Designing Color Schemes on the Quick

Ideally you should set your color scheme in the early stages of the design, but sometimes I get a little over-zealous on the black and white sketches and end up deep into the composition before I start thinking about color.

Typically when that happens I turn on Illustrator and poke around the Live Color Palette to browse for a nice harmony. But sometimes I'm not working in Illustrator and starting it up wastes time and hogs resources. Then I found this awesome online tool:

http://colorschemedesigner.com/

This nice little web app has some great features aside from finding color schemes. You can export HTML, Photoshop or Gimp palettes or text files. And best of all it is slim and takes up little under the hood.

Painting
If you're working on a digital painting this tool is very nice. You can find a color scheme and screenshot the block of colors on the right and paste it right into a layer of your painting and begin sampling. Honestly, it curls my toes.

Knight Receiving Bread

A sketch of a knight receiving bread. I added the page texture in Photoshop.

Vector Lineart Farm

A vector image of a farm done for a project.

Camping Image

A vector illustration showing a campsite.

Bikini Girl Vector Illustration

I've recently been contacted for some vector fashion illustrations and I noticed that I don't really have a strong portfolio in that area. So I needed to make a portfolio piece.

First step along the line was making a sketch. I decided to create an image of a woman in the water looking at the viewer provocatively. For vector work like this I enjoy composing directly in Illustrator so I just did a quick sketch to make sure placement and layout was proportional and so I had a basic framework to work with.

After the sketch is in place I dropped in the basic shapes in Illustrator, making sure to add areas for shadow and highlights. Here is the outlines view of the project.

Then it comes to color. I chose a nice color harmony based on the color of the water and added in her hair, skin and the rest. Most of the elements are colored with gradients, which colors a bit more subtly than solids.

Finally here is the image.

I was meandering around and saw this. It resonated with me, I think I'll try to work in letterforms as design elements on my next Graphic Design project that it makes sense for.