Recently I wrote about where I go, to get inspiration for my quilts. One of the things I mentioned was using the Google image search. Another thing I use images from the internet for is to get ideas for colour schemes. This is what I then do with them.
For example I chose four pictures – a beech wood in spring with a bluebell carpet, a beach sunset, a lavender field and a red admiral butterfly sitting on a bright yellow/orange flower. I use a program called OmniGraffle (it’s for Apple computers) to pick out the colours using the equivalent of the eye dropper tool. I then create a set of little squares each with a colour chosen from the picture.
It’s a really interesting experience as the graphics program also shows the value of the colour chosen. You can learn a lot about how much our impression of a colour is influenced by the colours that surround it. Sometimes a colour I expected to be light turned out much darker then expected when viewed in isolation. It also taught me that you can get some very interesting colour schemes with quite muted colours, so long as there is something in there which acts as an accent. The proportion of a colour in the final image is important. When I look at my colour palettes where all the squares are the same size and therefore the proportion of each colour the same – some of them are not as inspiring as the original picture.
You can have quite a lot of fun and some real surprises. I shall continue to play around like this. It’s a good learning experience.
