I want to share a nifty way of creating a unique colour palette that I discovered a few years ago. When faced with a new project one of the common problems first encountered is deciding which colours to use. Sometimes this can be daunting when faced with a blank screen in front of you.
To overcome this, I would like to suggest a simple way of finding inspiration and building natural and harmonic colour palettes.
All you need to begin, is a photo. So, find an image that you like and open it in Photoshop. I am using one I took myself in Rennes-Le-Château.
Once the image is open in Photoshop go to the FILTER menu, choose PIXELATE and from there pick MOSAIC. I usually use squares of between 20 to 25 pixels in size, but different sizes can be used depending on the subject matter.
Here is the result:
From this, we can pick our colours. The following is just one palette that can be derived from this image.
Here’s one more example:
Using this method we can turn photos of everyday objects or scenes into the most vibrant of palettes, so there’s no longer any reason for a lack of inspiration.
Happy colour-picking.
