Intro to Graphic Design: Expressing Emotion with Color Theory

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone. Welcome to this Skillshare course on color theory, about color and emotion. In this first video, I'm going to talk briefly about what color theory is, give you a description of the project, an overview of the course, and show you some examples of using color to convey emotion. So, color theory is some principles and ideas and understandings about color, about how to create color, about how to combine color, and how color interacts. We'll take a look at all of those things, and then we'll put them into practice by building out a cohesive color palette to create a series of four images that convey different emotions. For the actual assignment, you can create anything that you want to as long as each individual image conveys a different emotion. I wanted to keep things pretty open because color theory is one of the core cornerstones of design and visual communication. I'm a graphic designer and what I'll be showing you is graphic design, but you can apply color theory to just about anything out there. In this course, I'll be mostly using Adobe Illustrator to teach you about color theory. I'll show you a little bit of Photoshop at the very end, but to complete the assignment, you can use any program that you want to as long as you're creating four different images. The only restriction out there being that they're 600 by 600 pixel square images and that each one conveys a different emotion. The emotions you choose are totally up to you. So, let's take a look at a couple of examples here. Of course, you could do something very straightforward like this. If I want to convey love, I might draw a heart, I might pick up red. That's decent color theory in practice, but it's fairly straightforward. If you want to convey happiness, I might show a smiley face or something yellow and call it a day, but hopefully, what you'll get out of this course is a better understanding of color theory so that you can start to mix unique and original color palettes and create something pretty custom to you. So, one example here that I'm going to be using quite a bit in this course is a series of three posters that I designed. The first three books in The Chronicles of Narnia series. So, across all three of these posters, I'm only using four different colors plus the white of the paper color, but I'm trying to convey different emotions in each one. So, like in this first one, I've got a cool, almost tweaks, calm but active thing happening on the screen. The second one over here got this purple as a reference to royalty and a little bit more active with a little more contrast in the purples and blues happening in that one. Then the third one is The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, it is all about water and so we are using blue here as the reference there, but then adding even a little more contrast than the blacks and whites, and giving it an even more active feel out of all three of them. Another example that I wanted to show you guys is this excellent work for Target in Canada. These ads were not done by me. They were creative directed by Alan Peters at Target and illustrated by Lab Partners in San Francisco, but what I love about these is the cohesive color palette that goes across all three of them. All three of them being very active imagery, but each one conveying a very different sense of emotion. So, you might look at these first one and things feel very serene, wery calm, the light pinks in here give you really at ease feeling which is nice. The second one got a little bit more emotion with a nice bright orange hue to convey a sense of action or a sense of urgency or a sense of movement, and that works out pretty nicely. In this last one, we've got this cool blue giving you this is refreshing feel. Again, it's got just as much motion but it doesn't feel like as active as this one, and that's simply because of the change in color palette. The course is broken down into three different sections. The first one is an introduction to color theory and terminology, just to get the knowledge. The second one is a way to generate ideas, start the process, and start thinking even a little bit more about color and how to build a good cohesive unified color palette. Then the third one is finishing touches, assembling the last bits of your project and got some kind of Pro Illustrator and Photoshop tips in that last one for you. All right. That wraps up this first video. Keep moving through the course content and I'm looking forward to see what you guys create with color and your new understanding of color theory. 2. Color Terminology: Okay, in this video we're going to be going over sort of the basics of the terminology of color. Talk about hue, we'll talk about chromo, we'll talk about value and we'll talk about some different color schemes to kick everything off. So, I want to start this video by talking about additive versus subtractive color just so we can kind of lay down some basic guidelines for how we'll be talking about color and how I'll be showing you the principles of colored theory. And so there are two different ways to create color. One being an additive process and that's something that humans have invented with electronics, with televisions, with your phones, with computers and that's the idea of projecting a color of light outward. The other way is a subtractive process and that's the natural way that color is created and that's the idea that when light is cast onto something, that object reflects a certain range of colors back at you and absorbs the rest of them. So, light contains all colors it gets rejected at something, like say a leaf and a leaf absorbs all of the colors except for the green or red or yellow that that leaf is and then it reflects back those colors and then the human eye perceives those colors. That's a subtractive process. A subtractive process is also used when talking about printing, which was always confusing to me because when you talk about the idea of printing something, you think you're adding ink to paper, but the end result again is a tactile objects or ink that is going to be a subtractive color process where it absorbs certain colors and reflects back other colours. So, all of the examples here, I'm going to be showing you, are all digital and so we're talking about additive color for that. I've posted a couple of links in the additional resources. One really old fun one with Bill Nye that'll give you a little bit more idea about the science behind color. So, the other part that I want to talk about is different colour models. Now, that we're talking about additive color, of course hopefully you're familiar with the idea of RGB color versus CMYK color and the CMYK color is again the method that you're going to use to take a digital file and print out something in the subtractive color realm. Whereas RGB is what is made up in the additive colour process with your monitor that's going to be projecting color back out towards you. The RGB stands for red green and blue and their are values that each pixel gets a red, a green and the blue value and when they mix together they make a range of 16 million colors. Everything that I'll be showing you here is in the RGB world. So, now that we've covered that, I'm kind of set on talking about RGB additive color. What I've got here is, your basic color wheel and you guys are probably all familiar with this from kindergarten but it's a great tool to reference and remember. Certainly I've got 12 different colors on here. I've got yellow at the top because it's the brightest purple at the bottom because it's the darkest and then we start with the very basics which are the primary colors and all colors can be made up of these primary colours yellow, blue, and red. If you look at the complements of those colors and the complement of a color is any color that is straight across the color wheel here, so yellow is the compliment to purple, green is a compliment to red and blue is the compliment to orange, you'll get secondary colors. If you start to mix primary and secondary colors, you get what I called tertiary colors, and those are yellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-purple, blue-green and yellow-green. So that's kind of the basic color wheel here. Again I've built this on RGB which is slightly different if you were to mix paint, you would get different perceptual results but what I've done is kind of mathematically figured these colors inside of the RGB color model. When we talk about these colors, when you pick a specific color you're picking a hue and a hue is the definition of one color and so what I've got here is my red-purple hue as the center of this scale which is a hue value scale and if I back out here a little bit. All of this is based on black and white and so I've got black down here, white way up here, although it's slightly grey just so you can see it and then a range of greys in between. And if we start to correspond this hue to that value scale, we'll create what are called tents and shades. So, as I take a hue and I mix black or add black into it, I'm adding a shade of that hue that gets progressively closer to black. If I were to add white instead, I would be tinting that color and I would slowly tint it more and more and more towards white. So, there are a whole range of hues. Too many to show on here. We've got the basic color wheel and these 12 basic colors to give us a starting point but then there are all sorts of red-oranges or all sorts of blue-greens in between here and then we can start to add all of the tints and shades in between there and as I said before in the RGB world, you have a total of about 16 million colors by the time you're done and that gives us the whole spectrum of color to work with. Inside of Illustrator and inside of Photoshop, as you start to set those colors, you might look at them inside of the standard Adobe Color Picker. The color picker has a couple of different ways to define color, and you can choose how you select your color over here by picking up these different color models, and these little radio buttons here. Everything I do, I like to pick the hue first. So, the hue here that we've defined is this red purple area and it has 100 percent saturation. As we start to talk about saturation, saturation is the amount of color in the hue that you're using. So, here I've got this pure red purple that's 100 percent saturated, and as I start to tint or shade that, I start to lose some of the saturation of that colors and move back towards white here. So, as you're using this color bigger, you might start to pick a hue, but start to think about the saturation and the brightness as well. Brightness is something that I'll talk about shortly. Inside of here I can just click and drag around this guy to find what I want, but later on we'll want to think about how the hues and how the saturation and brightnesses are all combined. So, even though we're working in RGB color space here, and you can switch to the RGB color picker and slightly a different approach here. The way that we're going to make the colors is using hue saturation and brightness. So, we've talked about hue and we've talked about saturation, the other thing that I want to talk about is brightness. If you look at the colors on the color wheel, there are different brightness levels for each one, and way at the top we have yellow, yellow being the brightest color that's out there, and way at the bottom we have purple, purple being the darkest hue on the color wheel. I've got a slight test here to see a chroma value, and if I start to mix these two colors together which I did using the illustrator blend tool, you can see a spectrum of how much chroma there is as these colors start to move towards a more neutral color. Two things that we're trying to convey here are the brightness of a color, bright being yellow, purple mean our example of dark and there being a range in between as you move around the color wheel, and then the chroma of a color which is how much color is present. It's similar the saturation, but rather than moving towards a white or dark chroma as you start to mix the two colors together moves towards a neutral color. That's what makes up the center of the color wheel. As we start to move towards the center, start to blend two complimentary colors together, you'll get a neutral color. This still has some color in it certainly is not 100 percent neutral, but it's a more neutral in that range of browns and tans and creams and we'll talk about later on. It has a lower chroma value. One last thing to take a look here is brightness and value comparison is I'm taking my range of greys and I've taken my colors from the color wheel and I'm trying to map them to corresponding brightness or value connections. So again, we've got yellow way up here at the top, we've got red and green here in the middle, and then we're the blue purple and purple down here as it starts to get darker and darker. If I take this into Photoshop and desaturate it, we'll get some really interesting results. What I'm trying to show here is that even though we've got a really bright yellow, that color still has a visual weight to it. It's heavier than white is, and we find some that start to line up pretty close down and here purple is getting pretty close to having the same visual weight as black, but what you'll find is that white is a lot brighter than even the brightest yellow, and it's got a lot less visual weight when we look at it in this sense. So as we understand the RGB world, we understand hue, saturation, brightness, chroma, value, and how the colors start to compare, we can start to think about different color combinations that we can use as the basis of our color palettes. There are all sorts of different color combinations, but a few of the very basic ones are what's called an analogous color scheme. The word analogous just means colors that are close to each other, and we can think about this almost as monochromatic, but a monochromatic color scheme would be one hue, and then it's tens and shades and varieties in there. An analogous color scheme takes colors that are close to each other on the color wheel. So down here I've got red purple, and purple and blue purple, and that's making up my analogous color scheme. Like we talked about before, colors on the opposite sides of the color wheels are complimentary, and so, you can have a complimentary color scheme. Another pretty common practice because there's so much contrast in a complementary color scheme, I can't add more contrast to yellow and purple. They have the highest amount, is to use what's called a split complementary color scheme. So where I take, hue is a little bit to the left and a little bit to the right of purple just to nudge down that amount of contrast a little bit and add a little bit more variety to the color scheme. The last thing I want to show you we call a triad or triadic color scheme, and this is based on the primary and secondary color references, but they're just three colors from different parts of the color wheel. So, all of these showing just two or three colors and those are good places to begin, you can add more tens of shades of your hues to build a bigger color palette, you can also add more, you can make a quadtrad or tetrads or color scheme here by adding more than three colors. But these are just a few of the basics that can get you started as you start to build out your color palettes for your assignment. That's it for this video, in the next one we'll talk just a little bit more about color terminology and how colors start to interact specifically. 3. Color Interaction: So, in this video, what I'd like to talk about and demonstrate here is the interaction of color. Now that we've got a basic understanding of some of the terminology of color, we can use that terminology to talk about the relationship between colors. Whenever we have more than one color, those colors are going to interact and they're going to react differently in different types of situations depending on the relationship of the colors or where the colors might fall within the color scheme that you're building. So, we've talked about complimentary colors. The complimentary colors tend to have the most contrast with each other because they are across the color wheel. You can also have contrast between colors that are close on the color wheel certainly, and you can have contrast between colors that have different saturation levels or different brightness levels as well. What you want to think about when you're building a color palette is controlling those things so that they have the appropriate amount of contrast. Too much contrast, not enough contrast, these are all bad things. One of the biggest challenges of building the color palette is just maintain the appropriate level of contrast throughout the use of your color. So, to test some of that, we can start to look at how color interacts, and I'm going to show you a couple of things that I normally do and some ways you can look at color. I'm going to use an example here from one of these Chronicles of Narnia posters, where I've got purple as my dominant color, I've got some neutral colors of the black and white and bluish-gray, and then I've got also blue as an analogous color of purple to build out my color palette. When I was creating these posters, I actually started out with a totally different color palette that ended up not working very well for me. I had a green instead of a gray, and it just didn't end up working the way I wanted it to. So, the way that I figured out a better way to do that was to test the way the colors interact with each other. I posted a link in the resources section for the grand master of color interaction. There was a guy named Josef Albers, who taught at Black Mountain College, and there's a pretty cool iPad app that the Yale Press developed. It gives you access to play around with some of his techniques for testing the interaction of colors. So, I'm borrowing parts and pieces and his exercises, and then applying that and trying to find the right color balance here. So, what I've got is a couple of colors, and what I'm doing is taking the large color swatch and the small color swatch from palette and I'm testing out the amounts of contrast between the two. So here, I've got the purple and blue and they seem to have a pretty nice amount of contrast. The blue pops off with the purple without being swallowed up, and I can easily define the shape of the square inside of there. Then, we get the same thing happening down here in the black, and that's because they're not really quite the same but have a similar comparison of brightness of these two colors in comparison to the blue here. So, just look at those. Right, that seems about appropriate. I run some other tests, and one thing that we do is we flip things around. So, I've got blue on purple here, and so then let's put purple on blue and see how it holds up. Because as you expand the amount of color, sometimes that contrast can dwindle pretty quickly. Luckily, here, we got about the same amount of contrast with this purple on blue as we do here. However, when I add in one of my other colors that's bluish-gray, we can see that there's not as much contrast here. If we look at this thing, in comparison, when I look at this purple on blue, the purple seems much heavier, seems darker. They're about the same saturation level, but on the brightness scale, this one certainly on the darker end of the spectrum. These two start to get closer in comparison, and this purple actually starts to smooth out and there's not as much contrast between the two. So, I end up with this purple like looking about the same weight here as it does here. If I make this, let's try that one more time. If I make this dark my black color here, the purple actually seems a lot lighter. So, I have this light purple and then this purple that seems darker, and I almost started to play tricks on you to make you think that it's a two different colors of purple. So, these are just things that you want to run through and test and see what works and what doesn't, then it build out this whole pallet to see what different colors look like in different scenarios. So, what I've got here is certainly there are areas where I have about as much contrast as possible here with white on black and black on white down here. But I've also got an appropriate or a nice amount of contrast in all the other colors on white. Things seem to work fairly decently here, here, and then each of these. The main issue that I'm running into is this gray color. I want that last color to give me enough range, and the color pallet to build out all the stuff that I have in that poster, but I've got a few areas like purple on gray. Gray on purple is a little bit better, but purple on gray, there's not quiet enough contrast here. Gray on blue were in the same scenario where there's just not enough contrast in there. Overall, that's okay. I've got these five colors and there's going to be a wide range of different scenarios that I'm using them in, and each one might not work a 100 percent perfectly. But what we want is a nice balance overall so that the majority of these colors work well together in comparison to each other. So, when we come back in here and look at the final product of my poster design, you can start to see how limiting like, where did the purple and the gray are interacting. So, there's only a small amount of places where the purple and the gray come in contact with each other, and that's because they start to get a little muddy. I want to keep this thing, it's a nice even amount of contrast, and have a fair amount of contrast to start with with the black and white colors and hard edge shapes. So, I want to keep the contrast level high, and I'm limiting the purple on gray interaction there because I know that those are my low contrast areas. So, again, you want to run a couple of these tests just to measure the contrast between the colors. That can be contrast in hue, it can be contrast in saturation, it can be contrast in brightness. Overall, my whole color palette, I'm keeping the saturation level relatively somewhere of each one. So, you'll want to look through that as well. Keeping the saturation level similar allows me to add more contrast and brightness, which I tend to like, and that's look that I'm wanting for in this poster. But then, by keeping the saturation level similar, that keeps the contrast level dial back down, so that I have the right amount of contrast overall. It's just to balance. You just have to look at and revise and edit, but it's all of these tests can help you figure that out earlier rather than later. One last principle of color interaction that I'd like to touch on here is just the idea that when you place certain colors next to each other, we can give the appearance of translucency or transparency. So, when you look at this range of color that I have here, and I'm adding a couple of colors that aren't in my poster just to illustrate the process, you might think the what I've got is a transparent of the blue-green square overlaid over this purple and gray. But what I've actually got are a couple of other colors in there. So, out here, this thing looks blue-gray or whatever, this looks bluish-green. But when placed next to each other, I can give the appearance that these colors become transparent. I can give that appearance while still working in solid color. So, it's not something that you necessarily have to do, but it's something that you might think about. I can adjust these as needed, however I want to. I might move this thing a little closer to purple or something to build out a color palette that still gives the appearance of transparency, but I can adjust that. The main thing here is to just thinking about it rather than flipping it to transparency. It's like I'm thinking about the saturation and the brightness and the hue of the color in relationship to the other one, and I'm building that transparency. So, as you work through this, if you're working in Illustrator or if you're working in Photoshop, you might think about how you can give the appearance of transparency, or you might work only in solid colors instead of just downing or interchanging the opacity or something so that you're thinking about the interaction of color as you're building out the emotion that you want to describe to people. 4. Generating Ideas: Okay, in this video I want to talk just a little bit about generating ideas. So, you're starting to think about ways to show or to convey the different emotions that you've selected. You might build a several different ideas. So, I've got a few tips and tricks that I use sort of as I go along especially in the early stages of trying to build a lot of different types of ideas. So, the first one of those I call a word web or a mind map. So, I've got an example of an old one here that I've scanned in. That's just to take this sort of really basic central idea. This is actually from my other Skillshare course on badge design, but you can see you just started with the word badges, and I just start to build out all sorts of different things based on that. The trick for this thing is to turn your brain off and just do almost word association where it's just like badges in the Boys Scouts and then awareness and rewards answers or batches and design, history and artists and designers names, initials are badges, and stamps and stickers and people and activities or badges mid-century, furniture and life and living, the table, bed et cetera. As soon as you hit a dead end or something, just immediately drop it and go back to the beginning and build out another direction to try and give you a different ideas of how you might convey this emotion. After you've spent maybe 15, 20, 30 minutes doing this, go back and circle some of your favorite ideas and then start to compare those ideas and see which ones you might end up liking better. Oftentimes, when I'm trying to generate ideas or when I'm in this space I do a lot of word related inspirations sort of ways to think about different things. Another pretty cool tool is just like a thesaurus. For this you know, it's kind of jump online to thesaurus.com and I might search for emotion and then, I start to get a list of some of the emotions that you guys are hopefully already thinking about. You know I'm going to pick something like maybe, oh I don't know. Let's just pick excitement here and then it will start to give me synonyms for excitement and I can start to think about all sorts of different things. We might look at something like buzz, you know and then you start to think about a bee and being happy, having a big grin because he found like the biggest flower in the world or something. Just think about warmth, beam and then start to think about fireplaces all sorts of different stuff. So, this is just a pretty cool tool to keep ideas moving in a similar way to this word web where you just build word afterward word afterward word to make those associations. The main idea here being that you're getting away from that beginning idea, you know. Oftentimes too try and get as far away as possible from here after you done kind of free association thing where you turn your brain off and just write whatever comes to mind. You might sit back and just think about like, what is the worst idea possible? You know and so, for this we might take an emotion like love and think about like how I convey love, and what's the worst idea that I could do there. Maybe we could use cool colors, blue colors to try and convey love. It's not exactly a very good idea, but if I start thinking about cool colors and then start to think about water and then I start to thinking about fish and you know maybe I can have some small fish and some brightly colored medium fish and they find love unexpectedly. Start to play out this whole story in my mind or something, but then I can start to build some idea of a way to communicate love between two characters or something using only cool colors. So, it's possible to bring that back to something that might actually work. So, use it with caution of course, if you're thinking about terrible ideas but just a 180 degree thinking technique that I like to use sometimes, it's like what's the opposite of love? It's hate probably. So, like how may I communicate love while using hate, I'm not quite sure right off the top of my head but, I can see how I'm just trying to look at things from different perspectives, right? So, then after you've gotten kind of some general ideas down, after you've built some randomness into the equation, you'll probably want to start sketching. So, what I've got here is kind of just like some scan sketches from one of the projects at the overview of this course. There were a bunch of icons of badges at sign for location map. As you start to do this, I strongly advocate just putting more ideas down the less you know and just don't be afraid to sketch and sketch and sketch in. Here you can see I'm playing with a door idea and a question mark for one of them and sketch about five different doors open or there's a light from above or something you know. Here's gifts or gifts again and unwrap gifts, and gifts in a sack or something. So, after you've established the ideas, as you're starting to pull the visuals together, start to sketch them out. Don't be afraid of sloppy sketches, just do it quickly. Once you've done one, just do another one and just keep refining that idea as you move along. So, using those couple of techniques hopefully, we can build some interesting ideas, ways to show the different emotions that you've chosen or that you decide that you want to show and find something interesting or some unique way to present emotion inside of your square image whatever that ends up being. 5. Gathering Inspiration: Hey everybody. In this short video, I want to talk just a little bit about gathering inspiration. It's an important part in the creative process and, I think, most of the creative industry runs through this stuff early on to help get ideas generating, to help get your brain jump-started with every project. Everything that I do, I spend a little bit of time up front just gathering a pool of specific imagery that inspires me or gets me going on that specific project. I'd encourage you to do the same thing here, as you start to build out a color palette, as you start to think about what emotions you're going to be representing or conveying. You might dig a bunch of reference information, things that you find cool, color palettes that you find interesting, maybe some complimentary colors that you're just really in love with or something, and put all those into a folder that you can reference as you move through the project. One big thing that I want to talk about is that I feel it's really important to get away from the computer for this one. You can certainly spend some time on the computer, and I'll talk just a little bit about that, but I feel it's really beneficial to everybody to step away from the computer every so often and a great time to do that is early on. So, just as an example here, I have a huge reference of mid-century books because I'm really inspired by their use of color as well as a lot of other things. So, I keep a library of books right behind me and I just grabbed one here. It's Mary Blair, who's very famous Walt Disney artist in the mid-century, in the mid-1900s and this is the book "I Can Fly." I just love her color usage inside of this book. So, I often kind of flip through this and just take a look at how she uses different colors, how she's building a really nice cohesive color palette with a lot of different colors in here and then, how she might add in neutrals or change that color palette up, but still keep it similar at the same time. Also, find just inspiration in real life, so I got this little tin toy that my dad gave me for Christmas and I just love the primary color scheme on this thing. So, to give you one more just real life reference here, my wife and I were recently talking about redoing our room for our first child and we started talking about colors. We're having a boy. We didn't really want to go with strong boy colors or anything like that. We're having a really hard time talking about what things to get, what colors to put in this room, et cetera. So, the first thing I did was just flip back over to my books and started to pull a couple of things out and ended up with this cartoon modern book which has a really beautiful primary color scheme. We also took a look at this excellent book by Katie Kirk, called "Eli, no" and how we might take those colors, but add a few more because she really wanted to not just be blue and yellow and red or anything. But, there's some nice pretty secondary colors in here and they have a similar yellow color to the first book, which is cool. Then, I also happened to get in the mail that day this mid-century book, called "Nancy and the Unhappy Lion," and it's got a lot of cool stuff in there as well. Still based around the same yellow, some gray color. So, we're obviously not done with the room yet but, it's just a cool reference or real life story of me pulling all this color inspiration from books and it giving us the idea to get going on the project. So again, I'd encourage you to get away from the project here, but as we jump in to the computer here, I'll show you. I also use Pinterest a lot. I gather inspiration on the internet every day and I'm not saying you shouldn't do this, I'm just encouraging you to combine both of them. So, I posted a link in the resources to this color Pinterest board that I keep of just cool color combinations that I like to use. The other thing of course, you can use are tools like Adobe's Color here and you can browse through their color palettes and a whole bunch of other stuff. I think that this tool can be very useful, but in my opinion, what is a better way to approach it is with the knowledge of the color that we're talking about in this course, and then taking some inspiration of some kind, and building your own color palette. If you're going to use stuff from here, you should at least be evaluating it. What works? What doesn't work? What other colors can I add in this color palette to help me build up my project? What kind of color palette is it? Here's a neutral color palette. Here's almost a primary color palette. Here's an analogous color palette. Apply that knowledge that you know as you're thinking about these colors. So, take a little bit of that, go out, find some inspiration, collect it into a bucket somewhere, and use it to help you along the way as you're working through your emotions. 6. Sketching Ideas: All right. In this video, I want to talk just a little bit more about sketching. We just prefaced it and the generating ideas of video right before this one. I wanted to just be a little bit more thorough about the sketching process for me, and just reiterate how important it is. As you guys are starting to think in the second section about really how you express or show or convey the emotions that you've selected, you really want to be sketching through the ideas that you've built so far. So, to show my process and to give you guys some kind of reference here, I've got some examples of one project that I did as a poster for a company called Curriculet. The subject of the poster is the novel, Huckleberry Finn, as it relates to the one of the common core principles of teaching. So, the first image here, this is literally like the loose scribbles of my sketches of ideas as I'm starting to think about it, and it's basically unintelligible to anybody but me. Like, maybe here's a figure and then a whole bunch of scribbles of things back here, and maybe this is a figure on a raft hopefully. The likelihood of anybody else understanding this is null and void, but these are just for me. So, what I do is, as I'm thinking I'll quickly scribble down these ideas, right? Then, I might go back and start to develop the ideas a little bit more. So, if we take a look at this here, I got this idea of all of these things coming out of this book. There's different sort of parts and pieces of the world of Huckleberry Finn, and what I'm doing is this, I'm thinking about that and going back and sketching some more practical pieces of the story. I am adding the character here, that these ideas are projecting from his head as he's thinking about his adventure. This one can be a little more intelligible there, so few kind of things. Everything is rough around the edges as I move through this for sure. So, take another look at one of my original ideas, a little bit more developed. Here is this idea, a bit of old sunset behind the raft here, and as I sketch that out so that everybody else can understand it a little bit more, it's still just me quickly adding in, both the rafts, Huck and Jim, and the woods that they lived in for a while, and then on the river here. You can see the idea kind of develop, and that's the main sort of issue that I'm trying to convey here. It's just the idea that this is a process, and the process you should continue to refine as you move forward. Every time you sketch something, it's going to get better. So, let's keep looking at these, I've got one last one here. This is my character, there's different scenes from within the book, and then, the character standing in front being the narrator, telling the story of these different scenes, and that's from this little scribble of the sketch down in here. So, I take these three basic ideas, and then present them to the client. In which case, you'll want to post some of your ideas to your project and share that with the class for feedback. After talking a little bit with the client, they sort of end up in this scenario where they like this one, but they want to put him on the raft like in this one, and then, you'll want to take these specific scenes from the book and convey those. In which point, I take that feedback and do kind of a tightened up pencil sketch of what that is. While in the process of doing that, I have this idea like I'm drawing his straw hat here. One of the main things that they wanted to convey is the two worlds of Huckleberry Finn, him as the prim and proper boy that he's supposed to be, and then the rambunctious rowdy youth that he actually is. As I start to draw that hat, I think about whether it's a top hat or a straw hat, and have this idea to split the whole thing in half. So, I send them off this and then I also send them off this other really rough sketch, to where we do like a split screen, and then make it more evident that we're really talking about the two different Huck Finn's that are in the story. So, in this idea of him wearing a suit with a top hat, here he's got the overalls and the straw hat on. Over here is the ladies who took care of him and then they're trying to educate him, and then over here some hoodlums and the interacts within the novel. So, they really like this idea and begin here, I'm just stressing that as I'm sketching, I'm thinking about it and that's the important part of sketching. The more I sketch, the more I think, the more I think, the better things get, the more they refine. So then, I present that to the client or in this case, again, you would post revised ideas to the class to get their feedback. Then, they liked that idea and I go through and I make this poster. So, pull all of the ideas from the sketches into the final product. It's just a process as you move through this thing. So, I would strongly encourage you as you're working through this thing to post your work and get feedback often. It's important to hear from other people, it's important to get other perspectives, and that will make your work better. So, soon as you can come up with something that you think is worth sharing, just post it. If you are looking for feedback specifically from me and I haven't commented on the project, as I mentioned, just leave the Q and A or submit your project for feedback, and I'll try and get to that just as quickly as I can. 7. The Context of Color: Okay. In this video, back to our color wheel here again. What I would like to do this time though, is talk about the context of color and what color means. So, to do that, we're going to do really very basic breakdown of the color wheel, and then, I'm also going to take one color and we're going to look at possible different meanings for that color. If you split the color wheel in half, on one-half you'll have cool colors, on the other half you'll have warm colors. Warm's being your orange and red, even down on the red purple, and kind of yellow usually, and then, the cool colors being like greens and blues, and you know even down until like blue, purple, and stuff. Yellow and purple being like the split between the two, yellow green is kind of a cool color. Purple can be decently warm with a little bit of red in it. The big thing here is that the warm colors are more active colors, and the cool colors are more passive colors. So, you know this one's pretty obvious but, warm color's get associated with positive emotions, and cool colors get associated with negative emotions. It would be kind of the first thought there, but I also want to take just a quick look at you know, I'm going to pull the color red out here, and this red can mean all sorts of different stuff. I've always kind of found it interesting how the context that I'm using, the colors becomes really important to the emotion that I'm trying to convey. So, if we look at red in a positive light, I might have something like this. We start to talk about love when talking about Valentine's Day, and we talk about roses, and red is a very beautiful passionate sort of emotion that describes the relationship between two people pretty well. At the same time, on the totally opposite end of the spectrum, we can look at red as a color that's communicated hatred. Red can be a very violent color. It's the color of blood, the color of life or death, depending on how you portray it. It's something here used to evoke a lot of very very strong emotions, and by no way am I communicating my connection with these folks or anything, like I'm very opposed to the kind of emotions that this color was used in this context, right? But you can see how drastic the changes of the emotions are between the context of the colors that I'm using with virtually the same color. Then again here, if you look at something like this, and the exact same color of red can mean french fries. Everybody knows McDonald's red, and McDonald's chose red and yellow very smartly because they evoke hunger, because they're active colors. It kind of loops us back into those warm colors being active colors, and even with the different emotions of love, and hate, and hunger, and all the sorts of other things, we can add Coca-Cola red into the mixture. All of those are still communicating some sort of action. They're provoking you to do something or to feel something pretty strongly, and a more passive color will evoke less emotion typically. It's not less emotion, it's just a different type of emotion from cool colors, and it's types of emotion that are often less active, right? They're less provoking on the cooler side of the color wheel. So, as you think about those things, think about what kind of emotion you're trying to provoke. What you're trying to get people to feel, but then also think about where this image might live in the end? Or like, what kind of imagery you're trying to use? Colors can certainly mean different things in different areas of the world, and possibly, a couple of links and additional resources to investigate more about the psychology of color and the median of color, but also just do some kind of Google searches and Wikipedia searches. Like, if for instance, I wanted to do a series of emotions based on my trip through the Pacific Northwest or something from last summer, and kind of the dangerous emotions we felt while driving along rocky giant cliffs versus like the really happy emotions we felt while viewing some very beautiful sceneries, at the same time. I might try and create imagery to convey those emotions from different points in my trip. But I might also take a look at what the context of the color is in the Pacific Northwest, and what the colored green, or like what shade, or view of green, might work well for the Pacific Northwest compared to what that green might mean elsewhere in the country, or elsewhere in the world. So, make sure you're thinking about the context of the imagery, what you're showing, and how the colors you're choosing connect to what you're trying to communicate to people as you're moving forward. 8. Building a Color Palette: Now that we know a fair amount about color terminologies and color theory, we either thinking about color and context, we've generated some of our ideas for how to express or convey the different emotions that we want to, you are fully ready to start building a color palette. So, I want to just talk through a couple of ways that I approach building a color palette normally. There are two different sort of techniques that I might showing you here. One is definitely the one that I use more often, and the second one is just a tool inside of Illustrator that might help you out also. So, in the first one, for both of these, I'm going to be showing you where I started building the color palette for this series of icons at. So, in doing so, I just did exactly as I've described to you guys. I found a bunch of references, research material, and inspiration. I had one sort of stipulation from the client to make it look like a pack of wild berry skittles. So, we knew we wanted it to be pretty saturated, pretty bright, and of good variety of color, certainly. So, hit the Pinterest boards and everything else, and I just started looking at some color palettes. So, in Illustrator, I just make little squares and start to put them next to each other and start to build color palettes based on some things that I like. So, you can see here, I really love this fossil poster, and so I pulled the colors directly from this color poster. The thing here is, though, that I'm not going to use this as my color palette at all. What I'm looking at is how they're building this variety of color and how they're building a palette that has plenty of different colors in it and the appropriate amount of contrast. So, then I'm taking a look at a couple of those from different posters. I think this one was from one and that one, and then kind of combining a few of them and pulling in a few of my own ideas as well. So then, I even pull in, start to I think grab this directly from wild berry skittles package even, and then take parts and pieces of some of these colors like maybe this blue here, and this yellow up here, and orange from up here, and I started looking at how they come together. So, then I've got this color palette going on, and this is my edited color palette after making a few adjustments to the colors that I've sampled from some of those other color palettes. I'm starting to feel pretty good about this one. One other way that you can help build a color palette too is this piece inside of Illustrator called the Color Guide. So, this is a pretty cool tool sometimes. It's similar to the Adobe color tool that I referenced in one of the first videos, but it's built inside of Illustrator and it can give you a quick look at some other colors that might work well or might be harmonious with this color. So, I'm just going to grab one color here, and right away if I look in the color guide window, which can be found under Window and Color Guide, you can see that I can build these different harmonies in here and I can pick a triad color scheme based on this color. Actually, it's the one that it has. I click on that color, then it builds my triad color scheme here. You can see that I've got a red purple one, a yellow, and so I've got a red purple one and yellow in here and then maybe think about other things that we might be able to add in. If I click on Analogous, what colors might I get? So then, I can pull a few other parts and pieces of color from this one as well, and you can actually, if you pick multiple colors and click Edit or Apply Colors down here, you should be able to add a couple of colors. Then, if you click on Edit, you can start to click through these colors that it's using inside of these different color schemes. So, I might pick this one and then click on that and see what kind of colors I get from a tetrad color scheme based on that color, and then I might really like this color and click over there and see what kind of colors I can get from that. It's another tool to play around with to give you some ideas of colors that relate well to each other that then you can pick and choose from to build your own color palette. I'd use the same warning that I gave you with the Adobe color stuff for that Color Guide sort of tool is that it's your job to constantly be critical of the colors that it's providing. Don't just use them straight out of the box, but use them to maybe grab parts and pieces here or say, "Oh, yeah. I hadn't thought about maroon color." Just to keep the ideas moving. But then, go back and refine them and build a good, consistent, harmonious color palette with an appropriate amount of contrast that's going to give you the right colors for the context of the emotion that you're trying to describe, and it's going to give you enough variety to really to expand outward, and we'll talk a little bit more about how to add even more variety in the next video. The last thing that I did with this color palette is take a look at this one, and then I knew that there were going to be used on a dark gray background potentially. So, I started to look at that background color, and this is back to the color interaction tests and then start to say, "Well, maybe these are getting kind of dark here, maybe there's not enough contrast in here, so I can lighten some of these colors up." But then, as we start to look at these, I might even flip some of them around to do some quick color interaction tests. Even here where I've made them fair amount lighter, they seem to be working pretty well. But even there, I want to bring this saturation down and increase the brightness just a little bit on all of them to end up with this sort of color palette, which was where I based that series of icons from, and then added some other colors in which we'll talk more about shortly. 9. Expanding A Color Palette: Now that you've built out your initial color palette and have started to explore, creating the visuals for the emotions that you're trying to communicate, it's possible that you'll need to expand your color palette just a little bit. Over the series of four different images, what do you want as a color palette that appears unified, but is still robust enough that you have variety between the four different images, so that you're creating a unity in the series, but you're not becoming stale as you look from image to image to image. There's several different things you can do to add some variety into your color palette. To give you an example here, I'm going to walk you through how I expanded a color palette for this kid's iPad app that I designed, which originally started with a very restricted color palette and ended up with a much more colorful palette towards the end of this thing. So, when I started out, they had a totally different name and I started just cranking out some initial constant styles for this thing. I wanted it to be based on pretty strongly on, have pretty big influence at the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus with it's reduction to only what is necessary are the core elements of design. I thought for sure that I build this whole thing in primary colors. So, I build out a really nice primary color palette. You can see some of my experiments over here, already notice I tried adding a green, or we tried this desaturated primary color palette and a few iterations here. Then I end up with this color palette which is pretty saturated, pretty bright, fair amount of contrast because it's for kids. We want to have a lot of fun activity inside of the color palette, et cetera. So, then suddenly it's off to the client. We talked through, I did this whole thing in three colors. It's going to be amazing, et cetera, et cetera. In the end, we decided that wasn't going to be nearly enough colors to keep things fun and fresh, and different between every screen of this app. So, when we take a look at the final color palette here, which is this, and I have limited, I think, almost the entire app to just these solid colors. We've got quite a lot more happening. So, after you've built that initial color palette, in which case I've a got a primary color palette, which is the triad color palette. You can start to think about ways to expand that a little bit. So, when I start with primary colors, the immediate answer is I can start to use different shades of those colors, or hues, or tints. So, I've got a lighter tint of the yellow. We've got some darker shades of the red and the blue here to add a little bit more variety. You can even add other primary colors. You can see I added in this lighter blue, because there are several screens, I have a sky in them. I needed that lighter blue for sky, because light gray might have worked, but I won't be is fun. White, obviously, I wouldn't have clouds that would stand out or anything like that. So, I've got this light blue that were added into the mix as well. On the flip side of that, when I'm dealing with primary colors, the next obvious answer is to add some secondary colors to the mix. So, we start it off with yellow, red, blue and then, I'm going to add orange and purple, and green to the mix as well. Those, I'm going to use of a little bit less of and so I don't build out the necessary tensor shades, but that will give me enough variety later on in life, that I can do something that feels like an entirely different color scheme. But if I'm making sure that I'm coordinating things like the saturation and the brightness and the contrast between the colors. When I start to compare these things, when you'll see the different screens and the different color palettes, it will still feel like they all belong together. So, something that we're constantly checking and adjusting and making tweaks on, but we add secondary colors to the mix. Then we add a white and a black and in this case, add another tint to black or a gray here, and white is not quite white, black is not quite black. So, it's not like 100 percent contrast, about 93 percent contrast or something. Then as if that's not enough, we start to add neutrals. So, the neutrals being your tans, your browns, cream colors and that's going to, they'll stay out of the way of your color palette, they will work with just about anything, which is why they're called neutral. But they'll still bring in that variety, that you might want overall. So, you've got different tints and shades of your initial color palette. You might add some more colors. If it's not primary color palette, you might think about what other colors you might add to the mix. You can add white and black, which are neutrals, or you can add this neutral brown colors as well, to add some of that variety. So that in the end, when you start to see all the different rooms and illustrations that I've done here, you can get the same sense that I've got, a cohesive color palette cross all of them, but there's plenty of variety in between them. 10. Reviewing and Editing Colors: As you start to bring all of your different visuals and different emotions that you're portraying together, keep in mind that you can always edit color as you go through the entire project. So, don't feel like you're walked into the color palette that you chose originally or even the expanded color palette that you built out, you can always edit these things. Whenever I'm working, it's a constantly iterative process where I'm improving, improving, improving, improving as much as I can tell it's done or until we hit the deadline or whatever's happening. So, to show this is just a little bit, I wanted to use as an example one more time, the Narnia posters here and pick one of them, the first one and show you that even towards the end of the project I was still editing and tweaking colors to get things exactly perfect the way that I wanted them. So, this is an earlier version in my Illustrator file here and this is the final version and you can see a few changes. I'm pumping this down to make room for the author, title here and changing a few other things but the main thing is that, tweaking that purple and the blue color to add just a little bit more saturation to them, to give them a little bit more contrast in comparison to some of the background colors, so that they're popping out of the areas where I want them to be. So, I'm not running into issues here. Like we talked about, we have this purple and gray issue, felt okay about it, moving forward. But even there at the end I wanted to tweak it just a little bit. So, what I want to show you is how to quickly do that inside of Illustrator. If you're using Illustrator to create this stuff, it can be a difficult process to go through and change all of these different colors. There are a few different ways that you can do it but the one that I like is by just editing the colors, and the way that I do that is I make sure I got everything unlocked here and I'm going to select everything. One thing to notice that you can see all of that outlines here, and that is going to be a problem because it's really distorting the perception of the colors here. I want to be able to edit these and watch them update and so you can go to View and, say, Hide Edges or hit command H or control H and that'll give us a better look at this thing while still having everything selected. Then what you want is to come to Edit and come down to Edit Colors and, say, Recolor Artwork, and when you pull open on this window, sorry let me try that one more time, Recolor Artwork. You'll see, it's got the five colors in here that I have listed or that I'm using, but what I can do is I can quickly click on one of these colors and start to edit it. Unfortunately, it won't edit and update right here but as soon as you click OK, I can see how a really light sea foam green might affect if I were to change that gray. This becomes really nice, super easy to do later on in life and is a pretty handy trick especially when you're wanting to be really specific about the final colors. Unfortunately, I can't command Z to undo that right now, like almost, no, I can't pick that color either, so I'm just going to hit Cancel and then come back into this thing one more time, and you'll see that just by clicking on this little small purple square next to the big swatch of color, I can come in here and I can tweak and drag this down, add a little more saturation or brightness inside of here and you'll see, it can start to crank that color up just a little bit further. You can also come in here, select just the saturation percentage and either type in your own percentage or use the arrow keys on your keyboard if you really want to dial in no specifically saturation or brightness level that you're interested in. I can even change the hue a little bit, move it a little bit closer to blue or something just to see if I like that color any better. Soon as you make those updates, you can just hit OK and it's going to go through, it's going to change all of those colors for him. So, by the time I'm finally done, I've solved all my contrast issues, added a little bit more saturation to the colors to pull them off with a neutral and balanced this thing out to where I want it and, so we're ready to go at that point and I'm pretty happy with this thing. Quick, easy, nothing to it 11. Build Consistency and Depth: In this last video, I'm going to show you some advanced tips or ways to add some depth to your color palette by adding texture and dimension to it. To do this, I'm going to use as an example, this illustration of a wagon that I've created and this is the Illustrator file and then we'll take it into Photoshop and I'll show you how by adding a little bit more visual information, you can expand the color palette and add a little bit of depth if you want to. So, to start out, cut everything made with shapes here inside of Illustrator, I've added a little bit of texture inside of Illustrator, there and on the clouds and behind the sun. What I want to do is export all of this to Photoshop, so that I can add a little bit more detail to the illustration. When I'm going to do that, what I've got inside of the Illustrator file or these, let's see, seven different layers, but what I need in Photoshop is a whole bunch of different layers with all of the different elements on. So, what I've done is I've gone into each layer and I've grouped together the items that I want to be on their own layer inside of Photoshop. So, here on the wagon, you can see where I've made a group out of the wagon width up here at the top, which is actually two different shapes because it's got this highlight in there. So, I got that in a group, I've got the t-tails in a group, I've got the base in the group so on and so forth, different parts of the wheel in a group. These are groups that I'm making because I'll know that I want to apply different textures or shade things differently. You can group things however you want. What you just need to know is that when you group them, this will come in as it's own layer inside of Photoshop. So, I've gone through and I've done that on all of my layers here and I'm ready to export this file into Photoshop. I go to File and go to Export and I choose a Photoshop file and then give it a slightly different name. I'm going to check use art boards and we'll click Export. That pulls up this screen and this screen is going to be fairly important. You'll want to make sure you get the right resolution. Here, I'm just going to use 72 pixels per inch which will be fine for your assignment, for the project for this class. The main thing here that I'm concerned about is that I wanted to write layers, not create a flat image. We're going to go ahead and check Preserve Text Editability and Maximum Editability. Then, we'll leave these last two by default, set to Hinted and set to Embed The Profile and click OK. Now, I'll take just a short second and then, if we go in here to open this up, then we'll take a look at what we've got here. So, you'll see that I took my top layer which wasn't important to us because it was outside of the edges of the art ordinates, cut all of that stuff off, but then, if we look at the wagon, you'll see it's got the wagon lip as its own layer, it's got the details which are still grouped because they've got groups inside of groups there and the wagon base. Then the lug nuts, and the wheels, and everything else in the appropriate areas are where I want them to be. So, the way that I'm going to start to add some depth and texture to this theme is by expanding on the color palette in a few different ways. One, we might use a brush inside of Photoshop and I might start to add some details to the sun. Here, I've got two layers for the sun, I'll go ahead and merge those into one and then I'm going to pick a brush and maybe we'll pick this grainy brush that I built before and then I'll bring that brush down to size. I posted a couple of tutorial links that will help you get a basic idea of textures and brushes inside of Photoshop, so I don't have a whole bunch of time to talk about that, but what I do want to talk about here is that as I'm thinking about expanding the color palette, what I want to do is stay cohesive to maintain that same base color palette while adding just a little bit of variety in there. So, to do that, what I'm going to do is I'm going to pick the actual color of the sun, and then make a new layer right above it. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a clipping mask without layer, we go into Layer, Create Clipping Mask. So then now, anything that I paint will only apply onto the sun. So, if you paint over here, nothing's going to show up. If I undo the clipping mask, you'll see I've just painted all this texture, but it doesn't show up because it's only revealing what is directly on top of the sun. So, I'm going to maintain just a little texture quickly, once there, and then right now, you can't see anything because of course they have the same color. I'm going to come into the blend mode in the layers and I'm going to change that to screen and then I'm going to drop the opacity of the layer down to like 20 or 30 percent. Then, I'm going to make another layer and I'm going to brush some texture around the edges of this sun, which again you can't see. It's also on clipping mask because I made it above the sun layer, so it drops right in line and you can tell when it adds this little arrow over here, but it's still a clipping mask directly applied to the sun. This time around, I'm going to switch it to multiply and we're going to get this darker sort of image. Using this method, I can still stay true to the hues or the colors that I picked for my original color palette but then I can expand on that just a little bit by adding things that are really relevant, really relative, directly related to those initial colors. So, then I might do that a couple of times, actually in some areas, so I might come in here about this sun. Again, we'll add another little layer to add some dimension or make another layer there, and all kind of brushes. A little more room for that to multiply, just to get a little bit more depth in there. Again, this is a work thing, you don't need it. Oftentimes let's try and stick with just solid colors and really basic shapes, but if it's an aesthetic choice you want to make, the main thing that I'm trying to describe is that we're using colors that stay the same by just building on them a little bit by flipping things like screen and multiply, so that the relationship we established with our color theory knowledge stays true. What you don't want to be doing is starting to add just random colors again at this point. So, even if I pick another blue and I paint blue around the sky here, we're only going to apply that to the background. We get something like this and then I pick screen or multiply or whatever I'm after for this thing. The big thing is that'll start to shift or skew the color palette, and the way that the color of the sky interacts with the color of the grass is going to change and that's a bit, it's going to become a problem. So, either I want to use the same color as the sky, and just brush in that color to get that kind of detail or you can try using just black and white. So here, I might start over again and I might use just black for the brush and then if I multiply black, okay, darkness around the edges. Make a new one and paint some white in the middle, trying to give this halo effect. We'll flip that to screen and drop its opacity to 30 or 40 percent. So that way, I'm also still just expanding on that original blue color and I'm not changing any of the color harmony or the color relationship at all, but I'm adding a little bit of depth, a little bit of texture just to liven this thing up a little bit warm. In the end, end up somewhere in this area with a few other Photoshop things and applying those techniques to different layers inside of this file. It's a choice you can make. If you want to, if you want to explore a little bit, try it out and maybe you'll decide you like it or you won't. Hopefully, by that point, you'll be making the finishing touches and you'll always have all of your four emotions done, so you'll be pretty much wrapped up with your project. 12. Explore Design on Skillshare: way.