As many of you probably know, I draw much of my inspiration for wool colourways from nature. Up until now I’ve been using a software program called KColoredit to record my colour palettes (it’s Linux based as I use Ubunto on my desktop computer).
Recently, however, I’ve found a handy online tool that makes designing project colourways much easier.
The site’s called Colourlovers. You need to sign up with them to get access to their pallette tools, but it’s well worthwhile. I’ve been playing with their Photocopa tool, which takes key colours in any photo and presents them as a colour pallette, complete with web-friendly colour codes and, for some of the shades, interesting names.
Just look what it did with this photo of some willow flowers.
If you click through on the swatch above, you’ll reach the Colourlovers site, which will give you the names and details of all the colours.
Here’s another:
For each of these pallettes, I’ve picked out what I consider to be the ‘essential’ colours from the pallette that the software generates. It’s fun to play around with the tool, you’ll find that you can get a range of different colour schemes from a single photo, depending on whether you choose bright, light, subdued colours etc.
Here’s another one, from the scenery that I used as the basis of my ‘Coast’ colourway:
And here’s a pic of those colours on BFL wool fibre.
To be honest, coming up with the colour schemes is the easy part. For the fibre artist, the tricky bit is translating those colours into dye mixtures,. But not to worry, I’ll be writing more about how to do that in a future post.
Have you tried using colour pallette software before?
What inspires you when you’re thinking of colours to use in a project?
Color by COLOURlovers
