When it comes to decorating, a color palette is often chosen beforehand in that the walls have been painted, the furniture and accessories are bought and then lastly the hunt is on for the artwork to fill the walls. Then you find a piece of art you have fallen in love with but it doesn’t match your decor or color scheme. Bummer. I hate this approach personally, because it often deprives you of art work that you would love to have. Plus somewhere upon saying “it doesn’t match my decor” an artist just cringed or rolled over in their grave. Instead try this approach in color coordinating with artwork.

Buy the art you love first. What I will show you next is a simple and effective way to color coordinate a color scheme to the artwork you have fallen in love with, using the paint program on your computer. Other photo programs can also be used, but might be more technical for the novice.

Start by taking a good digital photo of your art. Then download it onto your computer. Open the photo of the artwork with your Paint program. I’m on a Windows platform, but I imagine a Mac has something similar. Here I’m showing one of my Byron paintings.

Notice that the photo has little handles at the corners and on the right side in the middle is a little box, place your mouse/curser over it and when it turns into an arrow drag it outwards to the right creating a blank white area.

Next, look at the tools section for the color picker. Select the color picker and then use it to click on an area of color that you like in the photo of the artwork.

Next look at the shapes section and select the square. Drag the shape out onto the blank white area. Then go back to tools and select the color fill then go back and hover over the square you just made and click it to color fill it with the color you selected.

Repeat the process by selecting another color, create a box and color fill it until you have the number of colors you want.

Once you have your favorite colors picked save your image as a jpeg. I first saved it to my desktop and then I copied it my dropbox which is an app installed on my computer and iphone. Now I can access the photo I created on my phone. If I were going shopping for wall paint, curtains, accessories, furniture or whatever, I have a color palette at my fingertips saved on my mobile device that will guide me in my color choices. Now you’ll never have to say, “it doesn’t match my decor.” This can also be used to update a current color scheme by selecting new color choices using your current artwork.

The above illustrated Byron painting is also one of four new paintings up for auction on eBay. While the auction is still active the listings will show up on my user profile. Once there you can click on the paintings to go to the auction page. My auctions have no reserve and bidding starts at only a penny!

Here are the other Byron paintings:

Thanks for reading! Would love to hear your comments.