How To Choose A Spring Colour Palette (Patreon)

Although in Australia it’s autumn, for a lot of you it’s spring-time and the sun is (hopefully) shining and the flowers are blooming! Regardless of what time of year it is I love spring colours so I thought I’d invite you along today while I show you how I choose a cute, spring-inspired colour palette (or three!).Spring summons up pictures of brighter, longer days and fresh flowers, so I think I should focus on ‘fresh’ colours for our palettes. First I’ll take a look at some photos of nature in spring and pick some ideas from those.

From these pictures I’m going to focus on pinks, oranges and warm greens to build our palette.

When I choose a hue (the base colour, straight from the colour wheel) it’s too vibrant for me, so to make it feel like spring I’ll take it toward white.

I’ve chosen this orangey-red to start with, and you can see on my colour picker that before I do anything to the hue it’s really strong. By pulling the colour toward white on my colour picker it gives me a more pastel version, and for spring colours that’s pretty much all it takes!

To get a darker tone out of this colour I’ll pull it toward black but also remove some of the white (so I’m taking it back a little toward the base hue, and then adding a little black to darken it).

I use this technique to choose all the colours for my spring palettes. I choose a hue, focusing on pinks, oranges and warm greens, and then I add white to soften the colours. I make sure that I can picture my colours in a natural environment, and if not I adjust it a little more. And that’s about it!

Here are three colour palettes I made for spring, feel free to use them in your own art by saving this image and using the colour picker in your illustrating program or by using the hex code.

Photo credits:J Lee on UnsplashBoris Smokrovic on UnsplashLeigh Kendell on Unsplash