Bella Knitting: Playing with Colors

May 30, 2008

Playing with Colors

Laura

After my foray in to the many gardens in the San Francisco area I had colors on my mind. The amazing potential in the variety of colors that can be combined by Mother Nature and by designers - be they working with yarn, fabric, paints or computers. One of my favorite little tools on my Mac is a Widget by Color Schemers.

The site has a Color Scheme Gallery with hundreds and hundreds of color schemes with amazing names like:

- Cold Shoulder,
- Grab that Dog,
- Mermaid on the Rocks
- Sunny Spot in Dark Forest,
- Mean Girls,
- Pepperoni Pizza and
- Sad but True.

I enjoy looking at the names as much as I do the color combinations! These designers are very imaginative, makes me want to rename some of our projects!

Under their products tab you'll find two free downloads. One for Mac Users and one for Windows. The Widget shown above is for the Mac Dashboard. It has thousands of inspirational color ideas - many of which I would never have thought of but really like. I would love to design a sweater using all the colors in some of my favorite palettes. The hex color values are included above.

Windows users aren't left out either. ColorPix is little app that let's you grab the color values and screen coordinates at any pixel on your screen. Then it translates any screen color into RGB, HEX, HSB and CMYK color values.

I have not tried this one but it certainly looks fun.

And there is one more free tool to tell you about. Their online color selector allows you to enter the RGB or Hex number for any color you want. The selector will lay out a series of coordinating colors then you can lighten or darken the entire palette. Great for selecting yarns, web colors or even paints like it did for my new living and dining rooms that are adjacent to each other.