Picking colors for your wedding is oftentimes one of the first things you do as a bride when designing your wedding. It's an important decision because it will direct much of the rest of your course for the overall wedding design.
There are a number of ways to go about picking your wedding colors. Oftentimes brides pick from their favorite colors or they go shopping for bridesmaids dresses to find a dress they love and that choice helps determine the palette. There's no one RIGHT way to go about picking your wedding colors but one of the ways that makes the most sense to me is finding out what flowers will be in season around your wedding date and picking your favorite flowers from among them -- letting them determine the course of the rest of the design. Florists can sometimes get any flower you want year round but you will keep costs down if you pick from flowers that are in season.
As I mentioned awhile back, I am LOVING pinterest.com and am using it to find inspiration for all manner of things. Pinterest is the perfect tool to use to find inspiration when planning a wedding as you can catalogue all the images you come across online that strike your fancy. I started a wedding inspiration board myself and these images are all of my favorite wedding images of flowers that I personally love. Aren't they breathtaking!?
I am by no means a floral expert. I'm working hard to learn the various names of the flowers in these photos and still don't know many of them (feel free to educate me in the comments below). I'm also finding out which flowers are in season during different times of the year and that has helped me to realize that if I ever get married, it needs to be in the spring :). Most of my favorite flowers are in season in the spring.
I thought I'd post these beautiful bouquets and arrangements by way of inspiration. As you can see, I LOVE color!
Brides sometimes ask me which colors photograph well. The answer is - pretty much everything but white and black. White and black are the most difficult colors photographically. They are the highest contrast in both highlight and shadow so they are the most difficult to capture detail within. But that doesn't mean you can't use them! Just remember that white highlights will draw your eye to them in photographs. That can sometimes be a distraction when you are not wanting whatever is white to be the focal point of the photo (i.e. a white shirt will distract from a face). And black is not the easiest color to capture detail in. So if you have something very detailed, make it a color other than black.
Once you pick your flowers, remember that you aren't tied to only using the colors within your bouquet and flower arrangements. These days in weddings, everything isn't so matchy-matchy. By way of example, check out the above images that include bridesmaid dresses in them. Note that the color of the bridesmaid dresses is not always present in the bouquets. It can even be an advantage to use a different color for your bridesmaid dresses because then the bouquets will pop when they are held in front of them.