How to Build a Color Palette for a Children's Book

Color is emotional before it is visual. That is how Diana McDerMott opens the color section of her children's book course on Twotap, and it reframes the whole job: before a child has read a word of your book, they have already had a feeling about it, triggered entirely by the colors on the page.

McDerMott, who has illustrated 23 children's books, is clear that this is not a full color theory course. What she teaches is the narrow slice of color theory that decides whether a picture book feels cohesive across 32 pages: temperature, saturation, a handful of contrast tools, and above all restraint. This post follows her three color lessons, ending with the palette she builds live in Procreate for her Jack and the Beanstalk demo book.

Is this a warm book or a cool book?

Every palette should have a clear overall temperature. Warm colors, the reds, oranges, and yellows, feel inviting, energetic, and cozy, which is part of why so many classic kid lit illustrations lean warm; warm reads as safe and approachable to a child. Cool colors, the blues, purples, and blue-greens, feel calm, expansive, mysterious, sometimes melancholy: moonlight, deep water, a quiet winter morning. Either direction works. What does not work is mixing warm and cool without intention, which leaves a book feeling visually uncertain.

The exception is the deliberate accent. In one book she shows, an underwater spread is all cool purples, blues, and greens, and the reader's eye goes straight to a brightly colored warm monster, who happens to be the main character. In another, a warm crowd scene is punctured by one boy in a cool blue hat, and the hat is why you find him instantly. A temperature accent is not a broken rule; it is color doing focal point work.

Match saturation to the story's volume

Saturation is intensity: how vivid a color is versus how much gray it contains. Highly saturated palettes feel bold and exuberant, and they read well at a distance and at small sizes, which is why they dominate younger picture books. Muted palettes, colors mixed with a little gray or brown, feel quieter, more sophisticated, more natural, with the handmade quality of watercolor and soft texture.

A muted palette on an action-based adventure story will feel a little bit off. A fully saturated palette on a quiet, contemplative bedtime story might feel like way too much.

Diana McDerMott, "Color Theory Essentials for Kid Lit" (Part 4, Lesson 11), From Manuscript to Printed Book

Two smaller tools round out the theory. Light and shadow are almost never the same temperature: a warm light source like sun or candlelight throws shadows that lean cool, and a cool source like moonlight throws shadows that lean warm, so pick a light source per spread and keep it consistent. And complementary colors, the pairs opposite each other on the wheel, create the strongest possible contrast, which makes them a reliable way to steer a reader's eye, but only with restraint. Orange clothing on a blue-green spread pulls the eye precisely because it is unusual; spread it everywhere and the effect dies.

Five or six colors are enough

Then she builds an actual palette, on screen, in Procreate. The brief she sets herself for Jack and the Beanstalk: warm, cheery, whimsical. She starts with a dominant color, a golden yellow pulled back from full saturation, meant for sunny afternoon scenes. Then supporting colors that sit comfortably with it without competing: a blue-green, a second green she later deletes because two greens were one too many. Then accents, a teal and a more saturated orange, a creamy off-white as the neutral, black which she never counts as a color, and finally a warm lilac because the story wants some whimsy. Separately she saves a peachy skin tone and a light brown for the main character's hair.

The total comes to about five main colors plus neutrals and character colors, and she is explicit that the constraint is the point. Shadows and highlights will multiply the working colors anyway, so the palette never feels as small in the finished art as it looks in the swatch row.

She then tests the palette before committing, painting it into cleaned up storyboard thumbnails with the linework set to multiply and a color layer underneath. The test run told her she needed one more neutral, a gray, and that otherwise the palette held. That is the whole function of the exercise: find the missing color on a thumbnail, not on spread eleven. Her warning for when you catch yourself reaching for a new color mid-book: ask whether the story actually needs it or you just want more. When you have a smaller palette, she says, it forces creativity and makes your book feel more cohesive, and if you flip through picture books you love you will find most of them run on a handful of colors used everywhere.

Night scenes: shift the palette, never switch it

The last lesson answers the question every limited palette raises: what about the nighttime spread, the storm, the dream, the underwater scene? McDerMott's rule is to shift the palette you have instead of switching to a new one. For night, desaturate your colors, cool them slightly, and darken the values, while keeping the character's signature color close to the original so they stay recognizable.

Her examples make the principle concrete. In one book, a monster who is bright pink by day keeps his pink in a nearly pitch black night scene while his usually bright yellow nose and the boy's peachy skin go gray and cool, and the pink is exactly what still pulls your eye to him eating his cake. A storm spread mutes everything except that same pink. A winter spread runs the background purple and gray. Different weather, different hour, same book, because the palette bent instead of breaking.

Color planning is Part 4 of Diana McDerMott's From Manuscript to Printed Book on twotap.art. Before it, the course covers pagination, character design, and storyboarding; after it, she renders full spreads in Procreate and walks the finished art all the way into print files and a proof copy. If you want to see the Jack and the Beanstalk palette actually painted across a book, that is where it happens.