5 Tips for Making Custom COLOR PALETTES - Digital Art Tutorial

hey all i'm brad of brave the woods today i want to show you five tips on how to make your own dynamic color palettes for your illustrations or for your designs using pretty much any digital art program and if you're familiar with my work you know how much i love color [Music] [Music] now two things are true one making your own custom color palette can be kind of difficult and sometimes time consuming and two there are a ton of free color generators online that you can browse through and choose from look i'm not opposed to pulling colors from existing palettes or even using color generators but that search can sometimes get you going down a rabbit hole where you lose a ton of time and most of the time you have to adjust the palette anyways to make it work for your specific project so you might as well learn how to make your own now i'm going to be demonstrating these tips using adobe photoshop but the specific art software app really isn't that important these tips are things i implement when using any of my art programs whether it's adobe photoshop or illustrator or affinity designer or even procreate on ipad pro okay so for tip number one start with very few colors you don't need a thousand colors in your palette right away you can end up with that but let's start with one color maybe just one like a base color and try to make sure it's vibrant well for me at least i like to have a nice vibrant color palette to start and it might be one base color and then two others maybe a secondary and an accent color so total three colors let's uh let's make one up on as we go maybe like an orangey color there we go like i said i like to keep them real vibrant because i have a few other tips here on how to kind of get the colors in between here but we'll start with ours that'll be our secondary and this will be our our accent color here we go this yellow big strong yellow it's kind of funny i always find out that when i'm making these i end up going with primary colors but then i can venture off from there and get really crazy with them but for some reason my mind always goes to the primary colors to start so three is nice because if you're trying to unify your color palettes having tons and tons of colors it makes it just that much harder to make sure they all feel unified so three is a great start and then you can quickly start building off of them some other variations of those colors even with just little sliders there i have a lighter blue i can go maybe more magenta in there got the more purple color and then i can start building off of each of those colors and i have a whole bunch of other options right away but i still need to make sure if i want to build these off from each other that everything feels related and that goes to another tip of mine tip number two make sure you have enough contrast you want those lights and darks in there right now if we look at our palette that we already have it's looking pretty similar in value and the way i can tell is by doing either the squint method where you squint at it and if it all looks kind of the same then you can't tell much of a difference that means it's probably too similar in value but you can also convert it to grayscale and or black and white let's do flat and sure sure okay and then you can see automatically how different they are how much they how much value change there is now in the yellow there's definitely more value change and this is clearly darker but it's not a huge difference you want something a little bit more extreme for a more flexible palette the only exception might be is if you're doing like psychedelic art or pop art where you want those colors to be bright and vibrating so let's add some contrast to this palette we want a really dark dark and a really light light so the way i might start off doing this is by picking my core color and then making a dark color off of it it would be easy just to do black but maybe i want to do more of like a dark blue purpley color let's try that there we go that's a nice dark color and i'll use that as my my real dark dark when i need it maybe not need it all the time but it's nice to have that on there makes your palette more flexible like i was saying and then maybe i'll take my other color that's pretty light already and i'll make it even lighter maybe i'll take out some of that red in there maybe a little bit more a little more yellow there we go so it's almost like a little tan color so automatically i'm already expanding my palette but it's also giving it some contrast now it's not quite enough and you might be thinking well what about an analogous color palette those are amazing and those are very similar in value for example this guy right here this is a fantastic color palette and there's a lot of value in finding colors that close to each other on the on the color wheel and that's really really good but if you were just to have these colors it makes it very difficult so the better option would be is to add the dark dark colors and a really light color in there so that you have some options when you're using this as a palette tip number three is one that i use all the time especially right after i finish making a palette and i feel pretty confident but i don't know if they're completely unified now one way to do that to help yourself out it's a little trick that i do which is i add another layer right above it and then i add any color any color if i want to make it a warmer for example if i want to make it a warmer palette then i'll add a yellow on top and then all i have to do is go over here and change it to color but i want my opacity that's a little crazy so i'll take my opacity slider take it to zero and then slowly move up to the right you don't need a lot move up to the right and you'll start seeing it there you go see how much warmer that's getting but it's adding that yellow equally to each of them so it helps unify the palette as one which is really a handy trick and like i had earlier i had like a pink color right watch this look how cool that looks that's a whole new palette that you have there it adds just a little bit of pink to it you can even go instead of just color you can just change it to overlay and that gives you some other options as well but not as dramatic i like to use color but that's just something i do at the very end of my color palette making experience to kind of get everything to feel like it's unified tip number four test out your colors against each other color is relative so it depends on what it's against if you look at this little square right here it's this tan color you put it on this green or the other darker tan or this purple and this color looks very different it almost looks green right here but it changes so it's really important that we look at our palette that we see the colors not just next to each other or nearby each other but on top of each other a good starting point is take your darkest color and put that in the background and then move your palette up and put it on there and then move your palette on a really light on your lightest maybe white's going to be my light color on here and you can see how they interact and how they're going to behave and you're like oh maybe i need to tweak that blue for when it's dark because it just is a little bit too vibrant on there and i can tweak that blue up here maybe and let's see yeah right here there we go unless maybe i feel like it needs to be a little bit less vibrant when it's on that blue so it stands out a little bit more and that's okay i can make those changes and now i just have another blue option that's part of my palette but i couldn't tell unless i put it on top of it it's also another way that i build my palette is that when i'm testing out new colors let's say i want another like a darker almost like a yeah just another darker like a orangier color to go along on here i'm going to test it out on top of it because i want to see how much different it really is but if i do it right here sometimes it's really hard to tell like right here it's hard to tell the difference between those two yellows until i put it on there i'm like okay that's not enough contrast so i need to go on there and tweak it just a little bit more and then i can do the same thing with my red if i want to go pink and look that doesn't look like enough so i'm going to add a little or take out a little bit more magenta there we go and so that's how i make my palettes whenever i'm drawing them i just do them over top of each other so i can see because color really is relative and you want to see them on top of their other colors to see how they interact alright last but not least is tip number five get adventurous with color don't be afraid to inject some really interesting colors into your palette maybe ones that you haven't really thought to use before because there is a way to integrate them in there even if it's just an accent color but one way i like to do this is i look at my color wheel and then i'll try to do look at my complimentary colors so the color right across the wheel so if this purple would be yellow but i try to go near opposites instead of just keeping it directly opposite because directly opposites pretty intense so if you just knock it down one or two off to the side you get those near opposites and it makes it just a little bit makes it sing just right and it introduces a little slightly different color in your power so it's not so predictable but another way you can do this too is just by picking a random let's go back to my cmyk slider just picking another like like a color you would never really use just try it just throw it into your palettes let's use this palette right here maybe like this was like a it's like a greenish puke color let's try it out yeah i would never ever really pick this color by itself and maybe i might need to tweak it just a little bit after i've chosen it it looks like baby poop but when you put it all together oh let's see how it plays on all of these it doesn't look half bad it actually kind of looks nice in there so don't be afraid to throw in a random color like i said you don't have to use it for everything it could be just an accent color but it's one way that i've just kind of found my palettes to be really interesting is by just throwing in some really funky color in there i know it seems kind of weird but adding that funky color in there really does just make it a more unique palette well there you have it five tips on creating your own dynamic custom color palettes for your next digital illustration or design hopefully this video has helped you in some way or another and if you have any color palette tips that you want to share please do that in the comments below that'll be really helpful and i'm really curious thank you guys please subscribe to the channel and if you enjoyed this video please give it a like it'll help me keep doing things just like this alright i'll see you guys next time

Channel: Brave the Woods

Views: 13,457

Keywords: color palette, color palette hacks, custom color palette, how to make your own color palette, color palettes for digital illustration, digital illustration, tips, color tutorial, brave the woods, color hacks

Id: _1a9aqalz-0

Length: 10min 19sec (619 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020