Clothing Color Palettes

One trick I've use in the past when students are having a difficult time creating a color scheme for a web page is to have them borrow a palette from nature. Pick a picture of a flower or a tree or a mountain vista and then open it up in Photoshop. Use the eyedropper tool to grab the color hex number for three to five colors. Create a second layer and then draw a thick line of each color across the picture. Does it look good with the picture? Hide the photo. Do the color swatches look good together?

Instant color palette!

I ran across a site that does something similar, Wear Palettes. It takes outfits that are posted on another site that are considered fashionable and then uses those photos to create a palette.

Fashion is not my thing.

Clothes are not my thing.

The women in my life will attest to my poor taste in clothes and attrocious color sense. Yet there are lots of kids who are into clothes and fashion. Here is one way to help them bring an outside interest into their web design projects.

All kids struggle (OK maybe only I struggle) with matching their clothes in the morning. Getting them to think about their clothes gives them another way to think about color and design.

[Image captured from Wear Palettes: http://wearpalettes.blogspot.com/search/label/army]