To choose a color in Procreate, tap the color circle in the top right corner to open the Colors panel, then pick a mode from the tabs at the bottom: Disc, Classic, Harmony, Value, or Palettes. Use Disc or Classic for intuitive picking, Harmony for scheme suggestions, Value for exact hex or RGB entry, and the eyedropper (touch and hold on the canvas) to sample from a reference. For production work, set the document's color profile before you pick anything so the color you choose is the color you export.

Open the Colors panel and understand what you're looking at

Tapping the color circle opens the Colors panel. A few elements matter before you pick anything:

• Primary and secondary color. The two side-by-side rectangles at the top right show your primary color (left) and secondary color (right). The secondary is used by certain brushes through Color Dynamics, so you can ignore it for flat fills.
• Active color. This is what you'll lay down on the next stroke.
• History. The last ten colors you used appear here. Choosing an eleventh bumps the oldest one off, and Clear wipes the row.
• Active palette. The current palette sits at the bottom of the Disc, Classic, Harmony, and Value tabs, so you can grab saved swatches without switching modes.

While you drag the reticle, it splits to show the color under your finger beside your most recent color. That's a quick A/B check against the shade you just used.

Pick the right mode for the job

Procreate gives you five ways to choose a color. They aren't interchangeable in practice.

Disc

Disc is the default. An outer ring controls hue, and an inner disc controls saturation and lightness. Pinch to zoom the inner disc and you get finer control over a narrow range. Double-tapping areas of the disc jumps to pure colors, which is handy for fast access to white, black, or fully saturated hues. It's the best mode for exploratory painting, when you're feeling your way toward a mood.

Classic

Classic uses hue, saturation, and brightness sliders plus a square picker. If you've used Photoshop, it will feel familiar. It's useful when you want to hold hue constant and walk saturation or brightness up and down, such as building a tonal ramp for a single object.

Harmony

Harmony generates schemes from your current color: complementary, split complementary, analogous, triadic, and tetradic. Pick a base color, switch scheme types, and tap individual swatches on the wheel to adjust them or add them to a palette. For motion work, this is a good way to find an accent color that contrasts with a dominant background hue without guessing.

Value

Value is the precision mode. It exposes sliders for HSB and RGB, plus a hexadecimal field. Use it whenever a color has to match something outside Procreate: a brand swatch, a hex from a client style guide, or a value you've already locked in an After Effects comp. Type the hex and you're done.

Palettes

Palettes store swatches you want to reuse. Procreate ships with several, and you can create, import, and share your own. Create a new palette with the plus icon, rename it, and add colors as you settle on them. You can also build one from a photo (Palettes tab, plus icon, New From Photos), which turns a reference image into a swatch set.

Sample colors from references with the eyedropper

Often the best way to choose a color is to not choose it at all, and take it from a reference instead. Touch and hold on the canvas and the eyedropper appears as a ring. The top half shows the color under your finger, and the bottom half shows your current color. Drag to preview, lift to commit.

If touch-and-hold doesn't suit your habits, you can change the activation method under Actions (wrench icon) > Preferences > Gesture Controls. Insert a reference photo or a screengrab of a frame from your project through Actions > Insert a photo, then sample directly from it.

Sampling from a reference is the most reliable way to keep a styleframe consistent with a director's moodboard or a plate you're going to composite into.

Build a palette deliberately, not by accident

A limited palette tends to read as more cohesive than a free-for-all. A workable process:

1. Set the mood first. Decide whether the piece should feel warm, cold, tense, or calm before opening the panel. Warm reds, oranges, and yellows read differently than desaturated blues and greens.
2. Seed the palette from a reference. Use New From Photos on a moodboard image or a location still, then prune swatches that don't serve the piece.
3. Add a contrast color with Harmony. Take your dominant hue and look at its complementary or split complementary for a focal accent.
4. Add tints and shades. Rather than adding more hues, extend each one by moving toward lighter and darker values. Four hues with a few steps each give you plenty of range.
5. Save and name the palette. Reuse it across boards so a sequence of styleframes stays consistent.

If you need to explore combinations visually before committing, an external palette generator can help you see swatches side by side. Bring the result into Procreate by importing a palette or typing hex values in the Value tab.

Choose the color profile before you choose colors

Most guides skip this, and it's the one that matters most for professional handoff. Procreate's Color Profiles include native sRGB, P3 Wide Color, and CMYK, and you can import custom profiles. The profile determines how your chosen values map to a display or to print.

Practical guidance:

• Delivering to video or web? sRGB is the safe default. It's the most predictable when the art lands in an sRGB or Rec.709 timeline.
• Working on a wide-gamut display and a P3 pipeline? P3 gives you more saturated options, but you have to be sure the rest of your chain is tagged correctly. Otherwise colors shift when the file is opened elsewhere.
• Producing print? CMYK is available.

Set this when you create the canvas. Changing profiles mid-project can alter how colors appear, and a color you picked by eye may no longer look the same.

When you move a Procreate file into After Effects, Photoshop, or Nuke, check that the working space and the file's embedded profile are interpreted the way you expect. If a hex value from the Value tab looks different on import, a profile mismatch is the usual cause, not the color you chose.

Speed up selection with a few habits

• Drag-to-fill. Dragging the active color from the color circle onto an enclosed area floods it with that color (ColorDrop). It's quick for blocking in flat shapes.
• Switch between current and previous color. Pressing and holding the active color in some layouts swaps back to your previous color. It helps when you're alternating between two tones.
• Keep History visible. On smaller iPads, the ellipsis button toggles between showing your active palette and your color history.
• Compare before committing. The split reticle shows the new color next to your last one, so check the relationship before you lay it down.

Where Procreate color choices fit in a motion pipeline

Procreate is a strong place to settle color for concept art, styleframes, and boards. The decision it helps you make, which palette and which accent, then has to survive animation, compositing, and grading. A few ways to carry it forward:

• Record the hex values for your key colors and put them in the project's notes or a shared palette file, so everyone in the pipeline works from the same numbers.
• Export a flattened styleframe and drop it into After Effects as a color reference layer for your comp, or into Nuke as a read node you can sample against.
• Keep the color profile in mind so your reference and your comp are viewed in the same space.

Using a finished Procreate frame as a reference in Styleframe

Once you've landed on a look, you may want to see it applied across moving footage or generated shots. A finished Procreate frame can serve as a reference image for that kind of work in a tool like Styleframe. Check the tool's current documentation for supported features and export formats. The point isn't to replace the color decisions you made by hand, but to carry them into motion without handing the look to a black box.

Quick reference: which method when

Final checklist

Before you start painting, confirm the color profile. Pick your mode based on whether you're exploring or matching. Seed your palette from a real reference, add one contrast color, extend with tints and shades, and save it. Note your hex values so the same colors can follow the project into After Effects, Nuke, or whichever tool does the next stage of work.

To choose a color in Procreate, tap the color circle in the top right corner to open the Colors panel, then pick a mode from the tabs at the bottom: Disc, Classic, Harmony, Value, or Palettes. Use Disc or Classic for intuitive picking, Harmony for scheme suggestions, Value for exact hex or RGB entry, and the eyedropper (touch and hold on the canvas) to sample from a reference. For production work, set the document's color profile before you pick anything so the color you choose is the color you export.

Open the Colors panel and understand what you're looking at

Tapping the color circle opens the Colors panel. A few elements matter before you pick anything:

• Primary and secondary color. The two side-by-side rectangles at the top right show your primary color (left) and secondary color (right). The secondary is used by certain brushes through Color Dynamics, so you can ignore it for flat fills.
• Active color. This is what you'll lay down on the next stroke.
• History. The last ten colors you used appear here. Choosing an eleventh bumps the oldest one off, and Clear wipes the row.
• Active palette. The current palette sits at the bottom of the Disc, Classic, Harmony, and Value tabs, so you can grab saved swatches without switching modes.

While you drag the reticle, it splits to show the color under your finger beside your most recent color. That's a quick A/B check against the shade you just used.

Pick the right mode for the job

Procreate gives you five ways to choose a color. They aren't interchangeable in practice.

Disc

Disc is the default. An outer ring controls hue, and an inner disc controls saturation and lightness. Pinch to zoom the inner disc and you get finer control over a narrow range. Double-tapping areas of the disc jumps to pure colors, which is handy for fast access to white, black, or fully saturated hues. It's the best mode for exploratory painting, when you're feeling your way toward a mood.

Classic

Classic uses hue, saturation, and brightness sliders plus a square picker. If you've used Photoshop, it will feel familiar. It's useful when you want to hold hue constant and walk saturation or brightness up and down, such as building a tonal ramp for a single object.

Harmony

Harmony generates schemes from your current color: complementary, split complementary, analogous, triadic, and tetradic. Pick a base color, switch scheme types, and tap individual swatches on the wheel to adjust them or add them to a palette. For motion work, this is a good way to find an accent color that contrasts with a dominant background hue without guessing.

Value

Value is the precision mode. It exposes sliders for HSB and RGB, plus a hexadecimal field. Use it whenever a color has to match something outside Procreate: a brand swatch, a hex from a client style guide, or a value you've already locked in an After Effects comp. Type the hex and you're done.

Palettes

Palettes store swatches you want to reuse. Procreate ships with several, and you can create, import, and share your own. Create a new palette with the plus icon, rename it, and add colors as you settle on them. You can also build one from a photo (Palettes tab, plus icon, New From Photos), which turns a reference image into a swatch set.

Sample colors from references with the eyedropper

Often the best way to choose a color is to not choose it at all, and take it from a reference instead. Touch and hold on the canvas and the eyedropper appears as a ring. The top half shows the color under your finger, and the bottom half shows your current color. Drag to preview, lift to commit.

If touch-and-hold doesn't suit your habits, you can change the activation method under Actions (wrench icon) > Preferences > Gesture Controls. Insert a reference photo or a screengrab of a frame from your project through Actions > Insert a photo, then sample directly from it.

Sampling from a reference is the most reliable way to keep a styleframe consistent with a director's moodboard or a plate you're going to composite into.

Build a palette deliberately, not by accident

A limited palette tends to read as more cohesive than a free-for-all. A workable process:

1. Set the mood first. Decide whether the piece should feel warm, cold, tense, or calm before opening the panel. Warm reds, oranges, and yellows read differently than desaturated blues and greens.
2. Seed the palette from a reference. Use New From Photos on a moodboard image or a location still, then prune swatches that don't serve the piece.
3. Add a contrast color with Harmony. Take your dominant hue and look at its complementary or split complementary for a focal accent.
4. Add tints and shades. Rather than adding more hues, extend each one by moving toward lighter and darker values. Four hues with a few steps each give you plenty of range.
5. Save and name the palette. Reuse it across boards so a sequence of styleframes stays consistent.

If you need to explore combinations visually before committing, an external palette generator can help you see swatches side by side. Bring the result into Procreate by importing a palette or typing hex values in the Value tab.

Choose the color profile before you choose colors

Most guides skip this, and it's the one that matters most for professional handoff. Procreate's Color Profiles include native sRGB, P3 Wide Color, and CMYK, and you can import custom profiles. The profile determines how your chosen values map to a display or to print.

Practical guidance:

• Delivering to video or web? sRGB is the safe default. It's the most predictable when the art lands in an sRGB or Rec.709 timeline.
• Working on a wide-gamut display and a P3 pipeline? P3 gives you more saturated options, but you have to be sure the rest of your chain is tagged correctly. Otherwise colors shift when the file is opened elsewhere.
• Producing print? CMYK is available.

Set this when you create the canvas. Changing profiles mid-project can alter how colors appear, and a color you picked by eye may no longer look the same.

When you move a Procreate file into After Effects, Photoshop, or Nuke, check that the working space and the file's embedded profile are interpreted the way you expect. If a hex value from the Value tab looks different on import, a profile mismatch is the usual cause, not the color you chose.

Speed up selection with a few habits

• Drag-to-fill. Dragging the active color from the color circle onto an enclosed area floods it with that color (ColorDrop). It's quick for blocking in flat shapes.
• Switch between current and previous color. Pressing and holding the active color in some layouts swaps back to your previous color. It helps when you're alternating between two tones.
• Keep History visible. On smaller iPads, the ellipsis button toggles between showing your active palette and your color history.
• Compare before committing. The split reticle shows the new color next to your last one, so check the relationship before you lay it down.

Where Procreate color choices fit in a motion pipeline

Procreate is a strong place to settle color for concept art, styleframes, and boards. The decision it helps you make, which palette and which accent, then has to survive animation, compositing, and grading. A few ways to carry it forward:

• Record the hex values for your key colors and put them in the project's notes or a shared palette file, so everyone in the pipeline works from the same numbers.
• Export a flattened styleframe and drop it into After Effects as a color reference layer for your comp, or into Nuke as a read node you can sample against.
• Keep the color profile in mind so your reference and your comp are viewed in the same space.

Using a finished Procreate frame as a reference in Styleframe

Once you've landed on a look, you may want to see it applied across moving footage or generated shots. A finished Procreate frame can serve as a reference image for that kind of work in a tool like Styleframe. Check the tool's current documentation for supported features and export formats. The point isn't to replace the color decisions you made by hand, but to carry them into motion without handing the look to a black box.

Quick reference: which method when

Final checklist

Before you start painting, confirm the color profile. Pick your mode based on whether you're exploring or matching. Seed your palette from a real reference, add one contrast color, extend with tints and shades, and save it. Note your hex values so the same colors can follow the project into After Effects, Nuke, or whichever tool does the next stage of work.