Picking my color palette

Now that I have the mechanics of making the flowers pretty well sorted in my mind I want to concentrate some now on colors.  I said last post that I wanted muted colors...This palette on the right  is one of the palettes that comes up when I put "Victorian color palette" in Google. It is basically what I want but some blues and more variety in value.

This palette is getting there.  It has some more intense values and a bluish gray/green.

I love it when color palettes come with a picture.  It give you a much better idea how these colors work together.

This one has more colors in it but somehow doesn't give me any inspiration. They just don't seem to work together for me.









I eventually settled on this palette.  It basically only has 4 colors - red, yellow, green and blue.  But there is a wide variety of values in each color going from dark to light.
I will print this (probably several copies) and keep them near my work to use as a guide when I am choosing or dying materials.

 I did run across a few palettes that I added to my color file for future possibilities.  I find that using a color palette as a guide opens up new color combinations for me and also serves a guide for adding just that extra color that brings other colors to life.

I would have NEVER thought of using orange, red, pink and lime green but it works and I might try it someday.

I love all the pastel shades of turquoise and pink but doubt I would have thought to add the brilliant cerise which just makes all the other colors pop.













I love this palette.  It is in my comfort zone completely.  This palette and the water lily before it are from one of my most favorite color sites....  Design  Seeds.  They have a daily blog with new palettes every day and you can type in anything... autumn, spring, floral, seaside, carnival etc. and a palette comes up.  A great site for inspiration.

My very least favorite palette is jewel tones.  I have only used it once as the challenge option when I made my vest and this was as far out of the box I could get. Although I am happy with the vest but I will   never use this palette again. The colors were too bright and intense and actually made me uncomfortable when working on it even though  I did add black to temper the brightness of it.  I certainly stand out in a crowd when wearing it.