Here are a few colorful flower fields from around the world for your color inspiration enjoyment.

Shibazakura Park Japan

The cherry blossoms that bloom each year in Japan bring masses of tourists and locals out to appreciate the natural spectacle but it's not the only blossom blooming their. Every spring the slopes of Mt. Mokoto bloom with shibazakura, or moss phlox, in a palette of white, pink and purple flowers that cover a carefully landscaped area of 80,000m². An area that was hand planted over an eight-year period.

Photo by cozymax.org

Shibazakura can be translated as 'lawn cherry blossoms' and it is easy to see why.

The palette of flowers weaves its way to the top of the hill as if someone has intricately rolled out a carpet, creating what is probably one of the most colorful hills in the world.

Achieving balance in your living space through the use of color can have a dramatic effect on your life, work and the overall feeling of your home. And even if you're not a devoted Feng Shui student it's a useful way to keep a color balance in your home that neither overwhelms nor sucks the color from you because the lack of it on the walls.

There are five elements in Feng Shui each with their own set of colors. Based on the areas these elements should be present in your home, this guide will help you figure out what colors to use in each area. It is necessary to balance all five but how you choose to find a balance in each area, whether it's used as a main wall color or a small highlight with the inclusion of art and decoration, is up to you.

Fire

Passion and High Energy

A balanced Feng Shui Fire element in your space will bring a supporting energy in all your career efforts and will help you achieve recognition.

Colors: red, orange, purple, pink, strong yellow.

Fire elements should be placed in the S, SW & NE areas of your home

Albert Henry Munsell was an American painter and teacher of art. As a painter he was noted for seascapes and portraits but he is most well known for an early attempt at creating an accurate system for numerically describing colors, now known as the Munsell Color System. His research began in 1898 with the creation of his color sphere, or tree, and came into light with the publication of A Color Notation, in 1905.

The system specifies color using three dimensions, hue (a specific color), value (lightness and darkness), and chroma (color intensity). Several earlier color order systems had placed colors into a three dimensional color solid of one form or another, but Munsell was the first to separate hue, value, and chroma into perceptually uniform and independent dimensions, and was the first to systematically illustrate the colors in three dimensional space. Munsell’s system, and particularly the later renotations, is based on rigorous measurements of human subjects’ visual responses to color, putting it on a firm experimental scientific basis. Because of this basis in human visual perception, Munsell’s system has outlasted its contemporary color models, and though it has been superseded for some uses by models such as CIELAB (L*a*b*) and CIECAM02, it is still in wide use today.

Since prehistoric times the naturally occurring colors of ochre, sienna, & umber have been brightening up the world around us, and caveman paintings done in sienna still survive today.  Ochres occur in various shades and colors, generally ranging from yellow to red to brown.

Ochre deposits near the village of Roussillon. Photo by elbisreverri.

The history of Ocher in Provence began 110 million years ago when the area was covered by a sea, which deposited a mix of gray clay and sea sand full of minerals. These minerals included Glauconite, the distant ancestor of Goethite which gives Ocher its color range from yellow, the iron oxide limonite, to orange, to red or iron oxide hematite. Man or pre-humans' use of Ocher began with body painting, burial and fertility rites as found in both Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon archeological sites. But the most dramatic prehistoric use of Ocher can be found in the nearby caves of Lascaux and Chauvet where some of the most beautiful examples of early human art have survived for over 30,000 years. - Ochre: Colors of Provence

Natural Pigments

North American vs. French Quarries

The set of colors below are all natural pigments with variations in shade between the 'colonial' North American quarries and the French Quarries.

Colonial Yellow Ochre

Natural Yellow

Now that most experts have dropped the 'R' word in regards to the U.S. economy, we thought we should take a look at one of the more colorful economic indicators, the Lipstick Index. Which is this: the purchase of cosmetics - mainly lipstick - is inversely correlated to the health of the economy. The idea being that during troubled economic times women are less likely to buy items such as dresses, bags and shoes and will go for a less expensive item for a quick consumption high. The term is credited to Estee Lauder chairman Leonard Lauder who first used the term to explain the rise in cosmetic sales after the September 11th attacks. And according to the New York Times lipstick sales have risen 40% in the last few months. So, here are 18 of the recent most popular colors of lipstick.

What do women want when they aren’t allowed to want too much? Traditional lipsticks in more-sheer neutral shades; the bright reds of days gone by have been replaced by pinky browns and rosy taupes.

Click on the image for the link:

Pur Minerals lipstick in Raspberry Quartz, $15 at Ulta stores.

Mally Beauty lipstick in Zooey Doll, $15 at henribendel.com.

Vincent Longo Lipstain SPF lipstick in Americana, $23 at vincentlongo.com

Michael Marcus lipstick in Jenifer, $24 at michaelmarcus.com.

When thinking of the color green we always tend to think of money, calmness and nature. For the most part, green is a pretty positive color. Who doesn't love having money, the idea and sense of being at ease and the beautiful greenery of nature?

The color green is also the most noticed color out of any other in the color spectrum. The variations of this color are amazing; starting from a soft pale seafoam green all the way on up to the darkest of greens, hunter green. So... basically there  pretty much is a shade of green that will make us all happy. What is your favorite shade of green?
Click on the image for the link:

No other color in modern history has carried such gravitas when it comes to associations with masculinity, femininity and politics. The color pink a vessel for weighty subject material, indeed. Especially when you consider the fact that it has only been around in its proper form for less than 500 years. Who knows what the future for this light shade of red will hold, but this info graphic created by Voltage Creative covers the last hundred years of politics and pop culture in all things pink.

Click to scroll the full graphic.

Here are the current color, logo and uniform designs of all 32 National Football League Teams. Many of the same team colors are used throughout this classic American sports league...

NFL Color Count:

AFC

-EAST-

Buffalo Bills

Miami Dolphins

New England Patriots

New York Jets

I was asked by the lovely folks over at Etsy to be a featured buyer on their blog. My picks were inspired by the current top colors here on colourlovers. Reposted from here.

This week's Featured Buyer is Davey Sommers, editor of the art and design blog for color trendspotting site COLOURlovers.com. In addition to analyzing color palattes, Davey is a member of the The Post Family — a group of Chicago gallery and event curators, an artist collective and a print shop all rolled into one. He also sometimes makes stuff out of recycled things. Here's Davey.

I love Etsy because it is an unbordered community that brings artists and art lovers together. It's a great example of a market economy, too: one without lobbyists and tax cuts for nonlocal businesses.

Using the Colors tool on Etsy, these picks are inspired by the top colors currently on COLOURlovers.

Blue, or 'balls' blue in this case, is a reoccurring hue in the work of Mike Best, aka BestArtStudios2. It's a nice match for the thoughtful, and at times vulnerable, facial expressions of this character seen throughout his work.

Not eaxtly the same as 'The Order of the Wen', but it shares the same warm color composition as this wonderful illustration by ashleyg.

In TheaCphotography's Bounty, she melds shades of green, allowing the deep color of the berries to pull the viewer's eye. As many of her photos contain a single prominent color, and since they are all sized 8x8, you could easily create a cohesive color palette made up of her work.

The Sand Mandala is a Tibetan Buddhist tradition which symbolizes the transitory nature of things. As part of Buddhist canon, all things material are seen as transitory. A sand mandala is an example of this, being that once it has been built and its accompanying ceremonies and viewing are finished, it is systematically destroyed.

ackland.org

Historically, the mandala was not created with natural, dyed sand, but granules of crushed colored stone. In modern times, plain white stones are ground down and dyed with opaque inks to achieve the same effect. Before laying down the sand, the monks assigned to the project will draw the geometric measurements associated with the mandala.

Henrico

The sand granules are then applied using small tubes, funnels, and scrapers, until the desired pattern over-top is achieved.

ze1

Sand mandalas traditionally take several weeks to build, due to the large amount of work involved in laying down the sand in such intricate detail. It is common that a team of monks will work together on the project, creating one section of the diagram at a time, usually working from the center outwards.

wikipedia

The Kalachakra Mandala for instance, contains 722 deities portrayed within the complex structure and geometry of the mandala itself.