Vibrant Color Palettes in Procreate 5X: Seasonal Botanical Illustration

1. Introduction: Knowing what colors work well together, it's a great skill and it can have a positive impact on all areas of your life. Whether you work on your own projects, projects for clients, or you want to improve your creative space, this class is for you. My name is Iva Mikles and I'm a professional illustrator and designer based in Europe. Understanding colors helped me to successfully work on many project, big and small, such as LEGO Friends animated series, which aired on Netflix, illustrations for magazines, and my own projects. During your amazing response to my class about color palettes, many of you have asked for more examples to learn and practice. Because practice makes better, I prepared this class for you so you can experiment with bit of unexpected color combinations and you can become even more confident when choosing color palette for your artworks. There is so much inspiration all around us and it can be overwhelming if we want to take all of it in. That's why in this class, we will work with a limit of one theme and reduce the complexity of too many decisions. We'll practice combining color and creating vibrant color combinations on a botanical illustration inspired by the seasonal symbols of the autumn. In the end of this class, you will have an illustration you could use as a phone wallpaper, print, or take your design further and turn it into patterns. I will be using Procreate, but feel free to use any other drawing digital software or medium you prefer. Last but not least, before we start, don't forget to follow me here on Skillshare to get notified when I release new classes and make special announcements about the giveaways and more. I also invite you to follow me on Instagram where you can see my newest artworks and follow the stories from my life as an artist. Let's get started with expanding your horizons and using amazing color palettes. See you in the class. 2. Theme and Color Inspiration: In this lesson, you will learn about my process of selecting basic colors and creating the basic color ballot. I will point out for you what I usually know these when taking inspiration from references and major. Why did I choose autumn as a theme and color inspiration for this illustration? I chose autumn and its seasonal symbols because of the rich variety of warm colors in the leaves, especially the bright orange color, as the leading color for our color ballot. I highly recommend it. When you're outdoors, you take photos of colors which interests you, so you can use them later. Browsing my photo gallery usually helps me to get inspiration and get creative spark when I feel I don't have any new ideas. Before the first color palette exercise, I will try few filters to see if I find some new interesting color palette. As you can see, I'm adjusting the photo with the filters in the camera app on my iPad. In my first reference image, I will settle on the vivid filter because it shows the orange color quite nicely. If you want, you can use the photo as a reference as it is right now, without any changes. But if you want to experiment with more vibrant colors and compare them with more desaturated colors, try out some of these filters. These photo adjusting is actually very interesting exercise, as I mentioned, because it may help you to get new ideas for new colors and new color palette. In the second image, I will try a different filter. Here I will adjust the colors with a vivid warm filter. By looking at this photo, I actually realized that it might be a nice reference for a landscape illustration using open colors. I might do it as a separate clause in the future. I will bring two images from my photo gallery to procreate. I can look at first ideas for possible color palettes and explore the colors which speak to me and which I notice first. When looking at your photos, notice which color you are most drawn to, and try to make them your dominant color for your illustration and color ballot. In this case, I am very much drawn to the orange yellow tones and I will sample a few of those from the leaves with the color picker. To add some other dominant colors from the image, I will select the green from the grass because it's a big part of the image and it creates a nice contrast to the orange leaves. I will also add one darker color, in this case dark brown, which helps the lighter colors do pop. Plus one less saturated color, like beige or less saturated pink, so I can use them as toning tone so to speak. The toning tone are the secondary colors, I don't need to be so dominant or visible in my illustration. Now, as an exercise, bringing another image from your references with similar colors and assemble the colors you are drawn to. You might want to save some of them into your color palettes in your app so you can use them later on. From this example, I very much like the muted orange and the muted brown pink in the bottom right corner. I might use these ones later on. Because as I mentioned, we were creating little bit of limitation from all the inspiration and creating autumn inspired color palette instead of just all the colors in the world, I will also think about the symbols connected with all of them. We will be creating a pattern or a paint, as you already know. Some of these autumn symbols can be pumpkin, acorn, different types of leaves and so on. I will skip to the first ideas here as shapes, and if you're not comfortable with sketching shapes of the leaves and the other items just from your head and imagination, no problem, don't feel bad about it. Most of the artists use references for the objects and things they don't draw every day. Just go to your photos and trace the silhouette of the object. For this example, I will take a smoother brush like ink or dry ink and draw a shape of the leaf I might use later on. Now go ahead and sketch and draw some of the items which remind you of a perfect autumn. In the next lesson, we will combine some of these elements into the floral composition. See you there. 3. Designing a Composition: When you are happy with the symbols and plants you wanted to sketch and include in your illustration, we will put them together into a balanced composition. I decided to create pattern-like illustration, so I will be grouping some of the elements together. If you would like to create single illustrations like for stickers of your favorite things, all of them, you can keep all the elements separately on the page with more negative space around them. As I mentioned, I would like this to be floral botanical pattern illustration. As the first main element, I will take the flower. Inside of the pattern idea, I imagine I could put this design or parts of it on thank you cards, invitation cards, calendars or to-do lists. I will take the flower design and make a few copies varying in size. As you can see within this composition, these flowers will become main elements of my design. On a side note, if you want to see more how I think about designing flowers and drawing them from sketch to finish, you can check out my class of how drawing flowers. Next in this process, I will add few leaves into the composition. Oak tree leaf with round edges, is quiet iconic for autumn. So combining it with the flower will help me bring out the feeling of autumn. Next, I will add another iconic element of autumn, which in my mind is acorn. I copied the sketch of the acorn and put the copies in groups of three, because that's how you can see them quite often in the nature. In these type of floral botany called seasonal composition, I will suggest that you combine maximum of two or three main elements and decorate the rest with leaves or less important objects and shapes. Otherwise, the illustration may end up too busy and of course, you can try different combinations for your designs and compositions. Here my main elements are the flowers and the acorns. They are the biggest and the most important in my composition, and I decorated the surrounding of the flowers with two types of leaves to bring variety into the shapes of the composition. When copying the elements in the composition try to create an overlap, placing the objects on top of each other in some part. In other words, to resemble how you would see it in the nature and then you can delete some of the unnecessary lines and parts of the illustration where the objects are overlapping. But this is not necessary if you don't want to fiddle with these details because we will create colored elements in the next chapter separately. When filling in the canvas with the copies of the elements you drew, try to vary their sizes and angles. It becomes less visible that they are just copied. By doing this, you are also sticking to the rules of the perspective because also in the real life, the elements which are closer to you appear bigger and you notice them first. As you can see here, I made the leaves and the branches facing outwards from the flowers, which creates nice movement around the composition. I also added branches to the design to create leading lines so they can lead the viewer to the center of the image from the side of the frame and of course, I have something where I can visually attach the leaves in the illustration. If you want to learn more about composition and composition schemes, you can check out my class about compositions. [MUSIC] Also notice that I didn't fill in the whole canvas with elements. Keeping some negative empty spaces helps the design elements to breathe and as a viewer, you would notice them quicker. When you are happy with your composition, save your drawing, get the PNG with the transparent background, so it will be easier for you the color when you set it on a separate layer later on. I also prepared a line art for you so you can use that one for practice. You will find it in the Resource Section and in the next lesson, we will do some more color explorations and create color thumbnails. See you there. 4. Color Explorations and Thumbnails: Even though I already had a few ideas about the colors, I always love to explore more. You don't have to spend too much time on this step of the process. It should be quick exploration, so you don't get attached to any of the thumbnails too much. To get more ideas about the color palettes and autumn, I will create a quick Pinterest board of the images I'm mostly drawn to, and they represent my idea of autumn colors. For me autumn is very much about the orange-yellow image. For you, it can be more red sub-tone or beige brown tones. Try to think what represents all of them in your eyes. In the next video, I will also show you a cool trick in procreate to speed up this process. When I'm happy with the collection on Pinterest, I zoom out and take a plain screen. It's like some of us did when we were kids, and we used the traditional paper cutout mood board and then step back to see the overall mood from a distance. But now, staying here, next step is to import the line art sketch from the camera roll to procreate and make it smaller so I can quickly test out the colors. Now, I will insert the plain screen into procreate to sample some colors. I will make another layer for the color swatches and sample some from my references on the top. Please remember that the warm and cool tones of the colors are relative to each other. This means that one color can look cooler or warmer depending on which color is placed next to it. In the first thumbnail, I will use some of the brighter and warm colors. For example, light saturated yellow and saturated orange. Then in the next thumbnail, I will try some tone down, like less saturated warm color tones, for example, brown tones or beige. Then I will test out some more of these neutral tones, like saturated and very light pinks and light grays. You can also test out some darker value tones. It can be warm or cool tones. In the warm color family, I'm thinking like dark red or dark brown. In the cold the dark [inaudible] family, I can imagine something like a dark bluish green. Now, we can practice a little bit more and expanding our horizons and thinking about combining warm and cool tones in the thumbnails. For example, you can use light-blue leaves as a cool tone and pink flowers as a warm tone, or very pale cool blue, almost white, with warm leaves and warm background. Or like in the fourth example, warm yellow leaves with light pink desaturated background and cool two [inaudible] leaves, the possibilities are endless. Try to test out on some of the thumbnails, your favorite color, either for the background or for the big flowers. You can have your favorite color in focus of the illustration. My favorite will be the orange-yellow which I will be using on the main flowers, and I will use my favorite color combination on the left thumbnail, which we will take further to the next license. As I mentioned in the next lessons, we will take our sketch with favorite colors, and I will show you how you can experiment further with the same object, but with more colors. But before that, let's look at two quick tips that may help you with your design process. See you there. 5. Quick Tip 1 - Automatic Color Palettes: In this video, I will show you how you can quickly create new color palettes from your references in Procreate. I still prefer the technique I showed you in the previous lesson, because I like to make cautious design choices. These technique I'm about to show you is an automatic and auto-generated process. However, there may be some [inaudible] accidents and you might end up loving some of the colors and color combinations. When you're in Procreate, go to color, click on the plus sign to add a new color palette. I will click on ''new'', and here you can select either one photo, or select a collage of images, which you have collected, for example, as a Pinterest board. Then I will select the mood board image, I created in the previous step. This will create a completely new color palette based on all the photos that I have saved in the Pinterest board as a collage. Now you can see all of these new colors on the top, as your new color palette. This tool ''alter'' selects the colors which are represented the most in the reference images. You can imagine this function, like if your reference photo would be very pixelated, and then he would even make the pixel squares bigger and bigger into big squares, and then this collection of big squares or the pixels becomes your color palette. You can try similar pixel functions in other programs as well. For example, in Photoshop, you will go to ''Filter'', ''pixelate filter'', select ''mosaic'' and set the cell size to the maximum, the cell size being the pixel. This process would give you these big blocks of color from your references, similar to these automated color palette in Procreate. As you can see, it's quite quick in both programs. Now you can try to experiment with creating an automatic color palette from both a Pinterest collage, mood board or from one photo reference. Don't forget that you can also rename your color palettes by typing on the text above the palettes, so you can find them easily later. 6. Quick Tip 2 - Reference Window: Here is another quick tip. This tip will also help you make your design process more efficient. I will show you how I usually set up my Canvas and the Reference Window so I can use them side by side. First, you need to save your colored sketch as a separate image. I usually just quickly take a screenshot and cut off the edges in the camera roll, because I don't need it as a high resolution reference, just as a guide in this example. As I mentioned before, save your sketch also as a PNG line art, which you can use later on as a base guide for composition. For this practice project, you can also use the PNG line art I provided you in the resources. Then, I will go to my gallery and click on the New Canvas. Because I mostly plan to have this artwork as a background on my phone or as a wallpaper on my phone and iPad possibly, I set the resolution 2,500 pixels by 2,000 pixels, which is enough in this case. The DPI to 300 in case I will decide to print it out. For the digital artwork, 150 DPI or 72 DPI is enough. But as I mentioned, I might want to do small prints out of this design, so to have a higher DPI, like 300, is good. If you are working with clients or you plan to do big prints out of your artwork, don't forget to plan the size of the Canvas, so you don't regret this later. The bigger resolution and bigger Canvas always allows you to have more options for final products, but in Procreate, it limits your amount of layers. The amount of layers in the current size of the Canvas, is also influenced by RAM and storage on your iPad model. You can research your iPad model online, what type of RAM and the storage you have. If you would spell it out, is R-A-M. Now with the Canvas all set, import your line art sketch as a guidance. Click ''Add'', insert photo, and select the PNG of the line art for the guide. I will also change the background to beige, so I don't have this blank, bright white paper which feels like it's staring at me. I always find it more calming to draw and paint with colored background. Also we tested out the beige color in our color thumbnails, and it works quite well. In this case, I will set it to DC blending mode so you can play around and test out different blending modes to see what you like the most, if you would like to keep it on top of your colors. The DC blending mode in this case, will make my sketch look a little bit blue, which I like. Rename this layer to outline, now go to Canvas and enable reference. This is a great help when you can see the whole image in this small window as a reference. Like when you are working on the details in your illustration and you have to zoom out to see if it works within your composition. In this case, I will select the image and select a reference image from the photo gallery. You have the reference image. How cool is that? I think is now one of my new favorite functions in Procreate. Now we are all set. In the following lessons, we can start experimenting with the colors within the shapes and objects. See you there. 7. Vivid Orange Tones: In this lesson, we will talk about how to combine orange colored tones and I will show you some of my current favorite texture brushes. Before you start using the brushes in your artworks, I recommend that you try them out and see how they behave. What is more, you may also get some new ideas for your art. I believe that one of the easiest ways to use textures on the illustrations and still have the overall clean and simple look, is to use the selection tool. This way, I will be using the selection tool most of the time when testing colors together with textures. I will start setting up a layer for colors just under the layer with the outline PNG, which I will use as a reference. I will select the shape of the flower and choose the warm orange we saved before in the color ballots. These warm orange color tone is usually connected with positivity and enthusiasm. That is what I would like to bring into this color combination. The orange and yellow colors can form stunning combinations when placed alongside each other, resulting in a lovely, warm, almost summery feel, which I really like. These firm color combination actually brings an additional brightness to any design. It provides an uplifting feeling that makes you feel more comfortable and at ease, almost like a summer vacation. If you tested some new texture brushes, now is the time to select your favorite texture brush. For the warm orange base of the flower, I will be using my new favorite, and it's called eagle-hawk. Now when I use this brush, we can see some of the background color through the texture, which is quite nice. This creates a lovely variety in color because it's not just one solid block of color. Then you can test out another brush, and this one is called styx. With this brush, I am adding some more texture. For softer textures, you can try out brush called gloaming, which is also quite nice. Now let's add some lighter edges on the petals. You could just make the orange lighter, but to add variety, let's make it also a little bit cooler. You can imagine having a cool light from the sky influencing these colors. Opening the color wheel, you can see two dots defining the hue and color saturation on top right. You can see that the orange is quite saturated and you can see it in the color wheel that the dot is on the top right and the hue is in the orange values, which you can see on the outer ring on the color wheel. I will move the hue slider from the orange tones towards yellows, the cooler spectrum of the color palette. If you would move even further, you would get the green tones. Now, I will reduce the saturation by moving the first dot to the left, making the color more light. Next, I will choose another texture brush and in this case, let's try stucco brush for more rough and define texture. Here we are adding a subtle variety on the edges of the petals and I will add another hue to bring more variety. When looking at the color wheel again, the orange, yellow, and the red are next to each other. To push the color to the cooler tones again, let's go another direction on the hue color wheel. Before we went towards the yellow and green tones, now let's move towards the blue and purple tones. As you can see, I will keep the purple very light, very low saturation, so it blends nicely with a warm tones of the flower, but it still stands out a little bit. For the middle of the flower, I will use darker, warmer, and saturated values to avoid the colors looking too muddy or dirty when they are too desaturated. The yellow, orange, brown color combination creates a lovely, happy summer look. We can think of the warmer, darker, orange and brown tones that they are providing some reassuring support for their more energetic partners. Brown color is also one of the most natural looking colors. I think that the symbolism of growth and the renewal really fits here. You can always test if you like the shape of the flower without the outline by hiding and unhiding the outline that our friends layer by clicking on the eye icon on the layer. When I'm happy with the base colors of the orange petals, I will add small details in form of lines, both in dark and light tones, which we already used on the flower. When I like the finished version of the flower, I will copy the layer with these flower and distribute it around the canvas based on the composition on my sketch. To add variety to the composition, try to make another big flower with the same technique. When finish, make few copies again. Due to the fact that the orange can be also considered as too loud or too vibrant of a color, matching it up with the neutral color like white, can result in wonderful color combination. So to help the orange flowers to pop, but also balance out the composition, I will add few white flowers around the illustration. To add highlights to these white flowers, I will use the same light purple as on the highlights on the orange flower petals. So we have a little bit of variety on these white flowers too. It is nice to use some of the same colors across your illustration to tie it together and create overall consistent look. Here as a shadow, I will use blue. In general, I try to keep the shadows with some level of saturation to avoid already mentioned muddy colors. Again, muddy colors, meaning when they are less saturated and they can look little bit dirty. Lots of beginner artists are using just gray as a shadow, but using blue or other little bit more saturated colors, adds vibrance to your illustrations. When you are happy, you can copy the white flowers around the illustration based on the sketch, or where you feel like adding them. Overall, I'm aiming to balance the use of saturated elements and different color use around the composition. In the next lesson, we will take a look at using the green tones in our illustrations, which sometimes proves to be a bit of a challenge. We'll see you there. 8. Making Green Look Natural: Because we are playing with different color combinations and I would like to achieve vivid color combination, let's add green leaves to our orange-yellow flowers. There is a somewhat tropical vibe created from green and orange. As explained in previous lesson, orange can be considered as a very loud color. If we were to combine it with bright green, it can all become too intense, that's why we will need to combine them well with each other. Let's think about, what are our options with the green colors? Green color usually makes us feel good, especially the earthy color tones, because most of us are quite accustomed to seeing them around us in nature. Green is mostly used when we want to express harmony, stability, and balance. However, using green colors in artworks can be difficult. If you are looking for one perfect green pencil or marker for natural looking landscapes or leaves, there isn't one. No matter what medium you use, creating believable landscape greens is a challenge. Many beginner artists have trouble with this, and they try to avoid using green colors, because they don't want to end up with this evil-looking green. As a side note, of course, I have nothing against using very bright greens, which some can consider evil-looking green, because that can be your intention in your artwork. Does it mean you're stuck if you can't figure out the right green colors in your artworks, which would look more natural? Not at all. What it actually means, is that you will have to rely on mixing colors, rather than using one single color tone. You will be looking for nature for inspiration and trying to replicate earthy color tones for the greens to feel real. In this illustration, I will be using earthy tones instead of a vivid, very saturated bright green. We will be selecting and working with three green color tones for the leaves; one for light, as highlights; one for the dark, for the shadows; and one middle green value tone, as a base for the leaf. If we would start with the main base color for the leaf, I would choose the earthy, warm green, that I saved from my reference photo, when we look at the reference from the nature. As you can see in this color example, if you would look at this color as a standalone, you might be thinking, oh, maybe it's yellow or maybe it's green. If you look at this color in the color wheel, you can see it's in the yellow family. But next to the bright orange, this color tone appears to be more green than yellow. To create dark parts on the leaves for the shadow, in the green tones, I would usually go for either warm, darker greens, almost dark brown, or cooler darker tones, like indigo blue. Again, if you aim for natural looking greens, when adding highlights to these greens, try to aim for warmer tones in the yellow spectrum to avoid the unrealistic evil green. Well, if you're thinking, wait a minute, isn't green and green tones in a cool color spectrum of the color wheel? Well, actually the green color can be also warm as well, if you didn't note that before, because the colors always look relative to each other. We can have cool red and warm red, we can have cool yellow and warm yellow, and so on. So don't be afraid to go for the yellow tones when you want to add highlights to your greens. For the details here on the leaf, I will try to use darker, warmer tones, which look like dark brown, as I just mentioned when going to the dark tones. The little variety here or the twist in the theory, I will push this dark brown to purples, but from the distance, it will still look like a dark brown. Test it out and try out how much purple would you like to be visible in these dark brown details? I like to keep it subtle, but still a little visible. Now, when you are happy how the leaf looks, you can copy this leaf around the composition or you can redraw it with a similar style. In the next lesson, I will show you how to use unexpected purple in your illustration even more. See you there. 9. Unexpected Purples: In this lesson, we will play with purple combinations. You might think that using purples on leaves is quite unexpected. Because a lot of people usually say green, when asked about the color of the leaves. Though, as we have seen from our reference further, the leaves can come in any colors. Nature is quite imaginative when it comes to its creations. Purple is a strong and powerful color with positive connotations like magic, luxury, and creativity. Purples can be one of the tricky colors when we want to make them more vibrant, more saturated, but also less saturated. When playing with colors, try to explore more shades of purple. You can go for a vivid color or more toned down combination. For example, darker aubergine or eggplant tones offer a rich dark shade, that flows nicely into the lighter petunia colors. Actually combining more purple color tones together in a design, can result in a really nice gradient look. The transition from very dark purple tones like the aubergine to lighter tones, can be used to create exhilarating and fascinating designs that demand attention. You can also imagine nighttime scenes using this type of purple colored ballot. Despite the vibrant nature of the purple color, the purples could be grade for a less energetic setting too. In addition to this, you can think of exquisite multicolored fabric or a peaceful space galactic theme design. Here, I think actually both would work well for the space theme setting. It can look peaceful if you use less saturated purples and it can look very loud and actionable if you would use very bright and saturated purples. So try out different types of purples and see what you like. To avoid our shadows here to look too gray and desaturated, I will go for a more reddish tone of the crimson for the shadows. There is nearly a hint of brown lurking behind the darker exterior of these red tone and this results in a nice, welcoming and friendly tone. Crimson looking red, which can look almost brown, works well with our less saturated purple here, which can look almost gray in this middle part of the leaf. But together they create quite lively combination. Purple works really well as a high catchy color because it can be so vibrant and pops out of the page. It is also quite versatile and goes well with many other colors, such as pink, green, red, or orange. Now, when you're happy with this unexpected purples on the leaf and the little bit of crimson, red and brown, you can copy or redraw it around the composition. What I find is really nice color combination is matching purples with pink coral-nude color. This particular shade of pink is quite sophisticated and gives balance to the rich and robust purple. On the other hand, if we would go for these purple extremes like very vibrant, very saturated, or not vibrant and not saturated enough, the whole color palette can start to look a little bit off. Don't forget to experiment with different shades. However, try not to go too extreme and have all the colors in your palette from the edge of the color wheel. What I mean is to have only few colors, very saturated and try to tone down the other colors in your color palette, so everything would work well together. In the next lesson, I will show you how to use comforting browns, yellows and pinks, combining them all together with the seasonal elements of the autumn in your illustration. See you there. 10. Comforting Browns and Yellows: In this lesson, we will be coloring the seasonal elements of the autumn we selected during the sketching phase, such as acorns and berries. In order to add my textures and colors quickly, I will first do the selection for the shapes of the acorns, and I will add the head for the acorns lighter. Based on the reference photos and my memories, I will color the acorn body in a lighter brown and the head of the acorn in a darker brown tone. You can choose the base brown for the acorn body from the color palette we created in the beginning of the class, or take the darker brown color from the leaf detail because we found quite nice, darker brown properly color. I would like to have the acorn in a lighter brown tones, so I will be moving towards the yellow tones in this color. In addition to this, you can play around with the slider on the color wheel, to the lighter and saturated or warmer tones to achieve the brown tone you like. I will add the pink coral nude tones for the variety in the color use. Browns, yellows and the coral pink tones can be considered as tender, cozy, caring color combination, that makes an interesting color palette for patterns, for walls or interiors where we want to feel relaxed. The coziness of the three colors, also makes them a good fit for a pattern on a dress, but still feels wholesome, earthy and neutral. Don't forget that every time you like some color hues and tones, save them into your color palettes for later use. Brown and pink coral, peach, combinations are colors that really contribute to a wholesome healthy vibe. Now moving to the head of the acorns, I am using a darker tone of the brown to create the difference in values. It's actually the same dark brown color as on the details of the leaves, to tie everything together. Also notice the shading angle. If you like more realistic illustrations, try to follow the shape of the acorn, which is round, so you will be adding shading and textures in the curved motion of your brush. If you prefer flat illustrations, something like a paper cut outlook, try to add the textures and additional color in just diagonal shading of the brush. If you're used to working in Photoshop or Illustrator, you can imagine this as a diagonal gradient in a digital medium, opposed to the radial gradients. When I'm happy with the acorns, I can copy and paste them in on the composition again. I will add the stems and branches in the same color as the acorn head tops, to have an overall consistency like in nature. Now, let's color the berries. I would like to have the overall palette with vibrant and strong colored tones, but also keep a little bit of delicate feel. I will go for the light pink for the berries. You can color pick it from the highlights of the acorns, or actually from the highlights of the flowers because we used this light pink there too. If you would want to stake with a vibrant and very strong color tones in the overall color palette, you can go for more Christmas look, and you can color these berries like a mistletoe. In this case, you can try more darker crimson red tones for the berries, or you can play around with very bright red tones and shades. I selected the light pink tones because they can also represent the soft feminine look, and they can also be a symbol for a new life and youth as well in the nature. You can also style out different color combinations on other elements in this composition. As you can see, I'm combining the pink tones with green and warm tones on this leaf bent on the left. For example, you can play around with the brown, yellow, pink color combination, so they can help you achieve the cozy field, and you never know, you might find your new favorite color combination. In the next lesson, we will look at the hue and saturation adjustment to bring more subtle variety to our colors and the overall composition. See you there. 11. Adjusting Hue and Saturation: In this lesson, we will adjust few elements to bring more subtle variety to our colors and the composition. I decided I would like to have fewer leaves in lighter tones, specifically in lighter green. Reducing the vibrance of some of the elements in the illustration will help the other colors to pop more. It is very handy that you don't have to draw the leaves again and we can just change the color hue and saturation to try this out. In order to do this, go through your layers with leaves, select the leaves you want to change, and draw the selection around them with the Lasso tool. In addition to this, what helps the other colors to pop is the less saturated beige background. As mentioned before, the colors are related to each other, and this one is one of the examples. If everything would be too saturated, you would not notice it and appreciate this as much. Go to "Adjustments", select "Hue and Saturation", Choose '"Layer", reduce the saturation, higher up the brightness, and we have a nice lighter green leaves. How quick was that? What is also great here is that the light green leaves are more subtle and blending more with the background, which creates almost a 3D view. They almost feel further away from us than the brighter green leaves. Although now we have a small issue in my warm color of the green leaves preference. Right now the leaves lost the more warm tone which I liked. In order to change that, you can experiment and paint over with lighter, warm green color, which is actually yellow as we know, on top of this part of the leaves, you want to keep warm. As I mentioned in the lesson about having natural green color, when you open the color wheel, you can move towards the yellow tones in the highlights. To do that, I would select the lighter green tone from the edge of the leaf as we have now as a baseline, so the lighter yellow tones would fit with the lighter green, what we just changed, and move this slider on the color wheel slightly to the top right towards the more saturated, warmer yellow tones. Now we don't see the line details on the leaves well. They are very pale, well, because I didn't have the line details on top of the leaf on a separate layer, which you can do that. However, I actually like this pale look on this leaf detail and these can be called a happy accident. So I will push this little further, meaning I will change the detail on the leaf to white. The small change on the light leaves will create the pale, almost pass the [inaudible] green look and add to the nice variety of the current combinations in the illustration. Talking about pale and pastel colors, there is something very peaceful about them, which makes them easy to engage with. They're slightly childlike too, which actually makes them great choice for decorating child's room, products for kids, or overall for the patterns on the cute products. In the next lesson, we will adjust the color a little bit more and play around with a new feature in Procreate 5. See you there. 12. Gradient Map: In this lesson, I will show you a new addition to Procreate a gradient map. That will help you get new ideas and maybe think outside of the box with colors. Gradient maps and gradient overlays allow you to add new color dimensions, echoes the value base of your artworks. By the way, this feature is also available in other digital software. Just check out your favorite drawing software to find it, if it is not Procreate. In Procreate select the element which you would like to test the gradient map on. I will select one or more of the leaves, which I would like to try in different colors. In order to do so, go to adjustments and select gradient map and now you might be thinking, what is the difference from the other color adjustments we just did? Gradient maps allow you to apply the selected color of the gradient to the highlights, midtones and shadows of the image. You can even use the gradient map adjustment on the black and white images. The gradient tool comes with some lovely predefined gradients, which I really like to help you get started. You can see the predefined gradient library at the bottom of your screen. When you tap on one of these gradients, for example, mystic or breeze or other, you will see the effect right away. When you tap and hold on the gradient map you selected, you can duplicate it, adjust it, or delete it. As I mentioned, you can adjust it. You can imagine that you can create your own custom gradient maps, which comes very handy. In order to do that, let's tap on one of the predefined ones and lets adjust it. At first in one of the basic gradients, you would see the two colors in the gradient. Tap on the box on the left in this gradient and select the color you would like to replace it with. On the bottom, on the gradient map slider, you can see that one color is applied to the dark values and the other color in the gradient will be applied to the lighter value tones. To test this out, you can also move around these box sliders around the gradient map. This movement or the adjustment where you move the box, will influence how much of the selected color will be applied on the dark tones or the light tones in your artwork. If you want to have more colors in this gradient, you can just click of the slider and this third color would be applied to your midtones of your artwork. As you can see, you can adjust and change the colors of the gradient map with the color wheel or with the saved colors from your color palette. As you can see, I'm adding a coral pink tones because I would like to add that feminine, delicate look to the whole tone of the illustration. I will use the same things which we have used for the berries in the illustration before. I can select this pink tones for the gradient from the colors I saved in the color palette before. At the end you can add the wide line details on these leaves as well, because wide and thin combination is quite nice and delegate. When I look at the overall illustration, I really like the combination of the bright vivid tones of the oranges, the greens combined with this light pinks and dark pink. Because it adds this beautiful feminine color combination. If you're thinking what pink tones you should use, the subtle pink tones in coral shades aren't too loud in illustrations so they don't come across as overly pink and retain a certain element of sophistication and maturity. In addition to this, you can add more pink leaves if you like, to the whole composition. As mentioned, the pink on its own can sometime be just too much for some people. But on the side of other colors as for example here, in this toned down hues, for me, it's just right amount. Tryout if you like more or less pink in your color combinations. To be honest, I really like the combination, and these color combinations can create a happy and joyful vibe. Each of these colors nicely complement each other. There you go, ta-da. We created a nice, interesting color combination within one illustration with one theme. You can now take this new knowledge about colors and experimentation further and experiment with your own other illustrations. I hope you feel more confident when playing with new and unexpected color palettes. You will have fun expanding your horizons, combining new colors and finding out what feels right for you in terms of color palettes. As I like to say, the sky is the limit. 13. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, you finished the class. Thank you so much for being here. I hope you now feel more confident about trying new color palettes in your artworks. By the way, if you want to expand on the knowledge you learned in this class, you can watch my other classes about colors. One called Color Palettes in Procreate, Find Your Unique Color Style, and the other one, Color and Light Masterclass: Learn from real life examples. You can just visit my teacher profile to find them. As a class project, I would like you to practice with different either vibrant autumn inspired color palettes on the botanical illustration, or create your own illustration with new color combinations. Please share it with other classmates in the project section. I can't wait to see all of your awesome artworks. If you would like me to also share your illustrations on Instagram, please add your Instagram handle so I can help you and your art to be discovered by more people. If you like this class, please leave a review because first of all, I appreciate it so much. Second, you will also help other students to discover the class and you might contribute to their artistic journey too. If you have a friend who loves colors and art, please feel free to share this class with them. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment in the discussion section. I would love to help out. Again, thank you so much for being here and see you in the next class.