Revisiting a colour-scheme

I’ve been relatively prolific in making recently, and I’ve also still been doing lots of thinking about how I could rework my colour scheme and do some more work on narrowing down a colour-scheme that I can buy fabric by.

If you’re a warm autumn, like me, you might be interested to read this blog post where I talk about taking more than a year to comprehend what that meant in terms of colour-combinations.

This time, I’ve organised some of my favourite and most-worn items (which means they’re relatively good at matching with a variety of other things in my wardrobe). Below, you can see (top to bottom) my favourite outers, knit tees, woven tops and shirts, and pants.

Since I’ve noticed that I’ve been really enjoying low-contrast combinations the best, I then used photoshop to map out the colour combinations in the outfits to see if my favourite outfits conform to this dressing-plan that I’ve identified for myself.

One benefit of viewing the outfits in this kind of 2D way, is that it made it a bit easier to see the colours that were showing up most often, and also helped me pick out a new pair of sneakers (my bright green ones were wearing through on the sole)- I felt pretty confident that my new dusky purple kicks would be something that would work with many of my favourite combinations!

One of the takeaways from looking at my outfits like this, is that I can see that there’s a lot of monochromatic and analogous combos (so pinks with different pinks or pinks and plums (things that sit next to each other on the colour wheel)). You might remember previous posts I’ve done about colour schemes (see them on the blog here), basically I had used my other outfits to set a colour palette for myself, and I mapped out how all the combinations worked with each other, basically to prove that the colours I had included were solid choices.

Except, the colour combos for the most part (maybe not including the 3-colour red, plum and pink combo) do not really reflect the wardrobe combinations that I reach for, or the colours that I feel most comfortable in! It was basically all well and good if I wanted to be dressing in contrasting and complementary shades… I had assessed what colour combos worked together, but I hadn’t really assessed my own feelings about how I wanted to dress.

What this means for this colour scheme that I reverse-engineered for myself is that I perhaps have to think a bit more flexibly (and some of the colours might disappear entirely). Since I probably won’t be using the colours to combine for high-contrast combos, can I think about having lighter and darker versions of each of the colours? Fabrics that are like that shade but more muted, or slightly brighter? This also means that my wardrobe isn’t less-than-10 colours (and that my fabric options aren’t super limited)! I’ll shop variations on pink and plum, and dusky red shades. I can have browns, and natural linens (probably those will be combined together in ways that are very pleasing for me).

I mention at the top of the post that I’m a warm autumn. I know colour seasons can be a contentious issue, and folks can often feel that ‘shopping for your colour season’ can feel a bit like ‘dressing for your shape’ if you’re fat. For me, the colour season thing gave me a place to explore from, and provided some structure. If I had decided that I might be a warm autumn but I only wanted to wear neon yellow and pastel lilac, then I would have gone ahead and done that. But, I liked a lot of the warm autumn colours- they represented (mostly) colours that I was already reaching for.

So, if the colour seasons are of interest, you might like to start with Anushka Rees and The Concept Wardrobe. You can also upload your photo into Colorwise Me, but it had a really hard time with my face but gave good results for others!