For most of my adult life, black has been my favorite color. There’s something about its boldness, its simplicity, and its universal donor quality—it goes with absolutely everything. In a way, it is perfection. But as an artist, you won’t get far by drawing and painting and designing in only one color, even if it is a perfect black.
Note: As I wrote that last sentence, I was prompted to do a Google search for artists who create with black exclusively. I found several references to French painter Pierre Soulages who died in 2022 at the age of 102. His museum is the south of France. It seems all black served him well.
I’ve expanded my favorites to include shades of blue and green. Lately, I’ve been drawn to yellow. (I learned once that yellow makes everything look bigger. I will not buy yellow pants.) Even pink is showing up in my clothes and my designs. It turns out, 11-year-old girls and Barbie® do not have exclusive rights that color.
Naming colors that you like is a far cry from being able to choose and use color with intention in your creative works. Some people seem to have an innate ability to pull colors together. Others of us have to take a procedural approach to it. Or borrow and steal from others. I don’t find much joy in putting together a color palette (probably because I’m not good at it) so I choose to use tools. And that is what I want to share with you here—a couple of tools I like that can help you play with color in your art, crafts, and designs.
Why does color matter?
At the end of the day, color is mostly about preference. Do you like it? Will the people you’re making for like it? You obviously don’t want to always limit yourself to favorite colors, but you do need to pick colors that go together and are pleasing to the eye. Here’s where color science comes in.
This video from Sarah Renae Clark explains key concepts of color theory. It’s a wonderfully clear and simple introduction about how to put colors together. (6:57)
If you want to dive deeper, Kahn Academy (a completely free online course library filled with a range of topics for kids and adults) offers a course called Pixar in a Box (yes, that Pixar). This course includes a Color Science unit. I didn’t complete the lessons, but I trust both Pixar and Kahn to deliver good stuff. Here’s an intro called “What is Color” to give you a flavor of the course. (2:48)
Color Tools
There’s an endless supply of apps and widgets to help make color selection easier and better. Here are three that I use most. (I do not receive a commission for any of these recommendations.)
Color Cubes
Sarah Renae Clark, who made the excellent color theory video above, offers a product called Color Cubes. Each cube-shaped box contains 250 cards. On the front of each card is an inspiring photograph and a color palette pulled from the photo. On the back, you find the color names and hex codes (a way to describe color for digital art and designs) and the colors from the palette in different shades.
When I’m working on a design and need to choose a palette or two, I simply deal out the cards until I find something that strikes a chord. Helpful and fun.
You can watch Renae introducing her products in this video if you’re interested. She talks about not only the cubes but the digital version of the cubes as a color catalog.
Coolors
Coolors is an online color palette generator. It is available as a browser-based tool, a mobile app, and a plug-in. I use the free version in a browser. The paid version gives more options and flexibility in how you search for, create, share, and save palettes (and it's ad-free). There are about a dozen tools to use within Coolors (most require a paid subscription), including a feature that shows you what a given palette looks like in a sample illustration.
My favorite Coolors feature is a nifty randomizer that lets you add colors to a palette with the click of a button. Users can save the palettes they make and can like/ up-vote favorites. So, you get crowd-sourced winners that can be filtered by color, category, or any search term of your choice. Each color is labeled with a name and various color codes (Hex, RGB, CMYK, etc.).
Warning: You can end up spending a lot of time playing around with this tool. I recommend trying it anyway. It’s better than scrolling through Facebook.
Color Pickers
You can find color picker tools in digital design applications (Canva, Adobe Illustrator, or Microsoft PowerPoint, for example) or as a plug-in to your web browser. They typically look like a medicine dropper—you drag the dropper over a color, click, and voila, you have all kinds of information about a particular color, or you can apply the color to another digital object on your screen.
When I do choose to create my own color palette, I’ll typically use a color picker on a photograph of a nature scene. Have you ever been out in nature and thought, “these colors are atrocious!”? Of course not. Nature only offers up beautifully coordinated palettes.
Coolors, mentioned above, has a color picker extension for the Chrome browser and there are dozens more to choose from. If you use Chrome, go to the Chrome Web Store and search for “color picker” to find them. The first one on the list is from Google, of course.
Now, go play with your colors.
Comments