Edith Young’s book, Color Scheme: An Irreverent History of Art and Pop Culture in Color Palettes, is a lovely tour through the colors, shades, tints, and tones across dozens of paintings over time. It’s a smart book of how artists think about color and how we in turn perceive those colors.

There are more than 500 separate color palettes in Young’s book, all listed in CMYK color codes for the curious reader at the back of the book. Well, I was that curious reader, so I extracted all of the CMYK codes and converted them to HEX and RGB color codes. I then compared each color to text so I could determine which colors could be paired with white text or black text. All of the color codes and samples can be found in this Excel file. If you’d like more details on how the color calculator works, check out this blog post.

And, of course, if you’re interested in learning how Edith extract all of the CMYK color codes from those 500+ paintings, check out today’s episode of the PolicyViz Podcast.