M83 · DSVII · cover art by Mœbius

A painting with
almost no contrast

Sampled from the file, not guessed at: sixteen dominant colours with their true share of the canvas, and the one measurement that explains why the picture works.

By area

1200×1200 · quantised to 16

Every band below is as wide as that colour is common. Rose alone is a sixth of the painting; the eight leftmost make up 78% of it.

#B06F78 · 15.2%the insect red is 0.02% — too thin to draw here

The measurement

lightness, area-weighted

Each dot is one of the sixteen, placed by lightness and sized by how much canvas it covers. The shaded zone is ±12 points around the area-weighted mean.

linework

insect

0%2550 66.7 mean88

82% of the canvas sits within ±12 lightness points of 66.7%. Meanwhile the hues run right around the wheel — 202° through 351°, 11°, 53°. Mœbius holds tone almost flat and lets hue roam, which is the inverse of how palettes usually get built. It's why nothing in the sky competes with anything else in it.

Only two things break the band, and they break it through lightness, not saturation: the linework at 13% and the insect at 42%. That is the entire contrast budget of the painting, spent on a hairline and a bug.

The field

eight · 78% of the canvas

Rose

#B06F78

15.2% of canvas

Mid sky, where warm turns cool. The most-used colour in the painting.

Ash Lavender

#A59AAD

12.3% of canvas

The near-neutral that mediates every other hue. Only 10% saturated.

Periwinkle

#9BAECA

11.9% of canvas

The scaled cloud-field in the foreground.

Pyramid

#AAC9DB

9.7% of canvas

The monument's lit face, and the haze along the horizon.

Salmon

#CC8B7B

8.1% of canvas

Warm sky below the halo.

Apricot

#DEAA92

7.6% of canvas

Upper sky, repeated in the warm strips at the bottom corners.

Paper

#E7E2DC

7.1% of canvas

The brightest structural tone. Warm off-white — a natural page ground.

Halo

#F2CEAC

6.3% of canvas

The glow behind the apex. The light source of the whole image.

The support

six · 20% of the canvas

Mauve

#A7778B

5.7%

Upper corners, furthest from the light.

Pale Lilac

#CCAFC3

3.8%

Foreground scales catching warm light.

Mid Blue

#6B94B3

3.3%

Deeper cloud shadow.

Slate

#516374

3.3%

The darkest broad tone. The only one that carries text on light.

Clay

#C17D76

3.3%

Warm mid-sky, close to Salmon but a step cooler.

Violet

#A57CAF

1.1%

The most chromatic purple, in the foreground scales.

Creature & marks

four · under 1.5%

Sage

#928F75

0.90%

The sauropod. A green muted almost to grey — 12% saturation.

Saddle

#93705F

0.42%

The rider's tack and satchel. The only true brown.

Insect

#9E3B37

0.02%

The floating creature's body segments. Sampled at full resolution — it is far too small to survive quantisation.

Linework

#1B2429

darkest 0.2%

Mœbius's ink. Not black — a very dark blue-grey, which is why nothing in the picture reads as harsh.

What holds text

WCAG 2.1, computed

A flat tonal range is lovely to look at and brutal for legibility. Almost nothing here can carry body copy.

Foreground	On	Ratio
Linework	Paper	12.25:1	AAA
Linework	Halo	10.67:1	AAA
Paper	Linework	12.25:1	AAA
Insect	Paper	5.20:1	AA
Insect	Halo	4.53:1	AA
Slate	Paper	4.82:1	AA
Slate	Halo	4.19:1	Large only
Rose	Paper	3.03:1	Large only
Mid Blue	Paper	2.50:1	Fails

Three usable text colours out of eighteen — Linework, Insect and Slate. Everything else is a surface.

#9E3B37 insect

#C4562C --roast

Close to the roast you already use — but not the same

My first read of this by eye put the insect at #C04A38 and had it within 4% of the Stego roast. Sampling the actual pixels moved it to #9E3B37: darker, and rotated further toward true red. The real gap is 10.9% of RGB space, five points of lightness and fourteen degrees of hue.

Still a relative, not a twin. The useful reading is that roast would sit comfortably inside this world without adjustment — it is the warmer, brighter cousin of the one accent Mœbius allowed himself.

insect · hue 2.3° · light 41.8% · sat 48.4% roast · hue 16.6° · light 47.1% · sat 63.3% distance 47.9 / 441

If you take one thing

Not a hex. The method: pick a lightness and stay in it. Let hue wander as far as it likes, keep saturation moderate — the area-weighted mean here is 32% — and reserve every scrap of tonal contrast for the two or three marks that must be seen. The Stego palette already does a gentler version of this. This is the extreme case, and it holds together at 82% within twelve points.

The warning attached: a palette this flat cannot carry a page on its own. Three of these eighteen pass for text. If any of this migrates into the site, it migrates as surfaces, with ink and roast still doing the reading.