Let's Explore Color in Procreate

1. Welcome to Class: Hello skillshare. Let's talk about color. I love color. My home is full of color, different shades of pink, green, turquoise, blue, and pops of yellow. I also love to include a whole lot of color into my illustrations and patterns and make them come alive in my eyes and hopefully gain the interest from buyers too. Color is really important. It can change the mood of an artwork from sophisticated and subdued to wild and fun. You can convey different seasons with specific color palettes and you can breathe new life into a design with just a few color adjustments. In this class, I will be taking you on a color journey so that you can confidently create color palettes and procreate. I will be sharing my process of finding a signature color palette, as well as choosing mini color palettes for each of my collection. I will also quickly cover an overview of why color is so important and the difference between RGB and CMYK. Finally, I will take you through the process of the class project, which is to create a CMYK friendly palette and procreate and recolor your artwork so that you don't ever have any huge color surprises when converting to a print friendly CMYK format one. I'm Christina Houchens, an illustrator and surface designer from Maria Fett, Sweden. I've been working full time as an illustrator since 2010. And I've worked with big clients such as Hobby Lobby, American Greetings, Paintbrush studio fabrics to name a few, and welcome to my Cheery Pink Studio. This class is great for anyone who loves working in procreate and would love to gain a lot more color inspiration. Color confidence, learn why color is so important, and also wants to make their lives easier when converting from RGB to CMYK. So let's get started. 2. Supplies and Class Project: The supplies that you'll need for this class if you'd like to follow along exactly how I am doing would be an ipad with the Apple pencil with the app procreate. I will also be using Photoshop. It's good to have and that's it. You can use all the digital brushes of your choice and things like that. We won't be focusing so much on drawing this time around, but mainly on color. The class project for this class is to create a CMYK friendly color palette in procreate, and you can recolor some of your artworks using this color palette For the class project, I can't wait to see what you come up with in class. 3. Intro to Color: All right, now it's time to talk about why color is so important. In this class, I really want to inspire you about how color can really show your style and what you love. But you can also play with color to make different moods. And color is also so important when you are designed for certain seasons or certain holidays because color matters so quickly. I just want to go over the differences between CMYK and RGB. If you didn't know, I'm not going to go into major detail because honestly, I don't have a clue other than the basics. Cmyk stands for Cyan, magenta, yellow, And K stands for black for whatever reason. And that's the standard color system when you're printing. So if you remember if you have a regular, like ink jet printer at home, you put in those colors. You put in a yellow and a magenta and a black into your printer. And those colors combine to print your artwork or print your other documents, you know. And it's the same kind of system, but a lot more advanced and amazing at traditional printhuses. Those are the colors that you can create with just those three colors or four colors. I guess you can say to create all the colors. R GB, on the other hand, is red, green, blue. I don't know why it's called that, and that is our color system on the computer there you have the ability of every single color that you can come up with. It shows vibrantly on your screen. But you might have noticed that when you convert to print to CMYK, your colors out, they're not as vibrant, they're not as exciting and beautiful. But, which can be a bummer, this class I'm going to help you along so you don't get too shocked when converting from RGB to CMYK. There are certain colors that you're never going to be able to get in CMYK and you're just going to have to deal with it I guess. But there are other options. If you are printing, you can print with pan tones, but that's a whole other story and I don't really want to get into that. Instead, let's jump into the computer and I'm going to present to you some artworks from my own portfolio to showcase Y, color is so important. All right, so welcome to my computer. I'll be up here on the little corner over there. You can see me. Yeah. I want to talk to you about why color is so important. I have picked out a couple of my collections from my portfolio to share with you. That wasn't proper English to share this with you. The first collections are going to show off my color loves, these are my colors. I love pink, I love turquoise, I love blue, I love yellow, I love pops of white. But that's like I were to choose every single color palette that I wanted to work with. This would be, I love that bright poppy, I don't know. It's cheerful and it's happy. And those are just the colors that I am personally drawn to, as you can see, by what I wear and what I have in behind me. It's just really I'm a pink girl and I can't deny it. Yeah. That's just it's nice to have colors that you're comfortable with and you love personally. Maybe you can't always work with them and that's okay. Here's another collection that I've created recently that also has the blue, yellow and pink thing, because those are my favorite colors. It's a vibrant and this is really shows off what I like to do, it's really important to find your thing. Here's another collection, Even though this isn't like a floral collection, it still works with these colors. This is Mother's Day collection. My color palette works really good for that occasion because it's happy and cheery and things like that. If my favorite colors were dark purples and muddy brown, maybe it wouldn't be the happy Mother's Day collection. Just things you have to think about. Also, I can't because I am working illustrator and not just creating art for myself that I sell to my clients. Like if you have your own online store or something like that, then you can choose whatever colors you want and put as much as you want. But if you're going to be working with clients, sometimes you have to adapt your color choices so that you sell more or that you appeal to a different client base, et cetera. Sometimes I do test out different color palettes here. It still feels really me. Because there's still lots of pinks and yellows and just a little bit of blue in this one. It's mainly green. But I toned down my color palette, made it a little bit more subtle, a little bit softer. It's fun to play with that kinds of things too. I felt like I created this during the spring time. Spring colors are a little softer and you're just like getting into the new season. It's fun to test out something else, but you can still feel like it's me. Even though it's a variation of my favorite colors. The there's still that nice pink in there and there's still that nice blue, but it's just fun to test as something else. This is a completely different departure from what I usually do. I don't usually go to the dark side, but it's fun to do that as well. Here is a really deep and moody floral collection. It's quite Goth, it's a lot of black. I usually don't use black in my artwork very much. But again, it's fun to test it out, this collection, because it is the dark colors, it gives it a completely different mood. If I were to recolor this into my bright and cheery palette, that would be appealing to some clients as well, because I deliberately chose a really dark palette, becomes really sultry, and you can think about different clients to choose. If I recolor this, I would maybe have to send it to a whole different kind of client. I also adapt some here. This needs to be, um, in, in here we go, I adapt my color palette to appeal to a different group of people. Maybe other people don't always like pink. I was thinking like with nature collection, people who are outdoorsy, you can love pink and be outdoorsy. That's not what I'm saying. I made something a little bit more nature colored with like Beijing browns and pinks. Like what is this like a burnt orange instead of my usual pinks. That's fun to do too because I was feeling more the nature vibes. Yes, I just remember that you can have a signature thing, which you can play with it to suit a different theme, to have fun, all kinds of different reasons. Here's another collection that I created and I wanted to also have that soothing spa, like color palette. It wouldn't be soothing if I had hot, hot, like super neon yellow in here. It would be a totally different thing. Again, that would be fun and cool, it'd be a little wild. But this is like calm and feels soft and quiet. And I felt like it matched the line work. And what I wanted to go with this, I wanted to be a little bit more chill, You think about that with the color mood. What mood are you going for for this collection or artwork? I have a really good example of a collection that I completely recolored. I sent this into my agent and she was happy with the artwork, but she thought the color palette was off Birthday. Birthday usually has more primary colors so that it appeals to anyone. So you can send the card to your grandma, your neighbor, your little sister, your dog, you know, anybody? This one, even though it was supposed to be floral and feminine, it was leaning to Va***tine's Day with the red and pink thing, there is like color. We understand color sometimes for certain things like red and green will always be Christmas, Red and pink is really Va***tine's Day, et cetera. After I got those comments, I did the color palette to wrong language, to still be feminine and pretty. But I made it brighter and happier and more happy birthday. With here I went back to my usual palette. I think the other one I was trying too hard, it just became a lot more cheery and still has that feminine look. I like it so much more and I think it will be more appealing to clients. That's something to keep in mind. Back to Va***tine's Day theme here. I did the pink and the red because I wanted to feel really romantic. And I don't like sultry or just like just romantic. I did quotes like, You are loved and you were the one. If this was a different color palette, no pinks at all, It was all blue. It would feel cold. Not the same vibe at all. If everything was blue, can you imagine It would just feel icy? You loved, it doesn't have that warmth. Thing to consider. Again, again, like I mentioned here, seasons and occasions have colors that are correspond to those seasons and occasions. Here's Easter, Easter collection, and I made sure to not only use the eggs and the tulips and things that we think about when we think about Easter, but I made sure to use the pastel colors Again, if I did this in red and pink or red and green, you'd be like, this is a weird Christmas Easter collection. Or if I did everything in black would be very depressing. Easter collection, you know? It's not like you can do tons of black things for maybe Halloween or something else. But yeah, just like you have to think about sometimes using the traditional colors when you're selling to clients who are going to be having things in stores. People like the comfort of things that are traditional, like the pastels in spring, and then bright colors in summer, and then the orange and burnt reds and things in the fall with browns. And then winters a lot of red and green for Christmas, but also the blues and silver and gold for holidays or just wintertime in general. Here's a collection for fall with the burnt oranges and reds and greens. I have a little dusty blue in here just to liven it up. So everything wasn't just orange. But yeah, you can really, this feels like a fall harvest look. I really liked working in this color palette, even though there's like a touch of dusty pink in here. Otherwise, a totally different thing than my signature color palette. But still again, I'm inspired by this. And then again, here's the traditional Christmas palette. It is red and green. You almost always have to have red and green in a Christmas collection, otherwise clients get confused. I've gotten comments before when I've done something a little bit to pink, pink, and mint Christmas. And it was just like, I don't know, a card, at least for traditional clients. I make sure to use the traditional red and green in a Christmas collection. For this collection, I tried to push it a little bit by going more in the winter zone. Even though this is a Christmas collection, I did the Blues, the reds and the gold. Just switch it up because sometimes maybe we don't always have to have, we don't always have to follow the Christmas or all the color rules. Yeah. That's my presentation of my color and how I go about working with color. I hope that that was a good introduction to why color is important and things for you to think about. In the next section, I'm going to be helping you figure out your own personal color path. 4. Your Signature Color Palette: All right, now we have learned all about why color is so important and can affect your work. In this section, I want to show you how I have gone about creating my signature palette. Like a really large palette of colors that I choose from when I am creating my smaller palettes. So let's get started on that. All right, so now we're in Pinterest. My favorite place on Earth. I don't know what I would do if Pinterest went away, because I've saved what feels like my entire creative life here. There's so much inspiration. I've already done this exercise several years ago, but I still feel like my color tastes haven't changed. This is the kinds of colors and images that I am drawn to in this section. To create your color palette, I want you to create a color Pinterest board and save photographs of things, interior items, just random stuff. Color is you're drawn to the color. Don't save other people's artworks, really. I think it's mainly about color moves. I think especially interiors is a good thing to pull inspiration from so that you're not pulling inspiration accidentally from another fellow artist. I've gone in and saved tons of images with lots of pinks and pops of yellow and blues and sometimes pops of red and things like that. Maybe you'll get a little surprised what you're really drawn to, what you really like. I think I definitely was certain colors. I really, at the moment, I love this vibrant purple in that rug there. It's like a purply magenta, pinkish red. That's really cool. There's so many colors that you can draw from. Just to continue here, you compress more ideas. Once you have saved a couple of images into a pints board, you have the option of more ideas and that will pull similar images. We can pin things like this. Definitely with the yellows I'm drawn to that. What else? I like these, the peach, this I'm drawn to with the yellows, with lots of white, and then like small pops of color, you just go ahead and you maybe need like 50 colors or so. Oh my god, look, this is like my dream rug. Just go in and choose colors from images that you are drawn to. Here's another amazing rug design with tons of my favorite colors. I think I've pinned a similar image. But yeah, that light blue with yellow is definitely my thing, knowing that it goes black when you choose it. Now you can't really see what I'm choosing here. This pink and yellow combination feels really me. Just go through your Pinterest and choose lots of images that stand out to you in the color sense. Maybe it has nothing to do with the design. Like maybe you think this chair is super ugly. Doesn't matter, you're thinking just about color. I'll choose this one, and this one too. And then we'll go back. See what color palette looks like right now. It looks like this. Again, these are the colors that I am drawn to. And I don't want to think that these are the colors that you need to be drawn to too, just it's personal. If you like more greens and browns, it's totally up to you what you like. But like I told you in my other presentation, maybe you'll have to adapt some of your designs that aren't like your signature thing. If you're going to do Christmas or Easter or Spring collection, then you might have to adapt your color palette. But for this section, we're going to have fun and just go all out with what we love. Next step, we want to bring this color inspiration into procreate so that we can gather images. Right now I'm in my computer. I'm going to switch over to my ipad instead, so that we can pick and choose colors from this. Let me just do that real quick. All right, now we're on my ipad instead. It's a little bit bigger images. I'm going to let see default. I'm going to do compact smaller images so I get more of the color look. I'm going to take a couple of screenshots of my Pinterest boards so that I can easily bring those into procreate and pick colors. I'm going to screenshot that, then I'm going to scroll a little bit The screenshot, this then. Well, here's some nice, nice blues and purples. I'll screenshot that so that we don't get too overwhelmed. I think maybe three screenshots is good enough, because otherwise we don't want to pick 1,000 colors. I'm just going to use a screen size canvas in procreate, Just so we know that our screen size canvas is an RGB mode in procreate. We're just going to double check that we go into the wrench. We're going to press canvas, we're going to press canvas information and then color profile. Then here we can see it is at display P three. I'm pretty dang sure that that is procreate RGB profile, you can see underneath, it's all the other R, G, B color profiles, but I keep it at display P three. I found that that's really vibrant and nice and I haven't noticed anything weird with that color profile. If you are curious, if you want to create another size canvas and you wanted to create your other, you just press the plus sign. You decide what size you want it to be. Then the color profile. Here you can choose RGB or CMYK. And here you can test out for yourself the CMYK settings if you want to, but I always go for RGB. Yeah, then press Create if you wanted to, but I'm just going to cancel that back in here. We're going to press the wrench and add the, insert a photo. And we're going to insert these three then. I'm just going to make them smaller wrench again. Insert a photo and then do the second one again. Make that one a little bit smaller. It doesn't matter that they're overlapping. Then the third one. No, not take a photo. The third one, we have that one down here. There we go. I'm going to just turn off the last two, create a new layer, pressing the plus, using absolutely any brush you want does not matter. Just make sure it's quite big. We're going to go in and create our color palette here on the side. To do that at the beginning, we're just going to choose the colors that we're drawn to. Color pick, you can have this set up in different ways. I have it set up so when I touch my screen color picks, but sometimes touching square over here also is your color pickers. You cook that and then make sure you're on that new layer. And I'm just going to start picking out colors. I like that peach, I like that orange. This lilac is amazing. Hot pinks. I like one of these coral pinks in here. No, not that I like that orange. See, not quite. Sometimes it can be difficult picking out of color. You might instead, like this wasn't at all as vibrant as I had considered. So you could just go in and color pick the color that you were inspired by, something more like. That is what I was going for. Let's see, I'm going to go in and pick all the fun colors first. Here's a really neon yellow, Fun. But I also like this, I do regular cadmium yellow. I want this purple over here so it can keep them in sections. Is blue, we haven't done. Dusty blue is nice. Oh, I definitely like this like minty color. I also am drawn to these weird, funky, burnt yellowy in colors. That's neat. This purple again, right now, like I said, we're just randomly, we're not thinking, oh, we're picking 50 colors. Okay, so I always start with the fun colors first. But then you can't always create color palettes with just fun colors that would be quite colorful. You need something like to make it more neutral, we need some neutrals too. I think this like creamy beige over here is nice. That's not really what I was going for. That's a little bit warmer. Yeah, it was warmer. I'm thinking more like something like that. Like a nice gray over here. Like a creamy pink was very similar to that. So I could just like lighten it even more. Yes. Okay. So that's the first picture, so I'm going to just check that one and check the next one and see if we find some more colors. Like here's this amazing blue that I really like. That's really nice. We don't have any pinks. Oh, that's really dusty. Again, I'm going to go in and brighten that up. Nice. I really like this. So that's not it. Again, it's too gray. You just have to make up your own colors. Let's see. Yeah, More of this. I love this super intense red. But that's similar to over here. That's pretty much the same thing. We don't need that. Okay, more of this green. See, this one's better. It's nice to have some dark too. Can't forget that we could go really dark with that blue rich that is nice. Moby pink was nice. Very similar to the other one that I got going on, but a little bit lighter. That's fun. Are there any other neutrals in here that we like? I think that's pretty much what I want to take from here. There's a lot of pinks. I only have one traditional pink, but we can sort out later. See what our palette needs. I'm going to uncheck that one and do the last image. See what else we're missing. We already have that nice purple, but we can see if we can get even better like a sage green is really nice. I like that too. These like peachy colors are really beautiful then. I definitely like all these, these different blues and purples are like this yellow tier yellow. That whole palette right there is stunning. Going to take that whole thing like this intense red could be nice. Someone else in this coral pink can go over here. I want to make that a little bit brighter. Here we go. Those are the colors that I was drawn to the most in these images. I'm just going to turn off those colors. We can focus mainly on these colors and test those out here. I think we have a lot of bright colors. We have a couple darks, that's great, and we have a couple of lights. When you're creating your color palette, I forget how many boxes you have in here. Was at 121, 234-567-8910, 30. So you have 30 chance or 30 colors that you can put in one color palette. And I think that's a good amount of colors, otherwise you'll be overwhelmed. So we're going to have to break these down into just 30 colors. And then of course, you can lighten and darken those colors afterwards. But just having like the basic colors that you really, really like. Let's see what kind of colors we come up with now then I'm going to continue just picking, I definitely want one of these yellows. I think that neon green one is a little off. So I'm going to take the more warmer one. I love this purple. I love this coral pink. I definitely want another hot pink in my palette. I love this, like orangey red. I want a funky yellowy gold color. Color pet. Okay. Maybe another, the burnt red or this like mave pink would be nice to have. I want to go in and get my blues that I really like, the blue and the mint green. See, maybe this dusty blue is working for me and I want to sage green as well. What other, this blue that's like in between blue and green. Very similar to these ones. Maybe that one is just too similar. I should go for something like my light blue would be nice to work on. Now, we have 612. We have quite a few more colors that we can choose. We need to maybe do a little section of my neutrals. I really like that peachy base color. This gray, I feel like it's a make it a little bit bluer. I think I want it even lighter. It's too close to that one, but I almost like that one better than this. I'm going to redo that one. I think this peachy color is really nice, neutral. I know myself and I like a lot of pinks in my work. Maybe a very light pink would be nice too. Then I do want something that's on the yellowy side as well, like a cream, creamy yellow. Maybe two. I want it a little bit more there. Maybe that's nice. I don't know. That's something you always have to test out with your work as well. That one looks a little dirty to me. Let's see. Make it a little less here. Clean that up. We'll lighten it up. That feels better to me. A traditional off white cream color. What else do? That one's this one you don't have This dark purple. Can go for that. We can start doing some dark. I have this really nice Navy. And this green I would like, I don't have any browns. And that's something I don't often use, but it's something that I could choose. I would want something really rich that maybe a little bit lighter could be nice. Let's see, 31234567. I have quite a few more colors that we can choose for my signature color palette. I'm going to make this section smaller so we can add in a couple more rows. See what we need. It was seven, we have ten, we have 123 more sections that we can add in sometimes. Yeah, it's difficult to figure out what is it that I'm going to be needing for certain artworks for right now? Have to wing it. Just think about the things that you like to draw. I do a lot of florals. What colors would I want? I want a lot of the nice bright pinks and things like that. I don't have any bobble gum. Maybe that's what I need. I also really like these purple colors I had. This color, Is this one the same? Pretty much. But I can take the lighter one because I think that's really inspiring right now. Again, these two right now look really similar. These ones, what can I do to make this one slightly different? We can make that even lighter. It feels like it's different in the color palette. That ones like a really nice warm background color. And then the pink, I don't have this orange. I don't usually use orange in my work, but maybe that would be something fun to update my palette with like that. Nice. Yeah, it could be nice. What else? I never use black in my work, but this navy blue is definitely dark enough. This mint color I showed you before, that I really like that color. Maybe I want to choose something a little bit more vibrant as well. 12345678 910. We have quite a few colors left. You, of course, don't have to fill up your entire color palette, but why not? I really like this blue. It's a little bit more brighter than that one, but we can also brighten it even more, can make sure to have some even more bright here. We have a light blue and a medium blue and a dustier blue and even duster and a dark here, the green. We have the mints and we have the really bright mint and we have the sage color. I do like for greenery more, my olive green, so we could try to find that ourselves like this green. Then we have one more row left of color. So let's see what we can come up with here. What else do we need? All right, let's just see. I don't know what else do I need in here. Let's do a light green since we can. It's really pretty. I feel like I don't have enough pink in here for whatever reason. Let's do like a softer bubblegum pink. Fun to have. And let's see something in between yellow and green. What does that look like? You like that? Yeah, maybe this is the minue, signature color palette that we're going to at least start with and see how that goes. I feel like this dark blue is maybe a little too blue or dark. I mean, I want to make it a little richer so you can tell that it's blue or black. But it's that. I feel like we got some fun right up here. We've got some nice neutrals and lights down here. We have a couple of, we have one, at least super dark that we can use. Then again, like these are just your main colors that you pick from all the time, but you can always go in, I like this green, but then create a darker version later when you're drawing. There's so much options with creating a color palette. Yeah, that's how I go about creating a new big signature color palette. It will be fun to this a couple years ago just compare to the color palette I did. Then I have it saved in palettes. Let's see here, signature color palette. At that point, I couldn't choose us 30 colors, so I did actually do two versions. But in that one here, I still have my bright pinks and greens. Lots of purples. I think I did a better job of cutting it down because these purples in here similar. I didn't have this color in my collection, but again, like this green and this green are quite similar. Then down here, I feel like these are all. I can't even tell the difference. I think I did a way better job of condensing my color palette. I have a really nice bag here that could be nice. Compare that to one of these. We'll keep it like this. I'm happy with the new version of my color signature color palettes. Fun that I use the same color inspiration because I have the same pints board, but this is just how I came up with it. I hope that you also are able to pick out a palette of max 30 colors to make a color palette. Don't go ahead and procreate color palette right away, because we're going to, in the next section, bring this image into Photoshop to switch to CMYK. I realize now that I never mentioned why I don't use CMYK settings in procreate. I just personally haven't liked them. I don't like the way it converts. I feel like it doesn't give you very vibrant colors at all in Photoshop. At least I feel like it's more true to CMYK and it's not as dull as procreate CMYK settings. Maybe it's something that they will update in the future. Maybe it's something they've updated already and I haven't noticed. But for right now, in my personal taste, I haven't liked the CMYK settings in procreate. That's why I want to bring this image into Photoshop. To do that, let's just save our image. The swatches. Just the swatches. So I'm going to press the Share button. I'm going to save it as a simple J peg. And I'm going to save it to my Dropbox so that I can easily find it somewhere. I'll just put it here. Yeah, I realize that I'm getting ahead of myself. Before we jump into Photoshop, I want to first talk to you about some tapes in procreate and how I go about creating smaller color palettes from this color palette. In the next section, we'll do that. 5. Mini Color Palettes: Okay, so that was really fun to get into the color mood and understand what you like personally. But using like 40, 50 colors in every collection or every artwork you do, would be too much and overwhelming. So every time I create a collection, I pick a smaller color palette of maybe 88 colors or so. Because I like the look of a more pared down color palette, it looks more sophisticated and put together. So in this section, I'm going to show you how I go about switching up my signature color palette. So I'm not using the exact same colors over and over again, but they still showcase my color loves, if that makes sense. Okay, so now we're going to look at how we go about condensing this really big color palette, like all of the colors that you really love and want to work with. How do I, then when I'm going to start a new collection or a new artwork, how do I go about choosing colors? Because if I choose 30 colors, always it's going to be really messy artwork. I want to make it look a little bit more sophisticated and put together. Let's see, I just do these colors. I'm going to select my color palette and press copy paste. And then I can put, we can just focus on the main color palette. Then I'm just going to do another layer so that we can play with some other color palettes. If I were to, I have this signature color, I want to create a new artwork for my portfolio. And I want to do like I usually love to do an every day floral collection. I want to do lots of happy florals. What would I choose then? I definitely, because it's a happy floral collection, I would do some yellow. I love this purple with that yellow. And then I would want something to pop off of that, something like that. Then, because it's a floral collection, I would need some greens. Maybe that one or one could be fun. And then we need some lights in here and some neutral. Whoops, neutral. That's how I would start off, a mini color palette like that. Like maybe I would need, going forward, more colors like here, there's no dark. I would maybe choose this green and make a darker version as well. So I have something to contrast with there. I feel like this little mini palette is done. I don't save these as color palettes in my palette picker here because I don't feel like I need to. I have my signature color palette that we will soon be converting and putting into procreate. But for right now, I am happy with just like picking from my color palette and picking out items. If I was going to do a Christmas collection, like I told you, I would always need some red and green. I'm going to use this coral red, I guess. Emerald green like that could be base colors for my Christmas collection is a little bit different than the usual, like super this red and green, more traditional. I've tweaked it a little bit by choosing from my color palette, the red and green that I like to use. Then after that, maybe I'd want to put in like an icy blue and these minty green, maybe a nice warm yellow somewhere in there. I would want to add maybe this gold for some small details could be fun with this really bright turquoise somewhere. I love myself some pink with red. Even it warms up that Christmasy palette. This icy to go with that blue, that one. This is the start of a Christmas collection in my eyes that I feel like has a really fresh color palette that shows off my color preferences but still goes to Christmas again. While you're creating, maybe you're going to need some other colors and it's okay to add colors that aren't in your color palette. Maybe this red is good for some of the details, but maybe you would also want to adjust it so you have a darker version as well. Same thing with that green. Maybe you want either a lighter version to use and a darker version. That's how I go about creating a pad like that and then figuring out later. Then you can always add a couple more colors or a couple more tones like a lighter version of something or a darker version of something. While you're drawing, let's do one more. What's another occasion? I definitely have p***ty of colors for like a Va***tine's Day collection. I really like this section up here. I think a Va***tine's Day collection with this purple coral and pink, that would be really cute and fun to work with. If I wanted to do something a little bit more sophisticated, I have a lot of these slightly tone down colors that could be used to create a really beautiful collection. Maybe just like this would be the pop of color. Something like that. If I wanted to do something a little bit more sophisticated and softer. Yeah. But you can see that there are so many variations of color palettes in here that I really like. I love this purple, with this blue and pink actually, and mixed with this green. And then maybe that yellow I want to bring in there, maybe some dust also to make it a little, not go too wild. That's something I love just in the palette here. This burnt orange with the Navy and this color, what. I could do a collection like that and then just have some neutrals like this and the peach colored one, maybe the blue to another version. That's just an overview of how I go about taking my full palette of colors and then breaking it down into being really useful to me so that I use similar colors in many of my collections, but they have variation and I won't get sick of these colors. Yeah, I'm pretty excited about this new version of my signature color palette. In the next section, I'm going to give you some tips for how to set up your files and Pro creates that they're easy to recolor. 6. Tips for Recoloring: All right, and before we get started on the class project, I just want to give you a couple more color tips. We're going to jump into procreate now. And I want to show you how I set up my file so that I can recolor easier, make my life easier. When I go back in and maybe a client requests color changes or while I'm creating the artwork, that I can easily change colors to get different looks and test things out, you know. So let's do that. All right, so let's talk about how to set up your files in procreate so that you can easily go back and recolor things. This is my pink light artwork for this year, my most recent artwork. So I thought that I would go in and here and share. I'm going to just duplicate so I don't mess anything up by accident here. We're going to recolor this image. If I got some feedback that it was too, I don't know, too blue to pink. Obviously, the background color is really easy to change right now. We don't have my other color palette, but we can just use another color palette. For right now. I've been using this one here. I can use Mali, my Terra palette. I was really inspired by her artwork lately. All right, The background color is obviously really easy to change then. If I want to match the leaves, the leaves were done. Let's see. I just make sure that things are on different layers. Obviously, I have this texture on these little leaves behind the flowers. Take those away for right now. The texture on the leaves, you can just alpha lock things by swiping to the right with two fingers or clicking on it and pressing Alpha lock there. You see it's checked. Now I can choose a darker version of that nice minty background. And Phil, you can see it just has like a slight variation. And then I have my lines again, alpha lock, and then I'll take a little bit darker there. Phil, that's been recolored. I made sure to have all of those details on different layers. Moving on to my flowers, I have group things depending on where they are. I don't put every single color on its own layer because that doesn't always make sense. Sometimes a certain colors underneath another color, I just build up my flowers or whatever object I'm drawing as best I can, layer by layer and make sure that there's enough layers so that I can go back and recolor things. As you can see here, the majority of my flowers are on the same layer, but they're different colors. You can't do the same thing of alpha locking and recoloring everything. Because if I do that see alpha lock and I change to red and fill, then they become all the exact same color and that's not what we want. You can pull your color and recolor that way, which usually works quite well, unless you're using a brush that's really textured, That's an option, especially if you have your settings, you see the blue line at the top. If you have it really low, it's not going to color recolor very well. But if you have it higher up now, I only had it at 60. But if you have it more like here, up towards 96, 97, you can't go 100, takes everything. But like 96, something like that, it recolors really nicely just by pulling. Then like I have some variation here, we can choose a lighter version for the other flowers like that. What else do I have? I have different layers. Because these flowers were underneath this flower, I made sure that they were on a different layer. I will use the same red to recolor here. There we go. Now I can go down to this one and it's alpha locked already and I can choose the lighter peach to recolor those light ones, the dark one. I think that looks quite nice. To make it a little different will change something like this. There we go. And that one change. Sometimes it so close that it recolors, but then you can just drag the blue line at the top there until it doesn't affect the other one. That one was really subtle to see somewhere around there. It worked out. But you can see here that it has recolored everything. There's no hot pink from before anywhere. That's one tip for making sure that you can recolor easily as having things in layers that even though you can have certain layers like my lines here that you can totally refill with a different color, then you can have these other larger blobs of color that you can easily pull color and fill. I use a lot of adjustment layers and now we're getting a little bit into advanced territory. You can take my class about adjustment layers and shadow and light to understand this more, but it's something that I do, it's hard to explain. But adjustment layers, they adjust your colors as you go rather than the my gosh, how do I explain this? These layers. Okay, Let me see if I change it back to normal adjustment layer. Right now it's on soft light, my favorite adjustment layer. If I move it back to normal, you can see that the shadows are black. And that obviously isn't cute. But when I bring it down to soft light, it just like darkens the color that you chose underneath. That makes sense, right? If you notice the shadows are going to be the same, even if I change colors to change colors all another way, adjustment hue saturation. And here I can rest the hue. You can see those details in the flowers. They match the color of the flower as I go and I change the colors because I used an adjustment layer. This is another option for changing colors. Something that I highly recommend is using adjustment layers. It makes your life so much easier when you are coloring your artwork and shading because for this reason that when you do adjust colors, you can see that these, the details follow along when you're coloring. I don't have to go into every single layer and recolor. This one, recolor, this one, this is the shadows. And then I did the lines on the petals. Then some more detail lines on the flower petals as a whole is another quick. I know that that was really quick and maybe a little bit difficult to understand, but I have a whole class about that. Adjustment layers. And I will make sure to link that in the class description because I know I whipped. I went through that really quickly. Let me, let's just change this color back again. We're back to our reds. That is how I recolored this image. In a nice way to go over my tips. Again, I highly suggest that you work on as many layers as you can without being too crazy. I group things together as well. So I don't do every individual flower in a group. I like to group. It makes my life easier. All the flowers on this layer that I decided on, this one layer, even though they are different colors. Yeah. And then I add details on different layers on top of that to give you another look at my work, We can look at this patchwork one where, let's see, As you can see here, I created lots of shapes the patchwork are going to sit on, they're all different colors. But I created, made my life easier by making sure that they were all on the same layer so I can just go in and recolor things. Then I put all the details on top. The again, to make myself my life really easy, I used an adjustment layer with a soft light feature so that I could add some shading and then I didn't have to change my brush. Everything is with a black brush. But it gives, it just enhances all of the colors in a really nice way that I personally like. Yeah, that is how I recolor art works. One thing I want to mention here in this group, I have all my details. They are overlapping each other a lot. I could have done a lot more layers here, but it's okay. There are certain things that won't easily recolor, such as if I drew all of these flowers in one clump, recoloring this could be really difficult if I wanted to see in my here, I'm on that layer and I wanted the pink to be that color. Procreate is pretty smart and helps you out, but it doesn't always do an excel***t job. Yeah, that's just another thing to mention. In the next section, we're going to jump into Photoshop to take a look at our signature color palette in Y. 7. Project Convert to CMYK: All right, so it's time to get started on our class project. In this section we're going to be taking that signature color palette that we worked on a couple sections ago. And we're going to bring that into Photoshop to convert CMYK and see what's going on there. So that's going to be fun. Let's jump into the computer. All right, so I have opened up our swatches that we created and procreate into Photoshop so that we can see what this is going to look like when we convert. Also down here on the corner, I have the original RGB color from my file form, procreate open in preview, just so that we have this. We can see when we convert, how big of a difference it's going to make to check that your image was in RGB. I guess we're going to go in here and press the color settings, and here we can see it was RGB, blah, blah, blah. I don't know what any of this means, but I know it says RGB here. Good. Okay. Now, moment of truth, we're going to convert this to CMYK and see what colors are really changed, and see if we can update any of them to the best that we can. So we're going to go down here and edit, convert to profile. Here, working CMYK. And here we already get the preview. You can see, look how vibrant these purples and pinks are. Cmyk deals everything down. This is the part where it's just so sad and depressing, like I love these bright colors and I wish that they printed like that. Sometimes they do. There's some good printers, but this is the reality that some of the really bright colors aren't going to print as bright. We're going to press, okay, now we're going to go in and see if there are any adjustments that we can make. We think this yellow is pretty good, but we can just double check that it's as good as it can get. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit onto our color palette here. I'm going to drop this color. It's as bright as it can be. Really, I can push it up a little bit more, pull color up a little bit. I'm going to press the brush and I can update that color a little bit, little bit brighter. But we're still in CMYK. This purples are usually really difficult to do this. What does that look like? Yeah, this is the part that's difficult. It looks so much brighter here than what it actually turns out in your color picker. I just want to maybe brighten this color. I'm not happy with that. I think I'm just going to keep that color, This coral color, we can see if we can get that a little bit brighter. So we'll just bring it up a little bit more to, as bright as it can go. Short cut for the brushes that didn't do any difference, really pink color again. We can also try to just brighten it up by pulling it up as much as we can. And B, that did brighten a little bit. It a little bit more cheery than that. Really dusty, Same thing, eye for eye dropper. We get the color. We go in and yeah, try to get as bright as we can in Y K rush. That didn't really do much. I think this color looks quite the same. The colors definitely were the same. I think this blue looks the same. This one, this one, all of these ones are similar to me down here. It's just these two colors that didn't convert so well, but I like them in this slightly more subdued color than over here. It's really bright. This lilac purple looks fine to me, looks really beautiful. Then this blue looks really nice. Does look really nice. We can see, if we can get to be a little bit more turquoise, see what happens, then it would be made it a little bit. Now it doesn't do anything. This is as good as it gets. I think we at least made some adjustments. Not much as you could see, it didn't really want to. We get used to it. Now I'm used to this color palette already because it's quite similar to what I wanted. This purple is the only one that I'm most disappointed with because I really love the vibrancy of how it looks in the original file. This blue is also really beautiful and vibrant, but this blue is really nice as well. I think that this palette is going to work for me when I convert my artwork using this color palette. I'm not going to be surprised if you constantly make artwork with these two colors, with the super bright, and then you bring it into CMYK all the time, We're going to be so disappointed. Now we have double checked our color palette and gotten used to it or like come to the realization that this is as good as it gets. As far as CMYK, I'm going to save this file and I'm going to bring it back into procreate so we can make our final color palette. And we know that it's CMYK friendly. See you back in procreate. 8. Project Final Procreate Color Palette: A. Okay. So now we've had some CMYK RGB converting fun in Photoshop. It's time to jump back into procreate so we can make our final color palette so that everything's set up for being able to use in the future. So we can always make CMYK friendly artwork. Jump into procreate. All right, so we're back in procreate. So I'm going to just bring in that CMYK file from Photoshop, back into this file so we can compare and contrast. I'll just turn off those extra mini palettes. And we're going to bring in that image, CMY K color, it's what I called mine. Here we go. I'm going to cut off those other images because we just want that part here. We can compare and contrast. It's not a huge difference. There's just a couple of things that are a little bit darker or less bright, like we noticed before. The purple. Let's see, this purple up here. This, what's that turquoise down there? Those are ones really dropped in color. And this blue, of course, as well, But the rest of the colors, for the most part, weren't affected. Now we know that when we use this color palette, we're going to be safe and we're going to be able to create artwork that's not going to drastically change, which is a comfort that you know, if you ever create artwork, if you want to print it, it's going to print out nicely and beautifully. And you're not going to be shocked by how different color profiles it is a lot more complicated than this, making it really simple, but for the most part, what you see on your screen is a little bit brighter and more vibrant than what's going to be printed. But my hope is that doing this process, it's going to help you out so you won't be shocked, et cetera. That's just my thing here. We are going to make a color palette using the updated CMYK. I'm going to turn off the other one so we don't get confused. Now, we're going to just make our color palette. I like how I set it up so I don't feel like I have to reorganize. But if you want to re, organize, you could always do that. But I'm just going to go for how this looks. To do a new color palette. We press the color up here, we go to palettes, and you press this nice sign, create palette. I'm going to. Yeah, you select the color and click Select the Color. A little tedious, but I enjoy this process. Okay, so there's that. I love how that looks and it looks a little fresher and different from the other palettes that I've been using lately. I'm, I'm going to say I'm going to call it Kure. Then I know that I have made this CMYK friendly done. Now, when I create my artworks and I choose my colors using this palette, I know that they are going to look good. That process done, we have a amazing color palette that we're really excited, at least I am excited to start using this in the next section. Let's just recolor one of our existing artworks in this color palette and then quickly test it in Photoshop so we can make sure that all this work we put into actually works. It won't work okay in the next section. 9. Project Recolor and Test: Last but not least with our class project, it's time to recolor artwork and test it out. In this section, we're going to recolor existing artwork that you have with your new CMYK friendly procreate palette. We'll bring it into Photoshop just to double check that everything looks great and then everything will be great from there. All right, so let's find one of our existing artworks to test out with this new CMYK friendly palette. I'm going to go out to my gallery. I'll go back to my pink light artwork. I want to choose something. Let's do this simple lemon artwork. Okay, I'm going to put to test my layering skills. So here you can see the lemons were all on one layer. I'm going to alpha lock that, go into my new color palette and choose my yellow there fill, it's slightly different. I think that I'm pretty safe with this layer. With the lighter yellow, it doesn't look like a much different tone. But the leaves, let's change that for fun. The leaves, so we're going to alpha lock those. Let's this color, Phil. The lines we need to adjust because there are different colors. Again, I will alpha lock that. I'm going to let let's see, This lime green that we have in my color palette. Phil, it's fun. My shadow underneath the bowl, in this adjustment layer that I've talked about, the soft light, that's going to adjust nicely. When I change background colors, the bowl, we can change to different colors. Again, alpha lock. Let's make this cool purple color. Maybe, let's see what that looks like. Maybe the background color we need to change. Let's change that to a light blue. Do we like that? Not really. This blue. Maybe like that. One of my more neutrals. I like that done. These light spots, I almost, I don't know, do they look good? Maybe. Okay, let's change the tablecloths again. We have to Alpha lock that. We'll change that to maybe this blue. We change that blue and then F, then we need to change the stripes as well on that layer. Alpha, lock it. And then we're going to choose maybe the turquoise that's next to that blue, Phil. Sure, I don't know if this is my favorite artwork coloring of all time, but it's fun. As you can see with the shadow here, it adjusted nicely to match the colors so I don't have to change that. Yeah, here is my newly recolored artwork. We can save and bring this quickly into Photoshop so we can just test to make sure that it looks like we had imagined it, because that would be fun. Share the pick, save files. Save it in drop box. Save there. Okay. All right, so I opened up the artwork in Photoshop, It's still in RGB like I had from procreate. So now we're just going to convert and see what happens. Convert to profile. Okay. I didn't see any difference to do that, just means that we did a good job of converting our CMYK colors and that we've saved them nicely in procreate. Yeah. That's few That is good to know and it just makes your life easier when you go to print things. I'm happy to have shared this with you and I'm glad if this will help you, because if you are somebody who uses the brightest of the brights and you get disappointed every time you print things, I don't want that to happen for you. This is the best cheat, I guess you could call it, or hack that I have come across to help. So that I don't pick lots of bright colors when I'm in procreate that I love, I just take all the brights from the best. And then when I convert to C, Y, K, and then I'm like, oh gosh, this is the way that I don't have to go back and adjust things later. I already know that when I'm drawing and procreate with these colors, that it's going to be safe and good. Yeah, that's it. In the next section, I'll just talk about some of your next steps that you can take. 10. Next Steps: My hope is now that you feel a lot more confident with your color choices in your signature color palette. And also that you've set up colors in your procreate color Swatch panel so that when you go to create artworks, you're not going to be shocked by the color differences when you go to print. I really hope that you keep going with this color love and you continue to work with color. Just before we go, I just wanted to help you with a few next steps to keep going with color. First off, if you have any favorite color palettes saved already in procreate, I would love for you to double check them in Photoshop and convert them to CMY K to make sure that everything is looking good. Make any updates that you need to so that you always have in your color panels, watches there, really great CMYK options. Second thing that you can do is you can go back and recolor some of your existing artworks and collections and see if you can breathe new life into them with a different color mood or your new color signature color palette that you're really excited about. Then three, I want you to remember that your color tastes are going to change over time. Do this exercise every year or so because your color, you're going to start to be obsessed with another color. Or want to maybe explore even more color in your work or less color sometimes. Just remember that just because you've created your signature color palette doesn't mean that this is the, these are the only colors that you can use for the rest of your life. You can always change your colors and your color taste. And that's just part of being an artist and a designer and what makes this so much fun. So yeah, I hope that these next steps will help you to know what to do next with color. 11. Final Thoughts: Al right, so that's it. Thanks so much for taking this class with me and learning all about color, and geeking out with me about CMYK friendly color palettes. I really hope that you've gotten something out of this class that you feel more confident when you're going to send artwork to print. And I can't wait to see all of your class projects. I can't wait to see your signature color palettes and your newly revived color, updated artworks in the class project section. Please be brave and upload there. It's a great way for you to mark that you've taken in class and get your work in front of me. I'd be happy to give you an back if you like. Just mentioned that in your comments that you would love some feedback. And I'd be I'd be happy to help you with that. If you'd like to hang out with me outside of Scotia, you can find me on my website at Emacstina.com sometimes on Instagram at Machst. I have a beautiful private Facebook group where we chat all day, every day about all things illustration and service design. And I have a lot of free content there. And then if you are not sick of me yet and you want to learn even more with me on a monthly basis, I have a monthly patrion called Collection Club, where design surface design collections every month together doing like popular surface design themes such as Christmas collections or everyday floral collections or fruit and florals or bugs. There's so much fun and I love it and I would love for you to check it out. We have seven day free trial. Okay. That's enough promo from me. I hope again that you've enjoyed this class and I can't wait to see you in the next one. So remember to follow me here on skill share. Bye.