vintagesimstress

Iron Age Colour Palette

Added 2023-02-03 16:56:48 +0000 UTC

Based on some Internet research and certain photos I took in the ancient village of Biskupin some... 16 years ago? 17? My my, time flies... I created a colour palette to use for my Iron Age creations/recolours. 'Iron Age' in a very broad sense - you could as well call it 'natural dyes palette', so you can safely use it also for many later eras.

Includes 40 colours.

Apart from pigments you could get using plants native to Europe (where the GBSC, obviously, takes place, so this was my reference point) I included also some which are a bit more exotic, but I felt like richer people would still have a chance to obtain them by trade. I mean here mostly dyer's madder, which afaik grows only in warmer climates. What I didn't include are dyes coming from very faraway places. So if you've already noticed the striking absence of indigo and wondered what happened to it, that's your answer.

Below you can find three attachments:

a .txt palette file for my fellow Paint.net users - you can just paste it into Dokuments\paint.net App Files\Palettes
an .aco file for those of you who use Photoshop (BIG shoutout to Peebsplays who just went ahead and made it for me from hex codes in the txt file 😭 Thank you!) - though I'm afraid you have to research yourself where to put it, as I don't even have Photoshop 🙃
a .pdf file with some completely unnecessary info, just in case you're interested in where those colours come from. Here a little side note: in some cases you can get WAY more colours from a certain ingredient than I listed, but because I already had similar ones on the list, I skipped them. Take apple trees, for example: I remember seeing so many yellows and greens in that 'dyeing with apples' post, but as I already had them in the palette, the only apple shades included are pinkish or brownish.

Oh, and I feel like I should add a disclaimer: as in reality I've never dyed anything, let alone with natural dyes, it totally might be that I made some mistakes. Don't quote me on this in your PhD thesis ;)

Please tag me if you use it, I'd be excited to see it!