4.5 Generating Color Chords

Hi and welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, we're going to have a look at the tools that are included in Affinity Designer to generate color schemes based on color theory. You can do this inside the swatches panel. Right, now the first thing we're going to do is just grab a shape. And then we'll pick a base color from which we're going to create on all of our color schemes. The first one that we're going to create is an analogous color scheme. So you head up into your swatches panel and hit this little drop down list. And here are three different types of pallet that you can create, an application palette which will be available to any document that you create in Affinity Designer. A document palette that will be restricted just to the document that you're working with, and a system palette that you can use anywhere on your machine with any other art application. So for now, we'll just choose add document palette. And it comes up as unnamed. To rename this palette, head back up here and choose Rename Palette and we're gonna call this Analogous. All right, now the first thing we need to do is get this red color, that we have in our little recent swatches here, into our color palette. So to do that just hit this little palette icon here. And that will add the currently active color into your palette. Now to create an analogous color based on this Red Rock Creek this watch. Go to Create Color Chord, and then choose Analogous. And now we have extra colors that have been added in based on our red color to give us an analogous color scheme. So we draw another circle and choose the orange that's been generated. The pink that's been generated. So there we have an automatically generated analogous color scheme. So let's try another one. This time we'll generate a shades color chord. So we'll get back to our red color. Delete these circles. And once again we'll create a new document palette, this time we will call it shaped. Add the active color to our palette. Now right-click that new color, choose Create Color Chord and choose Shades. So there's a whole bunch of different shades of our original red. So we can start using these colors. There's our base red. And we can see all the various shades that we've just had generated for us. So there are several different types of color chords that you can create. And if you're not familiar with any of these different types of color rules, then just jump into Google and have a look. You'll find a ton of information on each one of these different types of color schemes. So that's a great way to start with a preliminary basic color and easily generate some color schemes that you know I going to fit with color theory. In the next lesson, we're going to learn how to define an edit gradients. There are a couple of different ways you can go about this. And each one of those ways is suitable for different types of scenarios. I'll see you there.