Bead Color Triads: Spring Pastels

February often begins glumly, as we look forward to yet another month of winter. But the end of February is a milestone. Once it’s over, we can realistically look forward to spring. From the apex of February, we can look past March and see April on the horizon. To celebrate having one more winter almost in the bag, this month’s color trios feature some pretty pastels.

Any softened shade could be considered a spring or Easter color. Like baby pink and baby blue, pastels give a sense of newness. Freshly sprouted grass, flower buds, and baby chicks may not be powdery in real life, but they usually are in art.

Even browns and grays can be spring-like, if they are soft or sweet enough. Once you’ve turned down the volume on a color, it seems to belong somewhere between March and June.

To keep things simple and to the point, I chose some classic Easter colors for my bead palettes: pink, yellow and green. We could compare them to all sorts of natural things, like flowers, bees and grass, but the truth is that they are the most common colors of fake plastic Easter grass, which might be why they are so obvious a choice. Not that I would ever buy fake plastic anything, or course. Luckily, I can get my pastel fix with beads instead.

This Easter Egg may not be filled with chocolate, but the colors are yummy! The first palette features plenty of shine and shimmer with lustered dandelion seed beads, pink cat’s eye rounds, and sea foam green hex cuts.

First Flower started with some transparent green wavy leaves. To keep a theme going with similar finishes, I added transparent lemon seed beads and pink lined crystal AB peanuts. The lemon yellow might actually be a bit too bold here if it were a dominant component in a design. It would look very nice if it were hidden in the background, perhaps in a spiral rope core.

And finally, we have Spring Rainbow. Sometimes simplicity is best, especially when working with bright contrasting colors. Here I matched up pink coral and sour apple 11/o seed beads, with opaque yellow 8/o’s. This palette is my favorite, and not just because it’s all seed beads. The sour apple color adds a zesty quality that really makes the other colors come to life.

What colors make you think of spring?

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