Colour Palette Generation

Posted on by Rob Myers Posted in Generative Art

I’m looking at colour palette generation for paintr and draw-something.

Various mathematical systems:

http://openmodo.com/content/view/2/2/

http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/sasmac/brewerpal.html

http://www.telecable.es/personales/alberto9/color/index.htm

http://www.sonosphere.com/WebTools/ColorPaletteGenerator/

http://www.colorcache.com/colorpicker.shtml

The usual colour-wheel oriented schemes, plus a scheme that seems based on swapping the RGB values, and a map colouring system I haven’t figured out yet.

And there’s also many image palette extractors, such as the one at praystation I can’t find just now.

Paintr could use other flickr images for colours, but that would remove the folksonomy element.

3 comments on “Colour Palette Generation”
  1. Tom says:
    June 19, 2006 at 3:39 am

    How about mapping colours onto tones and using chords and scales? Anyone tried that?

  2. Tom says:
    June 19, 2006 at 3:39 am

    Also, http://colorbrewer.org might be of interest.

  3. Rob Myers says:
    June 19, 2006 at 4:16 am

    Heya Tom.
    Thanks for the link. Brewer’s system seems to be a way of making optimal palettes for colouring maps. No idea how it works but I’m going to see if there are any papers on it.
    I don’t know if anyone’s tried mapping colours to tones, that sounds cool, kinda synaesthetic. Colour and sound relations are all mathematics at root so it should work. I now have some more research to do 🙂 :
    Mathematics of musical scales at Wikipedia