Base Six palette

The six base colours patterns are written in — the quantiser anchors of internal/colour (quantise.go), as a navigable palette. Each is a point on the Tartan Dictionary fine grid (ref = its level-ring-hue address); see research/colour-six-palette.

These six colours are not a designer's choice but a statistical one: they are chosen to maximise explanatory power over the recorded corpus. Six anchors separate the patterns the dyers actually distinguished — fewer would collapse setts that differ on the loom, more would split shades no weaver treated as different roles.

And plotted over the fine grid in three illuminance layers — light, mid and dark. Each wheel is one lightness layer plotted in OKLab's own dimensions: the angle is hue — red at the top, then clockwise through orange and brown, yellow, green, blue and purple, the wheel's jog order — and the radius is chroma, with rings every 0.05. The faint grey dots are the fine grid at that lightness; the red dashed line is the dyeable limit. Hover a dot for its code, name and hex.

The shades

Each shade in OKLCh — lightness L, chroma C and hue h (degrees). The small number under each is that axis's fine-grid index: the lattice level, chroma ring and snapped hue angle that together make the shade's grid code.