Using nature to plan your color scheme 🌈✔🙏

I think we would all agree that nature has a knack for harmonizing color. When creating art it is a challenge to find colors that work together in a satisfying way. Maybe that green you chose seems to not be a good fit for a landscape painting. Using photos to explore color palettes is a good step to training our color sense.

In this picture I show a series of color dots, a design, and two photos I took in Palm Desert, California. As a New England native the color palette of the desert was so different and intriguing to me that I have wanted to create work based on it.

The technique I used was to create a palette from the colors in the photos by using the eyedropper tool. Most picture editing programs has such a tool. I used Photoshop. I then used the path tool to create a circle which I could activate and fill with my selected color. I repeated this process for all the colors I wanted.

From that point I created my design using the Photoshop custom shapes tool - the grid, blocks, and all the animal and graphic images were created that way. Shapes can be activated and filled with colors. 

Have you created a palette of favorite colors from photos you have taken? Adding a man-made element into a natural scene will give you the contrast that can make the palette more exciting.