DESIGN WITH ME - TRANSLATE TO COLOR

Hello everyone! I am thrilled to finally get to the guts of our theme garden design...choosing colors, structure, hardscapes, furniture, ornamentation and plant materials. Woo-hoo!

Let's continue with step four below...

1. Pick a theme 
2. Brainstorm
3. Research 
4. Translate ideas to physical form
5. Create the plan

The first part of this step is choosing colors for our theme garden. Our color palette will help us choose furniture, plants, hardscapes, fabrics, etc. We do this by sifting through our brainstorming and research lists, then look for clues of color choices. Some are obvious while some are not. I've decided to use this as our heavy metal color palette:

The black is from the dark and moody atmosphere, plus black leather jackets, the gray reflects chains, smoke, silver, and metal, while the yellow is my less-shiny translation of gold and flashy stage lights (it could also be the background of animal prints). I also had a suggestion of red and orange from heavy metal battle jackets...also a great idea.  For now I plan to keep my palette simple, but may dip into these two additional colors if needed.

Something you should know...in the garden world there are two neutral colors: green and white. Of course, green will always be in your garden through lawn and leaves, so just consider this a given.  You can also sneak in a bit of white for accent if you'd like. Make sure you put more emphasis on your main color palette though and don't rely on white too much.

Our next translation...garden structure.  I'll explain this more in my next post, but for now I encourage you to suggest shapes or garden styles that we might incorporate into our heavy metal garden.  Again, look at our brainstorming and research lists for inspiration (are you starting to see why these lists are so important?!).