Transcripts
1. Intro & Class Project: Choosing colors can completely
transform a design. In this class, I'll show you three simple ways that you
can create color palettes in Adobe Illustrator to make your designs beautiful and
feel true to your style. Hi, I'm Christina Forrest, an artist and surface
pattern designer. I create bold, playful patterns for wallpaper,
textiles and products, I love to help creatives build color confidence while
using Adobe Illustrator, which is my favorite tool
for creating patterns. In this class, you'll
learn three techniques for creating color palettes
in Adobe Illustrator, by the end of the
class, you'll have lots of color palettes
to choose from, and I'll show you
how to save them so that you can access them
when you're designing. The class project,
I'd love to see a design that
you've colored with three of your different
color palettes. If you don't have
a design to use, you can download one here
that I've provided for you. Please submit your class
project at the end of the course and I can't
wait to see what you create.
2. Why colours matter: So before we jump into
creating colour palettes, I want to quickly talk to
you about why they matter. It can be really tempting to just choose colors as you go, and sometimes that works, but having a colour
palettes chosen first makes the whole design
process much easier. The first reason is cohesion. When your colors
work well together, your design feels more
polished and intentional. Even a simple design can look much stronger when the
colors feel connected. Second reason is that it speeds
up your decision making. Instead of constantly asking yourself, what color
should this be? You already have a set group
of colors to work from that can save you time and helps you to stay in a creative flow. Finally, a color palette helps create consistent
look and feel. Whether you're
designing patterns, illustrations or artwork. Using a palette helps your work feel recognizable
and more like you. A good palette doesn't
need lots of color either. Often just three to
five well chosen colors can be enough to create
something really beautiful.
3. Lesson 1 - Prep your workspace: I've just created a new
file in Adobe Illustrator, and I'm going to just
clean it up before I start making my
own colour palettes. So over here, you can see
in the swatches area, I'm going to just delete
all of these colors. So firstly, I'm going to select the white square by using
my black arrow tool, and I'm just going to
select on that one. And then I'm going
to hold down Shift, and then I'm going to
go all the way down to this gray one here and put them all in the
bin and delete? Yes. So now I've got a nice tidy area to create
our swatches for the class.
4. Lesson 2 - Method 1 Inspiration Images: The first thing I'm going
to show you is how to create your very own
custom colour palettes, either from photos
that you've taken or from images that
you've found online, and you're just going to
take the colors out of them. I've grabbed these
images from Pinterest, and I've just screenshot
them and uploaded them into Adobe Illustrator and just copy and pasted them
all into the one file. Have a look for images
wherever you like, but just choose images that don't actually contain artwork or people's colour
palettes that are already created fabric
and things like that. Try to choose something
that really speaks to you, make a mix of different images so that you bring in colors from all different inspirations to create something that
you really like. If you like earthy tones, you might be looking
more for nature images, geographical images,
that sort of thing. Then if you are more
into bold bright colors, I always like to find
colorful exteriors of houses or as you can see
some beach images here. Depending on your style
and what you enjoy, just go down a little
rabbit hole of finding some colorful images that
you can then bring into Adobe Illustrator by
screenshotting and then uploading them into
Illustrator and copying and pasting
them into the One file. So here I have six images
that I've pulled out of Pintst and I'm going to
just be taking some colors. So to do that, firstly, we're going to draw a rectangle. So you can either press M on
your keyboard or pop over here to the rectangle
tool and just drag out. I usually hold down
Shift to get a square. It's got no stroke, but it has a feel of white, and I'm just going
to change that color now so that I can
see it for starters. It doesn't matter
what color it is, and then I'm going to go
up to my black arrow tool, and I'm just going to hold
down my option or Alt key if you're on a PC and just drag it out so you've
got a copy of that. There just press
Command or Control D, and it will repeat
out a few times. We're going to make some
boxes to fill with color. Just drag over the whole lot and then press Option or Alt
again and drag that down. We've got lots of boxes there that we can now fill with color. Now we're going to need our
eyedropper tool for this, which you can find over here. It looks like a little
dropper for medicine, what we're going to do is just select a square with the
black arrow tool like so, and then I'm going to press I, which brings the
eyedropper tool up or you can go over here
if you can't find it. But hopefully your shortcut works because it's a
lot quicker that way. I'm going to press I
and I'm just going to start grabbing colors
out of these photos. I'm just choosing colors that I really like that
I think look fun. You don't want to
just choose all bright or all dark colors. So you want a mix of light and dark when you're
choosing your colors. So have a go at uploading your own images and
pulling the colors out of them so that you can start with a colour
palettes from these images. I'm going to just
make a few more here because there's more colors
that I want to grab out. Now, I'm going to take
these ones up here and I'm going to use just
some warm colors from this tulips photo to fill up some other colors for another
colour palettes as well. You can see these ones already
look really nice together. I would be happy to just
even use that and I'll probably just play
around a little bit with the colorings here. But I'm really happy with
how that color palette already looks for this one here, I would then probably
choose colors out of this. Maybe I could even make a couple of colour palettes from it. I really like these two
look next to each other, so I would pull those two out. This one over here looks like
it will work nicely too. I like this lime green, and I want something lighter and probably something
nice and dark as well. I probably like to get
something in between these two, then I would copy
that square there and make it this color, but then I just want a darker
version of that color. So to do that, I'll just select that square and go over to here. I'm just going to choose
a darker version of that. I probably like a lighter pink
to go with this one, too. I'm just going to copy that
again and paste and back to the color picker and just
choose a nice pink to go. Pretty nice little colour
palette there as well. It's got a nice
bright bold green, but a nice deep turquoise blue, and then a nice neutral white as well, and the mint green. So you've got some nice contrast between the colors,
which is really good. And I just like the vibe of that. That looks
pretty to me. I possibly even think about adding some orange
into that as well. But for now, we'll
just leave it at that, and then I can think about
that down the track. From here, we've got maybe not the best
combinations of colors, but these two look
nicely together, and then I can see this one
also working well with that. It's a bit of a
wintery palette here. From here, you can adjust the colors by clicking on
them and then hopping over to the color picker and you can just choose where you
want that color to sit in the spectrum of
colors. So I'll press okay. And you can just do
little adjustments like that to create a customized version of your palette that
you've already chosen. So for this one, double click, and I might just make
that even a bit deeper. So there we have
three colour palettes that we've made really quickly, just using images that
I've taken from Pinterest. And in the next lesson,
I'll show you how to create easy colour palettes
using the Mosaic Object
5. Lesson 3 - Method 2 Object Mosaic: Another really fun and easy way to create colour palettes in Adobe Illustrator is to bring
in images that you've made. For example, I have
just brought in two images of original
artwork that I've created. These are acrylic
paintings that I've made, and I'm going to
use these to create different colour palettes
in Adobe Illustrator. At the moment, these
are just JPEGs. I've opened them up
in Illustrator and copy and pasted them
into this file. Now I'm going to
select this artwork here and I'm going to go up to Object and
create Object Mosaic. It asks you the number
of tiles and the height. You can choose any number here. I'm just going to go
with ten by ten is fine, and I'm going to press Okay. Then you can see it's pulled
out colors from the image. Now we have all these
little tiny tiles that are possible colors that we could create a
color palette out of. C, you can see the
original is underneath, and these are little
vector tiles. We need to ungroup them, select the whole thing and then go
up to Object and ungroup. Now we've got all these little
tabs that we can pull out and play around with to see what colors we might
like to put together. I'm going to have a play
around with this one now, and I'll come back to you with a few more colour palettes. Just make sure that
you're always thinking about having some neutrals, some dark and light contrast, and just going with
colors that you really like to look at and colors that you feel look
nice together. I want this to be more
of a warm yellow, so I'm just going
to bring this up to change the tone
a little bit there. This one, I'm going to
copy that same color, but I'm going to make
that a lighter version. Then I might need a
few more light colors just to make this
work well together. I definitely need to
work more on this one. This is a really
fun and easy way to create colour
palettes without having to do too much work apart from just choosing
the colors that you love. You can see that I've created a lot of little
colour palettes here, and they're all
different styles. I've got a sort of
monochromatic one here. I've got another nice
monochromatic green one here. I've got some nice warm
colors together here, some lovely pastels with
a few pops of color. And yeah, different
ones that I've created from using
this mosaic tool and obviously the one from
the lesson earlier where I showed you how to pull the colors out of the photo. Do the same thing with this
image here if I go up to Object Mosaic and I could make more tiles so I
can make it much busier. A lot more colors to choose
from if I wanted to. Then you can see it's
really narrowed it down. These artworks don't
have as many colors to choose from in
them as some of them, but it still shows that
you can choose to change the mosaic depending on how many colors you want
to be able to choose from. Then if I wanted to
pull these ones out, I would do that again
where I would ungroup it, select it with my black arrow and ungroup and then just again, pull some pretty
colors out of here. And then I could then
refine that more and change the colors depending on what I
wanted to do with them. That's the second way of
creating colour palettes. We've done colour palettes from images and then we've also done colour palettes using the Object Mosaic
tool in Illustrator. Now I'm going to
show you how to find colour palettes online
that you can use as well.
6. Lesson 4 - Method 3 Online Palettes: The third way that's
really fun to find colour palettes
for your designs is to look on websites such as
Color Hunt and colors. These are really great places to get inspiration for
your colour palettes. The best thing about
them is that they actually tell you the hex codes, so you can put in hex codes in Illustrator and create these exact palettes
to use for your work. So color hunt is free to use, and you can see that
down the side here. A lots of different categories. So you can choose
from ideas here. So winter is probably
going to have lots of darker more cozy colors, and then springs going
to be a lot more joyful and bright and pastels
and fun colors like that. There's summer, which is yet bold and warm colors,
and then footage. They've got all
different types of collections depending
on what you like. You can go through here and see what really specks to you. Always keep in mind
when you're creating your colour palettes
that you want to try to keep a neutral
color in there. You'll see most of these have a neutral color amongst
them because it works really well when you're
designing and also notice how the colors
go from dark to light. You've always got that
nice contrast between the darkest color and
the lightest color. This is a way to really get a nice finished pattern design or some kind of graphic design. This is a really
good way to make sure that it's going to
look really cohesive. Can muck around with these sites and have a look
and I'll just show you how I would go about finding
the hex codes for these. Let's go back to Color Hunt. I'll just choose one quickly. Let's go with spring looks
nice. I really like this. I'm going to show you how I find this in Adobe Illustrator. Firstly, I copy that link there, so if you hover over it and press on it, it
will allow you to copy. Then I go back to Illustrator
and I just create a square again using my A tool
and I drag out the square, and then I make sure that square is selected
and I go over to the left here and open up the color picker by
double clicking on it, down here you'll see code here. So this is where you can paste that hex code in and you
get your first color. Now, I'm just going to drag
that out a couple more times, so I can get those other colors. So I go back to my palette, and next I'll get this
light apple green, and I'll copy that
back over here and paste that hex code
in and there we have it. And then I'll go back again. Okay. And then I have that
really pretty palette there that I can use
for one of my designs. Another thing to
keep note of is that I find it looks much nicer to use an off white and an off black rather than just
the pure black and white. So when you're creating
your palettes, make sure you don't
go for the very, very corner here
where we get the F, CFC, or if it's pure
white, it's all Fs. So if you go for that,
it's just not quite as appealing as using a nice
off white color like that. I recommend to not use the pure white and
the pure black when you're creating
your colour palettes. They're a bit dark and jarring. Now we have all these colour
palettes we've created, and I'm going to show
you how to organize them in Adobe Illustrator so that you can use them easily and find where they will be saved.
7. Lesson 5 - Organise Your Colours: So we're back in my file here where I've created all
these colour palettes, and I'm sure you've got a lot of colour palettes
also in your file. I would like to organize these. What I could do is just leave this file like this, save it, and then whenever I want to play with colour palettes
in my designs, I could open this and drag the colour palettes
into the new file. However, I find it much nicer to organize my
colour palettes in Adobe Illustrator
so that I can find them easily when I am
creating my design. To do that, just get rid of this and don't
need this anymore. Here are my colour palettes. Let's start with this one. What I'm going to do is create little folders with these
colour palettes in them. I'm going to get
my black arrow and drag over that color palette, and then I'm going to click this folder here and I'm going to call this one
Apple. I don't know. Apple will do. Then I'm going to press I'm not going
to press anything here. I'm just going to
do selected artwork and then I'm going
to press Okay. Can see that's
just pop that into there and it's got the
name of it Apple there. I'm going to do the same
thing with this one and I go over to the folder again and what will
I call this one? It looks flowery. I'm
going to call it flowers. Press there it is,
popped in there. Of course, if you
want to edit any of the colors before you
create these folders, you can go ahead and do that. You can just click on
the color and go into the color picker and change your colors however you want to. However, I'm quite
happy with this. I'm just going to
keep it as it is. I'll call this one spring. It looks nice and
light and happy and this one here,
call that forest. So you can see these are all organized really
nicely over here. They have their labels, and then I'm going
to show you how to save this in the next lesson. I'll just finish
organizing these and then come back
to you and show you how to save this so you
can access it really easily without having to pull
up this file every time.
8. Lesson 6 - Save Your Colour Palettes: I've created all my folders for my colour palettes
and now I'm going to save them so I can
access them no matter what file I'm using
in Adobe Illustrator. To do that, I have all my
palettes here and I'm going to just clean up this because I don't really
need that anymore. I'm just going to
delete all of that. And this is just a
nice clean file then. I'm just going to
go up and press on this little hamburger
here and go down to Save Swatch
Library as ASE. This is in the Swatch library, and I'm just going
to save it here as colour palette and say
I've just saved that now. Now if I was to open a new
file and start working in it, here's the default
one that we get whenever we open a new
file in Adobe Illustrator. Then we just go over to
this little icon here, which is the Swatch
Libraries menu, and we go down to User to find
and you can see here is my color palette class one
and that pops up there. I'll just drag that open a little bit more so
you can see them all. There's the ones that
we've made in the class. Then if I want them over
here where I can use them, I just click on
the little folder here, whichever ones I want. I could also get rid of these by selecting all of those and deleting them so I can just have a nice tidy area that I'm
using when I'm designing. That's how you can organize your swatches and
really find them easily when you're
designing without having to click and open and
drag things around. They're all going to
be right there, easy to use in your swatch library.
9. Final Words: I hope you had fun creating
color palettes with me. I'd love to see
what you've made, please submit your
class project below, and if you don't have
anything to color, just use the download
that I've provided for you to color with
your color palettes. You might like to
check out some of my other courses on Skillshare, and you can visit me
at christinafest.com or on Instagram as
Christina Forest Creative.
Kristina Forrest, Colorful art & surface pattern design
