Vikki Olds

October 2005

This tutorial may seem pretty simple, and it is. Have you ever had trouble when creating a seasonal image with getting the correct colors together? Depending on your graphics software you might be able to create a palette from an image quite easily...but sometimes not. Well, here's a simple way to create a seasonal color palette. This palette is a fall color palette but you could use an image from any season. I used to digital camera to capture this image. If you don't have a digital camera you'll have to find an image with the colors you need in your palette.

This tutorial should work for most all graphics editing programs as I believe most of them have a color picker tool. Find that tool in whatever graphics program you are using and pick a color in your image to select it.

Create a new blank image.

Mine is 375 pixels by 25 pixels. You just need enough space to be able to pick the colors to use in whatever image you want to create.

Using a shape tool set to rectangle and the color you just picked from your image, create a 25 by 25 rectangle in your new image. Continue doing this until you have all the colors you want. You may need to resize your color palette either larger or smaller depending on how many colors you need.

Below is a representation of my color palette created from the photograph above.

When you are done save your new palette to your hard drive and open and use it when needed. I saved mine as FallPalette.jpg

Imagine the fun you can have creating lots of natural palettes with just a photo and your graphics editing program.

Copyright (c) 2005, Vikki Olds, All Rights Reserved