Color Palettes
Let's have some fun with color!
Artists use a color story to make art cohesive and lead the eye around the canvas, but here are some fun reasons to use it in other areas of your life. Color psychology: https://www.verywellmind.com/color-psychology-2795824
Interior design - I loved learning about indigo dye (I read an article about it before moving here https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/indigo-making-comeback-south-carolina-180980987/) and how it is grown in the south, so when Mark and I bought our house we decided to have a blue color theme. This worked out because all of the walls in our home are painted agreeable grey. This is not a color I would have chosen but I like it in this house. It's cool and clean and because it gets so hot here a cooler color palette makes sense. It also makes shopping easy and our artwork pop. We don't buy things that don't work with the blue color scheme. Lemme show you -
What if you don't know what colors your drawn to? or you want to update your colors - here's one way to figure it out. Make a Pinterest page. Add any images you are drawn to. Don't worry about the subject. Outdoor space - yes! Interiors - yes! Artwork you like - yes! Clothing - you know it. Don't have or want to use Pinterest then grab a stack of magazines and do the same thing. Once you have a nice amount of photos, digital or a real stack, put it away. Then, 2-3 days later go back and look again. What colors feel like you? Look at the colors and see what speaks to you. Then, you can pull the colors straight from those images. You can cut them out and put them on a new sheet of paper to see how they look together - this can be done digitally where you just snip a portion of the picture and put it on a google doc.
Another way - There are many apps to do this now but one of the easiest is to just install the chrome extension (palette creator). Then right click on the image and voila - it will give you a palette of various number of colors (see image below).
Back to art - artists choose their colors many ways, some choose the color palette before beginning, limited or a broad range. Some intuitively begin with colors and adjust as they move through their work. Others work to match nature or their source. Last, some unify their colors by using a transparent glaze. The eye is first drawn to lights and dark's, so it's important to get the emphasis right first. This is why many artists start with a value study prior to putting paint to canvas.
So, I hope this inspires you to play with color - digitally, with your own paints, magazine cut outs, decor, clothing, etc. Maybe, you didn't know you like army green paired with bright pink! What does your color palette say? Are you surrounded by those colors? I hope so. If not, maybe this will inspire you to surround yourself with the colors you love! I can't wait to see what your color palette looks like.
Here's a link to my pinterest pages, if you want to take a peek :)
Love, Eileen