Planning Your Color Palette in Children’s Books
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Why should you plan out your colors before you start illustrating your kids book? Taking control of your color palettes gives you the opportunity to create a magical, bold story in your style with unforgettable illustrations!
W hile I was illustrating “Mother Aspen”—a lyrical, non-fiction children’s book (written by Annette LeBox, illustrated by me, published by Groundwood Books)—I wanted to make sure the colors were both memorable and consistent throughout the book.
Because the book is about nature (specifically quaking aspens through the season of the year and the seasons of life) the colors really need to mirror the bright hues and the variety of shades in the real world.
As an illustrator, I can turn up the volume on the colors to really show off the natural world!
Four things that I did to control and emphasis the colors in this children’s book were:
- Start on color palettes right away in my thumbnail drawings
- Keep track of the colors on each page to create a consistent look
- Control what I could to keep all the pages looking like they belong in one story
- Add a dash of magic with a surprising unifying color through the illustrations
Keep reading to find out more about these techniques below.
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(Thanks for the support!)
Thumbnails Full of Color
To make sure the colors worked together and really popped throughout the kids book, I started planning them at the earliest stages of the illustrations—from the thumbnails onward!
One tool I love to use for many of my illustration projects, including this one, is Adobe Color. It’s a fantastic (and free) way to make color palettes using their color wheel tool and color adjustment options. Really, it’s easy to do and helps you create color schemes that are complimentary and consistent. You can even save the palettes as jpgs to import into your art files and sample, or (if you are using an Adobe project) save them to your cloud libraries to use.
Try it out. It’s fun to play with and you’ll get addicted super fast—I know I did! You can even import colors from an image (like a photo) into a color palette so you can start from a real-world set of hues and then play around with them.
Going Digital Fast
When working on thumbnails for children’s books, I like to jump to digital versions quickly so I can add in more details and play with the colors. I use Adobe Photoshop for the thumbnails—creating layers for each color—which allows me to alter them easily and find the look I want for the book before I start painting in Procreate.
You can see some of my thumbnails for “Mother Aspen” below. These weren’t my first thumbnails—those were super rough pencil sketches—but these are the version that I brought the color into.
Keeping Track of Colors Using Thumbnails
I put small spots of color beside each thumbnail to keep track of which colors were being used often in the illustrations—then I could emphasis these colors throughout the book and even add them into other pages to keep the look consistent.
I found that greeny-blue, yellow, and cyan blue were used in a lot of the pictures (no surprise, as it is a nature book), so I added them to most of the pages, even in just a small spot.
I used bluey-green instead of a more yellow-green for the leaves because I knew I had to convert these to CMYK for printing. When printing in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) there are a number of colors that won’t show up and a green with a lot of yellow in it is definitely a no-no. Luckily, aspen tree leaves have a nice blue tiny, so it didn’t look too unrealistic in the final art.
Taking Control of the Color in A Kids Book
Aspens are often associated with their bright fall colors of yellows and golds—but this book took place at different times of the year! In order to keep those beautiful gold tones happening anyway, I used a lot of yellow in the skies and forest floor fauna.
When the weather turns cold in the book, and snow covers the ground, it became a bit harder to include all of the main colors. In the illustration below, you can see I made sure the yellows and oranges of fall peeked in and the bright cyan sky was prominent behind the trunks of the trees. Even without the greens, this piece still fits into the look of the whole story.
Make Your Own Color Rules
In “Mother Aspen”, we follow a grove of quaking aspen trees through all of the seasons. This means a wide variety of colors; from the whites of winter snow to the oranges of fall.
To tie all of these seasons and different palettes together (with their huge swath of colors) I created my own color rules to follow in all the illustrations.
One rule I followed was to use high saturations throughout the book. For example; I used bright, highly-saturated colors for the leaves and skies, no matter what the season was! Even in the dark, the blues are highly charged.
Another rule I made up was to use mainly purple-based shadows in all the images. The light varied between yellow and pink, but was consistent.
My Secret Color Rule
There is a secret thread that I used to weave all the images together: an accent of bold pink magenta that can be seen on every page!
Sometimes the pink was in the sunrise, other times it was a highlight behind the aspen trees, or a layer of leaves under the canopy of the trees.
Although not true to nature, (possibly because it wasn’t true to nature) this pink became a magical addition that not only tied the images together but I think it also gave the book a unique style.
Even though the above clips of pages are from different seasons and times of day, they all have the bright neon pink and the same bold saturated hues. This helps the reader to see them all as one story—rather than just a collection of images.
Planning out your colors right away will save you time in the end, give your children’s book a unified look, and also allow you to make choices that give your illustrations a unique and bold style!
I’d love it if you’d check out “Mother Aspen” over here!
(Thanks for the support!)
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