Color exercise number two: a photo from my neighborhood, in the late afternoon:

First, I opened the photo in GraphicConverter. This time I pixellated the picture and used the eyedropper to pick out some representative colors.

This time, I thought I’d have some fun with a grid designed for helping chart warp-faced weaving (by Laverne Waddington).

I didn’t use all the colors from the square above, but I had fun with it:

I like that! And interestingly, I think I got the proportions to match the photo pretty well, though I wasn’t trying for it.

Just for an arbitrary difference in choices, I went back to Photocopa, with this result:

I picked out a color combination I wouldn’t expect myself to pick out (because I’m not much for yellow or chartreuse):

And played with the oval grid again:

I surprised myself by liking it, though it’s paler than I would ordinarily prefer.

I also picked out a more stereotypical palette from the Photocopa color choices:

and then did a design using both it and the less stereotypical colors:

It works well enough, though I’m not thrilled by it. I think I could come up with better combinations and proportions, but I’d run out of time for this particular exercise (not that I’m setting a limit; I just have other things I need to do too.)

Next time I’m going to pick a photo with almost no colors that are in my standard choices.

Constructive criticism welcome!

I’ve been wanting to play some with color schemes for a while now, as well as stretching the colors I work with. Some conversations on Ravelry as well as some books I’ve read cemented that desire. I particularly haven’t cared for yellow or orange in the past and still don’t care for pink. I prefer muted colors to bright ones. I’m not necessarily going to step outside those preferences much, but I am going to try to push the boundaries a bit.

I want to avoid feeling pressured to produce finished objects, so I’ve decided that for the moment I’m just going to produce color schemes. If I happen to actually go on to weave or knit or spin something specific based on the results, fine. If I don’t, that’s fine too.

I’ve been taking more photos lately; I’ll probably mostly work with those. Today’s exercise is based on a photo I took purely for the colors. I’ve been eyeing these blackberry leaves for a while now. (That is, I don’t care for the photo as a photo.)

First, I opened the photo in one of my photo editors (in this case, GraphicConverter), zoomed in the photo so I could see pixels, and used the eyedropper to pick out some representative colors – if I included the pylon in the upper right corner, I had a whole rainbow to choose from!

I decided to leave the pylon out of things, but to include the cattail beige from the upper left as the background. I made stripes in three different color groupings:

Since yellow can brighten an object, I decided to try to add a bit:

That seemed like a little too much (I’m trying to think about rough proportions from the original images, among other things), so I cut back on the yellow a bit:

That seems good!

There’s also a color palette tool I found online a while back, called Photocopa. It pulls out a selection of colors from a photo and also creates several palettes, not necessarily using the basic selection. These are the ones it pulled out from the blackberries photo:

I picked out these five colors:

and then played some with proportions:

All in all, I’m pleased with what I did, and I think I would feel happy to work with the final results of both processes. I worked in some yellow and orange, and once a bit of pink. Constructive criticism welcome!