The Complete RGB Scale
Color Palette
(mirrored on "Strawberry Akhenaten's Temporary Web Server")

Why bother?

Quite frankly, it's because I found a few RGB cheat sheets on
the internet but all of them are incomplete.  I want one, that's
all there is to it.  I'm sharing this on my web page because I
think others may want to use this chart as well.

This project has actually been around for a long time (1994).
Back then I was an art student at Pueblo Community College in
Pueblo, Colorado.  We were working on Windows 3.2 machines using
the paint program.  Later we switched to Corel Draw.

I spent my spare minutes between assignments mixing colors using
different RGB values (Red, Green, Blue - the primary colors in the
light scale -- as opposed to more well-known primary colors in the
pigment scale, Red,Yellow,Blue).  The result of these experiments
can be found in the palette v1 folder.

Over the years, I've been trying to expand on my basic palette.
Mixing colors using the RGB scale is done by choosing a number
value for each primary color from 0 to 255.  Sliding up and down
these scales resulted in a few color groups.

- Grays
- Reds (light and dark scales)
- Greens (light and dark scales)
- Blues (light and dark scales)
- Yellows/Greens
- Yellows/Oranges
- Blue Purples
- Red Purples
- Blues/Greens

There may be other scales hidden in there.  Maybe not.  I haven't
found them yet.

In version 4, I decided to make the work easier on myself by using
gradiant strips instead of distinct squares of color.  This scale
will work best with a color picker tool.

Version 4 is the latest of my attempts to mix colors.  In version
3, I created a template for mixing and charting the colors but it
was too clunky to work efficiently.  Even though I created a new
template to make the work easier, the project is gargantuan (there
aren't too many opportunities to use that word in a sentence).

I came up with a superficial estimate of how many individual
colors that can be mixed in the RGB scale by cubing the number
256 and came up with 16,777,216 possible combinations.  Odds are
against my being able to mix that many colors by myself.  It's
only a matter of time before I try to recruit help for this
project.  This is too much for a single person.

In order to have other people help with the work, I'll have to
find a way to make the template usable for others.  I'll also have
to make a procedure for others to follow so any helpers I may get
don't have to reinvent the wheel just to help with the work.

As of 21mar12, I only mixed 512 colors.  Naturally, I'm excluding
the hundreds of colors I already mixed in palettes 1-3.
To repeat, sooner or later, I'm going to ask for help.

Strawberry Akhenaten
Alamosa, Colorado
Updated: 16may12

--eof