Explore color palettes inspired by 3000 master painter artworks
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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.
HN · launched May 5, 2026 · 215 upvotes (top 3%) · 0 views
Niche: color palette generator software · 46 launches, 5 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Content generation
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 46 launches in color palette generator software →
Could you build this?
Yes The site is a directory of color palettes extracted from public domain artworks using standard color quantization algorithms (like k-means) paired with a searchable Next.js/React frontend.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Adobe Color, Pinterest, Pantone books, Coolors, ColorHunt
Concerns raised: Paintings have oxidized/faded from original creation, colors may not be accurate, Photo flattening loses texture/gloss differences crucial to composition, Gallery lighting affects how paintings appear vs original intent, AI art undermines professional artists who trained years for craft, Copyright issues with artwork and photography
Feature requests: RYB hue wheel instead of RGB for artist-relevant complementary pairs, Upload custom images to generate palettes with 'goes with' feature, Individual pigments used instead of just dominant colors, Sans-serif font (e.g. Inter) for better readability at small sizes, Radial hue histogram visualization for hue/saturation/lightness
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 240 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #5 of 241 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 183 days after the earliest competitor.
- Color Palette Generator - 17 Schemes · ph · 2026-09-13 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- Visual Atlas · ph · 2026-10-11 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Color template website · ph · 2026-11-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- An OKLCH-based perceptually uniform color system/theme builder · hn · 2025-11-23 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Palette by novoverse · ph · 2026-10-17 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- The Color Sheet · ph · 2026-11-09 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Desktopcolors.com · hn · 2026-08-17 · 166 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Palette · ph · 2026-09-23 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.49
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