An Urban Palette

What do you think of when you think of "Urban Skyline"?

Living in London my palette may be greyer than yours.

Does yours have a blue sky? Colourful buildings?

I am using such a palette at the moment and so far it's pretty grey.

But looking at my photos of skylines and urban scenes:



A poster of the London skyline:


and some palettes called "Urban skyline":


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Color by COLOURlovers


Color by COLOURlovers

I think I need to add more colour and make my skyline one I want to see

St Valery Sur Somme

I'm over in France and I don't know if it''s a combination of the sunshine, rest and good food and drink but this town oozes colour!
I seemed to spend the day coming across unexpected dashes of strong colour amidst all the natural schemes.

I have spent the day taking photos which I hope will provide colour inspiration for future projects.The sky before we set off:



The view over the water:




Some colourful shutters:




Garge doors:



Painted bricks and shutters:




Some irises:




More painted brickwork and shutters:



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Tiles:




Bright shutters:



A boat on the water:

Analogous Orange Scheme

After working in a monochromatic colour scheme for the past week and watching everyone else having fun with colour I'm itching to spice things up.

I'm still working on my Colour Challenge and the colour I'm using now is orange.

So far I've mixed it with blues for a complementary scheme, browns and yellow for a toned down look and pink with teal and gold for a sunshine look.

This time I have gone for an analogous scheme so am using red, orange and yellow.

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Yellow Lover Beads

After realising one of my favourite outfits was yellow based I knew I had to create something directly inspired by it.

So, out came the polymer clay:

I rolled snakes, chopped then up and combined them into a larger snake:

Into my extrduer they went and voila- long, dull grey tubes:

but ye of little faith- look at the ends of them- how fab are they?!?!?

A bit of playing around and I make some flat and pillow beads to add to my ever growing colelction of beads waiting to be strung.

You can learn how to make these beads in Donna Kato's canes book.

Secret yellow lover

After all my saying how much I don't like yellow, especially with black, I realised yesterday that one of my favourite outfits (this yellow t-shirt, black cardigan and multi-coloured scarf) is based around yellow and black!

It actually makes a nice palette- and seeing as today I got my new polymer clay extruder today I may make something inspired by it!

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Sand as inspiration

Recently I visited South Wold for a few hours and took some great photos of the sand there.
I have to bead a project for the next issue of Bead magazine and thought that using some beads inspired by the sand would look nice.

Here is the main photo of the sand


Here's a closer photo of the sand


Here is a palette I created for using the photo


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Here are some of the beads I'l be using in my work, obviously I'll be using a lot more of one tube than the others!

My yellow colour schemes in actual beads

After my post yesterday I thought you might like to see the colour schemes I talk about in actual beads so they make more sense!

Yellow and black
This I rejected right away as it was too bold and too much like a warning sign.


Yellow, black and gold
Still too alarming for my liking.

Yellow, black, gold and lavender
This is more to my liking but want to soften it further as just using the contrasts of yellows and violets is still a bit too strong for me. I want something that will calm down the black.


Yellow, black, gold, lavender, khaki and grey
Just right!
And here is the actual beadwork started

Finding a yellow colour scheme I like

So I know what I want to bead next- a new triangular bracelet (to continue my geometric series of work) using yellow beads and some great new crystal shapes. But the crystals only come in the solid colours (i.e. without a coloured backing which would show as I plan to use them side-ways) of black and clear (ok, I know clear isn't a colour but you know what I mean).

So I went with black.
Now alarm bells are ringing.
Yellow and black.
Do I really want to spend weeks beading something that will look like a hazard warning sign?
Or as though I've skinned a thousand bees?

No- so my first challenge with this piece is to come up with a colour combination I like- so out come the beads.
- Yellow and black- already I have given this a big no
- Yellow, orange and black- not really much difference
- Yellow, orange reds and black- this is a colour scheme I have planned for another project later on so don't want to use it here and be sick of it before then
- Yellow, violet and black- too bold. I'm wary of the black being such a strong colour that I need to bring it down in some way and create something that is appealing with yellow rather than shocking.

So after a long time playing with my colour wheel and looking at lots of different schemes I decide to resort to google for ideas.

Googling "yellow colour schemes" I get the following:
http://desktoppub.about.com/od/colorpalettes/l/blcpyellow.htm
The first colour scheme is the yellows and reds I have already rejected but I like the next two and the use of the greys and blues- but I don't really want to use oranges as I don't want this to be an analogous scheme.

Next I get: http://www.colorcombos.com/yellow-color-schemes.html
There are lots of ideas here but no way I can see of narrowing it down to ones with yellow and black without scrolling through lots of pages and I need to leave with my beads in a few minutes.

So onto: http://www.squidoo.com/colorcombos where I can choose different colour combinations with yellow. But none with black so I move on but will definitely return here for future ideas.

http://desktoppub.about.com/library/weekly/blcplimited.htm gives me a yellow and black theme but just using shades of yellow- nice but not what I want. The black crystals I'm using will be very large in the piece and I think I prefer this idea with less black.

More on yellow and black here which gives me the idea of adding shades of grey- I like the thought of this.

This website confirms my worries about using black and yellow- I do not want this piece to pop!

So I begin searching for colour meanings etc with yellow- lots of great info here but no time to read it.

In desperation- I really do have to grab some beads and go- I turn to Colour Lovers.
Perfect!
Their blog post for yesterday was on "thin line colour schemes" and as I'll be using my new crystals as lines in my work I am delighted- this is just what I want.

On this one page there are so many ideas I have to try and narrow it down!
I love:

Color by COLOURlovers
Black with colors- but maybe too bold still and I want the yellow to be the main focus


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Having fun- too subtle maybe and my yellow are stronger


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Aqua Yellow Orange- again maybe too strong and too much aqua


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Art Deco- wow- but too like the analogous scheme I plan to use later


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Boat Floaters- perfect- just what I want

This combines yellow and black with lavender, khaki and grey- just what I was looking for- the khaki colours were something I hadn't thought of and really make this palette.

So beads selected I'm off and raring to go

My first steps with yellow- geometric beaded bead

Yellow is not a colour I have used before and one I think I dislike so I am interested to see if there are any versions of it I do actually like.

I'm beginning using it on one of my geometric beaded beads and immediately I'm running into problems.
I'm finding it really hard to just use yellow. I want to add in purples, oranges blues etc to add some interest. Yellow by itself just doesn't seem right.

But I'm trying to stick just with yellows but it seems to me that there just aren't enough yellows to create contrast and variations so when I use them together they very quickly blend into each other. Any yellow I pick up that gives me variation is actually a shade of gold, orange or even green. Even when something seems to be yellow when I put it next to another yellow it turns out to be green- and whilst I like these colours I'm trying to stick to a true yellow scheme so reject them.


But in the end my all yellow colour palette has had to be stretched to include a gold or I don't think you would actually see that I'm using three different colours.

My research has now shown me that my thoughts about yellow are true- there aren't many true yellows- who knew?!?!
what would in other colours just change the 'shade' i.e. adding black, white or grey completely changes the 'colour' in yellow so it appears green when you add black rather than a darker version of yellow.
I wonder if this is the reason why I feel there isn't enough variation for me to use?
Does anyone have any other experiences using yellow?