nature's color palettes

The other day I went out to the barn for early morning chores. When I opened the barn doors, I looked through our bare woods and across the neighbor's misty field to see the sun coming up. I thought the colors were so lovely: pale pinks, peaches, purples, blues, greens, grays. I wished I'd brought my camera.

That sunrise got me thinking about color. I've been contemplating permacuture in art lately, in particular the fiber arts and especially weaving. The first thing I think about for permaculture weaving is fiber content (natural, of course!) Then I think about color. I tend to always go to my favorite colors and I'm trying to break that habit and be more adventuresome in my color choices. But I can spend days arranging and rearranging cones of yarn, trying to decide on a color combination. It's amazing how indecisive I can be! That sunrise made me wonder, 'What if I let nature help me choose my colors? What if I took various photos and used them to create color palettes? Would it help?"

So here are my first attempts at creating nature's color palettes. I'm thinking 'yarn' and 'weaving,' but this could apply to any artistic medium.

I used Gimp's color picker and bucket fill tools to create the palettes. I named them to help me remember.

January Daybreak

January Daybreak color palette

January Sunrise

January Sunrise color palette

Winter Evergreens

Winter Evergreens color palette

Pine Cones

Pine Cones color palette

Any photo editor would do, and of course, the choices with the color picker seem endless. Getting or dyeing yarns to match is a whole 'nother ballgame, but hey, one step at a time, right?

What an excellent idea.   The next adventure is sourcing the colours.  Dye or spin lots of white and make your own!
This might be helpful:  https://www.ritdye.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Rit-Color-Formula-Guide.pdf
and Ashford from your local source have a good collection for protein fibres.
Happy weaving, may your warp never go slack!  
Edit to add:-  those lovely oranges in the second photo are very reminiscent of the exhaust dyed colours I got from madder root.

Jill Dyer wrote:What an excellent idea.  The next adventure is sourcing the colours.  Dye or spin lots of white and make your own!

Exactly! As soon as I'm done collecting palettes, that is.

I think, though, that since I'm focusing on permaculture art, I want to collect natural dye stuffs rather than use commercial dyes. Over the summer, I had a lot of fun earning my PEP natural dyes badge bit . My next set of natural dyeing experiments will be to dye a variety of yarns according to one of my nature's color palettes. I think that will be fun too!

I wish you joy and good luck with that!  I've been natural dyeing protein fibres for more years than I care to say . . . most plants give some kind of yellow,  some a disappointing beige. Only a few surprises, mine being from Eucalypt species. Most can be modified with iron or copper salts and acid or alkaline additions.  There's a reason for the lasting run of the "ancient dyes" - consistent results, fastness, small weight of dye stuff to fibre etc.  Outweighed their high cost.
Overnight I remembered the following from a fabric design workshop - any colour will go with ANY OTHER COLOUR provided the ratio is right.   Wrapping of threads in various widths and combination gives some idea, as does overlapping printed paper colours. {Paint swatches?  or printing off your colour analyses? ]  Happy to swap results.

Our local weavers also use inspiration from nature - more limited palettes in the final product usually about three, it will depend on what you are making of course:

for example:


seaweed on a beach:

turns into:



I've often been astounded by the colours that nature puts together - the peach of the clouds against a bright turquoise sky at dawn is amazing! Dead or dying leaves often have really bright combinations too

Nancy, I love it! Beautiful colors, beautiful scarf. There are indeed more aspects to permaculture art, for example patterns and how they translate into an artistic medium. (That's another topic for me, though).

I think three colors is a good choice. The palettes themselves offer more options, of course, but I like starting with a diverse selection. It will be up to the artist to choose they ones they like for what they have in mind.

Here are a few more.

On sunny days, I get the beautiful blue of the winter sky,

Leyland Cypress

Leyland Cypress color palette

Moss

Moss color palette

Quartz Rock

Quartz Rock color palette

Observations:
    - The greens are mostly warm greens
    - I'm realizing how much my eye blends and assumes what colors I'm seeing. When I use the photo editor color picker, I get the color of one pixel which sometimes surprises me because my brain has interpreted the blend of colors differently.

My color palettes for winter feature a lot of browns, grays, blues, and greens. But sometimes an accent color is wanted for things like quilt making, weaving, knitting, interior decorating, or . . . (what else wants accent colors?).

A couple of the palettes I've already posted would work.

pine cones palette, where green would be the accent color

moss color palette, with several accent color options

I used Gimp's 800% zoom to find that last color in the moss palette.

For something like this photo of a pine tree the predominant colors could be either greens or blues.

pine tree

pine tree color palette

A possibility would be to use predominantly greens and use blue as the accent. Or use predominantly blues and use a green as an accent.

In winter in my region, I'm finding the accent color possibilities limited. One good one is red, which I found in holly and nandina berries.

holly bush

holly palette offers either greens with red accent or reds with a green accent

Or maybe something like this for pastels

snowy daybreak

snowy daybreak color palette

So even with limited seasonal colors I'm starting to see a lot of options.

Another source for color palettes - sheep fleece. Some of the breeds sport a lot of colors.

North Ronaldsay

Navajo Churro in a vest. The orangey color is from madder.

Shetland - whites, silvers, fawns, moorits, grays, and blacks

The Shetland yarn color palette is nearly identical to a palette I pulled from this photo of fungi on an old tree stump.

Fungi

Fungi color palette