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Posted by ouli 4 days ago

Show HN: Explore color palettes inspired by 3000 master painter artworks(paletteinspiration.com)
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.

214 points | 82 commentspage 2
trox 3 days ago|
As a traditional painter, I would love to see the individual pigments used, instead of dominant colors. I know this is not straightforward, but maybe doable to some degree based on the range of hue/value/saturation and context?
realitysballs 4 days ago||
Why no contemporary/modern painters? First looked for Basquiat then Lichtenstein , nothing
ouli 4 days ago|
Most contemporary artists works are still under copyrght laws.
mock-possum 4 days ago||
The colours they used aren’t
ouli 3 days ago|||
I still need to access and download such copyrighted images in order to derive palette colors and showcase sample images for those palettes.
Daub 2 days ago|||
There are two copyrights at work: that of the artwork itself, and that of the photo thereof.
79a6ed87 4 days ago||
Hi, I like it! 2 things I noticed:

1) Aren't "Modernism" and "Modernismo" the same thing? I'm a Spanish speaker and from my POV they are

2) Selected "Naïve Art" style and it's broken (images not loading). Probably something to do with the diaeresis

ouli 4 days ago|
Both issues are fixed now. Yes "Modernism" and "Modernismo" are the same, only some Latin American artists have art style as Modernismo instead just Modernism.
afolkest 4 days ago||
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.

ouli 4 days ago|
Thank you for kind words! That was my exact intention to share empirically proven color palettes for artists and designers like you. Adding API endpoint is a great idea. I'll let you know when it will be ready.
anthk 3 days ago||
Color extractor from pictures:

https://git.2f30.org/colors/log.html

BlueRock-Jake 4 days ago||
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.
ouli 4 days ago|
Great suggestion, thank you! I'll try reaching out to some art schools to see if they'd find the site useful.
vardump 4 days ago||
Weird how similar many of those are to Commodore 64 palette.
ouli 4 days ago|
You are absolutely right, I did not realize how similar some of these palettes are to Commodore 64 palette

see this palette for example: https://paletteinspiration.com/fauvism-palettes/fauvism-19-p...

or other Fauvism palettes: https://paletteinspiration.com/fauvism-palettes/

mistrial9 3 days ago||
feedback -- painting and screen luminescence are fundamentally different. Secondly, the chase after "most famous" seems to show the motivation here.

AI generated arts, IMHO, is an economic F-U to the people who spend real years of their lives to train in arts, and to the people who spend more time after that to teach.

beezle 4 days ago||
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.
ouli 4 days ago||
I fixed it. Thank you for helping to correct such an obvious error!
ouli 4 days ago||
Great observation. Thank you for pointing to an obvious error. I will fix it as soon as possible. it is not acceptable to order artists by their first name.
yubblegum 4 days ago|
It's wonderful. Thank you for building this.
ouli 4 days ago|
Thank you for your kind words!
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