Playing around with the exterior colors

Newmar has published three color schemes for their Dutch Star's.  You pick the one you want when you complete your order sheet.  They are called Maritime, Cannes, and Night Sky.  Each design is broken up into four basic colors, with some shading.

Here's their layout for the Cannes Full-painted Exterior Graphics:

My wife would like to use some different colors, or maybe even just use their available colors in her own arrangement.  You're not usually allowed to change the design, just change the colors assigned to "Skin", A, B and C.  The problem is that it's hard to imagine what it might look like using different colors.

Just to be sure we had a color pallette available that matched Newmar's (not that we'll use their colors, but it's nice to have it available), I captured screen shots of the color sections for each of the three exteriors.  It looks like this:

I figured that the best way to play with various color schemes was to use a graphics editor that allows you to select similarly colored irregular shapes - like those waves of color on the RV's graphics.  One such program is called PhotoImpact Pro.  And I just happened to have already had it installed on my computer.

Bringing up PhotoImpact, I was able to individually select the colors and "paint" them with a color of my choosing.  I was able to take the above Cannes graphic and change it to something entirely different in about 20-30 minutes.  It ain't fancy, but you can see the results:  the top is the Cannes and the bottom is my new creation:

Now don't think for one minute that the bottom one is our choice.  I was just playing around.  But now we know what to do to experiment with various colors.

If you have PhotoImpact, just load the basic photo and use the Magic Wand set to a similarity of 10 to select a particular color (like the Skin).  Then select the plus sign "+" and continue clicking on pieces of the skin color until you think you have most of it selected.  Once that's done, select the bucket fill tool.  You can choose a color of your own or use the eyedropper and pick one of their colors from another graphic (like the one I made above).  When you're done, just save it.

I didn't mess with blending and shading.  Newmar does a wonderful job with that.  But using this technique will give us a pretty darn good idea of what we'll want to do with our exterior colors.