Drawing with Limited Colors in Adobe Illustrator®
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Drawing with Limited Colors in Adobe Illustrator®

Tutorial Details
  • Program/Version: Illustrator CS3
  • Difficulty: Intermediate
  • Estimated Completion Time: 4 hours
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We have another great Vector Plus tutorial available exclusively for Plus members today. If you want to learn how to work effectively with a limited color palette when illustrating, then we have an awesome tutorial for you. Sometimes when illustrating for mediums with restrictive color use, like T-shirts, or just for a change from the thousands of colors we have available in our color palettes, illustrating in a reduced color palette can be fun…and challenging!

This Tutorial is Filled with Creative Techniques

Illustrating with a reduced color palette basically means deciding to use only a few colors , that can be between two and maybe up to seven or eight colors. Note: if it was only one color it would technically be a "Mono illustration" normally most mono’s are black and white like the illustrations in the Yellow pages.

So working with only a few colors is going to be fun, but the challenge, dear reader, is assigning those colors around the illustration to have an even covering and deciding what color to make objects that are very similar in color density?

Let’s have a look at one project that had a fairly complex scene that was rendered out with only five colors…and a bit of white ink for good measure!

A preview of the final image is below.

final

Plus members can Log in and Download! If you’re not a member, you can of course join today! You can view the final illustration below.

This is a Detailed and Professional Tutorial

Plus members can Log in and Download! Otherwise, Join Now! Below are sample images, which show some of the development of this tutorial.

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Discussion 8 Comments

  1. Rich says:

    Fantastic! As colours go, less is most definately more!

  2. Melody says:

    Nice clean design and good use of the complimentary colors blue and orange :)

  3. flyingfox says:

    Very nice and retro. Put that on a piece of soap and I would buy it right off :D

    Really great job of letting the overall illustration style and the fonts correspond to the low-saturated two-tone early-days-of-advertising look. Very consistent and convincing outcome.

  4. Mark Mayers says:

    Great retro style. Love it.

    I agree, sometimes less is more. Designing in 2, or more (spot) colours will test both your creative and technical skills – especially for screen-printed work (trapping etc).

  5. Nice outcome. Gotta love retro colors! It reminds me of Michael Cho’s stunning work http://chodrawings.blogspot.com/ and of course you can find lots of retro graphic on http://grainedit.com/

  6. Really clean one :P
    Thanks for the information :)

  7. Vladimir says:

    Very well matched color

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