The Art of Choosing: Building a Scheme Around a Photograph

The Art of Choosing is a series discussing fabric, color, and the fabric selection process! Here's what's been posted so far:

1. Recognizing a Fabric's Overall Color
2. Folding
3. Stash Storage
4. Organizing Your Stash by Color
5. Building a Well Rounded Stash
6. Supplementing a Fabric Line
7. Reader Stashes
8. Building a Scheme Around a Single Fabric
This Week: Building a Scheme Around a Photograph

This week we'll be discussing building a color scheme around a photograph! There are a lot of different ways to do this, the most simple being to just look at it! However, I'm going to share a few tools with you that make it a little easier!

Friendship Cinderella Bowls, originally uploaded by jenib320.

First, here is the image that I'm going to be using for this exercise. It's one of my photographs of vintage pyrex!

1. Kuler

The Art of Choosing, originally uploaded by jenib320.

This is one of the coolest color tools on the web. There are a ton of already made color schemes to choose from, or you can make your own! On the left hand side of the front page click "Create". You'll now have the option of creating "From a Color" or "From an Image". For our purposes, choose "From an Image". Underneath the preloaded image, you can choose to upload an image from your computer or sign in with flickr. I suggest uploading, it ran a little slow for me when I tried to do it from flickr. Once you've got your image loaded, it comes up with a palette for you! You can stop there, or play around and find other colors within the image. You can move the little dots on the image (they correspond with the color boxes below!) to choose new colors. You can register with the site and save your color palettes, or you can simply take a screen shot to save to your computer. The nice thing about saving it though is that you can go back and edit it in the future!

I also love sticking a fabric swatch into Kuler. It picks the colors out for me, super handy!

2. Color Palette Generator

The Art of Choosing, originally uploaded by jenib320.

This generator is a lot more simple and straight forward. Simple grab the URL of an image on the web and it will generate two palettes for you: Dull and Vibrant. The nice thing about this generator is it gives you a Hex code for your color, which you could use on your blog or website. Color Hunter works the same way, it allows you to use an image on the web and upload an image.

3. By Hand

The Art of Choosing, originally uploaded by jenib320.

If you aren't interested in creating a color palette online, you can always do it by hand. Having a color card around can be really handy when pulling colors. I like to grab a big box of crayons (so many colors!) and using colors from the photograph, sketch out a quick palette. You're doing more of the work, but sometimes it just isn't practical to use the computer.

Here is my fabric stack that I pulled from the Kuler palette! I puled reds, peaches, oranges, mustards, and browns!

The Art of Choosing, originally uploaded by jenib320.

As always, don't hesitate if you have any questions! :)