Show HN: Explore color palettes inspired by 3000 master painter artworks

Agreed. I absolutely adore the idea of it! But all the brownish colours tell the same story.

For some additional context; many old pigments were not stable at all.

https://www.vangoghstudio.com/what-were-the-original-colors-...

This is a very interesting perspective. I'd thought the muted, brownish colors in these paintings had to do with the quality and availability of pigments during that period.

It’s the colours you will see today when looking at the paintings, however. Your point is valid, but even the somewhat "chromatically degraded" versions of many of these are gorgeous.

> is because of dirty & old oxidised varnish

And the pigments fade. And even worse, they fade at various rates and some are almost completely gone.

It was short but I really enjoyed this little thread this morning, added much color to my life!

> Starting in the Renaissance, artists made sculpture and architecture that exalted form over color, in homage to what they thought Greek and Roman art had looked like. In the eighteenth century, Johann Winckelmann, the German scholar who is often called the father of art history, contended that “the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is,” and that “color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty.” When the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were first excavated, in the mid-eighteenth century, Winckelmann saw some of their artifacts in Naples, and noticed color on them. But he found a way around that discomfiting observation, claiming that a statue of Artemis with red hair, red sandals, and a red quiver strap must have been not Greek but Etruscan—the product of an earlier civilization that was considered less sophisticated. He later concluded, however, that the Artemis probably was Greek. (It is now thought to be a Roman copy of a Greek original.) Østergaard and Brinkmann believe that Winckelmann’s thinking was evolving, and that he might eventually have embraced polychromy, had he not died in 1768, at the age of fifty, after being stabbed by a fellow-traveller at an inn in Trieste

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-wh... cited by https://bsky.app/profile/ellipticalnight.bsky.social/post/3m...

Man, what a line. What a horror, this projection of opinion! From the "Father of Art History"! To rob the world so! I feel this way all the time, that anti-sentiment, that the pure marble world just stately and so is art and perfection, over the colors of the universe & it's possibility!

> "the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is"

This should make your blood run cold, imo. A world locked in amber view of reality, static, sedate. Whew.

So we can use AI or even deterministic algorithms to recover the original palette.

It‘s vibecoded slop that turned an idea that should have stayed a bad idea into poor execution, convincing the vibecoder that the idea is validated. The vibe coder has absolutely no domain specific knowledge to understand what you picked up in a second, yet no AI ever mentioned that, they didn’t learn, and instead reinforced their bias by producing another piece of forgettable slop. Yes, I’m fun at parties.

Most contemporary artists works are still under copyrght laws.

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.

Sorry for the inconvenience. The email works now. Regarding the article - I use similar ideas to extract colors form artwork images, only difference is I added color prevalence scale for each color and limited it to 10 colors per palette.

It is puzzling for me why you see these colors as Claude UI colors, since I carefully choose these colors as my main brand colors across all other art related sites (eg https://ouliart.com).

I fixed it. Thank you for helping to correct such an obvious error!

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.

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.

Great suggestion, thank you! I'll try reaching out to some art schools to see if they'd find the site useful.

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/

As you suggested OKLCH colour option is added now to the site. Thanks again.

Adding OKLCH color codes will be a great addition. Thank you for your suggestion!

There are 2 art style pages namely Advertising and Posters styles: https://paletteinspiration.com/advertisement-palettes/ https://paletteinspiration.com/poster-palettes/

I am aware that Advertisement palettes mostly based on Alphonse Mucha work since I could not include more recent ad illustrations for copywrite reasons.

Thank you for your kind words!

Yes, exactly this. It falls far short of the potential if it just shows the colours alone and not how they might appear if applied to sites, charts, illustrations or whatever you might want them for.

Thank you. Glad you find it interesting.

Thank you for the kind words and insightful feedback. My intention with page-switching on scroll was to offer more color palettes without requiring extra clicks. I had some reservations about it too, but couldn't find a better way to provide a continuous feed of similar palettes. I'll work on improving that feature.

I fix it. hope the new version provides better user experience

coming soon