Creating Custom Color Palettes
How I choose colors to build atmosphere
Disclaimer: this isn’t meant to be a technical document! I personally do most of my fine-tuning in Photoshop, but there are other applications that have similar tools. Use whatever is most comfortable for you. Also, the subject matter in this post is illustration-focused, but this technique can be used in any realm of art and design that benefits from cohesive sets of colors.
As an illustrator, I’m often asked about creating color palettes, so I’m going to walk through the process that went into creating one of my personal favorite palettes.
The first and most important question that needs to be answered is: what kind of mood or tone do you want to communicate? When I set out to create this palette, I wanted a very muted, almost overcast or spooky feel. I began searching for a landscape photograph with that type of atmosphere. I came across the image below and it was a perfect starting point.
I drop my reference image into a Photoshop canvas with some extra space on the side to create color swatches, and I began sampling colors with the eyedropper tool. At this point, I do not worry about how the colors work or look next to one another; I normally work with between three and eight colors, but this is personal preference. I poke around until I have a nice mix of colors and tonal values. I don’t worry about having all of the primary or secondary colors, just a nice mix. Sometimes having color constraints and can give very interesting or unusual results.
Once I have a group of swatches I feel good about, I remove the reference image and focus on the swatches. At this stage, the colors are completely random and have nothing in common with one another, so this next step will address that by tweaking them so any combination of colors will work next to one another.
I spent a few seconds staring at the swatches and decided the blue swatch will be the primary color of the group, so I sampled that swatch and added a fill color adjustment layer. See below for reference:
These next steps require a bit of trial and error, but they are also what gives the palette a lot of personalization. With the fill layer selected in the Layers window, change the blending mode; I personally choose between Overlay and Linear Light, but spend some time and experiment with different blending modes. They all perform different mathematical functions with colors and can make some unexpected (and unexpectedly beautiful) results. This step will change the values a bit but the key is that it is adding a little bit of that primary color from the fill layer into every other swatch, now that they all have something in common they will all sit nicely together and you won’t get any harsh vibrations. Of course, if they become too dull or too bright, you can adjust the opacity of the fill layer. Additionally, if you plan on importing your swatches into a program like Illustrator, you can tweak them a little bit with the sliders in the color palette, I personally stick to HSB sliders.
Once I am happy with the outcome, I do a Command + Option + Shift + E on the topmost layer to make a separate flattened layer without destroying the bottom layers of the file. This is handy case you want to go back and experiment further.
As you can see, the AFTER colors are a bit darker and richer. The last gray swatch in particular is a good example of how a little hint of blue is added to each hue. This, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg as far as customizing color palettes go. The sky’s the limit! To get a more extreme palette, try sampling colors from multiple sources, running the colors through multiple layer adjustments, and then tweaking and adjusting until you have a really one-of-a-kind palette of colors to work with. Below are a few sample illustrations to show this color palette in action. I included a monochrome, a two-color, and a four-color scheme to show a wide range of how color can be applied.
When creating color palettes, it’s important to remember that the goal is not to pick out the most beautiful colors individually, but to create a mood, temperature, or atmosphere from colors interacting with each other. A palette of beautiful colors that have nothing in common is going to feel confusing and poorly considered, no matter how nice each color is on its own. Having a palette also doesn’t necessarily mean using all of the colors in that palette at a time; as you can see above, the same palette reads pretty differently depending on how many colors you choose to include.
With these suggestions in mind, go make some palettes! You don’t need to have a specific project in mind to compose a great palette. Just think of a mood you want to create, find some references, and get going!
