How to use online colour palettes

There are more sites devoted to colour than there are hours in the day (or year). Here are some that are on high rotation at my place. I find them very helpful when feeling a bit “stuck” for colour ideas or just needing some delicious eye candy (no calories!).

1. If you’ve been over to Pinterest you’ll find lot of pinners pinning Design Seeds like crazy. Or maybe that’s just the people I hang out with, like Amy (Kadee11 on mydeco.com) and Giuliana (ITGirl on mydeco.com). Jessica creates amazing five-colour palettes from photos.

Design Seeds - Succulent Colour

Design Seeds - Puppy Tones

2. Spin the colour wheel. This generates random three colour palettes, specifically for web page design, but you will quickly find something would be gorgeous in a room design too. You have to scroll down a bit to see the Spin button.

"Spin the colour wheel" palettes

Remember you can use lighter/darker, more/less saturated versions of the colours, especially if they seem too strong and bright. Use my colour grids for hints.

3. Kulor has an amazing library of colour schemes contributed by users. You can search using words, like “misty” or “retro” as shown here:

Kulor - misty

Kulor - Retro

Then there’s palettes from nature (Planet Sam), palettes extracted from designers’ homes (DesignSponge), and palettes from fashion and textiles (Color Collective).

When you get tired of those, how about creating your own? If you are anything like me you will spend hours uploading photos of nature and textiles, and oohing and aahing at the colours extracted.

1. Colors Pallete Generator. This tool generates a pallette of up to 49 colours from an uploaded or on-line image. Loading up brightly coloured images is great fun (can you see why I am so in love with Anthropologie?)

Color Palette Generator - Anthropologie "Gloria's Garden" Rug

Lately I have been having even more fun uploading “neutral” images, natural (blogged here) and man-made.

2.  Pictaculous choses five colours from an uploaded image.  I loaded the rug again – what an amazing way to choose colours for co-ordinating paint or accessories.

Pictaculous colour scheme

While it’s nice looking at these I really want to be able to translate them into a room design. This is harder than it looks (well at least it is for me). Once I pasted an entire colour pallette (extracted from the rug) on a wall in a 3d design -

3d Room design - Du Jardin

That seems a bit extreme (though the room is certainly pretty – no suprise as Designers Guild knows everything there is to know about colour). So I have challenged the mydeco.com design community to create a room design based on this palette -

Berry Hues palette by Design Seeds

I’ll share their designs and the tricks I’ve learnt on how to do this with you next time.