Procreate for Surface Design: Color Palettes and Colorways

1. Procreate for Surface Design: Color Palettes + Colorways: As much as I love to work with physical mediums. There are just some benefits to working with a program like Procreate on my iPad. And one of my favorite things about it is that I can easily change my designs, including recoloring artwork. My name is Jana Sell, and I'm an illustrator who works in both physical and digital mediums, including Procreate. So why is recoloring artwork so important? Well, there are a lot of reasons. For one, you can get more mileage out of work you've already created. So let's say you made a really beautiful floral pattern in nice kind of summary pastel tones. Well, that's just a few easy steps. We can go ahead and transform that pattern into something for winter. And you could apply that to an entire pattern collection. So now you have almost two collections out of one. Another great reason to recolor artwork is if you have something that maybe an art director or a client is interested in, and they love your design, but the colors just aren't quite right for what they're looking for. With the tools in this class, that won't be a problem for you to deliver exactly what they're asking. Or maybe you're kind of stuck with a design. You have a really strong idea. You haven't gotten to it yet because you're not really sure, what you want the final outcome to be, what you want those final colors to look like, or maybe the mood. While we can go ahead and get started with the basic color palette that you can recolor later. So I'll start out by covering just some of the basics of the color panel in procure. And then I'll talk about how to create color palettes. From there, we'll talk about how to properly set up a file so that it's easy to edit later. And then we'll also talk about how to edit some more complicated files, as well as existing artwork that you may have already created that wasn't set up to be reclored. There's still some things we can do in those situations, too. This class is great if you already have a basic working knowledge of procreate. It's really not meant for brand new beginners. So if you are new beginner, I would definitely check out some classes here on skill share on how to use procreate. Oh that being you said, this isn't an advanced class, either. Just don't feel like you have to have a ton of knowledge of procreate. If you've played around and made some artwork in procreate, then you're ready for this class. 2. Color Panel Basics: Right. So for this first lesson, I'm just going to go ahead and get started by creating a new piece of artwork. So, as I mentioned at the top of the class, this isn't necessarily for brand new beginners. If you've never opened Procreate, I'm going to go through this kind of quickly. So I definitely recommend looking for maybe beginner level classes on Procreate here. This is going to be a step above beginner. So first, I'm just going to tap our little plus sign on the upper right hand corner. And I'm just going to use this screen size. I'm not too worried about quality right now because I'm just kind of demonstrating how I use color and procreate, so it doesn't really matter. Okay. So we have our new canvas here. And then we're just going to start by looking at the color panel. So in the upper right hand corner, we have this kind of dark. I think it's black, maybe a really dark brown. I go to tap that, and that'll bring up the color panel. So if you're on classic mode, you'll have this kind of gradient of colors. We have our hue here, saturation here. So we can move this around to play with the color. And then down here at the bottom, we have this slider where I can change the actual hue. So here we can play with our saturation. So this is going to be super saturated. And this is the least saturated, which will bring us to a gray neutral. And then at the bottom, we have our light and our dark. So I do use this part of the color panel pretty frequently, especially if I'm trying to find colors that contrast with each other. I like to play around makes it really easy. And then I'm going to show you this disc panel at the bottom. So here we can go all the way around the color wheel. I just another way of doing things. We can also play with color in here. I hardly use this one. I really usually stick to classic if I'm going to be playing with color in this way. Okay. Now we have harmony, which is a really helpful feature, especially if you're trying to find colors that work well together. So this green, this kind of bright green that I randomly landed on is our main color here. And we can change this color by moving it around the wheel. And then it's going to find the triadic colors. So that means this is going to be a group of three colors. And these are colors that will complement this green. So, I can move this around. It's going to change all of them, but theoretically, they should all compliment each other. And then we can change this from triadic here to complimentary. So this is actually straight complimentary. So this is going to be colors that are the exact perfect opposite of each other. We can also switch it up to split complimentary. So that's going to be colors that are splitting the complimentary. So exact complimentary would be here in the middle. And this is splitting those up. So we have this kind of orange color and a fuchsia pink. And then analogous are going to be colors that are actually kind of similars. So we have this teal, and then analogous to it is going to be this green and then a darker blue. And then finally, we have Tetratic. So it's basically Tetra four. So you'll see here, And we can just move these around, play with the color as much as we want. So those are all of our options here. If you want more features like that, I definitely recommend checking out Adobe's color features. It gives you a lot more options. These are just some of the options within procreate. Okay. Then we can go over to value. So this is just another way to change the color. You can get really specific with your red greens and blues. And Soe can play with that. I hardly ever use this at all, but it would be helpful if you do have a hex code. So the hexadecimal down here in this box, you could paste in an exact color. If you have maybe brand colors that you follow and that you're working with, that's a great option. Okay, so let's go to our last option, which are palettes. So here, I actually have some palettes that I've created myself. I'm going to scroll all the way down. There are some default palettes that come with procreate. So you'll find those here. And then here are the wounds I've created. If you've already played around procreate, you might be familiar with all of these tabs. But I'm going to show you how we can really make the most of color palettes and make our own. So we're going to go ahead and do that in the next lesson. 3. Color Palettes: So to get started with creating a color palette. We can simply tap this plus sign and create new palette. You will see there are some other options, and I am going to go through these with you as well. If I just tap that, we're going to have this kind of blank color palette here, and we could very easily go over to this tab, and let's see. Select this blue. And you'll see actually that the new palette we created is already showing up here. So all I have to do is tap that square, and now that's part of our color palette. Maybe I want. Dark blue. Maybe, let's do an orange. And then we could just proceed from there, creating our color palette if we already know what colors we're looking for. And then if I go back to the palettes tab, you'll see them up here. You also may like colors that you already have saved in a palette. So I could scroll down and just select any color like this pink. So now you can see that I have pink selected. It's showing up here in the upper right, and I can tap into our new palette. And now it's part of this new one, so you can definitely mix and match with existing color palettes that way. Okay. So now we're going to look at some of our other options. I'm gonna skip New Fork camera for right now. And I'm actually going to go New Form photos. So by tapping on that, it's gonna bring up my photos on my iPad. So I actually have some photos that I took for this class of flowers in my garden that I liked the colors, and I thought might work well. All I have to do is tap on a photo. Let's This has some fun variety. There's just pinks and yellows. So I tap import, and then it already created brand new palette. Blink and you miss it. It happened so quickly. So you can see there's a lot of colors here. It can be a little bit overwhelming, but it might be a nice starting point. So anytime that I've used that feature, I'm definitely not going to use all of these colors. I like to limit my color palettes to a degree, but I could go ahead and use this as a jumping off point. And I'll talk a little bit more how I make those decisions coming up. Alright, so let's look at more of our options. So we do also have this option new from file. So here's where you could add a color file. So if you have a branding tool kit, you could add it from here. Have nothing in these folders. But it's a way to load in existing color palettes, much like you would in Photoshop or Illustrator. And then we have New From camera, which is basically going to be the same as the New From photos option, except it's going to turn on my camera, so I could take a photo. And then right now, it just looks black because I have my case covering it. But if I open up my iPad, and I actually have these flowers, hydranges over here. So let's see. I'm just going to ankle this, hold it up, and you can actually see Awfully, you can see that. You can see the camera picking up those different hues. So look at all these different variations of this kind of line green. And then all I would have to do is tap on that And now we have our color palette from there. It's not something I've really had a need to use before, but it could be helpful. Okay. So now I'm going to show you the way that I most commonly like to make my color palettes, and a lot of times it'll be from an existing image. But instead of having procreate automatically make the palette, I like to select the colors myself. So to do that, I'm gonna go up here to this kind of wrench symbol up here. And then I'm going to go ahead and tap add. And then I'm going to insert a photo. So I'm going to insert one of these photos I took before. Okay. And then I'm just going to zoom in. And the reason I wanted to use this one. I really like the kind of contrast between the bright colors and the flowers and these kind of deep almost purply dark colored stems and these leaves. So when I pull this into procreate, you can see that it's selected. I'm just going to tap the arrow to deselect. And right now, it's just kind of a layer in this file. So, let's go ahead and create a color palette from this, so I'm going to go ahead tap that plus sign and create new palette. Okay. In order to select colors from here, I'm going to use my finger, and I'm just going to hold down and drag. And then you'll see that this kind of color wheel pops up. So the bottom half of the wheel is the color that we already have selected up in that upper right hand corner, that pink. But as I drag, it's picking up the colors in my photo. So I definitely want to get, like, a peachy kind of pinky orange. I don't know if there's really too much pink. Let's see what I can find. Okay, let's go with that. So I have that color loaded up here, and then I'll just tap in my palette to save it. And then I'm just going to keep looking for more colors. So I really want to get, like, a deep greasing. That. And I definitely want something kind of like this purply dark color to And I mentioned before about, you know, what I look for in a color palette. So there are a few different things. I like to have a few kind of key strong colors. So in this instance, it might be this kind of bright orange, and then probably some kind of green hue. And then I'm also looking for a mix of kind of darks and lights as well as neutrals. So an example of a neutral, let's see if I can find kind of toned down So that would be a neutral. I don't know if that really goes, though. It's a little too close to this orange. I kind of want something that's gonna contrast more. So I can go ahead and delete that from my palette. So to delete a color, we can just hold down on it, and then this little trash icon will come up, and we'll delete that swatch. And sometimes, I'll just pull a bunch of colors and make decisions later. So I like to do this. If I have a strong vision in my head of the colors I want to use. If I have procreate, make the color palette, then I just don't have as much control. But there isn't a right or wrong way to do this. It really depends on you and how you like to work. So I'm just going to go th and kind of refine my color palette, and then I'll get started on my design. 4. Artwork Setup: Alright, so I have kind of the start of a color palette here. I can always change it up later. Now I'm just going to go ahead and get started drawing. So the easiest way to recolor artwork is to be very intentional as you create it. So that means keeping things in separate layers because that will make things so much easier to recolor later, and we can get really specific as we recolor. Now there are options for more complex designs to kind of manipulate the color. But the ways I'm going to show you later won't give you as much control as having things laid out separately on separate layers. So first, I'm just going to go ahead and I'm actually going to hide that first layer. And start a new one. And I'm just going to do a really kind of simple, stylized flower drying. And first, I'm going to start with this kind of light, peachy, pinky color. And before I get started, actually, I will just cover what I did here. So this color was from my image, this nice peach color, and I really liked it. So I went ahead and I also made a darker version here and a lighter version. That's another way that you can use a photo as a baseline, but it might not have all the variations you need in one photo. So in order to do that, all I did was I hopped over to the classic view, and then I just kind of played around until I got a color I wanted. So in order to get the darker color, You can just move this down, play the saturation. And then to get that really light color, I went, you know, all the way to the lightest and then brought that saturation down to get almost a white. And that's how I came up with these. Okay, so now time to start drawing. And I'm not going to spend a ton of time walking you through what I'm doing right now just because the point of this class is to focus on color. I'm just really drying So quick, simplistic flowers. And I'm still working within the same layer because these are all going to be the same color. So it's totally fine that I haven't changed my layers. But once I start adding detail, I'm going to go ahead and add a new layer. So I'm going to use a different color. Things kind of p red. And then if I don't like what I'm doing, I'm just tapping with two fingers, that's just a really easy shortcut to undo. Alright, and then I'm going to switch colors again, so I'm going to make another new layer. And to this kind of dark blue. See how that s. Alright, so this gives us a little bit to work with now. And I'm just going to show you a couple of different ways that we can change colors. And you'll see here why working in layers is so important. So let's start with this base kind of peachy color. Let's say I actually want to change it to that pinky light pink purple. And there's multiple ways I can do this. So first, I'm going to go ahead and create a clipping mask. So I'm going to hit the plus sign to add a new layer, and then I'm going to fill the new layer with that color. Okay. So that layer is filled. And then to create a clipping mask, I'm just going to tap and hit clipping mask. And basically, it's clipping this layer to these circles. So that's all a clipping mask does. It's just a really easy way to recolor something without being destructive. And basically when I say being destructive, that means changing the original. So if I change my mind later, all I have to do is delete this pink layer or I can uncheck it and see the original. So that's how we're preserving the original instead of being destructive and changing it. And I could do the same thing with both of these. So this is where it can be great. If you have two things of the same color on the same layer. So instead of having to do this twice, I only have to do it once for both of these. So, for example, let's say I actually wanted this orange flower here to be the same color as these kind of dark blue ones. I could actually add it to this layer. So to do that, all I would have to do is go ahead and I'm going to use my two fingers and overlap them, and then it's going to combine these into the same layer. So you can see in the panel on the right hand side over here that they're combined now. And then I can add a new layer. So let's choose the start green. I go to drag this from the circle to fill that layer and tap it and hit clipping mask. And now I've just changed those colors all at once. Yeah. So this can come in handy. You know, if you're working with patterns or very complex designs, and you want to maybe simplify it. Maybe you do want there to be less colors. You can combine them onto the same layer and go ahead and apply the color that way. So I'm just going to undo those last few steps. And this is back to its own layer and different from these, and I'll show you another way to recolor something. So I have this layer selected here. And because I want to work non destructively, I'm going to duplicate the layers. I'm going to duplicate. I'm just going to hide the original. And then I'm going to go ahead and tap on flock. And when I do that, you'll see this has these gray and white checks here. So with alpha lock turned on, and I have that green color selected, and now I can actually just color to change it. It's hard to see because it's not that different from that dark blue. Let me try something. Ls, you can see it better. Let's use that orange color. So now I am working. Technically, I am working destructively because I'm changing the original. There's no going back once I start coloring this. But if you remember, I made a copy. So we do still have the original here if we ever want to go back to it. But basically, all we're doing is coloring right on over with a different brush. And because we have alpha lock turned on, it's only going to apply the color to where there already was a design. And obviously, this will take longer, depending how big or small your brushes, but it could be nice if maybe you do want this effect or part of it's colored, part of it isn't, or if you need a lot of control. That's also an option. So in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how we can use these different techniques to recolor something that's a little bit more complicated. 5. Recolor Artwork: Layers: Alright, so let's go ahead and take a look at something a little bit more complicated than my first example. So what I have here is going to be the basis for a pattern. So this is my tile that's going to repeat over and over to make a seamless pattern. And I have this very traditional kind of Halloween colors here, this pumpkin orange and a nice, bright purple, lime green. But I want to mix it up, do something a little bit more of a pastel, kind of softer color. So maybe something that might be appropriate for baby or kind of nursery items, and maybe have a different audience. So I'm going to show you what my file looks like. So you can see. I do have a lot of different layers, so things are separated by color, but it's pretty complex. And then I even still have some of my original sketches up here. So, what can we do to make this a little bit easier for ourselves and recolor this artwork all at once? So I'm going to show you how we can simplify this so that we don't have to go through and add a clipping mask to every single one of these items. So the very first thing I'm going to do is tap out of here, and I'm going to go back to my gallery. And then I have my artwork right here. Oops. And my artwork right here, and I'm going to hit select. And then tap on the artwork. And then now that I have it selected, I just hit duplicate. And then it duplicated that artwork here. So, I probably should have named it, but it's just called Untitled artwork. And now I'm going to work from my duplicate file. Just let me x out of that and open up my copy. And this is just so that I can preserve my original drawing. It's safe, and anything I do now won't affect it. So let's go ahead and start to organize these layers to make them easier to recolor. My goal is to get everything that's the same color on the same layer. And I'm going to do that starting with this It's a white. It's actually a very, very light purply gray. Zoom back out, and I want to find everywhere those appear. So some of them are just layers on their own, some of them appear in groups, as you can see here. If you're not familiar with working in groups, I'm just going to cover that really quickly. Basically, you can use your layers to create a group. And that's really nice for moving everything around, but keeping them in separate layers. So if I have this selected, and I go to the era up here. I'm moving around every single one of these layers, so it looks like it's just one object or drawing. I go to undo that. But in this case, now that I have everything where I want them, I'm going to take everything out of those groups. And really quickly, I'll just show you how to make a group. All you have to do is tap and drag on two layers, and then this group option will show up. Tap group, and now I have a new group. So I'm just going to sat really quickly. And I'm going to go ahead and start the work of taking these out of the existing groups because we're going to reorganize all of our layers. So basically, I want to have a layer that's all that light purple, gray color. Then the next layer is going to be this slightly darker purple gray. And then green is going to follow that. And then these little white dots, and then our actual kind of line drawings around these shapes. So let's go into our first group. And to pull them out of the layers. All I have to do is tap and then drag it up out of the layer. So you can see excuse me up out of the group, so you can see it's no longer part of this group. And I'm trying to keep things in somewhat of an order. And here you can see that I am using a clipping mask. So let me zoom in. We're looking at this ghost over here. Now, if I release the clipping mask, so if I basically tap on it unchecked clipping mask, you can see that my lines actually go outside of the initial shape of the ghost. So how is that going to work? What can I do to make sure it stays a mask? Well, instead of using a clipping mask, I'm going to turn it into a regular mask. So I want to replicate what we did with that clipping mask. So all I have to do is Whoops. Go ahead and tap on the slayer. So I have it selected. And then I'm going to tap select. And then I have this set to automatics. So that's really important. So it's automatically selecting everything that's in that layer. And then from there, I'll go back to the layers panel. And then you can see that these kind of, like, gray stripes here. They might be a little bit difficult to see. But basically wherever you don't see those stripes is kind of our selected area. So with that selection made, I'm going to tap on this layer. And then I'm going to hit mask. And then now we've basically made a brand new mask, and it's gotten rid of all those rough edges because we're masking them. So everything you can see in this panel here, this black is being blocked out, and the only thing left is the white area. And that's kind of the difference between the clipping mask and a regular mask. And then at this point, I'm just going to go ahead and basically rasterize that. So I'm going to make that selection permanent. So instead of a mask that I can edit, I'm actually going to basically erase those excess edges. So to do that, I'm just going to use my two fingers to combine these And there we go. So now, if I select or hide it. I can move it around. You can see that it's got these nice edges that were clipped exactly to where that mask was. Scan. Tap twice. To do. Okay. So I'm gonna have to do that anywhere that I've used a clipping mask before. But first, I'm going to keep working with the skill shape here. So now I can take that outside of the group. Take this outside of the group. And then there's nothing in this group anymore, so I'm going to go ahead and delete it. And you can see why I wanted to preserve that original artwork and made this new file, and that's so that we're not messing with that original because I am going to be making permanent edits here. Okay, this one, this little ghost here is all cleaned up. So let's move on to the next group. And to double check. Okay. So it's this ghost up in the right hand corner. In ideal world, I would have a name for each of these layers. I don't. It's a little bit messy, so please excuse me. But it's not always easy to do as you're working. So let's go ahead and get these layers out of that group. I'm basically just trying to keep them in the same order. Okay. So we've come across another one of our. This was a clipping mask. So if I zoom in, you can see that this goes. These little white lines go outside the edges. So I want that to be clipped to this kind of green background layer from the bow tie. So I have to do is tap on the layer of the shape that I want to clip this to. And then I'm going to hit select. I have automatic selected still, so that should automatically be selected. This green layer. You can see the stripes here, everything that isn't selected. Tap on that white cream color mask. Perfect. Now those lines have been cut off to that shape. And then I'm just going to combine those layers. And now there's no edges, and clipping mask is permanent. So I'm just going to go through with the rest of those ghosts and do that same process. All right. And then another trick that will make things go a little bit faster as you're doing this is that we can actually select multiple layers at once to pull them out of a group. So I already have this layer selected, and I'm just going to tap and drag. And now I have all of these layers selected that we're in this group. I'm going to tap and drag up. And then now I've taken them all out of that group at once. So that's just a nice little tip for saving some time. 6. Recolor Artwork: Changing Colors: All right. So now I have my layers all nice and removed from those groups. And now I'm going to basically move everything that's the same color onto the same layer. So now that I have all these layers pulled out of their groups, I'm going to start arranging them in a very specific order. So my top layer is going to be this purple color. So I'm going to start moving all of the layers that use that purple at the top of the stack. And this isn't a super complicated design. So if you have something where, let's say, you repeat a color, and it's actually layered, there is going to be more work you have to do to get around that. But this design isn't super complex. So this should work just fine. All right, so we actually do have an example of what I was just talking about where we are going to have to do some editing. So in the bottom left hand corner, you can see that I have the line that went all the way around the shape of the ghost, and it's actually over top of the headphones here. So that is going to be an issue because the headphones actually are on top of the ghost, and I want that. So I don't want this line here. So there are a couple of things I could do. I could find that shape. So it's in this layer here, and I could simply erase that line. And just clean it up that way. I'm just going to do that. That's a nice quick fix, but you can see I also have kind of double lines here, too. And that's because like I said, the headphones are coming up. So I would actually have to all of this. Except I went too far. So it's not totally a perfect process to erase like that, but it's good if you only have a small area like this. Another way to get around that is to go ahead and find the headphones and use the headphones as a mask on this outline of the ghost. So let me show you what that would look like. So I have the headphone selected that green shape. I'm going to tap and just look before, I'm going to hit select. So we've got that shape selected. And then I'm going to scroll back up to the outline of this ghost. And then if I just hit mask right now, it's actually going to get rid of everything except for this headphone area. So let me show you. So you can see that it's actually masking all of this outline around the ghost. So what I want actually is to reverse my selection. So I'm going to hit undo a couple of times. All right, so I'm going to go back to the beginning. I'm going to hit select like I did before. I still have automatic selected, and you can see that this purple area is what we have selected, but I actually want to select everything but that area. So I'm going to tap invert. And now you can see that everything else is what selected. So I'm going to scroll back up and find that ghost outline tap and mask there. So now we have gotten rid of that outline so that it makes sense again with our design. And then I want to go ahead and just kind of combine these like we did before, combine those two layers. And you can actually see in the thumbnail. It might be a little jerky to see that that areas disappeared completely. So that is a permanent change that I've made to my design. Let's see if there's anything else like that. So far, no. Oh, actually, over here, too, we have the little tag on the dog here. So we'll have to fix that too. And this one, I'm actually just going to go ahead and erase rather than going through that process because it's such a tiny area. So here's the outline of the dog. Go to find my eraser. Testing out the size. And then, I can just go ahead. And raise that little area. Now, let's get back to reordering things, but I may have to do that again, if anything else comes up, where as I relayer things, it messes with the design. So if we have any other overlapping areas that are out of order once I change the order of the layers. All right. Now we have all of our purple layers. I'm just going to move on to the next color below it, which is going to be our green. Actually, technically, it's going to be this white because the white appears over the green or this really light cream. It only shows up a few times. There's one that's already here that can stay there. And then we'll move on to our green. Okay. And then the next layer below is going to be this kind of medium purple color where these shadows are. Go. And then automatically, we already have our really light, kind of gray purple altogether. So before we move on to our next step, where we're actually going to combine these layers into one based on their color. I'm just going to do a quick kind of a proof read. I guess you could call it of my design and look for any weird overlapping parts. See if I have to do any masking since we've reordered our layers. I think we already took care of all of them. Like I said, this isn't a super complicated design. So all looks good to me. So we can go ahead and start combining layers, which is as simple as pulling these layers together with our fingers. So I'm just going to group those together. Now we have our shading that's all grouped or green, the cream color. And then finally, these outline layers. This is going to take a couple of times to do. I'm just going to keep grouping. Son. So now we've got a much more simplified design and we can recolor each of these layers at once, and we're going to totally transform this pattern. So as I showed you before, we have a couple of options. One would be to use the Alpha lock, like I showed you before and use a brush. And we could just color over to change our colors. I'm going to undo that. That's not really the most efficient for the purposes here, so undo Alpha lock. And I'm going to go ahead and create a clipping mask. So let's go ahead and find. I have a color palette they have in mind. So this kind of still fall colors, but a little bit softer. Let's try with dark green for the outline. So we're just going to click and drag to fill that layer. No going tap on it and hit clipping mask. And now it's clipping that color to these outlines. Let's take a look at the sheets for the gh. So let's use more about creamy color. Actually, let's use the soft for. Soft kind of sage, blue green. And then with that selected, all I have to do is tap fill layer. And I've filled in all those ghosts. And then we can just play around with colors now. And see what looks good. And then now this is the fun part, so we can just play around with color and see what color combinations make us happy or achieve our goals. So, for me, I want to make this a softer color palette, like I said, maybe a little more nursery baby friendly, so I'm going to play around with these. Alright, so here we have my final re colored little ghost pattern here. 7. Complex Art: Adjusting Colors: All right. So now we're going to take a look at something that's ale bit or a lot more complicated. So this is the basis for another pattern. And as it is here, it's somewhat straightforward, so let me show you what the layers look like. You can see, we have a lot of layers going on here. I'm using more colors than I used for that ghost pattern. So it's already getting a little bit more fussy. So one option would be to go about this the same way we did with the ghosts, so I could reorganize these layers and group them by color, and then change them that way. But I won't really be able to tell what this looks like as a complete pattern in those new colors. So it's not exactly a perfect process. And the biggest drawback and some of the biggest drawbacks to doing it that way are how complicated these are to reorganize with all these different colors going on, these different more complex scenes. Another drawback is how many layers we could end up with. So, you know, I only have so much storage on my iPad. Procreate can only handle so many layers based on how big your canvas size is. So at a certain point, you may receive a message that we can't add any more layers, you've reached your limit. So that can be pretty frustrating, too. So what I ended up doing with this pattern is actually exporting all of these layers into photoshop and recoloring them individually that way. So definitely a more complicated process. It did take some time, and I do want to focus this class solely on procreate. So let me show you another way that we can change colors. So ultimately, you have to make the decision if you want to balance doing more work in something like photoshop or maybe bringing these into Illustrator and trying to vectorize these images, which is another good option. Or we can keep the work here and procreate. And it's going to give us a little bit less flexibility, but it might save us some time in the long run. So it kind of depends how much control you're willing to give up or how much control you want to have. And then that way, you're going to give up a little more time. So you'll see what I mean here. So I'm going to go ahead and pull up the actual pattern. So you can see it got even more complicated. I added these stars in the background. There's a lot going on here. But procreate does have some color editing tools that we can take advantage of. So I'm going to go over to this magic wand button here. And then we have all these adjustments that we can make. So we can adjust hue, saturation brightness, the color balance. We can use curves to edit our colors and a gradient map. Curves and gradient map are two things that I don't use very often, but you can see they already have this preset gradient library. So it does some kind of cool things here. I might have to explore this further actually. I've never used it before. But it kind of keeps things in the same color family. The only thing that isn't changing is the background. So you would have to change that yourself separately. And then I'll show you curves real quick. Actually, let's undo that. So curves is going to give us this chart here, and we can play around with the colors. But I'm going to be honest. I don't really know what I'm doing here. I'm not a photo editor. I'm much more of an illustrator, so I'm not really doing this kind of editing with photos, but it does give us some cool effects here. So right now I'm basically adjusting the red tones. If I switch to green, I'm changing up the green tones. So that just gives you an idea of what this tab does. So I'm going to undo all those edits. And then I'll show you the ones I actually do know how to use. So first, let's do hue saturation brightness. So hue is pretty straightforward. That's going to be focused on color. So we're not messing with the saturation or the brightness at all. It's only manipulating the colors. And you can see that I must have this separate from the others. So, if I look at this layer, I actually have a purple square I actually have a square background in there, and the rest are transparent. So that's why it's giving me this funny effect. And then saturation, I can make things extremely saturated. Basically, that just means as much color as possible. All the colors at 100%. So I'm not changing what the colors are. I'm just changing the saturation. So if I pull it all the way back, it's going to give us this gray scale effect. And then finally, we have brightness. So if I make it as bright as possible, you can see it just turned everything white. I bring it all the way down, everything's going to be black. You can see it's kind of getting washed out as I move to the right here. It's getting really dark when I move to the left. So you can see that we don't have as much control over individual elements as we do when we're working with layers. So now that we've kind of gone over that, let's take a look at our color balance. So here you can see all of our color balance options. So by dragging this over to the left, I'm boosting that can up over to the right. I'm boosting that red. So you can see the outlines. It's very visible. If we're talking about the cyan, you can see it a little bit in the outlines, but you can see it mostly in these blue tones, these bluish purples. And you'll notice that this is just affecting this layer. So I'm not affecting the background layers. So you could kind of combine what we learned in one of our earlier lessons about separating things into layers and manipulate individual layers that way. And that would give you a little bit more control than you would have applying these changes to everything all at once. So this is our magenta and green. And then finally, our yellow and blue. I actually kind of like this bluish look. And then maybe I want to change my background, so I could do something that kind of goes with this. Maybe Hm. Something like that. Good work. But I could do some more playing around and just kind of see what I think looks best. So you can see there's a lot less control here. But I did want to show you that there are options, even if let's say you have an old piece of artwork, you didn't create any layers at all. So everything you did was on one layer. This is a way that you can manipulate those colors and saturation and play around with those sliders to get a look that you want or maybe just get some new ideas. I 8. Bonus: Photoshop: Okay, so as a bonus, I thought I would show you how I went ahead and change these colors in photoshop. This class is focused on pro creates. So that's why I'm treating this as a bonus. If you have some knowledge of photoshop and I've worked in there before, you might already guess what I'm about to do. But basically, I'm going to follow the same process that we did earlier with those ghosts. Except, I'm going to do it in photoshop because I can handle large file sizes, and I think it's a little bit easier to work on desktop when I'm working with something as complicated as that. So I have all of my layers separated out. So you can see here for each of these little scenes. And I'm going to go ahead and we can actually export to a PSD file from Procreate. So I'll go up to the wrench tool over here, and then I'm going to tap on Share. And then you can see we have PSD. So I'm going to hit PSD. And then I'm going to share it straight to my laptop with air drop. Okay. And then from there, we can go ahead and work in photoshop. All right, so I've went ahead and opened up our layered photoshop file. This file has preserved all of my groups from before. So you can see that, you know, this painting, which, if I click and drag, she's all in one group, which is perfect. And then all of our colors are already separated into their individual layers, but you can see this is a pretty complicated file. So just like before, my goal is going to be to get everything that's the same color onto the same layer, and then it'll just make recoloring and play around with colors so much easier. The caveat being that if we were working on a pattern or a tile for a pattern, you would want everything to be in their final places because once we put things onto the same layer, it's going to be a lot harder to adjust them. So right now, these are group based on their little scenes. But once we separate them into layers by color, they're going to be much harder to separate out and try to reposition. So I'll show you I do have opened in another file. This is the final result. So you can see here just how complex this repeating pattern is, and I definitely wouldn't want to have to adjust each of these objects and separate them out again once they're put together. Okay. So for this example, I'm going to act like these are in their final places, but I am going to rearrange them just to make things a little bit easier to see. So I'm just going to do that really quickly. S. Things aren't overlapping like they were before, so this should be a little bit easier for me to show you what I'm doing. And I am going to bring up the background just because sometimes I think it's kind of hard to look at with the transparent background. Okay, so let's look at the switch in the bottom left corner. I'm just going to in. So we can see that better. And hopefully you can see I tried to use larger thumbnails in this panel, but this layer right here is our top layer with our ink details. So that's going to be our very top layer, and I want to go ahead with each of these little scenes and put all of those ink layers into the same layer. So just like in Procreate, I'm going to get all of our same colors onto the same layer, and that's going to involve some shifting around of these layers. So let's just scroll through and find our next ink layer. I'm just going to hit command and hit command and click. Command and click again. So I'm just selecting these all at once. Okay. So now I've got all of those selected, and I'm just going to drag them up and out of their groups. So now you can see them all in order right here. And then I'm just going to right click and click Merge layers. And then now they're all in one layer. Oh, looks like I might have missed one. H Right here. I'm gonna drag that back up. Alright. So now, these are all in one layers. So if I hide it, you can see the ink details disappear, and now they're back. Okay. So, I'm not gonna take the time of going through that with every single one. You should be able to get the process by now based on the procreate section of this class. But you would go through all those steps with every color. All right. So with our ink details selected, I'm just going to hold on command. And then I'm going to wait until this little hand shows up, and it has like this little dotted box around it, and I'm going to click. And what that's going to do is select all of the details in that layer. And that's an important detail because this is going to select the actual content of the layer and not just the entire layer. So let me just deselect. I'm going to hit Command D to deselect. If I just click on the layer, you can see that those marching ants, those dotted lines don't appear. So it's selecting everything that's within the layer, not specifically the content. So once again, I'm going to hit command and hold down on command and wait till that little box shows up, click. And then now I've actually selected the content of the layer. Alright. And then the next step is pretty easy. So I'm going to go to my swatches. I'm going to select the color I want to change it to. I'm just going to pick white there this kind of creamy white, so you'll be able to see the difference. So with that color selected, I'm going to go down here to the bottom. Create new filler adjustment layer. And then I'm going to choose solid color. And then this will pop up. We already picked our color, but we could change it when this window pops up, too. I'm just going to hit okay. And then over in the right, you can see that we've actually created a solid color layer with a mask. So the mask is everything that we had selected, and you can see that everything that everything that was that charcoal inky color is now this creamy white. Looks kind of weird as it is now, but I just wanted you to be able to see that very obviously. And then we would go through that exact same process with all of our other layers. So you can see it only takes a few steps, obviously, reorganizing the layers is the part that takes the longest. And then the great part is that it's really easy to change colors from here. So, all I have to do is double click on that solid color, and then I could change it. And I'm just using my little eye dropper tool in these swatches and changing the colors. It could also move around here. And it's nice that it gives you this live preview too. So you don't really have to guess or make any commitments. You're going to be able to see what it's going to look like. And then you would hit okay to commit. And then now we have a totally different color. So I'm just going to show you real quick what that looks like. My actual final design. And you can see that I have all these layers over here of solid fill colors and masks. Something else I did want to point out is that while it is nice, if you can get everything that's the same color on the same layer, sometimes that does make things more complicated, especially if you have a design with a lot of different scenes like this. So sometimes it could make sense to have them on different layers. But the whole point is just to save time if you want to play around with color and not have to backtrack and redo all of your work. Finally, if we did want to commit these and get rid of the masks, that's pretty easy to do. That could be helpful if you are sending final layered files to a client. So they might need all of your colors on separate layers, but they don't need all of the masks and everything like that. So one of the quickest ways to do that is just to create a new layer, so I'm going to go to our icon down here, create a blank layer, and then I'm going to hold down on command. Click on both of these. And then I'm going to say merge layers. And then now we can no longer edit this with the mask. It's just its own layer here. And that's how you would commit that to be just a simple layer with no mask, no fill color. It's just going to be those orange details. So that's just a quick look on how to go through this process and photoshop. It can be really helpful if you like to draw free hand and procreate, but then get more into nitty gritty details in photoshop. So sometimes I do end up combining like in this example. 9. Real-world Examples: Before you start your class project, I thought it might be helpful to take a look at some real world examples of recoloring artwork and some reasons why can be really helpful for you and some ways that you can make the most of it. So here we have my example from class, the switch pattern, and I transformed it from very traditional, bright, cheery, Halloween colors to more muted, kind of sophisticated color palette, something a little bit modern and on trend. So that's one way where you can really repurpose your artwork and try to maximize it. By looking for trending color palettes or updating something for a different season. It's a nice way to repurpose your artwork without having to create something new and made a which art print in a simple black and white design. So don't feel limited to your original design either. Maybe repurposing your artwork is as simple as trimming down that color palette and making it something much simpler. And then here I have the same patterns, but in two different color ways. So once again, we have those bright Halloween colors, and then I have that muted color palette. And you can see how it really changes the mood of the patterns, especially something like the bats. They look appropriate for maybe like a one Z for a baby, as well. They have a softer color palette. And then the top row to me, is a lot more party themed, see it being used for Halloween decor, all sorts of things like that. So really, as you think about color and your ideas, maybe take some time to think about the final use case and how you can design very intentionally for that. And then next, I have an example of some client work. So I was commissioned by a friend to make a portrait of two of her cats, and and I gave her two different color options. So the differences are not major. All I changed was the color of the cocktail glass and the background. So even though the steps I took in this class, we completely recolord our artwork. You don't always have to do that. Sometimes the changes can be as simple as a background color or changing just a few colors here and there, can still make a big impact. On the left, we have something that's a little bit maybe more unique and on the right is a little bit more traditional. And then this is part of the same client project. I just want to show you the other options that I gave her. I could show you plenty of more examples, but hopefully this plants some seeds so you can start thinking very intentionally about the colors you choose and changing up color palettes for different uses. 10. Class Project: Okay, so at this point, I hope you're ready to dive into procreate and go ahead and change up some colors in maybe some existing artwork or a new piece that you create for this class. So please go ahead and for the class project, recolor a piece of your artwork. You can use the color palette that I'm sharing as part of this class or create your own. But I do ask that you upload both an image of your original artwork and then the recolred artwork. I can't wait to compare the differences between your original and what you've created for this class. 11. Thank You: Thank you so much for joining me in this class today. I hope that you find it useful going forward so that you can make the most out of your artwork. If you enjoy this class and you want to learn more from me, I do have another class on Pro Create that's all about creating labels and stickers, so be sure to check that out and look out for more classes in the future. You can also follow me on Instagram at Shane Asal Art or here on Skillshare to stay up to date with the latest and greatest. And finally, please leave a review. It's super helpful to make sure that I'm making relevant classes. I'm always learning from you all as well. So please leave a review. It's really helpful to me and also other students here on skill share. That's it for me, so I'll see you in the next class.