3 Tools to Help You Choose Colors for Your Children's Book

It can feel overwhelming to have to find just the right colors for 32+ illustrations that are all tied together to make a cohesive story that both evokes emotion and makes sense! How can you possibly choose?

And how do you keep track of it when you are elbow deep in the middle of a book?

Here are some helpful tools that will help you plan out your color palette AND stay on track during the process! You don’t want to find yourself eight months into kid’s book illustrations and still waffling on color choices.

Pinterest is a great tool for gathering reference photos, illustration examples, and even…color palettes! Start a pinboard that is just for pictures or photos that embrace color palettes you love.

Grouped together, you can start to see patterns that emerge—colors and combinations that pop up again and again. Like a song stuck in your head, these palettes want to come out in your art!

There are a number of color palette building websites or apps that are extremely helpful in putting together a first draft of the basic colors for your book. (You will no doubt have to add/subtract/edit these as you go through the illustration process, but a strong foundation is paramount).)

Why use a color palette tool? Mixing and matching colors is more complex then we might realize, with all sorts of complimentary/clashing pitfalls. However, we can recognize a great color combination when we see it! Using these tools to start with can give you a very solid base on your color choosing journey.

Try out the different color palette options such as monochromatic, adjacent, triad or tetrads—each one gives you options that match. You don’t need to use all the options they give you, but it is a great place to start.

Keep track of these palettes by exporting them as jpgs. You can then place them into your illustrations and use your color picker to grab the right ones when painting. (If you are painting digitally)

Tying this in with Pinterest—some color tool apps let you upload an image and then choose a palette based on colors found in that image. (Or you can do this yourself with the color picker in painting software) This is a great way to discover what colors were inspiring your from the pictures you pinned.

Thumbnails are a must for illustrating kid’s books, of course. Not only do you need rough ones to plot out the general composition of each page, but they are essential for timing, page turns, and more. Plus, your publisher or art director will definitely want to see them at some point.

You can also use thumbnails to plot out colors in your kids book in simple ways.

Above, you can see some thumbnails (digital) for the book ‘Mother Aspen’ (written by Annette LeBox and illustrated by me). These are, of course, not the first thumbnails I did for this project.

First: I took my rough sketches, scanned them in, and digitally colored a few of them to explore colors I might use. These colors were just based off of the content of each scene and the season, I didn’t dive too deep at this point.

Second: I used the color picker tool in my painting software to choose and make little dots of colors used in each thumbnail. This helped me quickly see what colors I was favoring.

Third: now that I had a sampling of colors, I could decide which ones would be the basis for the book. In this case, I used a lot of yellow-green, yellow, and pink.

As you develop your thumbnails more and more, you can track the color development throughout the entire book—page for page. This allows you to easily see the progression and make wise decisions about each page.

You can then track colors based on time of day, setting, characters in each scene, mood and season—while also making sure there is something tying them all together into a unifying book!

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!