Want some cool colour palettes for surface pattern design projects? In this video, I’ll be giving you a quick tour of Color.Adobe.com and sharing how I leverage its features to find and create cute colour palettes for my surface pattern designs. Even if you don’t have a Creative Cloud subscription, fear not! I’ll demonstrate how you can still utilize some of the platform’s key features. Plus, stick around till the end, where I’ll walk you through the seamless process of importing your curated palettes into Procreate and Photoshop.
Colour Palettes for Surface Pattern Design: Transcript
Hello. We’re staying on the topic of colour palettes this week. I’m going to introduce you to colour.adobe.com if you’re not already familiar with it. To start off with, I’ll open the page in a browser where I’m not logged into my Creative Cloud account, so you’ll be seeing the same as me if you don’t have a Creative Cloud subscription. You’ll be in the create tab to start with, and you’ll have some random palette here every time you reload the page.
This is the colour wheel page. There’s also an extract theme page, extract gradient, and some accessibility tools. There’s a whole bunch of stuff you can do here and it’s just a fun site to play on. I’m just going to focus on a few ways that I use the site for helping me with colour palettes in Procreate, and also Photoshop and Illustrator.
So the first thing to state here is that all the palettes will be five colours. You’re not going to be able to make a six colour palette here, but that’s okay because less is almost always more when it comes to main colour palettes for pattern designs anyway.
So the features I like to use here are the Extract Theme tab here. It’s a bit like when we create a palette from a photo in Procreate, but you have more control over the colours. You can upload a photo and it’ll pull a five colour palette from it. You can choose between different colour moods and you can also grab different colours if you want to.
If you want some inspiration and to check out ready made palettes, you can go to the explore tab and browse by theme or go to the trends tab to price some curated trends.
Everything I’ve mentioned so far is stuff you can do without an Adobe subscription. Getting the palettes into your software will be a different process depending on if you do or don’t have a subscription. If you go to download the palette either as a jpeg or an .ase file, it’s going to want you to sign in. So assuming you don’t have an account, you can either screenshot the palette and then open it in Procreate and use the colour picker to get the colours from it.
Or you can just copy and paste the hex codes. If you want the exact palette, then use the hex codes. When you take screenshots, they’re often managed using different colour profiles, which can result in the colours being changed ever so slightly when you come to open them and pull colours in another piece of software. It’s only going to be a tiny difference and often it’s not a big deal, but if it does matter to you, then copy and paste the exact hex codes instead.
If you do have a Creative Cloud subscription and are signed in like I am in this browser, you can save an extracted palette to your library, then tap over here on libraries, open it up and save it as an .ase File. To open it in Procreate, tap on New Palette from file and then bring it in from your downloads.
To open in Photoshop, either go to Window Libraries and use it from there, or if you want it in your swatches panel, then go to your swatches. Tap on the hamburger Import swatches and bring in the .ase file from your downloads folder. It’ll be right at the bottom of your swatch Group list.
[To import an .ase file into Illustrator: -From the swatches panel, click the hamburger menu, then go to “Open swatch library” then “other library” and find your.ase file in your downloads folder.]
There’s loads more to the colour.adobe.com website, but that’s a quick overview of the ways I use it for creating and finding new colour palettes and bring them into the different art software that I use.
That’s all for this week. Next week I’m going to show you a cool little website I discovered for helping us be a bit more creative with our colour names. When we’re naming our surface pattern designs. Don’t forget to subscribe if you don’t want to miss it. If you want to come, say hi on Instagram before then, you can find me at Becky Flaherty.
And if you want to check out some more of my in-depth classes, you can find those on Skillshare. Thank you for watching. Have fun, stay creative and I will see you soon.
