 Well, hi there. It's Sandy Allnock and today I'm going to talk about color harmony. I don't even know if I've mentioned color harmony before, but let's do that in terms of the Pantone colors of the year. This year it's colors plural. They usually just pick one, but this year they chose two colors, illuminating and ultimate gray. And you can see the history of all the colors they've chosen over the years on their website. They have full pages about each one of them. They have a rationale for why they chose it and how it's supposed to make you feel and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I will let you read all that on their website. There is a link to it in the doobly-doo. You could also get some swag. I've ordered a cup to put on my desk throughout the year and it should be here. If you want to see my cup, you can go to my blog and check that out after you watch this. But the palette explorations tab is the one that I want to pay attention to today. They put out these palettes and it's groupings of color they recommend to use with the color of the year. And off to the right they have those little bars that are color harmonies. They give you a suggestion for using a little bit of this, a tiny bit of that, more of this and then oh wow use a lot of that. Notice they don't have six colors in all of those. So they don't necessarily recommend that you use all six in whatever you're doing. And these are intended not just for artists, of course. They're intended for people who do things in print. They're intended for people who do fabrics and fashion and household items and on and on and on. So that's why they give a whole wide variety of ways you can use these colors. So I took this into Copicland and I chose colors to match as best I could the colors that I saw on the screen. Now it's hard to match those because you have on the screen you have light coming through and on paper you don't have that and it's really hard to get a total apples to apples. And even with this gray I found that I was struggling picking which gray to use because if you end up using multiple layers of a color even if just one swipe of it is a perfect match multiple layers is going to make it darker. However just going to say none of the colors on this page matter. If you have a yellow and a gray and a blue or what you know something that's close to what you see on the screen that's good enough. Nothing has to be perfect perfect. It's just always fun to try to do some color matching and test myself to see if I can find things that match. And I was tickled to find that some of them I would look at that color and I knew exactly which marker to pick and then it worked out. It was as close as I could get. So that was a fun thing to learn about myself how well I know my markers. But I'm just going to run around and color all of these in. You can download this and color it in yourself. I also have a blank page so you can print out either the blank or the one with the numbers in it because if you have different markers or a different you know different set of markers you don't have all these colors you can put in your own colors based on you know something similar and then write your own numbers in. You could also use this to do colored pencil. I'm probably not going to do a colored pencil exploration of this like I did last year. I may do a little bit more with the gray and the yellow throughout the year but not necessarily go through this chart so don't wait for that one. But you could use the blank one to come up with your own colors that match if you would like to do that. The way that I choose to use these color palette explorations is to challenge myself to use different colors. I tend to have my go-to colors the ones that I like that I use a lot and it's fun to try to make myself step out of my comfort zone and choosing one of these selections and deciding that I'm going to use those colors today can shake up the way I think about my art. It can shake up the way I color something. I might decide all of a sudden I'm going to make a pink sky and it's going to be the most beautiful thing in the world because I was forced to choose pink. So the colors down here in the bottom by the way this orbital this one in the little pictures on the screen has multiple colors in it. They look almost glittery or like a shimmery fabric. I chose a color that was kind of average from those because there's dark and lights in there. But that's why that's why those colors are a little funky looking. It's not my favorite combination which probably tells me sometimes I should choose something from that combination. Well let's get on to an example a real life example and this three room studio stamp has a chair and an ottoman and it has enough little parts in it. I thought maybe I could get all six colors into some cards and see if I could do that. So I've airbrushed the backgrounds of four cards. You just see two of them here and this is the yellow versus the gray. And even in this already you can see the difference between the mood of the piece based on whether the yellow is the dominant color in a large amount versus the gray in a large amount. So in the second one here I'm reversing those just to see what happens to the colors in it. I'm going to use all the other same colors on the rest of the picture. Just reversing the yellow and the gray and see what happens. That's the difference that color can make is how much of it you use in whatever the piece of artwork is and what is it that's going to create a pop of color. So sometimes it's putting a lot of neutrals around a color that's really bright. Sometimes it's putting dark colors around something that's bright and sometimes it's a combination of both. But until you try it you won't know that. And that's why sometimes I'll just stamp something several times. If I'm making cards I'll stamp it a whole bunch of times and try different combinations just to see what I like better. Each one may have something very different that is interesting about it and it really depends on what you want to highlight in the picture itself. In the picture on the left the chair is the most important part because it is clearly the brightest most intense thing. On the the card on the right hand side the person is going to get more attention because that color on the the socks and the outfit are much stronger than the color in the chair and in the background. So it depends on what you want to put the focus on if you want the person to be the thing that stands out the most the colors you put around it are going to be what's going to make the difference. And you can try this exercise with all those different color ways as well. All those different palettes just play with them and use them in reverse order from each other just to see what happens. The green color on this particular thing I used in the mug that she's holding in the polka dots and in the shadow underneath of the chair. So I used all the colors except for the tan in this particular card. I used other browns for her skin because it didn't quite work. So here's the finished card and you can see that the yellow is hugely dominant because of its size. The chair becomes a tertiary element because that carpet is so dominant as well but the color that pops is going to be that pink against the yellow and she is more important but in this other one the gray since it is such a receding color it's not jumping out at you and it's got that carpet that's nice and dark too. The chair is the thing that becomes the most important and it stands out the most and she is much more subdued because she's more similar to the background. So the feeling you get from both cards is completely different and I want to show you two others that I made as well trying other explorations with the same palette. You know there's that brown color so I airbrushed the brown into the background used the gray for the carpet and that neutralized it quite a bit and the chair itself is the navy blue color and for the ribbing in the corduroy on it I used a white pen and then just went over top of it in order to create the what looks like blue stripes that way and I made her in yellow her clothing is in yellow which is really close to that tan color so she does not pop out all that much because it's so close to it but look what happens when I take the the dark red red pink color and airbrush the top portion of it so I ended up with two tones of that color and then her yellow comes screaming out of the picture because everything else is darker and duller and she she is the lightest thing in the picture. So hopefully you can see from these examples how different a piece of artwork can be based on how much of each one of the colors you choose to use as well as the placement and the relationship between where those colors are in the picture. So over on my blog I'm going to have the chart that you can download as well as still pictures of those four cards so you can see the differences between them and study them a little more to understand more of the differences between each one of the color ways and how it expressed itself in that particular picture. I will see you again very soon here on YouTube. Take care and go make something beautiful maybe in yellow and gray.