Create a colour palette and mood board to inspire the look of your wedding.

Hiya,

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At Claude Bridal Studio, I make all of my bridal accessories to order which means customising a design to suit you is really simple.  One of the easiest and most effective ways to customise an original Claude design is to change the colour of the embroidery, the beads and the sequins. 

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Real bride, Marwa, did just that when she commissioned me to make her wedding veil. Instead of using the sequins from the original design, I sourced sequins that matched Marwa's colour palette so her veil worked perfectly with her wedding style. 

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But, how do you decide what colours to choose and what will suit your theme?

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In this edition of the blog, I will be sharing some advice and tips about how to design a colour palette and create a mood board to inspire the look of your wedding. 

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It's a great time to be wedding planning, there's a LOT of cool AF wedding imagery out there and some amazing resources to gather inspiration from such as The Un-Wedding, A Most Curious Wedding Fair, Rock N Roll Bride, and Pretty in Punk to name just a few of my faves.  Not to mention the vast archive of wonderfulness that is Pinterest. 

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If you're anything like me, you've probably got a million saved images of beautiful outfits, flowers, venues, decorations, cakes, shoes the list goes on and all too quickly you may well be beginning to loose your way.  This is where your mood board comes in to keep you on track and focused on your wedding goals.

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Once you have your mood board sorted, you can use it to show your suppliers the look and feel you want to create for your wedding day.  Real bride Kim did just this when she commissioned me to make her a customised veil for her 'Wedlock-a-Hula' tropical wedding theme. 

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Kim loved the Flora Starburst Veil but made it 'her own' by choosing to have the hand-embroidery in her green and peachy pink colour palette.  Having seen her mood board and the imagery inspiring her wedding I knew exactly what Kim wanted and I LOVED working to her brief. 

 

 

 

 

Designing your colour palette.

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I believe the most important element of a mood board is COLOUR.  Your mood board will reflect your chosen palette through the imagery you decide to use.  Colour is a really powerful and gorgeous way to set the vibe and show who you are as a couple, literally setting the mood for your wedding.  

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To start, I would suggest selecting a couple of your favourite images and deciding what it is about them that you love, what colours can you take from these images to put into your palette?

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I recently created a mood board for my latest collection of deocrative, hand-embroidered bridal accessories, 'Anemone'.  My starting point was this painting by Childe Hassam that I happened to see on an Instagram account I follow @giveup.thefunk. I was captured by the dark indigo hat band against the cream...

 

 

I soon came across this image of pale pink tulips amongst dark, purply-blue berry-like flowers and then a glorious bouquet of pinks, pale blues accented with dark mauve and indigo.  My colour palette was coming to life and these images became the foundation of my mood board.

 

 

 

Once you've chosen your main colours separate them from everything else, like you would with swatches of paint colours if you were decorating a room.  What do you need to add to make a complete and coherent colour palette?  For example, if you have a peachy orange, a warm pink and a pearly cream, do you need the addition of something else for depth or highlight?  Maybe you could add some metallics like a gold or a silver, maybe a lilac blue or even a dark green to bring it all together.  Play around until you have what you're looking for.  When I am finalising my colour palettes for collections, I love to look at my floral designs and images of paintings that I've saved, this gives me endless inspo, for example....

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This image is a colour palette alllll of its own!

 

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Creating your mood board.

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Now you have a colour palette to die for you will have a stronger sense of where you're going with your theme.  With confidence, you can go through all your wedding inspo and edit out those images that no longer fit with your theme.  You have already chosen a couple of your favourite images to start your colour palette, now you can add to them to complete your mood board.  There will be some swapping in and out, but keep going until you have up to 10 or 12 images that give you the vibe you are looking for.

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A top tip is to imagine you are handing over your wedding planning to someone you have never met or chatted to. Would they get the style of wedding you want from these mood boards?  Would they understand your colour palette and the look you want to create? 

 

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Once my Anemone collection mood board was giving me the vibe I was looking for I was able to source the perfect coloured beads and sequins I needed for the designs and then make the collection.  Here are a few shots from the Anemone collection photoshoot. You can see the colour inspiration from the mood board coming through in the designs.

 

 

 

 

 

And just as an experiment...

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To reiterate the power of colour, Here are two images of the Anemone belt from the collection.  The first image is the original in my 'Anemone' colour palette, the second, a totally different colour palette.  You can see how different the vibe is just by changing the colour.

 

The Anemone belt...

 

 

 

 

The power of colour is real, if you could customise your bridal accessory to perfectly match the look of your wedding then why wouldn't you?

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If you're interested in finding out more then take a look at how to customise your bridal accessory here.

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What colours would you choose? I can't wait to hear from you, see your mood board and find out.

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Emma xxx