I created a program to create images of colour palettes based on a set of emojis.
Motivation
Around November 2021, there was a TikTok trend to create palettes of colours from a given set of emoji. This was usually accomplished using the blend tool in a paint program. I thought it would be fun to automate it, learn a bit about how emojis are represented, and learn a bit about colour mixing.
Usage
Preparing Emojis
Not shipped with this tool are the actual PNGs for creating the emoji palettes. This is because I can’t be bothered to work out the licences. Instead, included is a python script which as of 2021-11-20 will scrape the emojis from the Unicode website.
This really is a testament to just how easy web scraping is with Python
Usage
It’s a simple tool so I’ll leave in depth stuff to --help here is an example though
emoji-palette -p twitter -s 500 -r "emoji_scraper" đ đ đĻĢ
Will output
Colour mixing
Colour mixing doesn’t appear to be a precise art, which makes sense considering human colour perception is not a precise sense. Given that, I’ve gone for the simplest approach I could implement, which may very well not produce “nice” outputs, but again this was mostly for fun
The emoji are resolved to a single colour by simply resizing them to a 1x1 pixel using a standard flitering technique. These colours are then blended by taking an average of the R/G/B values, which is a simple model.
I may revisit this and add alternate colour blending options, once I’ve researched it more