A palette of five is a promise

Before a panel starts, its palette is mixed, named, and painted onto a card: three colors minimum, six maximum. Petrol night. Tide teal. Harbor amber. The card hangs on the easel, and for the weeks that panel is alive, those are the only colors that exist.

The limit is not an aesthetic pose, it is how the night stays coherent. Real darkness compresses color; a dozen hues in a nocturne reads as a lit room with the lights painted out. Five mixes, reused in every layer, make the water and the sky agree with each other because they are literally made of each other.

The promise cuts the other way too. When a mix runs out mid-panel, it gets rebuilt from the card and matched by eye, which is the best color training the ladder has produced. The palette cards are becoming their own shelf of tiny paintings: the records will outlive the panels they served.