Terracotta Wedding Colors: A Splash of Warmth for Your Special Day
Choosing a wedding color scheme is one of the most important (and difficult) decisions you will make when planning your wedding day. Your color palette sets the tone for your celebration and helps your vision come to life.
In this post, I’ll explore why terracotta wedding colors are an ideal choice for your special day and share some tips on how to pull off this color scheme! You can jump to any section that you’re interested in.
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Why Choose Terracotta for Your Wedding Colors?
First, let’s look at why you should consider terracotta for your wedding colors. Admittedly, I’m a little biased as this is the color scheme I chose for our wedding. However, there are a few key reasons why terracotta is a great color for your wedding day.
Terracotta Is Unique
Often, wedding color schemes involve pastel colors such as pale pink or light blue. While these beautiful shades are popular for a reason, if you want a color scheme that is more unique and outside the box then consider terracotta. It’s a gorgeous color and is less commonly used, so if you’re looking to stand out then terracotta could be a great choice.
Terracotta Is Warm
One of the things I love most about terracotta is its warmth. When you’re considering your color options, think about what tone you’re trying to set for your wedding.
Due to terracotta’s vibrancy and reflection of the autumn season’s natural hues, it’s a particularly effective color for fall weddings (again, maybe biased — I was an October bride). However, terracotta works well for any season if you are looking to create a warm and inviting atmosphere.
Terracotta Photographs Vividly
I knew I loved terracotta, but I was pleasantly surprised by how well and strikingly it photographs! Terracotta is a very saturated color, which means less gray has been added to it and it appears more vivid.
If you want vibrant, dramatic colors to pop in your wedding photos, terracotta is an ideal choice. However, if you prefer a softer aesthetic, then maybe consider a more muted color.
Terracotta Wedding Color Palette
After you’ve decided on terracotta, you need to finalize the supporting colors to create your wedding palette.
Primary Terracotta Wedding Color Palette
Terracotta is such a vibrant, dominant color that I wanted to avoid introducing other strong competing colors. Instead, we used some neutral colors to complement the terracotta:
- White: our main supporting color
- Black: for wedding party tuxedos
- Gold: for accents
Keeping it simple this way helped the terracotta color shine. Additionally, too much terracotta can be overwhelming. Using a neutral supporting color such as white helps keep your wedding feeling light and airy while allowing the terracotta color to remain the focal point.
If you don’t want to use white, a warm, neutral color such as beige or peach could be a good choice to complement it as well.
Secondary Terracotta Wedding Color Palette
While we kept our primary wedding color palette simple, we also incorporated supporting colors through our florals (more on those later) to add dimension and vibrancy. These colors included:
- Peach
- Burnt Orange
- Mustard
- Eucalyptus Green
- Plum
The result was even more striking and beautiful than I had expected!
Tips for Terracotta Wedding Colors
Terracotta isn’t the most common or straightforward wedding color, especially when you’re wedding planning on a budget. Here are a few tips to use this unique color scheme for your celebration.
1. Identify Terracotta Accents for Your Wedding
First, decide on what terracotta accents you want to incorporate. With terracotta, less is more. Since it’s such a strong color, you don’t need it everywhere. Finding a few key accents is all you need to incorporate terracotta into your special day. These are a few of the elements I chose to focus on.
Wedding Party Attire
I found my bridesmaid dresses through Azazie. Be sure to order swatches, because the terracotta looks completely different (and better) in person than on the website! Once I decided on the dress, I used the shade to match my other elements.
Although you might be able to find terracotta-colored suits for your groom/groomsmen, a) the amount of terracotta could be overwhelming and b) it would be very difficult to match your bridesmaid dresses. If you want to just go with terracotta ties, Azazie offers an exact color match to ensure you have the right shade.
However, we chose to pair black tuxedos with the terracotta, which I loved the look of. It also incorporated our black and white supporting colors. Apart from the boutonnieres, I didn’t feel that the groomsmen needed to wear any terracotta to pull off the color scheme.
Invitations
Invitations are the very first impression your guests will have of your wedding, so it’s important to make them count! This is a key opportunity to introduce your terracotta color scheme.
I deliberated at length on how to incorporate terracotta into our wedding invitations. I debated using a terracotta background for the invite itself but was worried a) that it might be overwhelming and b) that the darker background wouldn’t print/read as well.
Instead, I opted for a white background with terracotta design and text accents, using black text for the body copy. Again, I wanted our wedding colors to feel light and airy, and you can never go wrong with lots of white space in a design. I designed the invites myself in Canva and printed them through Moo.
To get the right shade of terracotta, I took a picture of the bridesmaid dress swatch and then pulled the hex code (It’s becoming increasingly easy to do this with different software. I have a Chrome extension I use).
After I had decided on the invites, another thing I went back and forth on was whether to use terracotta envelopes. I spent hours of research on this, and realized using this color of envelopes would be difficult for a few reasons:
- Right Shade/Quality
- There just aren’t that many options for terracotta envelopes, and finding the exact right shade is difficult. I ordered a couple of samples but wasn’t happy with the color or quality.
- Expense
- Even if you can find the right terracotta envelopes, they’re pretty expensive. Depending on your budget, that’s a factor to consider.
- Legibility/Transit
- Sending wedding invitations through the mail can be a little dicey, especially when you’re using specialty envelopes/addressing/wax seals (more on that next). While I generally recommend hand-canceling your wedding invitations, colored envelopes introduce another variable that can make the address more difficult to read and risk your invitations getting lost. Additionally, envelopes get pretty beat up in transit, and colored envelopes show wear and tear more than white.
For these reasons, I chose to not use terracotta envelopes. Instead, I used white envelopes and terracotta wax seals (I found the right shade of terracotta wax glue gun sticks on Amazon). We addressed the envelopes with gold markers.
Incorporating terracotta accents into our wedding invitations while continuing to lean on our neutral supporting colors of white, black, and gold helped introduce our terracotta wedding colors without being overwhelming.
Wax Seals
In addition to using the wax seals on our wedding invitations, we were able to incorporate them as part of our wedding day decor on our favors and seating chart. Having the continuity of the terracotta wax seals from invitation to event helped tie our color scheme together.
Linens
Another way to introduce terracotta to your wedding is through table linens. I didn’t want terracotta tablecloths because I felt they could be overwhelming or clash with the bridesmaid dresses, but we did use the venue’s terracotta napkins.
Although they may not have been an exact match, they were pretty close. Also, napkins are unobtrusive enough that it doesn’t matter as much if the shade is perfect, as long as it’s similar enough.
Cake
Instead of a traditional wedding cake, we created a Nothing Bundt Bundtini tower with a tiered bundt cake on top. We ordered a mix of flavors: red velvet, pumpkin spice, and white chocolate raspberry. Although the cake colors weren’t explicitly terracotta, the red, burnt orange, and yellow colors blended well with our palette, particularly with the accent flowers.
Those are a few ways I incorporated terracotta accents into our wedding! Here are a couple of other ideas if you feel like you need more terracotta.
Candles
I used white candles and vases from Yummi Candles, but they also have a Sienna color option that appears close to terracotta. However, I wouldn’t recommend ordering them without getting a sample first. You could also explore candle options elsewhere to get the right shade.
Signage
We DIYed our painted signage with help from friends. We kept it simple and used white backgrounds with gold accents/easels. For our bigger signs, we added floral swags to tie in terracotta. Additionally, for our seating chart, we used terracotta wax seals to add that splash of color.
While we went more minimalist with our signage, if you wanted to incorporate more terracotta you certainly could. Particularly if you print it, you could match the shade with the right hex code (although you should still compare in person because results can be different — more on that later). If you’re interested in DIY/paint, you can go to Home Depot with a swatch to find the right color.
Now that we’ve gone over a few ways to add terracotta accents to your wedding, let’s talk about maybe the most important tip for terracotta wedding colors.
2. Lean on Your Florals
My biggest piece of advice for pulling off terracotta wedding colors is to lean on your florals.
Florals were one of the wedding decisions that we just agonized over. For months, we planned to DIY our flowers to save money. However, since incorporating terracotta was important to me, I stressed endlessly about finding the right flowers. After all, terracotta is not the most common flower color out there, and flowers are seasonal which makes it difficult to plan.
I wanted real flowers, but for a brief time, I considered artificial flowers when I stumbled across Ling’s Moment. Their terracotta collection is beautiful and has many of the shades I was looking for. However, they are actually somewhat expensive, especially for a big wedding, and after ordering a sample I realized real flowers were important to me.
We finally caved and decided to go with a florist, and I’m SO glad we did! Yoli (Blushing Florals) was amazing and was able to work with our budget and help us get the most bang for our buck.
To incorporate terracotta, I gave her our primary color palette but then gave her the freedom to add whatever colors she thought would look best. In addition to terracotta/rust colors, she incorporated ivory, peach, burnt orange, mustard, plum, and greenery.
Although not explicitly terracotta-colored, since many of these colors were less “on the nose,” I felt that they complemented the color scheme extremely well and were even more effective.
While I mentioned a couple of flowers I wanted for my bouquet, I allowed our florist to choose whatever she thought would represent the colors best/help save money. She used a combination of garden sprays, roses, garden roses, ranunculus, dahlias, and eucalyptus.
Due to their expense, seasonality, and short lifespan, flowers are one of the most stressful parts of wedding planning. However, leaning on your florals is a highly effective way to incorporate terracotta in an understated, elegant way.
3. Match Your Shades
Another important tip for terracotta wedding colors is to match your shades. This is especially important if you are relying on a more critical accent such as wedding party attire.
Colors look completely different on a phone or computer screen (and even on different devices) than they do in print/person. And different printers/papers/materials can all reflect the same color very differently.
Anything terracotta that you order for your wedding must be seen and compared to your other terracotta shades in person. If multiple terracotta-colored items will be in the same area, place them next to each other (even if it’s just in your living room), to ensure that they won’t clash.
You should do this for all wedding colors, but it’s especially important for terracotta. A soft pastel color such as light pink or light green will be a lot more forgiving than a vibrant, saturated color.
If you can’t match your shades exactly, use your supporting colors instead. Having a few well-chosen terracotta accents that match will look far better than having a lot of terracotta accents that clash with each other.
4. Trust the Process
My last piece of advice for terracotta wedding colors is to trust the process.
I was excited, but also a little nervous to use terracotta in our wedding. Since it’s less common, I couldn’t find as much inspiration online, and at times it was difficult to locate terracotta elements and supplies.
I questioned myself over and over again. Do I have enough terracotta? Is it too much? Will it look awful? Will my accents clash?
While I spent this post diving into all my recommended tips for success, at the end of the day, no one will notice the details of your wedding as much as you will. No wedding is flawless. Despite my best efforts, all my terracotta shades did not match perfectly, and we had a couple of hiccups on the day.
But no one ever mentions this to me! All they talk about is how much fun they had and how pretty the colors and the flowers were.
So trust the process! Terracotta is a beautiful, unique shade for a vibrant and memorable celebration. If you’re still deliberating about your wedding colors, choose terracotta and add a splash of warmth to your special day.
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