Rothko: A Set of Color Palettes for R

March 3, 2021

Rothko is a set of color palettes for R in the form of an R package. It follows directly from Karthik Ram’s wesanderson package, but instead using color palettes derived from Mark Rothko’s paintings. I did this with ImageMagick, but there’s many websites out there that will do the same thing.

It’s simple to install, and has options for both continuous and discrete data. Install it using devtools::install_github("mmerrittsmith/rothko").

The palettes are named after the paintings they are derived from, and this leads to some having rather long names like “Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red”. Others are named simply “Unitled 1949”. My personal favorites are shown below.

rothko_palette("Number 10")

rothko_palette("Light Cloud, Dark Cloud")

rothko_palette("Number 16")

You can use these palettes in the same way that you would use any palette in R, for example as an argument to scale_fill_gradientn.