- Colors don't need to have anything in
common to get along with each other.
Complimentary colors, for example, they come from
opposite sides of the color wheel and neither has a
trace of the other in it's DNA.
And yet these, they can look great together as long
as the two colors have clear differences in value.
And that said, there's definitely a time and a place for
palettes made from colors that do share in common qualities.
Like when a hint of gold and yellow is added to all the
colors of an illustration to give it notes of warmth
while also lending the palette a look of inner connectivity
because of the in common hints of gold and yellow.
I first learned about using tints to harmonize palattes
when an art teacher he saw me struggling to get
the hues in one of my paintings to look like they
were getting along and he told me a trick about
mixing a light transparent color of some kind and
floating it over the top of an entire painting as a
way of bringing unity to all it's colors.
And that's basically what you're doing when, for example,
you open an image in photoshop and you add a solid
color fill there and you click on a color in the
swatches panel, hit okay and then change the
fill layers blend mode to overlay.
Then reduce it's appacity to around 50% so the
before image doesn't look bad but the hues in the
after image, with it's colored fill layer, they do have
this especially nice and harmonious look to them.
So, here's before and after.
So that's one way to help colors to get along.
You can tint them with an in common hue.
This is a treatment you can apply digitially
not only to photos but also to illustrations and layouts.
Another way of infusing a palatte with an in common
color using software is to manually tweak the CMYK
formulas of all the colors that you're using.
So, here's another example.
Okay, so the colors in this illustration,
they're looking alright.
But let's say, for whatever reason I want to bring
a unifying touch of yellow into each of it's colors.
I'll do this manually and not at all
scientifically as you're going to see.
Here's what I'm going to do, I'll go over to the
swatches panel, double click on the bottom color,
this green and up comes the swatch options panel,
Now, since this is a CMYK document, you'll see sliders
for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.
I'm simply going to nudge the yellow slider
to the right around 20 or 30% adding more
yellow to the mix in other words.
Moving upward from there I'll do the same thing
to the next green and then with the dark green.
And with this dark green I see that the yellow slider's
already at 90% so I'm going to raise it to 100 and
also lower the cyan and the magenta percentages
and this is going to give yellow some more priority here.
And on up through the colors, skipping over the
two yellows since they're already yellow enough and
on to the two neutrals, a little more yellow in each.
You can see how the image is changing here.
And finally a touch more yellow to the violet
red crest of our pilliated woodpecker.
Alright, done.
Now all the colors lean toward the
yellow end of the spectrum.
Here's the original for comparison.
So, here's a before and after and either could work.
The newer version is a touch warmer because of
the yellow that's been added and it shows off a bit
more unity in the palette because of the in common yellow.
Keep thoughts and ideas like these in mind when you're
working with palettes and take a good look at what you
got and ask yourself do things look fine just like they
are or could they look even better if I unifed my
color scheme with an in common color.