Nature provides some of the most striking and beautiful color palettes imaginable! You don’t have to look far to find great inspiration. Flowers especially can give you such a varied and bright color scheme that you will never run out of ideas. I had so many flower pictures I wanted to share with you, but this is one of my favorites. Notice how the complimentary colors of green and red are present in nature. Red and yellow are two parts of the triad of primary colors (blue is the other one), too.
Nature is, of course, a great source for an earthy color palette. This little bird provides us with a calm scheme of brown, green, and black. He let me get astonishingly close to him so I could take this photo! I only have a 4x zoom. He loved to pose, too!
Have you ever seen a Rainbow Eucalyptus tree? They are amazing! You will hardly believe your eyes when you see this tree with bark of bright pinks, purples, blues and greens. I took this picture (and the two above) at the Hawai’i National Botanical Garden in Kaua’i.
Now we plunge under the depths of the Solomon Islands. This little critter is called a nudibranch (pronounce the ‘ch’ as ‘k’). These little guys come in all sorts of brilliant colors and crazy shapes! Some look like leopards, others are charcoal with black spots and others have funny little tufts and dusters along their backs (which is actually how they breathe!). Our friend here and his surroundings provide us with a beautiful palette of greens, purples, maroon and orange, which could be effectively used to highlight a particular element in a layout. You have to check out more of these guys!!
You’ll want to choose a variety of colors for your scheme. Some colors can be similar to each other to create unity (pastel purple and violet for example), others can be complimentary (purple and yellow, orange and blue, green and red) and at least one color should stand out from the rest so you can use it to draw attention to a particular section or element. These feather dusters offer a wide variety of hues, but they all work well together. Many designs I’ve seen recently have been very brightly colored. I can think of several menus—especially drink menus—that are full of these types of colors.
If you are not a diver, you should be! Look at all the beautiful, amazing and colorful life under the sea (I can just hear Sebastian singing about it). The parrotfish is one of my favorites because he is so vibrant! Can you believe colors like these pinks and aquas can show up in nature? What a great palette for a travel poster, huh?
If you’d like to read more about color, check out Why Color is Critical.
Technorati Tags: Design, Graphic Design, Color
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The nature’s colours are indeed amazing. I’ve never seen those nudibranch before - WOW!
Isn’t it something that we’re trying so hard to get the perfect colour combinations, while they’re all around us - the Mother Nature got them all so perfectly blended.
Yes, nature’s colors do blend perfectly together! So often I am struggling to find a decent palette and you’re right, all we have to do is look around us! And some of those animals and plants can sure be vivid, can’t they?
they absolutely can. Just look at the peacock’s feathers - you would think nothing can look so over the top, but look again, and wow - The Nature has certainly created its own rules - blue and green never looked better together before. Though Van Gogh did perfectly blend those two in many of his paintings, especially in Starry Night.
Oh, I didn’t even think of a peacock! Yes! Blue and green go really well together but sometimes it’s tough to find the right staturations… I guess we all sould have a few nature photos on hand for help with choosing our colors… we collect other inspiration, why not for colors? I never thought about that before… maybe we could start a Flickr group, LOL. I’m glad you enjoyed this subject, Vivien!
I LOVE seeing entries like this, where color palettes are inspired by photos. I have some beautiful photos of Greece and Yellowstone Ntl Park (and countless others) that I should dig up to see what I can pick from them. I always forget that my own photo collection can be a great resource for color selection! Great post as usual Lauren
Hi Charity! Oh I’m so pleased you liked it! I like stuff like this too (duh!). You should do a similar post with your photos! I would love to see them.
Hey Lauren, very cool to see this post, and color blocks based on images - I’m pretty color uncoordinated, so seeing things like this (and Color Schemer) really motivate me to get better at that!
Hey Brian! Thanks for stopping by
Many people seem to have enjoyed this and I’m glad I could offer something useful and inspirational! Stop by again some time, ok?
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