What is Your Palette?

Seems every place you turn these days you find yourself being asked, what is your palette? What colors do you wear, what colors do you choose in decorating your home or planting a garden? Then the next question...what is your inspiration for each palette? This past week, the seaglass finds were quite plentiful and as usual, I tossed them on my kitchen counter and quite coincidentally, on an open page from House Beautiful.

There was my palette! Many of the colors seemed very similar to my home decor choices....hmmm, I wonder why! Considering how much time I spend walking the shore, it is logical that those colors from nature would be of interest to me. But how to "extract" a true sampling?

Enter the web site pictured here!  I could upload any image from my endless supply in iphoto and this site will generate a palette for me! I was hooked. One after the other photo was uploaded as I sampled this new toy! Then, I can save the custom palette as Photoshop swatches as an .aco file a.k.a. Adobe Color file.

   

For example, here is the kitchen table with its bright and colorful color scheme....

And voila! A full range of colors pulled from the image is now mine to use. Not sure what rocks your boat, makes you smile or gets you a little excited but I find this to be just crazy fun.

Next, I wanted to translate these web colors into a Pantone Swatch so I could use that color in a paint store or most importantly in a garden. Photoshop allows you to replace the preset swatches with that aco. file saved from the Color Palette Generator. Then you select one color, double click to chose which "library" you want to use....and there is my Pantone number.  Got it?  

That's OK....it may not be fun for some but now as I roam my home and garden looking for more color palettes I am sure I will find a few more to show you. So now the question,  

what is your palette and where do you find your inspiration?