The palette
Which colours, and how many at once.
Nijimi has had eight palettes. Which paints they hold was never the hard part. How many of them are in your hand at once was, and finding that out took a mixing well built three times, a twenty four colour tin, and a dial nobody could read.
Pairs of inks
A colour and its opposite
Eight pairs of traditional Japanese inks, each pair a colour and the colour across the wheel from it, three dilutions of each, and arrows to change pair. Living inside one pair kept a painting harmonised, and any pair could mix a grey. The next three palettes were the same row with different pairs: quieter ones for ink painting, then ten pairs instead of eight to cover the gaps.
What none of them solved: two pigments at a time meant most of the wheel sat behind an arrow.
Replaced, four times over.
The long version: The first three directions · Every palette, measured
A well
Nine parents, and a dish to mix them in
If a palette cannot hold every colour, let the painter mix one: nine pigments, the warm and cool of each primary, and a well. The well was built three times, as an XY pad, as a stir field, and as the real engine running in a second dish. All three were dropped. The targets were too small for a fingertip, the mixes came out muddy, and on a phone the dish took room from the painting to do something the paper already does.
Dropped. Mixing went back onto the sheet, where two wet colours that meet make the colour the pigments would make.
The long version: Palettes with a well · Making the dish feel like paint
The tin
All twenty four, in reach at once
Real paints with published pigment codes, so what the app mixes can be checked against what the tin does. Everything was reachable without switching palettes, which is what the pairs could never manage.
It answered the wrong question. Reach was never the problem. Twenty four colours in one place with no reason to prefer any of them is a choice, and a choice is harder on a phone than it is over a table with the tin open.
Kept as the source of paint. Dropped as a way to choose.
The long version: Every palette, measured · The running record of colour
A shape for them
A dial, then an arc
Twenty four colours need a shape. First a half dial under the thumb: six pigment wedges by three dilution rings, sizes on the rim, spun to reach the rest. Then a single arc running warm to cold, with water at one end and a continuous size track on the rim.
The research on radial menus says they test well, and says the thing that kills them is slice count. Both were true here. What decided it was neither: the dial covered the paper while it was open, and a puck on an empty sheet tells you nothing about what it does.
Both lost. The dial was built and painted with; the arc never got further than the page that proposed it.
The long version: The dial and the arc · The dial prototype · What other apps do
Five at a time
A card you swipe
The tin cut into stacks of five, each with a dark, a warm and a cool so that one card can finish a painting on its own, and a swipe to the next card. Seven ways of choosing five were measured the same way: the range from darkest to lightest, the most vivid green, orange and violet the five pigments and their ten pairs can reach, the darkest mix.
The measurements agreed with each other and settled nothing. Every set of five reached most of what any other could, because pigments mix.
What separates one set of five from another is not what it can reach. It is what is in your hand at once, and whether those colours go together.
Kept. The card and the swipe are what the app has now.
The long version: Stacks of five, swiped · Seven ways of choosing five
What shipped
Fewer colours, in more than one strength
By then the stacks had grown to as many as twenty four paints, the same colours repeated from one card to the next, and every swatch painted at full strength, so every mark landed dense. There was no pale wash to start a sky with unless you made one.
The first palette the app ever had was four inks in three strengths each. The palettes went back to that: four of them, a few paints apiece, with the washes and pale washes on the card beside the full colour, and water in a slot of its own. Choosing between them moved to a screen of its own, so the sheet keeps the rest.
On the phone now.
The long version: Fewer colours, three strengths
What the measuring said
Reach was the wrong measure
Every palette was scored the same way, and the scores never separated them. Five chosen well reach nearly what twenty four reach. What separated them was how much sits in front of you, whether the colours on one card belong together, and whether a pale wash is there when you want one instead of something you have to build first.
That is why the palettes in the app are small, and why each one carries its own washes. It is also why choosing a palette is a screen you visit and leave, instead of a control living on the paper.