COLOURlovers is a welcoming, creative and supportive community and we want to hear you shout your love from the mountain tops for color. We want you to stand outside the tree in the front yard, late at night in the rain until color opens the bedroom window and tells you it loves you too. (Please don't actually wait outside our bedrooms...)

Did you know that two lovers of color met on this site a couple years ago and are now happily married? It has helped artists find ideas for their work... It has brought family members closer together and given friends and lovers something to share from thousands of miles away.

Profess Your Color Love...

Colors, Palettes and Patterns all tell stories and we want to hear what they are... How did you come to find COLOURlovers? How do you love thee? Why do you love Color so? Why can't you live without color?

Comment below with a palette, color or pattern badge and a short story as to how you love Color, COLOURlovers.com or a fellow lover... or whatever you feel inspired to share.

Happy Valentines Day

According to the Greeting Card Association, 25 percent of all seasonal cards sent each year are valentines, making Valentine’s Day the second most popular card-sending occasion in the Unites States. Approximately 190 million Valentine’s Day cards are exchanged annually, not including classroom valentines sent between children at school.
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We might have a grasp of the colors that make up our skin, hair, eyes, and blood, but what about the rest of our internal systems?

The recent exhibitions of preserved human bodies has opened our eyes to color inspirations from within ourselves, literally. While the context of the colors can often leave us less inspired and, well, more nauseous, by viewing these colors in a new perspective we can gain an appreciation for the colors found in an, usually, unseen place.

According to the exhibit OUR BODY The Universe Within,

The process leaves even the finest, most delicate tissue structures virtually intact, down to the microscopic level, making the process invaluable for medical study. The organs are actually IDENTICAL to their pre-preservation state.
- From the Exhibit's Website

Plastination

Color preserving embalming solutions where developed to preserve lifelike color and flexibility to aid in the study of the body
- From Wikipedia

Though a lightning bolt radiates pure white light, various atmospheric conditions can tint the brilliant flash into a rainbow of electrical colors. Red, yellow, green, blue, pink, purple, violet, cyan, and orange are all possible lightning colors, depending upon the presence of water vapor, dust, pollution, rain, or hail.

Just as lightning is said never to strike twice in the same place, no two lightning bolts are ever exactly the same color. In fact, different branches of the same bolt can exhibit different colors, due to temperature variations. The hotter the bolt, the bluer or whiter it will appear, and the cooler it is, the more orange or red. Because lightning heats the air as it travels, the presence of different gasses will also lend color as they ignite.

By jahdakine.

Weather expert Dan Robinson explains that different film stocks, exposure times, and camera types can also bring colour to lightning. "The same lightning channel can appear blue, purple, red or orange depending on the type of film, length of exposure, and other factors. Slide film is more likely to produce a more purple/blue image, while print film tends to give lightning a more yellow/orange tint."

It started as a simple exercise, a cure for writer’s block, copy a Van Gogh. Practice discipline in painting, work on mixing complex colors, capture vintage tones, and learn from the best. But, it is now late afternoon, the natural light is starting to fade and I,well, I am arguing with Van Gogh. “Why Vincent? Why? What color is it?”

It never is just ‘green’ or ‘blue’ with Van Gogh. Its more colors than one could possibly imagine, more hues than those contained within the range of my modern palette, more subtle variation of tone than my amateur skills are capable of; more madness than I care to explore. Oh Vincent…

Photo by Jim Chou

His lines are simple, his subjects relatable, and despite his over popularity with the makers of screen savers and dorm room posters, Van Gogh had something I believe no other artist has ever managed to replicate for me: an internal color palette that is uniquely his, wonderful and frustrating.

Think you can't find beauty in a bank? Think again. The Dexia Tower, located in Brussels, embodies just that. Thanks to the creativity of LAb[au], a Belgium based digital design lab, the Dexia Tower has become infinitely more than just a home for paperwork and numbers.

The tower itself went up in 2006, and since then has been host to a variety of fantastic light shows. The third tallest building in Brussels has a lot more going for it than just height, however: Of the building's 6000 windows, 4200 of them contain an installation of 12 light bulbs, each housing 3 LED's (a green, blue and red) that can be combined to form a complete palette of color. The result is a tremendous canvas that can display anything from letters to geometric designs. Seem wasteful? It isn't --recent tests show that the tower uses 1/3 of the electricity that Paris' famed Eiffel Tower uses, thanks to a highly efficient energy saving LED lighting system.

by Pierre J.

The tower is currently exhibiting a show called "Who’s afraid of Red, Green and Blue?" which is shown in the picture above. In a two month collaboration with the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium, the tower exhibits the temperature of the following day using color. The color code follows a naturally coordinating scale, with violet symbolizing -6° or colder and warming through the color spectrum, red being at the opposite end and symbolizing +6° or warmer. The result is beauty with something useful below the surface, and while there is much to be said for beauty and art all on their own, the function of the Dexia Tower's current show lends a lovely depth to the spectacle. Hit the link below to see this stunning exhibit in action.

Bringing color into a living space isn't just about painting the walls. It's also about paying attention to the way the objects in a home relate to one another. A full spectrum of color resides on most bookshelves, but it takes a good eye to make an average shelf into a work of art.

If you're really lucky, you can find a complete set of color-coded books at a thrift store. A few collections that come in a colorful series: Wallpaper's City Guides, many of the old color-coded Penguin books, and World Book Editions. For inspiration, check out the Rainbow of Books Flickr Group.

by Chotda

How to Organize Your Bookshelves By Color

I'm quite obsessed with delightfully delectable French macarons. Last summer we went to Paris on our honeymoon and it was the best vacation we've ever had! If it weren't for our families and the petty but rather hindering language barrier I was ready to pick up and move there. One of the main reasons was the colorful and heavenly macarons. I wish I had taken more photos of them but we were too busy having them for dessert after breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

1 Paulette Macarons in Cali via happy cavalier.
2 Payard Patisserie in New York, Vegas, Tokyo etc.
3 Of course Laduree in Paris.

The History of The Macaroon

Some say they were Created By Italian Monks, Refined By French Pâtissiers.

People that have been in love with toys have likely been in love with them for a long time. That is the heart of many of today's premier vinyl designers, which may be the reason for the bold statements they make in both design and color. For those of you unfamiliar with this popular trend, you may be startled to find what an intense source of color and beauty the designer vinyl toy universe can offer.

by delarge

Designer vinyl started to pop up around 1990. It was coming from radically different sources: Some designers were classically trained in art and design, while others were self taught. My own personal discovery of designer vinyl started with Toy2r's Qee bears, around 1997. The 2" bear shaped toy with Mickey Mouse ears quickly became a ubiquitous symbol of designer vinyl, not to mention a great inspiration for artists everywhere. By taking something as simple as a toy and projecting art onto it, a new creation was born -- a highly accessible art form to people of all ages and backgrounds.

by Andy Woo

The look quickly caught on and spread to other forms of toy art. "Designer plush" was true to the same artistic ideals as designer vinyl, but made use of the medium to make its own unique statement. One of the most popular plush designers is Friends with You, a Miami based company that is heavily inspired by Miami's strong design aesthetic. These toys have also become highly collectible and much sought after, making it cool to have a shelf of "stuffed animals" in the house again.

by revlimit

What's blacker than black? Well, black, apparently.

Researchers at Rice University in Houston have succeeded in creating the veritable black hole of all color-dom: a material that absorbs 99.9% of all visible light. This penultimate black supersedes the current black, a carbon based substance housed at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, and is measured as being 30 times darker.

by: Tiagoribeiro

If this isn't blowing your mind already, then how these researchers inadvertently flipped the design community for a loop might. The team, led by Pulickel Ajayan, used carbon nano-tubes 400 hundred times smaller than the diameter of a strand of hair and stood them on end, arranging them in a tightly gathered group. Imagine a carpet's pile, but on an infintessimilly small nano scale.

The tops of the nano tubes are also arranged irregularly in order to cut down on reflectivity. This results in a material that has a total reflective index of 0.045 percent, a far cry from your basic black paint which has a reflective index of 5 percent to 10 percent.

by: The velocity of saul at the time of his conversion

Practical Applications?

The application of this new black extends to fields as diverse at design, astronomy, and solar energy conservation, however if tests with infrared and ultraviolet light prove as successful as those with visible light, the potential application may extend to stealth operations and the defense sector.

Mr. Ajayan has stated in numerous media interviews that this new material could be used to improve optical devices and increase the efficiency of photolytic cells on solar panels, which would be good things; and, unfortunately, there could be some national 'defense' applications as well - think stealth bomber, but only stealthier.

While this is inspiring, I'm left wondering when superblack's going to show up in a paint can. Hopefully we won't have to wait too long.

The Color Black

Black does not reflect light at any point of the visible spectrum.

Not only is black associated with rock bands, such as the likes of Spinal Tap, but black is also associated with a whole slue of other symbols both positive and negative; negative: black death, bad luck (black cats), black list, blackmail; positive: black is the color of rain clouds, and soil. Krishna means the black one. And being in the black is good for business.

Some Black Color Inspiration

Widgets, Widgets everywhere! One of the coolest recent web trends has been the development of widget platforms that allow people to easily create and share tools to help communicate and connect any number of their interests or ideas. It is much more simple for individuals with good ideas and a bit of gumption to develop tools that thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people will enjoy using. The idea is often the easiest part, the execution of it is the challenge... So we hope by using our resources you'll be able to share your widgets with the world in any number of colors and color combinations.

Widgets are great because with little effort you can add music, a timer to your baby's birth or a clock for keeping time on your site... but if the widget's color options are locked in place, it makes it less appealing to the public when they can't find a color option that fits in well with the colors of their site or matches their personal style. But, don't beat your head in trying to come up with great color combinations for your widgets... More than 250,000 palettes are already being shared on COLOURlovers.com

I made this widget at MyFlashFetish.com.

Widget Color Showcase: MyFlashFetish.com

MyFlashFetish has tons of flash widgets that you can add yto your websites, blogs or profiles... Clocks, Countdown Timers, Days You've Been in Love and two dozen or so styles of mp3 players. And with almost all of these widgets they allow you to customize the colors to match your style.

MyFlashFetish has uploaded dozens of color options for their widgets, but even if you can't find the perfect colors... you can load in your latest palettes from the COLOURlovers.com site.

 

Some Top Widget Platforms