#voronoi

Marc Newson, "Voronoi" Shelf (Grey), Australia, 2007,

Bardiglio marble,

Neonopolis / 5.12.26 / Blender, Cycles

Human art from a human heart 🫀 No GenAI

I've been thinking about reorganizing my marker collection, if you can call it a collection. Organizing means creating a color palette I can refer to during my coloring session to color pick from and this is what I came up with.

The main problem with organizing a color palette is that color space is multidimensional (hue, saturation, brightness, or RGB, etc), but we try to project it down to two dimensions to fit it on a page and here the main problem is: how do you arrange the colors such that they are arranged in a logical fashion and similar colors are placed next to each other? This is actually a problem in science and people have come up with different ways to solve this problem, but I couldn't really find a concept that suits my purpose because, ultimately, I need this palette to retrieve my markers, so I need something to fit me as an artist, sooooo I went and had some of my own thoughts and I want to show you the process and how I came up with this heart.

The first thing I did was cut u my old swatch cards to have little swatches that I can move around. I first tried to arrange the colors in a rectangular palette sorted by hue, going from light to dark, but then I didn't know how to deal with less saturated colors. You can see this pretty well in the greyish-blue shades in the bottom. There is simply no way to arrang them that is both logical and places similar colors next to each other.

So then I figured I might go with a color wheel instead, which is based on the three primary colors... place white (which is the absence of all primary colors) on the outside and black (which is the presence of all primary colors) in the center, and the greys in between the primary color ring and black. But then I was struggling a bit with where to place the neutral greys and how to deal with different brightness of the low-saturated tones. And also, I have soo many skin tones (many beiges and browns) that it's kinda hard to fit everything into it... by color palette is definitely not an equal partition of the three primary colors, so this doesn't work that well.

After getting an overview over my grey shades, I came up with the idea of arranging the greys in a swirl with different hues from blueish, greenish, yellowish to reddish, and do the same thing for the skin shades. I also rotated the whole thing because I have lots of blues and greens and oranges and pinks. That gave me this color butt- er, I mean peach, which looks quite sensible already. And it has the cool tones on the left and the warm tones on the right.

All that was left at this point was to do some rearrangement to recover the original color circle (note, I placed brown on the main circle, where it doesn't technically belowng, but this allowed me to logically arrange the skin tones in the right side of the heart, the greys in the left, and the blacks in the tip and here we go.

The rest of the process was very technical. I wanted a color palette, not a loose assembly of swatches, so then the final question is how to turn this into a palette, and I decided to go with a Voronoi tessellation. This is a bit technical, but it is basically an algorithm to partion a space around an irregular arrangement of grid points. It has a lot of applications in physics and engineering, so this is what I'm familiar with.

Doing this basically involved placing points on the swatches in the photo and then using them as the grid points for the Voronoi tessellation, which I did in Matlab, and this was the result:

This looks really satisfying, but of course I needed to fill my palette with the actual marker colors, so I printed the lines on marker paper and colored everything and got my cute heart palette:

It's not perfect. I actually made a few mistakes while coloring it and also, I think some of the swatches were either mislabeled or faded to the point where some of the fresh colors I put down don't look like they are in the right places. As you can see, some colors actually appear twice in this palette, which is simply because they make sense in different contexts, so I decided to duplicate them, but it's actually not too many. I'm quite proud of this first attempt, but I also know that I'll have to redo this if I ever buy new shades. But the second time around will be easier because I only need to fit the new shades into a palette that already makes sense for all of the colors that I have.

Ikeda Map with Associated Voronoi Diagram

...and a lot of colours!