Swatch Watch
Hot off the runway is a new look called "Gilded Safari". Although I don't think I could pull this look off, with a faux leather motorcycle jacket and nose-bleed high heels, there is a certain appeal to using barley beiges, white, black, browns, and elements of metalic shine with just a little pop of color.
So think of how well suited these colors and look will transfer to your scrap-pages when selecting papers, elements and colors for your font titles or journaling... and don't forget to add a little SHINE !
The Spring Catalogs are starting to arrive and the colors are wonderful! Reminds me of Hyacinths and Lillacs, I can almost smell them! If you have any shiney silvery elements or blings, this could be the perfect palette for some 'Spring' pages! I think I have to take a trip to the greenhouse and pick up some inspiration!
Looking ahead at fashion, interior-design trends, and gardening magazines, a new bold palette of yellows, grays and blues are seen in new fabrics. Perfect for the scrapbooking palette, applied to modern patterns, florals, and stripes, all in perfect harmony with natural materials such as wicker, wood, or your outdoor fun photos!
Blue in the Garden 
Blue & Brown seem to be favorite colors
as they
also appeared in Real World Color,
week 8, color swatch with
Cathy Z's Design
Your Life class. LUV it !
Actually this combination has been a favorite
color palette of
Candice Olsen... in many of
her "DevineDesign" Interior
Design
TV shows.
She often uses dark chocolate browns, muted
shades of blue and silver in her designs.
Forecast: Yellow 
Design with colors first...
Sample #1 #2 - Screen print from Kuler site
After you have your photos picked out for your page... put together a color palette (see #1) that will compliment them, with at least one color that can be found in your photos. Depending on the event or theme of the page, this will make it easier to pick out papers and embellishments for the page. When planning an album, where uniformity may be your plan, this will help in creating the 'Look' or color theme of your album when you have a color palette in your bin. Here are a couple of links if you need help. Just take a 'screen print' or 'save image as' and put the image in your current WORKING FILE for easy reference. White, Creams, and Black, are not considered as a color when assembling a palette, because they are considered neutrals. Some people even consider Brown as the new Black. So there you go!
Have some fun and play around on these sites, see what YOU can do!
Adobe Kuler... you'll need Adobe Flash 10 (free from Adobe). (see #2)
Color Matters... get acquainted with the color wheel and learn more about color.
Color Scheme Designer... you can go a little crazy with this one.
G Peters... this one uses key words to suggest colors.
Little library of colors:
Start collecting some examples of 'color themes' ... colors on newer monitor screens and laptops are better today, especially if you have a new flat screen (so you get what you think you see, when you have it printed)! Since we all see colors slightly different than they are, I depend on color swatches, rather than depend on my eyes to create that theme. It's a good idea to keep track of the color numbers too, so that you can just plug the # in, when you want to use the same exact color and it saves a lot of guess work!
In CS or PSE you can rely on your eyedropper to do the color selecting.
For example ... color #´s for this set of colors:
Left ... #a37460, #849a97
#78e66 (center color)
#ca9591, #90918b
