Using Color Palettes to Create Identity in Artwork

Artists
set themselves apart from each other and seek to stand out in a
variety of ways. One way that you can accomplish this is by using a
recognizable color palette throughout your work.

In this article
we'll explore ways to find inspiration for palettes, how to create,
save, and easily use palettes in your vector work, what these colors
may convey to the viewer, and how something as simple as a color
palette can define you as an artist.

Finding
Inspiration

You've
heard this a billion times: inspiration is all around you! But when
you're looking for a color palette that defines you, “all around
you” is an unhelpful answer and an incredibly wide scope. I think
it's important to narrow an idea like this down towhat you really
enjoy, as a person and an artist, and to bring that to your creativework.

Whether
you're an illustrator or designer of some sort, or aspiring to become
one professionally, the color palette you choose as an identity
should communicate something about you. This can be a good place to
start your hunt for inspiration: Who are you and what do you want to
say?

Consider
this color palette and what it may communicate to the viewer.
It's brightly colored and contains a variety of hues, rather than
multiple shades or tones of a single hue. Its vibrancy can be
construed as being playful and fun to a viewer or client.

Now
consider this palette. The use of natural tones with a more vivid
hue can be seen as being more serious than the last palette and more
conservative. While the design itself could be quite dynamic or
playful, seeing the colors isolated already provides the viewer with
an idea about the messages being conveyed or allows an artist's work
to speak to the viewer in a different manner than the colorful
palette above.

There
are a wide variety of resources in book, web, and app form ready for
creatives to establish palettes or find inspiration from others. A
few of my favorites can be found in the list below and are a great
starting point to spark ideas for your own palettes.

• Adobe
  Color CC
• ColourLovers
• Designer's Guide to Color Series

Creating
Color Palettes

With
the assumption you're working in Adobe Illustrator, there are a
couple of places you can create, save, and edit color palettes.

Firstly,
you have the Swatches panel, which allows you to access the
default swatches for new documents as well as an assortment of color
books created by Adobe. Additionally, however, you can customize this
to your own preferences, creating a swatch library that's
unique to your own document.

If
you open the Swatches panel within a working document, such as the
one seen below, you'll notice you can hit Select All Unused
in the panel's option as well as Add Used Colors. Doing both
of these gives you a palette of colors that you've used within a
design. If you've already created a vector piece whose palette you
want to use in later pieces, this gives you the quick and easy option
of doing so and referencing it at any time.

To save the palette, go into
the Swatches panel options again and either Save Swatch
Library as ASE or Save Swatch Library as AI and you'll be
able to load, edit, and save this palette any time within Adobe
Illustrator on your machine.

Secondly,
if you want to access your swatch libraries through other Adobe
applications or an alternative device, you'll find the Libraries
panel to be the perfect place to save your content. Simply hit Add
Fill Color in the panel to add each selected color to a newly
created Library, and your content will be tied to your Adobe
account.

A
third and final method makes use of Adobe
Color CC. You can use the mobile app or the website to upload
images, take photos, or create color palettes from scratch. Any
palette you create will be saved to your Adobe account and easily
accessed through the Libraries panel for use within your
vector work in Adobe Illustrator CC.

Establishing
Identity and Style

So
we've discussed inspiration and creating color palettes, but what
does this mean for your identity and style and how to establish that
within your work? For starters we have the methods through which we
can create the colors that will define who we are as artists, or at
least who we are throughout a series of designs.

I'm
going to use some of my own artwork as an example. The three
illustrations below have become a set for a few reasons: they're
drawn in a similar style, they contain some repeated imagery, and
they draw from the same color palette.

Most notably this set uses the
same dark brown as line work in each. Immediately, a viewer can see
that these pieces may be from the same source or are meant to be
together, as they look similar from a glance. How your work is
perceived at a glance is often important when establishing your
identity, and when that identity is your color palette, you want it
to be noticeable through a variety of illustrations.

Check out another example in the two images below. Again, they use the same dark
brown for all of the line work, and based on the drawing style are
more recognizably a part of a series of designs.

Additionally,
however, they use the same color palette and gradients within each
piece. Every time I wanted to use teal or pink, I grabbed the same
color so that when people saw each of these elements, most of which were made
into jewelry, stickers, and other products, they knew that
they were from the same brand.

While
the two examples above are solving the issues of branding and
identity in the same manner, I'd like to explore another set of
images that does so for a different reason: tones and temperature.

Take
a look at the images above, and note how warm the image on the left is
and how cool the image on the right is. They share a lot of colors in
common, but the main difference is the use of reds, blues, and pinks
between the two images.

The image on the left is a bit nostalgic,
harkening back to childhood and real-life gumball machines, many of
which tend to be a bright, shiny red. The image on the right is a bit
more updated, taking on a vibrant, whimsical feel. While bright pink
gumball machines exist, they surely weren't as common and aren't considered "classic". Additionally,
each image has an associated era in my mind: 1950s America and
1980s America.

I
feel this is entirely due to my own experiences and media I've been
exposed to over the years, but color palettes can do this for a viewer
and are important to keep in mind while you establish your own
identity or brand as an artist and what sort of style you're aiming
to produce.

Cool colors can convey sadness, warm colors can convey
happiness, and neutral colors can convey a tone of authority or be
considered conservative (of course these are all subjective ideas). The colors you choose can establish a mood
for the viewer or allow you to aim your work at a particular
demographic. Think about how many children's illustrations contain
bright, colorful rainbows, or how inappropriate a client may find rainbows and assorted bright colors on a memorial pamphlet created for afuneral.

Conclusion

Colors and color palettes have a lot to communicate to a viewer. When you use certain colors throughout a series of designs or illustrations, you're able to establish an identity for yourself through abstract means. Color palettes find themselves inserted into style guides for designers to refer to all the time. Consider a university or sports team's official colors and how important it is for a designer to use the correct color when creating products or a logotype for that entity.

The colors you choose to use as a means of expressing yourself or your artistic brand help establish who your demographic is and what the tone of your artwork is, and give viewers a bit of information about you or whatever it is your artwork is trying to convey to them.

Consider some of the tools discussed above to help you find inspiration for your own unique color palettes, the ways in which you can save and reuse said palettes, and simple techniques in which to establish said identity throughout your work (reusing palettes, eliminating certain colors as a rule, and using colors to convey messages).

I hope you found this article interesting, informative, and inspirational. What colors do you find you use a lot in your work? What do you think they convey to a viewer? What would you like to be your color palette legacy within your artwork? Let's discuss color in the comment section below, and don't be afraid to show your colors in your future design pieces.

For more articles on color here onTuts+, check out the following links:

• Create Color Swatches For Your Designs From a Photograph
• Quick Tip: Enhance Your Designs With Adobe Color in InDesign