Scrapbooking with a Pastel Rainbow and How To Make Your Own Palette

That was pretty colourful by my standards, that post on Friday, wasn't it? Every time I pick up my crochet blanket I'm a little bit amazed by my own bravery. It's bright! And usually I'm not! Most often when I'm asked to choose colours, I head towards paler shades, grungy ones, even. There is quite a bit of grey in our house. 

But maybe it's time for a change? There are so many enticing pastel shades around at the moment. Would I? Could I? Paint a wall pale pink or soft duck egg blue? Perhaps I'll start with paper: it's easier to do over...

Another page about food! 

..and a very good way of trying out new combinations. Cut it, stick it and then decide where it might go in the house? I like the sound of that. And, with that idea in mind, I finally got round to working out an easy way of making a colour palette from an inspiration photo. 

A Palette from Picmonkey

Recently I've been looking at fresh colour combinations and pinning palettes onto my Pinterest Let's Colour board. And I've always had a hankering for being able to make my own. If I see a photo with shades I love, I think how useful it would be to pull the shades and make one of those mood board paint chip colour things I could  keep. There are lots of ways of doing this with Photoshop and templates and all the rest, but this is what I did with the totally free and ridiculously easy to use Picmonkey

My Picmonkey palette with my layout as inspiration

If I can do it, you can!

1. Choose the photo you want to pull your colours from and open it up in Picmonkey.
2. Select "Effects" from the menu on the left hand side
3. Select "Draw"
4. Click on the eye dropper tool and pull it over to the first  colour you want to pull from your photo and click again to select it
5. Now, make the paintbrush tool as big as it goes and colour right over your whole picture. Don't worry, you'll get your photo back. At this point all we're doing is making a square filled with your first favourite shade. So, colour your whole square in and then save it to your computer in a nice new colour palette file.
6. Hit the "undo" arrow at the top of your photo and your colouring will disappear. leaving your photo back ready for you to choose another colour and repeat the process.
7. Once you have little coloured squares for each of the shades you'd like to keep you need to go into the collage section of Picmonkey
8. ..and choose any of the dozens of collage shapes to make your palette. It's easy to drop your coloured squares and your inspiration photo, if you choose, into one of the collage shapes. I used one from the "cards" menu.
9. Hit save and it's done! If you like, you can go back into the "Editor" and use the text option to add some notes or a chic looking title over the top. That'll be a pinnable palette, then and using only Picmonkey.

My pastel page today was made for Get It Scrapped's Ideas For A Pastel Rainbow Scrapbook Page