COLOURlovers is a community site devited to the exchange of colors and information about color and color trends.

Aimed primarily at designers, the heart of the site is the posting of various color palettes created by members.

Of more interest to artists, however, is the COLOURlovers Color + Design Blog, which I mentioned in my post on The History of the Color Wheel.

The blog features articles on color, color trends and various potential sources of color inspiration. The latter can include images, and color palletes extracted from them, from such varied sources as plants, animals, buildings, clothing, flowers, rust, fireworks, paper, sailboats, crayons, cartoon characters, comic book costumes, anime, tattoos, graffiti, churches and temples, video games, bicycles, currency, furniture, crustaceans, insects, birds, chameleons, clouds, skies, vegetables and, presumably, the kitchen sink.

You can sort the blog posts by Articles, News, Trends, Interviews and Most Popular.

Of particular interest to me are the occasional articles they will do in which they extract simple color palettes from paintings by various artists. They’ve featured Surrealists like Yves Tanguy and Giorgio de Chirico (see my posts on Yves Tanguy and Giorgio de Chirico), modernists like Joseph Albers and Mark Rothko, old masters like Da Vinci and Impressionists like Armand Guillaumin and Claude Monet (see my post on Armand Guillaumin).

I find it particularly interesting to see the four or five dominant colors in a painting extracted and displayed as a simple palette.