A free 24-palette pack for Lospec — Spring 2026 notes

Every winter I make myself a small obligation: one palette per week, twenty-four weeks. The 2026 batch is now up on Lospec, all under sixteen colours, all CC0, all named after places in my notebook. This is the writeup that goes with them.

The constraint

Sixteen colours and CC0. Both choices matter.

Sixteen because the cap forces you to combine roles. A "shadow" colour has to also serve as the darkest skin tone, as the underlayer of metal, as the colour the night sky goes to at the horizon. You learn to choose colours that earn their place by being useful in multiple contexts, not by being beautiful in one.

CC0 because Lospec is a public archive and I want the palettes to end up in student work, jam games, and the back of someone's brushes folder without anyone needing to ask. There are good reasons to release art under more restrictive licences. None of them apply to a sixteen-colour list of hex codes.

How a single palette comes together

The workflow this year was unusually disciplined, mostly because I was writing a longer process piece in parallel. For each palette, in order:

1. A reference image. Almost always a photograph, occasionally a single frame from a film. I keep a folder of about three hundred reference images going back to 2018.
2. Octree quantisation, k=24. I run the reference through a small Rust tool I wrote — the same one as in the octree quantisation piece — to get twenty-four candidate colours, which is more than the cap because the reduction in step three needs slack.
3. Manual reduction to sixteen. This is the only step that takes real time. I open the candidates in Coolors and walk the list down to sixteen, merging neighbours and dropping colours that overlap in hue and value. Usually about forty-five minutes of staring.
4. Test on three sample sprites. A character sprite, a tile, and a sky. If a colour is "missing" on any of these, I swap it in and re-test.
5. Final pass in Aseprite. Set the palette, run the Shading Mode brush over a small test scene, and confirm the ramps walk smoothly.
6. Upload to Lospec with the reference image as the description.

That is the whole loop. It is mechanical and that is the point — the constraint is the creativity.

Three favourites from the batch

Kamogawa, dawn

Twelve colours. Cool grey-blues at the dark end stepping through pale lavender to a single warm peach at the top. Built from a 5am photo of the Kamogawa under fog. The palette is almost monochromatic except for the peach, which is the colour of the sky at exactly the moment the city wakes up.

I use this one for melancholic indoor scenes. Office cubicles in the rain, that kind of thing. The lack of a strong dark anchor makes everything feel slightly weightless.

Yobiya signage

Sixteen colours, the maximum. Lots of warm red, three flavours of yellow, two off-whites, and a single brown that does almost all of the structural work. Sampled from a row of izakaya signs near my apartment.

Good for night scenes with a single light source. The palette wants neon and rain. I made a CRT-look test sprite of an arcade cabinet that lives entirely inside this palette.

Trans-Siberian, winter

Fifteen colours, mostly muted. Pale ochres, deep greys, two icy blue-greens, and one orange-brown that exists so the snow has a colour to fall against. Sampled from a stretch of footage I shot from the train window in 2014, near Krasnoyarsk.

This one is harder to use well. The temptation is to paint a snowy scene with it and have done, but the orange-brown is what makes the palette interesting and a snow scene does not need it. The palette is more useful for indoor warm-against-cold scenes than for the literal winter landscape it came from. The first time I made the mistake of going literal with a reference, I have not done it since.

What I learned this batch

Three things, in no particular order.

Sixteen colours is plenty if six of them are greys. The temptation is to use the cap for hue. A palette with six neutrals and ten chromatic colours almost always reads better than one with sixteen chromatic colours, because the neutrals are what shading depends on.

Avoid the "high-contrast pair" trap. It is tempting to put a deep navy and a bright yellow into every palette because the pair is so satisfying. After about the third palette of the batch I noticed I was doing it on autopilot. The palettes with the most use this year are the ones where I forced myself to skip it.

Reference photos with three light sources are gold. A sunlit room with a lamp on and a window in the corner gives you warm, cool, and ambient in the same image, which is exactly what a palette needs to feel three-dimensional. A flat-lit photograph rarely produces a palette I want to use twice.

The pack

All twenty-four palettes are collected here on Lospec. They are available as .ase, .gpl, and PNG strips, which between them load into Aseprite, GIMP, Photoshop, Krita, and basically every other editor I know. The Aseprite files include my ramp tags, which the Shading Mode brush picks up automatically.

If you use one of these in a piece of finished work and want to send it over, I am @[email protected] and I love to see them. Credit is appreciated (CC0 does not require it) but not required.

Spring batch starts next weekend. Twelve more palettes by November.