Autumn Colour Schemes

Now that October’s here, I’ve got plans for making autumn themed things.

Here where I live, autumn isn’t quite as beautiful as it is in other parts of the world, but we still get some lovely colours. It just tends to be individual trees, rather than everywhere you look!

For the creative things that I have in mind, I need some autumn colour schemes!

Choosing colours from a photo can be difficult, but as I now have a strategy that makes the whole process much easier, I can make my own colour schemes from photos I’ve taken, rather than choose from ones other people have made.

The trick is to pixelate the photo first. Having the photo transformed into a series of coloured squares makes it much easier to identify individual colours, and choose some to make a colour scheme. I go in to how to do this in more detail in this post, and I also have a free course that shows how to, with videos and PDFs. There’s more information about that here.

The first photo is one I took the other day. There are a few of these trees outside the Co-Op in the village! A wonderful thing about modern life is that it is so easy to whip out your phone and take a photo, then open it on your computer. I’m old enough to remember the days of waiting two weeks for photos to be developed, only to discover that they were all terrible!

The other photos are all from previous autumns. It’s nice to go out and take photos, then use those pictures for current projects, but you don’t have to do that. You can use what you have already, especially if you have some nice ones that you want to use.

The next two photos are ones I took in King’s Lynn. Inspiration can come from anywhere. There’s no need to go somewhere special. I’d taken my son to the dentist and we were walking back into King’s Lynn when I took these.

This is a tree in the park in the village. I took this photo three years ago, and just looking at it reminds me of what a lovely day it was.

More trees in the village. This photo and the one below it both show that pink can be an autumn colour too! I think this colour scheme might be my favourite as it’s quite unusual.

I actually don’t remember where I took this one! The colours on the leaves are so pretty.

I took this photo in the Japanese garden in Seattle. I think we often associate Japanese gardens with spring and cherry blossom, but they are lovely in autumn too.

The tree in this photo caught my attention. It was on the same trip as the Japanese garden, where we started in Seattle and travelled up the west coast to Vancouver, which is where I took this photo. It’s not a good photo! But it doesn’t matter, because the colours are what I wanted.

I encourage you to have a go at making colour schemes from your own photos, but feel free to use mine if you want to. If you have an autumn themed project that you are working on, I’d love to see! I’m on Instagram and Facebook, or you can send me an email at [email protected]. Happy making!