10 Free Color Theory Tutorials to Learn How to Use Color

Explore the world of colors and color theory to make your creative projects stand out, from interior design to illustration

No matter how skilled you are or how technically perfect a project is: the very first thing the eye notices is color. If you design attractive color palettes, that beautiful design in your favorite technique will surely attract viewers and potential clients.

That’s why we compiled this list of 7 free tutorials, where experts from different backgrounds will teach you how to use the color wheel and make engaging color palettes of your own.

If you want to read full instructions for each video tutorial, just click on its red title and learn more.

Illustration Tutorial: The Color Wheel

The color wheel is a useful tool that will help you do just that. It usually takes the form of a circle. Around the circumference, you can identify the primary colors and see how they mix together to make the secondary and tertiary colors. Illustrator Andonella (@andonella) is here to give you some tips on how to create a color wheel from scratch.

Watercolor Tutorial: How To Create A Color Palette

Nature is bursting with color. A blue bird is not only blue, its feathers will mix blues and violets and spots of grey. This is why it’s important to think carefully about your color palette when drawing a subject from nature. In this tutorial, illustrator Antonia Reyes (@antoniapajarito) explains how to create your own color palette for a nature-inspired illustration project.

Illustration Tutorial: How to Create Color Palettes from Images

Your color palette will transmit a series of sensations completely different from those that other tones would achieve. Therefore, knowing which colors we want to use in our illustrations, and being able to choose them well, as the Adobe Capture app allows us to do with images, will help us make our mark on our work. Illustrator and print designer Catalina Estrada (@catalinaestrada) explains how to use Adobe Capture and Illustrator to import color palettes from our favorite photographs, to be used in an illustration.

Interior Design Tutorial: How to Choose Your Color Palette

Choosing the right color palette is one of the biggest decisions of any interior design project and it is not one you should take lightly. The color you choose will affect the entire project, from your materials to your furniture, so knowing how to bring these elements together is key to a successful design. In this tutorial, Vasso Asfi from STUDIOLAV (@studiolav) shares some basic principles and tips for choosing the right color palette for your next project.

Interior Design Tutorial: Tips to Use Color in Your Home

Colors can help us to create harmonious and elegant atmospheres, but their combination, as well as their proportion, must follow a series of patterns to achieve the best possible results. In the following tutorial, decorator Sofía Saraví O’Keefe (@decolookbook) teaches us how to define a color palette and apply the 60-30-10- rule to designing interiors.

DaVinci Resolve Tutorial: 5 Basic Color Correction Tips

Primary color correction affects the whole shot of the audiovisual work that we want to color correct and is, therefore, the foundation of a consistent color, that contributes to the visual character and coherence of our videos. That is why Leo Fallas (@leofallas), colorist and postproducer, explains in this tutorial how to do so well, using colors, curves and other tools in DaVinci Resolve to achieve a perfect balance in our images.

DaVinci Tutorial: Step by Step Color Grading for Beginners

Color grading is one of the most important jobs in the production process of an audiovisual project. It allows us to explore the expressive possibilities of color to provoke sensations in the viewer. In this tutorial, colorist Sonia Abellán Avilés (@soniabellan) gives us a series of tips to start a digital color grading process and adjust primary colors and lighting using DaVinci Resolve.

Watercolor Tutorial: How to Create Shadow Using Color Theory

The color theory explains that by incorporating a complementary color with a base color, we can generate a darker, more neutral tone and tone down the original base color. This resulting shade can be utilized to enhance composition, depth, and equilibrium when utilized as a shadow color.

In this introductory tutorial, Sarah Stokes (@sarah_stokes) illustrates how to utilize a color wheel to identify the complementary color for your base hue and how to produce a muted variant of this shade to introduce shadow effects.

Interior Design Tutorial: How to Choose Your Color Palette

Choosing the right color palette is one of the biggest decisions of any interior design project and it is not one you should take lightly. The color you choose will affect the entire project, from your materials to your furniture, so knowing how to bring these elements together is key to a successful design.

In this tutorial, Vasso Asfi (@studiolav) shares some basic principles and tips for choosing the right color palette for your next project.

DaVinci Resolve Tutorial: 3 TOP Tips for Beginners

As a professional colorist, Alex Berry’s job (@make_it_pop) is to help capture the viewer’s attention and highlight the emotion and spirit of a film.

For him, DaVinci Resolve provides all the ideal tools needed to perform this task. He shares his top tips for correcting video color with this package.

6 Interesting Facts about Color Theory

We are surrounded by colors. They are one of the first things we learn to identify and name. We all have a favorite one, and use them as tools to represent both cultural and artistic identities. But what do we really know about them?

Do you know why the Pantone color classification system exists, how the color pink affects us, or why orange didn't exist before the 15th century?

You may also like:

- Find the meaning of color harmony
- What Is Color Blocking in Interior Design?
- Color Theory in Photography, a course by Yaopey Yong