Color Inspiration

The link to the color palettes inspired by master painters has provided a great deal of inspiration in my designs. One of the things I seem to struggle with most at the beginning of a design is color. I feel that color is one of the most important parts of a project for me, so taking the first step toward a particular palette can be a challenge. Perhaps it has to do with the season, but I tend to like my designs to feel warm and I try to use deep reds or vibrant oranges to accomplish this.

I find that it is much easier to create a color scheme if I have a photograph to work with because I can use the eyedropper tool to select colors directly from the image. However, when I am just beginning a design, that is not always the case, so the website provides an excellent resource for getting started My personal favorite palettes are William Adolphe Bougereau's Nymphs and Satyr, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa John William Waterhouse's Lady of Shallot.

There are also a couple of other sites I use to help come up with a color palette. Color scheme designer is an excellent resource for finding colors for pairing and offers options such as mono, complement, triad, tetrad, analogic and accented analogic to test out various color schemes. There is also an option to test dark and light websites for a particular color scheme, which provides an opportunity to see how the colors work together.

Unfortunately, when I have decided which colors to use on one of these sites, I generally don't know how to put them into Photoshop or InDesign without taking a snapshot and using the eyedropper tool. Instead, I use ColorHexa to find the CMYK or RGB code for the colors. This site also provides color scheme combinations, but they aren't as easily customizable as the color scheme designer.