Earth tone color palettes

Six natural schemes, five colors each, ordered dark to light. Click any hex to copy.

Earth tones are the pigment colors: ochre, sienna, umber, terracotta, clay - hues that exist because they were dug out of the ground, which is why they share a warmth and a low saturation that no digital palette quite reproduces by accident. The family is forgiving, and its one real failure mode is flatness, because every member sits in the same narrow band of hue and saturation.

  • Sienna

  • Desert

  • Umber and slate

  • Terracotta

  • Riverbed

  • Ochre field

Flatness is fixed with lightness, not with hue. Take the range wider than feels comfortable - a genuinely dark umber at one end, a bone or chalk at the other - and the mid-tones stop competing. The other move worth knowing is that earth palettes tolerate exactly one cool color and are improved by it: a muted slate blue or a deep green in among the browns gives the eye somewhere to rest, and it is what stops the scheme reading as sepia. Beyond one, the warmth that defines the family starts to break down.

Other palettes.

Same format, different mood. Every hex on every one of them copies in a click.

All thirteen palette collections · Pull a palette out of an image · Check a pair for contrast

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