ART 220 06: Color Systems

Thursday, September 10, 2026 · Workshop

Global swatches, and why they exist: edit once, and everything painted with it changes. Value first: a picture that fails in gray fails in color. Then a tour of how illustrators use color, on the real pictures, from Malika Favre's three-color covers to Saul Bass, Whistler, Jon Klassen, Mary Blair, Tomer Hanuka and Hiroshige, with each picture's own count under it, so a palette reads as a choice among many and not the only one. Then the tools: Adobe Color, Coolors, oklch, Color Oracle, and Swatches, Color Guide and Recolor Artwork in Illustrator, with the same ideas in Photoshop. Exercise 3 runs in class on your own Project 1 set: every loose color down to three globals without losing the read. Vector drafts are desk-checked at the start. The target is one palette across the hero and both spots by the end of the day.

Read before this class

- Favre, Malika Favre. optional, browse the covers before class.

Due

- Vector drafts. - Color systems.

Materials

- [Color Systems, the slides](/lecture/art220-color.html). Value first, eight treatments on real pictures with their counts, the tools, then Illustrator and Photoshop step by step. - [The slides as a PDF](/lecture/art220-color.pdf). The same deck to keep. - [Color Lab](https://wrkhrs.co/tools/color). The class demo as a page. Hue, saturation and brightness on one color, the square in gray, why brightness is not lightness, then a palette in OKLCH with ramps, a gray check and a contrast table. Copy the hex list or download the swatches as an SVG for Illustrator. - [Adobe Color](https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel). The wheel with harmony rules, palettes pulled from a photo, and a contrast checker. Saves straight into your Illustrator Libraries. - [Coolors](https://coolors.co/). Press space, get a palette. Lock the ones you like and keep going. Export as an .ase for Illustrator. - [Khroma](https://www.khroma.co/). Pick fifty colors you like, and it learns your taste and generates pairs. - [Realtime Colors](https://www.realtimecolors.com/). See a palette on a real page, not on squares. - [oklch.com](https://oklch.com/). A color picker where equal steps look equal. Use it to build tints and shades that actually stay the same hue. - [Color Oracle](https://colororacle.org/). Free. Shows your whole screen the way a colorblind viewer sees it. Run it on your set before you hand it in. - [Sim Daltonism](https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/). Free, Mac. A floating window that shows whatever is under it as a colorblind viewer sees it.

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Class 06 of 28, ART 220, Digital Illustration, Charleston Southern University, Fall 2026.