The Beauty of Restricted Palettes

Constraint Breeds Creativity

In the world of generative art, one of the most powerful constraints is the color palette. When you reduce an image from 16,777,216 colors to just 8, something remarkable happens — the image becomes more intentional. Every color carries weight. Every transition is deliberate.

How Median-Cut Works

Median-cut quantization works by recursively splitting the RGB color cube along its longest axis. At each split, pixels are divided at the median, ensuring each resulting bucket contains roughly equal pixel counts. The average color of each final bucket becomes a palette entry.

// Median-cut: 16M colors → 8 palette entries
colorCube.sort(byLongestAxis);
const [left, right] = splitAtMedian(colorCube);
// Recurse 3 times: 2³ = 8 buckets
// Each bucket → one palette color

Retro Nostalgia, Modern Composition

There is also a nostalgia factor. Restricted palettes evoke early computer graphics — CGA, EGA, Game Boy palettes — but the compositions themselves are thoroughly modern. This tension between retro medium and contemporary subject matter is central to the BVDART aesthetic.

Every artwork in the portfolio is available in a "quantized" variant that reduces the palette to its essential colors — often revealing structure that was hidden in the full-color version.