Choosing a color palette is often challenging – especially when you want to push yourself outside your comfort zone a little…  so when I found these, I didn’t want to wait til next Wednesday’s sharing day – I wanted to share NOW.  Using art for color inspiration is a tried and true designer technique when trying to come up with colors that will please a client.  If they like the art, they’ll likely enjoy colors that appear in the art.

What a cool tool!  Check one out at DeGraeve.com - use any jpg picture from an image sharing site like flickr (one of my favorites) and use it to generate a possible color palette.  As you can see from this screen shot, the selector offers both a ‘dull’ palette and a ‘vibrant’ one. 

I used one of my flickr shots to see what would happen.  Even in this blurry screen save it’s easy to see the dull version creates a very livable, warm palette with plenty of color options.  The vibrant one encourages you to be bold…look at the great combo of the bright red in the middle paired against the brown – that’s a great combo!

The application is SO easy to use – you just need a URL address that ends in .jpg for a picture, paste it in the URL window then click the button “color-palette-ify”.   Once on this site, they offer a click through to another color-picker site: colorhunter.com.  Of the two I like DeGraeve better because it gives you a bigger image of your original picture to compare with the color selections. 

Big Huge Labs is another color palette site.  Here’s the result of colors pulled from my recent Tuscan color photo at Lake Las Vegas.  Depending upon your computer monitor, you may or may not be able to see the slight variations in blues and tans that this application pulled out of the picture.