Digital Illustration: Draw A Vertical Garden on Procreate iPad

1. Class Trailer: In real life, I don't have a green thumb. Every plant that was placed under my care has died. However, I really enjoyed drawing them. Actually, this class is about drawing plants. Hi, my name is Esther Nariyoshi. I'm a surface designer and illustrator based in Michigan. I'm so glad you're here. I didn't study illustration in college, I actually started out with an engineering major and ended up with advertising degree. It's serendipity of life that I ended up drawing. I fell in love with the illustration and surface design after I had my children. Illustration is definitely something that I picked up later in my life. As an artist, I've grown to like iPad for one, it's really easy to clean up. Basically, you just have to pause it. That makes it really easy to fit art-making into a busy life. In this class, we're going to draw a vertical garden together. We're going to do some clench shopping through an actual book. I'll explain to you what to consider and how to draw inspiration from a real life photo. As we move on to actual drawing, I will walk you through the entire process. You would understand why certain design decisions are made. I think this is going to be a really fun class. I'm so glad you're here. Let's get started. 2. Plant Shopping: There are a few different ways of finding your inspirations. You can go to a local garden to take your own reference pictures or do an image search on Pinterest and places like that. In this class, we're going to do our plant shopping through a book. This is a really awesome book called Decorating With Plants: What to Choose, Ways to Style, and How to Make Them Thrive, written by Baylor Chapman. I've bookmarked a few places for you to look over with me. The first one is over here. This book will give you some really good idea in terms of how to pair your plants and the container. In this case, our plants is pretty dark and very heavily textured and in contrast the author paired it with a really quiet wooden container. I think that really compliments the style of the plant. This book also shows you how to put different types of plants of different personality together in one frame. As you can see, they really vary in direction, and vary in scale. Of course, certain plants are more like the centerpiece and louder and some plants are quieter and in the background. There's a lot of wisdom to it. This particular one shows you how someone interact with a plant. If you are a artists that feels comfortable drawing body and hands and people, this might be a type of composition you want to consider. This little guy over here, if we look at the plants over here, we have one container, but there are two different type of plants that they complement each other in color and also in shape. That's another great idea we can borrow for our composition. If you like to draw animals, this is also a good idea. As you can see, this is a really good picture in terms of how many angles that has been incorporated. Some leaves are facing down, some facing front, some face backwards. You will just see a nice variety that adds volume to this plant. Even if it's a flat picture, you can tell this plant it's quite big in real life. Some beginners tend to draw all the leaves facing one direction. That will make your plant really flat, so this is a good thing to think through how you can diversify the directions of your leaves. The next one over here, this is a group of picture that's isolated to clean background. If you're not used to drawing plants, this might be a good entry point. You just focus on one type of container and one type of plant. Once you grow and feel more comfortable drawing more complex ideas then you can pair them together. But this is a good starting point. If you're thinking of drawing a really big centerpiece, this is a good photo that shows you how you can layer different types of plant and how to put in fillers so that the entire vase look really supported and that's complemented by different hues. If you're super bold and you want to draw a whole room scene, this is a good reference photo where you have plants in a background on either side of the couch, and there's also elements of a living room that you can incorporate with. But I understand this can be overwhelming for first timers, but just an idea that you can maybe pursue later on. This one is a simpler rendition of the same idea. It's a corner of a bedroom. There are different type of plants, some are further, some are closer, some are bigger, smaller. Just a pretty nice variety. That's all I want to talk about over this book, and there are plenty. If you go to a library and find something that you're really happy with, it's very likely the neighbors of this book also fall into the same category. That may save you quite a few trips. 3. Sketching: So once you have your app open, go ahead and click on the plus sign to create a new canvas. For our class, I'm going to do 12 inches by 12 inches, and I want to keep my DPI at least 300 so that it will print out a good crisp quality. Go ahead and create. First I want to pinch to zoom just a tiny bit so that all the edges of my canvas is visible. Before I start anything, I like to lay down a grid. It's pretty simple. You can just draw two lines that roughly divides the vertical space and do the same for horizontal space as well. Basically, you have nine little squares in this case. It doesn't have to be perfect. So if you're familiar with photography, you will know this is called the rule of thirds. Basically, if you place your object of interest along the lines of the grid or close to the intersection, the composition looks more interesting versus placing everything right smack in the middle. This is just the guideline, by no means that you have to rigidly align everybody along the line. But this will just give you a good framework as you start your composition. I'm just going to reduce the opacity and create a new layer. Now we're ready to sketch. There are multiple ways of approaching this. If you know that you are going to draw something super simple, you can just go ahead and, for example, draw a container and the stem of the leaves and moving on from there. But for my project, I'd like to have maybe five or six different types of plants so that we can see how they interact with one another with different shapes and contrasting colors and stuff like that. I'm going to start with maybe laying down on my containers. So I roughly know where the plans start. So I'm going to choose pretty bright color over here. I want to make sure I have a separate layer for the sketching. It doesn't have to be perfect. Maybe I want a big guy over here so the composition is balanced. Things looks pretty pointy so far. I'm going to create some round circle thing to balance the composition, and you want to vary in shapes as well as in sizes. I'm going to create a group of three over here. Since this is created on iPad, which means that you can change your mind any point later, so there's no hard commitment, you can move things around later as well. This is just a rough idea. Now I want to put in plants in them. Make sure I have a separate layer. I know I want to create some really rigid plants that goes all the way up like this. So I'll lay this down. By doing that, we have created this little space over here. To fill the space, you can either create another plant that goes up like that, or you can also create a softer plant that flows down from this particular container. At this point, I'm not really thinking about colors. I'm only looking at the space and how things can comfortably fit in this space and still have a sense of harmony. These two containers are pretty close to one another, so I'm going to move it a little bit so we have enough space to let our plants fly. I'm going to use the selection tool, free hand to laso it, and click on the arrow over here and move it just a little bit. Now let's go back to the plant layer on the top. I don't know if you remember there was a picture from the book that I showed you earlier that one container has two types of plants. I'm very inspired by that. Maybe I'll do that. One plant goes all the way up and the other one flows down. Something like that. I'm not really thinking about the shapes just yet, I'm just thinking about the general direction of my plants and how they fit with one another. Looks like these three guys can go down just a little bit so that they have space to grow upward. So maybe a cactus type of plant over here or it could be very leafy. But it's going up for sure. This one I'm not sure. There's a lot of shade and not a whole lot of space. Maybe I'll do a tiny sprout. Not everything has to be so pronounced. You add it a little bit of variation in terms of the stages of life as a plant. So we have a very young guy over here and maybe older and more mature plants over here. Just a thought. We have some space over here. You can definitely just let it be the breathing room so that your composition doesn't look too crowded. But I happen to fill spaces. I'm just going to bring something here. To me, this feels like awkward silence when two people are having a conversation and there was just a few seconds of silence. That feels a little awkward. So I'm going to feel it up. Now I have my rough sketching done. So I'm going to group them together by swiping right and click on "Group" over here. There are neatly tucked in together in a group. Maybe I'll change the opacity so that my next layer can be more clear. They're not visually fighting with one another. You can also go ahead and make this a flat layer by clicking on the "New Group", and flatten. So now you just deal with one layer. If you want to change opacity, which has changed that one opacity instead of three. I feel like this is a pretty good spot. I'm going to start with a new layer to draw on top of that. So now we have a basic sketch, we're ready to elaborate our sketch. But before we do that, I'd like to do some brush shopping. Basically, you play with different brushes and see what type of texture you prefer. I have collected quite a few third party brushes, but by no means that you have to have them all to make your decision. I think Procreate comes with a tons of brushes that are great to use. I think I'm going to stick with this. I don't know if you can see the edges that are pretty jagged and gives me a good texture. As I drew this line, I varied my pressure a little bit, so you can see this type of brush respond to pressure really well. So down the road, that will give me some really nice curves. It's calligraphy. I like this look and feel. So that will be my main all blind brushes. If your chosen style is vector and flat, by all means, go for it. 4. Drawing in Action I: Unlike previous version of this scattering this time, we want the shape to be pretty close to the final one. Once you draw a rectangle, you want to keep one finger on screen to hold so that you have a perfect rectangle. You can just drag and drop to color it. If you choose pretty texture to brush like me, you might need to retouched the connection point to make sure the connection is smooth. I will want each container to be on its own layer. We'll just make it easier to resize and move it around. Again. If you want a perfect circle, just hold one finger on Canvas. I think this is called quick shape. It's pretty convenient. If you want it to be perfectly horizontal or vertical you can also do that. Use your non-dominant hand, one finger to hold on Canvas. This is a pretty good size. I'm pretty happy about it. Another one. This base over here is obviously needs to be symmetrical. There are a few ways of doing that. In the past, I have done exporting from illustrator when I make a perfect vase and export it and import it. But I realize that I can just draw that using the drawing guide that is within procreate app. We'll come over to actions and turn on the drawing guide under the Canvas tab. You want to add it, the drawing guide and make sure you have the symmetry selected. This will give you a line that is really fine. You might not be able to see at this point. Let me zoom in. You want to move this line to the middle of the base and we click on Done the corner and start drawing from here. Basically, procreate is giving you some help. As you're drawing one side of the base, the other side is perfectly mirrored so that you don't have to worry about symmetry. Interesting. Maybe I want to give it a little belly like this. Obviously this is cropped, but I'm okay with that. This address a little bit too sharp. You can either erase the edge a little bit to round it out or you can also draw from here to create something like that. I want a new layer. As you may have noticed, the previous layer says as the stead, so you want to turn that off and then move onto the next one. We can use the same method to create these little three bases. Or if you want to make something really quirky and have an asymmetrical shape and you can just go ahead and draw. Now we want to left swipe to duplicate and add another part to be seen. Now you have three identical ones. You can use two-finger pinch to combine the layer. Now all three a little pots are on the same layer. Now we're ready to get some plants in the containers. I'm going to start with this big guy here because I know that I'm going to plant something that is going upwards like that. It seems a little bit big now to me because the plan space is a little bit small. I'm going to move this guy downward a little bit and maybe shrink it in size just a tiny bit. I want to create a layer beneath it for my plants. Maybe going after a color that is darker green, I want a little bit of wave to it. It's not strictly going straight up. Here is a little movement to it. Let me just turn off the container for a second so you can see how I drew the line. This part which is super messy, but that's covered up by the pots. The reason why I want to do this, is because when I color the plant, it is an enclosed the shape. We will just color this part. As we're drawing, we want to make sure to take advantage of the nature of digital painting and understand how the program works to save you some time. Maybe I want to move the plant a little bit over to this side and add another leaf over here. Currently, you can call it done or you can add a little bit of volume to it. I'm going to use a darker green to convey dimension. I want to create another layer underneath the green leaves we just drew. Just to for the parts that curves in, you can use the darker green to add almost like another dimension. Overall your leaves look like it's curved a little bit, so it's not like a flat facing up. This time, I want to give it a little bit of texture because currently the leave is just have one color. That's not how plants in real life works. I would like to use a lighter green but maybe with yellow tent and then increase my size and just draw a line on top. Like that. Certainly let me just leave it that way. It looks pretty, I don't know, it's symbolic, but I like to add some additional texture on top of that. You can tell me where to adjustment panel and click on liquify. Lacked that you've fact and that is called crystals. Basically, this tool will make all the edges pretty jagged. We can play with this size, pressure, distortion, and momentum. I will just go with the default. You see? Let me just zoom in. As my pen traveled down, it naturally create this plenty look. It just more interesting than a boring straight line. Some went over the edge and you don't want that to happen. You can either go in and you raise every part that went over, or you can turn the top layer into a clipping mask. Basically this will only show the overlapped portion of the two graphics. I do have another class if you want to dive deeper into this specific topics, but I would not repeat the information so that it's not redundant. Now I want to maybe make the color a little bit lighter so that the texture is pretty subtle or you can go ahead and play with the blending mode. I can never remember what each one means, so I just go ahead and click. I like this one better. I'm going to keep it that way. The next thing I want to do, is to group this part together, or maybe I want to change the container color. Maybe something warmer. This is darker, colder type of green. I want to give it a lighter contrast. I can't see. This may look too light. I have decided my background will be white. This is or to closer to white. I'm going to have to make some changes. Much better. I will leave it like that for now. I want to group this group of plants together. Right swipe all the way yours you want to group together and then group. You can collapse the group or expand as you want. 5. Drawing in Action II: Well, since we have introduced some colors, I think I'm going to go ahead and color all the containers. I have a general idea of what tone and hughes I'm working with. First I want to give it brighter, happier color. Maybe this yellow, maybe less saturated. A cooler tone for this circle guy here. Saturated. Something like this and maybe warmer, pink for this rectangular guy over here. Keep in mind that you can recolor everything. Keep in mind that you can recolor everything later on so you're not really committing to it forever. Later, I will show you a trick. How to change things in harmony. I mean, how to change colors in harmony? I'm not really a big fan of purple, but I'm going to challenge myself and use unfamiliar color. I'm going to use these guys for now and move on to the next plant. Let's see the pink rectangular thing over here. Since I'm working with purple, I'm going to actually make the leaves purple. Which is a little bit imaginative since not a whole lot of plants have purple leafs, but that's okay. You have that freedom in illustration. I'm going to create a layer underneath this pink container so that even if I'm drawing under, it will be blocked. You will not show over here. That's my purpose. First I want to make sure I know where the general direction is. Maybe going up and down a little bit. Like that. This brush that I chose is really pressure sensitive. I like the variation between the tip and the bottom of this dam. This is a good start. I will use a lighter purple to draw on top of that for the leafs. I'm not really going off of any reference photo at this point yet. Just doing whatever I'm thinking at this point. What I did is to rearrange the layer order so the lighter purple is underneath the stamps. I like this half leaf shape and it's not perfectly symmetrical. I think we did talk about using two different plants for this container. But I really like the purple vibe. I'm just going to give it just one plant for now. Maybe I'll change my mind later. I want to make sure the shape is closed so that when I drag and drop, it doesn't color the whole world. Let's see. This is a good situation that is going on. But there's this little awkward space that is going on here. If I do add another plant, it will make these three plants pretty crowded. For example, if I do add a point here and give it some leaves, it will just make this portion really crowded. I think I'm going to later find a solution, maybe having a plant coming from above to fill the space. Now I want to give it some highlight. I want to create a separate layer and use a very different color so that it stands out. There are different ways of giving highlights. You can do regular vain. Just how normally leaves grow or you can do somewhat symbolic icons or drawings. You can make up your own idea. I'm going to go with the latter. I will see every time. Let me just zoom in. Every time this leaf curves in, I'm going to go with that a little bit further to create this. I don't know, like armpit. Yeah. To create this little beautiful curve and to build on that. Basically by adding highlights or shadows on, it will give your leaves more dimension to it. As you can see feels like this leaves have movement already and I like that. I'm going to change the blending bode to multiply or maybe colorbar. Let's stay with this and I will do the rest. I'm going to stay with this. This blending mode is called screen. I think this is a better fit than the previous one. I'm going to leave it as it is for now and just group it together with the container and move on to the next. Let's look at this yellow container. I know I want these leaves to be flowing down to interact with this green plants that it's going up. This one looks pretty agey and hard. It would be nice if you are able to add more curves around it to balance that tension. I'm going to do that. This time I want to create a layer on top of the container because some will actually go over and it's visible. Let's start by giving this plant some branch over here. The overall idea is that this plant is pretty soft in comparison to the point t1 that is next door. Once you are happy with the general direction of your branch, you can start adding leaves. To color the leaves, you can just drag and drop the color. But I think that's a little a bit boring in this case. I'm going to try a different method, which is a little bit more messy. I'm going to create a new layer underneath the leaf layer we just drew and choose a color that's pretty bright and happy. Then I want to select a brush that is more grungy than the liner brush that I choose. Maybe something. Let's try this. It's called the streaky marker. Let me test it. This is pretty good. Then increase the size and just start coloring. I'm just going through the different blending mode to see if there's any effect that stands out. I'm going to just leave it that way. Again, I'm going to just group this particular plant together with its container and move on to the next. 6. Drawing in Action III: Let's work on these little guys over here. Let's create a new layer and then drag it under. So far the leaves we have are pretty big and pretty long. We want to change that by adding some choppy type of leaves. I'm going to go little imaginative over here by creating some leaves that are exactly just, basically made up with dots. First, I want to have a stem. First, I'm just going to go ahead and draw some outline of this plant, and then I want to select a brush that is perfectly round. When I just do my dots. This is a good one. I will go with something that is quiet. I'm just going to go around and dot my leaf. No actual leaves in real life looks like this, but I feel like just adding a little bit of 'unrealistic elements' that will make my illustration more fun. This is a nice little group that I have over here. I'm going to do something a little bit different, which is to move my pot under, over here. Because I'm going to add a different layer to show the depth, to show the rim, the rim of this pot over here. I'll just create a new layer on top of the containers and then create as a clipping mask. I will use black, but I will reduce the opacity of the black. Let me rotate it and just draw, and just to color the soil portion of the planters, so the containers don't look like they're just one-dimensional. Then I want to come back to my branches to erase this portion. This is a much better plant. Let's move on to the next. We also have this little awkward space over here. The dotted plants that I have have pretty wide branches that blocks some space for the orange planter. I have to be really creative in terms of how the plant grow. I guess, technically, I can draw a plant that is overlapping with this big guy over here. But as I said before, I'm not really big fan of overlapping. I'm just going to create something that is completely different. Let's see. Maybe I'll give it a bright blue, which we haven't used for our visual so far. Let's create this little arch that just goes around, and then we'll give it some wave. They hug each other visually in this way. Let's add a little bit of depth by creating a darker blue underneath. Now, we have our second leaf. This one looks a little bit lonely and a little bit flat. I'm going to add more texture to it. This time I will give it a warm highlight. Because why not? I'm going to trace this spine of this particular leaf. Maybe I'll give it a more texture. That is along the line of the veins of the leaf. If you want to increase your texture even more, you can create a clipping mask on top of the blue leaf over here. Maybe select something that is really rich in texture. For example, this guy, that has the texture of a dry wood. I believe in the built-in library brush library there is, I think under painting, yes, this one, old brush. This is a really good texture as well. If you just decreased the brightness of the brush, and then just paint it over like that. Maybe this is a little too big, painted over like that. You will see this old brush texture that just beautifully swings by. This is a good way to bring dimension to your leaves. I really love adding texture this way. I'm going to leave this green plant alone and then move on to the next one. We actually don't have a whole lot of space over here. We talked about just creating a little sprout over here, but I think it's also fun to add something that is completely unexpected, which is a cat maybe. Let's try that. We have plant all over, but we do not have any animals in this. Maybe let's put sleeping cat over here and see how it looks. I don't plan to bring too much visual attention to it. It would just be a little nice surprise, if we were to find the cat sleeping in here. All right. I'm going to leave it this way for now. I'm going to group the three small planters over here first, and then create a layer at the very top. Now, looking at it, we have two shades of blue are competing against each other. I'm going to recolor this circle element over here. Much better. 7. Final Touches: Now, since we're running out of planters, I'm going to create a plants, that they just come from above. To cover this or roughly covered this blank space over here. I will give it a general direction first before I put on any leaf shapes. I'm not sure if I want another one in here. I'll just go with what I have so far. When I draw, I really want to vary the pressure. So you see the lines have beautiful waves instead of have one uniform radius. You want to backup a little bit to see if it fits together with the rest. It seems fine with me. Now I need to think about what I'm going to do with this space in the middle. I spend a few minutes playing around. Eventually I settle with the solution of moving basically this planter and these group of three planters downward and to the right a little bit to create this gap for our new plant to come through from the bottom. So I feel like that's a pretty good solution. I also went ahead and duplicate these leaves from the top and to fill the space over here, I feel like we do have a opportunity to add in some more leaves or some flows from here with a warmer color. That's what we're going to do from this point on. If you noticed, I have sampled the same pink color. I'm actually going to go ahead and recolor the planter or container over here. I'm going to add a little bit of pop over here. I will create another layer on top and turn it into a clipping mask just to try it out. I feel like this is a good solution. I also want to color this pink to something else. I don't quite know what colors yet. So if that's the case, it's better to come over to the adjustments panel and use hue, saturation, and brightness. The major advantage of doing this is to preview what the final result is going to be on the fly. This is a good solution. I may want to change the Blending Mode of the top texture a little bit just to see what options I have. I like this one much better. So I'm going to go with this. I haven't done anything with the circle yet. I think I'm going to go ahead and turn it into a clock, but not just any clock because we want to add more visual interest. But instead of having the space perfectly even, I'm going to create a different interval of the dots. Let's see how many we have. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 perfect. We have 12 over here. Let's add some more elements so it looks like a real clock. I think this is a pretty good result, but before I sign off, I'd like to just add a little settle texture for containers at the bottom because they look flat. I'm using a texture brush that adds a little bit of imperfection to the scene. As you can see, this looks a little more realistic and more textured. That's our vertical garden right here. 8. Bonus: Adding Volume and Movements: In this video, I'm going to show you a couple of ways of drawing leaves more realistically. Normally when we draw leaves, I tend to draw leaves that's facing upward. But in real life, if you look closely, they tend to bend and twist, and they have a natural movement to it. In this video, we're going to cover how to achieve that in your artwork. Let's grab a clean sheet of paper or your iPad or whatever. Say that we're going to draw a leaf that twist. Remember the first we drew for our art work previously, that is going upward. Imagine if this long rigid leaf that is making a twist. We're going to basically write out the letter S, like this on our paper, then find the turning point. I'm going to mark it over here. I'm going to make it a really obvious. From the very top tip, we want to go down and then ends somewhere over there, that is our turning point. Then for the bottom half, we move up a little bit to pick up the movement and then close the leaf this way. If I trace the outline for you, our leaf will look something like this. Now we have long leaf that is making some movement, it looks more realistic in 3D. Let's practice one more time. First we're going to draw a long S, and then we want to come from the top down and that close the loop. Then find the intersection point and move up a little bit and then draw another half curve. Now we have a leaf that is making a turn. If it's hard for you to see, let me trace it out for you. We have this S curve, and we want to close the loop and then pick it up, something like that. If the light comes from this way, this part, the lower part will be shaded. As you can see, this one is much more dynamic than just a flat leaf. That's another factor that you can consider when you draw your vertical garden. Another way of approaching leaves, this one is a little bit complicated. Imagine in real life, if a leaf that is really, really big and heavy, it's probably you're going to be able to see both sides. It's not going to stay flat this way. In this case, similarly, we are going to start from the tip. This is the root. Somewhere over here, that's the tip. We're going to draw a bigger curve and across the line somewhere, and then close at the bottom and then continue to find that point that is a little bit on the left of our intersection, then goes down a little bit and then picks up and close at the same point over here. Now we want to finish the other half of the tip by closing like this. Now we're able to add a little bit of dimension. Ideally, we want this line and this main direction to be really close. I'm going to fix that when I trace with my sharpie. I want to go this way and then it bends downward a little bit and it that end over here. I want to keep this roughly about the same, this one about the same, and maybe a little wider, I guess. Then you do want to draw your stem. This looks like a leaf that is bending downward. Let's do one more try. This time we're going to draw a leaf that's coming from left to right. We start from the tip and somewhere on the top we're going to cross the line. I don't really have a name for the method, it's just something that I came up with when I'm trying to draw realistic leaves. Now we have a leaf that's making the turn. Sorry if my focus is on and off. I hope you are able to see. This time, when we're tracing, we can add a little bit of wave to the edge of our leaf. I'm going to do a little wavy leaf and find the connection point and do the waves. This part over here is not wavy because technically we want this to be relatively flat because that's when the leaf is bending. Then we want to trace the middle line. I don't know the technical term, but you know what I'm talking about. So now we have a leaf that is bending downward. If you want, you can extend the leaf and then maybe do a container or something at the bottom. This is a more realistic leaf. Yeah, I thought it would be fun to cover this technique and to share it with you. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you. 9. Bonus: About Colors: In this video, I'm going to show you how I normally approach colors. One of the easiest way that I do is to grab a photo that I think convey a mood that I want to achieve for. You can source to photo from your own library or online and bring them to iPad and you can click on the wrench icon and Add and Insert photo to bring in your reference image. It's very tempting to just press hold and sample color that way. However, I find it really inaccurate because sometimes your photo is really low resolution, so depending on where exactly are you sampling that color, it could be just ever so slightly off and your color palette will end up looking darker or brighter than you wanted. I have a little hack for you, that is using smudge tool. You see this little smudging icon over here at the upper right-hand corner? It kind of functions like brush of some sort and you can even select the shape, make the brush tip or smudge tip a little bit larger and come to my target area. For example, if I want to sample some color from the red dates, if I just press and hold and go around, you will see the color shifts dramatically as my finger moves around. That's because there are so many creases on this tiny little area, it's really hard to get accurate read. What I prefer to do is to grab this smudge tool and just lightly smudging the area over here. Make sure you're on the image layer so that your smudging on your photo, it will mess up the photo but that's okay. This is just a reference. Basically this will present you an average color of this tiny area. It's much easier to sample an accurate color from the smudged area. Another really cool tool that I like to use is called Coolers, that's spelled as C-O-O-L-O-R-S.CO. You can go to their website or you can use iOS apps to sample the colors. One of the reason why I really like this app, it's because the color combinations are really well curated in a way. I can tell it's not straight up randomized computer ideas. Sometimes the color can look really off, but this one, I can tell there is a human touch to it. Upon opening the app, you will already have a combination. If you want to switch things up, you can press Generate and each time you will have a brand new color palette. For example, if you really like this color in the middle but not so hot about other colors around it, you can lock the middle color by pressing the lock icon. After that, whenever you click on the generate, the middle color will stay the same, only surrounding color will change and then you can keep on locking different colors that you think work well with the middle color until you have a cohesive palette of five colors.