Friday Tuts – How to choose a color palette based on a picture

I feel like I’ve covered this, but for the life of me cannot find the post anywhere on my site.  Maybe I didn’t title it correctly?  I’m working hard to get my site seriously organized, so if you see something that you think I might have posted before, it’s for the sake of organization.  Now you know.

How do you decide on the colors for a quilt?

Most of the times I have one or two colors in mind and then build from there, adding colors, or mostly I just end up picking up fabrics and thinking this looks really good with this.

Other times, I have a particular color palette based just on my mood.

And then sometimes, I’ve got nothing.  No where to start.  I don’t know what I want.

I do have a really great picture on my phone that I recently snapped that I keep going back to look at.

I really just love this picture.  We pulled off the side of the road while in Alberta last week just to get a better glimpse of this pristine lake.

Maybe I want to build a color palette out of this pic?  That minty lake is begging to be used, plus the mountains have a navy color going on and mint + navy = made for each other.

But just looking at the picture and trying to read the colors can sometimes feel difficult and you might miss a color.

I found this site to help pull a color palette from an image.

You upload your picture and it gives you a palette.  I have tried many different sites (there are tons!), but I particularly like this one because it puts all the colors together in a little diagram that is helpful instead of just listing them.  Here is what they gave me based on my above image.

You can see why this is really helpful.

You don’t even have to use all the colors.  Pick what you want from the grouping and go with it.  I try not to worry so much about making exact matches.  I just try to get close.  And in my opinion, a quilt with multiple shades of blue looks a thousand times better than a quilt with the same shade of blue throughout.  Mix and mingle.

Now let’s see what fabrics I pull based on this palette.

You can see I really just picked out the one’s I wanted to use.  I’d liked to have used a little more minty shades, but my stash was a little light in the mint.

Still, I really like this grouping.  Maybe I’ll keep it together for a quilt in the future.