Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello, everyone.
Today, I will be walking you through one of
my absolute favorite things, which is to create your very
own signature color palette. This class is about
helping you find your artistic voice
through color and building a tool that
you can rely on to make your work
instantly recognizable. I'm Peggy Dean. I'm
an artist, author, and educator, and as an artist, I actually didn't find
my artistic voice until I committed to developing my own
signature color palette. And it was a bit of an accident, but it's like the best accident that I stumbled into
because before that, my work felt scattered, mostly because I
love creating in so many different
mediums and styles. So once I found my palette, it felt like me,
it just clicked. It gave me confidence and consistency that I
had never had before. So today, that's what we are going to be
covering together. I'll be using a template
that I made that will act as a visual aid as
we build color palettes. It's not required. But if you do want to snag it,
it's available for you. Color workflow is going
to be your secret to creating consistency and
elevating your artwork, whether you're
painting or designing or branding or
illustrating digitally. By the end of the class,
you're going to have a personalized palette
that's uniquely you. And this is for all creative. So it doesn't matter if you're a beginner or a seasoned artist. If you want to develop a
distinct, recognizable palette, something that you
feel really excited about throughout
your entire work, this is perfect for you. I'm here to help you
unlock the power of color. Are you ready to
play with color?
2. Class Project: Take a look at
your class project and everything that
you're about to build. This is going to be a set of colors that really
reflect your style and give your work
that consistency and personality and depth. And you'll walk through a very unique process to deliver the colors that
you naturally love, and they may be unexpected that you might not normally
think to add in. You'll be organizing
them by value so that you can ensure that you have
that full and complete set, and then you'll be
refining them into something cohesive and usable. That is the foundation.
We'll also explore color harmonies
like monochromatic analogous, complimentary
color palettes. That's all going to
help stretch and expand your palette in ways that still feel
very true to you. And you'll end up
with a flexible and personal color system that you can come back
to again and again. Once this palette or palettes, once the palette is ready, you'll take one design, and that can be an illustration
or lettering piece, graphic design, even just
a quick floral sketch, you'll be recoloring that same design four different ways, using your palette
and its variations. And that's where you really get to different moods
with these colors, and it'll evoke different vibes. And you'll see just
how powerful color can be even when it is limited to the selection
that you've chosen. And then you'll share all of
your four versions together, what you love, perhaps
what surprised you, maybe the color journey
you experienced. And I find that these
reflections are often where the biggest creative light bulb moments happen. So don't worry if your palette doesn't feel perfect right away because this class is designed to help you tweak
and evolve as you go. Everything that you
build will come together in that final
creative moment, and I cannot wait to see
what you come up with.
3. Color Palette Examples & Possibilities: So before we jump in and
create our own palettes, I want to show you the
application so that you have a visual of what your
end goal will be. So if I open this
up, you can see, I have a limited color palette, but I've also played
with other options. So this is another
option, right? And it also is lovely. This is another option.
This is another option. So altogether, we have
multiple color ways, and it just kind of
depends on the vibe. Each of these has their
own interpretation of what that feels like, you know, something
might feel like more enchanted gardeny
that's still light, springy. This one right here is it's
the vibe is very warm. And it's very cheerful, but it also has that, like, deeper grounding
color that brings it into more of a neutral space while still being really bright. Whereas this one
down here definitely feels like it has
a lot more depth, but it's super, super bright. And so you have a balance there. Now, you don't have to have a balance of something
that's super bright with some neutrals or super bright with some depth. But these options,
as you can see, give off a different vibe. This one right here is a lot
more playful and colorful, but the tones are actually much more muted than
what you might imagine, so they're not fully saturated. We're going to explore
how you can come up with variety for yourself amongst the entire spectrum
of colors so that you have your go tos every
time that you want to play, and then you have consistency
across the board. I'll show you another
example here. This one's really simple because it's a three color palette, technically four
because of background. If you look at
them individually, they definitely give off
a different feeling, but they all are great
palettes. They all stand alone. They're all strong. There's not one choice that's
better than the other. This one here, I feel
like florals are such a good example, always. So I have some um they're
not organized super well, but I was playing with some when I was creating these palettes. So this was what I came
up with originally because I'm really
drawn to personally, I'm really drawn to warm tones. But then I thought,
you know, I don't have enough cool tones in my art, so I went with this one and
actually loved it even more. So these are just
little adjustments that we can make to play with our
color to bring it to life. But let's determine
how you can create your own version of colors that you're happy with
every time for yourself.
4. Color Inspiration: I have a color palette
Builder that I've created. I have it available. You're welcome to grab
it. You don't need it. I'm just going to show it to you so that you can work along with me and know exactly what
we're doing as we do it. So I'll be dragging and dropping colors
into these shapes, but you can just grab
any brush that you want. So let's say this one,
and then you can go in on a blank canvas and
just color it in. So you'll know for your notes, otherwise, you can
definitely grab it for free. Okay, so the first thing we
want to do this is where we're just exploring
our go to colors. You actually already have your
color inspiration set up. It lives all over. It
lives in your home. It lives in your Pintresbards. It lives in the art you buy. It lives in the
photos that you take. It lives in travel destinations. It lives in the places that
you feel most drawn to. So when you ask yourself,
why is this enticing to me, it might be a color pop that's
just like, Yes, please. So if you were to
visit those boards, how are they going
to inform you? So I have this
board that's called All the Places on My Pintrst, and I am obsessed
with all of this. And I can tell you why
right off the bat. I love greens and I love color. So you can see
there's a combination of both of those things here. What this is going to
do is actually create color palettes that
are more muted than what we would think to try. So we are used to going
into color palettes, and we just jump into straight saturation,
all the way saturated. But there are so many fun areas right in the middle to play
around with when you are increasing the tint or going into different shades, decreasing,
increasing saturation. There's so many beautiful colors along this entire spectrum. So I want to get us there. I want to get you there
to where you are going to absolutely love your palette. Another place that you
can look at is Unsplash. Unsplash is a website that
has royalty free images, which means that
all of these images can be used for your artwork. They can be used for
whatever you want. And florals are fantastic to
look at color inspiration because they are usually
concentrated colors. They're always vibrant. They always have a lot of
variety in the color itself. So, you know, pinks and then
you have your darker area. So this alone is a great
sampler for pinks. If I was to look
at places again, so I could say travel
and then you can see this is a really
nice earthy palette but still has that
bright yellow. So again, don't necessarily look for the colors
in the pictures. Look at just the pictures
that you're drawn to. So if I'm scrolling through
this, I think, Okay, well, I love all the colors here, but it's not quite
vibrant enough for me. I personally like lighter
colors that are more vibrant. So this would be a
palette I would grab. Another one you could
look up is clothing. Clothing is also a
great source for color. Any sort of design
trends are going to pull in certain
color palettes, and photographs really
isolate color palettes. We don't really realize it when we're
looking at clothing, but you can see
that that happens. Another one is interior design. So if I look this up, it's oftentimes a
lot more neutral, but you can grab some really good
color palettes from interior design that
are more sophisticated. Let's just look at how you can build off of a photo itself. So you can use split
screen. It's really easy. You just pull up slightly. You're gonna have your
procreate icon here. You're going to drag
and drop that over. To the side, and then it
will create split screen. So I have now Procreate
and I have Unsplash. So I want to go back
to that photo I saw. You can also adjust the split screen into thirds
or half, which is nice. So I want to find
where I just was. And then what you can do is open your color palettes and just tap a photo and drag
it over and release. And it's going to I did it here, but it's going to generate. I'm going to drag
that to the top. It'll generate a palette
based off of a photo. So that's really handy. And I love doing this,
especially with flowers. So let's do one more, and we'll do it with flowers. So this time, I'll
just search bouquet. And, this is really dark
and moody. I love that. But then you can have these
cheerful palettes, as well. Like, this one is going
to be really warm. There's not a lot of blues
to it or greens to it, whereas this one's got
a really nice contrast. You're going to get light
lights and dark darks. This one is primarily dark. You don't have a lot
of highlights in here. They do exist, but mostly you have your mid
tones and your darks. So as you are looking
through this, we're going to talk about how to identify what midtones are
versus highlights and whatnot, because we want to have enough contrast in
our color palettes, but I will set you up for
success there, not to worry. So I'll show you
another way to do this that's not
dragging and dropping. Let's say you have saved a
photo on your camera roll or maybe it's a photo of your own you can go to
your color palettes, tap the plus symbol
for a new palette and select New From file or new from photos
wherever it's stored. And then you can tap that photo, and it will pull the
colors from that photo. So this is that picture
that I showed you of that little pink flower that
had a lot of values to it. So you can see, I
mean, this palette is pink, pink, pink pink, but we have a lot of different shades and tints within it. So that's really helpful
when you want to find those dark spots
in the lighter spots, but it's also a
good way to study what kind of contrast that you need in your
illustrations to make them actually stand
out and have that depth. So let me show you how you
might do this if a photo is, in fact, on your canvas. I'll go ahead and
hide this for now and create just a blink
space to work in. And if I was to pull that
photo into my actual canvas, what I'm going to see here is when I invoke my eyedropper, you can see the color
that's selected at the top. So we have this really,
really light pink. We can do this again, and I have a mid
tone right here. And then if I want
a deeper tone, I can grab it from right here. So you can see how that is
coming about very simply. So rather than grabbing all those colors from the
photo, you can do it from this. And you're going to have a lot
of different hues in here. So this is the reason
I like to point out this as a study
first before we get into generating our own is because if I was to go if
I was to look at this, naked eye, right, and
I want to grab a pink, I'm probably just going
to go to pink and go into the lighter areas and just
grab the most saturated pink. And then I draw
with that, and it's pretty. That
actually works well. It's not too bright,
but you can see that this color here is a
little bit more subdued. So that's where we can
make creative choices. Obviously, it doesn't
have to be literal, but this is just an example. Especially the lighter pink. If I was to go into a really
light light light pink, you can see the
difference where I have decreased my
saturation here and added that gray
tone in so that I have more of a realistic
representation. Now, I don't think I'm the first person that will
say not to go literal with, you know, your illustrations because you want to
make them yours. However, I do think
that it's so fun when you can explore within
the color spectrum. So let's start building here.
5. Midtones, Lights, & Darks: Grabbed this download. I'm going to start on
Hugh's Discovery one. This number one is
for reds and oranges. So that's gonna let me
pull some mid tones, some light reds, some dark reds. I don't care about
matching right now. Do not worry about matching. All we're doing is pulling
tones that we are attracted to because this is going to
be it might be shocking. It might be like, Oh, wow, I
actually liked number four, the best, even though I thought I would like
number one the best. So to prevent me from being distracted by the
palette that's selected, what I'm actually
going to do here is create new palette and
then just have it empty. So and then clear my history. I don't want to have any distractions
when I'm doing this. So I can go into
the red family and I can go along this area here. I'm probably going to
stick to the top right of the quadrant if you were
to divide this circle, and I'm going to find
a red that I like. I'm drawn more to warm reds. You might be drawn
more to cool reds. All you have to do is slide
the hue up and down here. So I'm not going
full saturation. I'm pulling it in
just a little bit, so it's not like wildly bright. And then I'm just going to drag and drop the color directly onto the first shape. Now, if yours is not
filling completely, know that there's a
color drop threshold. If you go all the way up, your thresholds at 100%. It's going to fill
everything on that layer. If you pull down and then
go all the way down, you might have some weird edges. So I usually just
keep this almost to 100% and it's just enough to where it's not
going to fill everything. So maybe I'll just switch
the hue a little bit. Remember, we're doing midtones
for this first row only, and I'm just going to
snag a few options. We're going to get to light
reds and dark reds next. So right now, just focus on grabbing some that
you like the most. You can also look
at your classic. If you tap on classic
at the bottom, it's going to give you a square. That might be easier
for you to look at. You can change the hue or you can change the
saturation on the bottom, and the top is the hue. So you can play with that. I'll grab a cool red. And then maybe just
a little deeper. Okay, so there I have
some reds in here, and now I can go into light red. So that's where
I'm going to pull into this white area
a little bit more. You're going to get
pink, essentially. So when you add white to red, you're going to get pink. I'm going to go back to my disk. I work better in there, and then I can change it. I'll go into the orange
area a little more. That's going to pull a peach. I actually you know, if we look at this, this is
going to pull midtone more. There's not enough
contrast here. So we actually need to grab
this and go even lighter. So we want this
to be very light. Now, if this happens to
you, if you pull it in, and it grabs more
than just that one, I don't know if you
could notice that, but it changed more. That's where you're
going to hold and then pull the threshold down
just a little bit. So the more you change colors, because these colors are
getting more and more similar, it might grab the
one next to it, but they're separated, so you
should be able to just pull the color threshold down and then be safe from
that happening. Okay, so pull that in.
Great. Continuing on with the light colors, I'm just going to go we're not going purple. We're
not changing much. We're just grabbing
the lighter shades of these reds. So I'm going to go
into the neutral area, so I have more gray, and I'm also coming down a little bit. So this is going to be
a lot more neutral. It's not going to be up
along the sides here, that's staying away
from the shade, and I want to have some
shading in there to where we actually have
more of a full spectrum. That's a little
too dark. Alright. Now I'll grab some dark reds. So you're going to
continue this process. Until you have, I know that
it seems like a long process, but I promise you
it's completely worth it when you build up your palette that you are so excited to use over
and over and over. So see dark red can
actually go into a muted kind of brown,
like a mauve brown. All we're doing is changing the hue a
little bit and changing the tint and shade and
saturation in here. Okay. I think I need one that's
a little more wine tone. There we go. Maybe cooler. I don't have a cool cool one. Okay. So there I
have some midtones, light reds and dark reds. We'll do the same for oranges. And then when we're
done with that, we can go to the next one. So we're going to
go to number two. Now, you don't have to turn
these layers off and on if you grab this download because
I have page assist here, so you can see you
can kind of go through each layer as if
they are sketchbook pages. If you want to turn that off, you can always turn it off under the wrench icon and
then go to Canvas, and then Page cyst
is right here. So now we'll do the
same thing for yellow. I love a true yellow,
so I'm going to grab the yellowest yellow I can find. But I'll also go into
this orange hue, and I'll also go into a
little bit of a green hue. And then I'll dole it
down a little bit I also love a good ochre color. So those are my midtone yellows. We'll continue this with yellow and greens, blues and violets. When you have all of your
midtones, lights, darks, I want you to really
look and make sure that your light colors are indeed light and your darks are indeed dark because this is
where a contrast comes in. So if this is looking
similar to the midtones, we're going to want
to adjust that. So don't resist going in and
ensuring that they are dark. Like, oranges are going
to look quite brown, but the undertone
is still orange. Because if it was over here, you can see that
the undertone here. This is the orange undertone, and this is the same exact area, but with blue as the hue. You can see that it's in there, but we need to pull darks from the orange
from each mid tone. So that even darker. And it's okay if we get
right in this muddy area here where you can't quite make it out because that
undertone is in there. So you can definitely
see the difference between these dark tones, whoops, these dark tones and
these dark tones, right? So anything that looks like
it's a bit too saturated, a bit too bright,
you're not quite in your sweet spot for your
lights and darks just yet. When you are, though, we're going to select our
favorites from each one.
6. Curate Your Color Selections: Next thing we'll do, and again, you don't have to
have this, but this is just going to give you a
visual of what we're doing. We're going to select
one midtone one light and one dark from
each color family, and we're going to put
them into these trios. So if I go to the Red family, I can grab my favorite red. So for right now, I really like this one
right in the middle. So however your eyedropper is invoked, go
ahead and grab it. If you don't know how
to make that come up, you can go to your settings or your wrench icon,
which is actions, go to preferences, and
then your controls, and then you have
eyedropper right here, and then this is how your eyedropper will
come up for you. So mine is touch and hold,
and that's going to, uh all I have to do
is touch and hold, and then it'll come up.
So I grab that red. I'll go to the page
with the red family, and that'll be my main color
there, my midtone color. So you'll drag and drop
that or if you don't have or if you're not
using the template, go ahead and just color that on, and that's going
to be your main, and then we'll go to the light. So I will grab I think
I like this one, but I think I want
a little pink in there and maybe a
little cooler pink. So I'll go ahead
and grab this one. And, you know, seeing this here, I think I want it even lighter. So I'll go ahead and push
that lighter and see. See if I like how,
I like that better. So I'll grab this one and go ahead and drop it into my light. And then I'll grab my dark tone, and I have a warm red, a light. I have a warm midtone, a cooler light, and then I think I might like a
wine color I went with. I'll go ahead and drop
that into the dark. And now you can see that
I have a balance of these colors so that I have a version to pull for light
for dark and for the midtone. You're not set to this. This is not going
to be like, This is the end all of your palette. You could come in here
and maybe you love this version and I can just go on and put it next to there. Okay, so Okay, nobody's saying that you can't have multiple colors in
your red family. But this is just
going to give you a starting point so that you
can start building these up. Next version of this page is actually my favorite,
so we'll get into that. We'll go ahead and do orange. I'll grab my favorite orange. And I think I like
this terracotta color. So I'll go ahead
and pull that one over into my main color. I'll go here and grab the light color I like.
These are pretty similar. I think I want to see what it'll look like if one of
these is even lighter, 'cause I didn't get
quite light enough. Whoops. Go. I think
I like that one. I'll go ahead and pull that
over into the light area, and then I'll grab a
dark version of these. I think I want to go for this more gray tone, which
is surprising to me. It's not something
I would normally grab, but I actually
really like it. See how that created a
family that works together. We'll go to yellow,
do the same thing. I think that why not go
for this dirty color, this dirty greenish color. I really like how those are
looking together already. So this is part of
the fun discovery. So you're not married
to this palette, but it's going to give you
a great starting point to really pull in colors
that get you excited. So we'll go back to there, grab a dark version. See, this isn't
quite dark enough. Let's see if I grab that color and pull it even further down. What will happen. This one. All right. Okay, we'll go to
greens and grab from there. I like this muted tone,
so I'll pull that in. Green is actually here on this chart if you're going to be working
along with me. Green here, light. I like this. Also this muted sage, really light sage color, and then I'll go for
this deep forest. Actually, I'll do the
one right next to it. It's a little cooler. It looks like I pulled
really cool greens, but I like the way that it's working out,
so that is right. Okay, so we'll go to blue.
Same thing for blue. This is like a
corn flower color. I don't know that I like it with this palette
as it's coming up, so maybe I'll go for more of
a teal. Yeah, that's better. So, see, you can start
to see this coming to life before it
actually even gets there. Okay, so then light blue. And finally, the dark. And then the violet. And you might be wondering
why I have brown here. And that is because while we
did pull brown from here, Brown has a lot of
space to show up. And so I wanted to
be able to give us the opportunity to
grab a mid tone brown, so without having to take away from the orange family
or the red family. So maybe that is more
terracotta for you. Maybe it's pretty neutral
or maybe it's more golden. But that's going to give you that opportunity to have that grounding color, the neutral. And then we'll go light with it. Okay. And then a
deep dark brown. You can make this really
warm or a little cooler, desaturate it. There we go. This is our starting point. Again, nothing is set in stone. We don't have to be
married to this palette but this is going to
be your building block into the next portion, which is where you
really start to tweak exactly the
colors that you pulled.
7. Build Your Signature Color Palette: So I want you to pick one color, and we will put those
into color harmonies. As a reminder, you do not have
to work on this worksheet. This is just a visual. So again, if you grab, let's say you want to
do this light color, and you have your
main color, great. And then I'll show you how to go along and build those colors. You can just scribble them in, scribble them next
to each other. Or you can grab this for free. But just so you know. Okay, so I'm going to grab the pink.
I thought it was fun. I know that it's crazy
because I love this red, so I might end up doing two of these red family colors in this palette that I build
up. Who knows? We'll see. My suggestion for you is to
do a few different of each. Actually, I would duplicate
this a few times, and then you can create a few different varieties of these. So I'll go ahead and
pull that main color. And what we're
going to do is take that main color,
that exact same one, and we're going to pull it into all of the main color slots. And if that means scribbling in each section, that's fine. You need six groups
at the end of this. The first one is monochromatic. This is exactly what we just did when we made these families. It's monochromatic. It is different tones,
different shades. So I can go in anywhere
I want in here and create a
monochromatic palette based off of my main color. We're not thinking
about reds anymore. Or any other family
is worth just thinking about our main
color and going from there. Now, I feel fine with changing my hue slightly
with monochromatic tones. So sometimes I'll just tweak it just a little bit so that I can get a little more variety in my monochromatic palette. Like, those two. This is a
little warmer than this, but that is what
I decided to do. I want you to play with getting dark and light colors in this monochromatic in all
of these color harmonies, really, but it's
going to allow you to have depth based off of
a color that you love. That's the idea, based off of one color that
you happen to love. Now you have each
individual palette for it. So let's really quickly,
I'm not going to go into a lot of
color harmonies, but I am going to
share with you Pro creates tools for these.
I love these so much. My favorite favorite favorite is an analogous palette,
so we'll do that next. These are all terms you'll find in regard to
the color wheel. Monochromatic is the same
color in different shades. Analogous, what that means is colors that are next to each
other on the color wheel. Let's say we have
red here and then we have pink right here, and then we have
orange right here. That area right here. Now, if you want a quick
reference for this, just go to harmony and it doesn't look
clickable, but it is. Right here, if I tap it and you'll see all
of these choices. I'll go to Analogous first. Now, keep in mind the
color you have selected is the color it's going to show you analogous palette based off of. I want to grab that pink. Now you can see right
here the analogous color. It's hard to see these are overlapping because
it's so close to white, but there are two versions. I I tap the one next to it, I then have this orange tone. If I tap the pink again to make sure to make sure that's selected and then tap
the one next to that, I then have this lilac tone. So this is where that analogous palette is created
based off your main color. And if these were true to the same tone and
shade or tint rather, of this main color, then they're also going
to be really light. But remember, I said, to make sure you have your mid tones, your highlights and
your deeper tones, your dark tones in
with your main color. So even though I just
tapped that purple, I can go back in and
change the shade, but I could also change the hue. I can play with it if
I go back to my disc, and then see how that
adds a little depth, and maybe I'll bring
that even darker, okay? So that's where I'm creating an analogous palette
that isn't so literal. And this is where we
start to really open up. And I think that
this is often missed because we use color harmonies, and we think that they have to be exactly along the lines, um of the same
values and whatnot. But now I have two mid
tones with a light color, and so what do I need now? I could use a dark color and maybe another light
color or two darks, let's just see what happens. So if I tap this again, I'm going to go
into my harmonies, and then maybe I'll pull
that middle color just out, and then I have
these tones, okay? If I pulled that down, what's
that going to give me? That's going to give
me this nice neutral. I want that even deeper, so I'll go ahead and
make that even darker, see how that is
building together, and it looks really
sophisticated instead of being
so in your face. So this is my secret lepon
oh, I love it so much. Alright, so let's we grab
that pink one more time. I'll drag this out. And then
I'm going to go to the disc. I want to see what
this is giving me. Now, I can keep with the pink because that's part of
the analogous palette. We need that anyway. So maybe I'll pull
this down there we go. Okay, there's my analogous
palette that's a little more sophisticated than what
it would have given me straight out of
the box, so to speak. All right, so let's
do complimentary now. We're going to grab
that main color again, go back to our color harmony, tap analogous, and then we
will go to complimentary. So this is going to give us
the color that's directly opposite of itself
on the color wheel. In this case, because it's
pretty close to white, this is also pretty
close to white. If I tap it, this is the
color that it produces. Now, I don't love this pairing. If you have that
feeling right away, don't you don't have
to be stuck with it. This is a palette
you are building. So if I go in here,
go back to my disc. I can bring that down and maybe even desaturate
it a little bit. And then I have this tone, which I actually really
do like together. Okay. So going back to
that main color harmony, we're just going to play
in these two areas. So we'll play with the
pink a little bit. We'll play with that blue, that teal color a little more. We can bring this
into our deep tone. Bring that to the back here. I want to put a darker pink. Next to that. So see
how that worked out. Complimentary. So you can
tweak this even more, though, where it doesn't
have to be so so similar. So let's say this
dark color here, I went to my disc
and changed the hue. Slightly, I know I'm
breaking the rules. I know it, but that
is just fine with me. So then I can pull
that in and see how it just livens it
up a little bit. These grains are really similar. I do like this one. So let's see what we can do about changing the hue slightly on this one. I'll pull it more blue and push a little
more saturation in. It's subtle, but it's something. Okay, this is where
we're going to get a lot more
colorful when we get into split complimentary
and triatic and tetratic. So split complimentary. Is the same idea as complimentary where it's
opposite on the color wheel. But instead of being completely
opposite, it's split. Here's the other side, but
then we're going to go right next to what
the other side is. That looks like this. We have this blue selected. These are the split
complimentary directly across and
then spread out. In the analogous world. It's essentially an
analogous palette with the complimentary color
of the analogous palette. That's not confusing.
I did my job. If this is the color we're
basing everything off of, we're going to
grab that and look at what's on the opposite side. If we dragged that all the
way out to full saturation, these are the opposites of it. We have this bright
blue, bright green. Our color, in this case, is closer inward, so I
have this green here. I can pull that over,
which is super bright. Then I have grab that again. And then I have this blue color. So that's what I would be
working with if I was going literal to the exact shade and tone of this pink.
Don't want that. So I'll go ahead while
I'm on this blue, I'll return to my disc,
and I'll just play here. And I'll grab this,
like, gray denim color and fill just that shape. Okay, I like that, and
then I'll grab this green, and maybe I do want
a vibrant green, but not so so light. And then I'll just tweak the hue slightly and then we'll see
what this looks like. Okay. That's not terrible, but let me go the opposite direction
and make it a little warmer. I think I'll like
that better. I do. Okay, so see how I just put
my own personality into it. I wanted something
that was a little more olive and that
works great for me. I'll go ahead and grab
some more of this pink and maybe I'll push a lot of saturation in but
create a midtone with it, and then I'll do another light
version maybe in the blue. See, you're just building up, you're just playing and seeing what you can come up with
that you're happy with. It ends up being a
very fun exercise. So we'll do the same for triatic and Tetratic if
I'm pronouncing it right. But you're going
to go to harmony. You're going to tap here, and triatic is a triangle,
essentially. I'll go ahead and
grab this green, but return to the disc because I want to bring this
down quite a bit and then shift it to a color that I'm really happy with in
that same green family. And if you need to, because you know it's in
the green family, if you don't love what
you're coming up with, you have your color
palettes as reference. So if I wanted this
soft sage green, I can grab it and
bring it on in, and then that's going to
help me build up my palette. So you always have that option. But I want to give you all of these tools so that you can
use them at your disposal, and you can be really, really happy with
your end results. Because I promise you,
when you love your colors, you will like your
artwork, so much more. And that is exactly
what happened to me. Okay then Tetratic is
four. It's a quadrant. So going into
harmony, here we go. One, two, three, four, I'll grab this one here and it's
going to be a yellowish. I actually really
like this color. It doesn't really balance well, but it's like a yellowish green, and
I think it's really fun. I'll just bring it
down a little to add a little bit more of a gray in it and it balances a little bit. It's still a light color, so
I can still use it for that. But since I have three left, I want to make sure I'm
grabbing all four quadrants. I'll go back to
harmony. Now I'll tap the blue green color, but I'll go to disc and just
edit that to my desire. This one's going to
be real vibrant. Then the next one, grab
that main color harmony, and this is a violet color. I really like this one
that's coming right out, so I might save that and then also
create a deeper version. There we go. Okay. So here I
have this complete palette. Now, from this
palette, you guys, this is only one color out of all of these colors
that we just pulled. All of these colors this
family that we just created, we have only created one version of all the colors
that you just grabbed, that means that you have so much opportunity
to build a palette. So if I go to my final build
your complete palette, which again, grab colors
and scribble them on here. But let's say, okay, I'm
going to grab this pink that created this full spread. I can pull this
in, and now I can use this just to pull
the colors that I loved. And I can also keep
this to base it off of my colors when I
want to isolate a palette. So I just created six
different color palettes. Even though I'm not even
creating the full one yet, you guys are going to have
so many options when it comes to building your own
colors that are cohesive. Let's fill this palette based off of what
we've just created. If you want to duplicate it
to save one layer you can. So the first thing I'll
do is grab my main color. Let's say I want to base this
palette off of this pink. I put it here
because I usually go mid tones and then lights and darks, you can put it
wherever you want, and then I will grab a few more light tones that
I like but not everything. Not everything that
I just did because I want to pull in a
few more colors from this palette eventually into this one that I'm building. So what what do I
love right here? What do you really, really
like that you're drawn to? So that's what I'm
going to focus on. I'll go ahead and
grab this dark color. See, these are really,
really similar. So I don't think I'm
going to keep that one. I think I'm going to swap that out for
something different. So maybe this sage
tone. There we go. And going through here, I'm grabbing those tones. You can see how this is coming
together and it's more of a polished version of color. And that is what we want
more than anything. This is a mid tone, so I'll go ahead and pop it at the top. If you're confused with what midtones highlights and deeper tones are
going to look like, something that you can do
that's a bit of a trick, you can change something
to gray scale. So if I tap a new layer and
then I apply a clipping mask, the reason I'm doing that,
you don't usually have to, but I did it because I
have page assist on, and so it's just going to
act like its own page, even with a blend mode, if I don't apply a clipping mask, don't
let that confuse you. But the idea is just to
make this gray scale. So if you go anywhere
in the gray area, I just usually fill it with
black and then I'll go to the blend mode here and then just go down all
the way to color. Color is going to just basically with the
black desaturate it. So this here should
be medium gray. This should be light gray,
and this should be dark gray. So that's going to
be your telling of the way that you can tell your midtones your light
tones and your dark tones. So that should be dark.
This should be light, and this should be in the mid. And then you can turn
it off, but use that as you need to to make sure that the
colors are light enough, dark enough, or
middle of the road. Okay. So essentially, this is going to give you project after project
after project. Whenever you're feeling like, Oh, I have a blank canvas. I don't know what to do
with my blank canvas. And maybe you're not happy
with your color palette. This is an exercise that you can do that is going to make you so, so happy with your choices. I'm going to speed this way up so you can watch
another version of this inaction based off of one more color from
what I already grabbed. So now that you
know the process, you can just watch along. So I'm going to start
with this yellow. And So now you can see if I was to isolate
any of these palettes, they're going to
have their own vibe. Like, this one I'm loving. It's so unusual. This one I really like,
it's very earthy. And then this one I just
like because it's just got that warm grounding feeling. I mean, all of them are great. So I can pull this color then into my palette. So
already, I like this. So this was on its own, and then I added this yellow in, and I really like how that's
coming together already. I'll grab this light yellow. And put that into my lights. And then let's see. What else am I? I
love this hot pink. It's unusual, but
it's definitely. It makes sense for me to
have in this palette. This sage color here. Let's see. I think I have a sage already. So let's see here. This
light purple, I really like. It's more of a mid
tone, actually, so I'll put it into my mids and then we'll go into
and look for lights. This one here, I
think it's good. I think it needs to
be a little lighter to work for a light tone. So I just pulled that
up and we'll see I like a good brown and it is different from this
one, so it's warmer. And then if I go back,
I like this blue a lot. This was its true
complimentary, actually, so I was pleasantly surprised. This is probably going
to be a dark tone, even though it's pretty vibrant. So again, I'll apply this color, I'll apply this color
blend to make sure, yeah, it's nice and dark. So that will work. And then
let's see what else we have. I like this green tone. And then this wine tone I like, I think I might have
one. No, I don't. Perfect. Okay, so you can
see how this is building up and I can do this with
any of these colors. So as a recap here, we're playing just
with midtones, lights and darks, just
playing with them, seeing what we pull out, and then we're choosing
one from each of these groups and putting
it into each color family. So we'll have one midtone light
and dark for each family, and then we'll pull one color and we'll put it
into our main block. And then we will create each version of color
harmony from that. That will inform our
palette as we build it.
8. Test Your Color Palette: Sake of visual, I'm just
going to cover those up so that they are not showing. You can see now a palette that would work
beautifully together, and obviously not all of these colors would be
selected for each piece, but this is where you can challenge yourself to work
with a limited color palette. So for example, if I was to
take this exact palette, can grab these colors and drop them in in the
order that I want to. But why not just have it
be in order of having the top be the midtone
ight tones, whoops. Don't worry if you tapped in the wrong area
because you can always tap and hold on a square in
the palette and delete it. But the other thing is,
you can set current color. So if I grab this
dark color here, I can just go over
that block and say set current color
and it'll replace it. So I've got all these in here. And now I have this
palette that I've curated, and let's just apply this
to one of the examples that we started with so you can see how this would come to life. So this is this block example. I can duplicate one
of these groups. If I'm playing with color, I'm not really sure how I
want to render the color, I will end up grouping
the colors and making it work so that they are all on their own layer
so I can play around. Okay, let's use
this new palette. I've got it selected.
I've got the colors here, and let's say I want
to select just five. This gives me a
lot to play with, but I'll start with background. I'm going to use
my recolor tool. If you're unfamiliar
with where to access that, it's the
best thing in the world. This is how it works. So
I can do in live time, change the color to my liking. It is amazing. So if you want access to that and
don't know where it is, you're going to find
it under quick menu. So however you have
quick menu pop up, if you don't know
how to get to it, go to the Actions
menu preferences. Your controls, and then
you'll go to quick menu. So I just have it where I tap that little square in between the brush sliders.
So here we go. And then you're just
going to hold down one of the items try that again. You're going to hold
down one of the items and then find recolor. Okay? So then when
quick menu is open, you're going to tap recolor. There's a little cross hair. You're going to drag that
where you want it to be. Right now, I'm on a layer for
just the background color, so it's not going to it's
not going to matter. But if you're
changing an object, just make sure the cross
hair is over what you want, and then you can adjust
the flood right here, just like the same you
would with color drop. So then I can go in
and change the color. So I can try this one on
the palette I just created. I can try the blue.
I can do this brown, so I want to do either. And this is also going to help
me build out my contrast, because if I choose a mid tone, I'm going to want
everything else to be in light or dark tones because look at how that
just gets muddied. You can't tell what anything is. And so that's why having all the tones in your palette is going to be really helpful. So I want to go bright
for the background. Which means light or
dark for the wings. I'll go ahead and press
recolor. It's over the wings. I still have that green color selected, so I can
switch that up, go to a light tone, and then I'll go ahead and
recolor these leaves. If you're in the mid tone range, not all of them will do well. Like, this is competing. It kind of hurts
the eyes, whereas this one does actually work. If you like layering
different hues of green, I really do, but it's
not for everybody. I know that. So that's something to play
around with as well. And then we'll go
ahead and change this here to a light
or a dark ideally. I think I'm going to like
that lighter better. So maybe this light tone this one's a little more
green. This one's creamier. I'll go with the cream color and then I'll do the details. So instead of being
this brown color, they will be maybe
I'll go with that one. And then I will do this last
layer of these flowers. I like how the blue
pulls and kind of grounds creating
some balance, but let me just see the blue, the lighter blue
brings more color in oh, I like the wine. Okay, so see, that's
a version of this, and you can do a lot with it. So this same exact color palette that I used could be
applied differently. So if I grabbed this peach tone and made that the background, if I grabbed the wine and made that the
wings, like, already, we're getting a very
different picture, and I'm only using the
colors that I grabbed. Let's see. I had that
sage color in here. And then I had I'll just look right here 'cause I don't want to do the
palette I grabbed. I just want to do
those five colors that I used because that's going to that's going to allow us to see it on more of that limited palette that makes it have so
much more interest. So you can see how
that really comes to life with the same exact colors, although I really
like a pop of pink, especially when it's subtle. It's so fun. Let's see. I think I want to do that
burgundy color again. Yeah. So clearly, you know, you can play around with
this and make it yours. And then you can see how
it's just, like, very, very different, even though it's the same five colors or
same enough, five colors. So color is a journey. There are so many ways that you can be
creative with it to create a very different energy
from all of your pieces, but still have a cohesive color palette across
all of your work.
9. Bonus Color Goodie: Now I'm giving you an
extra extra bonus. You're automatically
getting access to steal my color palettes if you grabbed the color
palette Builder. That means 150 curated color
palettes, and don't worry. They are nice and tidy, so they're easy to navigate. Watch your inbox for the
access link to that shortly. Let's review what you
have achieved today. You have explored what a
signature color palette is and why it is such a
powerful tool in your art. You have found inspiration
from curated sources, and you've assembled colors
that truly represent you. You've learned how
to balance hues and saturation and values, and you have tested and refined your palette to
make sure that it is versatile and cohesive. And now that you have
your palette or palettes, I want to give you some homework because there is
nothing quite like the motivation and
the drive when we can apply what we've learned to art that we're
really proud of. So start using your color
palettes in your artwork, whether that is illustrations,
patterns, even branding, and try pulling smaller
project specific palettes from your palettes to explore versatility in those
limited color ranges. And then, of course, continue tweaking and evolving your
color palettes over time, as your style grows and changes, I would love to see
your color palettes. So tag me at the
pigeon letters and share the same piece of art
in different color ways. Color is forever inspiring, and the palettes that you have created are something
very special. Thank you so much for
joining this class. It is an honor to help
you take this step. Toward building a more confident and consistent
artistic practice. Remember that your palette
is so much more than colors. It is your voice. So keep
using it to tell your story. Until next time, I
hope to see you soon.
Peggy Dean, Top Teacher | The Pigeon Letters
