I was browsing through the photos on Alisa Burke’s site earlier (on this post) and her picture of the 3 shells reminded me of reading many months ago about a process to create a natural colour palette that can be used in any art or craft. I grabbed a picture of the new shoots in the polytunnel to demonstrate this idea.
Open the picture in your photo editing package of choice…ours happens to be GIMP; we’re massive fans of Open Source, particularly Ubuntu which makes it so easy to install whatever type of package you need and were considering given some faceless conglomerate a few hundred pounds for the privilege of owning. Check it out…although I digress.
Open the photo and use the colour grab tool to sample the different parts of the picture. Create some layers and drop the sampled colour onto each layer. From this point you can build a natural palette on which to base your sewing, knitting, painting, interior design…anything!
The first colour came from the leaf that you might be able to spot to the left of the photo. I tried so hard to sample the brown of the soil, but it turns out it’s not brown, it’s blue-grey. The greens are from the shoots.
Because these colours occur naturally together they are pleasing to the eye…nature will never let us down in that respect.
The idea is further demonstrated on the Colour Lovers website, where they grab colours from various images to show trends.
