A colorful change - or so I thought!

I've been working on a blog post about the importance of updating ones color palette - something I have been attempting to do lately with some success. My usual color schemes tended to be colorful rainbow hues. I love bright pink and purple mixed with sky blue and lime green - oh, and throw in some bright sunshine yellow. But, in looking online and in stores, I realized my color palette was woefully out of date and needed a sincere effort on my part to try some new colors.

My first step was to go online and check out those wonderful sites that feature colors for 2015. (There are a lot of them, and they just proved how old fashioned my color sense was.) So, the great thing about working digitally was that I could just place some wonderful new color palette into my Illustrator window and use the eyedropper to quickly build a new set of colors. I chose a lovely set from this site http://www.bhg.com/decorating/color/schemes/2015-color-palette-of-the-year/. It was called Anne Fox's Juicy Citrus. You can see their image (the circles) I captured to grab the colors from below. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

It was fun creating drawings in a totally new color palette!

I had to add some darker darks, but then I made the first drawing shown in the middle and was happy with it. I then created the second, on the upper right and was surprised that I liked it, too. So, I went for the third, shown at lower right and was really getting into using my new colors!

This was fun! And, knowing Illustrator and how wonderfully flexible it is, I grabbed another set of colors from the same site. This one wasn't "juicy" it was "fresh." Just the name made me feel more updated.

I used the eyedropper again to add the colors to my file. I added a blue to it because I needed to add one more color. Next, I just had to make sure nothing in my Illustrator drawings were locked or still linked to the symbols I often make. Then, I selected everything, chose Edit>Edit Colors>Recolor Artwork. Picked the first color in my new color group - and voila - my colors changed in a rapid way that I can only refer to as "automagically"! 

All three images were converted in less than 10 minutes each to the new color palette.

This was just what I needed! Fresh colors. I started a new drawing and had just as much fun making it with that first "juicy" palette and then changing a copy of it to the "fresh" one.

Juicy on the left and Fresh on the right!

I was tickled pink with the results and was ready to write this up for our blog. I was definitely feeling that it is good to change one's color palette! Before writing it up, I thought I should apply my old fashioned outdated color palette to this drawing as an example. After all, it only takes a few minutes to change! Danger! Danger! Will Robinson!

That was even more fun!

Yes, it took less than ten minutes! And, woe is me, I do still prefer my favorite colors!