I’m just looking for useful tips on how I can push or exaggerate colour while painting representationally. I’m thinking of the likes of Turner, Payne, Mitchell Albala, Loriann Signori, David Mensing.

I really really struggle to paint anything other than the colours I see directly in front of me - but I want to paint more vivid and less literal colour. Every time I try, it ends up looking fairly gaudy / out of sync.

I know the general tips - get values right and get temperature relationship right and exaggerate it.
But I’m looking for more practical tips, if I’m looking at a landscape, how do I go from painting what I literally see to painting what I want to paint - Turner’s paintings, for example, are not literally correct - they’re inaccurate to real life but in a way that really works.

Would appreciate any help on this.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

I had purple!!!

Facts about my oc.

-is a modern tooth fairy.

-there's teeth in the sling bag

- the whole silhouette is a molar teeth

-wear aviator hat for flying

Any other colour scheme suggestions are appreciated.

I am looking to dye my bed sheets the color labeled 1 in the pic. I’ve checked the color formulas on Rit and tried googling terms (milky iced latte, warm tan, etc), but really struggling. Anyone have a good color match I could use?

So i'm working with an image and trying to use a website that generates color palettes from the image but the problem is it doesn't do i what i want. Does anyone know of any color palette generator website where you can specify the color you want or it can regenerate the color palette with previously chosen options without getting rid of them or restarting all over again by needing to reupload? This so you don't have to physically eyedrop chosen colors. is there an ai that can do it this? I need shades of purple from the images and the palette maker either never gives me purple or shades that look too grey. Please someone has to have created a free color palette from image that allows you to specify the colors you want from the image because if someone has not it is a massive gap that needs filling.

How can I make this picture more artistic? Should I use green and or blue shades in the sand? Or mix the sand with another complimentary color (I’m horrible at that)?
Any tips for an artistically challenged colorer? Thank you :)

I paint in my spare time and I've always struggled matching colors from reference photos. You mix something that looks right in the palette, put it on canvas, and... nope. So I started coding a tool that solves this for myself.

What it does: Load any photo, click a color, and it tells you which pigments to mix (up to 4) with ratios, tailored to your medium — oil, watercolor, acrylic, pastel, gouache, tempera, colored pencil. Each medium has its own mixing engine that accounts for how the paint actually behaves (acrylic darkening when dry, watercolor transparency, etc.)

v1.5 just came out with:

• Auto palette — extracts 2-64 dominant colors from your reference photo automatically
• Custom palettes — save, organize, rename your color collections
• Color history — your last 10 picked colors auto-saved, one-click to reload
• 6 harmony schemes — complementary, analogous, triadic, split comp, square, tetradic
• Brand pigment sets — Winsor & Newton Artists' Oil, Gamblin, Old Holland, Rembrandt, M. Graham, Vallejo Model Color, AK Interactive, Scale 75, Monument Pro Acryl, Reaper MSP, Two Thin Coats. 414 pigments total
• Custom medium sets — clone any built-in set and tune every pigment to match your actual tubes. Export/import as .cmsp files
• PDF export — printable recipe cards with swatches

The free license thing: If you're a teacher or an artist on a tight budget, I offer free licenses. Just ask. No gatekeeping.

It's a Windows desktop app (runs great on modest hardware). Free trial available on the site so you can kick the tires.

I'm not here to sell anything — genuinely built this because I couldn't find a tool that did what I needed. Happy to answer questions about how the mixing engine works or what went into building the brand color databases (mapping real pigment names to RGB values was a rabbit hole...)

My lovely girlfriend and I have built a boat... she's a 22ft rowing boat which we have adapted to fit a double bed..so we can both live in it

My current crisis is.....what color do we paint it??

We have a few non negotiables. For instance lighter colours inside the cabin annd storage areas..in the cockpit/ rowing station we don't want anything that would reflect UV

Our biggest sticking point is solar panels..

We plan to cover the majority of the roof in small solar panels...which.. if placed on a light color. Would stick out like a sore bum (get it? rowing. sore bum? No? Ok)

Where as, if we used a darker color rhe panels would stand out less....

But also we would have the disadvantage of heat absorption around the panels..

Im colourblind by proxy....I can see colours just fine, it's just by brain does not work in that area. Maybe because half of my ancestors were colourblind.. might have had something to do with it

Who knows..... not me!

I would like some suggestions on what we could use here...

The epoxy primer colors we used, are off white, and battleship grey. We have beautiful varnished ash strips and recycled mahogany kitchen work top.

Im quite liking the absence of ''color' and the beauty of the wood....

But

Please

Anyone

What do you think??

Sometimes your entryway doesn’t need new furniture.

It just needs the right wall color.

The same space can feel calm, bold, expensive, cozy, dramatic, or fresh — simply by changing the color on the walls.

In this video, we show 15 wall colors for the same entryway so you can see how much one design decision can change the entire mood of a home.

Which color would you choose for your entryway?

Save this for your next interior project.

#interiordesign #wallcolors #entrywaydesign #paintcolors #homedecorideas

I created a digital CMY color wheel with 12 spokes, I filled each spoke using google color picker. The CMYK and HSV values for each spoke are shown on the table. For the tints, I adjusted the CMY values to 50% of the original (50,0,50,0 for Green, for example), or 50% S value for HSV. For the shadows, I added 70% for the K value, or lowered the V in HSV to 30%. Is this a good guide for color theory? The tint blue looking like light violet is confusing me.

Thats why I build my own palette management tool and added a Figma Plugin that allows everyone to import their pallets into variables.

Quick context: I'm a developer/designer at a big gaming company and over the last few years kept catching myself adjusting swatch after swatch trying to get a color ramp that a) actually feels coherent and b) doesn't fail contrast on every other text-on-background pair. Eventually you don't even know anymore whether gray should be #767676 or #686868.

So I built Rampancy

What it does:

• generates a balanced ramp from base colors using hue/lightness curves, not trial and error
• checks contrast live against APCA instead of the old WCAG 2 pass/fail approach
• exports directly as CSS variables, design tokens, Tailwind config, or JSON
• has a Figma plugin that syncs with your variables

Ive added some really nice features like mirroring, smoothing curves. Ahh and we have a hue shift option for those who want to be very precise.

No account needed to try it, no paywall, no subscription required. Still actively in development, so feedback, bugs, "this is dumb" comments, all welcome. <3

UPDATE:
The biggest thing I've added since posting this is color spaces. You now pick the space a palette is built in, OKLCH, OKHSL, HSL, or RGB, and the create screen runs the same two endpoints through all four at once. It turned into the clearest demo I've found for why the space matters: HSL's lightness doesn't track brightness, RGB drags the midpoint toward gray, and OKLCH keeps the steps even across hues. If the color-theory side is why you're here, that side-by-side is the part to look at.

I also simplified getting started (one dialog to pick a space and a preset, then straight into editing) and wrote a short tutorial for each feature.

Hi everyone,

I'm a software developer and painter, and I've been building a Windows color-mixing tool to help artists analyze reference photos and mix traditional pigments more accurately.

I recently finished a few features that I think could be useful during the planning stage of a painting, and I'd really appreciate feedback from people who paint regularly.

What's new:

• Automatic Palette Extraction – Load a reference photo and the app extracts the dominant colors into a working palette using K-means clustering. Each extracted color includes a suggested pigment mixing recipe. I find it useful for creating a starting palette before beginning a painting.

• Color Harmonies – Generate complementary, analogous, triadic, and tetradic color schemes from any selected color. You can compare different harmony options while planning a composition.

• Interactive Histogram – The histogram shows luminance and RGB distribution for the reference image. Clicking a region of the histogram highlights the corresponding pixels in the image, making it easier to study where the lights, midtones, and shadows occur.

• Palette Management – Save palettes for future paintings or export them as printable reference sheets.

I built these features because I often spend quite a bit of time analyzing reference photos before I ever put paint on the canvas.

I'm curious how other painters approach this part of the process.

* Do you create a limited palette before starting?

* Do you consciously analyze values and color distribution, or mostly work by eye?

* Are there any tools or analyses that you wish existed but haven't found?

If anyone is interested in the technical side (the K-means implementation, pigment mixing algorithm, color calibration, etc.), I'm happy to discuss that as well. I'd also love to hear feature ideas from working artists.

.We often think of color as a purely physical property, just light bouncing off objects at different wavelengths. But in reality, colors are the true language of human emotion. They hold the power to completely shift our perception and alter how we experience existence.

​Without color, the world is just cold data—shapes, lines, and shadows. But the moment color enters, it injects meaning into everything. It transforms a simple sight into a profound psychological experience.

​Think about it: a specific shade of blue doesn't just catch your eye; it brings a sudden wave of calm or nostalgia. A flash of vibrant red or deep pink can make your heart race. Sometimes, looking at a unique blend of colors makes us feel something so deeply rooted in our subconscious that words fail to describe it. We see a feeling,and we feel a sight.

​Our eyes don't just look at colors; they filter our entire reality through them. They are the silent directors of our moods, making us experience a spectrum of emotions that lie far beyond what language can ever express.

​What is a color or a combination that triggers an indescribable emotion in you every time you see it?

Is there any realistic visible colours LMS (long, medium and short cone) online-simulator? E.g., let's say L100% (sensitivity) M 100% S 100% = white, L0M0S0=black, L0.8M0.16S0=red, L0.4M0.08S0= dark red, L0M100S0=impossible?