The secret of my colour-matching success (Part 1)

Are you like me, and sometimes your colour combinations are a bit hit-and-miss?  Whenever I created a page that really works, colour-wise, chances are I've used one of two methods.  So I thought it would be fun to share with you my process.  So without further ado, here it is:

The secret to my colour-matching success, part one (or colour combinations are not just for challenges)

First up, I always start with my photos, and take one or two colours from there.

In this case,  I still had some orange paper out on my desk from the last page I made.  I was also hoping to use kraft, using the ledger paper left over from another page, and also I wanted to use this idea:

So what I do next, is, I pull out all the colour combination challenges I have printed out (most of which are from ColourQ) and I'll firstly go through them looking for the colours that I want to match - in this case orange and kraft.

Then it's a simple matter of holding your photos next to them and seeing how they look.  I was fortunate enough to find one that not only had the orange and kraft, but also some blue and red, similar to some other colours in my photos:

Now, here's why ColourQ is my go-to place for colour combinations: if I didn't have a printed combination I wanted to use, I can always go to the website and search by colour.  In this colour combo above, the orange is called "tangerine tango" so I could search for all the combinations on the website that use that colour.  Failing that, I could search for "Pumpkin Pie", or even "peach parfait" at a pinch.

Once I've gotten to this point, I find that you can tweak the colours a bit - I am guided by how my colours look together rather than whether or not my blue is an exact match for "not quite navy".  My red is definitely not "cherry cobbler", but it works with the other colours on my page, and that's what counts! (And all from my Counterfeit Kit)
And for the record, when you're thinking colour, you don't have to limit yourself to any one collection.  The papers on this page are all from different brands - the only exception being the two blue papers are both sides of the same sheet.

Here's how my doggies turned out, pretty cute, I'm thinking:

Here's a close-up of the journalling.  This page tells the story of one of those key moments where our family went from "we'll probably get a dog someday" to "it's time to get these kids a dog!"

I am linking this post up to Jennifer's Scrapbooking Soiree, so if you are visiting for the first time from there, welcome! Feel free to stay a while and have a look around!