Planning Your Color Palette in Children’s Books
How to pick colors in your illustrations for kids books—keep it simple, consistent, and unique!
Why should you plan out your colors before you even start illustrating your kids book?
Taking control of your color palettes at the very beginning of the process gives you CONTROL. The opportunity to create a magical, bold story in your style with super impactful illustrations!
Start thinking about it before you even start—check out some tips below:
While I was illustrating “Mother Aspen”—a lyrical, non-fiction children’s book (written by Annette LeBox, illustrated by me, published by Groundwood Books)—I wanted to the colors to be both memorable and consistent throughout the book.
“Mother Aspen” is a kids book is about nature so the colors really needed to mirror the bright hues and the variety of shades in the real world but also carry a PUNCH!
As an illustrator, I can turn up the volume on the colors to really show off the natural world.
Four ways to control & emphasis colors in children’s books:
Start on color palettes RIGHT away in thumbnail drawings
Keep track of the colors used on each page to create a consistent look
Control what you can to keep all the pages looking like they belong in one story
Add a dash of ~MAGIC~ with a surprising unifying color through the illustrations
Keep reading to find out more about these techniques (including my secret color rule)!
Get your copy of “Mother Aspen” on Amazon over here! (Thanks for the support!)
Start on Color Palettes in Thumbnails
To make sure the colors worked together and really popped throughout this kids book, I started planning them at the earliest stages of the illustrations—from the thumbnails onward!
TOOL TIP:
One tool I love to use for many of my illustration projects is paletton. It’s a fantastic (and free) way to make color palettes using their color wheel tool and color adjustment options. Really, it’s easy to use and helps you create color schemes that are complimentary and consistent. You can even save the palettes in a multitude of ways!1
Try it out. It’s fun to play with and you’ll get addicted super fast—warning!
Going Digital Fast
When working on thumbnails for children’s books, I like to jump to digital versions FAST so I can add in more details and play with the colors. I create layers for each color—which allows me to alter them easily and find the look I want for the book before I start painting in Procreate.
You can see some of my thumbnails for “Mother Aspen” below. These weren’t my first thumbnails—those were super rough pencil sketches that disappeared soon after1—but these are the version that I brought the color into.
Keeping Track of Colors Using Thumbnails
With so many pages in a book it can quickly become confusing keeping the colors consistent yet varied — without having them turn into a rainbow-puddle-muddy-wild-nightmare.
You can see in the pic above, that I put small spots of color beside each thumbnail. This helps me notice which colors are being used OFTEN in the illustrations—then I can emphasis these colors throughout the book and even add them into other pages to keep the look consistent.
In the same way, I can root out colors that I only use a FEW times and would rather replace with something that matches the rest of the color scheme.
In these thumbnails, found that greeny-blue, yellow, and cyan blue were used in a LOT of the pictures (no surprise, as it is a NATURE book) so I made sure to add them to most of the other pages, even in just a small spot. This makes all the images feel like they are part of the same story.
I used *blue-green* instead of a more *yellow-green* for the leaves because I knew I had to convert these images to CMYK for printing once they were finished. When printing in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) there are a number of colors that won’t show up, and green with a lot of yellow in it is definitely a no-no. Luckily, aspen tree leaves have a nice blue tiny, so my changes didn’t look too unrealistic in the final art.2
Taking Control of the Color in Your Kids Book
Get creative! Aspens are often associated with their bright fall colors of yellows and golds, so of course I wanted to highlight these—but the story took place at different times of the year. Oh, man!
In order to keep those beautiful gold tones happening during the rest of the book (which helps create consistency throughout the book), I use a lot of yellow in the skies and creatures, even using a sunset to bring out the colors that were missing!
Winter Problems:
When the weather turns cold in the book, and snow covers the ground, it becomes a bit harder to include all of the main colors I use in the other pages/seasons.
In the winter illustration below, you can see the yellows and oranges of fall peek in from previous pages, and the bright cyan sky is prominent behind the trunks of the trees. Even without the greens, this piece still fits into the look of the whole story.
Make Your Own Color Rules
In “Mother Aspen”, we follow a grove of quaking aspen trees through all of the seasons. This means a wide variety of colors; from the whites of winter snow to the oranges of fall.
I created my own color rules to follow in all the illustrations in order to tie all of these seasons and different palettes together,
One rule I followed was to use high saturations throughout the book.
For example; I use bright, highly-saturated colors for the leaves and skies, no matter what the season or time of day! Even in the dark, the blues are highly charged.
Another rule I made up, was to use mainly purple-based shadows in all the images. The light varies between yellow and pink, but the shadows are consistent.
You can break real-world rules in your book, really!
My Secret Color Rule
There is a secret thread that I use to weave all the images together: an accent of bright pink magenta that can be seen on every page!
Sometimes the pink is in the sunrise, other times it is a highlight behind the aspen trees, or a layer of leaves under the canopy of the trees.
Although not true to nature, (possibly because it wasn’t true to nature) this pink becomes a magical addition that not only ties the images together but I think it also gives the book a unique style.
Even though the above clips of pages are from different seasons and times of day, they all have the bright neon pink and the same bold saturated hues. This helps the reader to see them all as one story—rather than just a collection of images.
Planning out your colors right away will save you time in the end, give your children’s book a unified look, and also allow you to make choices that give your illustrations a unique and bold style!
I’d love it if you would check out “Mother Aspen” over here!
(Thanks for the support!)
✏️ Learn more about me as an illustrator or check out the kid’s books I’ve illustrated over on my website here.
🦋 Say hello over on BlueSky where I hang out quite a bit!
and shall nevermore be seen
Your art director can let you know whether you need to be concerned about CMYK colors in the printing. They can also help convert your pictures and adjust colors to closely match what you see on the screen.
I also love using colors that wouldn’t “naturally“ occur, like pastel pink and orange. I agree that they definitely give it a subtle sense of magic 🖤
Great tips! I’ll have to check out Paletton