How To Choose A Spring Colour Palette

Mar 26, 2021

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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 Unsplash
Boris Smokrovic on Unsplash
Leigh Kendell on Unsplash