I built PaletteInspiration.com, a browsable archive of color palettes pulled from artworks by 3,000+ master painters (Monet, Vermeer, Raphael, Van Gogh). Why I built it: every color palette generator I tried converged on the same five muted pastels. Painters spent centuries figuring out color and we mostly ignore that body of work when picking colors for digital design. Please share your feedback on the Color Harmony Explorer - drag the wheel to any color and it shows which hues master painters historically paired with it (not only standard complementary, analogous, triadic, etc.) It is solely based on co-occurrence across thousands of real paintings. Not algorithmic color theory rules - actual empirical pairings.

No signup, no paywall, no email capture. Just curious what people think.

As an "expert viewer" of Baumgartner Restoration, this site usefulness is questionable. If you look at those color palettes, most of them brownish that is because of dirty & old oxidised varnish. These are not the intended look of these paintings. So these color palettes has nothing to do with those 3000 masters.

https://youtube.com/@baumgartnerrestoration

I used to run an art social network 15 years ago that did this automatically with every piece of art uploaded and then it let you search for art by color that way.

Basically

$average = new Imagick( $file );

$average->quantizeImage( $numColors, Imagick::COLORSPACE_RGB, 0, false, false ); //Reduce the amount of colors to 10

$average->uniqueImageColors(); //Only save one pixel of each color

The letter directory is based upon artist first name... seems odd especially as most are going to know the last name and only maybe the first.

Hey ouli, your hello email bounces.

See also: https://amandahinton.com/blog/creating-a-color-palette-from-...

It's wonderful. Thank you for building this.

Why do I only see Claude in this UI? It seems Claude is picking up the very same color scheme for many webpage building requests.

This is great! Love the idea. You should send to some art programs, sure they would get a kick out of it. Also gives another use case outside of just digital design.

Weird how similar many of those are to Commodore 64 palette.

Love it. I'll be using this on a weekly basis in my art practice.

Let me know if you ever create an API endpoint.

As a gruvbox enjoyer, I approve.

this is interesting, we should wire this to frontend design system library that automatically helps user use these palette.

Very nice. My only gripe is the automatic page switching on scroll, never encountered that before and I absolutely hate it

app version?

I am currently looking for colour palettes and this website is of interest to me.

Small snag, some UTF8 things are going on with some colour names, I am sure you know and have cursed accordingly.

I like OKLCH colours and the ability to mix them in interesting ways using CSS things. This means I don't do hex codes for colours in CSS. I can translate though, however, soon some people will demand OKLCH, so you might as well add it in, trying to get it natural with the picker.

I appreciate the masters but I wonder how this would work using other sources, for example, Sunday newspaper supplements from the last century, and their glossy adverts, which were to a higher standard than what we get today.