Somewhere over the rainbow way up high.
I won't sing any more of this,
due to Copyright.
Today, we're making rainbow gradients, but not with your traditional rainbow colors.
Instead, I'm showing you 21 different fun and colorful combinations that you can try
for yourself to create amazing patterns, gradients, and interesting art.
But even more, I'll show you how to find
your own colors so you can come up with your own unique combinations, too.
Let's go.
The easiest place to start in choosing rainbow gradients is the color wheel.
If you're not familiar with the color
wheel, I have a quick video here that will give you a great overview of how to use it
to find color combinations that work well together.
For our gradients, the best combinations are analogous colors, that's the colors
that sit next to each other on the color wheel.
I've already got some examples from my color three workbook that we can
use as inspiration for our first few gradients today.
Once you've found your inspiration, it's time to find your pencils.
This is where swatching your pencils can help because you can simply line your
swatches up against your reference and find the closest match.
It doesn't have to be perfect,
so my Prismacolor swatches are getting a bit old.
I definitely need to redo these soon.
In fact, as you can see from these colors,
this is exactly why I need to redo my swatches.
These colors have actually changed because
these aren't actually lightfast pencils, so definitely time for me to redo these.
If you can't find an exact match,
you're better choosing a slightly different hue instead of going darker or
lighter, which isn't always the case of matching colors to a reference photo,
but it is the case if we're making a gradient with similar colors like this.
Test out your colors side by side, see how they look, and add or remove any
colors that you feel would help to make a better gradient.
And when you're happy,
create yourself a final gradient swatch to see how it looks.
Today, I'm doing all of my gradients
on this page so that they look beautiful when we're done.
And instead of drawing guides like I normally do, I've decided to mask my page
just with some simple washi tape to help me stay within the lines.
I'm using the Strathmore Bristol 400
series, which is a bit of a more expensive paper, but I really wanted to use it today
because I don't often get a chance to pull this out does mean it has a little more
tooth than I'm used to, so I'm pulling out my Prismacolor blender
just to help me get rid of some of the extra white tooth on this paper
when I'm done, instead of pushing too hard with my pencils so that I don't create too
much wax on top when I'm finishing off each of these gradients.
So I really like how these first three have come out.
The only thing I would change if I were
to do this again is maybe add one more transitionary color between the yellow
and the green on this third gradient just to make it a more smooth transition.
Let's find some more analogous gradients from this workbook to try today.
Okay, so this one's kind of giving me
a bit of a vintage vibe, and I'm not sure if I like it as much
of the rest, but for the sake of variety, we're just going to do it.
I'm using Prismacolor Pencils today because I know these are pencils that many
of you own, and they do blend really nicely for projects like this.
But you can do this with any pencils you own.
The key, whatever you use, is to keep your pencils sharp and your pressure light.
Overlap each color as you go and build up
the layers. Only add more pressure as you get towards your final layer.
The amount of layers you need will depend
a lot on your pencils and the paper you choose.
If you want a more in depth look at this process.
I've created a whole video about how I
create these smooth blends, and I talk about the Color Wheel
and analogous colors in a bit more detail there as well.
You can watch that here, so these are pretty so far,
but eventually you might run out of Ideas if you only use the color wheel.
So I've also got my Color Catalogs here to help get our creativity flowing.
The Color Catalog is aimed at being
a point of inspiration for colors that work well together,
but not all of them will necessarily work well in a gradient,
so we're looking for colors that still have the potential to blend together,
even if we need to add a few transitionary colors in between.
So sunsets are always good for gradient inspiration.
Actually, the Color Catalog, too, even has gradient as a keyword.
I forgot that was there.
This one reminds me of the vintage ones we
just did, and if we browse by colors,
we can pick some that maybe have some colors we haven't used yet.
Whoa, bright.
Because I'm using Prismacolor Pencils,
I printed off the Prismacolor Companion for the Color Catalog.
That gives me the closest pencil match for each of these palettes.
This should save some time in trying to match these pencils myself.
I've designed the Color Catalog Companions so
you can either leave it as a whole page,
or you can cut it into cards like I've done today.
A few of these instantly work as gradients, and for the rest,
I've added some extra colors using the Color Wheel for help and just
experimenting with others, and I think I'm happy with what I've come up with.
I'm going to stop talking for the next few
minutes so that you can sit back and enjoy watching these satisfying color gradients.
So obviously it's hard to see all of these in full details, so I will be including
every one of these gradients and the colored pencil numbers to match
in my blog post along with links to the other resources I've used today.
You can check it all out at the link in the description below.
I noticed something strange happened
with these two colors Where there's a little bit of an odd purple showing up.
I think that's because the pink had a bit
of white in it so just keep this in mind when you're mixing colors it's probably
worth doing a test run on a scrap piece of paper first.
Now I know we all love color but there's
one thing I don't like in color and that's your subscribe button.
So go ahead, make it grey.
So other than making up pretty blocks
of rainbow color, how else do we use these gradients?
If you've watched my pastel pencil video recently, I used a similar process
to choose my colors from my range of Holbein, Marco pastels and Pastelove
pencils and colored those gradients along the patterns in my coloring planner.
Even though those colors were pastels,
I still followed the color wheel to choose colors that were analogous so they
followed the same basic system and the end result looked great - in my opinion at least!
21 gradients perfect for sunset, for rainbows or just for pretty patterns.
This video was just as much for me as for you because I'm going to keep these,
maybe even cut them up as handy little cards or as a pretty poster to remind
myself to try these again when I'm coloring.
If you have a favorite, tell me in the comments.
Is that it? Do we cover everything?
Are we supposed to let everyone know why
we've got random paper stuck all over the wall?
We have set up this whole time? Supposed to pull it down before the video.
You probably probably want to explain why it's there then.
So yeah, interesting story.
So the paper is here because...