Hermit crab color exercise

Hasn’t even been a week and here I am again. I have a newish iPad 2 and have just been finally settling into it, which means I want to play with color on it, too, as well as making use of the WordPress iPad app. This whole post was produced on the iPad, from text to pictures. Though I did take the original photo with a proper camera. Anyway, here we go!

Here is a hermit crab at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Look at those gorgeous blues and purples! There’s also a pale color behind the hermit crab with its jaunty hat—I keep thinking it’s something like a pale chartreuse, but no. It’s actually more like a shade of creamy grey! Just goes to show how adjacent colors affect each other, I suppose.

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Most of the online color palette generators don’t really work all that well with the iPad (because you can’t upload a picture using the usual menus and because it’s hard to get a picture’s link). However, I did find a satisfactory one that plays well with Flickr and Facebook. It’s from BigahugeLabs.com: http://bighugelabs.com/colors.php.

Here’s the palette it gave me:

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That’s all very well and good, though I didn’t end up playing with that any further. I was more curious this time about iPad apps. The one I found is called Palettes. I’m going to borrow a description I wrote on Ravelry: “There’s a free version and two paid modes. I wouldn’t say it’s entirely user friendly – it does benefit from RTFMing. It’s also probably overkill unless you’re used to graphic design programs or web development. I do like it, but I have done both, so. If I do much more of this color palette stuff, I will probably shell out the money for the paid version.”

The free version didn’t automatically make a very impressive palette from the photo; it was mostly greys and blacks. Since it was free, I couldn’t create a palette with more than five colors, so I made two:

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This time I decided to design a hexagon quilt; I used a free app called Sketchbook Express. I found some hex paper online and downloaded the picture. I wrote down the RGB numbers of the colors I wanted from Palettes and then used the paint bucket tool to fill in the design I wanted. And here we go!

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I am quite happy with that; I played some with using some colors as both dark and light, which I always enjoy. What do you think?