Find Your Wedding Color Palette Without Pinterest

Stunning Palette Design by @transfiguredflorals

If you’ve opened Pinterest to find wedding color inspiration and somehow ended up with 47 nearly identical mood boards, you are not alone.

It can be surprisingly hard to figure out what you actually want when you’re looking at thousands of beautiful weddings. You start saving things because they’re pretty, and before long you have a collection of images that look lovely individually but don’t necessarily feel like you.

So instead of starting with a wedding, start with yourself.

Think less about “wedding colors” and more about the feeling you want to create. Your wedding is an experience, and color is one of the tools we can use to build that experience.

Start with something that has nothing to do with weddings.

Think about a movie you love. A painting you could stare at forever. A song that immediately transports you somewhere. A favorite dress, an old family photograph, the colors of a place you traveled, the garden you grew up in, a restaurant you love, or even the feeling of late afternoon light through the trees.

Ask yourself:

What is it about this that I love?

Maybe it’s the dusty blue of a particular movie scene. Maybe it’s the strange combination of chartreuse and lavender in a painting. Maybe it’s the warm, slightly faded colors of an old photograph. Maybe a song feels exuberant, moody, nostalgic, or wildly romantic.

You don't need to recreate the thing itself.

You're looking for the feeling underneath it.

Don't choose five colors. Choose a world.

Rather than deciding, “Our colors are peach, pink, and green,” try describing the world you want your guests to step into.

Maybe it’s:

A lush summer garden at golden hour.

A moody dinner party in an old European house.

A slightly surreal, colorful garden that feels like it has grown around the tables.

A warm autumn landscape full of rust, moss, fading flowers, and candlelight.

Once you know the world, the colors become much easier to find.

And this is where I love working with my couples. You don't need to arrive knowing exactly which flowers you want. Give me the feeling, the story, the season, the things you're drawn to. I can translate that into flowers.

Look for color in unexpected places.

Try making an inspiration folder that contains zero wedding photos.

Instead, collect:

• paintings

• movies and film stills

• fashion

• interiors

• landscapes

• vintage photographs

• food

• ceramics

• textiles

• album covers

• books

• architecture

• places you've traveled

• things from your own life

  
  

Then look at everything together.

You'll probably start noticing patterns.

Maybe you're repeatedly drawn to murky greens, faded yellows, and warm pinks. Maybe everything you save has a little bit of blue in it. Maybe you love incredibly saturated color paired with earthy neutrals. Maybe you keep gravitating toward things that feel slightly strange, romantic, wild, or nostalgic.

That's your palette beginning to reveal itself.

Let your season have a say.

This is especially important when you're working with flowers.

I don't believe your wedding needs to be locked into a rigid seasonal color scheme, but there is something incredibly special about allowing the season you're actually getting married in to become part of the design.

Spring has its first tender greens and precious bulbs.

Summer gives us abundance and color.

Late summer brings dahlias in all their ridiculous glory.

Autumn gives us bronzing foliage, berries, seed pods, fading flowers, and an entirely different kind of richness.

Your flowers don't have to pretend it's another season.

Let them tell you what is beautiful right now.

That's one of the reasons I love growing flowers for weddings. Every season gives us a palette that could never be exactly replicated somewhere else or another year.

And then you can bring Pinterest back in.

Pinterest is a great tool that I love to use too. It's just not where I want you to start.

Once you know your feeling, your world, and your color story, Pinterest becomes much more useful. You can use it to find specific details, gather ideas, and communicate what you're drawn to.

But instead of sending me 30 bouquets you want recreated, send me the painting, movie, song, landscape, dress, or strange little object that made you think, “THIS. This is the feeling.”

That's where things get interesting.

Because I don't want to make your wedding look like someone else's wedding.

I want to make it look like you.

And if we do it right, your flowers won't just be pretty.

They'll change the way the room feels.

They'll give your guests something unexpected to discover.

They'll make the tables feel alive.

They'll become part of the story of the day—and a little piece of that particular season, place, and moment in time that can never be recreated.

So forget finding the perfect wedding palette.

Find the feeling.

I'll help you turn it into flowers.