Now, all time I designed my blog I chose a scrapbook kit and that pretty much dictated what my color palette was going to be. This time around, all the elements I found that I liked were just plain overlays, doodles, etc that were just borders without a predefined color.
Also, maybe I didn't find a scrapbook kit I liked this time around because the color palette was off. Anyway, I had to choose my own colors to design with. Where to start??
I looked through Design Seeds to find a scheme I liked. I copy pasted the ones I liked into OneNote. I quickly realized that the other I liked were very colorful, and not shades of the same color, or couple of colors. Not surprising, I LOVE color. The more the better.
The thing was that I wasn't satisfied with any one image and color scheme. I wanted to mix and match. But that doesn't always fit together. I picked one image that I liked best and that I wanted to use the most of its colors, it was this one:
I started an image in photoshop a made circles of the colors. Then I went and found more images, that already had at least one of the colors I was looking for, and others that weren't in the first image, and copied their colors into the same photoshop major collage, as I'll call it. I must have used about 10 different images, and in the end I had this collage of colors:
Naturally, that was way too much! I had a hard time finding the right green and blue. So I picked the ones that were my favorite, then crossed out the colors that didn't match well, or were slightly off, and in the end I ended up with this smaller collage for a color scheme:
Still, 9 colors is a lot!! But there are 5 (or is it 6?) major colors, and some tones of the main/favorite 3. I plan to/have been doing my design mostly around the 3 main colors: the pink (my very favorite color in the scheme, thought it would be the orange, but no!), the blue, and the orangey yellow. The pruple and the green are more for when I want more colors instead of more tones (I'll use them when I need to make a list of similar elements, like the follows buttons). They are the colors that are featured prominently in the logo, which was the first piece of graphic design I made up, and what's setting this tone for the rest of the graphics.
I'm still debating whether I do a rough tutorial for how I made the header graphic. I played around with photoshop until I was happy, mostly, but maybe there are some tricks one might find helpful if they are doing their own graphic elements (FYI, I am not that great with photoshop, or graphic design...). At the same time, I don't want anyone copying my effect, so yeah... If you got any questions as to how I did it with photoshop (I think if you look at the graphic long enough you can see what I did) just ask in the comments :)
So with that, the theme I'm going for is: doodly, swirly, colorful, fun, whimsical. At first I thought I'd be outlining everything in black, but as I go along I find myself removing that aspect more and more- it's just too harsh. I'm still using it for some elements, but dulling the blackness down a bit, either by using a more charcoal color, or just simply decreasing the opacity of the black layer.
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