When asked to write this piece my first thought was who am I writing this for? I know most of you are “Creatives” and have your own ways of approaching your creativity; but we can all become a little lazy in our practice and use off the peg template colours. I hope you’ll find this simple exercise of use.
Colour palettes are ranges of pleasing colour combinations taken from a image used as inspiration. I started mine just as an exercise in looking at colour and for use in my textile designs. They are inspired by photographs I take during my travels, around the county, country and the world. It’s an enjoyable exercise and I have built up quite a portfolio of colour!
Many of you will build up a sketchbook collection of your drawing; not necessarily complete, but lines, shapes, textures, etc. Looking at colours in images and building a digital sketchbook or catalogue can be just as useful even before you take the paper and paint in your hand. It’s amazing what unusual colour combinations can be found that move you away from those “safe” schemes we are often lead to.
I don’t need to tell you how to use Photoshop or any of the other photo manipulation packages, but here’s how I approach my palettes:
- Find an image you really like – for me it’s usually colour that grabs me first, surprise, surprise! I’m afraid I can’t do “neutrals”, as hard as I try, colour always creeps in. Flowers – wild or cultivated; the countryside – Derbyshire, British or more exotic locations all appeal in quite a soulful, intuitive way. Urban landscapes are a good source of shapes for weavers and will often throw up interesting colour combinations, as in the “London Colours” palette. Having said I find neutrals hard, this image illustrates how colour within a fairly neutral palette changes the dynamic making it much more “friendly” to me!
- Crop your image if necessary. Fussy, overly big images can be too distracting, so focus on the area that really appeals.
- Copy and paste your image onto an A6 white background.
- Decide how many colours you want in your palette, an odd number is more pleasing than an even one.
- Decide what shape you want your palette to take. I like oblongs as they are more suited to my woven fabrics, but circles or squares are all acceptable. If your image is large and you only have a small border at the side or bottom, then the smaller, circles or squares are a better bet.
- Create your shapes and select the most prominent colours using the colour picker tool. Drop the colours into your chosen shapes using the bucket tool. Sometimes the colour combinations work immediately, sometimes you need to change odd ones and shuffle the order of the shapes for them to work in a pleasing way. That’s for you to try out yourself, but just as you’d keep sketching a particular shape in your sketchbook then you keep shuffling or changing the colours in your palette.
It can be quite frustrating trying to select the correct colour that your eye sees as the colour picker tool selects only one pixel at a time; your eye sees a group of pixels that make up the colour. The “Bungle Bungle Colour” palette illustrates this phenomenon, there is quite a lot of purple in the rocks, but it was almost impossible to select the right colour. This is where paint and paper come into their own – attempting to mix the colour, in any medium, helps you to become more familiar with that colour, making it easier to use with the other colours, especially if you’ve tried to mix those too.
Having built up a collection of palettes, you now have a library of colour combinations that can be used in a variety of situations. These become your own ranges to offer clients, rather than using “off the peg” colour templates or swatches.
Award winning textile designer, Alison Yule, creates luxury hand woven fabrics that fuse contemporary design with traditional fibres and techniques and targets both the domestic and corporate markets. She specialises in unique products that are individually designed and hand woven for each client and can include wall panels, rugs, cushions, throws and window hangings.
Visit Alison’s website at alisonyuletextiles.co.uk and then follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.
