Have you ever wondered how artists choose such amazing colors that just work perfectly together?

It’s time to share a secret… You don’t have to be good at choosing colors to produce a masterpiece!

The trick? Get your color inspiration from other art, photos, interior design, nature and everything around you. But it gets even easier, because there are a number of fantastic people who have already done the hard work in finding great pictures and drawing out the colors into easy-to-follow color palettes that you can simply match to your pencils and start coloring!

So I’ve gathered a list of 10 great sources where you can find color palettes that have already been assembled for you. The options are endless, there are palettes to suit almost any theme, page or mood, and they all look great!

B colored by Linda Franklin

Pictured: Page colored by Linda Franklin from “Color the Alphabet” by Sarah Renae Clark using a color palette.

1. Pinterest

Pinterest contains a massive amount of color palettes curated by artists from all over the world. You can either do a search for “color palettes” with your color or theme (ie. “winter color palettes” or “purple color palettes”) or you can find some good boards that collect color palettes and start following them.

Here are some Pinterest profiles worth following for coloring inspiration:

Art Therapy colored by Linda Franklin

Pictured: Example of a coloring palette from Pinterest used on a coloring page. Page colored by Linda Franklin from “Ultimate Art Therapy” by Sarah Renae Clark

2. Design Seeds

I’ve already mentioned Design Seeds on Pinterest, but they also have a beautiful website with all of their color palettes in well-organised collections, so you can find your palette based on a particular color or theme.

Pictured: Some of the color inspiration categories from www.design-seeds.com

Pictured: Some of the color inspiration categories from www.design-seeds.com

3. Colorpalettes.net

Color Palettes is another from the Pinterest list with it’s own website. Each palette on this website is manually created and is the personal creative work of designer, colorist and photographer Alex Romanuke. You can also find his palettes at color.romanuke.com– although this website isn’t in english.

Color Palettes

Pictured: An example of Color Palettes.net being used on a coloring page. Page colored by Emma Turnbull from “Enchanted Forest” by Johanna Basford.

4. From Pantone’s recommendations

Everything from fashion trends to interior design is influenced by Pantone’s predictions each year, so it makes sense to use their color predictions as color inspiration on whatever projects you are working on!

I’ve put together 30 of my own color palettes inspired by Pantone’s Top 10 color trend predictions for Spring 2017 HERE.

30 Color Palettes Inspired by the Pantone Spring 2017 Color Trends | See all 30 color schemes for inspiration at http://sarahrenaeclark.com

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5. From your own photos

Why not use your own personal photographs and special memories to inspire your color choices? What a beautiful way to really make your art personal! There are a few websites that allow you to upload your own photos and will pull the color palettes from them for you, so you don’t need to be a Photoshop expert to do this! Although personally, I think you’ll get better results pulling the colors out yourself.

Pictaculous

Pictured: A color palette created on Pictaculous from a photo. Photo credit: Pixabay

6. Akula Kreative

Akula Kreative regularly add new color palettes to their blog. Some of their photos are stunning!

Pictured: A color palette from Akula Kreative

7. Adobe Color

Adobe has a huge library of color swatches that have been submitted by other users. You can choose a palette and then make further changes to each indivual color. You can also set “color rules” to limit the selection to only analogous colors, complementary colors, triad colors, shades and more.

Adobe colors

Pictured: A selection of swatches from Adobe’s color website

8. Colourlovers

Colourlovers is a community where you can create and share colors and patterns. They have over four million palettes to choose from!

Colour lovers

A screenshot from http://www.colourlovers.com/

9.The Color Wheel

Choosing colors for your project  is not just art – it’s science.

Check out my YouTube and blog post, because I can show you how to use the color wheel and some basic formulas known as “Color Harmonies” to choose color combinations that are appealing, cohesive and just look GOOD!

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Here we cover basic color theory, the color wheel, primary colors and so many other concepts that will help you choose your palettes!

Now, over to you…

There are many other sources of color inspiration – these are just a few of my favorites. Now it’s up to you to find the perfect fit for your artwork or coloring page to set the perfect tone and create a masterpiece!

Do you have any other sources you’d like to see added to this list?