Let me share one of my de­sign se­crets and source of in­spi­ra­tion with you. Look around the land­scape and ob­serve the colours sug­gest­ed by Moth­er Earth. We are not so re­moved from na­ture that we can­not find in­spi­ra­tion around us. What I love about this is that it re­al­ly makes choos­ing colours for your home an eas­i­er task and there­fore ac­ces­si­ble to every­one. If you love neu­trals and want a tan in your en­try way, look around you. What is lit­er­al­ly ly­ing around our earth that in­spires your favourite tan? Might it be the stem colour of the bud­ding bush? Or is it the colour of the bush­es in dry sea­son? Or the rich colour of wet sand at the beach? Just choose, and there you have it – the per­fect tan (maybe) for your en­try way. Many paint man­u­fac­tur­ers (es­pe­cial­ly the in­ter­na­tion­al ones avail­able here), have made it even eas­i­er to turn the colours that you see and love in­to the paint colours for your home. Yes, you guessed it – they "have an app!" for that ! Google 'colour palette gen­er­a­tor' you would find web-based tools that can lit­er­al­ly gen­er­ate colour palettes from your pho­to. They are re­al­ly very cool tools... per­fect for the "colour-ob­sessed" de­sign­er and home­own­er. One such colour palette gen­er­a­tor can be found at www.de­graeve.com/col­or-palette . Oth­ers ex­ist. But did you no­tice all these colours in this pho­to of the flower?

They work by tak­ing a pic­ture with your smart­phone of the colour, ob­ject or scene that you like, and then the app in­stant­ly ex­tracts the in­di­vid­ual colours from the pho­to. Some of­fer up cor­re­spond­ing paint hues and some give pan­tone or RGB val­ues. Some may even sug­gest co­or­di­nat­ing colours to cre­ate a uni­fied palette. Re­mem­ber that rich colour of wet sand? You just take a pic­ture of the beach, and it will pick the main colour for you, as well as the greens and blues that would com­plete the colour palette. Very cool! Be sure to check out the web­sites of your favourite paint sup­pli­er and see if they have sim­i­lar apps. For reds you may be in­spired by a dis­tinct or­ange flare or glow­ing em­bers; the colours of fire and pas­sion and the earth's molten core. With blues, think clear wa­ter, fad­ed Amer­i­can den­im, rivers, seas, and crisp blue skies. For the neu­tral lover in all of us, think peb­bles, weath­ered wood, earthy clay and dry leaves. I have found that na­ture is nev­er wrong. Even when we see 'freaks of na­ture', it is just some­thing dif­fer­ent, not wrong. In na­ture, many colours mix per­fect­ly and sub­tly in com­plex com­bi­na­tions. We are sel­dom aware of the in­tri­cate mix­tures and even the im­pact it has on us. You would be ex­posed to com­bi­na­tions that you would have nev­er thought of. If the sug­ges­tions are not quite what you are look­ing for, you can al­ways tone down or amp up the colours to suit your taste and sit­u­a­tion. So, get a fresh per­spec­tive on things with a whole new set of colour palette pos­si­bil­i­ties for your decor.