When you're devising innovative colour palettes and ideas for texturing, this website might prove useful. 'The Colour Of' website creates impressionistic colour swatches from image searches resulting from a key word, i.e. 'Halloween', 'Parrot' and 'Coral Reef'. Annoyingly, the resulting swatch includes the keyword itself as part of the image, but, that aside, it's a quick way of getting ideas about colour up and running. For another useful site to assist in the design of colour schemes for effective character design etc. go here.
BA Hons Computer Animation Arts is a 3 year degree course at the University for the Creative Arts, Rochester, UK.