Mastering Color in Procreate: Theory, Palettes, & Digital Illustration

1. Intro: Color plays a huge role in establishing the mood and storytelling in our art. It can be used to create a specific atmosphere and help convey emotions, as well as having a big impact on the composition and readability of your image. Hi, I'm Sarah Holiday. I'm an artist and illustrator creating work inspired by nature, whimsy, and imagination. Color is one of my favorite parts of the illustration process. It's so fun being able to breathe life into your artwork and play around with different palettes to determine the desired mood and atmosphere. If you find that your colors are falling a bit flat, or you find it hard to come up with impactful palettes, then this class is for you. In this class, I'm going to focus mainly on how we can use and apply color in playful and imaginative ways to create striking artwork with a lot of practical exercises, resources, and demonstrations to help you with that. Begin the class by going over some handy color theory principles, which will help you understand how to think about color and what to be aware of in your illustrations before moving on to our practical exercises and demonstrations, which make up the majority of this class. I'll be guiding you through several exercises to get you more comfortable experimenting with and using color in both a playful and meaningful way, as well as showing you how I go about choosing colors in my own work with a few in depth demonstrations. I'll provide you with several pre made linework drawings so you can get straight to the coloring part of the process, but you're more than welcome to use your own drawings if you prefer. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced artist, this class will give you the tools and practice you need to understand and apply color effectively in your work. I'll be demonstrating this class using pro creates on the iPad Pro and focusing mainly on using color in digital arc. You'll get the most out of this class if you're also using some form of digital drawing software, whether that's pro create Photoshop or another program. My goal is that by the end of this class, you'll feel more confident at making bold and creative color choices in your work and come away with a deeper understanding of how to communicate moods and stories using color. If that all sounds good, then let's get started. 2. Class Overview: Hello, and welcome to the class. I'm happy to have you here. I'm really excited about this topic as color is something that I personally love playing around with in my work. I know that a lot of people struggle with color and I often still do too. It can sometimes feel like you have an overwhelming amount of choices, which on one hand, is exciting, but can also feel pretty intimidating if you have no idea where to start. To me, becoming confident with color comes down to learning how to make decisions that feel right to you. Having a good foundational knowledge of color theory, along with practical techniques can be really helpful in building up the confidence to use color in a way that works for you. It took me quite a while to decide on the best way to teach this topic as I personally use color in quite an experimental and intuitive way. Sometimes it takes me a lot of playing around and trying different things until I land on a color scheme that I love. There are some set principles that I follow that I'm always thinking about when using color that we will cover in the first lesson. Then I decided that instead of giving you step by step instructions on how to apply color. I would spend more time demonstrating my own process, which is not exactly linear, but it's how I like to work most of the time. And I think it allows for more fun and creativity than having a step by step process to follow. Just to note, this class is going to be mainly focusing on using color digitally. We won't be covering color mixing with paint or anything like that. But a lot of the theory and examples I'll be talking about can apply to any medium. I'll also be focusing mainly on coloring scenes in my demonstrations. But again, a lot of what I'll be talking about and demonstrating can apply to all kinds of illustrated compositions. Another thing I won't be covering too much is how to color something in a realistic way. Most of this class will be about working with color imaginatively and intuitively to come up with really unique and striking palettes for your illustrations and designs. To begin with in this class, I'm going to start off by covering some basic color theory, mainly showing you how we can think about color in a practical way to achieve contrast and balance in our illustrations, along with how to convey your desired mood and story through color choices. I'll then quickly cover some technical tips and tricks like working with color for screens versus print. Before giving you a quick rundown of the procreate color interface for anyone who may not be too familiar with working with color on procreate. But if you're using another software or medium or you already know your way around the color interface on procreate, then you can totally just skip this lesson and move on to the next. We'll then dip our toe in with our first exercise, where we'll be choosing colors based on word prompts. This is something quick and easy designed to get us warmed up and start connecting color and feelings and practice making decisive color choices based on intuition. We'll then talk about finding color inspiration and collecting palettes before we dive deeper into the rest of our exercises and demonstrations. For this more practical part of the class, I've made some resources available for you to download. I'd encourage you to do that now so that you have these ready when we reach that part of the class. However, you are absolutely welcome to use your own drawings to practice with if you would prefer that. As for brushes, I'm going to be using a brush that I modified myself, so you can use whatever brush you like. If you want to use the same one as me, it's available to download as a newsletter sign up gift over on my website. In this second part of the class, we'll begin by practicing using values. We'll be working only in gray scale for this exercise and trying to establish balanced and readable compositions using small thumbnail size drawings. Then once we've got the hang of working with value, we'll move up a level and practice coloring in these same thumbnails, experimenting with different types of color schemes and allowing ourselves to play and have fun with these without the pressure of getting it right first time. Once we've practiced these, we'll be ready to move on to our final project, which is to color a scene of your choice. I've provided a choice of three different artworks which are ready to color, but you're more than welcome to use your own artwork or redraw these in your own style. We'll be starting off by experimenting with coloring these scenes to create four different color ruffs before choosing our favorite of the four to take on and finalize. I am going to be demonstrating how would color each of these three pieces. If you feel like that's too time consuming to watch, feel free to pick whichever composition you're most interested in. Use a lot of the same techniques in each demo, but sometimes I do mix it up a bit, so there are a few different nuances and interesting techniques to learn from each. I've also decided to keep these demos fairly real time without speeding anything up too much to give you more of a realistic overview of what my decision making process looks like. If you'd like, you can watch these videos while you draw yourself and it'll be like having a drawing body talking you through my process as we work together. At the end of these three thumbnailing demos, I'll be choosing my favorite piece to finalize and showing you how I would normally finish off a piece as well. Everything that I'll be demonstrating in these videos is just my process and my way of doing things. But I always encourage students to take what helps you. If you find that you prefer a different method of doing things or a different style from what I'm working in, then I totally encourage you to go your own way and do what feels right for you. Lastly, I would love to see what you make during these lessons. If you're up for sharing, you can upload your project in the project section here on Skillshare, and you can also share your work on Instagram and tag me there to at Serra Holiday. I'm going to be demonstrating this class using my iPad Pro with Procreate and we'll be sprinkling lots of procreate specific tips and techniques along the way. But most of what I'm teaching will apply to any form of digital art making. If you're using traditional mediums like paint or colored pencils, then the main color theory principles for creating contrast and balance still apply. But the method of working and experimenting with color and choosing colors will be slightly different and I won't be covering that in this class. Hopefully, you're also excited to get started, and when you're ready, you can meet me in the next lesson, where we'll dive into some important color theory principles. 3. Contrast & Balance: In this lesson, I'm going to go over some color theory principles, which will help you understand how to think about color and what to be most aware of in your illustrations. I'll be mainly showing you how we can think about color in a practical way to achieve contrast and balance in our illustrations and also help you to think about how to convey your desired mood and story. Let's start off by clarifying the three variables that define a color, those being, saturation, and value. When we're talking about hue, we're referring to the color itself, regardless of its virancy, or how light or dark it is. Any of those colors that we differentiate by their basic name such as orange, red, pink, purple, blue, green, yellow, we're usually referring to the hue, and we can visualize all of our hues in a color wheel, ranging from our warm colors to our cool colors and back again. Whenever we move around the color wheel, we're changing the hue. Then saturation refers to the intensity of the color. If we visualize saturation on a scale from completely desaturated to completely saturated, then you'll see that at the low end of the scale, the color is completely drained and it's merely a shade of gray with no pigment relating to whatever hue you're working with. Then as you move up the scale, more color of this hue gets added until it becomes very vibrant and intense at the highest end of the scale in this most saturated version. And then value, which can also be referred to as tone or brightness, refers to how light or dark the color is, regardless of its hue or saturation. We can visualize our values on a gray scale or a color. To lighten the value of your colors, you can move closer to white and to darken the value, you can move closer to black. Those are the three building blocks that make up a color. By playing with these three variables, you can come up with an endless amount of different colors. Now let's talk about contrast. One of the most important aspects to consider when you're working with colors is contrast. Our eyes are naturally drawn to the areas of highest contrast within an image. When used effectively, this can help draw attention to a particular focal point or several focal points within your image, which helps to direct the viewer's eye and create a more easily readable illustration. Contrast is most effectively achieved by varying the value of your colors, meaning how light or dark your tones are, but it can also be further enhanced by placing colors of different hues, saturation levels and detail level next to each other. Let's start with value, focusing on a scale of dark to light tones. We can create areas of high contrast in our image by placing values that are far apart on the value scale next to each other. Areas of low contrast can be created by placing similar values next to each other. As you can see, these tones with high value contrast stand out much more and catch the eye compared to these tones with low value contrast. In our illustrations, you'll want to use high contrast for elements that you want to stand out in an image and low contrast for elements that you want to blend into the background and be less noticeable. I personally think that value is the most important thing to consider when working with color. Because if your values don't read well, then your illustration won't look good either. As you can see in this image, we have the highest value contrast drawing the eye to this main focal point, which is this character because I've used the darkest colors against the lightest colors to really highlight that silhouette. Compared to the rest of the background where I've gripped darker values to help frame the composition. I've also separated the values by using lighter values in the background, which helps to push that background back and we have a little bit more contrast within the foreground, which helps to bring it forward. Often when I'm working on an illustration, I will check my values periodically by placing a gray layer on top of my work and setting the layer blend mode to color. I just do that by adding a new layer and making sure that it's over my image and choosing a color that is completely desaturated. It can even be pure black or pure white. It just has to be completely desaturated, and then dragging and dropping that color over the whole canvas. Then going to the layer, clicking on the layer blend modes and scrolling down until you reach color. That will drain all of the color out of your image and turn it completely gray scale so that we can check our values more easily. Again, in this image, you can see that I have highlighted this frog by using our darkest darks and I've used a little highlight here to add some light colors. Then I've been careful in the rest of my image to not use too much contrast, but just enough to make all the extra little details stand out without taking away from my focal point. I've just made a quick edit here to show you what would happen if it was the other way around, you can see that I've upped the contrast within the backgrounds and I've lowered the contrast within the character, and it really ruins the illustration because the eye doesn't really know where to look here, and that focus has been taken away from the main character. Your values are really important to get right to help the eye know where it should be looking and to help tell the story of your illustration. If we toggle back to the original You can see that reads so much more nicely. I has a much more realistic atmosphere. I haven't actually used the whitest whites and the darkest darks, but close enough to them to give me a very wide range of values here. Next, I want to give you a quick overview of color harmonies. As these are something that you might see or have seen crop up quite a lot in color theory. But I want to preface this by saying that I actually don't think learning about color harmonies is all that important. Don't feel like you have to memorize these or refer to these at all when you're coming up with color schemes. But if they help you, that's great. I usually work more intuitively depending on the composition I'm working on, and a color harmony will often appear naturally. But I tend not to focus on it or aim for a specific harmony too much. I think the main point to take away from color harmonies is just that limiting the amount of different colors you use within a palette will help to create a more appealing and striking image than if you were to use every color all at once. The easiest color scheme to achieve is monochromatic where you're just using one color in varying values. This is effective because it's much easier to achieve a good balance in contrast between values when you don't also have color contrast to worry about. A step up from this is an analogous color palette which is also quite easy and effective to achieve because you're using similar colors just from a small portion of the color wheel. I tend to use these palettes for scenes where I want to create a really calm and peaceful feeling as there isn't too much contrast or tension between the colors. Then a complimentary palette uses two opposing colors which sit directly across from each other on the color wheel. For example, red and turquoise, blue and orange, yellow and purple, pink and green. Those are all color combinations that will create a lot of energy and contrast with each other. This can also be quite an easy harmony to achieve. The more colors you add, the more difficult it becomes to balance your composition. These three color schemes, triadic, split complimentary, and tetradic, are a bit harder to pull off. Personally with these three color schemes, I usually don't consciously try to achieve any of these. But the more that I add an experiment with colors in a scene, it might move towards one of these harmonies naturally. Later on in my demonstrations, you'll see me working with a few of these harmonies and also just building up color schemes intuitively. The best way I would say to think about which color scheme you want to use in your scene is to ask yourself how much energy you want to portray. To simplify things, we can just think about using high color contrast versus low color contrast. Here I've grouped illustrations of mine into two camps. We have high color contrast and low color contrast. As you can see in the group on the left here, these all have high color contrast. Meaning each illustration has a lot of contrast between their warm and cool tones, which gives off a really energetic and vibrant feeling. We can think of color contrast as a pushing and pulling between our cool and warm colors. The further apart they are on the color wheel, the more pushing and pulling, the more tension you'll get between them. With colors that are close to each other on the color wheel instead, you'll have much less visual friction and tension and therefore a more calm feeling. If I just pick some of these colors, you can see that these colors from my high color contrast image span a wide range of the color wheel. With my low color contrast, if I just pick these and take a look at where they lie on the color wheel, they're all thing within a small portion of that wheel. You can see that compared to my high color contrast illustrations in these low color contrast pieces, I've only used colors that are close to each other on the color wheel. These are all analogous palettes, and they feel a lot more calm and peaceful compared to my illustrations with a higher contrast in colors. That doesn't mean that I've used every color possible in these illustrations with high color contrast. These are all still quite limited palettes. But the colors I've used in each palette are quite far apart on the color wheel from each other, which is what creates that tension and energy between them. Something else, just to note that you should always be considering is about how to draw the eye with your colors. Even in these analogous color schemes, where in general, we have low contrast between colors, we do still have some contrast. I've been conscious of keeping the highest levels of color contrast to the areas that I want to stand out in the image. In this scene with the frog, I've made the colors of the character warmer in comparison to the background, which again helps to draw the eye. The same with this character here sitting on the step We have our highest contrast between both value with the lightest and the darkest tones next to each other, as well as that pink and blue very close to each other, which creates the most interest in that region and draws the eye. With my high contrast color schemes, it's a little harder to get the balance right. In this woodland scene, I've used warm colors to help draw the eye, which contrast against the cooler colors in the scene. In this house scene, I surrounded the main character with a dark background. That value contrast really helps to draw the eye amongst all these other contrasting colors. Same with this jungle scene, we have the highest value contrast really highlighting the silhouette of that character. Although we have a lot of the same colors from the character in the rest of the image as well, because I've surrounded them with that complimentary green color, that really helps the character to stand out. In this cactus desert scene, the character actually blends in with the background a little with those warm yellow and orange tones. Again, I've used value to differentiate that lighter yellow from the darker yellow background. Because these teal colored cactuses are well balanced and surrounding the character in the composition, they help to lead our eye and eventually focus in on the character in the middle of the scene here. Apart from leading the eye to the focal point, I also generally like to balance any colors that I've used for the focal point, around the rest of the scene. Often in a less contrasting format, as you can see here, I've balanced a lot of those warmer colors around the scene in this room. That helps to create a more balanced feeling and ground those colors within the scene a little more, either in a subtle or not so subtle way. If you're having trouble with leading the eye around your scene or establishing a focal point, Then I would definitely recommend checking in with your values first and trying to establish contrast that way and then see what happens. I'll be demonstrating all of this in more detail later on in the class as well. In my work, I try not to use equal amounts of each color from a chosen palette. I'll often use one color far more in my piece and use the others only very sporadically. This allows the colors that you're using less often to stand out and draw the eye. It also helps create a more natural look if your colors aren't distributed evenly. Considering the balance and composition of your colors throughout your image is also important. If you only use a particular color very heavily in one area of your image, you might want to sprinkle some smaller suggestions of that same color in other areas around the scene to create more of a balanced and natural composition. Then the last thing I want to talk about in regards to contrast is saturation. In this diagram here, we have three fully saturated colors, which all have a high color contrast from each other. As they become desaturated, each color moves towards a gray tone until they become completely desaturated and have absolutely no color contrast. These tones here in the middle as they become more desaturated, these three hues gradually lose contrast with each other as well as they all have that gray tone in common. Being aware of how saturation affects color contrast helps us to use saturation more intentionally. If you feel like your piece has too much contrast and you want to tone it down a little. Can try desaturating some colors and that might give you a more calming and peaceful looking scene. Or if you want to draw attention to a particular focal point, then you can increase the saturation and contrast between your colors. Aiming for a mix of saturation levels between colors creates a more natural balanced look and it allows space for the eye to rest. Sometimes artists want to use way too many highly saturated colors because they think it will help their piece look more vibrant and energetic. But if you don't balance your highly saturated colors with some more desaturated tones, then there isn't anywhere for the eye to rest. Scenes which use too many saturated colors are generally quite difficult to look at, and they seem very unnatural and a bit chaotic. On the opposite side of the coin, using too many desaturated colors can result in a bit of a washed out look. And loses a lot of atmosphere and context. If your values are solid, then low saturation can work. If you want to create a calm or somber mood, but generally, I prefer completely black and white to a low saturated palette. To quickly recap, when we're coloring our illustrations, we want to make sure that our values are well defined and readable. We can check that by adding a gray layer set to a color blend mode on top of our image. We want to identify a focal point in our image and draw the eye using a combination of contrast between color, value and saturation. We also want less important elements in the scene to have less contrast than the focal point. Using colors further apart on the color wheel will result in more energetic and vibrant looking illustrations, while using similar colors will create a more calm and peaceful looking scene. Limiting your palettes will help you create more appealing artwork and using uneven amounts of each color in your palette will help you create more natural and balanced looking compositions. With that knowledge equipped, let's move on to our next lessons where we can put these principles into action. 4. RGB vs. CMYK: When working digitally, it's useful to know about CMYK versus RGB color profiles. CMY K stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and key, another word for black. This is the color profile you'll want to use if you're printing your work. In this model, colors are created by mixing these colors in varying amounts. This is a subtractive color model, meaning that the more ink that is added, the darker the color becomes eventually resulting in black. RGB stands for red, green, and blue and is used in digital displays such as computer screens and TVs. This is an additive color model and works with light instead of ink. The more light that is added, the lighter the color becomes eventually resulting in white. When setting up a digital file for your artwork, you will usually be given a choice between color profiles. Now, sometimes there are a lot of different settings to choose from, which are specific to different printing methods, but I wouldn't recommend using any of those unless you know what you're doing and what you're using it for. In general, you will want to use an RGB color profile for digital work, which will be displayed on screens. Because screens create color with light instead of ink, you can get much brighter colors in RGB profiles compared to CMYK. Personally, when I'm creating work for print, my preference is to use RGB to create the artwork and then I'll convert the color space to CMYK in something like photoshop afterwards. Often converting the image to CMYK will dull some of the brighter colors, and I'll need to make a few adjustments. When I'm working in RGB, but I know that I want to print my work as well, I do try to stay away from some of those really bright neon colors. This is something that you'll learn over time as you get more familiar with working with digital color. Don't worry about it too much at this stage. I just wanted to clarify that because I think it is something important to consider as a digital artist. On procreate, I always like to work with this SRGB setting, the second down on the RGB color profile when you're setting up a custom Canvas. You can also work with display P three, which gives you an even wider range of bright colors to work with. But I find that it doesn't translate well to all screens, so I prefer to stick with this SRGB setting. If you do want to use a CMY K canvas on Procreate, I would recommend that you just use the generic CMYK profile. All of these other settings are specific to different printing methods that I don't really know about. I would recommend generic CMYK profile just for ordinary at home printing. If I set up an RGB Canvas and a CMY K canvas. I'll just quickly show you the differences in color. You can see here in this CMYK color wheel that the brightest colors that we can get are a little bit than what we're used to seeing on screens. Then if I go to the RGB canvas, we can achieve a much brighter color palette. You can see that has made quite a difference between using the RGB, which is super bright, but if we were to print those colors, they would become duller like these CMYK colors. Just something to be aware of when you're setting up a canvas, I always like to work in RGB and convert to CMYK after. But if you know that you're making a piece specifically for print and you want to use CMYK, then that's absolutely fine too. If you're following along with me on procreate, I'm just going to go over the whole procreate color interface in the next lesson. If you're already familiar with using procreate and using colors in procreate, then feel free to skip that lesson and move on to the next one. But if not, then stick around and I'll walk you through it in the next lesson. 5. Procreate Colour Interface: In this lesson, I'm going to give you a quick overview of the procreate color interface, just to cover all the tools that I'll be mainly using in this class. If you do know your way around procreate already or you're using another software, then feel free to skip this lesson and move on to the next one as these are purely technical tips and tricks that I'll be showing here. But if you are following along with procreate and want a quick overview of the color interface, then we'll dive into that now. I am just going to delete those two Canvases from the previous lesson. Now I am going to start a new canvas by pressing the plus button in the top right hand corner of procreate here, and I can then press the little black rectangle with a plus button in it next to new Canvas to create a new Canvas. I am going to use 3,000 times 3,000 pixels at 300 DPI for my Canvas. But you can choose whatever dimensions you prefer. Then on color profile, I'm going to make sure that I'm on an RGB color profile just so that we can get those brighter colors. Then once I'm happy with those settings, I'm just going to press Create, and that will bring me into that new canvas. In procreate, mainly everything to do with color is found in this little colored circle in the top right hand corner of your Canvas. If you just tap on that, you'll see that it opens up our colors interface. Within this interface, there are a few different tabs along the bottom that you can switch between four different uses. With the disc option selected, you'll be able to view this color wheel and select any hue that you want by tapping or dragging around this wheel. And then within the color wheel, you'll be able to change the value and saturation of whatever hue you have selected. You can also focus in on that inner circle by pulling or pinching with two fingers. With the classic option selected, you'll be able to choose colors in a slightly different way. Instead of a color wheel, you can change the hue using this multi colored slider along the bottom. You can also change the saturation and value with these two sliders underneath, or just by dragging your pencil around within that box. If we select harmony, you'll see a different type of color wheel appear. This allows us to play with color harmonies. If you tap on that word underneath colors, you can change to a complimentary, split complementary, analogous, triadic or hetrat color harmony, and you can play with the values by using the slider underneath Then inside this color wheel, you can bring these colors closer to the center to decrease the saturation or closer to the outside of that color wheel to increase the saturation. Personally, I don't use this feature very often and you have to be careful that you don't use colors that are all the same value and saturation when working with these harmonies. Otherwise, you might be wondering why your colors aren't looking all that harmonious, but it can be another option to experiment with as long as you're mindful of keeping a range between saturation and value levels. Then we have the value tab. Again, I don't use this one very much because it's not very visual, but if you know that you want a specific color or want to insert a specific hex code from a color palette, then this is where you can do that. We have hue saturation and brightness sliders at the top here, and then red, green, and blue or RGB sliders. Then here where it says hexadecimal, that's another name for Hex code, and you can insert a specific code if you know the code for a specific color maybe that you've found in color palette. You may have noticed that on all four of these tabs, disc, classic harmony, and value, We have a history panel, palettes panel, and we also have these two little rectangles in the top corner. The history panel shows us the ten that we've just used with in our canvas. This can be really handy if you want to select a color that you've just recently used, but might not have saved in a palette yet. I'll go ahead now and just put some random colors down on this canvas just to show you that in action. If I take a look at that history tab, you can see that those colors that I've chosen from my color wheel and placed on the Canvas have automatically been added in the history tab. Then that means that I can just easily select any of these colors if I want to reuse them again and it will give me that exact same color. This can be really handy if you want to select a color that you've just recently used, but might not have saved in a palette yet. With these two colors in the top right hand corner, you can toggle between them. And change these colors as you go using the color wheel or whatever color selector you choose. You can toggle between these colors, which allows you to have two different colors loaded onto your brush, but you can very easily switch between. Then underneath the history panel, we have space for a color palette. If we open up our palette tab, which is the fifth option in this interface, this is where we can save any palettes that we might want to use in the future. And we can also select any pre saved palettes to use whenever we like. To create a new palette, we can press the plus button in the top right hand corner, and it'll give us a few options. We can take a photo on the spot by pressing new from camera or open up a file or a photo and create a new palette based on those. But I usually like to just start from scratch and create new palette. That will open up a blank palette for us, which we can start adding colors to. If we return to any of these four tabs, We can select any color that we like, and with that color loaded onto the brush. If we tap within a box on the palette, that color will get added to the palette. I'll just go ahead and add a few random colors to this palette to demonstrate that for you. You can also drag these colors around to rearrange them within the palette. If you want to delete any of these colors, you can just hold down on one of those colors and select deletes watch. If we go back to the palettes tab and tap on Untitled, you can rename this palette. I will just rename that example. You can also share duplicate or delete a palette by pressing those three dots on the right hand corner of each individual palette. If you want to select a different pre saved palette, then you can just scroll through until you find whichever palette you want to work with. Select those three dots and select set as default. That will appear in your palettes panel underneath the procreate interface. If you want to keep the colors interface open while you work, we can just drag this little tab at the top over to another part of the screen, wherever is most comfortable, and you can switch between each of those little tabs from there. If you're working from a palette, it's really easy to switch between your colors to make your work flow a little bit faster and more efficient just by tapping on them to load each one onto your brush one at a time. You can also pick colors directly from your canvas by holding down and dragging your finger around until you select your preferred color. When you release your finger, that new color will be loaded onto your brush and you'll be able to draw with it. Or maybe you want to change the color very slightly, then it will appear within the color wheel and you'll be able to make adjustments as you like. You can then cross out the color panel if it's getting in your way and you'll still be able to access all your colors by opening that little colored blob again. To fill an area with a specific color, if I just add a new layer to demonstrate this. Instead of coloring the whole thing in by hand, you can just draw the outline of your desired shape and then drag that colored blob from the top right hand corner into the middle of that shape. Then keeping your pencil held down on the canvas, you can either drag to the left or the right to increase or decrease the color threshold until you achieve the effect that you like. If you have more than one shape to fill, Then you can drag your color into the first shape and then press continue filling and just tap in the middle of your other shapes. Once you're done, you can just press that tick. You can also recolor these shapes by choosing a different color and dragging that new color onto the shape. Again, you can increase or decrease the color threshold by keeping your pencil held down and dragging to the left or the right. Once we have a few colors down on our canvas or a color rough to work with, we can make adjustments to these via the adjustments panel at this magic wand icon here. These four options at the top of this panel, hue saturation brightness, color balance, curves, and gradient map, will all adjust our colors in a slightly different way. Huge saturation and brightness allows us to make adjustments to the hue saturation and brightness. And we can tap outside of the Canvas to bring up this preview panel and preview any of those changes and see if we like them. These changes will affect the whole layer that you're working on. If you only want to adjust one section of your layer, then you can just select that individually and make adjustments only to your selected area. I'll just hit back to my first layer now and I'll show you how to use color balance. Color balance allows us to tweak the balance of our colors with a little more subtlety. We can change the balance of colors individually on our shadows, mid tones, and highlights. When adjusting the color balance of our highlights, that will only affect the lightest tones in our image. And mid tones will affect the mid range values within our image, and shadows will affect the darkest tones within the image. We can bring those shadows closer to blue or to yellow, to green or to Magenta, and to red or to cyan, which all give slightly different and subtle effects. If I tap out with the Canvas to bring up that preview panel, you can see that's given us just quite a subtle change. Then I can select apply if I want to keep that change, I can select cancel, if I want to cancel, I can select undo if I want to go back a step, or I can select reset, which will reset the color balance back to the original. I'm going to select apply to apply that change. Then we have curves, where we can play around with these colors using curves. I find curves to be the most effective for playing around with the contrast of our colors. Here you can select between gamma, red, green or blue. Gamma will affect the whole image. Red will affect the warmer parts of the, the red channels. Green will affect the more green channels of the image, and blue will affect the cooler parts of the image. This right hand portion affects the lighter tones of your image. This left hand portion selects the darker tones of your image, and these middle portions affect the mid tones of your image. By dragging that curve upwards, we can lighten the mid tones, and by dragging the curve downwards, we can darken the mid tones. If we drag this bottom part of the curve upwards, we are lightening the darkest tones. If we drag that bottom node to the right, then we're moving those dark tones more into the mid tone sections. We're darkening more of those darker mid tones. If we drag this right hand node to the left, then we're lightening more of those lighter mid tones, and if we move that downwards, then we're darkening more of those lighter mid tones. I usually like to just very subtly the lighter tones slightly to the left and the darker tones slightly to the right. Maybe just experiment with bringing that curve upwards or downwards a little and see if that has any effect on the contrast of my image. You can also come up with some quite interesting effects by playing with the red, green, and blue channels individually. And then we have gradient map. The gradient map works by mapping different colors onto different ranges of our values. If we create a new gradient map, just by pressing this plus button here, it will give us a completely black to white gradient which maps each part of these gradients depending on the value of each of these colors. If I change the color on the left of this gradient, that will map onto my darker tones, and if I change the color on the right, that will map onto all of my lighter tones. You can just tap to keep adding colors. Anywhere along this value range, and see what you can come up with. I don't often use this gradient map feature, but it can be quite fun to play with to help you come up with some quite interesting and unique results. That's mostly everything that I'll be playing around with in this class today. Feel free to get yourself familiar with these tools if you like. You'll see me using these a lot more in my demonstrations later on as well. Then once you're ready, let's move on to the next lesson where we'll be doing a fun exercise, choosing colors based on word prompts. Oh. 6. Exercise: Word Prompts: It's time to start our first warm up exercise, where we'll be choosing colors based on word prompts. You'll probably have noticed how different colors can influence your mood and communicate different vibes and symbolize emotions. For example, a bright red, which is a very strong and eye catching color could communicate anger, love, fire, or passion, all emotions or subjects which have very strong emotional connotations. Then something like a pale blue might communicate sadness, loneliness, or peacefulness, which are all much softer and more subtle emotions. We can also approach this the other way around. If I name an emotion like anxiety or joy or surprise, for example, what color would you associate each of these feelings with? There's not really any one right answer and it might be slightly different for each individual. That's why instead of making this lesson just about telling you which colors are associated with which emotions, I thought it would be more fun to give you an exercise instead to help practice making connections between feelings and color and to exercise our intuition a bit more when it comes to choosing colors. I've made a little worksheet for you with word prompts, which is available to download from the class resources. Basically, we're just going to choose a color to go with each prompt. There's no right answer here. This is just to help us warm up and start thinking about color as a way of communicating moods and feelings. I'll quickly demonstrate the first few prompts and then I'll give you a chance to pause the lesson and fill out the rest of the worksheet on your own. I'm just starting a new layer and I'll rename that layer colors, and I'll just keep all my colors on this one layer. Then I'm choosing my first color for my first prompt happy. I've gone with this bright yellow color. That was quite an easy one for me. Now I'm choosing something for my second prompt forest. I'm going for a dark greenish color that I feel represents that word. Then moving on to the next one, quiet, I'm going into the lighter desaturated areas and choosing a desaturated grayish beige color here. So now it's over to you. You can pause the video here and spend a few minutes in this exercise, filling out these colors, or just imagining in your head a color to represent each of these words. And then once you're ready, you can come and meet me back here. Once you're done, have a look at your colors and they might be similar to minor, they might be totally different. That's totally fine if you have a bunch different interpretation of these emotions and words, I generally have very vibrant saturated colors for the sts. I have a little more de, maybe pastal colors for these so quieter emotions. And some of them I've taken quite literally like forest. It's quite dark green, that's the color that I associate with forests. Adventure. I went with this right turquoise color because I associate that with the sea and tropical oceans. Note where you've used cooler colors, where you've used warmer colors, and you can also do this exercise again with other words, that might be quite interesting, and that might be helpful for you to build up this intuition of what these colors represent to you. And that you can use within your artwork. Yet, once you're ready, let's move on to the next lesson. 7. Inspiration & Collecting Palettes: In this lesson, we'll talk about how to find color inspiration and collect inspiring color palettes. There are many different ways to approach this and no one right answer, but I'll talk about a few options that might help you to figure out which colors you're more drawn towards, as well as point you towards a few handy resources for sourcing and creating palettes. I personally enjoy using pin test to find color inspiration, and I keep a pinboard specifically for color palettes that I'm drawn to, as well as images that I just love the colors of. Then I can refer back to this board whenever I feel like I need a bit of inspiration for my color palettes. You can also just search for color palettes on Pinterest and see what comes up. If you're searching for a specific mood of color palette, then you can just add a word that defines that mood or feeling in the search bar as well, and you'll get loads of different options coming up. You can just have a scroll through and see if any of these palettes catch your eye and think about how these color combinations make you feel what vibe they give off. You can take notes on how you can replicate those vibes using similar colors in your own work. When I'm working on an image and I'm not really sure what direction I want to go in with my colors. I'll take a look at my pinboard and see if any of these palettes match the vibe. I usually don't copy them directly, but use a few colors from one of these palettes as a starting point to work from, which can be really helpful when you're not sure what direction to go in with your colors. There are also quite a few websites out there that can help you generate your own palettes. I don't often use these because I like to come up with my own palettes depending on what I'm illustrating, but they can be quite fun to help you come up with some options that you might not have otherwise tried. I will list a few of these websites here if you want to pause the video and check those out. Each of these websites works in a slightly different way. Feel free to try those out in your own time and see what you think. If you do want to use a specific palette to save for later, you can take note of the Hex codes. Hex codes are those six digit number and letter combinations that you see underneath each color in these palettes here. Those codes can be used to generate the exact same color within any digital art program like Photoshop or Procreate. If you want to create a palette with these exact colors on Procreate, you can just open the palette section, tap the plus button in the top right hand corner, select create a new palette, and then select the value section. Right under all those different color sliders, you'll see the word hexadecimal. Alongside, it will be a hash tag with six digits. In my case, it's six zeros, if if you currently have a color selected, then it might be something different. You can then just copy those hex codes individually into the hexodesimal panel and then select enter, and that should load that new color that corresponds with the hex code onto your brush, that you can then add within the palette just by tapping your finger on one of the empty boxes. Then you can just continue adding different hex codes until you have that palette saved within procreate, which you can then use at any time. You also might want to make color studies from photos and see if you can improve or exaggerate the colors that you see slightly, and then save those colors in a palette. You're doing this, then I would suggest avoiding picking colors directly from the photo and instead just use the colors as inspiration. When I'm doing this, I try to use slightly brighter colors than what I see in the photograph just to exaggerate them a bit more. But that's something that you can play around with outside of this class and see what works for you and what you prefer the look of. You can also observe how your favorite illustrators use color. Do they use a lot of lighting and gradients? Do they use realistic colors or flat colors? Do they use bold, dark backgrounds or light ay backgrounds? Maybe they use more neutral muted colors or a very vibrant range of colors. What do you prefer? I always recommend if you're taking inspiration from other artists, take inspiration from many, not just one or two, as that will give you a broader range of inspiration and you'll be able to make more unique looking work that is truer to you. For my own palettes, I usually like to have at least one dark color that I can use for definition or linework, one light shade that I can use for highlights, and then a range of mid tones of varying hues, depending on the mood I want to achieve. Sometimes I color an artwork using a pre existing palette. But a lot of the time I just restyle it and start by choosing one color and building up the rest of my palette based on what I feel works for the specific illustration. Go ahead and check out those resources now and maybe gather a few palettes to potentially work with in the next exercises if you feel like it. Then let's move on to the next lesson. 8. Projects & Resources: Now it's time to put everything that we've just talked about into practice and begin our exercises and project. I've made several coloring resources available for you to download, which you can then import into Procreate or Photoshop or any digital program of your choice. Or alternatively, you could print them out onto paper and color them traditionally if you'd prefer. You're also very welcome to use your own drawings to practice with, I would absolutely encourage you to do that if you would find that more fun. Either option works absolutely fine. To download these resources, you can head to the projects and resources tab underneath this video and just download the resources where it says, download resources and you'll see the file there. Once you've downloaded these resources and sent them to your iPad, you can then open each file on Procreate or whatever you're going to be using them. As for brushes, feel free to use whatever brush you feel like. I'm going to be using my own brush that I have modified from one of the procreate native brushes. If you'd like to use the same brush, you can download it as a free gift by joining my newsletter via my website sera holiday art.com. But it's absolutely not necessary to complete these exercises. Please feel free to use the brush that you're happiest with. If you'd like, you can also use these drawings I'm providing as inspiration for the subject and just draw these in your own style. In these resources, you'll find a file called Practice thumbnails with nine small illustrations, and we can use these to practice the first two exercises where we'll be working firstly with values and then with color. So I encourage you to play around and be as experimental as you like. If you think something doesn't work well, then that's actually a really good way to learn. You can keep coloring these thumbnails as many times as you like and get as much practice as you like with these. I'd recommend that you just work on one layer and keep things loose so that we can move quickly and make changes and try things quickly and just have fun with these. So you've had a chance to play around with these two exercises. I'll move on to three more demonstrations where I'll show you how I would go about experimenting with and planning colors for three separate scenes. I didn't want to speed anything up too much. There is quite a lot of content to watch here. If you're short on time and don't want to sit through each demonstration, then you can just choose the one that you find most intriguing to watch, or you can watch these on double speed if you'd prefer that. It also might be quite nice to play these in the background while you work on coloring your own pieces. Whatever you prefer, you can mix and match and make this class work for you. Then after those demos, I'll choose my favorite piece to finalize and show you how I would create a finished illustration based on my chosen color ruff. Again, I've made these linework illustrations available for you to work on in the project resources as well. Your final project is to either color one of these linework illustrations in your own way or to choose one of your own drawings to color. Once you're ready to share, I'd love to see what you make. You can upload your exercises and project to the project gallery, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can with some kind feedback. You can share your work on Instagram two and tag me there at Sara Holiday. Everything I'll be demonstrating in these videos is just my preferred way of doing things. But I always encourage students to take what helps you. If you find that you prefer a different method or a different style from what I'm working in, then I totally encourage you to go your own way and do what feels right for you. In these demos, you'll see me sometimes making mistakes and correcting those mistakes and just experimenting. It's not always a linear or step by step process. I hope that encourages you to not be afraid of making mistakes either in these exercises because the earlier that we allow ourselves to make mistakes and learn from them, then that's always the best way to learn and improve. If you have those resources downloaded, iPad or tablet or sketch book of the ready, then let's get started on these exercises and project. 9. Exercise: Value Thumbnails: If you open up your practice thumbnails procreate, and we are just going to start a new layer and bring that underneath the layout. If you've downloaded the JPEG version of this, then all you'll need to do if you're on Procreate or Photoshop or any other program is go to the layer blend mode and change this to multiply that will mean that you'll be able to draw on the layer underneath and see those colors come. We'll just this values and We're going to try and stick to this one layer. Using these illustrations as a guide, we're going to practice coloring just with values at the moment. That's anything on our gray scale just down the side here with absolutely no saturation at the moment, so we're only focusing on value and readability. If you want and you're on default procreate palette. We can just head to palettes. If you're on another palette, you can just press plus and create new palette and that will create this new palette for you. You can tap on that to rename it values. If it's got that blue tick, that means you can start filling in this palette down here. I'm just going to fill in a few different values in this palette so that I can easily access those for practicing this exercise. Just by sliding up on that scale there until we have a range of values from black to white. What I can do is just bring that over. Click on the palettes icon. I have those sitting there and I don't need to keep opening up the color interface on procreate. Making sure I am still on that. Values layer. I am going to just go in one by one to each of these little thumbnails and color them with these gray scale values. I'm going to start with this one, quite simple, just an object with the background. I've selected a mid range gray there, and I'm just going to enlarge my brush size and just really roughly color this thumbnail so that I have something to work with now. With my subject, I can either go lighter or darker than the background. I've just chosen this mid range background, but I could have also made it a lot darker or a lot lighter. I want to see what this looks like with a bit of a lighter value. Usually when I start, I tend to avoid using pure white or pure black to start with. I tend to stay in the mid ranges of those grays. Then I reserve the pure white and pure black for highlights and shadows for stuff that I want to define at the end. I'm going in with a darker gray. You can see this is darker than the background to color in these leaves. And I don't really have a plan. I'm just trying things out and seeing what looks readable. Then I'll go in with a lighter color again for the flowers. We can then go to our layers again and toggle on and off If we toggle off that layout illustration. We can see what these values look like without those black lines to help us define the illustration. Everything looks pretty well defined here. The flowers stand out a lot more than the watering can because they have more value contrast from the background. You can see that the highest contrast is between these flowers and the darkest tone, which is the stems, which really draws your attention to this area of the image, which is what I want. I do think that I could make the watering can stand out a little bit more and I can do that with maybe some highlights as well, which might look quite nice. I can also add in maybe some shadows. But I want to avoid you see how I've added that shadow and it's the same color as the background. I want to avoid that. I still want the subject to stand out from the background. I'm actually using a color that's a bit darker. It's all about thinking about contrast and the readability of your image. And there, I think that looks a lot better. Then if I want to add a really dark black, I think black might be too much. I usually don't like to use pure black. But in this case, I will try it out just with some defining lines. You can see I'm using it very sparsely and the bright white. I can also just use to highlight a few areas. I actually don't like the white highlights. I'm going to undo those. I can use a white, I'm actually going to use a little bit of an off white to highlight a few areas. I can add a gradient in those flowers. Maybe more highlights in the watering can. Then I'm going to maybe add a little bit of a shadow underneath, just to balance some of the those darker colors. You also need to think about balancing your values within your image. So go ahead and try that out. You can try with a dark background or what it looks like with a light background and just apply some of those principles. Now we will just move on and fill out all of these. With this frog, I'm actually going to start with a lighter value, maybe a little shade darker. I find that it helps to block in one main value or one main color first, which you can then use as an anchor point to build up your other colors around. Because we have a few more layers in this scene, I decided to go from light in the background and then getting darker as it moves towards the foreground. I'll just color in everything with the screen. Then getting slightly darker. Defining some of those shapes on the toad still there and getting darker again still. I'm going to turn off that layout again and we can see that the scene is starting to build up, so that looks quite the light to dark. I could have also gone light in the foreground to darker in the background and that would have given a different vibe. You can try that as well if you want to try out something different. L et's keep going. I want to bring more attention to this frog. I'm going to add in more of these darker tones to help add contrast and bring attention to that frog. I'm also adding in a suggestion of lighting as well by leaving that upper part of the frog a little bit lighter if there's a highlight there. I might try a little bit of shading here a bit of shading. You can see that it's brought more attention to the frog character here. It's brought forward and seen, highlighted a bit more. Something that I like to do with in my backgrounds, sometimes is to lighten the scene towards the bottom. I just feel that it gives more of an atmospheric and natural look. If you've taken my class illustrated environments, I cover a lot of lighting techniques. You might find that useful if you want to check that out after taking this class. I think that's really added something adding in the white there. With this, I don't want to add in ultra blacks, but I might add in just some darker shadows still. Just to add definition. I think that's enough. Continuing on that we'll start. This one with quite a light background as well. Then I know that I want to make that sun lighter. I know that I want to have a little bit of a gradient in the sky getting lighter towards the bottom. I'm just to achieve that gradient. I'm I'm just angling my apple pencil to the side and leaning a bit lighter than I usually would. Then I'm going to see that same color and I'll make the boat a bit of a darker value. And the sales a touch later. And then I'll make these clouds. Very light. That was really simple. I just use darker shades for the boat and that light gradient on the sky worked really effectively and keeping the sky area behind the sun a little bit so that that sun shape stands out, works really we as well. Then I can also just add in some little details, keeping the values quite close so that the contrast level doesn't take away from the ship, and then I can even a slightly even darker shade. Notice in these two, I haven't added the darkest darks, and I think they look more natural, more effective than perhaps this image, this one with the dark highlights, which looks more stylized, which st, I think works effectively. It's just not as realistic looking in terms of values. It just depends what look you're going for. Then we have another scene here. For this piece, I'm going to start with a darker tone just to see how that goes. And fill that background in again. We have that base to start with. Then I'm going to choose one of these mid range tones for this house in the middle. I actually want to make this house lighter. I'm going to make a gradient effect with a few different tones and lighter house in the middle. I'm not using pure white, but this looks quite white because it's on the darker background. Actually I might even use slightly less bright shade of white. For this house and already that is quite simple, but it looks quite effective. It gives us an impression of lighting. I want to use a darker color for the roof to give some contrast here and help draw the eye. Let's turn that composition off and you can already see that we can make out this house quite nicely and I am going to. I am going to to make these windows at bit lighter in the rest of the house. Now I can start going in and defining these tree shapes. I'm going to use the values that I had already defined in these circles, and I'm going to just follow the shapes of those trees. To make this a little bit more natural looking, but still keeping to those flat colors right now because I think it would get a little bit messy at the moment to start going in with the gradients, even though I think it would look quite nice for the scene to have gradients, but I think defining the flat colors first, especially if you're just starting out, will give you a clearer base to then add more of a lighting effect on top of that looks quite nice. Let's see what that looks like, and yet, that looks really effective, I think. I think it would be quite nice to define these rocks. My maybe add a gradient in that water, but I'm not sure. No, I don't like that, actually. Then maybe I can even go in with some darker tones. Then I can also just add some little details into these trees. Like I can start to define the tree trunks by tracing over those lines that I've drawn and making sure there's very just a slight contrast between those branches and the trees. That just helps to add detail in, and then it can also define some shapes that are the same value just by using a little line. If I lower the opacity by taping that M or an n, and I lower it atle bit, then we can see the shapes that need maybe a little more definition because they are of a similar or the same value. This is a stylistic choice. You can also define them using shading or keeping that black line around them. I think the darkish lines, we need to actually add some to the house. Just to keep that as the area with the contrast. I think I also would tone down these black lines a little bit. Which I think works better. I'm going to turn the opacity back up again. I think that works quite nicely. I used a different layer accidentally, so I'm just going to merge them together. I think I might even make the side a bit. What you can also do is add a new layer. Choose maybe a mid range of gray. Maybe draw ale vignette around the outside. And set that to a multiply layer, and that just darkens everything around the outside. We can even go to adjustments, hue saturation brightness, and then play with how bright that multiply layer is. I'm going to keep it about where it was before, maybe a little bit lighter, and then I will just merge those layers together by pinching with two fingers. Then moving on to the next one. I'm going to start with a mid tone color again and play around with these. I'm trying to make decisions quickly because you learn more quickly if you make decisions quickly and gets through everything rather than trying to make the perfect decisions straightaway. Allow yourself to make some mistakes and then review what you think could be improved next time and then implement those improvements next time, try them out and see what happens. You can see that I'm avoiding using the darkest dark and an the lightest light to start with. I only using them if I really feel that I need definition in my piece towards the end of blocking out my values. In this piece, I am going to do the opposite of what I did in the frog piece and I'm going to go from dark in the background to light in the foreground. I'm starting off with a dark value. It's not pure black and I'm just going to add in some values slowly getting slightly lighter as we move forward in this space. And then actually, I think the fish, maybe I want to make this big fish, maybe not really light because against this dark background, this gray already looks pretty light, even though it's one of the mid range grays. Then we'll make these tiny fish because they are secondary focal points. They're not the main focal point, make them a little bit darker than that big fish. If we wanted them to be hidden, we can make them much closer to the darker background and then they wouldn't be as easily noticeable straightaway. Then I'm wondering what would happen if I make this lighter. But I feel like I would need to balance it on the other side as well. Can you see by itself, it looks a little odd, but when we have something to balance it, it's more anchored in the scene. And then I'm just going to add little highlights to that big fish. And then we can turn those values off and on. I actually think these are too light. I'm going to tone them down a bit. I'm actually going to tone everything in the scene a little bit more because I think this type of scene works better when there's not too much contrast. I'm lightening this big sure a little bit more to really draw the eye and some color, some value variation, some detail, and maybe tiny highlights. I may add some tiny highlights on the little fish as well. I think that looks a lot nicer when we turn off the layout there. This fish stands out a lot and the other fish they do still stand out because they are contrasted against that black background, the dark background, but not as much as the big fish. I think that looks quite striking with those values. These three along the bottom. We're going to end on an easier note because as you can see, they don't have much depth to them, they don't have many backgrounds that you need to capture. You can either leave the background white or a gray color or dark or even black, if you want to. Let's try with this one. Let's keep the background white and we'll just color in the chair. I'm going to go for a mid range gray. I'm just coloring the whole silhouette of this chair. I'm going to start blocking in to some of these values and see what works. Giving that cat a little bit darker. I want the cat to either be the darkest thing or the lightest thing apart from this white background. I'm dark at the moment, and then I'll make everything else in the scene. This mid colors mid range grays. And then I could also add a shadow the chair. Then I'll make the cap a little bit darker to contrast with that pillow let's see how that looks. I think that works quite nicely. Then I might even add in some darker lines just to define some more areas of the cat. And the I think that works quite nicely, quite simple, but effective and moving on to the cake. I'm going to do the same thing, start with a mid range, gray color and just color the whole silhouette of the cake. And these stars, which even works well by itself, or I could do the opposite thing where I could color in the background and leave the cake in the middle white. Let's just try that and see what works out. Let's just use this time to experiment. Just coloring the cake and leaving leaving the middle white, which looks pretty effective, and then we can go in with some even darker values and add in some of those details into the cake. Okay That looks quite nice. We might even want a little bit more definition in the background. If I choose just a lighter color than the background gray. Then I can add a tiny bit of a shadow areas that I want to have definition. Obviously, it doesn't work in the areas that are the same value. We need to change those. Actually, I'm just coloring the whole background because I think that works a little bit nicer, a little bit more in that mid range to make the p. I'll just change this value. I think that works quite nicely. Then for this last illustration, I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to even use maybe a darker value and color around the silhouette of this bird. You can color in the bird if you want and background or a different tone. There are so things that you can do. But the main thing is just to make sure that the highest contrast part of the image is the part that draws the is the part that you want the i to be drawn by the vocal point. Then the parts of the m which are, still important, but less important, we tone them down. So in this image, I want the bird to be the focal point or maybe this part of the bird to be the focal point. I'm going to go in and darken the stems slightly of these flower buds and I can even make those buds quite a dark value, and maybe I'll color the beak of the bird. I think that looks quite nice. Would be the beak of the bird, could be darker. That's the same colors the background, so we don't want that. And I'm not sure because I think the lighter color works well. I think that those values look quite striking, especially with leaving the bird white and having the darker background. We could equally make the background lighter and the bird and it would still look striking. I think that most of these look quite effective. Obviously, we can add in more details, and as you add more details. You'll need to still think about the value of the details and how that works within your image. I think this one was definitely the trickiest for me. I'm actually going to go back in because I think that the trees are on the outside can be even darker. I'm going to start in there, and then try adding in more of the darker tones to this image, to increase the contrast, increase the drama, and what I can do is lower the opacity slightly. I need a tone that is just slightly lighter than that second darkest tone. Remember, you don't have to be too neat. Just blockout shades and blockout shapes and don't worry about being too neat. I just think it needs darkening in general. Okay. Let's see. Let's try and put that on a multiply layer and lower the opacity. Can you see that by just darkening the surrounding trees, it makes this house, this focal point in the middle pop out a lot more, and it adds much more drama and atmosphere to this image. I like that a lot more. I am then going to merge down these two layers by pinching together with two fingers. I also want to define these stepping stones a little bit because I think they're a bit lost in lighting there. It might take you a few goes before you get to something that you quite like and that you think works nicely. That's fine. We're just practicing. I'm going to stop there before I get carried away because I could so easily get carried away. The last one that I wanted to look at because I don't really think that black black works well here. I'm going to change that to the only slightly and see what happens. Which I think looks nicer. I don't usually like to use a pure black for defining things. I like to use a darkish brown or darkish purple, some dark color with a little hint of hue in it, that's not pure pure black. Because I think it's really uncommon to see pure pure black in nature, and it just looks a little bit more natural. Feel free to have a go at this as many goes as you like, and you can always go a bit more intricate than me, but I would say don't spend too long perfecting anything. I would rather you have maybe turn off your layers, start a new one. And start again from scratch. Try it maybe two or three times and maybe set a timer, maybe two to 5 minutes for each little thumbnail and compare your results and see what you feel works for you with this exercise. I know it's not as fun to look at black and white images, but it's really important to get the hang of values and know how to use your values effectively so that when you turn off your linework, when you don't have linework to help you with the readability of your image, you can still tell a story, you can still understand what's going on. You know that it's a birthday cake. You know that there's a nice scene with a sailboat. You know what the main focus of the illustration is. You understand a little bit of the atmosphere, of the lighting or the silhouette of what you're looking at. Once you are Happy with this exercise, you've gotten a handle on your values. We can move on and we'll be coloring the same images using real colors this time, so let's go. 10. Exercise: Colour Thumbnails: Okay. Now that we've practiced our values, we're going to move on to coloring these thumbnails. So I want you to just experiment with this exercise and don't feel like you have to get it perfect. Just try things, make decisions, just like we did in our values exercise, except this time we're going to use colors. So we have to think about value alongside the mood and the combination of colors and the palette. So This is your chance to just experiment, make mistakes on these tiny thumbnails with no pressure, Let's just dive in. To start with, I am going to I'll just cross that palette out from before and open up the color wheel. This time, I'm just going to use this color wheel mainly, and again, just like we did with our values, I'm just going to start with one color. Focusing on each thumbnail individually, and let's try to do this pretty quickly. I'm going to try and spend about a couple of minutes on each. I'm not actually going to worry about color harmonies. I usually work quite intuitively with color. I'm just going to work how I normally would work here and talk you through my process. If it helps you to work from a palette or to think about color harmonies, then you can absolutely do that. I'm just going to start with one color that I want to define the mood of my piece. I'm going to start a new layer underneath my layout, and I'm going to call this colors. Making sure I'm on that layer and I'm not worrying about keeping the same values that I did in the last exercise. We can disregard that for now. I'm just going to start off with one color. To define the overall mood of my piece and use that as a anchor point for the rest of my colors in each image. I'm starting off with this pch beige color and I am then going to choose a color that complements that. I think I'm going to stay in that Pach range for most of the image. I'm choosing a slightly darker and less saturated color for the teapot, not the teapot, the watering can. I could go ultra realistic and go for a green color for the leaves, which could work. But because I want to try things, I think I'm going to stay within this range of the color wheel and because this is more towards the yellow side of the color wheel and it's a little bit more desaturated and then it contrasts with this warmer desaturated tone. It does come across as a green shade in this context. Which I think works nicely because it harmonizes quite well. Then for the flowers, I could do something really bold, like add in a red color. But I think I'm going to keep it in these oranges. Because I want my flowers to be the focal point, the main attraction of the image. That is my most saturated color. Again, we can turn off the layout and look at our colors. I really like this as a start. Something else we can do is add a new layer and choose a gray value, either from your color wheel, bring it right across to be totally desaturated. I'm just picking that from the values Palette had earlier, and you can just drag and drop that gray blob into the whole scene and go to the layer. Click on n, drag down to the bottom to color. That will just drain all the color from the image so that we can see our values again. And we can turn that on and off because it's still really important when we're working with color that we keep our values readable. Sometimes because you have so many things to think about, it's easy to overlook your values and you think, there's something not quite right with this image, but you don't know what it is. It's often your values are not contrasted enough. This looks quite good. We can see the silhouette of our image. The higher contrast is in these flowers. There's not that much contrast between these two shades that orange and the greeny color for the leaf. I think I might either make either the flowers darker or lighter than the green leaf. Just to add even more contrast. Let's see what would happen if I made them a little bit darker. I still want them to have that high saturation. I don't want to darken them too much. But you see just changing that slightly, it has made that flower stand out much more. I think that also looks more striking as an image as well with this more burn orange color. I can also add in some details. With my details, I can pick the color by holding down with one finger until this little wheel comes up. Then you can see that if you drag your finger, it will pick other colors from the image. I use this a lot if I want to pick a color and then I want to head to my color wheel and choose a slightly maybe darker or lighter variation of that color, and maybe add in a few details using that color. Maybe something even darker would look nice. That just helps to add tiny bit more detail. I can do the same thing with the watering can. I can also choose a lighter tone if I want to add a highlight. I think that looks very nice. I can check my values with that gray layer. I think that works well. Let's move on to the next one. Don't want to spend too long ding. For this frog, I've got to go with a green palette. For this scene, I'm going to start again by choosing one color that I want to define this scene. It is minty green, a little desaturated. Now I'm going to build up around that. I want the background to be a little lighter, maybe of that same hue or maybe a little bit more blue. Let's try it. Let's keep building up. If you remember with our values, we built up from light in the background to darker in the foreground. I'm going to do the same here. Except this time, I want to add more vibrancy and maybe contrasting color into this area to help draw the eye more. Because I've this green tone, if I want to go for a complimentary palette, I can just choose the hue that's right opposite on the other side of the color wheel, which is this red color. I will choose a desaturated tone of that red for the toad. Okay. And I'll go in with a few different values of that red. I think maybe that pink tone, it's a bit too saturated. Just trying things out here. I actually even though I want this to be a complimentary palette, I can still add in a tiny bit of variation as long as it's not overpowering. I'm just trying out different things here because I'm not sure what's going to work until I try it really. I'm really not sure about the color for this dock of the mushroom. It does help to occasionally turn off that layout like we did in the exercise before. And to check the values as well. I think the values are looking quite nice. There could maybe be more variation between that mushroom stock and the background, which I think I will do a light in the background slightly. You can see how that has made the room stock stand out a lot more. I want to make the frog stand out as well. I might add in some reddish tones. Let's. I'm not sure if I like that. Ll Just going to add in some tones in, which helps to draw the eye. Except, can you see we have some vibrating here because the values are too similar. The values they're almost exactly the same. I need to either darken the frog or darken that red and I think I will darken the frog. That works a lot better now. I think I'm also going to brighten this red. I think we can afford to brighten it. I do like the greens, but I think we can have a bit more color variation in these greens because they're looking a little bit flat. I might bring them more into the yellow green territory. I'm not sure if this is going to work, but let's try. Quite like that. Highlight a few highlights here or there. I'm bringing some of that yellow into the sky as well. I think that looks quite nice. Let's just check the values once more. I think that works. And let's move on to the next one. For this tail, I'm picturing a s, maybe blue and yellow, another complimentary. Let's start by adding in color to set the. Maybe a really light yellow. And then I'll just o, reach across the color wheel. This is a purply blue complimentary color, which I think will look really nice. Let's just try that out. I think those two colors go really well together, that purple and the yellow. I think I'll just stick to different values and saturations of those two hues. And adding in a lighter color. I also want to have a lightish gradient in the sky and some white clouds. Some ripples in the water. Let's see what this looks like by itself. I think the values look good. I think that I could potentially add in another color because I think it's lacking some vibrancy and interest in my opinion. I think maybe a pinky color could work. And a little bit in the sea, which that already adds more interest, I think, and looks quite nice. The sky could even a a bit of that pink color. I think that looks a lot nicer. I try making the think more vibrant on the sales. I'm actually going to try with a more saturated yellow and see what happens. And Let's see what would happen if made that sun a little bit darker. It's not realistic, but it might look quite nice stylistically. I'm getting rid of that pink and just bringing it back to the purple because I think actually just changing the sails to that yellow color gives it more balance be the yellow and the purple that it was needing. I think that works quite nicely works nicely with the darker sun as well. Now let's move on to the next one, this house. I could make the forest very green, these trees and make the house have maybe an orange roof to make it contrast against the green. But we've already done a similar color palette with this frog. I want to try maybe the inverse of that and make the forest look very autumnal with warm colors, and then I'll have the house maybe with a cooler color to make it stand out. I'm first of all going to block out One main color for the overall vibe of the scene. This is the color that will be predominant. This will be another complimentary color palette and directly across from that, we'll choose a color. I actually might go more into a turquoise color because I really like that color contrasted with more autumnal tones. I'm going to lighten the house in general. Not loving that blue right now, but it's good to just have something as a placeholder and then we can change it. Now I'm going to go in to all these trees and just block out some different variations in warm tones. I'm going to try and keep a slightly different value and huge variation between every adjacent tree, if you see what I mean. I'm trying to get a nice balance between those colors overall. And I'm making them different saturations as well. I don't want them to all be fully saturated because it can overpower the image and make it look a bit too much. The eye needs to have some resting points. Not loving the look of this that much so far, but we will get there. I think that yellow is maybe far out and we'll bring it back to this more tan color. I'm adding in some more vibrant tones now, but I don't want there to be too many of them just enough. Just trying different placements of these colors. I think I'm going to make the house a little lighter, maybe an almost white, which looks a lot nicer. And then I'll maybe bring an orange into that window. If we turn the layer off and the values are looking ok. We could maybe add in some darker values, but we need to be careful. Let me adding in some browns maybe which might look quite nice. When I'm adding in a new color, I'm trying to make sure that it's also balanced elsewhere throughout the image. I can add in little details of different colors here and there, just picking colors from my thumbnail. I'm starting to build up quite nicely. I think we should bring in some more warm colors into the house. Valued tiny hint of lighting, but nothing too drastic and some different colored details. I quite like that. Those values look reasonably good. I'm wondering if I should slightly darken the roof. Which I think works nicely. Let's move on and maybe I will try a triadic color palette with this scene just to test it out. I'll maybe have maybe some green, blue and red. I'm just going to look at a main color. Let's see, maybe this pink color will work quite nicely as a base. And then Notice when I'm working from a color harmony. I don't want to use the purest form of that color, the most saturated form of that color. I'm choosing lighter, more desaturated tones so that they don't clash and it means your colors will be more harmonious together. Let's try setting in one of those greens. Let's keep everything pasted in this image to give a light a feeling. Because pastal color palettes can look really nice, but sometimes they can be tricky to get the values right because you still need to make sure you have some contrast. With pastal color palettes, quite often, people tend to only use the very light tones. But actually, you should be mindful that you use some darker tones just to complement those pastal colors and maintain that readability of your image. I'm starting to add some variation between hues that I blocked down just now. So you can see I need to add in more darker tones now to define the scene. What I can do is pick that purply color and use darker tone and then define some of my shapes. Already that's looking much better. I think I'm going to add in maybe a saturated red to add a pop of color maybe a darker color of that red just to make the scene pop a little more. I also think that vibrant blue works quite nicely with that red, going away from a pastel palette now. But that's fine because we're just drying stuff. I might be quite nice to add in some texture or gradient to make this wall bit. Next step, we have this fish. Because this is a water scene, I want to stay in the blue colors region. Let's just start by blocking that out. I'm going to start with blue. I might even go d than this. Actually, I will. And then just like I did in the values demo, I'm going to go from dark in the background to lighter in the foreground. I might add a slight color variation just to keep the scene interesting into those purples. Adding some subtle play between warm and cool even though we're staying in those cool colors. Then with the fish, let's make the fish. Let's dry the fish in a more greeny blue color. We'll see if that works. Yeah, I think that is quite nice. Because we have more pink color, there's the color contrast going on here, which draws more attention to that fish, which I think works nicely. We can add in even more saturation. To the fish and then we'll keep the little fish darker than the main fish. Which I think looks quite nice and we can even add more highlights to that fish. I think that works quite nicely, especially with the blues and the pinks because we've stayed in the cool region, but we still managed to get a little bit of color and interest into that scene. With this, it feels like a very peaceful, cozy scene. I want to use some warm colors. I am going to stick within this range of colors. That's another analogous palette. I'm just going to start off by defining the chair color, which is going to make up the most color in the scene and some warm brown to the chair legs. Then I'll maybe change the hue a little bit. A nice magenta colored cushion, but I think it needs to be a little bit less in I've brought it more towards the red because it was looking a little too cool. I could have the cat as the darkest subject in the scene like I had in the values demo, but I think I want to make the cat lighter in this scene. It's an off white that I've chosen. I might even choose a darker shade of that off white. I think it still needs to be. That's a bit too gray. I don't know if you can tell the difference here. It's very subtle. I think I want to bring in some orange to the cat. And maybe make it a stripy cat. There's more detail and color variation going on, which draws the eye to that cat and Let's color the blanket some cooler, maybe in the magenta region. I think it needs to be a slightly A I think that's quite nice because it's still gripped with the chair, but you can tell that it's a different object from the chair, which I think is really nice. I can also add a darker version of it just underneath the cat. To add a bit of a shadow and a bit of definition. Then I can pick the color of the chair, add a darker version of that, and lips. Add in some details in the chair and same with the cushion. I just choose a slightly different color than the cushion. I'm also going to bring that color into the legs to add a bit of shadow there as well and under the cat. I think that works quite well. It's quite simple but effective. I could also bring some of that orange, maybe into the chair just to show a little bit of that highlight. Then moving on to the cake. I think I will add a background in this cake like it did with my values. Maybe something like a mint color. Let's try that anyway. Because I think if we have a mint and then quite a bright pink, they could compliment each other really nicely. I'm thinking to add another color. I could go with a triadic color scheme. We have the mint. Well, the mint is from this region, and I could make the pink a bit more cool and then I could go with peach color to tie together. More like a peach color for the cake stand. Let's see how that looks. It's okay. The little stars at the side don't really stand out very well. I need to make them a lighter color, I think. I think I also to I think I need to make the background slightly. Let's see. This might be too dark, but let's try it. I think it works quite nicely, but I'm not sure if the green could be improved. That lime green looks quite nice actually. It just gives a very different vibe. You can always try different colors by just a new color on to any of your current colors, if you drag this blob into the area that you want to try recoloring, and then you'll see that this color drop threshold comes up and if you just keep your pencil on the screen, and you can drag along or down and it will increase the threshold that that gets affected by that color. Or decrease it if you drag to the left. I think any of those background colors work and sometimes it's a case of having too many options because I think that yellow and pink actually looks really nice. What about a blue? I don't like that so much. I actually really like the yellow with the pink compared to the green. I think it gives off a much more happy and eye catching look. Let's move on to the last piece. What color should I make the background on this? Let me see. Maybe blue would work well. I think any color would work well to be honest. I think I might try Maybe a deep blue color or a sky blue might look quite nice actually. Let's color something in and then we can play around with the color. I think that looks quite nice. Gives a nice silhouette. Something I can also try is to click on the selection tool and just select the area, select the image, and then I can go to adjustments, saturation and brightness, and I can try out different colors of different backgrounds. These all could work. I can also increase the saturation or the brightness. I quite like the look of the lighter backgrounds, and I quite like the turquoisy color. Yeah, I'm going to go with that one. Then I can either choose an accent color. Maybe something like yellow for these buds, and the beak. Even that looks quite nice by itself looks quite stylish because the silhouette is so well defined. But I can also choose maybe a darker color of that turquoise for the stems of these flowers. Which also works really nicely. I quite like that. Then maybe I'll want to add a darker color to define any details. There we go. Again, feel free to do this exercise as many times as you like and see what different color palettes you can come up with and how the i changes depending on the color palette that you choose and don't feel like you have to stick to any harmonies. I prefer to go in more intuitively and start with one color and then build up the other colors over it. I do follow some basic principles like I like to have a range of values and I like the highest contrast in values to be my focal point where the eye is drawn to, and I like the highest contrast between hues to also be the focal point, such as this house, this blue color contrasting against the rest of the warm colors in the image. The same with this toadstool, this red really stands out against all the greens. Another thing that I'd like to keep in mind is the balance of my colors. If I use one color somewhere in a scene, I like to bring it into other parts of the scene or make a feature out of it. Think about the amounts of colors you're using. Usually if I'm using an accent color or a complimentary color that I want to use to draw the eye, I will use a lot less of that color, such as this red toadstool here It's definitely the most eye catching part of the image, but I've used less of it. That is part of why it's so eye catching, the same with this house here, the same with your values as well. If you use less of a lighter color, then your eye will be drawn to that lighter color. But if you use more of a lighter color and less darker colors, your eye will be drawn to the darker colors. So it's about what stands out in the image. So be aware of that, be aware of your silhouettes. And most of all just have fun with it. Try and think of it intuitively, and be creative and try out different things and don't feel like you need to stick to rules because it's good to know the rules, but it's more fun to play and not have to think about sticking to rules. Okay. So Once you have finished those exercises, we've done our colors and our values, then we can export these. You can either export the image with the layout on or off or you can do both. To do that, we can go to the spanner icon next to gallery at the top left hand corner of procreate, and then you can share as a GPI or a PNG. And just save the image, and that will save the image to your photo gallery on the iPad. You can then share the image on Instagram, and then you can upload your work and progress to the project gallery as we go. I'm also going to save my values, practice thumbnails. And once you're ready and you've had a go at all these or maybe even a few goes, then let's move on to the next demos where we'll be taking more detailed illustrations and trying out various different color schemes with them. 11. Demo: Moth & Flowers: We are now going to start on these thumbnails and I'm going to come up with four different ways of coloring these illustrations. What I'm going to do this time is instead of starting off just with one color and building up intuitively, for my first illustration, I'm actually going to start off with a pre made palette. I have a lot of different palettes saved here from previous illustrations, and I am going to maybe take a look through these palettes and see if there are any that can match the vibe that I think would go with this illustration. I'm going to have a look through. I really like this color palette here that I've named fresh. I'm going to tap on those three dots in the right hand corner of that palette and select set as default. Then that will show up in my default color palette here. Then I can just select any of these colors and that will load that color onto my brush. I'm going to start off with lightish background. I'm going to start a new layer Move that underneath my layout, and I'll name this colors. I'm going to be using my N K liner, which you can download for free by signing up to my newsletter via my website. And I'm just blocking out that background again to make it easier for me to work with. Again, I'm being rough and not worrying about staying within the lines, just trying to get an impression of the overall the of these colors in this illustration. Again, I am going to move this color interface by dragging that tab out to the other side of the screen. And I'm selecting the palette icon so that I have these colors ready for me to work with. Because I have the palette predefined, it makes it quite easy for me to just select a color and try that color. I don't have too many choices to get overwhelmed with. If you don't have many palettes to choose from yet, don't worry because you can easily build up a library of them the more you practice using color and saving each palette that you really like from your illustrations. I'm just going in blocking areas of color that I think work with this palette. I think I'm going to concentrate the warm colors within this middle section of the illustration and have the greens in these plants. I'm going for realistic colors and I'm not set in stone when I'm putting a color down. I might change them later on, but it's good to just block something out to begin with and make decisions as you go. Don't feel that you have to make the perfect color choices straightaway. That's why we're working messily. And not bothering staying within the lines because we want to be quick about it. You can see I'm using the lightest color from my palette as this circular sun shape, which really helps to highlight the silhouette of this moth, which I want to be my focal point. I'm not sure if I want this moth to be in that vibrant red color because I might reserve that for the flowers. Something I can do when I've blocked out a color already is just drag from this blob into the color that I want to change and that will make it much quicker for me to change these colors. If you find that the color is bleeding out onto the other colors, with the apple pencil held down on the screen, just drag your pencil to the left and that will decrease the threshold of the surrounding colors being affected. I already think that looks pretty, pretty vibrant. I am going to add a gradient in the sky because I always like doing that with skies, but you don't actually have to. That's just a personal choice. That might actually be too dark. I'm not sure. But what we can do is go to our layers, turn off the layout, and that will help us visualize what's going on here. I think we need to add in some more variety into the greenery here. I need to add some of that dark green. Something else I'm going to do right now is add another layer. Choose a gray tone. It can also be pure black or pure white. It just has to be something completely desaturated. Color drop that over the whole screen. Go to the, the layer blend modes, and scroll down until we reach color. That will make everything gray so we can see our values again. Turning that off. We can see that the silhouette of the moth stands out nicely against the sun, but it's pushed backwards in the scene, which I quite like that sense of depth. The sky and the greenery, however, doesn't have that much contrast. I do want to lighten that sky a little bit, and I also want to add in more contrast and darker values to the greenery in the foreground. I'm going to go ahead and do that now. Adding in gradients as well. Seeing how that looks, and that's be. We've got a lot more definition in the foreground now, now we need to sort out a bit of the background. I'm just bringing that color back, lightening it again, because it was good to try that darker sky. But now I know that it doesn't work as well as I thought it would. I'm maybe just going to add a tiny bit of pink, which is quite subtle, but it worked well. And then adding in a little bit more definition into the moth and color variation, and the same with those flowers, I'm just going to try adding a touch of orange to them, maybe just a gradient to give a subtle lighting effect and maybe adding a touch of orange to that greenery just to push the warm and cool tones a little and add more interest in those areas. Then just defining any shapes which need a little extra definition. I might add a touch of that red in the moth. Let's try it. In general, I think that looks really nice. And we might need just one darker color to add definition within the foreground here. If you have a palette that you like the vibe of, but you might need a couple more shades of different colors to define any areas of your illustration or to add depth, don't be afraid to add in those colors. I would maybe suggest trying to keep it within the same hues that you already have in your palette so that you don't change the overall vibe of the color combination, but also feel free to experiment and you don't have to totally stick to a palette once you've decided to use it, you can still experiment. It's nice to just have that palette there as a starting point, but you don't need to stick to it religiously. I think in general, that color scheme looks really nice. Now let's move on and color the other scenes and try out some completely different moods and see how we can change the mood of this same illustration. This time, I'm not going to use a predefined palette because I have more of an idea of what I want to do for this next one to make it look quite different from my first one. I want to make nighttime scene and use only cool colors, maybe ranging from purples to blues and to more of Tarquisy blues, but keeping everything quite cool and calm and serene looking. I'm going to start off with one main color that I want to define the scene. Then I'm going to build up all my colors and values based on this one. Sometimes I find that analogous color schemes are easier to work with because it's easier to think about your values when there are fewer contrasting colors. It also makes a really harmonious and calming color scheme. If you are feeling like you have a really busy scene and you want to tone it down a bit, then analogous color schemes are a really good way to go with that. Because this is a nighttime scene, I could make the sky darker in the background. I'm going to try it so that we can see what it looks like. But I'm not sure if it's going to work because I do want to have that circle as a light source as if it's a shining moon. But let's try darkening this background first. I think it could look quite striking to darken this background. But I'm going to try the other way now. And darken the foreground. That it frames my focal point, which is this moth, because you can see in this composition, all of this greenery surrounding that moth is framing the scene really nicely. I think that going dark to light works better to frame a scene than light to dark. Not saying that it can't work, but that is my preference for this scene. I think that looks more striking now. We have the dark greenery and the lighter sky. I'm going to block out the moon shape because I know that I want this to be my lightest part of the scene. Then I will color that moth something a little brighter than the rest of the scene as well. Let's check that out. You can see I only have four main colors here, but it already looks like a really striking scene because we have that contrast, that framing and the composition all blocked in. Sometimes with these nighttime scenes or more subdued scenes, adding in a color is going to be too strong. Now, it depends if you want it to be quite stylized, but if I want more of a natural look, what I can do is add another layer and draw on my color. I just draw with a pinky color on these flowers. Then what I can do is tap on that there and lower the opacity slightly so that you still get some of that warmer tint, but it blends it in much more nicely with the rest of the scene and it makes a much more subtle color change. That can be quite effective if you just want to add a subtle hint of a color just to play with the opacity on a layer above your main layer. Then what I'm going to do is pinch with two fingers to merge those layers. I'm going to pick that blue color and add in even more definition into this foreground. So grouping. Everything in the foreground is in that dark value group so that the eye is not too drawn towards it, but there is definition there, which adds quite a nice subtle detail, which I think looks very nice. Then I'll add in a little shadow into these flowers. Then I'll add a bit more color variation into the moth. Okay. Then I'm going to add a very subtle lightening of the sky area as well. I'll maybe change the hue very slightly. That just gives a really subtle glowing effect and adds some n atmosphere to the image. I think that looks really nice and striking as our nighttime scene. It's quite magical looking, quite subtle looking. I can always draw even more attention just brighten that moon even more. That makes that moth stand out even more. I'm quite pleased with both of those. You can see in this scene how striking it is the contrast between these silhouettes and the sky behind, whereas this scene, there's not as contrast, but it's a bit more Everything blends in together nicely with the warms versus the cools. Whereas this one, it's more about our values rather than our hues contrasting with each other. If we turn our gray layer on and just look at the values, you can see these both work nicely in different ways. Here we have something quite warm, something quite natural looking. This one is more of a nighttime scene, very cool, very serene and calming looking. And now I want to do something that's maybe not so realistic, that's maybe more stylized. I am just going to look through my colors here and I'm going to block out a color that I like. Then we'll work with it and I'll show you how we can still create a really striking image with not so realistic colors. Actually for this same, why don't we totally mix it up and I will choose a much darker color for the sky. We're going to have this one be que bold and quite stylized. Starting to block values out first with these colors. Then I want to add in some more vibrancy, I'm going to block in. That's quite a nice vibrant color to draw the eye. I quite like this scene so far and Let's block in some lighter values now just to balance the dark. I think for these flowers, it'll be quite nice to have a lighter value. And then I'm just defining more shapes. We've ended up with quite a warm color palette here. I do like how those colors work together, but there's not much value contrast within the foreground or within the moss and the sun behind. I am going to add in some lighter values. I can even add in some white So I think that looks really quite effective now. I'm not sure about this color palette. I am really not. If you try something and you're not sure about it, it's okay, it can always be saved. Let's analyze maybe why this isn't working. What we can first do is go to our values. Are these values working? I'm not sure about that. I think it's maybe because our highest contrast is in maybe this area, we have that lightest light on the darkest dark. And this is not really our focal point, our focal point, I want it to be this moth. I need to somehow soften the contrast in this region and increase the contrast in this region. I also think that I need to balance this area somehow, and I think that our circle here is too close in value to our plant life. I think I just need to maybe lighten the foreground a little and that might help. Because I don't think necessarily the combination of hues is bad, but it's the values that are not working. I think even just lightening that region has helped because we have more of a hierarchy of composition now. And I'm going to lighten. I think I need to darken the flowers. Maybe we will go over that pink color. I think I'll make the sky a contrast in color or at least a different color to that pink. Already this is coming together a bit more. I think we need more contrast between our stems here. Let's lighten those and see what that does. This is better, I think. I'm going to spread some of these colors around to make a bit of a gradient between that warm pink and the cool pink. I think what will hit that off is maybe some yellow. I've added a bit of yellow just to add in a little bit more color variation. I'm also not really feeling the dark background. I think it's maybe not the way to go, so I'm going to try a lighter background now. I think the dark background is not the way to go for this particular scene. I've lightened the background and I already like that. Much better. We have quite a warm palette here. It's mainly pinks and yellows. I might try adding in a cool color. Let's try adding a new layer first. And using the same trick that we used here for the purple flowers. Except let's add some areas of blue maybe. I'm just adding some areas of blue and then I'm going to soften it. Then because I've drawn that blue on the different layer. I can click on that and I can scroll through these layer blend modes and see if there are any effects that I like. That linear burn looks quite nice or darken looks quite nice. I really like how that darken looks, actually. Then I can also lower the opacity. But I actually really like how this blue and that purple of come about through that effect. I'm going to pinch your two fingers to merge that now. Then I'm just going to pick that turquoise color and some of these other colors, and I'm going to distribute them more evenly around the scene where I think they'll work. This is quite often how I come up with new palettes by trying things out with layer blend modes and seeing what looks good. Often you just need to experiment and try out things and be okay with going through an ugly phase until you land on something that you think looks quite nice, which is what I've done here. Now we have pink to blue to turquoise green color palet. We're still staying in the region, and then we have a little bit of a yellow, pale yellow. It's quite a pastili color palette. I really like this. The last thing I'm wondering is if we should give the moth any other colors. Let's try picking some from the scene that we have already. This purple is quite nice. And maybe some of that pale pink. I can keep some areas white because that draws the eye. Maybe I just need a tiny bit more definition within the foreground. I might just one of the cooler colors, maybe that blue. We'll take it into the dark desaturated region, and then I'm just going to add in some very subtle shadows and lines to define these darker areas and add a tiny bit more contrast. I actually really like this one. I think that's actually my favorite out of the bunch after I honestly thought it wasn't going to work and I was going to have to start again, but I'm glad that I persevered and that I tried out the layer blend mode because that really changed the whole feeling of the piece and I'm glad that I lightened the background as well because I think for this composition, the lighter background works well to enhance the silhouettes of all the foreground elements that we have. In this scene, I actually have no idea what color harmony it is, probably I could work it out. But it doesn't matter because intuitively, I think it looks nice. I think it gives the scene quite an unusual look which I like. If thinking about color harmonies doesn't help you, it doesn't help me that much either, don't worry about it, but if it does help you, then absolutely use it as a tool there to help you or not, whether you want to use it or not. Okay. So all of our scenes so far, they're quite calm, and I think we should try something a bit more vibrant and exciting. So I'm going to start off with maybe quite a bright arquis color. Which is one of my favorite colors and then we'll take it from there. I think I'm going to have a yellow sky to complement this blue color because these are quite contrasting. I don't think these are quite opposite each other on the color wheel, but it doesn't matter because they contrast with each other anyway and you don't need to absolutely follow the rules of color harmony. Just blocking in that lighter sky. Then I might make the sun a deep orange color just to try that because that really pops out against the blue as well. Then I might make that moth something really warm. Already, I really love these colors together. We have our cool colors versus our warm colors. Let's add in more values. Actually, let's check those values. I think the values in the sky look quite striking, and then I might want to darken the values in the foreground just a bit. And then we'll build these up. I've added a new layer and I'm just going to use that trick again of drawing the color on top and then maybe lowering the opacity, seeing what works best, trying out different things. I can also blend modes, but I don't think that something about those dark flowers actually looks really nice. See how these blend modes, they make you try things that you wouldn't actually have thought of. Sometimes you can come up with something very unique. Hoops. I'm actually going to use that to define some of these shapes as well. This is almost like a bright sunset scene that is contrasting a lot with the foreground. I think that looks very, very nice. I am going to merge that down now, and then I'll bring some of that orange into these stars. I think I really like that as it is just with those simple colors. I don't think I need to do much more to that. Something else we can do if we slide left on that color layer and it brings up these three buttons, and we press to duplicate the layer. Let's turn off the original one. Then what we can do is go to the selection tool. We can using the rectangle selection. We can select each thumbnail individually and head to adjustments. With these three options at the top, we can play around with these colors and see if we can improve on any of these colors. You can play with the hue saturation and brightness, and if you just tap anywhere outside of the Canvas with one finger, it'll bring up this little panel and you can select preview. And you can't see much difference now, but you can preview what effect these adjustments are having on your selection. I'm just going to press cancel at the moment, and then I'm going to play with a color balance as well. With the color balance, you can change the shadows, the mid tones and the highlights. In this case, with these mid tones, they're quite yellow at the moment. If I change them towards blue, it takes some of the yellow out of those mid tones or I can add even more yellow into the mid tones. Then you can do the same with magenta and green, cyan and red within the shadows and the highlights as well. I find that sometimes just making subtle changes and using your intuition to decide if it's an improvement or not. I just take your palette from being a nice palette to something really striking. Then to view those changes, I will just tap with one finger outside of the canvas and select preview. Actually prepare what I had before, so I'll press cancel. And I can also play with the curves. With the curves, you can change the gamma, which just means the whole range of your colors. If you move this top handle towards the left, it will increase the brightness of your lightest tones. If you move this bottom toggle, that will affect your darkest tones. We'll bring your darker tones darker or lighter if you bring them up to the top. Same with your light tones, and then you can also play with the mid tones. You can either darken them or lighten them. Sometimes I find just bringing the lighter tones up slightly lighter and the darker tones slightly darker. It just adds a tiny bit more contrast, and then you can play individually with the red tones, green tones, and blue tones. Again, tap outside to bring up this panel, and then I'll preview that. I actually think that's an improvement because it's brightened some of those highlights to increase the contrast here. I'm going to apply and that will apply all those changes to this selection. You can also with the gradient map with your selection. I don't often use gradient maps at all. But they can be pretty fun to play with. You can see we have these presets here, which you can play around with, and they map the gradients. They just look at the values, how light or dark each of these tones are in your image, and then they map colors onto each value. If we add a new gradient map, you can see that these darker gradients towards the left, if we add maybe a red color, It will affect all of these darker tones and turn them red. Let's choose maybe a blue tone for the lighter gradients. You can see that all my lighter gradients have been affected by this blue tone, and then when they meet in the middle, the blue blends with the red. Then these mid tones, let's try maybe a pink This can be something fun to play around with and see if you can come up with something pretty unique. Then if you want to get rid of any of these colors, you can just hold down and press delete. That can be something fun to play with. But I prefer to just work with what I've already got. Go to press Done and then undo that gradient map. If we do, It's actually quite nice the gradient map, but I preferred what I had before. I can do the same thing by selecting each of my thumbnails and just playing around with making any subtle changes and seeing if I can improve these pieces. It's absolutely fine to keep them just as they are. This is just a little final touch that I like to do before I move on to finalizing my pieces and seeing if I can make any adjustments or improvements. If we turn the original layer back on and we toggle on and off a layer that we adjusted, you can see those changes are very subtle. I didn't really add any changes in this last one because I didn't think it needed it. And I mainly just brightened the lightest lights in these two pieces. You can see that this one I added in slightly more turquoise highlights in the lighter areas as well. This one I brought the lighter areas more towards a yellow tone as well, which I think just adds a little bit more magic to each of those pieces. So have fun with this exercise. Try out different things. Don't feel that you need to follow what I've done. You can try starting with one color, starting with no idea what you're doing, starting with a palette, and try using blend modes, try using adjustments, and maybe even try using gradient maps if you feel that that works for you. Think about your values, think about pushing and pulling with cool and warm colors and see where it takes you. Don't be afraid to go through an ugly phase because sometimes that's what you need to go through to find some really unique ways of coloring. Once you've finished, let's export these s thumbnails by heading to actions at the spanner icon, share, and then I'm just going to save this as a JPEG, and then save image, and that will just save to our photo gallery on the iPad. If there are any palettes in particular that you've made during this exercise and you really like them and you want to save them on procreate to use maybe for another illustration. You can do that now by just going to palettes and select that plus button in the top right hand corner and create a new palette. Then you can just pick the colors from your lumnil with your finger and add them in a palette. Then you can rearrange those if you like. My instagram is a bit glitchy. You shouldn't be changing color when you move them around the screen. Usually like to group my palettes, having the lighter tones on a different row to my darker tones, and then having my cooler hues merge into my warmer hues and back again, just so that the palettes look cohesive and it seems easier for me to pick colors that way. But it doesn't really matter how you display your palettes. You can also rename the palette. If you want to, but often I don't bother, and it just stays in my palettes interface ready for me to reuse whenever I want to. 12. Demo: Lighthouse: Now we're going to choose some colors for this lighthouse scene. Because this is more of a landscape scene, I want to think about what time of day I want to illustrate and also what season and the mood and maybe the weather that I want to be if it's raining or if it's a really bright day or if it's a really or stormy day, I want to try and capture that. I think for the first scene, I'm going to try and capture a sunny spring day. And I'll bring some blues into the sky and some greens into the grassy areas and then we'll take it from there. Let me just choose a main color that I want to define this image. I'm going to start off with the sky color because that is taking up a big section of the illustrations. I want to maybe define my other colors around that. I'm thinking of something like a little bit of a turquoise blue, not too highly saturated. First of all, I need to add a new layer, bring that under the layout. And I'll rename that colors. Now I can block in my sky color. Already, I think that looks too dark. I want to lighten that because actually I think this is more of a stormy sky color. It's okay to try different colors and the color that you choose within the context of the color wheel might look quite nice, but then when you bring it out into your image, it might give you a totally different look. It's okay to play around with different tones of that same color and tweak things until you get it the way that you like it. Then I'm going to choose a green color. These are quite subdued green colors at the moment, but it's okay to just block something in and then you can change it afterwards because it helps you to visualize what you need to do once you have something blocked in to start with. I'm actually going to bring that sky color into the sea here as well. I'll block something out for the rocks, maybe a desaturated beige color. Which I think looks quite nice. Again, just being quite rough blocking these in. Then I can block in maybe some lighter colors for the sun and the lighthouse, because I want that lighthouse to be our focal point. I might add in a complimentary color to that blue, add an accent color for this lighthouse. Which I think looks that works well. It really draws the eye to that part of the scene. Now let's add a new layer and add a completely desaturated tone over our whole scene, and then press that in and we'll go to color to add in our gray layer. And name that values so that I can see what's going on. We need to define more of these islands because as you can see, they are the color, the same tone right now, so I want to add more variation between those greens. Just choosing one color for now. When you're illustrating landscapes, I always love to capture a feeling of depth in my images. That can be done by defining layers and it can also be done by pushing everything in the background layers back by making them lighter than ever in the foreground, and it can also be done by making everything in the background closer to the sky. If you have a blue sky, then making everything in the background, pushing those hues more towards that blue tone. That will give you a sense of atmospheric perspective and it'll make everything look quite atmospheric and full of depths, I'll give you a little more of a realistic look and it'll help to draw the eye as well to your focal points, wherever that may be. I do cover a lot about these lighting techniques in my illustrated environment's course that I'm not going to have time to cover here. You can also check that out after taking this class if you haven't already. So continuing on, I'll just block out these layers with that green right now, but we might darken this actually, we will darken it just slightly, these greens to give the impression that they're further in the foreground. You can see already that has given us a lovely sense of debt that we didn't have before. Another thing that I always like to do in the skies that I've already mentioned before is lighten the bottom of the sky. You can also create the same effect by darkening. The top it doesn't really matter, but I like to create this nice gradient and I just feel like it adds such a nice charm and atmosphere to a landscape scene. Or any scene for that matter, and I think that looks really nice. I think I'm going to push these mountains in the back even further back by picking that green color and then pushing it to even more of a blue hue. We'll see what effect this has. It might not work, it might be too blue. I think that has added something. It's pushed them further in the distance. And I can also bring some of this lighter color into the C as reflections, which works quite nicely. Something else that I can do to add in some shadows and add a bit more definition is if I add a new layer, and maybe we'll choose a actually a purply color for this particular scene. Then I'm going to draw in any areas roughly where I think there should be shadows, anywhere that's opposite where the sun would be hitting in this scene. Just roughly blocking those. Maybe also some ripples in the sea, some shadows cast on the sea, maybe even a little bit. On those mountains. Then I can go to that layer that I've just made, click the n and go to multiply. You can see how that affects all the colors underneath, so they become darker and a little bit more purply. Then I can play with the opacity here. If I want softer shadows, I can just lower the opacity and if I want dramatic harsh shadows, I can keep that up even higher. I can also go to the adjustments at the magic one tool and go to hue saturation brightness and just play around with the tone of those shadows. I can have some warmer tones which ties in quite nicely with the red striped lighthouse. I do like the effect of the purply tones. It just gives a slightly different look. To the red. I can also brighten the saturation and change the brightness. I think that works quite nicely. If we check our values, you can see we have a really nice focal point here and there's a sense of depth in the scene, and it all works quite nicely together. You can see how that shadow has just added a bit more definition and bit more realism to the scene, which is quite nice. I'm going to pinch those two layers together, the colors and the multiply layer that I had. Something else I can do to add highlights is add a new layer again. This time, I'll choose a lighter color, maybe that same color as the sun. Then I will just draw in the areas where I think the sun would be hitting directly. Just drawing on the edge, too much, just to highlight those areas. Then they even look quite nice like that just highlighting those areas, or I can click the n on that layer and go to overlay. You can see how that just brightens these colors underneath and gives us some colors that we didn't have previously like this yellow or this light minty green, which I think looks n. It works nicely both ways. Somehow I think that the image is maybe more striking without the highlights. Actually I like those highlights. I'm going to keep them and I'll just merge that down again to keep everything neat. I think in general, that looks really nice. I think that the only thing I don't like is these ripples in the water. I'm just going to draw over them. Maybe just with another color that's already in the scene that I think would work. N. Then I'm just going to bring a slightly more saturated color into the top of the sky, slightly darker, not by much, just very subtle and into the water as well. I think that looks really nice. Then for the birds, I can just take a color that's already in the scene and just draw those in. I wonder what would happen if I took this yellow and I brought it into that sun and then had a gradient around the sun to give off a glow coming from that sun. Which I think looks really nice actually. And it works well, the values work well in black and white. I think that works well. I might just add a darker Yeah, I really like that. It's quite a nice spring or summary scene, and we can also just duplicate that scene and go to adjustments and maybe just play with any of these adjustments. Just for fun, I think it's fun to see how you can either change or improve your colors just by making subtle changes. Paling with any of these adjustments on the colors. If we turn this new layer on and off, we can see we just made it a little warmer. I think they're both quite nice. The shadows are also brighter in this scene, which gives an overall. To get a combination between the two of them, I can press the and lower the opacity about 50%. I think that's a nice compromise. I'm going to keep that and I'm going to merge these two together by pinching with two fingers, and then we'll move on to the next scene. For the next scene, I think I'm going to go with autumnal colors and keep everything really warm with oranges and yellows. Let's maybe start off an orange color. Then again, I'm going to block in these islands with one color for now to group those colors together and then I'll change the value of each of these. I want these mountains at the back to blend in more with the sky. I'm going to lighten them and push them more towards the yellow color scheme, but I still want them to stand out from the sky. I think this color works quite well for that. And then these in the foreground. I'll make darker. Then for these rocks, I'll choose a desaturated color. That looks quite gray, but we do have a bit of color in it, and I'm lightening this middle island there. These two in the foreground look more like they're in shadow, which I quite like as if they're a bit more overcast than our focal point. Now let's maybe use that same gray from the rocks for the lighthouse and see what happens. You can see these two values are too similar. I need to make the lighthouse either darker or lighter or make the background lighter, which I haven't done yet and I want to do. I'm using a lightish yellow, adding in that gradient there. You can see that just putting that lighthouse on a lighter background makes the silhouette stand out so much more, more clearly. Then we can block in the sun. Just leaning with my apple pencil at an angle to get a softer gradient. And I'll lighten that again to make the sun even brighter. I'll maybe even use some of that brighter color just at the bottom of the sky. I want to bring some of those highlights into the sea. I want to use an even more vibrant color for the stripes on this lighthouse. I might change the color of this lighter part of the lighthouse. Going to darken that rock again actually. I think actually I'll bring it more towards purple. And just drop that in. That might be too much towards the purple side. I think that's quite nice. Instead of just pure gray. The lighthouse is still not standing out that effectively. I'm going to lighten the sky behind it even more. I think that looks quite striking. I think we can even push these mountains in the background even more to make this focal point stand out even more. What I'm going to do is actually pick that original sky color, add a new layer, and I'll just over those shapes roughly with this for now. Then what we're going to do is head to that layer and lower the opacity. Until I like the shade. I think about that 50% mark is quite a good spot and just pinching to merge those together. What I can do this time is add a new layer and I can just pick my color from the image, and then add in some little details here and there for the grass and the rocks. Then I'll change that layer to multiply and maybe lower the opacity quite a bit. Then instead of adding in shadows, we just added some very subtle detail here. I'm going to pinch those two layers together again. Something else I can do on a new layer. If I select the lightest color, the color of the sun, and then draw a really large blob around it. Go to adjustments, and then down to gaussian blur, and then just drag with my apple pencil along the page to maybe or percent. You'll see this gives a really nice glow here. Then I can tap the n on that layer. And drag down to overlay. Can you see that's just given a really nice glowing effect over all of these colors here, and we've added in some lighter yellows. That's just a really nice soft way to add lighting and to help draw the eye to your focal point in your scene. I think that is quite effective. I'm just going to have one last shot at playing with the colors on the stripes of this lighthouse because I think that could be quite a good opportunity to add in an accent color, something that's a little different from these orang ice and warm colors. If there's anything like that that you want to try, but you're not sure about, you can try that on a new layer. And just choose any color because I really like a hot pink magenta color with oranges, I think goes really well, especially with autumnal style scenes. Because we're on a separate layer, we can just go to adjustments, hue saturation brightness, and we can play with any colors and see how they look. Because using that compliment greeny blue color, that turquoise color, I think also works nicely. As well as more warmer colors. Even bright red works very nicely. Purple. I'm not sure about. It would need to be softer. I need to be desaturated that desaturated purple. Even mustard yellow. That looks mustard yellow. It looks quite different actually. Often just having your scene being one hue and then adding an accent color, it can make a really striking palette. Even that soft pink work quite nicely. You just can use your eye here and try desaturating colors if you think they're too much and try to make it look seamless within the scene. It can be overwhelming. You can feel a bit spoiled for choice sometimes, but sometimes you just have to make a decision and go with it. I think that moth color looks really nice. It's a little bit more desaturated than the one that we started with, but not by too much. I like our original color, but this one, it just gives enough difference that the Lighthouse really stands out. And we can also scroll through our layer blend modes and see if that changes anything. Actually really like what the u layer blend mode is done there. The multiply, I think is a bit too dark for the scene, even though I like that color. It's between u and normal for me. I just go with u and Maybe I'll just lower the opacity slightly. It's a very subtle change, but I really like that. I'm going to make the decision and just merge that down. Part of the problem with colors is that sometimes we have too many decisions to make and they all could look good. But sometimes you just have to choose one even if you're not sure and just go with it. With this glowing effect, you can also scroll through the blend modes. Usually with lightening. The ad works well, but you have to really lower it. Also green and overlay. I quite like the yellow effect that the ad is giving, but I'm going to lower the opacity quite a lot there. Yeah, I really like the look of this scene. I think we could have a tiny bit more definition. I'm just picking some of the darker browns and just adding a tiny bit more definition into that. See you can see that really draws the eye a lot more that we have a bit of contrast there, and then I might bring some of that lighter color into the foreground elements. I'm actually bringing that pink back to the magenta color, which I really like and I'm going to merge down that blurred lighting layer. Now again, I can duplicate this layer and select my me and just around with any of those adjustments and see. If I can add anything to the scene. Because we duplicated the layer, I can have a bit more freedom to try things and if I don't like it, I can revert back to my original layer, and if I do like it, I can keep the layer that I've added adjustments to. Quite like those adjustments that I've made, Let's try and see if half and half looks better. Then once I'm happy, I'll merge those down and start on my next piece. For this next scene, I need to think of what to do. I might look through my palettes for inspiration. It might be quite nice to use that maybe something like this dreaming palette or cosy sunset or this one that I've named Juicy because these are all a bit different. I'm going to try this one day dreaming, and I'm just going to drag that palette over to the side. I messes up. The palette a little bit when you do that, but I have my colors there that I can pick from, which makes it easier for me. On that same colors layer, I'm just going to block out maybe the lightest color to start with, and I want to make this scene look very dreamy and ethereal, which I think that palette provides. I blocked out that light pink and then I will just start blocking out my values with what I have in the palette. Using that lighter color in this background. Sometimes working from a palette that you've already made can help you come up with something really unusual because you'll use the colors in more creative ways. I think because this blue is cooler, I'm actually going to use it for the rock and keep that pink as the grass color. And then maybe use that purple in the foreground as that darker grass. Then I might swap it here and use the purple as the rock. We'll just see how that looks. Actually, I'm not sure. I think maybe I'll use that orange and then for the lighthouse, I'm going to use the darkest color. Maybe with the lightest color as well. I don't know. This all looks a bit of a mess at the moment, but we're going to save it because we have this minty green which I can use I can use it for the sky or I could use it for this grass, or I could use it for the rock. But and then I can bring some of that. I can bring some of that orange into the lighthouse because it doesn't have to be white and another color. Then for the sky, I'm actually going to I don't think this works at all. I really don't no. I don't like it. I think what's going to work is if we use the orange the browns for the grass. Then we save these more pastele colors for things like the water and the sky. And the lighthouse. The lighthouse, I could make pink or purple or maybe pink or blue, or even that green quite like that minty color. Maybe the minty color and the pink would look quite striking. Or should I use the pink for the background and have some colorful gradient in the sky. Just trying lots of things out and being prepared to try it again if it doesn't look good the first time round. Sometimes a palette will just not work in a certain combination because the balance of colors is all wrong, and you're trying to balance the colors evenly without thinking about how you want to draw the eye. With this palette, I might only stick to the warm colors. I might not use that I think that is finally coming together, but we need to sort out the values. I'm actually going to get rid of the palette now because I don't think it's helping me now to give me that starting point, but now I want to finish it off without the palette and just do my own thing with it. First of all, I'm going to add another layer and make this into a multiply layer, and then add some shadows. Which already adds definition to our piece. I'm then going to go to adjustments, hue saturation, and brightness and change the color of those shadows. I always think purple shadows look quite nice because they're in that cool range, but they still have a bit of warmth to them. But because this is such a warm scene, I think that warm shadows will actually work really well. You can see that that shadow is quite a pink color. I think that actually helps to tie everything together a little bit more in the scene. I might change the color of these mountains a little as well. I'm going to merge down my multiply layer, and then I'm going to add a new layer. I'm just coloring over these mountains on that new layer and then again, maybe lowering the pay. Let's see what that looks like without line work. I'm also going to go to adjustments, hue saturation brightness and play with the color of that layer. I actually think that it looks quite nice in the blue tones because it helps to group with this blue grass here. It actually also looks nice with the green because it ties in with the lighthouse. Just playing with the hue saturation and brightness levels until I'm happy with it, but again, there could be so many different options that I could go with and it would still look good. So I just need to pick one. And then I can just merge that together again. I maybe want to slightly darken these areas in the foreground to create that depth, adding another layer again and just blocking in those shapes, using multiply and lowering pacity, put with the hue and saturation and brightness. I think that works. Can you see how that just adds a bit more space between this little island that the lighthouse is on and these two in the foreground? Then I'm just merging those down. Maybe adding a slight bit of definition. And enhancing that gradient in the sky. I think that's looking really nice. I might maybe add a subtle bit of that blue at the very top of the sky just to tie everything together. With this green, I might just darken it very slightly. And the same with the part of it that's in the shadow, which is actually not green because it's got this multiply layer on it, which I think that makes it stand out, but more and then I'm just going to add but more of a highlight in the sky around those areas. I'm going to add in some highlights on a new layer and just drawing along the areas I want to highlight, and maybe some gradients, s. And then tapping the in and using the add this time looks quite nice. Because this is quite a light and dreamy looking scene. I'm going to bring some of that lightness into the bottom of the sky as well. I do really like that. It's highlighted the focal point a and just gives a bit more added definition to everything. Then I'll merge that down and I might add a new layer again. It's a lot of new layers and then merging down. Then I want to try adding a little bit of that blue into that background mountain and lowering the opacity. Which I think looks quite nice. I'm just going to merge that down as well. One thing about this image that I'm not sure about is that the cliffs are the most saturated, most vibrant part of the image. It feels a little unbalanced because the focal point here is not as vibrant and it doesn't draw the eye as. I could either make the lighthouse vibrant with the colors that I or I could tone down the cliffs. Let's try both. I can do is bring that green color over the cliff and I'm on a new layer because I'm not even sure if this orange actually belongs in the scene anymore, even though it was in the original palette. Then I can scroll through and maybe go to saturation and that just desaturates those cliffs, and I think that looks more like they belong in this scene. I actually really like that. I'm not going to play around with it too much more, and I'm going to merge those together. I think that looks a lot more cohesive. It looks really calm and really passively and it's got a lot of atmosphere. Just one more thing that I'm going to try and then we'll move on is with another new layer, I'm going to draw a color onto this lighthouse again and just play again with the hue saturation and brightness. And see if I can find any colors that maybe work a little bit nicer and roll the eye. Because maybe using that pink it works quite nicely against the blue does the golden yellow. Compared to the mint green. I think using color burn in this case, works nicely for me to get a more accurate feeling of what works. Actually, I really like the look of these blue stripes. Either purple or that turquoisy blue. I think that turquoisy blue looks really striking, so I'm going to go with that. Y tone down the opacity very slightly to about 70% and then merge down those colors. Again, I'm going to duplicate the scene select just that piece, and then play around with the whole colors of the scene on that new layer and see if I can make any improvements playing with the hues aturation, brightness, the color balance, and the curves. It's usually just very subtle changes, but sometimes it does make a big difference. In this scene, it's very subtle, but I think in general, the colors are a bit warmer. I'm going to merge those down and then start on the next scene. For all of these three, I've done daytime scenes or maybe they could be sunset and sunrise. But for the next scene, I want to do something a bit different. Maybe this next scene is going to be a nighttime scene and I maybe want to make the overall vibe feel a bit more stormy and more atmospheric. I'm going to start off with a darkish color that I feel defines that theme. Maybe a desaturated purple color and block that out. And we'll stay within the cool tones for most of the scene. Choosing a slightly different color for the s, that might be too colorful, but we'll keep it for now. Then I'm just going to block out of these values. And then even in our dark scenes, we want to have some light source or lighter tones to really enhance the darker ones. I'm not sure about that blue tone. I made it tiny a bit more purply, and we're having a very subtle hint of that lightness from the sky. A very subtle gradient. I also want to add in a moon. We have a light source because this is a lighthouse, we can also have a light coming from the lighthouse. That is going to happen. I'm just going to block the lighthouse out as a dark value for now. And then let's check our values. I think that looks quite nice what we've defined here. I am going to darken the foreground elements even more. I also want to move this water towards that purple color because it was looking a bit too vibrant. I think that tones in much more nicely now. Now I want to darken the top of the sky to have that st feel. Big dark storm clouds. Enhancing just getting that nice gradient At this stage, because we have some nice values blocked in. I'm going to add a new layer and I can again add a color to block out these shapes, and I'm not going to keep this color because this is too vibrant, but I can then lower the opacity so that it toes in more with the background, but it still defines certain shapes. And I can merge those together, and then I can keep doing that by adding a new layer, drawing in a color, lowering the opacity until I reach an effect that I think works well. I can also go to adjustments, hue saturation brightness, to change any hues that I want to. And I'm going to add in more highlights. Now I'm going to maybe add add these highlights on an overlay layer and then play around with that. So again, changing the hue. And I want to lighten the sky a little bit more. Night scenes are quite tricky because you want to make them feel like they're dark, but you still need to add enough light sources so that you can see what's going on and you can add a feeling of atmosphere. I'm going to add in some glowing effects now by adding a little blob, going to adjustments, blur, dragging with my apple pencil to blur that blob. And then going to the layer blend modes. Usually overlay or something like vivid light might work well in this case. Let's try that, but I need to change the hue. I really like how this warm light plays against the cool tones in the scene. I can maybe have some more of that warm light bouncing around the scene. And an overlay layer works nicely, I think. Turning the linework off and turning the values on, I think we need to add in some more dark values right now, but I like how this is coming together so far. I am going to add a multiply layer, just pick one of my colors from the scene. Change that layer to multiply, and draw in some shadowed areas in the scene. Just really roughly. I don't need to be too detailed with it at the color rough stage. Then I'm just playing with the opacity and the hue again. And then merging down once I'm happy with that. Something that I like to do in nighttime scenes when there's a sky is adding a few stars which adds a little bit more light and magic and interest. I can make that into an overlay layer maybe and make it a bit subtle. I might add a tiny bit of paraquoisy color in the water. Not quite sure yet. Let's try. Let's maybe add some in the sky. I think that looks good. And just merging that down and adding maybe some final just highlights. And details. So Let's take our values. I think that works really nicely. I wonder if a shadow would work well. Let's test it by adding that on a multiply layer. I think it does. Then I'm just going to merge that down. I think that's done now. Again, I will duplicate the layers and isolate this layer by selecting it with the rectangle tool and play around with adjustments. And I really like the adjustments that I've made. It's just brightened the saturation of the highlights a little bit more. So I'm just going to emerge those. And I think this has worked really well. Even though this is a nighttime scene and I have some quite dark tones, I've been very conscious about bringing light in to the scene by using artificial light and also natural light from the moon, which gives us this contrast between warm and cool tones, and I've still managed to add color that w by using lighting in an atmospheric and effective way. That's something that you want to consider when you're doing nice scenes is just to try and add light wherever you can and make sure you have a nice balance between your values and that everything works well together. You can see in this scene that I really relied on lighting quite a lot. And there's a lot of gradients within this scene compared to maybe this scene where the gradients are solely in the sky and I didn't use many lighting effects here at all. I mainly just used flat colors and then a few lines for highlights and definition. Compared to my other scenes where I played a bit more with lighting. It's totally up to you, whether you want to work more with flat shapes or whether you want to play with gradients. It depends on your style and the effect that you want to achieve, but either can work really well. As long as you consider how to achieve depth within your scene by pushing back the subjects further in the background. By softening them and bringing them more towards the sky color and bringing forward items in your scene by darkening them, and then drawing the eye by using contrasting colors and contrast between values. I'm really pleased with how these have turned out. Feel free to experiment with these and have fun with different times of day seasons, unusual color palettes, and just have fun with it and try lots of different things and different blend modes. Then I'm just going to save this by going to actions at the spanner icon, Share, you can share as a JPEG or a PNG. Save image. Now we'll save the image to your photos gallery on the iPad, and then you can upload that to wherever you like. If you're ready, then you can meet me in the next lesson where I'm going to be demoing another scene. 13. Demo: Kitchen: Now I'm going to demonstrate coloring in this kitchen scene. Again, just adding a new layer, bringing it underneath the layout, and renaming this colors. For my first piece, I think I want to make something quite vintage and cozy looking, maybe using pastel colors, light blue, light green, and maybe a warmer color like a beige to compliment those colors. I have this initial idea, but let's try it and see how it goes. First of all, again, just blocking in a main color. This time, I'm not going to fill the whole page. I'll try something a little bit different just to try something else. I'm going to choose a warm color to compliment this minty green, but I still want to keep it desaturated. I think this these two colors go quite nicely together. I have these two colors as my base and now I'm just going to pick those colors and maybe change the hue of each very slightly and the values and just block in some initial ideas, and then I can go and change them if I want to. But those two colors as my base to start with. Then I'll also choose a lighter color of that blue to block out some other parts of the image. Then picking that warmer color. I'll do the same thing and block out some different values. Of that warmer color around the scene, and I think with these tiles, I will group them in that same beige region, but I will add a bit of color variation to add more subtle interest and definition to these tiles. Just making subtle changes to the value and saturation, just placing them at random intervals these tiles. You can also very subtly change the hue towards that warmer tone. Let's just see how this looks so far. Already, I really like the effect that I've created in the tiles with just adding a little bit of variation between the hues and values there. I'm going to add another layer. Choose a gray value fill that over the whole scene, like we've done before. Then go to that layer, click on the end, scroll down to color, and check my values. I think that's reading nicely so far. I probably want to push some values and add more definition, but I can do that as I add more colors. But I think we're off to a good start here. I'm just picking the colors that I already have in the scene right now and just trying to fill every space with that color and thinking about the balance of all these objects and the balance between the warm and the cool tones. I would say it's working quite nicely so far. Just make a decision to block something out to begin with, and then we can tweak it as we go. And then starting to add in lighter tones and periodically checking my values, which I think are working well for now. I think this works really nicely as a base so far, but I think it's missing an accent color. I am going to with my accent, start a new layer, and choose something really vibrant, maybe like a bright red I'm just going to draw that in the areas that I really want to draw the eye to and just add a little extra something. This teapot is a real focal point in this scene. I'm adding some details with the accent color onto there. But I also want to spread this color a little bit more around the scene. I'm going to color in one of these cups and maybe some of the buttons on the radio or the handle on the radio. Maybe in these biscuits, I'll add a little bit of that accent color as well, and maybe in the flower up here. I'm not sure about that in particular or the handle. You don't want to use too much of your accent color because then it takes away from the effect that you want it to have, which is to add a little bit of pop and help to draw the eye to your vocal points. Then on that accent color layer, I'm going to go to adjustments, hue saturation brightness, and play around with the color and see if there are any colors that might work a little better than that vibrant red, which I do like, but it's fun to just experiment and play with the saturation because sometimes lowering the saturation will make a color tone in much more nicely with your scene. And also playing with the value. This light purple goes pretty nicely, I think. Also, this grayish color goes quite nicely. I think what will help me is if I turn the layout off to try these colors. I quite like this. It's quite a desaturated red color, but I think it tones in more nicely than the vibrant red that we started with. I can try and saturate it a little more, but I don't want to saturate it too much. I think that works quite nicely. Then I can merge those two layers together by pinching with two fingers, and keep adding and playing with values. I'm actually going to add even lighter values, just to add more contrast. We do quite like the look of that, but I'm wondering if it's a little bit flat. What I'm going to do is duplicate the layer and I am going to play around with some adjustments and see if I can tweak the colors or the vibrancy and the color balance and see if I can push this palette a bit further. This way you can come up with some really cool effects sometimes that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise before you allowed yourself to experiment a little. You can see here if I tap outside of the Canvas until this preview panel comes up and I press on preview. That's just pushed our colors a little bit further and push this saturation into something more interesting in my opinion. I really like the effect of this. I think it's a little bit warmer as well, overall, and I'm going to apply to apply this change and play with the curves now. Again, previewing that, But I think I prefer the palette from before. I played with the curve, so I'm going to press cancel. Yet, you can see if we compare the old colors that I was choosing originally to the new ones. The old colors are a lot more gray and desaturated looking. It's definitely worth having a play of the adjustments just to see where you can take your colors. I'm going to merge those down now with two fingers. I haven't really thought about lighting yet because I think it looks quite good just with these flat colors, but I might on a separate layer, just try adding a few shadows and see what happens. That minty color, I think will work well for shadows. I have my window here. Anything that's facing away from the window, any of these surfaces, I'm just going to add a very rough shadow to. Not being precise at all. Then going to that layer, clicking the n, going to multiply, and then lowering the opacity a little bit. You can see that's just made these objects look a lot more three dimensional. I can go to hue saturation brightness and play with the color of those shadows. And I think that creates a really nice effect. The warm shadows work nicely, I think. If you just want to keep your colors flat and not add shadow, that's absolutely fine. It depends what style you want to go for and the look and feeling as well. But I think that adds a little something. I'm going to merge that down. Now I'll make a start on my next. For this next piece, I'm not really sure what I want to do. I maybe start with something a little lighter yellow, and just fill that whole scene. Maybe I will just block in my values just with that yellow tone right now. Just using different tones of that yellow in different saturations. Maybe changing the hue ever so slightly. Getting enough value variation. Then I'll check those values which are okay, but they could be enhanced a little further. Then I'm going to ask maybe a checkered pattern in these tiles. And see how that looks, which is, I'm not quite sure about it yet. I think we need some variation, some definition between the wallpaper and this teapot. I'm going to pick that color, choose a very slightly darker version of it and color in that wall. Now we turn that gray layer on the teapot stands out a lot better. But now the counter top and the wall need a little bit more definition. I'm going to grab one of those colors from the tiles, darken it very slightly and then drag that onto the color to replace it and the same with that other color. A This is okay for now, but I feel like we could add in an accent color to just make the scene pop a bit more. I'm not actually sure if I like this it's a greeny yellow tone. I'm going to select that layer with the selection tool and go to adjust, saturation brightness and play around with those tones for now. I think it's okay for now. I'm going to play around with the color balance. This will just give us a little more color variation in the scene. I can change the highlights, the mid tones, and the shadows individually from each other. That's given me a little bit more variation between the yellow and now we've got more of a purple tone within the shadows, which I quite like there's a little bit of contrast there. I think it looks more interesting than the previous just plain yellow. Yeah, I definitely like what I've done now. I'm going to to apply that change and now I'm going to add in an accent color. I can still maybe use a green as an accent color which goes quite nicely and just spread that around the image. I like that green. I think it gives a little bit of a pop. I can also play around with other colors by using hue saturation brightness again. I think a pink color works well, but I like how that green goes with the desaturated purple tones. I'm going to merge that green down and commit to it. Then I am going to add a new layer. I may try adding in another accent color. Maybe something opposite this green like a red orange and see how that works to inject a little more color in the scene. And then I will play with that color as well. I think bringing down the value helps to add a bit more value variation in the scene, helps to draw the eye, it adds more contrast, which is really nice. I really like how green and pink go together because they are contrasting colors. That really helps to draw the eye as well along with the more desaturated and cool tones hitting against each other. I can always try to soften the opacity of that layer if I want less of a contrast to create more of a calm scene. If I turn that accent layer on and off now, I think that it does work nicely. I'm going to merge that layer down now. Then once again, I can add in some shadows. Just drawing very roughly where I want shadows to be with any color, and then clicking the n, changing that to multiply, lowering the pacity slightly, changing the hue I always find purply shadows to work quite well. Especially in this scene. Actually think a warm shadow works nicely in this scene to keep that color palette cohesive, and then I'm quite happy with that now, so I'm just going to merge that down and move on to my next scene. For my next scene, I actually want to try something a little bit different, and that is to take one of these scenes that I've already made. Copy and paste it. Bring it into the next scam. Aligning it with the linework there. With this already colored artwork, I'm going to completely change the colors. It just makes the process a little bit simpler because you don't have to color in every single layer. I'm going to blend down that copied layer into my colors layer to keep everything neat. Then I am going to play with all of these adjustments to start with. I'm going to select the artwork so that I can work on it in isolation. I can then experiment by changing the hue saturation brightness, color balance, curves, and maybe even gradient map. So with the gradient map, we haven't used that yet. But you can see I have all these presets here. If I just scroll through them all, they are applied instantly to the image and they immediately give a completely different feeling to the image. Even just this yellow looks quite nice because it reminds me of a CPS style photograph, but the colors are really vibrant. I actually want to start a new gradient map. You can see we just started with our values black to white. Then I'm going to play With each group of value. For the dark values, I want to keep it in the darker region, and I'll just block out anything at the moment. The mid tones, I maybe want to make them pretty saturated. And then getting into the lighter tones. I want to keep them. Still quite saturated, but getting a bit lighter. Then as we move to the right, I want the color to get a little bit lighter. Here I can just play around with the different hues and see how that affects this image. You can see that I can have come up with something completely different to the scene that this is based on. I can just really experiment here. If I want to delete a color, I can just hold on it until that delete button comes up and press delete. I can also drag any of these colors to increase the value range that it affects. I hardly ever use this technique, but it is actually quite fun. And you can see that it's giving me some really interesting effects that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. If I tap outside the Canvas and press preview, you can see how that gradient map has changed the whole mood of the scene. I'm going to press apply. Then I am going to select that image again and then play now with the color balance, and just keep experimenting with this image and having fun. Something else that I can do here is add a new layer and I can pick a co, any color, and just draw over that layer with the color on a new layer, and then I s the blend modes and scroll through those blend modes and see if that has any interesting effects on my image. Selecting a soft light looks quite nice because it just ties everything together. I can then change the U and see what effect this has. I think that cool palette is quite interesting. If I lower the opacity, slightly, it just gives a different effect. This time, I'm going to tap on the layer and turn it into a clipping mask before I merge down just so that it doesn't bleed out with the boundaries of this color rough. I can also play with adding an accent color. Maybe something warmish this time, something like a brown neutral color. I can play with that color as well. That pink works quite nicely. Green yellow also works along with a color. There are a few options that I could have used for that color, but I quite like how the brown goes with the blues and purples and pinks here. I'll soften that brown very slightly by lowering the opacity and then I will merge that down. I think in this scene, I might just want to add a few darker tones of this purple or blue, add more definition between these objects. You can see that just adding a darker line can often help to make the objects in your scene pop out a lot more. Then if I change that to a multiply layer, then that can create a really nice effect. I'm quite happy with that, and I'm just going to merge that down again and we'll start on the last scene. I really like how calm this piece looks, but I feel like it might be missing some of the warmth that we have in these first two color ruffs. I want to try one more thing. I'm adding a new layer, and I want to choose a warm color. And then draw that color over this rough, go to the layer blend modes. And I think using a soft light that just warms these colors up and it makes them more cohesive with each other. I think that creates a really nice effect. Something else that I want to try maybe is adding an accent color because I know that's worked really well on our first two pieces here. It might change the whole feeling of this piece, but let's anyway and see what happens. Can you see adding those colors in has changed the whole feeling of this piece. It's really brightened it and brought more energy into the scene, which I really like. I'm actually torn because I like both effects. But I think for this particular scene, I really like the accent color. I think that that red works best as the accent color in this scene. I'm just going to make the decision right now to blend that down hoops. I think I'll have to make that yellow into a clipping mask so that it doesn't spill out from the sides and distort the energy of those colors. Then I'm just going to merge those three layers together and make that decision. I'm now going to start on the last color rough here. I think because we have quite a lot of color variation in these scenes, I want to keep this one quite analogous and maybe make this one a nighttime scene. I know that we've done a few nighttime scenes, but I think they are always nice to experiment with. I am going to block out a blue color and then just block in some values like usual. Keeping this countertop a little bit darker. And I'm going to block in some randomized variation in these tiles around the scene. And then lighter values for the plates. But I'm keeping that lightest light still with quite a lot of that color in it, so it's not bright white at this stage. Then I want to add in maybe some warm colors. Nothing too vibrant, still keeping within that purple range, but just to add a tiny bit of contrast within this analogous palette. Then I want this window to be a bit of a light source for moonlight. Let's check our values so far. I think that works quite well. We can see these individual objects. Now I can start a new layer and add some highlights with this light bluish color to create more definition and atmosphere in the scene. A Like I've said before, lighting is quite important within nighttime scenes because that's going to add atmosphere and because we have less colors to play around with, it adds in a little more vibrancy in color to the scene. I'm changing the blend mode to overlay on that lighting layer. If I turn my layout off, you can just see how that's added a lot more definition and color to the scene, and it feels a lot more atmospheric now. I also want to add in maybe a few darker lines. To define just the spaces where these objects are resting upon other objects and a definition there. Just a few lines here and there. I'm going to set that to multiply layer and lower the opacity. I'm going to merge these layers down now and something else that I can try is adding shadows again using a multiply layer. Which will just help me add more definition. I think that works quite nicely. It's quite a different scene from the rest. And I'm just going to merge down that shadow layer. Now I am going to maybe make more adjusts to all of these layers. These three color roughs. They all look quite similar to each other. They just have a slightly different palette. I want to make them more different from each other. This one is definitely different because it's that analogous color palette and it's very much in the cool color region and the values are a lot darker. There's nothing wrong with having quite similar palettes, but because this is a color class, I want to push them a bit more. I can duplicate my layer and then I'll play with the adjustments by selecting each of these roughs individually. And then playing with hue saturation, brightness, color balance, curves. I won't play with the gradient maps. I'll try to work with what I have and see what I can tweak and even further. I'll just go ahead and do that now. I decided to bring a little bit of a pale yellow into the scene, which I think helps to just lift this scene a little bit more and give it more vibrant feeling because we have more of those primary colors. Then I might move this red more towards red rather than pink, and see what happens there. I'm going to add more of that yellow around the scene. And maybe move these tiles more towards a pink color. And brightening the tiles as well. H I'm really pleased with that Rug. This last scene, I think, could be a bit more cohesive, but maybe we can do that with lighting. I'm starting a new layer and I'm going to draw a little blob where the light source is coming from, that window, and go to adjust, and soften that blob a and then to or hard light is quite nice. I really like the effect that that has given. It helps to draw the eye to this part of the scene, which is lovely. I will just merge down the hard light layer, and I think I'm not going to mess around with lighting too much anymore. If I turn on and off the layer that I've added adjustments to, you can see that I changed the color scheme of this first piece to use more primary colors. I added in yellow and I changed the hot pink color to red. I think the previous one did work nicely, but I quite like the vibrancy and playfulness of the primary colors. This scene, I brought those desaturated tones more into a pink region. It's a little bit warmer and I also increased the contrast, which looks nice. This scene, I just added the lighting effect to, which I think elevates it a lot and helps to draw the eye. This nighttime scene, I basically just enhanced the contrast between the lights and the darks. I'm really happy with how these color roughs have turned out. They've all been on quite a journey to get to where they are with a lot of tweaking and decision making to do. Now I'm going to go to actions, share, and then save this image as a JPEG or PNG. And select save image. Now I'm going to choose one of these color ruffs to finalize in the next lessons. 14. Final Piece: Colour Blocking: I have chosen this piece to finalize. I'm going to export this image with the linework turned off by going to actions at the Spanner icon share, I'm just going to select JPEG and save that image. Then I am going to select actions again, Canvas, and I'm going to toggle on that reference panel. You'll see this reference panel come up. I'm then going to select image, and then I'll select import image. And that will open up my photo gallery. Then I'm going to select the image that I just exported. And I'm just going to zoom in on my favorite dumbnail that I've chosen to use the colors of. Now I am just going to toggle these colors off, toggle the layout back on. I am going to use the rectangle selection tool and just select one of these layouts, press copy and paste, and that will paste that onto a new layer. I'll turn the rest of these layouts off. Go to the arrow tool and using uniform. I'm then going to drag this layout over my whole image, and I'm going to go out with the scene a little bit here and just line it up as best as I can. Then I am going to lower the opacity a little by pressing that. And I'm just going to select all of these layers. I've selected one and then I'm dragging to the right to select all of these layers in a group, and then I'm going to press group, and just keep that group out of the way now as I add my colors. Before I toggle this group layer off, I'm going to turn on my original color ruffs. I'm going to head to my palettes, make sure I'm on a default palette. If you're not, you can just press plus and create new palette. Then I'm actually going to add all of the colors directly from this scene, not from the reference, because if you pick colors from the reference, you'll get them near enough, but procrate does desaturate those colors very slightly if you pick them from the reference, which I think is maybe a bug that they're working on. I'm not sure. But anyway, this is an easy fix for now. Just pick them directly from your palette and you'll get the exact color. I am going to organize my palette from warm to cool and dark on the top row, mid tones on the middle row and lights on the bottom row. I'll start with my warmest most vibrant tone that red, and you can organize your palette in whatever way you like. This is just how I like to do it because it keeps my palettes looking pretty and organized, but it's absolutely not essential. I'm just picking those colors from the palette. And then I'm just tapping them in that palette to add them into that palette. I think I've added most of my base colors. I'm not going to worry too much about getting all of the variation between shadows in at the moment. I'm going to select this tab and drag it to the corner underneath my reference. Then I'm going to tap on that palette icon and it's jumbled my palette a little bit, but that's okay because I can still identify and select the right colors. I don't need these colors anymore, so I'm just going to toggle that off and add my layout and put my layout on. If you think that any of these panels are getting in the way, you can make them a little bit smaller or drag them to another part of the scene. Now I'm going to start blocking out some of these colors. I'm just adding a new layer and going to block out base colors for each object in the scene for now. You might want to start with a background color just so that you have that base to start with. Maybe start with the largest areas in the scene. Here I've just drawn a line and because it reaches to both sides of my canvas, I can just drag in a blob of that color and making sure that the threshold is below where it's going to fill the whole scene. Just release that and that has filled in a shape for me really quickly without me having to color in all the pixels. I'm just going to go ahead and add a new layer for each object in the scene. Following roughly along my line work, and making sure that each shape I fill is a closed loop. Otherwise, the color is going to bleed out onto the rest of the canvas. With some of these shapes, you might want to keep them on the same layer. But for anything that might be overlapping such as these two cups, I am going to draw them on separate layers. And draw the whole silhouette for now, not worrying about details at this time. Because I want this mug to appear in front of the red one, I need to bring that layer underneath the blue cup. Just continuing to block out these shapes. As you can see, I'm often twisting the canvas around so that I can draw a smoother curve using the axis of my wrist. Obviously, if you have a different rendering style than this, this is only one way to color, but you can definitely do it another way if you want to be more painter or work only in one layer, then I absolutely would encourage you to do what feels natural to you. For now, I'm just blocking out shapes. I'm not worrying about the colors at the moment because I'm going to work on them once I have all my shapes blocked in. Okay. Once I have all of those solid shapes blocked in, I'm going to go individually into each of these shapes with mas. So if I just turn that you back on, and I'll start with my countertop Adding a layer, a new layer above the layer that you want to influence, and then tapping to the left of that layer and selecting clipping mask. You'll see that little arrow comes up, and that means that we can now draw within the boundaries of the layer that that is clip two, and it won't bleed out with the boundaries. This is great for adding gradients or color variation within the boundaries of an object. I am going to add in some of that color variation between these tiles now. Saying clicked to this counter top. Then if you already have a clipping mask on a layer and you click back onto the main layer and add a new layer, it will automatically turn that new layer into a clipping mask above the layer that you want to affect. I'm going to work on this teapot now. Again, making a new layer, and then making sure that sitting above the layer I want to clip to, tapping on the left side of that layer, selecting ma, and now I can or I can even color drop over that whole layer and turn that layer another color. Another thing that I can do if I want to a layer another color without actually adding a clipping mask is I can select the layer tap on the left of that layer to bring up this side bar. I can select Alpha lock. With alpha lock selected, that means that these layers are locked now. If I want to draw on that layer, I can't draw anywhere outside of the boundaries of that layer, but I'm not on a clipping mask on that same layer, so I can't turn it on and off. I usually use alphac if I want to change the colors of the whole layer. Again, with that alphac on, I will bring up the side bar again and click Fill layer. Can you see in the layers that teapot is that creamy white color now? I actually don't need this clipping mask that I've added. I can just slide to the left and press delete on that layer. But I do actually want a clipping mask on this layer because I want to add in that blue and those blue and red details. I'm going to add a new layer and turn it into a clipping mask. Sect that blue color and start drawing on my details. And I can then add a new clipping mask underneath that one for my red details. So I think that looks great. I'm going to use the eraser and just add a little detail that I didn't have in my color. I'm actually making use of negative space by adding a little bit of a gap between the red and blue details, which I think looks quite nice. Now I'm going to do the same thing with all my other objects, adding clipping masks above them and drawing in and blocking in some of these details. I think this is looking pretty good. We have our main flat colors blocked in. Now I think before I define any shadows or lighting, I want to go in with some line work and define some of these areas without lighting to start with. I want to choose maybe a darker color than I have so far in this palette. I'm actually going to first of all, select all of my layers. That I have color blocked out with by just sliding to the right until I've selected all of those layers and clipping masks, and I'm going to select group and keep these all together right now on their own layer and I'm going to bring my gray layer that we had previously above everything. I can toggle that on and off whenever I need to. Our values are looking quite good drawing the eye towards this teapot and around this area, they maybe could be improved by the window ledge, but I'm going to leave that for now and start defining some linework. On a new layer, I am going to choose maybe this brown color and head to my color wheel and may make it a little bit darker, maybe more towards red, and I'll add that to my palette somewhere. And turning on my layout again, but lowering the opacity. I'm now going to go in and start drawing just with lines around some of these edges, only where I feel there needs to be a little bit of definition. That can be things like where objects touch another object, or where you feel that there is not enough value contrast to define an area and defining some edges of any objects. You can also use it to define any shadows as well. Let's toggle our layout off and our linework off and you can see that just adds in a lot more definition to the scene. If I click on the n and change this to multiply and maybe lower the opacity slightly. Then it blends in a lot more with the scene into the object of each color. You might want to play around with different colors of linework. Again, it depends on what look you want to go for in your scene. I'm just going to continue adding lines where I think it makes sense. I think this is looking quite nice now. I might add some linework in I might add some lighter linework in between the tiles. I'll add a new layer, select my lighter color from the palette, and just in lines in between these tiles. If I turn that on and off, I think that has quite a nice effect. Just adding a bit of a line around this curtain as to define that a more. Again, I can click on the layer and Alpha lock it and choose different colors to fill the layer with if I want to try things out. I can see how it looks with a darker layer but I think it was much better as a lighter layer. I think this already looks really nice as it is. But I think it's lacking a little bit of atmosphere in texture. That's what I want to do next, bring in a bit of a lighting effect and some shadows and texture into the scene. 15. Final Piece: Shadows & Highlights: Now we're going to add some texture and lighting effects in details and bring the scene more to life. What we can do first is add some shadows. I'm just adding a new layer and maybe I should rename my layers to keep things organized. So I've added this new shadows layer, and I'm going to choose maybe one of the more purp tones, and I am just going to quite neatly draw in areas of shadow over any objects that are opposite the window where I think there should be shadow, and I'm using the color thumbnail as a guide for this. I don't really mind being a little bit messy. I'm trying to be neater than I was in the color thumbnail, but I'm not going to be too much of a perfectionist about it because that would take ages and I actually prefer the look of having slight imperfections. I'm going to turn that layer into a multiply layer so that I can see the effect that it's having as I go and now you can see that actually looks really good so far. I can also ease with my same brush, any areas that I want to be more subtle, especially bits of the shadow that are further away from the object. I'm just going to draw in that shadow or wherever I think. It should be using my color thumbnail as a gate. And you can already see this is adding so much more atmosphere to the image. And I think it's working really well. O We have some shadows there, and I think that's really helping to add more life to this scene, and now I want to try adding some highlights. I'm going to add a new layer again. Those my lightest color from my palette and using an layer. I'm going to on. Where I think there should be highlights, where the light might be hitting from the window. I can be stylized with this. It doesn't need to be completely accurate to reality. But just getting a general feeling will really help to add a sense of atmosphere to the scene. I'm trying to make gradients with my brush and then maybe erasing some parts that I think might need to be a little more subtle adding a bit of shine to the teapot, to really make it feel three dy. I can also add in maybe some dots with that layer as well to add texture in some regions. If I play with the opacity here, I actually like it at full opacity. I think that works really well. We've just added a lot of lovely lighting effects to the scene in a really simple way just with highlights and shadows, which grounds the scene more in reality and it gives it a lot of atmosphere. 16. Final Piece: Textures & Details: Now I think the colors look pretty good, the scene looks pretty good. The only thing that I think I could improve now is to add some textures and also maybe more detail. I'm going to add texture first within my shapes and maybe only a subtle amount of te. I'll first of all add it onto the tiles. I'm going to add a new layer and create a clipping mask again, and then I'm going to scroll through some of my brushes and choose something that's a textured, maybe with a bit of a grain texture. I'm using a rhizo texture shader that I got from tip top brushes, but if you want to procreate native alternative, you can go to Bobo chalk, which can be really nice. I am then maybe just going to pick some colors from my scene and just add a subtle bit of texture within the boundaries of that shape. Then I can play with blend modes here. Maybe a multiply is quite nice or an overlay. It just helps to add a tiny bit of variation to these colors instead of having them completely flat, which I think creates a more natural and atmospheric look. Multiply makes the colors a bit darker and overlay, makes the colors a little bit lighter, and I think I like them. A little bit lighter. I can also play with the hue saturation brightness, which I think is fine as it is for now. I'm going to do the same with just a few of these layers adding a tiny bit of texture. And color variation. And then playing with the blend modes. And I might add a tiny bit of a pattern in the wallpaper. Just a very simple pattern. Picking a color that's already in my palette so that we don't change too much. I think I might also need to add a gradient in the wall. Okay. I think that is enough detail for now. I think this is looking really good so far. I might even change the hue of the shadows just a tiny bit to that more purply tone, which I think maybe just makes the toes contrast with the warmer tones just a bit and it looks. And just tweaking a few things here and there. I quite like how this is all looking, and I'm going to add a new layer and add some last details. I might add more dimension to these tiles in a few ps. And I quite like that effect, but I'm just going to lower the opacity to make it a little more subtle, which I think works really well. I also want to add in maybe a tiny bit of a highlight in the cups of tea or coffee or hot chocolate or whatever it is. I think to add an extra tiny bit of atmosphere. I might add some bits of steam coming off these cups of tea and maybe just a little puff of steam coming out of the kettle. So I'm not quite sure this takes away from I might just have the from the teapot. Which I think looks quite nice like that. Then I can go to the n and play with these blend modes. I think soft light looks quite nice. It's quite subtle. Yeah, I'm going to stay with that soft light and continuing to add very subtle details. Maybe some wood grain in this frame. And a few crumbs from these biscuits. And maybe just a few lighter parts of these tiles to give a bit of variation just in a few random places, but nothing too obvious. That can just give a suggestion of detail and helps to add a bit of extra charm to the scene. Me adding an image in the photo frame, something really subtle. I think that has just added a really nice sense of charm to the scene. Once you're happy with any of your layers, you can merge stuff do if you need more layers to work with, which I'm doing here with the radio. I think actually I'm going to add another clipping mask to the radio. I might experiment with adding a little bit of a gradient to bring more of that pinky color over to that side of the scene. That we have our high contrast between the red and the blue with this kettle in the middle of the scene because I feel like the radio is maybe taking away a little bit of the impact from that kettle. I want to maybe soften the radio slightly. I'm just trying it out and seeing what happens. I think that is quite nice to soften that just a tiny bit. I might do the same for the mug and for the plate actually. I just want to highlight the smoke a tiny bit more, and I'm going to do that by duplicating that layer, and then I'm going to go to adjustments and Go blur and that smoke bit. That gives a lovely glowing effect to that. I'm not sure whether I will keep the steam or not, but anyway, I really like how this has turned out. If we turn our values on, you can see that we have our highest contrast in this area, our highest value contrast, and our other areas in the background, they have a little bit lower value contrast, but we can still see what's going on and the composition feels quick balanced. Then if we turn our colors back on, you can see that the highest saturated color, that red, and then that blue, they're really drawing the eye towards our focal point, and then we have a lot of desaturated versions of all of these colors scattered around this scene, which just helps to ground everything in the scene and make it feel really realistic and atmospheric. I'm quite happy with these colors now. But one thing that I'm thinking is that my scene lacks a bit of texture and charm. What I'm going to do is Using that six B pencil, which you can find in the sketching folder in procreate. I'm going to add a new layer. I'm going to pick colors from my scene. I'm just going to draw them on other areas of my scene and just add in texture that way. This also helps to add a bit more color variation and interest to the scene. It's going to just add in more variety and make this scene feel a bit more handmade. And I just really like the effect that these pencil scribbles give. Just picking colors from the scene and bringing them into other areas of the scene, sometimes in a subtle way or sometimes not so subtle and it just softens any hard edges and flat colors as well and adds a bit more charm in my opinion. I don't want to overdo it, I want to get the balance just right. If I feel like I've overdone it, I might take that back by using the eraser a little Even bring even bringing some cooler toes into the warmer areas and warmer tones in the cooler areas can sometimes give you quite an interesting effect. Maybe bringing some pink. Just a touch into the wallpaper. Can create quite interesting effects and adding more texture into that smoke or steam You can see we've added quite a lot of pencil textures into that scene. If you think it's too much, then you can always try lowering the opacity and maybe adding a very subtle effect of texture, which I think it's nicer, something more subtle for my particular scene, but I think that's really nice. It just adds a bit more charm. Then what I can do is go to actions, share, and save this scene as a JPEG. And then I can add and then I can bring it in again by going to actions, ad insert a photo and bringing in that image that we just exported so that it's all on one layer. I can then go to adjustments and play ad with the hue saturation brightness, co balance, and curves and see if there's any subtle differences that I can make to just bring the whole scene together. I'm already liking a lot how the original looks, but let's just try this anyway. Then I can toggle that on and off. It's a very subtle change. I haven't really changed that much. Maybe brought the red and orange tones closer to a pinky color, but just very subtle change, and I think that works really. I'm happy with this piece now. I am going to go to actions, sh Save this is a JPEG or a PNG. Then if you share your work to Instagram, I would love if you could tag me on there at Serra Holiday so I can see your work. I'd also love to see your work uploaded to the project gallery. I can't wait to see your creations. 17. Thank You: Well done for finishing this class. I know it's been a long one, but hopefully that's been helpful to watch through all these demonstrations and practical tips and tricks. I hope you've been able to join me in completing these practical exercises, and I honestly can't wait to see what you make. If you're ready to share, then I would love to see your project in the project section of this class. You can also share your work on Instagram and tag me there too at Sarah Holiday. I always do my best to give everyone a bit of kind feedback and encouragement. I just love to see what students make in my classes. It really makes my day. If you enjoyed this class, I would be really grateful if you could leave me a review. And also share this class with friends or followers or anyone you think would enjoy it. If you want to stay updated with my work and more classes, you can follow me here on Skillshare over on Instagram at Sara Holiday. You can also sign up to my newsletter via my website sara holidayrt.com. If you want to learn more from me, you can check out my other classes on the platform. I have classes about drawing people and expressive characters about illustrating landscape compositions and drawing houses, trees, and plants. Thank you so much for taking this class. I hope you've had fun and learned a lot, and I look forward to seeing you in a class again soon.