Live Encore: Troubleshoot Your Color Palette in Procreate

1. Introduction: I don't think it's hard to find colors that you like. I'm pretty sure that we all have colors that we love. What's a little bit more hard is taking those colors and adapting that to your own art and making it work. I'm Brooke Glaser. I'm an illustrator. I make cute art for kids apparel and greeting cards and I love sharing what I've learned over the years with other artists. Whether that's how to use Procreate, or how to make a living as an artist, or what we're going to do today, a little bit of color theory. Today's class is all about color. Color is my favorite part of making art and finding color inspiration is really easy, its everywhere. The hard part can be taking that color inspiration and actually applying it to your sketches, going from the real color pallets into your art. Sometimes that just comes out looking all wrong and it takes a little [inaudible] and adjusting those colors to get them to work for your art. That's what we're going to do today. We're going to take our color inspiration and adjust it so that it works beautifully for our unique sketches. I did a color theory class and we dived super deep into all the nitty-gritty of why these colors weren't good together, and what are the things you need to pay attention to. But we didn't do a full walk-through of this is how we actually go with a real example, this is how you choose your colors, and this is how you apply them, so that's why I wanted to do this live today was to really show you the actual step-by-step. How are we actually going to apply this to our own art? I'm going to be using Procreate because it's my art tool of choice. But you can use whatever digital software that you like best. But these are principles that are also something that you can apply to your traditional art materials as well. I've created a downloadable sketch that you can follow along step-by-step with me and you can find that in the Reverses tab. I hope you'll feel much more confident in choosing and applying colors to your art by the end of this class. Fun fact, this class was recorded live and I got to interact with the audience while we were doing this step-by-step. Let's get started. 2. Setting Up in Procreate: Hi everybody. My name is Tiffany and I work on Skillshare's community team. I will be the host for today's live class with Berkeley. I think we are ready to jump right in, if you are. Yes, I think so. Color is my favorite part of making art. I think that it can be a little bit tricky when you're finding color inspiration and adapting that to your art. I don't think it's hard to find colors that you like. I'm pretty sure that we all have colors that we love. I don't think it's hard to find inspiration. Honestly, a quick search on Pinterest is pretty easy to do. Even walking through the floral section of the grocery store. It's easy to find colors that you love. What's a little bit more hard is taking those colors and adapting that to your own art and making it work. Because to make those color palettes work, sometimes you need to adjust things. You have to play with different arrangements of the color on the art, but also making some things lighter or darker. Those are some of the things that we're going to be doing today. Before we get going, I want to show you how to set up for coloring in Procreate. Hopefully everybody has downloaded this reference cheat sheet that we provided at the very beginning. If you haven't, that's okay, you can follow along later. But what we're first going to need to do is open Procreate. I've got Procreate open, and the first thing that we're going to want to do is import that photo. This is really easy to do. Up here in the upper right-hand corner, there's a little, well it says Photo, and we're just going to tap Photo. When you tap Photo, it's going to open up all of your options here, and at the top is All Photos. Then from there, I can just tap and choose the photo, the reference photo that we have, and it's just going to open up the Procreate document with that art right in there. Easy-peasy, not very complicated. We're going to do a little bit of setup. I know it's boring to do a little bit of setup, but we need to do a little bit of setup before we can actually get to the colors. Have a little patience with me here. The first thing that we want to do is we're going to grab these two different color palettes because we're going to do one color version that is like a beachy color theme, and then we're going to do another version that's more of like a deserty thing. Just to give you guys a heads up, I took these colors from inspiration that I found on Pinterest and I used them directly. These are not colors that I picked, and I fine tuned this ahead of time. We are going to have some trouble, and that's what we're going to do here. We're going to work through the trouble that we would have, that would normally happen to you, anyway. The first thing we want to do is grab these color palettes. If you go up into the right-hand corner, there's a little circle, and if you tap on that, it's going to open up all of the different color rails. Right now I'm in classic, and I want to head to palettes. You'll see down here it says Disc, Classic, Harmony, Value, Palettes. If you tap on Palettes, this is going to be all of the saved palettes that you have in Procreate. Up here at the top where it says Palettes, there's little plus icon, and that is going to create a new palette for me. I'm going to come back to my palette over here, and I'm going to use the Eyedropper tool. I'm just going to hold my finger down on the color that I want to grab and boom. It's going to grab it, and I can pop it into the little squares inside of this palette right here. For those of you who that's working for, cool, just go ahead and grab the rest of these colors. If you are finding that the eyedropper doesn't work for you, if you go to the Wrench icon at the top, and you go over to the Preferences tab over here, and down here in Gesture controls, there is the eyedropper. Sometimes your settings might be different or you might have decided to change up your shortcuts settings, so you'll be able to see how you can invoke the eye dropper from this menu here. But I think for most of you, this shouldn't be too much of a problem. Again, we're just going to keep going ahead and grabbing all of these lovely colors. Don't forget the gray. While we're here, we're going to go ahead and grab the color palette for the deserty scheme as well. I'm going to tap the plus icon again, and I'll just be able to grab that next set of colors. We're going to do the beachy theme first, so that means that we want to have that one chosen. If you see right here, there's this blue button that says Default, we're going to switch that to the beach theme, and then I am going to switch back to classic mode. If you are really a big fan of using the disc mode, you can use that too. I'm a big fan of the classic mode, so that's what I'm going to be using. You're welcome to use whichever one you want. The next thing that we need to do is we need to set up our sketches. We are going to be drawing underneath of our sketches so that we can see what's happening, but we're not going to draw directly on the same layer. If you go to your sketch layer, if you open the Layers panel, which is these two little squares right here, there is this sketch layer right there, it's called Layer 1, and there's a little N on the right-hand side here. If I tap on N, it's going to open up a new window, and if I scroll up, I want to go to Multiply. Now for those of you who are really familiar with Procreate, what this does is it basically makes everything darker. All the colors a little bit darker, and because there's a white background, it's going to make the white background a little bit transparent. It's really useful. If that all is gibberish to you, you don't have to understand it, it just works. Just trust me. You want to find multiply, and then most importantly, you want to lower your opacity. There is a opacity bar that you can slide right here. What I want you guys to do, is I want you to go as low as you can so that you can barely see this sketch. I'm going to make my sketch darker so that you guys can see what I'm doing. But for you, you want to only low enough so that you can just see what's going on. Next question is, we need to add our layer for our art. So I'm going to tap on the little plus icon right here. That's how you're going to add a new layer, but I want this layer to be underneath of the sketches. To move a layer, what you do is you tap and hold on layer, on the brand new layer doesn't have anything in the thumbnail. Tap and hold on it until it pops up, and then I can drag and drop it wherever I want it to go underneath there. I want this layer to be underneath the sketch layer. Pretty much everything we're going to do is going to be underneath the sketch layers. The question that I know is going to be happening over and over again, what brushes do you use? Everybody loves a good brush. Well, if you are doing this by yourself, you could use whatever brush you want. Because we're doing this altogether, I think it's going to be easiest if we just use the same brush together. Personally, I use a variety of brushes in my color sketches, but for this exercise, I want you to look down here, if you can find the Airbrushing tab right here. I'm just using the Hard Airbrush. Again, if I tap on the Brushes icon right here, and I just scroll down until I see air and then inside of here. Boom. Airbrushing, Hard Airbrush. No big deal if that's not the one that you chose, will be fine. It's okay if you're not using everything exactly the same as I do. Guess what? That was all in the setup. Now we get to get to color. 3. Laying Down Your Main Colors: We're going to start by laying down big blocks of color on the main areas of our piece. I'm going to be on my new layer here. The real question is what color should I start with? How do I know what to start with? How I work is that I think about, "Hey, what is the most important part of this painting? What is the most important part of this picture?" That's what I want to choose the color first for. In this particular picture, it's the door. The door is the most important thing. I really like this light teal. I'm going to choose the light teal. I'm going to come in here and I'm going to fill in this door with that light teal. Now, that brush is really small. You can change the size of your brush up and down here. Just make it big enough that it's easy for you to use, and you can switch the size. Now, this is a color sketch. I don't care if it's perfect. If I go outside the lines, no problem. This is a sketch, this is not final art. Look at that, I drew into the steps. No big deal. That is totally, totally fine. I want you to go ahead and fill in the door with this light teal, and then I'm also going to do this outer frame with this light teal as well. I'm not worried about going over the plant, that's totally fine. Look at that, I'm being super sloppy. Totally fine if you don't color inside the lines. We're artists. We don't have to color inside the lines, we can do different things. Cool, we have a teal door. Now, the next most important thing is to focus on the background colors, because here's the thing about background colors. They affect everything that surrounds them. Everything that goes around these colors, like the plants and the clothes up here, those colors are going to be affected by the background. We are going to need to make sure that we're being light enough that it can be seen on the background, or darker than the background so it can be seen. If we save that for the last, we're going to have to rework a lot of different moving parts because these are all going to be different colors. So we want to do that first. I'm going to create a new layer using that plus icon right there, and I'm going to grab and drag it underneath the door frame, and I'm going to choose colors for the background. For the background, for this lower wall, I've got an upper wall and a lower, I'm going to choose the second darkest blue. You know what, this is a great time to talk about color drop. Let's do it over here. Color drop is a really fun tool. If I have an enclosed space that I've outlined like this and I grab and drag that color ball over here, it's going to fill up the entire square. This is like the paint bucket. Now, here's some important tips for you. If you find that you got this weird outline like this, that's because your color threshold is really low. If I grab and I drag, and I don't pick up my pen, when I slide to the right and left, there is a little blue bar at the top of the screen that says Color Threshold. If it's really low, it's going to leave that little jaggedy line. If it's all the way full like this, you see how it filled the entire screen on? That's because it's at 100 percent. We don't want it to fill the entire screen on. In order to not make that happen, you want to drag and drop, and slide to the right or to the left. I'm just going to go with about 50 percent. You don't have to make it better or anything. One thing to note. If you don't enclose your space, if there's a little gap like this, when you color drop, it's going to fill the entire layer, so you don't want to do that. But check this out. Now I can drag and drop and boom, I filled that color in really fast. It's going to save us a lot of time in these big areas like this. I'm going to fill this lower wall in with this dark blue color, and then I'm going to choose a little bit more of a neutral color. I'm going to go with that gray color for the upper wall. I'm going to go around the door frame up here, make an outline like this, make sure it's enclosed, and I can color drop. All right, cool. I've got my lower blue wall and I've got my upper gray wall. This is going to create some nice contrast when we mix some different colors in here. 4. Layering on New Colors: Now we're going to start layering on new colors and I'm going to talk about some of those tricky things that we want to watch out for. The next most important thing is going to be the plants. The plants are going to be the thing that I think are the most important here, so we want to choose that color next. I think I'm going to go with this medium teal, so it's not the darker blue, it's like this medium teal and it's not the teal of the door, it's medium teal right here. I'm going to create a new layer, and I'm just going to fill these guys in. Again, look at that, I am being really sloppy. I come in here. Wow, I am not staying in the lines at all. No problem, I'm not worried about staying in the lines. I'm going to give you guys a second to fill these in. I'm going to be honest with you guys, I chose this color palette because I knew that it had good contrast in colors already. I can see that this is much darker than this and much darker than this, and they're all quite different. By the way, do you guys see that this plant is underneath the door frame? I don't want that, so I'm going to move this layer above the door frame, so that I can see this contrast. I'm going to turn the visibility of the sketch layer off so that we can see this a little bit more clearly. You can do that by checking the visibility, just a check mark, that's the visibility. This works, this dark blue. If I were to zoom out, I can pretty well see that this stands out on this dark blue background, and it also stands out on the light gray background. I'll turn my sketch back on, no I'll keep it off for a second. I'm going to show you what could have happened, so if I had a darker version of this teal. Look at that, I cannot see the difference between the wall and the plant and this is something that we really want to pay attention to a lot when we are working on our sketches, so you always want to have contrast. You could, if you wanted to make a lighter version of this blue, and you could do a lighter version down here and a darker version up here, so that there's a little bit of variety in your plant colors. Now we're going to create a new layer, and we are going to do the pots. Now, this so far is really heavy on the blue side, so I think it's high time we came in with the pink. But if I'm honest, I'm not sure how I feel about the pink on here. But here's the secret about these color palettes, you actually don't have to stick with the color that it already is. Especially when I've got this whole classic mode right here, I can move and grab something that is in the same family, anything that's in this square should match. If it looks good right here, it's going to look good if you choose a lighter or darker version as well. This color palette, we don't have to use that really pale pink, we can come down into the right-hand corner over here and grab something that's a little bit more terracotta color. I can come in here and I can color drop onto the palette right there, and I can say, wow, that looks a lot better. Now I want to point something out. If I turn this sketch layer off, this blue and red they're a little bit close to each other, so I might go a little bit lighter with my terracotta color. That looks a lot better, I can see that a lot more clear. Another thing about reds is that they make really good browns. If I go into the dark version and I go a little bit over here towards like the grayer color, but I go dark. I can come in, that's really dark, maybe a little bit lighter. Oh yeah, that's a nice brown color, so that is something that you can do and we just got like three different colors out of that pink. That added a whole lot of range to our color palette. 5. Balancing Color in Your Composition: Now let's start coloring in this smaller elements and talk about how to keep your colors looking balanced. Now that we've got the most important elements in here and elements that have to make sense, we can move onto the clothes. The plants, they need to make sense in the color scheme. You're going to know like, well, that's really not the color that a plant is. But the clothes can be whatever color we want them to be. But like I said before, this is really heavy on the blues. So I'm going to come in here and I'm going to do pink. I'll create a new layer for my clothes, and I'm going to start adding pink. I want to add pink to, let's say, I'll add it to this one over from the edge on both sides here. Why am I doing that? I'm doing that because I want to make this one pink because then I just have this layer, this straight line of pink. I want my eyes to bounce around, to find the color in this painting and bounce and reflect back and forth. I'm going to do the same thing with the rest of these clothes. I'm actually going to choose the same blue that I chose for the background down here, for the wall, and I'm going to fill these in with blue. What that does is it just draws my eye. My eye connects the dots. It creates a nice color balance. Oh, there's blue down here, there's blue up here. It creates a little bit cohesion to the whole color palette. You know what? For the same thing I'm going to do the same thing with the steps. So I'm going to create a new layer for the steps, and I'm going to choose the same gray that I chose on this wall, and I'm going to fill the steps in with that same gray. Now we really have like, if I was really being artsy, I would say we've got repetition. But it's just matchy-matchy. We like to make things matchy-matchy, but not too matchy-matchy. Now I need to add the details in the door up here, the little circles up here and here. Like I said, this is super blue, so I'm going to go with the pink over here. Oops. No. I did that right. Ignore me. Look at that you guys. Remember how I said, I didn't care about being precise. I just want to get these blocks of color ends so that I know that the balance is working really well. I'm going to turn the color sketch off. Well, if I'm honest, this looks fine. There is definitely a balance of colors. But if I'm honest, it feels one-note to me. Even though these are different blues, this is a different blue then this background is a different blue then the teal of this door. To me, it just feels a little bit flat. What I want to do is I'm going to add another color into this. You could just choose another color to add into this, but there is a little bit of science between choosing colors that go well together. So I'm going to introduce a brand new tool here. If I go to my color palette and I go down here to Harmony, this is going to be a really cool tool. Now, if you don't have Harmony, it might be because you haven't fully updated your iPad and Procreate. If you don't have this, you can do this with the normal color wheel. You don't have to do inside of Procreate. But what I'm going to do in this is I'm going to choose a complimentary color from one of the colors that I'm already using inside of this palette already. To do that, I'm going to go up to where it says Colors. There's a little word underneath there. If you tap on that, it's going to open up a menu. If your color does not say Complementary, I want you to choose Complementary now. Now, I'm going to choose the color that I think is used the most in this image. I think the dark blue has the most color in this image. So If I tap on the dark blue, that is going to grab the opposite. Here's the dark blue, here is the opposite color of that. It's actually yellow. So this yellow, I don't want to use that yellow. That looks nasty to me. So there is a little bar underneath of here, and if you drag that, it'll go darker and lighter. I'm going to go all the way light and I'm going to use this yellow, and I'm going to drag and drop it onto this door frame. In fact, I could even use it up here. Just that alone, I feel like really it adds a little bit more spice. It adds a little bit of interest. There's not yellow everywhere all over this, but just that little detail alone. I feel this color palette fills a little bit more filled out. We're going to do one more thing though, because my favorite part is once we've got these colors blocked in, is getting into the details. 6. Adding Eye-Catching Details: Finally, we can add some smaller details to really bring this to life. If I tap on the plus icon once more, I'm going to come in here. I'll turn my sketch layer back on, the visibility back on. Up here on the clothes, there's a lot of little details, and these little details can really make a piece sing. I even have lines in the plants. In the final version of this, there's little striations. This is supposed to be a snake plant, if you guys are familiar with house plants. There's little striations and stuff in here. These details really make a big difference, but we don't want to get into these details at the beginning because we don't want the details to inform the entire color palette. We want the color palette to dictate, "Hey, what details should I add in, and how can I add contrast and visual interest?" Because otherwise, it's just going to get messy really fast. I am going to actually use white. I'm going to go back to my classic palette and I'm just going to drag this all the way over to white. By the way, I got a new layer. This is really important for later on in the next step in the workshop. Make sure that you have a separate layer for your details here. I'm just going to add some details. I'm going to add white to the little cross or whatever right there, and I'm going to do the same thing over here. Maybe I would change this later, but just to give me an idea of, "Hey, here is some details." When I turn the sketch layer off, that is eye-catching. We had a nice balance of colors before, this is eye-catching. My eye just goes, "I want to look at that." Why? Because this is the lightest color we have and it's next to the darkest color we have. This light and dark, that contrast, your eyes are just going to go [inaudible] and go straight to that. I could also make some darker version of pink for the clothes over here. Boom, boom, boom. Maybe a little bit right there. I'll turn my sketch layer off because it's a little bit dark. This is all really cool. The one thing about this is that you want to find a balance between, "Hey, these details are really fun to add," but these clothes, they're not the main part of the artwork. The main focus of the artwork is the door. Since this teal is a really light color, I want to come in with some dark details. I could even grab the darkest dark blue color here. I could add that little peekhole and the doorknob, and I'm going to make this really small, and I'm just going to add some really rough lines in here. Now, the contrast is coming in here a lot better. This is really important to me, is that there is a good amount of contrast. Because the door is so big and it's so broad, it's still pulls your interest in there because it's simple as opposed to these tight, tiny little details in here. In this particular piece, this works really well. If you really want to draw your eye to something, it's not a bad idea to use really dark and really light colors to that area specifically. Also, when something takes up the majority of the space, it is also something that can be really dominant. Ta-da, we made a color palette, you guys. I think we have time. We should try and do something new. We dealt with some challenges in this one, we made sure that there was enough contrast, and all that good stuff. Well, that took us a little bit a while, that took us a little bit of time. That was a lot of work. Good news, guys. We've done all of the hard work. It is going to be so much easier to grab all of this and duplicate it. The next color palette, you guys, is going to fly by. 7. Quickly Trying a Whole New Palette: Now that we've done this whole piece, I'd love to show you how to quickly play with an entirely new palette on this drawing. What we need to do is we need to grab all of the layers except for this sketch layer. My details layer is on right now. I know that one is selected because it's blue. Now, if I go down to the next layer and I swipe with one finger to the right, it will also turn blue. I'm going select all of my layers except for my sketch layer. Then I'm going to tap "Group' and it's going to group everything together. There's a little line here that says New group. If I swipe to the right or to the left on that one, then I can hit "Duplicate". I can grab the arrow tool, and I can move this until it lines up with my sketch on this side. Look at that. This is going to be so easy, it's going to be so much easier for us to just come in here and change this entire color palette really fast. We don't really need the sketch layer anymore, so I'm going to turn it off because it's just distracting. Remember, you just turn things off by hitting the checkmark box there. I'm also going to turn the details layer off, because like I said, the details, they're distracting at the beginning. We want those out of the way. We don't want to have to look at those anymore. We also need to switch our color palette. We are going to go back to our color wheel, and we're going to go down to where it says palettes. You're going to set the default to the color palette that we grabbed before, the dusty desert color palette. Then I'm going to switch back to classic. In the same way that we started with the big chunks, with the big detail, we're going to do the same thing in this color palette. I want to find my door. My door is the most important detail in this color palette, and so I'm going to choose that color first. I'm going to to my yellow, and guess what? I can just drag and drop it, boom, color is in there. So much less work. We're also going to go next to the plant layer. I am going to come in here and I'm going to choose the far left color, the green color. I'm going to add the green to these plants as well. You guys, this is exactly what we're talking about. If I kept the background color this, there's just no way to see the difference between these two. You might see me doing this a lot when I'm teaching a class, and that is because it's really important for me to see how this looks like when it is small. When it's small, this is like if you're scrolling on Instagram, this is what you're going to see. Or if you are making printed art works, this is how it's going to look from across the room. This contrast right here on the left-hand side, this is a lot more appealing. This is something I'm a lot more likely to click on to make it big in Instagram or walk across the room to see it than this, because this just looks like one big blur. It's all about finding that contrast. We've got door, we've got the plants, obviously, now we have to focus on that background. I want you to find the background layer. I'm going to go for this dusty desert look, so I want to use this red underneath of here. If I drag and drop the red onto these colors, well, this contrast is okay, but here's where the trick comes in. I know that I'm going to want to make these pots, another terracotta. Either I need to make the terracotta pots much, much darker than the background or I need to make the background lighter. In this case, I'm just going to make this a little bit lighter. When I'm going around here, well, there's my solid color. Typically, I don't just go straight to the left here because it creates a little bit too much gray in the color. Typically, I go a little bit up and a little bit to the left. I grab here and I just go a little bit up this way and drag and drop it. It's just mildly lighter. It's not hugely lighter, but it makes a big difference. I actually usually reference this, so I'll just drop the color right in here so that I can always come back and just grab it. Then we're going to do the same thing on the upper wall, but I want this to be really, really light. Like this gray was really light and this is much darker. I want to go way over close to white. Not gray, not white, not neon pink, somewhere really close towards the top up here. This is actually up to you too, it's your color. If you get to choose how bright or dark you want. There's no right or wrong answer, color is extremely subjective. But that looks pretty good to me. I'm going to go back to those pots. Now, you might say, "Hey, I already have this red, that red really matches. It's like a good terracotta color." Well, yes. There's nothing wrong with adding a couple of little colors in. But the truth is, colors work best when they are in the same family. When we come in here and I drag and drop this, I'm on my pot layer by the way. If I drag and drop this in, well, first of all, that's too light. We need to go darker than that. I'm going to go a little bit to the right and down. Sometimes it doesn't want to grab. If you're just making lines, the color is not grabbing, so you have to re-grab it. There we go. That's a little bit better. I might even go a little bit darker with this. What was I saying? Oh, great. This, I don't know if you guys can see, but look, this red color right here to this red color right here, this is in the same orange family. Having things in the same family is going to create a much more consistent, cohesive look, not just eyeballing it, grab this color and get it in a darker version or a layer version, but stay in the same family, stay in the same color, because that's what's going to match the best with all of the other colors if you already found a color palette where the colors look good together. You can save this color palette and drop it in here. This is also a really useful tool. Remember when I grabbed the color and I was like, oh, actually I need this to be a little bit darker, working that out in here in the palette is really easy because I have these colors right next to each other. I can really clearly see that this color is the wall and not the pot. It's way easier to see that and be like, okay, yeah, I can definitely tell the difference between those two. Enough about these pots, let's just fill them in and keep moving. Are you guys tired of talking about pots? We've got the pots, we've got the plants, let's do the clothes. We have different issues with this color palette than we did with this one. We actually have some really nice contrast and a lot of color balance in here. We haven't even used this teal color. Let's go ahead and grab this teal color and drag it and drop it. First, you need to be on your close layer or you're going to fill up the entire layer and it's going to look wacky. But you want to grab this and drop this here. New problem. This is this contrast against the background and all of that. But this color, this teal color and this green color, they are so similar, I can barely tell the difference between them. What's the point of having another color if you can't tell the difference between them. I really want to make sure that I come in here and I go a little bit later with this teal. I'm going to tap and add and look at that. I can visually see pretty well that this teal is going to contrast with that green pretty well. It's definitely lighter than what I've got there. If I drag and drop that there, there we go, now I can see that they're different, and it's not that it has to be darker or lighter, it just has to be visually different. I'm going to add these two to the end ones. Then, you know what, I think that you can also do the same thing with the green. You can come in here and do like a darker green to this color guy right over here. You can come in with the red and make some red paints. You can even come in with the yellow and make this guy yellow. Now, I think that this dark yellow when it's the same color as the door, competes for attention. I'm going to make this yellow a little bit lighter, and I think that works pretty well. We also obviously have neglected the door frame because that is one wacky color that's in there and it doesn't fit it. We need to go back to our door. I think now is a great time to come in with that lighter teal. First, I'm going to drag and drop the darker teal on here, and this is the same issue. Remember how I was talking about when things touch, it really matters that they have contrast. Because this plant is lined up with this door frame, we really need them to be different. Now, here's a cheat for you. If you find that you have to have something in a certain color and there's no contrast when you come in shading and highlighting, and all of that stuff, you can create. Like I could come in here and create a light highlight on my plant and that could create the separation. If you had to, you could still find ways around this, and I could maybe create some shading on the door that made this a really dark teal so that I would contrast. That's the cheat. But we don't have to cheat this, we're just laying out the colors, we can just solve this problem now. I'm just going to make this the lighter teal. Now I've got enough contrast between the green of the plant and the door frame. It's no big deal. For the details in the door, I'm going to add the darker teal. Whoops, I just dragged it in the wrong spot, that's all. That happens a lot. Don't worry if you don't make things go where you want them to, happens to the greatest of us. Why is the dark teal okay here when it's not over there? Because this isn't touching anything, so it's totally fine. As a bonus, actually, this lighter teal and the darker teal creates a glowing effect. In this particular piece, the way that everything is laid out, it draws your eye in towards the door. That actually even works in our favor to really just bring it in like that. Cool. You can come in here and I would make these yellow, the same yellow or maybe like a lighter yellow. I don't know if it bothers you guys, but there's something about this, like it just doesn't match these yellows because it's the yellow from the old color palette. It's not the yellow from this color palette, so I don't know. I think it just makes things nicer when you have them all together. Guys, this color palette is looking really dynamic. It's way more dynamic than when we started working on the details in that one. Let's turn on our Detail layer, the one that we turned off before. This is chaos now, this is terrible, this is awful. I don't like this at all. We have different issues with this color palette than we did with this one. This one was too blurred, we needed more contrast. We don't need this much contrast, this is grabbing my attention way up here and it's just totally skewed the dynamic of everything. We're going to change that. I'm going to go to my detail layer. Sorry, I'm shaking the cameras. We're going to go to my detail layer here, and I'm going to use two fingers and I'm going to swipe to the right, and this is going to turn on Alpha luck. I'm going to choose the darker teal. Alpha luck by the way, sometimes we do want to stay in the lines, and this forces us to stay in the lines. It's very useful. If I come in here, and I'll just make my brush bigger, and I can just create a darker teal on top of these white details because I don't need it to grab that much attention. When I go to the door, I'll just make this keyhole the dark teal, but the blue in this door, it just doesn't work for me. A nice thing to do when you're doing details can be to stick with colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. The blue doesn't make sense next, even if that was like teal, it just doesn't make sense for the cracks of the door. I might actually use red. If I go to the disk, yellow and this orange, they're right next to each other on the color wheel. If I come in here and I color this in a darker red, I think that just makes so much more sense. Technically, the cracks in the door are going to be like they're shadows in-between the slaps on the door. It just makes much more sense to do a dark color like this. I think that just looks so much better. But you can also do this with the other details. Something fun could be like to use our pale teal on the clothes up here. I could come in and use the teal color on the green because those colors, again, this green and teal, they're right next to each other on the color wheel. This can make some really fun little contrast. Instead of just going darker or lighter with your color like we did on the details of this clothes, this can create some nice contrast right there. If I add one more new layer and I make my thing small, and I want the light teal, I bumped it somehow, this can be really fun when I do these little lines in here. It's fun to play with colors that are right next to each other on the color wheel, especially that's useful inside of your color palette, using those colors to bounce off of each other. You guys, we made two very completely different colored palettes. I hope that it was really helpful taking the color palettes as they're originally are and switching them up. We did it. You did it. 8. Q&A: Now we're going to open it up to the audience for questions. There was one question about the desert scheme. Does the yellow towel, you feel, does it draw attention away from the door? We have one of those questions from the audience. Well, it's all subjective. So really it's up to you, what do you think? Do you think that it draws from the door? If I wasn't in a rush and being, "We got to get this stuff out. I want to make sure I cover all the ground." I think that I would make it a little bit more distinctly different. I think that I would come in here and I would make it even a lighter yellow and something that maybe isn't quite as vibrant so that it doesn't create as much eye-catching. I think it's fine to have a few details that pull from the yellow, but what I wouldn't probably want to do, if I wanted the door to be the main focus, I wouldn't want there to be yellow and yellow and yellow and yellow and yellow and yellow. The other side of that is that you might not think that the door is the most interesting part of this piece. You could also argue that, "Hey, I think that the clothes are the most interesting part of this piece and what I want people to focus the most on." In that case, your emphasis of where you would place the color would be different than the way that I have laid things out. One of the questions from the audience, from Joe is, sometimes when I fill a shape with the color, the edges of the shapes stay the original color. Is it because I use a soft brush? Yes and you can even see that in mine right here. There's a couple of ways that you can tackle that. You can increase the color threshold. If you remember, let me go to this guy right here, and let's do something entirely new. You can see, if you come in here and you drop the color, you can even see, it's got three different colors on here. The color threshold, if I drag it, I lost it. I drag the color threshold, see how it's getting more and more in there, that's one thing that you can do to deal with that. You can also come on here and make an Alpha Lock on here. Then actually just physically come in and draw and this is going to fade out because it's partly see-through. It's blending with the background color. But if I turn the background color off, then it wouldn't look like that. But yeah, this is one thing that I do to counteract that. I'm not so worried about it when I'm doing just my color sketches because I can just ignore that. But if I'm actually doing final artwork, that matters a lot to me. So yeah, up the color threshold or come in there and manually do any wonky edges of the color threshold just isn't grabbing [inaudible] Do you have sort of a go-to place or approach for finding new color inspiration? I use the same color palettes over and over and over again. If I come into my palettes here, like this is a color palette that I just refer to and I use this over and over again. This is another one. Once I found two or three color palettes, I've stick to those. In that case, sky is the limit. Something that I see that really strikes me, I'll try it out. If it works, it works and if it doesn't, I'm going back to my tried-and-true. But I do cover this in my color theory class. There is a whole bunch of places that I do go to for color inspiration when it's not just my personal work, when it's client work. There are trend resources that have great color palettes. There's a couple of people who are, I think, trendsetters and that I always love what they do and I will go and see their color inspiration. I'm blanking on the name of some of these people, but if you do want to see the details of that, I cover specific places where I go. Pinterest is great, Instagram is great. Walking around with my phone and taking pictures is also great too. You mentioned a few times that this is a color sketch. What would be the next steps that you would take after this to maybe turn it into something like a final product? I wouldn't always go into this level of detail with the details. I would probably just do the rough blocks of color. If I was doing a project that wasn't me being, "I want to play with color." I would do a very rough, just the main elements of a block in the color and the next step to that would be that I would come in with these colors and I would make sure I was precisely getting the outlines because that does matter. That is going to make a big difference in the way that these plants look on the background and precisely fill that in. Then from there, I really get into heavily tweaking my colors because I'm adding shading, I'm adding highlights, I'm adding texture, and those things that actually impact the color quite a lot. But I don't need to get into that in my color sketches because I just need the base color. From there, I know what colors I'm going to be using. It's all about tweaking what's going to be a little bit lighter? What's going to be a little bit darker? Making sure that I'm refining the details in the edges. That's the next step really, if we had been really precise about how we were laying things out, the next step would be adding shadows and highlights and texture and all of the really fun details and making sure that it still work, that the balance still stayed correct, if that correct being a really loose term because color is subjective and art is objective. But yeah. Sandy says, "First of all, thank you for the lovely class." She's a big fan and is wondering, do you have any tips for developing a personal illustration style? Boy, I wish I did because this is how it comes out. This is just how my art comes out. When I have tried to figure out what my style is, I basically look at things that I admire, other illustrators that I admire, whether they're current or they're old. This goes even into movies, other artistic styles that I admire. I try to add elements, the elements that I like of that into my art. If I see somebody that draws eyes a certain way, that's something that I'm going to try and integrate into my own art style. I'm not trying to take everything from that one person. I'm only trying to take the things that I like about what they're doing. That has definitely influenced like I like texture. That's something that I've added a lot into my work. I'm looking at the way that some artist that I admire, how they use texture, how they do their line work, how they do that sort of thing. Just finding good quality inspiration that you really like. Not just, "Oh, this looks good today, I'll just borrow that." Finding quality inspiration and trying to find how you can naturally fit that into your own art. Like that conglomerate of, "This is how it naturally just comes out," and, "This is how I really want it to look." That's going to evolve into your own personal style. 9. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining along with this Skillshare live class. I want to say that these colors fit like a puzzle coming together because I practiced this beforehand. I tried the colors in different spots. If it takes you a little bit longer to adapt a color palette to your piece, that's normal. I tried different colors for the background, I tried different colors for the details. I didn't just instinctively know like, "This is the right color for this." If it takes you a little bit longer, that's totally normal. This is a class. We want to make this educational and not confusing, so I'm not going to lead you down to lots of wrong tabs in a way that doesn't work. It's totally normal if it's not just like, "You just got it. It's just perfect now." It's still not perfect for me. I don't always do things perfectly. That's fine, that's normal. If you want to learn more about color, I have an entire color theory class where we dive into the principles of why colors work together and what colors work good together and how to use them in your art. If you want to find out more about that, you can visit my profile page where you can find more about color theory, more about how to use Procreate, more about how to draw, and how to make a living as an artist. Great. I have more coloring sheets on my website, which is just brookeglaser.com. I have a newsletter there where I share tips and tricks for artists. You can join on my website as well. I would love to see what you guys do. Please be sure to share your projects in the Project tab below. Thanks for joining us and happy art making.