APP Words: Adding a Splash of Colour

[4]
With only my pattern design to do, I thought it was time to start figuring out what colours to use on my design. I'm going to thinking of the background as well as that'll be the main factor affecting the colours I choose on my "Never Give In" design.

As we've seen from a few posts back, this is what my design looks like right now:

Right, let's start adding some colour! I'm going to just show a whole series of different colours and put them all in one picture so that it'll be easier for me to compared everything.

I got a bit fed up with what I've got so far so I took inspiration from one of Linzie Hunter's designs and created a colour palette from that. I then played around with similar colours.

I quite like the last one where there's a hint of blue as a background, but I also like how the deeper aqua turned out as well. It is a perfect combination of soothing colours (blue and aqua) but then I have one really bold, contrasting colour to provide that excitement. This is a similar technique I found when analysing inspirational designs.

I think that the red might be a bit too bold so I'll dampen that down a bit. 

I then tried out some more colour shades.

Taking a look at all of the versions above, I think I prefer the bluer background but maybe with red writing... Oh, I can't decide! I'll place them side-by-side to help me figure it out. I'll also try out not having an outline around the words as well.

I actually think the version without the outline is better because the letters are a lot thicker, so I might try out a really thin outline just to bring out each letter a little bit. I also want to try creating a thin outline around the ampersand (even though I'll be adding some shading at a later stage). 

I then wanted to try and created an outline for the whole of the design. So I selected all of the elements and put them on separate layers, and then locked the background. I then highlighted everything else and added a stroke.

However this made the letters really funny so I went back and only selected the banner and ampersand, then added a stroke. 

This really made the design 'pop' but obviously I would need to do it at a much later stage as I've yet to add all of the little details to it. Plus I'd also like to put it on an actual travel mug template before I do anything else, but it was still good to know what it would look like.

Conclusion:

With my colours sorted I can now move onto adding colours to all of the other aspects, the tea leaves pattern in particular.

[n] Learning Outcome