Where do You Get Your Color Inspiration From?
 

I'm taking a class that requires four primary fabrics - two light-ish and two dark-ish. After purchasing fabrics that no longer feel right, multiple shopping excursions and wasting of an LQS employee's time helping me try to make the fabrics work, I found my inspiration:

The wallpaper in my half bath. Four perfect colors and its background.

Where do you get your inspiration?

I get alot of my inspiration from looking outside. Nature's colors are beautiful. Of course that being said, I still haven't seen many colors that I don't like.

I do not think that there is one place that I look for Color Inspiration. It ends up being all over the place. Like you, in a way, if there is something that I own that I really love, color comes from there. If there happens to be a fabric that I really love, pull color from there. I also go to the best color combiner I will ever know, Mother Nature! She comes up with some spectacular combinations. I have found myself saving color combo that I run into in the form of pictures or pieces out of magazines. And then there is the Internet. There are more combos out there that a person can find that it makes my head spin and yes, I have used that as an option also. Basically, all over the place.

I usually have a color in mind when I go looking. At the store I look for just that color and walk around comparing it to other fabrics until I have something I like. Having said that I often change the plan and end up rejecting some of the purchased fabrics (called a stash building plan) and choosing others from my stash or buying (eyes downcast in shame) more fabric...

Books!!! Looking at pictures of quilts, noticing what catches my eye and figuring out why that quilt "works" for me.

Fabric collections by manufacturers, what they have put together with their "theme" print.

Quilts of national/international artists I admire; paintings that are well known....how their color is used, in what amounts, what color alongside/against another, how they create depth, focus, line, eye movement across the piece.

I LOVE this part of quilting!

Jan in VA

It's my favorite part of the whole quilting experience. I just love picking fabric to go together and then picking the pattern or vice versa. It's all over the place. Something will catch my eye and I'm off and running. In a lot of cases it's someone else's quilt with a combination that I never thought of before or had never seen before.

I look for color inspiration all around me. I am primarily drawn to earth-tone colors, so those are the colors I use the most. Artwork, people's outfits, nature etc all around me is full of different colors. Just the other day I had thrown a silver-grey vest over a russet top and now I want to investigate that combination.
If you are really stuck, look for patterned items that draw your eye and duplicate their color scheme. Either fabric (which you use as focus fabric or not) or ceramics, other objects with a range of colors that you can copy.

I get a lot of inspiration from nature and the outdoors. My husband is a keen painter so I look through art books a lot. It goes without saying....I also get very inspired by this board.

I keep books with pictures of anything that inspires me. Designs, colors, shapes, ideas, etc. When I find myself stumped I go to my books.

Definitely nature, for me. I have "color ideas" for two quilts: one to celebrate trips my family used to take to Florida. It's the color of the waves, backlit by the son, that are stuck in my mind for this one. The other idea came to me while driving to church a couple of weeks ago, where there was a little snow and a blue/cloudy sky, and it was so cold that the dried grasses leftover from summer were all coated with frost that paled out their colors.

Dreaming is free... and whether I ever make these quilts, I can enjoy them in my mind.