Playful palette: an interactive parametric color mixer for artists

We present Playful Palette, a color picker interface for digital paint programs that derives intuition from oil paint and watercolor palettes, but extends them with digital features. A Playful Palette is a set of blobs of color that blend together to create gradients and gamuts. They can be directly manipulated to explore arrangements and harmonies. All edits are non-destructive, and an infinite history allows previous palettes to be revisited and modified, recoloring the painting. The Playful Palette design is motivated by a pilot study of how artists use paint palettes, and we evaluate the final design with a set of traditional and digital media painters to demonstrate that Playful Palette is effective both at enabling artists' color tasks, and at amplifying their creativity.