- Instead of creating a palette based purely
on either color wheel theory or personal invention
there are times when borrowing colors
from an existing work of art or photography
when that makes sense, too,
and I'm talking about borrowing in two contexts.
One, like when you borrow an inspired set of hues,
from something like an early 17th Century masterpiece,
and you apply them to a layout or an illustration,
and two, in the case where you add a photo
or an illustration to a layout and you borrow colors
from it and you apply them to other elements
of the design.
So let's talk about the first scenario first.
Painted masterpieces from earlier times,
these can be great resources for color ideas.
Pallet's from these works of art
might be just what you need
to give a layout or an illustration exactly the look
and the feel that you're aiming for.
You want some ideas,
some ideas about who to look at
for this kind of inspiration?
Well, here are a few of my favorites.
Now I'd say that each of these painters
is really worth a look.
You can go to Google or the library,
or the bookstore and check out Vermeer of course,
and Paul Klee a real favorite of mine,
and Mary Cassatt,
Sandro Botticelli,
and Gustav Klimt,
and also check out the work of Joan Miro,
he's a great colorist.
So, exactly how can you borrow colors
from a masterwork of art?
Well as you know, Illustrator and Photoshop
do have a nice little color sampling tool
called the eye dropper, need I say more?
All right, enough about borrowing colors
from the masters of painting,
let's move on to creating a layouts color scheme
by borrowing hues from an image that it contains.
Say you're working on a page layout
for instance and along with the headline,
a sub-head, and a decorative sidebar, and some text,
you're working with this photo,
so you've got the layout pretty much figure out,
and now it's time to add some color.
Why not choose colors based on what's in your photo?
I mean after all, that will help make sure the photo
looks right at home in the layout.
Let's start with the layouts backdrop color.
I want something subtle here,
something other than white.
I'll begin by going to the toolbar on the left
and activating the eye dropper tool.
Now I'll hold down the command key
to temporarily turn the eye dropper into a selection tool,
and I'll click on the layouts white background panel.
Next, I'll release the command key,
and with the eye dropper active,
I'm going to aim for a light area
of the tan colored surface in the photos backdrop,
like way over here to the right toward the top,
this little area.
I'll click on it and there,
our pages backdrop is this tan color.
It's a little bit dark, so I'll alter it
by double clicking on the color swatch
at the bottom of the toolbar
to bring up the color picker panel.
While here, I can click on a lighter tan, like so
and the new color shows up here.
Let's go with this.
That's better.
Now the headline.
I want two colors, so I select a word
and then sample colors from the photo
with the eye dropper tool until I see something that I like.
Same for the sub-head.
And now I'll choose colors in the same way
for the pattern off to the left,
and I'll use the color picker as needed to fine tune
any of my choices.
And there we go, it's not bad at all.
Some nice color echoes going on between the image
and the rest of the layout.
Here are three other solutions that were created
by sampling different areas of the photo
and applying the colors in different ways throughout.
I got one with a darker backdrop,
one where the backdrop is left white,
another with an overall palette of brighter hues,
and one that keeps things highly muted.
As you can see, there's a huge range
of different outcomes that's possible
when sampling and applying colors from an image.
My suggestion, try out both of these color borrowing
techniques for upcoming projects,
you know the one where you borrow from
a masterpiece of painting,
and the one where you borrow from an image
in your own layout.
This can be really effective ways of coming up with
good looking color schemes,
and digital technology makes them relatively easy
and quick to pull off.