# The One-Palette Illustrator: Discover How Color Works in Your Art - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/the-one-palette-illustrator-discover-how-color-works-in-your-art/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Illustration & Drawing · Solid intro · Rated 7 /10 # The One-Palette Illustrator: Discover How Color Works in Your Art Updated August 2026 Tom Froese · Illustrator and Designer Intermediate · 192 min If your color choices feel random, this class teaches you to pick one palette and commit to it on purpose. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fthe-one-palette-illustrator-discover-how-color-works-in-your-art%2F1543667470) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. ## A course built on a single, well-argued premise Tom Froese's central claim is simple: illustrators who commit to one dominant color palette look more consistent, more confident, and more hireable than illustrators who reinvent their color choices project to project. The course spends its first third defending that claim before ever touching a brush. Froese walks through six specific objections, among them the fear of becoming a "one-trick pony," the worry that limiting colors signals ignorance of theory, and the concern that a fixed palette shortchanges clients, and answers each one directly rather than glossing over them. This throat-clearing runs long relative to the payoff, but it is not filler. The "One-Palette Illustrators in the Wild" lesson, which walks through the recurring color choices of working illustrators like Anna Hurley, Louise Lockhart, and Klas Fahlen, does real work: it shows a repeated pattern of triadic printmaking colors (cyan, magenta or pink, and yellow) combined through overprinting to generate secondary colors and a non-black dark. That pattern becomes the technical backbone of everything that follows. The color theory section is intentionally thin, and Froese says so directly rather than pretending otherwise. Traditional RYB concepts like hue, tint, and shade get a quick pass, mostly so the course can pivot to the more useful material: how RGB and HSB behave differently from pigment mixing, why complements shift when you move from paint to screen, and how to read the hex and RGB values in Photoshop's color picker. This digital-versus-print bridge is the most practically useful stretch of theory in the course, since it addresses a confusion that trips up a lot of illustrators moving between paper sketches and screen output. ## Where the technique actually lives The real teaching happens in the exercises and the final project, not the primer. The Simple Palette Builder walks through constructing a six-color triadic palette plus a dark, then extending it with tints and shades, and the two-part final project applies that palette twice: once to a tight set of simple objects, once to a busier scene that reuses the objects and loosens the palette. The workflow shown while building these illustrations, including a sketch layer at reduced opacity under an art layer group set to multiply, textured brushes applied at low opacity for shading, and colors combined via multiply blending to generate new hues on the fly, is concrete and repeatable. Watching Froese build his own palette-constrained camping scene, deciding in real time that a tent green is too intense and needs a tint, or that a car color needs pulling back, demonstrates the decision-making the course is actually trying to teach, which is more valuable than the palette-building steps themselves. The course is honest about its limits. It says plainly that this is not a full color theory class and that some digital illustration experience is assumed, which is accurate. Anyone without basic comfort in Photoshop or Procreate will struggle to follow the demo pacing, since Froese moves through dozens of small tool decisions quickly and narrates his own process rather than pausing to teach software basics. The reward for illustrators who already have the tool fluency is a genuinely transferable framework: build one palette from self-reflection, extend it with tints and shades, and use overprinting to keep the whole thing harmonious without leaning on flat black. The standout The overprint technique, where two flat palette colors are multiplied together to generate a third color and a natural non-black dark, gives illustrations cohesion without a single new pigment. ## What you will learn - · How to audit your own past work to identify the colors you naturally gravitate toward - · How to build a personal triadic palette with tints, shades, and an overprint-derived dark, instead of pure black - · The practical difference between RYB pigment theory and RGB/HSB digital color, including how complements shift between the two - · How to translate a digital palette into print-safe values - · How to construct a flat, printmaking-style illustration using texture brushes and multiply-blended overprints in Photoshop - · How to scale one core palette from a strict six-color version to a more varied extended version across two linked illustrations Best for: Digital illustrators with working Photoshop or Procreate skills who already have a visual style but feel scattered or indecisive about color. Skip it if: Absolute beginners to digital illustration tools or anyone wanting a comprehensive traditional color theory course, since the theory here is deliberately abbreviated. Actionable Steps Clarity of Instruction Engaging Teacher Helpful Examples [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fthe-one-palette-illustrator-discover-how-color-works-in-your-art%2F1543667470)