Evolution of a color scheme – step three

If you recall, last time we used three online color palette generators to help us pull the dominant colors out of our mosaic. Now our job is to pick our favorite choices from those palettes, narrow them down to three main hues, and determine our final colors.
I pulled all three palettes into Paint Shop Pro and chose four of my favorite blues, greens, and pinks to help me narrow it down. Looking at these choices helps me to see what hues will look the most appealing together.

And there is one more option… I can use the color picker in Paint Shop Pro to just grab my favorite colors directly off of the mosaic. As it turns out, this is a good thing, because none of the pinks that the palette generators spit out were the “right” ones. I Sometimes you just have to go with your gut. The image above represents the three colors that appeal to me the most together, and I got them directly from the pictured photos. Despite the fact that we didn’t ultimately go with any of the hues from the palette generators, I don’t consider that a wasted step. Under different circumstances, where I didn’t already have a particular vision of what I wanted before I started, it would have yielded perfectly acceptable results.

So, this is the color scheme I want, but we can’t stop here.

Look carefully at the image above. These tiles represent the Blue color scheme. The tile with the stripes shows the three main colors (plus white) of this scheme. See how dark they are? Nearly all of the canes in this color scheme are much lighter than those stripes. That’s because most of the cane designs don’t use the base colors as-is, but rather mix them in varying proportions to white. If we choose our favorite pink, aqua, and lime colors and use them as-is, the resulting canes will actually be much paler than what we were hoping for. We need to start with darker versions of our favorite colors.

Since I generated these colors in Paint Shop Pro in the first place, I just used PSP to darken them uniformly. These are our base hues for our new color scheme.

Are you getting excited to see these colors translated into clay? You’re in luck – that’s our next step. Start coming up with ideas for how to name this color scheme while you’re waiting. There’s a contest a brewin’!

This day in blog history:

• Movie night - 2008
• Contest Deadline Approaching - 2005

This topic in blog history:

• Evolution of a color scheme – step two - October 2007
• Evolution of a color scheme – step one - October 2007
• Evolution of a color scheme – step seven - December 2007