This one. And you can see I'm getting these ashy purple colors. They're not quite blacks, but they have more of a subdued color to them. Now we have shade, tint and tone. Go up here and make a note of what that is. Adding black to a color. Dd white to color. Add gray color. All right. So those are tint shade and to. 14. RGB, CMYK, Mixing Color Digitally: Now, at the very beginning, I told you that I like to work in RGB versus CMYK. That's because RGB has a wider range of colors in CMYK. Let me illustrate this to you. Let's grab one of these little circles to start with, and we'll just start working up here in this area. Let's grab one of these little headers. Hold the option again. RGB. RGB is red, green, and blue. RGB is colors used for the screen. That means websites, video, apps. Everything is used by mixing light. So when I click this red, we can see up here in our color mixer. If your says something different, you can click here and we have the different color mixers. We have gray scale, RGB, saturation brightness, and C MIK I never use that. So we're going to keep it in RGB right now, and you can see that means that all the reds turned on. If I turn all the red light off, I get black. That means there's no light coming through the screen. I turn red on, A reds coming through the screen. If I add green to it, we start to mix color. I add blue to it, we start to mix color. I can see here that if I wanted to get a pink here, I need to add blue to get that pink. Okay. Now, when I click the green, you can see all the green turned on and the other colors are turned off, and blue is also pure blue. Well, when I click this color, it's a very bright vibrant ee on green, right? Let me copy this and bring this down here. So I have this very bright neon green. So if I wanted to design a pattern and pitch it to a client and show them my vision that I wanted it in neon, I could do that in RGB. The thing is my work is always seen on screen first, either in my portfolio or on my website before it gets to a client. This is my opportunity to use all the color I want to communicate the way that I want my collection or my patterns to look. But you can see right here I have a little warning sign, and when I roll over, it says out of gamut warning. If I click this, it's going to change it to a different color. Well, that color is the closest color that CMYK can create. CMY K cannot create this bright vibrant green because it doesn't have that range of color. That's why I prefer to start in RGD because I can get colors that I can in CMYK. The thing is, I can always take color out. What I mean is there's more information here. I can always go down to this color if I change it from RGB to CMYK. But if I change it from CMYK to RGB, that doesn't make a difference. Let me show you what I mean by that. I'm going to go and open a new file, and I'm going to start with print because print is a CMYK color profile, and I'm just going to hit Create. Watch what happens? When I go from this RGB, you can see up here, it says RGB, and over on this one, CMI K, I'm going to hold shift, and I'm going to select both of these colors. This one's RGB, and this is the CMYK limitation. So command C to copy. And when I paste those into here, this new CMIK document, command V to paste, you can see that they're both this dark green. That's because this is a CMYK profile, and it can't create any other green brighter than this. If I copy these from CMIK, and paste them back into this document, Command V to paste. You can see that this color didn't return to be brighter because the color was removed when I put it into CMYK. But when I turn it back to RGB, RGB doesn't know that it needs to add color, it thinks that this is what I want. So that's why I always start with RGB because I have a wider range of color to work with in my patterns, and I love color, as you know. So let's make a little CMYK chart. Let's just copy this group. And pull it down here. And we need another circle because we have four colors. Okay. We have our four circles. So let's double click our type and change it to CMYK. And let's change our example colors here. So let's click the first one, and let's change our color mixer to CMYK. We're still in an RGB color profile for our file, but we can change the way we mix color using these tools here in the color panel. So I'm changing CMYK. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull all of these down to the left, and they all say zero. Now, when I add all C for this cyan, that means that I'm adding Cyan ink. Remember when we had RGB and we turn them all off, they were black. Well, these when we turn them all off, they're white. That's because we're not mixing with light, now we're mixing with the idea of ink, and CMYK is also known as the four color process. This is the most common way of printing many materials. You might be familiar with it with your own printer at home. When we add Cyan to 100%, that means we're printing 100% Cyan on When we add cyan to 100%, that means when we print something, we're printing 100% CAN. We go here and we can pull magenta to 100% and pull these down to zero, and this means we're printing 100% magenta. If we pull these down. Then we go 100 yellow, we're printing 100% yellow and the same with black. These four colors are used to print multiple colors by mixing these colors as they're printed. This is usually done with tiny little dots. This is what we know as DPI. With these four colors, we can create almost any color, but remember, they have to be within that gamut range of CMYK. So let me just pull one of these down. I'm just hold the option. And now let's think about mixing these colors in the way we think about color theory a little bit. If I wanted this to be more purple and I had this much magenta, I can start sliding this toward the adding cyan, and I'm getting purple. If I want it to be more blue, I take out more magenta. You can see that this is giving me suggestions of where that color is going to go as I add more or subtract more. So let's pull down another way here. And let's say I want to make an orange color. More orange. I talked about blue. Is making it dirty looking. Maybe more peachy, so I take out color. So you can see that that's another way that you can mix color using these color mixers. But you're thinking about the idea that this is almost like blue and red or blue and yellow. You know, the way we think about color theory. So that's a way to think about mixing color when it comes to CMYK. Let's put here on our RGB, green. Let's put CMYK. Four color process print. Now we're starting to understand a little bit about mixing color and color relationships. Let's pull this down here to the bottom. I'm just going to drag over all of these elements. I just bring them down a little bit to give that some space. I'm actually going to shrink this down a bit. I just holding shift and I'm dragging it down from the corner. Just getting it locked in underneath this color wheel nicely. I'm going to bring this down here as well. All right, let's talk about color harmonies. 15. Color Harmonies: All right, let's talk about color harmonies. Color harmonies are the relationships of colors on the color wheel. So I'm going to delete our little hexagon guide here, and we're just going to draw a line with our pin tool. Okay. And any two colors across from each other are complimentary colors. So red and green are complimentary colors, orange and blue, yellow and violet, and any of the tertiary colors as well can be complimentary colors. They're any color directly across from each other on the color wel. So let's make another cluster by holding option and copying this. And let's write complimentary. Complimentary colors are directly across from each other on the color wheel. So let's make some little samples of these. Let's grab a circle from here. And in Zoom. Let's make this a little bit smaller. Okay. I'm just going to hold option and make another copy. And I'm going to press I for the eye dropper tool. The first one, we'll make it red and the second one. I'm going to hold command to use my arrow tool to select the other circle and green. They can see these complimentary colors vibrate against each other. They create a really strong contrast of color. So I'm just going to select this and hold option and copy this. And command D, command D, command D, command D to make multiple copies. And we don't need to do all of them. But let's do orange and brown. Let's do. All right. Those are complimentary color pairs. Let's drive over everything here and let's whole option and bring that down. Let's go on to our next color harmony, which is split complimentary. Those are two colors adjacent on each side of the complement of the chosen color. I have to hit return here. In here. And we're just going to drag split the lot pies and bring them down. Split complementary. Let's look at what this looks like. Split complimentary. If we take this, make this shorter, and we say that we're looking at this color and this color. We're looking at the two colors adjacent to the complimentary color. If our color is red, then the complement of it is green, and the split complement is yellow green and blue green. Let's look at what that looks like here. Let's just delete these. Drag this over, and we're going to have this color and this color. That's the split complement. I'm just make these. Let's look at the split complement orange, for example. Which would be we look across that's blue and that would be blue green and blue violet. Then we add blue violet. All right. Let's make this one. Let's take a look at violet. I'm going to grab. Violet, and that would be yellow orange and yellow green. So you can continue to fill in the other split complimentary combos, as many as you like for your examples. Let's grab this now and pull it down, and let's talk about the nods colors. Analogous colors are three or more often thought of as three colors next to each other. On the color wheel. Let's take a look here. In this case, we are example. In this case, I'm going to make a circle. I'm going to use my scissors C for scissors tool. I'm just going to cut each of these two points here. And I'm going to delete. See this half is selected. I could see my vector path and this one is not selected. So I'm going to hit delete twice, and now I have just this one little piece selected. So Analogous or any colors right here next to each other on the color wheel. I basically can drop my rotate tool here and rotate around at any three colors that I can find next to each other are analogous colors. That's an analogous harmony. This is analogous harmony. This is an analogous harmony. These are all analogous harmonies. Now, when we talk about analogous colors, we also are looking at the idea of warm and cool colors. Basically, all of this side are all cool colors. And from the yellow over to the red or all warm colors. So these are all warm and these are all cool. So that's an important thing to remember when we're thinking about working with analogous colors. So let's draw some analogous palettes right here. Let's start with this little red zone. So we're going plus for our eye dropper tool, who option to select another circle. Let's do one here around green. We have this color and I would be this blue. That's an analogous palette. Let's do one here a purple. We've got our violet here, and we could do and vile. These are all analogous colors. The last concept that I want to introduce you to is monochromatic. This is a color scheme based on one color. This means that you're using, tone and shade all one color. Let's go back and look at some of these tin tones and shades that we used. I'm just going to click each one of these here with my eye dropper tool. Let's get some tens. Let's get to. Let's get some toed. Okay. So you can see that this entire color palette is based on one color, our original color using tints, tones and shades. And these are great ways to do subtle colors, to add highlights to your work, and to use tone on tone textures in your background. These are great ways to also execute blinders. So keep these color schemes in mind. Now, you can see that we have a really lovely poster taking shape here. I'm just going to drag this, select everything. Just move it up a little bit to get everything a little bit of air. And I'm going to go make my head a little bit bigger here. Actually, let me make it black, and I'm just going to make it 48 points. All right. I'm going to bring it down just a little bit. Lastly, I'm going to double click into here and just remove this one little curve. I'm going to press command. Si Micol and to hide my guides, and now we can see our beautiful color the poster. 16. Print Your Poster: And now we can see our beautiful color theory poster. Now, to get this ready to print at your local printer, you can go to file, save a copy, select PDF. Click Save. You can go down and find high quality print. Neck, preserve Illustrator capabilities, that way no one can edit your Illustrator file and select Save PDF, and you should be good to go. I hope you've enjoyed creating this color theory poster with me, and I can't wait to see how this insight and knowledge helps change your work going forward in the future. 17. Thank you!: Well, hey, there, how did the go, Color Pro? I'm sure you are well versed in the world of color by now. And I can't wait to see your color theory posters. So please share them in the project section here on Skillshare, or you can also share them and tag me on Instagram. If you want to learn more about color with me, join me in my signature course, Color camp. I host color camp once a year, and we go more in depth into the world of color. This is where I empower designers to gain their color confidence, have better color stories, and communicate more powerfully with color in their work. I can't wait to see you there. If you can't make it there, or, you can always join me in Chico's Design Club. This is a space for designers, artists, and creative entrepreneurs to learn more about design and level up their design and color skills. You can join for free at chico. If that isn't enough, of course, you can find much more of me here on Skillshare. You can find other courses on design and color on Skillshare, and I can't wait for you to check those out and learn more about the incredible world of design as you level up your skills. I'm Chico and until next time, keep it colorful.