From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

Creating with captured color

- [Instructor] Welcome to Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory. In this movie, I'm going to answer a question that was submitted about using the Adobe Capture Mobile App for color exploration, and how we can bring color captured by that app and use it inside of Illustrator. So let's dive into it. The photograph that you see here was taken on my iPhone, and it is the inspiration for the artwork that I'm going to show you now. So, I saw this, took a picture of it, and decided this would be a fun theme for an illustration, so here's my rough sketch here, and I've scanned this in and like I've done before, I usually set it for about 20%, lock the layer, and then a layer above it, I'll start building my base art. Let's go ahead and zoom in on this a little bit, so you can see it a little better. I think that's a little clearer. And I don't worry about being precise on this but, I want to point out that when I created this artwork, I created it with the pin tool but then I used elliptical shapes, that is circles and just fused them to get these perfect kind of circular shapes, almost, I don't know if they call 'em warts, but they look like warts so I'll call 'em warts to create all these protrusions on this gourd. And then on the striping on this gourd, 'cause a lot of gourds have stripes, I used the blob brush to actually draw those out and you've seen me use that in previous movies and there's an actual, new DVG Lab that's going to be coming up where I go into that a little more as well. So, those were the methods I used to create all the base art, and it's at this point, when I get to this point in a process, I want to start color exploration. I usually just jump to my swatches. I usually have pre loaded colors that are in there, but on this one I wanted to focus on how you could do it in a completely different way and if you're not familiar with the mobile app, this is where Adobe Capture really comes in handy to utilize for this. And if we go back to my photograph, you can see, this was the inspiration for the illustration, but it's also now going to serve the purpose of being the inspiration for our color as we move forward. And so what I want to do is at this point, I want to leave the desktop and I want to jump to my iPhone and show you how I use that to capture color and then push it to Illustrator so I can use it. So we're going to move over to my iPhone. So when I visited the local market and I saw these gourds sittin' in a bin, I immediately grabbed my iPhone and I took a photograph of it, and that's what you saw as the inspiration for this illustration. Now I'm going to go back to that original photograph on my iPhone here and I'm going to use Adobe Capture. I'll go ahead and launch this app. And this is the app that I use when I take photographs to capture all kinds of things. Now they have different things you can use in this app, such as shapes. I don't really use this a whole lot. I've featured this in a course where I did artwork of a bluejay, and I used some of that in there, but I really don't use shapes that much. I don't use type ever. Materials, I don't do a lot of 3D type stuff, so I have no interest in this really. I've been playing with patterns, and I'm going to feature this in an upcoming DVG Lab. This one's kind of fun, and it's a little unique on what you can achieve with that, but for this one, I want to focus on color. Color is the one that I use the most, and it really does work well. You can see some of the different color captures I've done here, and these have all been based off of photographs. So if I go into The Shadow Knows, you can see it's created, this photograph, and if I go to info, you can see the source image that I used to capture these colors. So that's what we're going to do here to inspire our illustration is I'm going to go ahead and click the plus sign here and I'm going to go to my photo album and I'm going to pick some colors. You can see the recording lab here, that's what it does, but we're going to go specifically to my camera roll, and when my camera roll loads, I'm going to go ahead and find the specific color, you can see a lot of my Inktober work here. This is a specific photograph that is and it's right here so I'll click on this, and this is the one that I want to use. You can see that it will automate some of the colors it choices. It kind of gives you a gamut from light to dark, and I like many of these. I think that these are going to work well, but one that I want to adjust is I'm just going to tap on one here. And this, you can see, this is, you move it over an area and you achieve a different color here and I want to leave this one kind of a brownish color. That's fine. It's the other one, this one that I specifically want to drag down, and I want to pick kind of a green color here. Now I'm not worried about gettin' it nailed exactly in terms of the hue, just a rough approximation, just to work out the tonal family, if you will, and that's what I have here. Once I have it, I'll click the check mark. I like this so I want to use it. And you can adjust stuff here, but I never do that. And down here below if you tap on it, you can even select CMYK. Now I tried this, I just don't even bother because you're on a RGB device. It's not a process screen. It's made up of RGB. So I just leave it at RGB and I'm going to deal with that when I move to Illustrator. So I like everything I see here. I'm not going to adjust any colors on my iPhone. I'm going to do that inside a better environment for that which is Adobe Illustrator, and so now I'm going to hit save, and we're going to have to name this. It'll just populate it with kind of a pre-formatted name, but I'm going to call this Fall Colors, like that, and I'll hit done. And you see I have saved to where? My Creative Cloud library, and this is the panel that's going to show up in Illustrator and give me access to these colors and so you can also publish it to color.adobe.com, so if you want to go there, you can explore other color palettes and push those to your desktop, to Illustrator and utilize them. This, in my opinion, is the best tool for Creative Cloud. I don't use most of their services, but this one I do use, so I'm going to hit save and now, we're back in our library, you can see the previous, The Shadow Knows library there, and the one above it is Fall Colors. So now, we're going to return back to the desktop, back to Illustrator. I'm going to show you how I proceed from this point going forward. Now that we've captured the color through the mobile app and we sent it through Creative Cloud to the desktop, you can access that color family that you created by going to your library's palette. So we're going to open up that here, now, and you want to make sure you're on My Library, and we're going to go down to color themes and I'm going to click this and you can see the one we created, Fall Colors, is right here. Now it's not in our swatches, so to get it in our swatches, it's easy. All you have to do is right-click when you hover over the color just right-click and go add to swatches, and now it's in our swatches. We can go ahead and close this panel. So that's how easy it is to capture something on your iPhone using that mobile app and push it to your desktop. So this is from this point forward, I'm going to go in, and I'm going to start utilizing these colors to flesh out my composition. Now, one thing I want to point out is, you're never going to get the colors exactly on your iPhone. It's an RGB environment. I like to build all my colors, as you can see here in CMYK, so this is where I'll go in, I'll select the color, I'll go to color, see what the color break is, and then I make any directions. I think this brown, the color I selected is just way, way, too dark so I'm going to adjust this. And I don't like fractural numbers. I like using whole number coordinates when I'm working out colors, so I'm just going to punch in some numbers here and refine this just to make it more of a rich brown, not so, this has too much black in it. I could have noodled around in the app a little more to get it closer to what I thought would work but we'll go ahead and punch in here and this is more what I want here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and drag this to my swatches and we'll put that right there. I'm going to double click into it and make sure it's a global color. Click OK. We'll go ahead and check some of the other colors here. You know, this is a good darker color. I think that works for a darker color, but I want it kind of a lighter hue so I'm going to go back into CMYK and I'm going to use pretty close to the same coordinates but I'm just going to reduce some of the values just so it gives me a lighter hue of that and so I think that'll work and we'll drag it right here. So you can see it lighter or darker once again I'll click in. I'll go global colors. And this is usually how I set up my colors. I like to really dial 'em in, get 'em figured out, and then from that point moving forward, it makes the whole process go a lot faster. I think we can even create one more kind of tonal family of this derived color. So I'm going to go back in here and I'm going to set this, let's see, I don't want this much black. So I'm not going to change anything, just the black, just to create another level. In this case a lighter kind of orange-ish color. So we have three stages: light, medium, and dark. So that's kind of what I was looking for, and we started off with this. I probably could have done this darker color a little better in the capture app, but that's okay. It's easy enough to adjust. It gave me the idea of doing brown since the app itself showed me a brown. So we're going to make a few more color edits. We're going to select this orange color, which I like, and this is probably not too far. Once again, I like using whole numbers here, and not quite so much magenta. So think of it as this way, it's gettin' you in the right neighborhood, 92.83 well, I'll just round that off to 90, zero, I don't want any black in this. So I think that's going to work and then we'll drag this one down like this. Sometimes Illustrator can be a little frustrating. I wish there was, on this screen where you could just, I don't know, option click and it would shove it into your swatches palette, but you have to drag it and sometimes it's a little finicky so if you've run into that, everybody has to deal with that, okay? And then, let's see. We want to go to this lighter hue kind of a yellow. So I'll click on that. We'll go to color and I'm going to finesse this one to, I think five's okay. I think I'll round this up to 20. This is pretty close, but we'll go to 80, so it's not fractural, and we'll leave this at zero. So that's all I do is most of the time it gets me almost exactly what I need. I just finesse these colors and here's an interesting thing to know about Illustrator. We'll focus on this green now. If I select this green and go to colors, notice how it's fractional colors here, okay? So if I just added this as is, as another swatch here, and I select it and go into it, it shows fractionals down below, but even Illustrator itself shows whole numbers in its name. So I'm not sure why that is but I always go in and finesse the numbers anyway, and I never leave fractural numbers. Not that it won't work. It will. Probably more has to do with my ADA tendencies so that's what we're going to do here and here's another, it'll automatically update the name and if it doesn't, you can just delete the name, set global colors, and go okay, and then if you open it up again, it's going to put the break in there for you. And it's always, I like having it in the break, 'cause sometimes I have tool tips on and I can hover over it and it'll tell me what the color is. So that's a good thing. We're going to do one more color here, and this is going to be based off the green and we're just going to make a lighter hue of this color, so not so much blue, we'll knock that down. We'll knock this down by 10. I think we'll leave that as is, and we'll knock this in half, so just to create a lighter shade of this green, and we'll drag this down and make this a global color and click OK. So, now we're going to start coloring. So capture helped us arrive in the right neighborhood to utilize color, and now we're going to apply that color. And this is where it goes pretty quick, so we can just select this. We're going to fill it with this color, and all the stripes in here on this gourd are going to be our nice, green color, the lighter green here. So we'll drag that up into fill, get rid of the outline. He's lookin' pretty good. We're going to select his eyes. We're going to select the stem, and these are going to be the darker kind of brownish color we made. We'll select these little highlights in his mouth. These will just be turned to white like this, and forgot this guy here. And you can always use the eye dropper to sample a color you've already placed, and then we're going to go ahead and start, let's see, what else will we do, we'll select this guy and this guy and. Oops that's outline. We'll colorize that color. Maybe, probably that color. Yeah, that looks good. Now we'll go ahead and colorize the leaf. The leaf on this side is going to be the lighter green, and then on this side, we're going to use the same lighter green, but we're going to go back to color now, and because it's a global, we can establish that this is going to be a tint. We don't want 100%, so I'll do it 70 like this. We'll select this one, and we'll make it green, like that. And now I'm just going to select these warts. I don't even know if they're called warts, I'm just, I'm callin' 'em warts. Actually, let's select all the highlights here, like this. Like that, and we're going to color those the base. Oops get rid of the outline, color those to base, go to color and I want these to be like, let's see if that looks good. Yep, that's fine. Normally I'm not talking when I'm creating so this process goes a little slower as I'm talking, but we're going to select all these little slivers that indicate shapes, and define shapes, and all of these are going to be, let's see, we'll color it that. I think that'll work. Like that. And we'll make a few more decisions here. We'll select some of these, and these will become these fills. Get rid of the outline. Maybe this guy can be the same color. And then I'll select these and I think I'm going to make those kind of a lighter shade and this guy's gettin' lonely. We'll apply this and on this one, I'll apply this medium color for a drop shadow so, that's how I'll work out base colors. Now that went a lot slower than it normally does because I'm normally not talking when I'm doing this, but all of this was derived off of our color inspiration that we captured in Adobe Color, pushed to the desktop and applied it to our art work. Now, this art work, let's go ahead and zoom out a little. I went ahead and fleshed out the whole thing, right here, and added a nice little saying. Used the font that I created that goes good with this style, but it's this easy to create some nice colors using the mobile app. Now with me, I don't like stopping here. I like to work with some textures, so what I'm going to do is, if I slide over you can see this texture, and this is just a really bad xerox, so I'm going to select that, and we're going to go to align and I have my alignment set up to Artboard and I do that because I can place stuff in here and then just simply hit align and it will align with the document size if I have it set up the right way. Once I have this, I can colorize it. It's a bitmap TIFF image, so I'm going to colorize it. I don't want to leave it exactly like this, so we'll set this to multiply and I'm going to go 30% so it's not full value, and that looks pretty cool and then the last one on top is just another subtle texture that I did, and I'll go ahead and zoom in on this so you can see what's goin' on. Actually I think this could be set even, maybe it's a different hue. Let's try this, and let's adjust the value down even further, maybe 20, and I like that better. So, that's how I go about using Adobe Capture with Illustrator and I have to admit, I'm not a huge fan of a lot of mobile apps, mainly because I don't like the quality of the image they produce so I don't use most of the features in Adobe Capture, but the Color Capture is one feature I really like and find extremely useful in figuring out color exploration and working with it inside Illustrator. So remember if you have a question you'd like to see me address in the DVG Lab Movie then email it to me at question@dvglab.com. Thank you for watching DVG Lab and remember, never stop drawing.

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