Palette Hunting: Finding and Crafting Impactful Colour Palettes

1. Welcome!: A color palette may sound like all part of the creative process, but a great color palette can take your work to the next level. In this class, I'm going to give you the tools you need to start building color palettes intuitively because there are no bad colors. It's all about context. My name is Shean Dumps. Some of you may know me as Very Little Peach, and I'm an artist, illustrated and author from Sydney, Australia. Whether you work digitally or traditionally, by the end of this class, you'll have eight or nine palettes to take into your practice. You'll know how and where to look for color inspiration, and you'll become more familiar with mixing colors to make building a unique color palette debris. In the next chapter, I'll be running you through everything you need for this class, as well as prepping the palette finding tool. Let's go. 2. Let's Prep For Class :-): Let's start by prepping for class. You're going to need everything you usually do to create. If you're using the printed finder, you'll need to print out the palette finder tool and palette stencils and grab a pair of scissors or blade, a pen and pins. Prep your palette finder by cutting along all the dotted lines and all of the sheets, but leave the gray.in the center as a guide. If you're planning to work with the palette finder digitally, you're going to need to download and open the digital files into your device and app of choice. You can use these tools digitally, even if you're working traditionally, as long as you know how to rotate images. I'll also list the products I'm using, but it's probably best to use mediums that you're familiar with already for this class. For the next chapter, you're going to need your color wheel base, the monochromatic color stencil. And if you're working with a physical palette, a pin and something to stick it into. I. 3. Exercise 1: Monochromatic Palette & Mixing Colour: We're starting off with the monochromatic palette, which may seem simple, but I'm using it as an excuse to brush up on huge tints and tone, color mixing basics, and also introduce you to the palette finder tool. When I talk about Hues, I'm talking about the base color that our palette will be built off of. On our palette finder tool, this is the center color. And if you're working traditionally, it often means the color that's coming straight out of the tube unless you're really good at mixing. Let's begin by spinning the palette find a tool to a color we like. I love a mustard, so I think I'm going to go a yellow orange. Take out one of the swatch cards. You can either paint straight onto this or just use it as a guide. I'm using guash, and I've also printed this on quite thick paper, so I think it will be fine. But if you're using a we a medium like watercolor or ink, I would go with whatever paper you usually use. When you finish painting, your base hue, write the color or hex coat you used underneath, you can refer to it later. A tint is a lighter version of a hue, so we're going to take our base yellow orange and add some white to it. And if you're working with a medium like water color, your paint will get its lightness from being able to see more of the paper underneath, so just add a little water. Put it on the swatchcad above the hue and label it. A tone is a darker version of a hue, and while sometimes this can mean adding black to a color. I like to keep this as a last resort because black can desaturate and fade a hue. When working traditionally, this can end up gray or muddy. Remember, with traditional media, a little black paint goes a long way, so take it slow. Because three colors are not usually enough to fill out a palt, I'm gonna go ahead and push our tints and tones, as well as add almost black brown and almost white to our lightest and darkest shades over here. This ensures that our palette has a range of tints and tones for us to pull from, as well as allowing us to have contrast in our work. In the next chapter, we're going to need our palette find a tool, which we already have, and the harmonious palette sencils. You're also going to need a swatch card or paper or layer, depending on how you're working. 4. Exercise 2: Harmonious Palettes: Next, we're going to move on to our harmonious palette. A harmonious palette has three to five hues as a base. And the beauty of them is that it's really hard to make it look stressful. It just looks good. If you don't want to use the exact colors that are on this wheel, that's totally fine. Just make sure you're looking at if it's like a warm version of the color or a cool one. If you're using like a warm yellow, maybe use the yellow orange, if you know what I mean? If you're using a green, but it's cool or neutral, make sure you're using the green that aligns to that. We're going to go ahead and pin the unpacked harmonious palette onto our color wheel base. Once you find a combination that you're drawn to, let's start laying down the hues. I think I'll go with the purple, red and orange because I think that's an interesting color combination. Once we've laid down and labeled the hues, we're going to add the tints by adding a bit of white to all of our hues. Leave some of the original hue so that we can make tones out of it. Let's do the same for the tones, and if you want them to look richer, remember, try adding color to darken before you add the black. For example, if I'm using the red and I want to darken that, I will probably add a purple to get the tint and some of the black. If I'm using the orange, I might want to add red and some of the black. Let's add the lightest and darkest shades to our palette, and it can be black and white, but remember, I like to do an almost black and off white because I think it just makes it so much richer. The second part of this chapter is to expand the harmonious palette. So let's pin this on. You can use what you've already started with and just expand from there, or you can take a new swatch card and start again. In the second part of this exercise, try looking at what colors you don't want to include. Having these swatches means that you can create work inspired by the palette, but you can pick and choose which colors you keep and which you leave behind. In the next chapter, we're going to explore one of my favorite types of palettes, which is the complimentary palette. So when you're done with this exercise, get out your compact and expanded complimentary stencils, and we can get started. 5. Exercise 3: Complementary Palettes & Culling: A complimentary palette is one of my go toes because often the combinations can be unexpected and very interesting to look at. Let's go ahead and pin our compact complimentary palette into the color wheel base, so we can take a look at y. Because there's a huge contrast between the colors on each side. These are the kinds of palettes you can use to draw the viewer's eye around the artwork, because yes, you can do this with tints and tones, but adding hue is a whole another level of contrast. You know where this is going, so let's begin to fill out our hues, but for this exercise, I want you to omit one of the hues from the larger window of the palette finder. Sometimes I isolate the colors to see which will work best together, and then fill in your rows of chosen hues and then move on to the tints tones, lighter and darker shades. Oh When you're done, move on to the expanded complimentary palette. Again, you can use what you already have or you can do something new. This color spectrum is super wide, so what I want you to do is emit two of the colors. Either you can take off two from the smaller window or one from each window. Once you've decided, fill in your swatch. Once you're done, take a look at all of your swatch cards, and let's give them all titles. I think this is a nice, whimsical way to kind of, like, I don't know, personify your palettes. If you want, you can add adjectives to the right hand side. The reason I would recommend doing this is when you're creating a painting, for example, in the beach, some of these adjectives may be a deciding factor on, Oh, that is a very beachy palette or that's a palette I would like to use in a forest. In the next chapter, we're going to apply what we've learned in previous chapters to looking for color inspiration in classical. 6. Exercise 4: Colour Inspiration in Classical Art: Color studies can be a really interesting way to find color inspiration. Where better to look than art that has stood the test of time. Centuries old artworks are a really good place to start because they're also public domain, you can use them freely for inspiration. I'm going to use this piece by Honor Edman Cross as an example. Your National Gallery should have an online collection of resources or images of a bunch of classic works, scroll through until you find one you're drawn to. It helps to sit down and verbalize what you're seeing because when you're seeing a finished artwork, sometimes it can be difficult to tell what's going on because everything is together. But it's great practice. I can immediately see that this is a complimentary palette my fave because this piece is warm and cool. If I look at the palette finder, I would say it's like oranges sit more towards the red side, and I see red and red tints used for the darker warm shades, as well as a bunch of cool blues that edge on indigo or purple. I usually use warm paltes so this is going to be interesting for me. Our task is to take a swatch card and create a palette spied by what you see. Try to identify what kind of palette you're looking at. Mind you, these stencils may not be perfect. You may just have to look at the color wheel base and choose from there. Title your palette, the artwork of your choice, and write some adjectives that you think describe it. Next, we're going to prep to go palette hunting. 7. Exercise 5: Palette Hunt: Pallet hunting is a game I like to play every time I go outside. It's an ongoing search for palettes that appeal to me in the outside world. The reason this is amazing is that you can do this any time anywhere, and you're finding palettes that are unique to your experiences, and therefore unique to you. Your task is to go outside and take three photos, one that contains a harmonious palette, one that contains a monochromatic palette, and one that contains a complimentary palette. Interesting color palettes are all around us. If you've taken the same route more than once, you know that the same scenes can change color depending on time of day or even weather. When you get back, take a swatch card and fill it out inspired by one of the photos you took on the palette hunt. 8. Wrapping Up, Sharing Your Projects & Other Resources: Congratulations on making it to the end of our class. By now, I hope you feel a little bit more comforty with color. You'll hopefully be able to identify different types of color palettes, have just under a dozen color pets to choose from. And I'm hoping that you'll be looking for color inspiration wherever you go because there are so many interesting color palette to be found. If you'd like to share photos scans or screenshots of your color palettes or projects that you used inspired by the color palette you made in this class, I would love to see them. It would be cool if the project gallery could be a resource that we can look at whenever we're feeling uninspired. If you'd like more practice or further reading in the resources Doc, I've got a reading list that includes and also accounts that will help you learn more about color on your own. A list of places to fine color inspiration when you're stuck, and also the palettes I created in this class. You now have about ten color palettes that you created from scratch. So feel free to use these as a base. You can include or not include any hue that you think would look good. So go, be free and happy making. Thank you for watching. And I hope it's helped you, and I hope I could share something that for me, feels really intuitive and that hopefully for you, it will become that way if it's not already like that. Bye.