Y2K Chrome and Ice
- millennium chrome
- ice blue palette
- turn of the century silver
Brushed silver and ice blue with a lilac tint, lit from every side at once.
Opens an image model with the palette in the prompt. The same words work on a video model.
- #4A5A68
- #7E93A6
- #9FB3C8
- #C9E2F2
- #D9CDF0
- #F4FBFF
What it is for
The millennium was sold as a clean start, and the colour of a clean start turned out to be silver. Every product of the period was finished to look like metal whether it was metal or not.
Chrome is not a hue, it is a set of reflections, so the palette is really a description of a surface. That is why it survives on a phone, a car and a font at the same time.
How it works
Drop the blacks. The darkest value is a cold blue-grey, and a true black makes the chrome look painted.
Blow the highlights out to white. A reflective surface has small areas with no detail left in them, and that is what sells the material.
Tint the shadows blue and add one pale lilac. The lilac is the detail that dates it to 1999 rather than to any other silver period.
When to use it
Use it for technology, sport, music, packaging and anything that should look new and manufactured.
Leave it alone for anything warm or handmade. There is no warm colour in this palette and adding one breaks it.
Told apart from its neighbours
Achromatic has no hue at all. This one is deliberately cool, with blue in the shadows and lilac in the mid tones, so it is not neutral.
Art deco gold and black is the other metal palette, and it is the exact opposite: warm metal on black rather than cold metal with no black in it.
Where it was used
Consumer electronics of the period were finished in silver whatever the material underneath, and album art followed the products. Mobile phone advertising ran the same ice blue and chrome until about 2003, when white and matte took over.
- Y2K consumer electronics
- turn of the millennium album art
- early mobile phone advertising
The prompt
Run it as it stands, or drop the colour clause into a prompt you already have. It works in an image prompt and in a video prompt.
<subject>, Y2K palette of brushed silver and chrome with ice blue and a pale lilac tint, everything cold and reflective, blown out white highlights and soft blue shadows, no warm colour anywhere and no black
What goes wrong
Black appears and the chrome goes flat. Say no black, with the darkest value a cold blue-grey.
A warm highlight creeps in and the metal looks like gold. Say every value is cold, including the highlights.
Leave out
warm colour, black, earth tones, matte surfaces
Watch for
There is no black in this palette. The darkest value is a cold blue-grey, and black flattens the chrome.
Questions
Paint it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
