Welcome to Crafted Colour – Practical Colour Theory for Craft, which is aimed at helping you develop your Colour Confidence and Craft with Colour. It’s time for our first Inspirational Colour Palette.
How I create my Colour Palettes
The first step in creating a colour palette from a photo is to find a beautiful photo that you can use. I either take my own photos or use Creative Commons photos that allow me to use them without attribution. Some of the websites you can find free images are MorgueFile, Photo Pin, Pixabay and Death to the Stock Photos.
Look for beautiful photos for your palette
I usually create colour palettes on my iPad, although I have created them on my computer using Photoshop Elements. Check out this tutorial and free template by Brandi Hussey, it dates back to 2011 but is still fairly relevant to Photoshop.
On the iPad I use the Palette Picker app although it isn’t in the Australian iTunes Store at the moment. This app allows me to choose the colours myself and position them on any of the four sides of the photo. I can also choose the shape of the sample palettes, such as hearts, flowers or paint brushes, but I still prefer the squares. An excellent alternative to Palette Picker is the Real Color app by Makan Studios which is on the iTunes App Store and Google Play.
Once I’ve chosen the photo and the app I start to grab colours from the photo using the selection tool in Palette Picker, or by choosing the colour scheme in Real Color. Here are four of the colour palettes I pulled from the photo.
Most of these colour palettes use more than one colour scheme, a set of Analogous colours with a pop of a warm colour.
Here’s the final product. Feel free to use this colour palette in any of your craft adventures, I think it would make a fantastic Spring crochet garland or perhaps a framed watercolour artwork.
