Choosing Decorating Colors
March 28, 2012
When I first started decorating cookies I ordered every Americolor gel available, because that’s what you’re suppose to do, isn’t it? Go full speed throttle right out of the gate?
Don’t believe me?
Tah-Dah!
And before you ask, you can find this AWESOME slim rolling cart at The Container Store. It took five minutes to put together and if you can have a love affair with a portable 4-tiered plastic rolling cart then consider me smitten! I have two of them. This one holds my glaze making/color supplies. The other one holds my decorating supplies (toothpicks, candy tweezers, piping tips, wax paper, paper towels…). But back to colors.
So there I was with all those amazing color gels but every time I made up an order of cookies my color choices were hit and miss. More miss than hit. My red would be deep and intense, my green too blue, my yellow too pale and my purple was so neon it looked like Tinky Winky, the purple Teletubby had gone head first into the Vitamix.
Not only did I have a hard time matching up the shading, hues, and tones but every time I veered outside of the primary and secondary colors, things got even more sketchy. And then…cue harmonic heavenly music….I discovered two incredible online color resources, Design Seeds and Photo Card Boutique.
Designs Seeds is all color all the time. Everyday they pop up two or three color palettes. To find a selection of color palette choices that include blue, you just need to type “blue” into their simple site search engine and all their past palettes with blue will come popping up for you to look through.
.
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But leading the way for me is Photo Card Boutique. In addition to their regular offering of cool color palettes they also provide other graphic services and resources like fonts, freebies (wonderful word posters), and tips/tricks/and tutorials for photographers and card makers. But me, I’m all about their Cool Color Palettes.
So let me tell you how it works.
The other day I wanted to make a spring time set of flowers in muted soft shades. I knew I wanted one of the colors to be like a muted purple so I went over to Photo Card Boutique and using their site search engine, typed in “purple” and up came this one among the selections.
Once I decided this was the one I was going to base my cookies on, I printed out a color copy, and started mixing my icing colors. In the example above it was easy to match up the top two colors. All I had to do to get the first was to add a drop of Royal Purple and a couple drops of White to the glaze and almost immediately I had a spot on match. From there I added a few more drops at a time of the Royal Purple until I had the bolder second color. You know the color copy I mentioned printing out before starting to mix the icing colors?
This is why I match my icing colors to a printed copy rather than to just view the palette on my iPad. Can you imagine what a sticky mess my iPad would end up being by the time I was done! As you can tell I had a tough time getting the green lined up. What eventually saved the day was Avocado (one of my favorite colors for tweaking) and a speck of Egg Yellow (another great one for tweaking).
Once I had a match for all the colors on the color palette I decided it would be fun to add a lighter green and a lighter fuschia to go along with the light purple so all I needed to do at that point was take a couple tablespoons of the existing colors and add them to containers of white glaze.
In a couple days I’ll be showing you the full set of cookies because there’s a very touching story that goes along with them I want to share with you but for now, I just want to give you this peek so you can see how well the colors worked together.
Nice, huh? Wait until you see the full set!
On another related note, the cookies pictured above were actually extras that I held back from the order, so that I could package and freeze them. In another week or two I’ll remove them from the freezer and after they’ve thawed I’ll take a few photos so we can see how the finish and color of the frozen glazed cookies compares to the fresh ones.
So that’s how I come up with my color palettes most of the time.
Posted in glaze icing, Tips
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March 28th, 2012 at 3:06 pm
Great post, I have the hardest time choosing complimentary colors, I will definitely check out those links. Great tips, I did a practice set of Easter cookies and decided I didn't like a couple of the colors together, so I redid them. Your color link would have saved me doing twice the work…
March 28th, 2012 at 4:17 pm
GORGEOUS!! And brilliant!!! Thank you for sharing Anita
March 28th, 2012 at 4:35 pm
Anita, yet again you are such a fountain of information!!! This is a fantastic post! I discovered design seed a while ago. My favorite cookies have been ones from sets from there! But now I am in love with photo card boutique- so big hug and thanks!!
That set is beyond beautiful!!!! As usual.
March 28th, 2012 at 5:06 pm
Oh my gosh Anita, you have no idea how helpful this is! I have been wondering how to do this for so long! Thank you so much!! YOU ROCK!!!
March 28th, 2012 at 5:26 pm
What a wonderful idea! I have looked at The Play Date Cafe site for color combinations in creating my own cards but hadn't thought about using it for cookie colors. I really appreciate your demonstrating this, and I'm going to visit your two recommended sites!
March 28th, 2012 at 5:27 pm
Anita, that is SUCH a help! Thank you for sharing…..and this cookie selection you have pictured are just marvelous! I love them! Blessings, Donna B.
March 28th, 2012 at 6:05 pm
Great post, Anita! I do something similar, but I put the printed sheet inside plastic binder sheets that I wipe afterwards… that way, I can reuse my printed sheets… so much for recycling
March 28th, 2012 at 6:06 pm
I love using a printed palette. Thanks for the introduction to Design Seeds – I did not know them. I definitely look forward to seeing the glazed cookies after freeze. I freeze my dough, baked cut outs not iced and Royal Icing iced cut outs without issue.
March 28th, 2012 at 6:43 pm
You are so good with the colors!!! Someone I'm making cookies for wants vintage blues and reds – any ideas???
March 28th, 2012 at 7:04 pm
This is so helpful — You're so sweet to share about it. My colors have always been horrible, and good color is really one of the main hallmarks of a good cookier. One particular cookier I have followed does such a great job, with one exception: Her colors are Just. Terrible. These are great resources and I know I will use them.
March 28th, 2012 at 7:38 pm
Thanks for the tip! This is really awesome. It'll help with cookies, cakes and decorating!
March 28th, 2012 at 9:58 pm
This is awesome – thank you for sharing. I have spent the afternoon printing color schemes and while I'm super pumped about it, my boss probably wouldn't be. Anyway, I literally laughed out loud when I read "When I first started decorating cookies I ordered every Americolor gel available, because that’s what you’re suppose to do, isn’t it? Go full speed throttle right out of the gate?" because I JUST ordered oh, say 15 bottles of Americolor gels. And I'm scared that I'm going to try to use all of them at once and completely overwhelm myself.
You've got a great thing going on.
April 6th, 2012 at 2:50 am
[...] Choosing Decorating Colors from Sweet Hope Cookies [...]
April 6th, 2012 at 2:20 pm
Excellent! Thanks for such info!!! If its ok for you, I´ll share it on FB using your direct link! Happy Easter!
May 1st, 2012 at 9:51 pm
I've never heard of these two on-line resources so thank you for sharing this information. I don't have a good eye for colour and could use all the help I can get. The shades of your cookies are wonderful.
June 29th, 2012 at 3:30 am
[...] Choosing Decorating Colors by Sweet Hope Cookies [...]
February 6th, 2013 at 8:21 am
I am just new to cookie decorating and have absolutely no idea about color so these websites for color palettes will be fantastic. My one question would be how do you know what colors to mix together to actually get the one you want? I have read about mixing colors with ivory, black and white to achieve different shades. Is that pretty much it most of the time? I am just reading above about how you added some egg yellow to the avacado to get the green you were after. I would never have thought to do that. Is this where having a detailed color wheel would come in handy? Apologies for the lengthy question!
February 22nd, 2013 at 7:50 pm
Liz, I really do think knowing what colors to combine comes with practice more than anything. If there's a particular color I want I look at a sample of the color and just try to break it apart. Does it have a tint of yellow? Is it muted or more bold? Does it lean toward a blueish-green or a greenish-blue? And then I start adding colors and if I'm LUCKY I end up with an icing color that's in the ballpark. If it ends up totally wacky then I freeze it and use it later for a base for another color. The main tip is add your colors in tiny amounts. If you want pink, add a single smudge of red. It's the old adage, you can always add more but you can't take away.
March 20th, 2013 at 5:55 am
What a wonderful tip!! Thank you so much. Color pallets have always been so difficult for me.
I know that in many cases the shade of colored royal icing will change (usually deepening) over the course of one or two days. Have you ever found that to make unsavory color combinations out of ones that had originally worked? (Or maybe it's just a problem for me because I use Wilton instead of Americolor gel… I really need to get me some Americolors, they look and sound great!)
Thanks again!!