[This article was first published on CHI(χ)-Files, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't. 色彩雫I just discovered that the R script I had written while back, which was a hand-curated colour palette of Pilot Iroshizuku fountain pen inks.Pilot describes Iroshizuku as a combination of iro = colour, and shizuku = droplet. The individual inks take their names from Japanese landscapes, plants, seasons, and other bits of nature.The names don’t simply tell you what colour an ink is.月夜 isn’t just dark blue. It is moonlit night.花筏 isn’t just pink. It evokes cherry blossom petals floating together on water like a little raft.冬将軍 – literally the Winter General – somehow becomes a cool gray.So naturally, I turned them into data!The dataThis is a small hand-curated dataset of 24 Iroshizuku inks. The hex colours are approximate representations rather than measurements of the physical inks. Fountain pen ink is much more complicated than a single hex value: paper, nib width, saturation, shading, sheen, and lighting all change how an ink appears.The ink names and descriptions are based on Pilot’s Iroshizuku collection. The hex values are approximate colours used for this visualization rather than official measured colour values.But hex is enough for a little plotting experiment!First: just the coloursBefore making bottles, it is useful to see the palette itself.The Iroshizuku palette in its original order.This already makes a nice colour chart, but the ordering feels fairly arbitrary. So I wanted to see what would happen if the inks were arranged by colour rather than by catalogue order.Sorting colours perceptuallyRGB is useful for screens, but it isn’t especially good at representing how humans perceive differences between colours. For sorting this palette, I converted the hex values into HCL colour space using the colorspace package.HCL separates colour into:Hue — roughly which colour family it belongs toChroma — how colourful or saturated it feelsLuminance — how light or dark it appearsThat makes it much nicer for arranging colours in a visually coherent sequence.Codehcl_coords as_tibble()ink_plot bind_cols(hcl_coords) |> mutate( # Rotate the hue wheel so the sequence starts near blue / teal. hue_sort = (H - 220) %% 360 ) |> arrange(hue_sort, desc(L), desc(C)) |> mutate( plot_order = row_number() - 1, col = plot_order %% 6, row_raw = plot_order %/% 6, row = max(row_raw) - row_raw )The exact order is not scientifically important. I rotated the hue wheel so that the display begins around the blue-green part of the palette, simply because it produces a calmer visual flow for this particular set of inks.The tiny ink shopI wanted the palette to look like a tiny Japanese stationery-shop display: rows of ink bottles, wooden shelves, paper labels, and little price cards.The whole thing is still just ggplot2.A tiny Iroshizuku ink shop, arranged in perceptual colour order.The palette as dataAnd because this is still a data project, here is the resulting palette in the same perceptual order.日本語InkMeaningHexHue °ChromaLightness月夜TsukiyoMoonlit Night#016D8C22844.542.5立夏RikkaEarly Summer#1A7DA523352.449.0冬将軍FuyusyogunWinter Commander#6A869A23324.554.5天色AmairoSky Blue#00A0DF23776.562.1紺碧KonpekiDeep Cerulean Blue#0368B425074.543.1深海ShinkaiDeep Sea#1C3A6525336.924.4紫陽花AjisaiHydrangea#1255A225470.036.4朝顔AsagaoMorning Glory#04318E26167.824.2紫式部MurasakishikibuMurasaki Shikibu#765FA827656.545.4竹炭TakesumiBamboo Charcoal#1E1D1E3080.610.9山葡萄YamabudoWild Grape Vine#660D5B31747.223.2花筏HanaikadaFloating Cherry Blossoms#ED7E93274.665.8紅葉MomijiAutumn Maple Leaves#E12E2C12140.049.7春暁SyungyoSpring Dawn#674F4D1715.536.0冬柿FuyugakiWinter Persimmon#EA5A1022128.056.9夕焼けYuyakeSunset Glow#EF881F35104.266.6山栗YamaguriWild Chestnut#5B45324521.231.1灯籠ToroLantern Light#F0B0185592.775.9蛍火HotarubiFirefly Glow#D9DA268689.984.5竹林ChikurinBamboo Forest#94BD4E10768.971.7深緑ShinryokuForest Green#007E4F14548.946.3松露SyoroDew on Pine Tree#077D5E15641.946.3翠玉SuigyokuEmerald#03726116935.142.6孔雀KujakuPeacock#02898618940.451.4I started with an old R script containing 24 fountain pen colours.Somewhere along the way I learned a little more about perceptual colour spaces and built a tiny imaginary Japanese ink shop out of geom_rect().Now I just want more ink. To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: CHI(χ)-Files.R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.Continue reading: A Tiny Iroshizuku Ink Shop in R