Bead Jewelry Color Palette Designer

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If you’re like me you sometimes find yourself with the same beads and the same jewelry ideas cropping up again and again. There are just some days (okay, weeks!) when I can’t seem to get my brain in gear and begin creating anything “different” from what I’ve been making.

I find that I’m often more “color blind” than anything else where I tend to put all the cool blues together in one piece and the warm red beads in another and never really do much color mixing. I just get hung up on color families and have a difficult time finding beads outside that color family that will blend well.

So I went searching around the Internet for a color scheme picker and while I wasn’t able to find anything free and specifically made for jewelry, I did find a really need color theme builder which is supposed to be used for creating websites. I tried it out and I was able to use it to piece together some simple pieces!

It’s called ColorBlender.com and it does what it’s name implies: blends colors together and shows you colors that work well together. It looks complex at first, but it’s really pretty straightforward.

When you visit the site scroll down until you see the three color bars that are labelled “R” “G” and “B”. Those are short for “red” “green” and “blue”. Now you can just drag the little sliders back and forth and you see the leftmost color box change colors.

What’s really cool, though, is that the other five color boxes also change colors (and not always in the same color family…yay!) and demonstrate what might look good together. I chose a light blue and would have never picked out that warm gold or fancy brown on my own!

You can even name a color combo, save it, and then load it back when you visit later! Now what I’ve been doing is picking beautiful beads I haven’t used yet and holding them up to my monitor. I’m adjusting the color box to match the bead as closely as I can and then seeing what it suggests as complimentary colors. Then I go hunting through my bead boxes to see what I have… It’s almost like a color game for me, but I’ve already got a couple great mixed color pieces in the works!