Posted on Leave a comment

color inspiration in a book

Palette Perfect by Lauren Wager is a book all about color. It’s really more of a lookbook. I think it took me less than 30 minutes to read, but I have spent a long time studying the palettes that Lauren has put together.

The book concentrates on the moods of your life. Colors that represent those emotions and moods. She then makes palettes of 3-5 colors that represent the mood.

She presents 15 different emotions such as tranquility, curiosity and trendy. Within each chapter she gives images such as paintings, photographs and textiles. Each of these has a “color wheel” of colors shown in that image. The size of the pieces of the wheel represent the amount of color in that image. And then for each color she gives the CMYK percentages and the RBG percentages.

CMYK is used for printed materials. Dyeing can use the CMYK numbers too. But the numbers aren’t a direct % of each color, as the numbers add up to more than 100. But lets say that if the number is 14/0/35/80 You would have a color that is mostly black with about half as much yellow, no magenta and a small amount of cyan. So the color is a deep green color. If you aren’t a math nerd, that’s OK.

I love this book for it’s pure inspiration. Looking through it you can find some combinations that you may not have thought about before. Get yourself a copy here on Amazon. This is just a link, I haven’t received a fee for reviewing or promoting this book. It is merely a good book for those who want to hone their color sense and widen their creative use of color.

If you’ve always wanted to learn to dye, I’m working on a dyeing ecourse that is almost ready to be released in the world. You can find out more here .