Monday, December 10, 2012

Color and colors

I have coral-dyed marbles of several sizes in my stash. I have already used them with turquoise and white pearl, which is a quite common color-combo, but after that, I didn't really know what to do with it... Having many other projects to bring to life, I put the beads aside and forgot them for some time.

Color Scheme Designer
Kuler
Recently, they started begging for attention... but I didn't know how to use them well... So I asked fellow-beaders which colors they would use with coral... and the clever Laulo Darbas came up with a link to a very interesting Color Scheme Designer, a tool for website designers... why not beaders? Lucky me for having kind friends who discover new things and tools and who have a brain to remember the things that I forget... 'CSD' is nice. I am  impressed by the bold and vibrant colors, as well as by the various formats of the files one can  download with this tool. But as for all the color generators here, you need to use the print-screen option to keep the image on your computer if you don't want to create an account to save the color studies you make. Kuler is also very an impressive tool, and it seems to be nice to use...

Paper samples available for free at DIY such as the Home Depot (for paint) was the first 'tool' that I used to find which combos I liked most. It was pretty useful for my home: the colors weren't too bright and I had quite some fun with it. Their clever online tool, Behr's Color Smart Tool is really very nice for choosing colors for your house. You can even paint your own house virtually!


Seeds
The thought of Behr's Tool led me to search for a downloadable generator to make color palettes myself, like the incredible Eva Maria Keiser who has made an amazing series of 'Artisan colorways'...

I haven't found a software available for free, but I've come along a few nice color generators though:

Seeds offers an amazing amount of incredibly beautiful pictures and color palettes which you can download for free and print. There is something for everyone's taste; if you are stuck and need inspiration, this is the place to go. No need to go further if you don't have your own image.

Degraeve
Now, if you are inspired by an image or picture, you might like to use this tool from Degraeve or Color Hunter to see which are the dominant colors of your favorite image; either by entering the url of the image, or simply loading it up from your computer. Both generators will give you a vibrant and a dull color palette.

Color Hunter

Bighugelabs , focused on fabric, is also a nice color generator using your own picture - the result is quite exhaustive - many beautiful colors...  See here what JaneVille's design look like thanks to this tool. It allows you to download the swatches in Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) format for Photoshop or compatible applications and  CSS Drive (yes another one) allows you to save the palette as CSS stylesheet (.css file) or photoshop swatches (.aco file).

There are many color palette generators online, but I think that my two favorites are Seeds for the inspiration by color and by theme and Degraeve (white background) and Color Hunter (dark back-ground) for their succinct selection of the colors.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks Cath. I checked them out with some pictures I had been saving on my computer. I thought the colors in nature photographs would look nice in my beadwork. Thanks b

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  2. Very interesting blog post :)
    Happy to help when I can...
    Hugs

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  3. super cet outils ,ton blog est superbe et je lui souhaites longue vie ,Kiki

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