Introducing The Palette Studio. Upload any image, or pull a painting or movie from the archive. The Studio distills its palette into a series of chromatic studies, each a different way of seeing the colors within. Copy color values, download studies or browse palettes. 🔗👇

Edgar Degas, Four Dancers. About 1899. Oil on canvas. Orange-red bodices against a field of green.

Nobody knows who she was, or whether Vermeer used a real model. Girl with a Pearl Earring is a tronie, a study of a character rather than a portrait of an identified person. The dark background was once a green curtain but its translucent paint has changed over the centuries. Researchers have also found tiny eyelashes that are now difficult to see. Her pearl has no visible hook or outline. Vermeer suggests its shape with touches of white paint, including a reflection of her collar. And the blue in her headscarf began as lapis lazuli from what is now Afghanistan, ground into ultramarine, a pigment often described as more precious than gold in the 17th ce.

Félix Vallotton, The Ball. 1899. Oil on cardboard mounted on wood. A red ball, a yellow hat, a pool of sunlight.

Albert H. Munsell, Atlas of the Munsell Color System. 1915.

Nicolas Lancret, Wall Panels. c. 1723–27. Oil on canvas. Lancret painted these panels for a room in a Paris house, to hang above the chair rails and between the doors and windows.

Wassily Kandinsky, Flowing (Coulant), likely 1931.

Red cabbage can tell you how acidic something is. Its purple pigments, called anthocyanins, turn its juice red in acid and blue or green in alkaline conditions. Tight curls, pale veins and purple edges, with its palettes.

Johannes Itten. Tape Ball Color Space, 1919-20. Itten trying to solve a strange problem around 1919, if color has relationships, could you give those relationships a physical shape? His answer was to move beyond the color wheel and into three dimensions, eventually producing his famous 12-hue color sphere in 1921.