Your Guide to Making a Colour Palette—Using Emotions: Summer Diaries
- Devangana Sharma
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Devangana Sharma| The Atlantic Muse| Summer Diaries| 2025-07-14
What does being calm look like in a colour? How can you paint joy without drawing a smile? From designing a book cover to buying a new purse—emotions lead our colour selection. Sometimes a palette is more than just an aesthetic; it’s the feeling that it brings us.
Let’s explore how colour palettes don’t just look good—but also feel good.
Emotions:
Calm: Reading a book in the rain
Colours: sage green, muted lavender, pale blues, and warm greys.
These colours don’t yell or shout; they are soft-spoken. Using a calm palette helps to promote stillness and a sense of centralization. The use of muted tones and low contrast is great for meditative, self-care, and healing visuals. It’s all about saturation, saturation, and saturation. Even a loud colour like orange can become serene if it turns into terracotta vibes.
Energy: The need to rearrange your entire room at 3 am
Colours: fiery reds, electric blue, Aperol spritz orange, and hot pink.
Think of any colour that you can’t miss, and your job is done. These hues can be a bit much at times and are definitely overstimulating. Yes, use with caution. When used at the perfect opportunity, heads will turn and attention will be captured—more like taken hostage.
Joy: Summer days, sunshine, and the beach
Colours: butter yellow, eggshell blue, tropical greens, and peach.
This set is a careful balance of being out-there but still introverted enough to not give you a headache. It can range from pastels that you have to squint to see to hues that can hardly be ignored. Joy is a subjective emotion because people can get joy from multiple colours; that’s why it’s important to maintain an equilibrium between polar ends. These friendly colours are an open invitation for spontaneous plans and endless adventures.
Sadness: When you are channelling Monday blues
Colours: deep blues, faded mauve, soft charcoal, and cool greys.
We always have days when we need comfort. That’s where the sad palette comes in to support: dark and moody on the cooler end of the scale. They are edgy enough to understand your melancholy and offer hope. It’s perfect for those cloudy days when everything feels out of place and all you want to do is curl up in bed. This palette gets you; let it be there for you too.
Dramatic: For maximum feelings
Colours: crimson, black, burnt gold, deep violet, and cream white.
The boldness of drama is always intentional. It’s cinematic and emotionally charged, often by using contrast. The grey area between the competing colours is where the emotions are truly amplified. Their reckoning works well for cover art, theatrical visuals, or anything inspired by Florence + The Machine. A pro tip is to let a dark colour dominate and to pick a lighter colour to highlight important elements.
In a world filled with colour picker tools and hex codes, emotions are one of the strongest tools we have. You don’t need to know every single rule in the book. Just let the colours talk. When a palette feels right, your audience will feel it too.
Now go on and feel the colour.
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