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.

Mostly through nature. Occasionally from gemstones.

Mostly from nature, but I've found the computer color coding on the fabric selvedges to be a pretty good choice for tones of complementary and opposing shades to match my main color.

My color inspiration comes from the recipient of the quilt when finished. I rarely make a quilt "just to make one". I almost always discuss the use of the quilt and where it will be and try to color coordinate. Once in a while a collection of fabrics all work together very nicely for me, but not often. I LOVE brights, but will often gravitate to the natural colors.

I watch a lot of HGTV designing shows for color inspiration and color combination. Also two of my favorite magazines, Southern Living and Better Homes & Gardens are great inspirations.

I think that most people gravitate to color range that they like. I personally pick fabric that I like and work with colors that are in the fabric. There are little dots on the salvage on most fabrics that thell you what colors are in it. You can use that to find the right colors. I also think that there are 2 kinds of quilters. Those who lean toward blending colors and those who contrast colors. I tend to be a blender. I also get color inspiration from the pattern itself. I am a red head but I still make quilts in purple and rasberry colors.

Funny how they just occur to me. Like the log cabin top using wine, navy, brown, and beige, made it 15 years ago, sold it two years ago on ebay. Glancing through a catalog of home goods and there was my quilt, being made in China. Guess we know where some designers get their color inspirations.

Lots of books and nature......but I like to spend time in a LQS and just walk up and down the aisles until fabric jumps out and grabs me.

Anywhere and everywhere Just look around you God made a very colorful world use it

For gifts, I go with the colors the intended recipients usually wear (or, for one niece, the close up of the living room wall she sent me). For charity quilts, colors that aren't too personalized. For other quilts, the colors in my favorite photos of my favorite places and things in nature.

I have to agree with what others have been saying -- everywhere!

But I also keep a loose-leaf notebook. It started out being clips of quilts I would like to make or just enjoy looking at. But it changed over time and became a color inspiration book. I cut pictures out of magazines, catalogs, just about anywhere if the pictures feature color combinations I find pleasing. They mostly aren't pictures of quilts, but of fabrics, clothes, interior design, gardens and plants, just about anything that has an interesting color combination.

I refer to the notebook when thinking about a new quilt to get color inspiration. It's great to see the colors in an exotic plant leaf, for example, become the colors in a quilt. Inspiration is everywhere but I find it helpful to clip and save it when I see it so I have a record of the actual shades that struck me initially.